CHAPTER ONE
LISEY AND AMANDA
(EVERYTHING THE SAME)
1
To the public eye, the spouses of well-known writers are all but invisible, and no one knew it better than Lisey Landon. Her husband had won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, but Lisey had given only one interview in her life. This was for the well-known women’s magazine that publishes the column ‘Yes, I’m Married To Him!’ She spent roughly half of its five-hundred-word length explaining that her nickname rhymed with CeeCee. Most of the other half had to do with her recipe for slow-cooked roast beef. Lisey’s sister Amanda said that the picture accompanying the interview made Lisey look fat.
None of Lisey’s sisters was immune to the pleasures of setting the cat among the pigeons (‘stirring up a stink’ had been their father’s phrase for it), or having a good natter about someone else’s dirty laundry, but the only one Lisey had a hard time liking was this same Amanda. Eldest (and oddest) of the onetime Debusher girls of Lisbon Falls, Amanda currently lived alone, in a house which Lisey had provided, a small, weather-tight place not too far from Castle View where Lisey, Darla and Cantata could keep an eye on her. Lisey had bought it for her seven years ago, five before Scott died. Died Young. Died Before His Time, as the saying was. Lisey still had trouble believing he’d been gone for two years. It seemed both longer and the blink of an eye.
When Lisey finally got around to making a start at cleaning out his office suite, a long and beautifully lit series of rooms that had once been no more than the loft above a country barn, Amanda had shown up on the third day, after Lisey had finished her inventory of all the foreign editions (there were hundreds) but before she could do more than start listing the furniture, with little stars next to the pieces she thought she ought to keep. She waited for Amanda to ask her why she wasn’t moving faster, for heaven’s sake, but Amanda asked no questions.
While Lisey moved to a listless consideration of the cardboard boxes of correspondence stacked n the main closet, Amanda’s focus seemed to remain on the impressive stacks and piles of memorabilia which rant he length of the study’s south wall. She worked her way along this snakelike accretion, jotting frequently in a little notebook she kept near to hand.
What Lisey didn’t say was What are you looking for? As Scott had pointed out on more than one occasion, Lisey had what was surely among the rarest of human talents: she was a business-minder who did not mind too much if you didn’t mind yours. As long as you weren’t making explosives to throw at someone, that was, and in Amanda’s case, explosives were always a possibility. She was the sort of woman who couldn’t help prying, the sort of woman who would open her mouth sooner or later.
© Stephen King 2006
Reproduced by kind permission of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
