Read Lisey’s Story for Free Online

eyes spilled down her cheeks.
    Now she turned the photo widdershins and read the other, longer note.
    8–18–88
Dear Scott (If I may): I thought you would want this photograph of C. Anthony (“Tony”) Eddington III, the young grad student who saved your life. U-Tenn will be honoring him, of course; we felt you might also want to bein touch. His address is 748 Coldview Avenue, Nashville North, Nashville, Tennessee 37235. Mr. Eddington, “Poor but Proud,” comes from a fine Southern Tennessee family and is an excellent student poet. You will of course want to thank (and perhaps reward) him in your own way. Respectfully, sir, I remain, Roger C. Dashmiel Assoc. Prof., English Dept. University of Tennessee, Nashville
    Lisey read this over once, twice (“three times a laaaa-dy,” Scott would have sung at this point), still smiling, but now with a sour combination of amazement and final comprehension. Roger Dashmiel was probably as ignorant of what had actually happened as the campus cop. Which meant there were only two people in the whole round world who knew the truth about that afternoon: Lisey Landon and Tony Eddington, the fellow who would be rahtin it up for the year-end review. It was possible that even “Toneh” himself didn’t realize what had happened after the ceremonial first spadeful of earth had been turned. Maybe he’d been in a fear-injected blackout. Dig it: he might really believe he had saved Scott Landon from death.
    No. She didn’t think so. What she thought was that this clipping and the jotted, fulsome note were Dashmiel’s petty revenge on Scott for . . . for what?
    For just being polite?
    For looking at Monsieur de Litérature Dashmiel and not seeing him?
    For being a rich creative snotbucket who was going to make a fifteen-thousand-dollar payday for saying a few uplifting words and turning a single spadeful of earth? Pre-loosened earth at that?
    All those things. And more. Lisey thought Dashmiel had somehow believed their positions would have been reversed in a truer, fairer world; that he, Roger Dashmiel, would have been the focus of the intellectual interest and student adulation, while Scott Landon—not to mention his mousy little wouldn’t-fart-if-her-life-depended-on-it wife—would be the ones toiling in the campus vineyards, always curryingfavor, testing the winds of departmental politics, and scurrying to make that next pay-grade.
    â€œWhatever it was, he didn’t like Scott and this was his revenge,” she marveled to the empty, sunny rooms above the long barn. “This . . . poison-pen clipping.”
    She considered the idea for a moment, then burst out into gales of merry laughter, clapping her hands on the flat part of her chest above her breasts.
    When she recovered a little, she paged through the Review until she found the article she was looking for: AMERICA’S MOST FAMOUS NOVELIST INAUGURATES LONG-HELD LIBRARY DREAM. The byline was Anthony Eddington, sometimes known as Toneh. And, as Lisey skimmed it, she found she was capable of anger, after all. Even rage. For there was no mention of how that day’s festivities had ended, or the Review author’s own putative heroism, for that matter. The only suggestion that something had gone crazily wrong was in the concluding lines: “Mr. Landon’s speech following the groundbreaking and his reading in the student lounge that evening were cancelled due to unexpected developments, but we hope to see this giant of American literature back on our campus soon. Perhaps for the ceremonial ribbon-cutting when the Shipman opens its doors in 1991!”
    Reminding herself this was the school Review, for God’s sake, a glossy, expensive hardcover book mailed out to presumably loaded alumni, went some distance toward defusing her anger; did she really think the U-Tenn Review was going to let their hired hack rehash that day’s bloody bit of