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her something upon which to focus her unease. For she is uneasy, profoundly so. She has tried to tell herself that it’s no more than the humidity and the gathering clouds in the west presaging strong afternoon thunderstorms or maybe even tornadoes: a low-barometer kind of thing. But the barometer wasn’t low in Maine when she got out of bed this morning at quarter to seven; it had been a beautiful summer morning already, with the newly risen sun sparkling on a trillion points of dew in the grass between the house and Scott’s study. Not a cloud in the sky, what old Dandy Dave Debusher would have called “a real ham-n-egger of a day.” Yet the instant her feet touched the oak boards of the bedroom floor and her thoughts turned to the trip to Nashville—leave for the Portland Jet-port at eight, fly out on Delta at nine-forty—her heart dipped with dread and her morning-empty stomach, usually sweet, foamed with unmotivated fear. She had greeted these sensations with surprised dismay,because she ordinarily liked to travel, especially with Scott: the two of them sitting companionably side by side, he with his book open, she with hers. Sometimes he’d read her a bit of his and sometimes she’d vice him a little versa. Sometimes she’d feel him and look up and find his eyes. His solemn regard. As though she were a mystery to him still. Yes, and sometimes there would be turbulence, and she liked that, too. It was like the rides at the Topsham Fair when she and her sisters had been young, the Krazy Kups and the Wild Mouse. Scott never minded the turbulent interludes, either. She remembered one particularly mad approach into Denver—strong winds, thunderheads, little prop-job commuter plane from Death’s Head Airlines all over the smucking sky—and how she’d seen him actually pogo-ing in his seat like a little kid who needs to go to the bathroom, this crazy grin on his face. No, the rides that scared Scott were the smooth downbound ones he sometimes took in the middle of the night. Once in a while he talked—lucidly; smiling, even—about the things you could see in the screen of a dead TV set. Or a shot-glass, if you held it tilted just the right way. It scared her badly to hear him talk like that. Because it was crazy, and because she sort of knew what he meant, even if she didn’t want to.
    So it isn’t low barometer that’s bothering her and it certainly hadn’t been the prospect of getting on one more airplane. But in the bathroom, reaching for the light over the sink, something she had done without incident or accident day in and day out for the entire eight years they’d lived on Sugar Top Hill—which came to approximately three thousand days, less time spent on the road—the back of her hand whacked the waterglass with their toothbrushes in it and sent it tumbling to the tiles where it shattered into approximately three thousand stupid pieces.
    â€œShit fire, save the smuckin matches! ” she cried, frightened and irritated to find herself so . . . for she did not believe in omens, not Lisey Landon the writer’s wife, not little Lisey Debusher from the Sabbatus Road in Lisbon Falls, either. Omens were for the shanty Irish.
    Scott, who had just come back into the bedroom with two cups of coffee and a plate of buttered toast, stopped dead. “Whadja break, babyluv?”
    â€œNothing that came out of the dog’s ass,” Lisey said savagely, and wasthen sort of astonished. That was one of Granny Debusher’s sayings, and Granny D certainly had believed in omens, but that old colleen had been on the cooling board when Lisey was barely four. Was it possible Lisey could even remember her? It seemed so, for as she stood there, looking down at the shards of toothglass, the actual articulation of that omen came to her, came in Granny D’s tobacco-broken voice . . . and returns now, as she stands