So there, that’s my only “true-life” ghost story or whatever you want to call it. My Wednesday morning confession to this drugstore notebook. No doubt, I must have come up with all sorts of rationalizations for what I’d seen that day. Maybe the girl was from another town — Moody or Odenville or Trussville — and that’s why I’d never seen her before. Maybe she was committing suicide, and she never came back up because she’d tied concrete blocks around her ankles. Maybe she didcome back up, and I just missed it, somehow. Possibly, I was suffering the effects of hallucinations brought on by the heat.

And it’s raining even harder now. I can hardly see the slaty smudge of Ramswool Pond anymore. It’s lost out there somewhere in this cold and soggy Rhode Island morning. Days like this one, I have a lot of trouble remembering why the hell it was I left Atlanta. But then I remember Amanda and all the rest, and this dreary goddamn weather seems a small price to pay to finally be so far and away from our old place in Candler Park. Yes, I amrunning, and this is where I have run to, thank you very much. I put out a housing-wanted add on Craigslist, and one thing led to another, connect the fucking dots, and here I am, crappy weather, sodden groundhogs, and all. No regrets. Not yet. Boredom, yeah, and nightmares, and a dwindling bank balance, but life goes on. And now I have a hand cramp, so enough’s enough. Maybe I’ll just stick this notebook backin the bag from the drugstore, dump it in the trash, because right now, I truly wish I’d been content to sit here and drink my coffee and wait for the deer to come out.

The thing I can’t seem to get around is the boredom. Or maybe I mean the solitude. Perhaps I am not particularly adept at distinguishing these two conditions one from the other. I didn’t have to plop myself down in the least populated part of the state. I could easily have found something in Providence or some place near the sea, like Westerly or Narragansett. Coming here was, I suppose, an impulse move. Seemed like a good idea at the time. And there’s TV and the internet (by way of two different satellite dishes, I’ll note), and I have stacks of DVDs and CDs, my cell phone and the books I brought that I’ve been meaning to read for. well, some of them for years. But I’ve been here two weeks, and mostly I just wander about the property, never straying very far from the house, or I drink coffee and stare out the windows. Or I drink beer and bourbon, even though that’s a big no-no with the antiseizure meds. I’ve taken a couple or three long drives through South County, but I’ve never been much for sightseeing and scenery. Last week, I drove all the way out to Point Judith. There’s a lighthouse there and picnic tables and a big paved parking lot, though, fortunately, it’s early enough in the season that there weren’t tourists. I understand they are like unto an Old Testament plague of locusts, descending on the state from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, other places, too, no doubt. The siren song of the fucking beaches, I suppose. I saw a bumper sticker during one of my drives that read “They call it ‘tourist season,’ so why can’t we shoot them?” And yet, I expect that all of South County and much of this state has, sadly, become dependent on the income from tourism. The curse is the blessing is the curse. But, yeah, I sat there at one of the tables at Point Judith, and I watched what I suppose were fishing boats coming and going, fishing or lobster boats, a few sailboats, headed into the bay or out to sea or down to Block Island. The gulls were everywhere, noisy and not the least bit afraid of people, and that made me think of Hitchcock, of course. The tide was out, and there was a smell not unlike raw sewage on the wind.

Yesterday, I drove up to Moosup Valley, which is a little ways north of here, much closer than either Coventry or Foster. I saw the library, but only went in long enough to grab a photocopied flyer about its history. I don’t like being in libraries any more than I like being in bookstores, and I haven’t liked going into bookstores since my first novel came out fourteen years ago. Here’s a bit about the library from the flyer: “The History of the Tyler Free Library began when the people of Moosup Valley acquired Casey B. Tyler’s private collection of about 2000 books and therefore needed to build a structure to house it. The Tyler Free Library was formally organized in January of 1896, and a Librarian was hired. The Library opened and fifteen cards were issued on March 31, 1900. Local residents organized the books and the Library was open on Saturday afternoons.” The flyer goes on to say that the rather austere whitewashed building was moved from one side of Moosup Valley Road to the other, north to south, in 1965. And why the hell am I writing all this crap down? Oh yeah, boredom.

I also stopped at an old store on Plain Woods Road, to buy cigarettes and a few other things. I’m smoking again, and that wouldn’t make my doctor back in Atlanta any happier than would all the whiskey and bottles of Bass Ale. Like just about everything else around here, the store is ancient, and like the library, it, too, bears the name of Tyler. I always heard all that stuff about how closemouthed and secretive New Englanders are, especially when you get way out in the boonies like this, and especially towards outsiders, but either the stereotype is false or I keep running into atypically garrulous Yankees. There was an old woman working in the Tyler Store, and she told me it was built in 1834, though the west end wasn’t added on until 1870. Most of what she said I don’t recall, but she did know (I don’t know how, some local gossip’s grapevine, I suppose) that I was the “lady author boarding out at the old Wight place.” And then she said it was such a shame about the last tenant, and when I asked her what she meant, she just stared at me a moment or two, her eyes huge, magnified behind trifocal lenses.

“You don’t know?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Then it’s not for me to tell you, I suspect. But you ask Mr. Blanchard. You got a right to know.”

I told her that Blanchard, the landlord, is away on some sort of farm-related business, a fertilizer convention or sheep-dippers’ conference or something of the sort, and that I wouldn’t be seeing him again for at least a week, and probably longer than that (he lives up in Foster and hardly ever comes out this way). But, no dice. She wouldn’t say more, and returned, instead, to the history of the old store, and a cider mill that used to be somewhere nearby, and something about the cemetery where her father is buried, and all that sort of thing. Local color. And I listened politely, deciding I shouldn’t press her regarding the former tenant, whatever it was about him or her I should know, that she felt I had a right to know. All Blanchard ever said was that a professor from URI rented the place before I came along, but I know it’d sat empty for more than two years.

Not long after I got back to the house, there was a phone call (because I forgot to turn off my damned cell), Dorothy wanting to know if I was settled in, how I was getting on out here, was I homesick, and, finally, when she could no longer put it off, had I made any progress on the novel. I almost hung up, because she knows I have not even startedthe goddamn novel. But, Dorothy is a good agent, and those don’t grow on trees, and I might still need her someday. She reminded me, tactfully, but unhelpfully, that publishers who have paid out sizable portions of sizable advances eventually expect manuscripts in return, no matter how much money I might already have made for them on my previous books. I could have lied and said the writing was going well and not to worry. But where’s the fucking point? The deadline is only six weeks off now, and that’s not the original deadline. That’s the extension on the original deadline, and so then we talked about the feasibility of a secondextension, say six or eight months. Dorothy gets this tone in her voice at times like that, and I feel like I’m a kid again, talking to my mother. But she said she would call my editor next week. At least she didn’t ask about my health. At least that’s something.