Bag of Bones: Chapter 10 (pages 135-158)

This chapter will be known as the "exposition chapter." Bill Dean, the local caretaker, visits Mike at Sara Laughs and gives him an exhaustive history of Max Devore, Lance Devore and Mattie Devore. This chapter reminded me of the scene in Wayne's World, where Chris Farley plays a security guard and gives Wayne all the information he needs to track down the record executive he seeks. ("That guy seemed to have an awful lot of information for a security guard.")
Mike has an hour and a half long conversation with Mike (King gives a specific time frame for this conversation. Bill arrives at 9 am and has to leave to get to his next appointment at 11 am).
Mattie came from a poor family from the area and Lance, the son of the wealthy Max Devore, developed a passion for forestry. Max hired Lance to explore the vast forests he owned in this part of Maine. He also played in the local softball games held every week. The locals played the out- of -towners and Lance would play for either team. He met little Mattie then who was only seventeen and they fell in love.
King describes all of this exposition as coming from the mouth of Bill Dean, or as if the reader should understand that it's coming from Bill Dean but he also adds an odd little paragraph in the middle that gave me pause as to where the information was coming from. Bill's describing how Mattie met Lance and then Mike's narration takes over, " Mattie never said much about it, so I don't know much. Except I do...some of the details might be wrong [but] I got most of them right. That was my summer for knowing things I had no business knowing." So is King saying that Mike is becoming psychic as to the history of the people around him and is the story we're hearing coming from Bill, Mattie or the voice in Mike's head? Later on, Mattie tells her story herself, going into greater detail so we should then assume that the version in this chapter is Bill Dean's alone. But that paragraph throws some of this into confusion.
We find that Lance died retrieving a wrench from the top of his trailer during a thunderstorm. Lightening struck near him and he fell off the ladder. After Lance died, Max came into town and has been there ever since trying to get custody of Kyra.
The plot development in this chapter is that Bill tells Mike about some plastic owls that Jo had ordered in the fall of 1993 and that she came up to Sara Laughs by herself to retrieve them when they were delivered to the house. Mike has no memory of Jo going to Sara Laughs by herself and tries to dig around in his records to account for Jo's actions.
We also get more details about the woman with the face from "The Scream." (I'm not going to call it "The Cry" even though King does throughout the book. I want people to know what I'm talking about.) Her name is Rogette Whitmore, she's Max Devore's personal assistant and the locals think she's a witch. Only in New England do people go around thinking other people are witches.
The chapter ends with Mike making contact with the ghosts that inhabits Sara Laughs. He goes into the dark basement to look for the owls and he starts to hear thudding and Mike starts to talk to the noises. He asks Yes or No questions while instructing the ghost to thud once for "yes" two for "no." It starts off kind of silly but in King's defense, it does get a little creepy after half a page. Mike asks the ghost if it is Sara and the ghosts says "yes and no." At the end of the chapter the ghost has rearranged the magnets on the fridge to spell "hello."