Bag of Bones: Chapter 12 (pages 176-209)

A nice long chapter describing Mattie and Mike burgeoning relationship. Mike calls Mattie to discuss the lawyer situation but incredibly he picks it up and, without dialing, Mattie is on the other end calling him. The phone never rang at all! That's how connected they are. She invites him over for dinner and he accepts. After dinner he goes into her trailer (even Mattie comments how they should only be seen in public. How having a relationship with a successful, millionaire author who cares enough about her to hire a lawyer for her custody battle makes her a bad mother, I'm not sure. The age difference?) Mike reads Kyra a bed time story and after Mike puts her to be, he and Mattie have a nice, long talk.
Mattie tells Mike all about Max. Max never wanted her to marry Lance and offered to pay her to go away and never see her again. Once she became pregnant Max offered to buy her child for a few million dollars. Mattie told Lance and Lance broke off all communication with his father. (He did this through email because Lance stutters. An unusual plot point considering he's dead. I hope his ghost stutters.) Mattie lets Max see Kyra a couple times a month. But Max is portrayed as a blood thirsty monster throughout. King references him as a villain from The Brothers Grimm over and over. Drilling it into the readers head that he is evil, even though nothing in his actions described has suggested a level of abnormality bordering on the supernatural. There's one scene where Max picks Kyra up and Mattie says he looked at her like he wanted to eat her. I hope that there's going to be some kind of soul-transference type deal where Max wants Kyra so he can transfer his evil and immortal soul into her. That would be really cool.
Kyra has stopped liking going over to Max's but still like Rogette whom Mattie calls "white nana." Does she also have a black nana? An Asian nana? When some one's white they usually don't go around describing other people as white. "My white uncle is awesome!" Aren't all you're uncles white?
Mattie agrees to let Mike help her with the lawyer as long as he really cares about her and it's not a game to him. Mike replies that he's doing this because he's really done nothing of value in the last four years. Four years with nothing to show for it he thinks. There's one little moment when Mike claims that they were both thinking about kissing but Mike lets the moment pass. Mattie says thanks again "and if there is anything I can do to return the favor let me know." Mike immediately envisions sexual favors and chastises the girl in his mind for giving him a virtual invitation to swap sex for law services. Nice.
An important plot point brought up is that Mattie saw Mike's wife in the summer of 1994 at a softball game with another man. They were hugging each other and looking a little bit cuddly. It's not too unusual for someone to remember they saw someone briefly four years ago, if it's a person of note. But Mattie has an unusual memory for something that happened for thirty seconds four years ago. Of course Mike didn't know Jo had come up to Sara Laughs in the summer of 1994 and Mike of course needs to know who this guy was and if the pregnancy test she bought the days she died (and didn't tell Mike about) was for this guy's baby. We get a little soap opera mixed in with our horror.
The chapter ends with the ghost spelling out on the refrigerator that Mike's wife is a liar and saying "ha ha." The ghost might be Nelson from the Simpson's.