Bag of Bones: Chapter 9 (pages 120-134)

Nothing much happens in this chapter, just King laying the groundwork for later events. Mike Noonan goes to take a walk near the Warrington ( a compound of restaurant-hotel-golf course) and sees an old woman he takes for a ghost standing outside the deck of the bar. The woman is described (to me at least) in a very confusing way. First, King brings up the Munch drawing "The Cry," not "The Scream" as most people in the English speaking world know it as but "The Cry." Wikipedia says that a more direct translation is shriek rather than scream, but it is occasionally referred to as "The Cry."
"Imagine that face at rest." King asks the reader. Then imagine that figure wearing black shorts over a black tank bathing suit. Huh? OK. King says that combination is "strangely formal, like a cocktail dress." I give up Mr. King, I'm not sure what you're talking about...Anyway he waves at the woman, she doesn't wave back Mike turns away for a minute and she's gone. He thinks it's a ghost but "Jo" tells him it's not. Thanks Jo, a ghost telling him it's not a ghost.
Then Mike wonders why he and Jo didn't go to Sara Laughs the previous summer. Mike declares that it was always Jo who brought up the idea of going and she never brought it up this year and he had "forgotten" they had a summer place upstate apparently.
Mike now remembers an old blues song that "Sara Tidwell" a black blues singer from the twenties and for whom Sara Laughs is named after. I think this is the first mention of her in the book and I was a little confused about it, at first I didn't know why she was being brought up. Or who she was. King explains it in the next chapter but for this brief appearance (unless I missed something earlier) the reader is lost.
Mike then goes about cleaning up his offices and Joann's office (it is never made clear what, if anything Joann did as far as an occupation, she seemed to be a full-time volunteer and hobbyist). He finds a dictating machine from his writing days, and instead of thinking about trying to write with it he will use to record the sounds the ghosts in house make during the night. Earlier in the book when Mike's writer's block is described in some detail King tells us how Mike tried to write longhand and even how he tried to write using the Notepad program. But he never even brought up the subject of dictating. But if Mike never dictated before, he might not have thought of it as a viable option. It's just funny how the first thing I thought of when the dictating machine made an appearance was, "Mike's going to try writing with it," and the first thing Mike thought of was, "now I can record those ghosts!"
He sets the tape recorder up and in the morning plays it back and hears a ghostly whisper, "Oh Mike."