The joke didn’t seem so funny this morning. I waited, listening for the sound of footsteps inside. I wouldn’t blame Ross for not wanting to answer his door. I might be an irate student or parent. After a few minutes I tried calling his name, but he didn’t appear. Maybe he didn’t want to talk to me either.
I walked around to the kitchen door. The top half of the door was glass. I could see a wedge of granite countertop and the kitchen sink, both spotlessly clean and bare. He’d had a housecleaner in since the party. The crystal bowl that usually held his car keys and spare change was on the counter beside the sink. I pressed my face to the glass, trying to make out if a cuff link was there, but I couldn’t tell through the thick, faceted crystal what were coins and what might have been a cuff link. I knocked again and called and listened to the echo of my voice die in the wind—and to another sound. A low hum. It sounded mechanical. The refrigerator maybe, or some kind of pump or generator. Knowing Ross he’d have an automated system for sucking moisture out of the basement—and it did seem to be coming from beneath me. I could feel the vibration in the soles of my feet.
Well, at least his house would be dry and mold free when he came back to it—because clearly he wasn’t here. He’d decided to ride out the wave of scandal somewhere else. At a friend’s apartment in the city, maybe, or one of those divey hotels in the Catskills he’d taken me to—Ko-Z Kabins or The Stagger Inn.
I suddenly felt foolish for coming. What reassurance did I think he was going to give me? Even if he swore up and down that he hadn’t been sleeping with Leia, how would I ever believe a word he said? How would anyone? I turned to go and saw the barn. It stood out in the snow, emblematic and stark, like an old weathered barn in an Andrew Wyeth painting, vibrating with some mysterious emotion.
It was vibrating. And the hum was coming from there. Ross must keep a generator in there, I told myself. But I felt a wrongness exuding from the square red façade. I didn’t want to go any closer to it. Perhaps because it was where I last saw Leia, standing beside the barn, shivering in her red leather jacket. Laughing with Troy.
She had been laughing. But Cressida said Leia had come to her guilt-ridden. And when I saw her in the kitchen she looked like she’d been crying. How could she have been laughing just minutes later? Was she that good an actress?
I started walking toward the barn as if I could bring the memory back into focus by moving closer to where she’d been. As if I could catch an echo of Leia’s laugh on the keening wind. Instead the hum from the garage grew louder, like the growl of an angry animal. There was a smell too leaking through the double doors, a sweet, sickly smell—
I started running through the snow toward the door. I pulled at the rusted metal handle, but snow had drifted in front of the door, making it hard to pull open, and I was getting dizzy with the effort—no, dizzy from the fumes leaking out of the barn. I yanked my scarf over my mouth and nose and, using both hands and bracing my feet, pulled the door until it opened a few feet. It was dark inside and thick with exhaust fumes, but I could make out Ross’s Volvo, the engine running. I took out my phone to call 911 but then I saw the slumped shape behind the wheel of the Volvo and I ran for the car door. It was locked. I pounded on the partially opened window and shouted Ross’s name. I thought I saw his eyelids flicker but it was hard to see in the dim barn through the fumes and my own eyes were stinging. If I didn’t get him out soon I would lose consciousness. I should get out of here and call 911—
But Ross could be dead by then.
I tried the handle of the door again, but it was locked. I tried sticking my hand in the cracked window, but I couldn’t reach the lock switch. Then I noticed the combination pad below it. Ross had to have the latest, fanciest gadgets. Including a combination lock on his car. If I knew the combination—
I did. Ross had told it to me once so I could get something from his car. It was the pub date of his first book. But what the hell was that? Why couldn’t he have used his birthday, like a normal person? All I remembered were the first two digits, 03—March—and then I remembered him laughingly adding, “Published on the Ides of March in the first year of the nineties—I should have known the book was doomed!” I punched in 031590, squinting through tears now streaming down my face, and the door unlocked. When I pulled the door open Ross slumped out. I caught his shoulders before he fell to the ground, nearly falling myself as the weight of his body fell against me. I scrambled to hold my footing, afraid that once I hit the ground I’d stay there. I readjusted my grip under his armpits, the cashmere slippery and cold under my hands, and dragged him backward toward the door—or at least toward what I hoped was the door. The barn seemed to be spinning. Crazy slants of light shot through cracks in the roof like laser beams in one of those video games my students played. I looked behind me for the door and it seemed like it was a mile away—and as if someone was standing in the doorway. A slim, dark figure silhouetted against the light that swelled until the dark blotted it out. It took me a second to understand what I’d seen. Someone had closed the door.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
With the last of my strength I pulled out my phone and dialed 911. Before I passed out I managed to give Ross’s address and tell the operator I was trapped in the barn with a running car.
When I woke up I was outside, throwing up in the snow. I felt an arm around my shoulders and cool hands holding back my hair. I looked up into Joe McAffrey’s face, his skin as white as it had been that morning when he knelt beside me on the road with Emmy.
“You’re okay,” he told me now. “A few minutes later you might not have been. I heard the call come over the radio while I was driving back from the impound lot. If I’d been ten minutes later . . .” He looked like he was going to throw up too.
“Ross?” It came out a croak. My throat felt as if it had been seared. Before I could say anything else a uniformed paramedic was clamping an oxygen mask over my face and ordering me to breathe. I looked past McAffrey to an ambulance where two paramedics were loading a stretcher. A bit of caramel-colored coat flapped in the wind. I looked back at McAffrey.
“He’s alive but unconscious,” he told me. “They don’t know what the damage will be.”
I nodded, unable to talk with the mask over my face. One of the paramedics came and said something to McAffrey and he nodded and waved them back to the ambulance. “Get Ballantine to the hospital. I’ll follow with Ms. Lewis.” He turned to me. “Is that okay?”
The paramedic lowered the mask from my face so I could talk. “Yes. I’m okay—they need to help Ross.”
“They’re going to do that. We have to get you to the hospital to check you out too.” He helped me to my feet and steered me to his car. I felt dizzier when I stood up and I wondered if I really was all right, whether I shouldn’t also be in that ambulance that was pulling out onto the river road, lights flashing, sirens shrieking. It sounded the way the wind had this morning, as if the wind had been trying to warn me.
“You’re not going to turn on the siren, are you?” I asked as McAffrey helped me into the passenger seat.
“Not if you don’t want me to. My niece always begs me to.”
“The one who loves horses?” I asked, the question popping out before I’d even realized it.
He looked up from snapping my seat belt, his face so close I could make out the fine lines around his eyes and smell the crisp citrus tang of his aftershave. “You’re waking up,” he said. “Good. I need you alert.”
His hand brushed against my leg as he pulled it away from the buckle and then he moved quickly away, slamming the door and jogging around to the driver’s seat. He barked something into his radio—I only caught the part about taking me to the hospital.
“Why?” I asked when he signed off and reversed the car onto River Road. “Why do you need me alert?”
“So you can help me figure out what the hell just happened.”
“I thought it was obvious. Ross was so upset that he was under suspicion for Leia�
�s death he tried to kill himself.”
“But that’s just it. He wasn’t under suspicion anymore. Abigail Martin came in last night and gave him an alibi for the time of Leia’s death.”
“Abbie? But if he was with Abbie why didn’t he say so?” And then I knew. “Oh!”
“Exactly. Your friend Dottie saw them together the night of the party.”
“She did? When?”
“She went back because she’d forgotten a casserole dish in the sink. She didn’t tell anyone because she saw President Martin and Professor Ballantine in the kitchen, but when she found out last night that Ballantine was under suspicion she went and told Dr. Martin, who came down and gave a sworn statement that she was with Ballantine until the early hours of the morning.”
“But Abbie is married and”—I was going to say “old” but then I realized that she wasn’t much older than Ross—“his boss. If this gets out . . .”
“It will hurt both their careers, which is why I was inclined to believe it. We’re dusting the keys and the interior of Ballantine’s car for prints and any other evidence that someone else drove his car. What I’m having a hard time understanding is why Ballantine would try to kill himself when he’d just gotten an alibi.”
“Because the damage is already done. Kelsey Manning has already spread the rumor of his affair with Leia on the internet. Even if it’s not true, Ross’s reputation is ruined and the respect of his students meant the world to him—”
I stopped, reliving those nightmarish moments in the garage, the terror of seeing the light in the doorway obliterated—
“The door . . .”
“The wind must have blown it shut,” McAffrey said.
“No, there was someone there. I just couldn’t make out who it was.”
“Are you sure? You had carbon monoxide poisoning. You might have been hallucinating.”
I pictured the dark figure in the doorway, the arm lifting and drawing the dark around it. “No, I definitely saw someone there. Whoever it was shut the door. They wanted Ross dead. It wasn’t a suicide attempt; it was attempted murder.”
I expected him to argue, to say I was hallucinating again, but instead, as we pulled into the hospital parking lot, he said, “If that’s true it wasn’t just Ballantine they tried to murder. Someone wanted you dead too.”
* * *
McAffrey left me in the hospital after making sure I had a doctor with me who promised not to let anyone in to see me. “Stay here,” he barked at me. “I’m going back to Ballantine’s to have another look at the scene. I don’t want you going anywhere without me.”
As I was hooked up to an oxygen machine and IV—for fluids, I was told—the order seemed superfluous, but I agreed. I was feeling woozier than I’d thought. Maybe it was the idea that someone was trying to kill me. The same person who had killed Oolong and left the bottle on the shrine. Someone who thought I knew something about Leia’s death. But what? I felt as if I knew less than ever. I hadn’t even known about Ross and Abbie or that Dottie knew—of course! That’s why she’d clammed up on me last night. Did that mean she wasn’t angry with me—
Awash with questions and lulled by the rhythmic pulse of the oxygen pump I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke the room was dim and gray, the light grainy like an old black-and-white television broadcast. For a moment I thought I was back in the barn, struggling under Ross’s weight. I craned my head for a glimpse of the door—for a way out—and found it blocked by a dark figure.
I lurched from the bed but was pulled back by something. Ross, I thought, dragging me back down with him. But then I realized it was the plastic IV and oxygen tubes. I tried to scream for help but my throat was so sore barely any sound came out. I tore the oxygen tubes off and grabbed the IV stand, grasping the cold metal for support, and tottered out the door, sure that the figure was the same as the one who had closed the barn door. The one who was trying to kill me. The hallway was empty but I heard a door swing shut at the end of it. I pattered down the hall, clutching my hospital gown with one hand, the IV stand with the other. I pushed open the last door on the hall into a double room. The first bed was empty, the second hidden by a drawn curtain. I’d woken up enough to wonder if this wasn’t a bad idea. Someone had closed the door of the barn; someone wanted me dead. But I kept on, as if I were skidding down an icy hill, unable to stop my own forward momentum.
I stepped past the curtain. A woman was huddled in the bed, her knees drawn up to her chin, lank hair hanging over her face.
“Hannah!” I said. “You’re conscious.”
“I-I just wanted to see that you were all right,” she stammered, cowering as if I meant to hit her over the head with my IV stand. “I heard the nurses talking about you. I-I just wanted to make sure you were okay. That’s all I ever wanted to do.”
“Is that why you left those things on the stone wall—the flowers, the barrette, the bottle?”
“I didn’t leave no bottle. I left those other things for your little girl. That’s what I was doing when I saw you in the woods.”
“What?” I noticed that there was a large bandage on the right side of her head. She’d hit the pavement pretty hard when Ross’s car ran into her. She might have brain damage. “What do you mean in the woods? You were outside my house—”
“Before that,” she said. “I wasn’t spying. I was only walking home on the road and I saw you hit the deer. It wasn’t your fault. It came outta nowhere!”
A day ago I would have been glad of her eyewitness account. But today, not only was it a bit too late, I remembered that Hannah Mulder had thought Emmy was a cat when she hit her. She wasn’t exactly a reliable witness. “I suppose you were walking home from the Swan.”
“I’d only had a few.” Suspicion flared in her eyes. “I saw the deer, then you got out of your car and went into the woods. I followed. I only wanted to see you were okay. That’s all I ever wanted.”
“Because if I killed myself you’d have another death on your head?”
She flinched as if I’d struck her. I instantly regretted my words, not because they were cruel but because she might stop talking. But she recovered soon enough.
“I saw you on the bridge that night.”
Touché. I could have pretended not to know what night she was talking about but there didn’t seem to be much point. It was a few months after Emmy died. Hannah must have been out on bail, not in prison yet. Evan had left that day because he said he couldn’t bear to be in the house surrounded by reminders of Emmy. I’d driven him to the train station and then, instead of going home, I’d driven across the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, then halfway back. There weren’t any other cars out, which I’d taken as a sign. I’d pulled over on the south side of the bridge on the highest point of the span. Whenever we’d driven over the bridge with Emmy she would strain against her car seat belt crying “Bon Boy-Osh, Scuffy!” Evan had read her a story in which a toy tugboat named Scuffy floats down a little stream to a bigger stream to a river and all the way to the sea. All summer long she and Evan had launched twig boats on the stream that ran behind our house and down to the river. Bon Voyage, Scuffy! we’d all shout as the twig crafts bobbed on the current, or Bon Boy-Osh! as Emmy would shout as we crossed the bridge, hoping for a glimpse of Scuffy the Tugboat headed down the Hudson to the sea.
Earlier that day I had come into the kitchen and found Evan holding a plastic mug with a picture of Scuffy the Tugboat on it. He was quietly weeping, trying not to let me hear. I knew then that he was going to leave. After I had taken him to the train station I drove to the bridge and stood at the guardrail watching the dark water flowing toward the sea thinking It will be quick, like flying into a wall of ice and then nothing. I’d leaned into the wind, yearning for that nothing, but then I heard Emmy’s voice shouting Bon Boy-Osh, Scuffy! and I couldn’t do it. It felt like betraying her somehow.
“How do you know it was just that one night?” I asked. “How do you know I didn’t go stand on the Kingston Brid
ge every night while you were in jail?”
She shrugged. “Because if you were gonna do it you’d’ve done it that night,” she said with the authority of someone who had stared into that dark water herself. “But when I saw you sit down in the snow I thought you’d come up with another way. Freezing to death would be slower but you wouldn’t feel so much like you were to blame. It would just sorta happen, like it was taken outta your hands.”
“You sound like you’ve given the subject a lot of thought.” She shrugged again, a habitual cringing gesture that summed up her preferred mode of suicide—something that was taken out of your hands. “So you watched me in the woods. What would you have done if I hadn’t gotten up?”
“Dragged you back to your car, I guess. But then I saw the girl and thought maybe I could get her to help.”
“What girl?”
“One of them college girls. Skinny. Short hair. Long neck. Red leather jacket.”
“Leia.”
“Yeah, that’s what her boyfriend called her. They were walking in the woods together, friendly like at first.”
“Did you recognize the boy?”
Her eyes slid away from me toward the door. I followed them, but the curtain blocked my view.
“It was dark. He was wearing a hood. They were going fast. I followed for a bit. They went over the hill and down to the boathouse. I don’t like it down there . . .” She hugged her knees in and shivered, as if the cold of the night had penetrated into the hospital room. “I went back to check on you. You was still sleeping. I thought I’d have to do something but then that girl came back. She ran right past me, the boy following her, calling her to come back.”
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