by Ava Barry
“Hailey,” she said, nodding a greeting. “What do you need?”
“Can’t this be a friendly visit?”
She rolled her eyes. “You have a carefully curated network of friends all over Los Angeles. Out with it, Hail. What do you need?”
“I need a blood test.”
“You been promiscuous lately? Worried you might have picked something up?”
“It’s not my blood.”
Claudia nodded at Petra and Madeleine. “Are you going to introduce me to your friends?”
“Petra, Madeleine; this is Claudia.”
“Pleasure’s all mine.” Claudia bowed her head. “Let me finish this sandwich and then we can go inside. Jesus, Hailey, you’re seriously starting to owe me.”
When she finished her break, we followed her into her office, which was crammed with blood slides and test tubes. Claudia heaved a breath and sat down, then adjusted her glasses and folded her arms across her chest.
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“I just need a match.”
“Okay,” she said. “Are you breaking any laws? Am I going to get in trouble for this?”
“I’m not breaking laws,” I said. “This is an ancient case that the Los Angeles murder squad failed to solve.”
“Is this about Eleanor Hayes?”
“Maybe.”
She beckoned. “Maybe. Like you ever talk about anything else. Let’s see your sample.”
I took out the plastic bag and handed it to her. “It’s a piece of wood.”
“I see that,” she said, peering at the piece of wood.
I handed her the locket. “I don’t know if this helps,” I said, “but this is a locket of Eleanor’s hair.”
“It’s not going to happen right away,” she said. “Probably at least a week.”
I ran a hand through my hair. “Any chance you could do it faster than that?’
“What’s in it for me?”
“Dinner at the Magic Castle?”
“I’m not twelve, Hailey.”
“Who doesn’t like magic?”
“I’ll let you sit on it and get back to me.” She tilted the piece of wood under the lights. “I like Brazilian food and Korean spas, by the way.”
“See you, Claud.”
* * *
It was almost eight by the time we left the hospital.
“Home?” Madeleine said, turning to me. “Or do you need to drown your sorrows at some shitty bar?”
“I was hoping you could take Petra home,” I said. “I’m going to the airport.”
Madeleine gave me a long look. “You’re not kidding.”
“Afraid not. I need to go to Vermont.”
“Probably wise.”
“I thought you might try to talk me out of it,” I said. “You’re really supporting this?”
“Hailey,” Petra said slowly. “They’re going to come looking for you.”
“Who?”
“The fire,” she said, giving me a look I couldn’t decipher. “They’re going to think it was you. And if Thierry’s right, that the only reason they’re not pressing charges is so they can come after you personally…”
“I couldn’t have set the fire,” I argued. “I was in jail last night.”
“But the fire started today,” she said. “They’re going to think it was you. You have a record.”
“Jesus, I wish people would stop reminding me,” I said. “I didn’t set Windhall on fire.”
“We know that, but who else does?”
“I’m not going to jail until I finish this story. Otherwise I risked it all for nothing.”
TWENTY-TWO
I didn’t sleep on the plane, and felt jittery and anxious during takeoff and landing. The flight was a red-eye, and I imagined all the amorphous states collapsing against each other beneath the plane as we headed east. I had always had a strange affection for these places, the self-contained towns where everyone knew each other, where you could settle into a slower pace and know your own place in the world.
By the time I arrived in Burlington, I was starting to get paranoid from dehydration and lack of sleep. I made my way to the rental car counter, rubbing my eyes to feel more alert.
“What’s the cheapest car you have?” I asked the girl behind the counter.
“How long do you need it?”
“Today.”
“It’s going to be around a hundred. Sedan okay?”
“That’s fine.”
“You need chains.”
“Chains?”
“For your wheels.” She looked at me like I was an idiot. “It’s fall, but you never know what weather you’re gonna get, not with global warming. There’s a chance it could snow in the mountains. Do you know how to put them on?”
“I’m from Los Angeles,” I said, and she rolled her eyes.
“Come with me.”
“Look, how long is this going to take? I don’t have much time; I’m flying home later today.”
“Your rental insurance is no good if you get into an accident without chains,” she said.
Thirty minutes later, I was heading toward Grafton. Clouds of yellow and russet-colored leaves rose above the bends of the highway up into the mountains, shifting from apple green to crimson. Even though I was sleep-deprived, I couldn’t help but feel entranced. Growing up in Los Angeles meant that I hadn’t seen very many real autumns, apart from my college tenure. The air felt crisper and fresher than it had even in Burlington, and as I rose up through the mountains, I started to feel more optimistic.
I knew that it was irrational for me to feel rushed about getting to Grafton. Whatever information lay in wait for me there was already several decades old, and another few hours wasn’t going to harm anything. Still, an incomplete picture was beginning to form in my mind, and as a writer, I knew that if I didn’t act on my impulses quickly, they were liable to evaporate completely.
Grafton was just as lovely as all the pictures that I had seen of it: white houses with red caps, American flags crooked in the wind. Sugar maples and green firs, little white churches and apple orchards. I didn’t know where Saint Lucia’s was, and my phone was having trouble picking up a signal. I spotted a bed-and-breakfast up ahead and parked outside.
When I climbed up the steps, the woman behind the desk looked up and smiled. “Reservation?”
“I was hoping you could help me with something,” I said. “Have you ever heard of Saint Lucia’s?”
Her smile faded. “Are you law enforcement?”
“No, I’m a journalist,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow. “What have they done now?”
“Who?”
She shifted in her seat and glanced around to make sure that nobody else was listening.
“Last month, it was an overdose,” she said. “Apparently both parents were hooked on meth, and they let their little children run wild. Two of them had to go to the hospital for inhaling the fumes.”
“Are you talking about Saint Lucia’s?”
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“I’m looking for these buildings,” I said, and I passed her the photo of Theo and Connie.
She adjusted her glasses and examined the photos. “Oh, honey,” she said. “The buildings don’t look like that anymore. This was when it was a home for single mothers.”
“What happened?”
“They meant well,” she said, passing me the photo. “The nuns set up a home for women who had nowhere else to go. For a while, things were going well, but then the nuns ran out of money. They left town, and the squatters moved in. It’s not Christian to judge, so I won’t, but you don’t find anyone in Grafton who’s glad they’re here.”
“The squatters?”
“The buildings have been derelict for years,” she said. “No power, no water or gas. It’s awful in the wintertime—they burn anything that will catch a light. You’re not planning to go out there by yourself, are you?”
&n
bsp; “You don’t need to worry about me, ma’am.”
“Some of them have knives. It’s not technically in Grafton, so our police don’t go out there unless they really have to. Unincorporated land, you understand.”
“Can you tell me how to get there?”
She hesitated.
“Please, I’ve flown all the way out from Los Angeles.”
She paused. “All right. I’ll draw you a map.”
Once I was back in my car, I looked at the hand-drawn map. There was no sense of scale, but I gathered that the old buildings were some distance outside town. I shivered, not from the cold but from what the woman had told me. I knew that connecting the dots between the broken-down women’s facility and the burnt shell of Windhall was going to be a stretch, but I didn’t see any other paths opening in front of me.
* * *
The drive out to Saint Lucia’s was pastoral and lovely. Cathedrals of trees intersected over the narrow road, which wound past acres of apple orchards. It was at least a half-hour drive from Grafton, which was remote enough as it was. I was starting to wonder if the woman had given me wrong directions when I saw an old wooden sign in the distance.
SAINT LUCIA’S, it read, and nothing more. The sign was wind-battered and derelict, hanging off its screws. A few more minutes passed, and then I came upon some overgrown hedges leading down a long drive. I turned the car carefully down the drive, aware of several large potholes in the pavement. Piles of leaves had blown into some of them, so I was able to drive down the road without too much difficulty, but it still made slow progress. At the end of the hedges, I emerged into a wide parking area, and I saw what the woman had meant about Saint Lucia’s falling into ruin.
In the photograph, the buildings had been crisp white Victorian buildings, tidy as ironed shirts. There had been signs of life and ebullience here and there, a bit of rebellion in the form of wildflowers shooting up from between stoops and in the cracks of sidewalks. I had painted an entire narrative around the two dancers in the photograph, Theo and the unknown Connie, but this was not what I had been prepared for.
The original buildings were still there, all six of them, but they were nearly beyond recognition. No longer painted white, each house was a different shade of sherbet: lime, mango, rose. The new paint was evidence that at some point, someone had taken the initiative to restore life to the place, but now, all that life was gone. The houses had seen better years, the paint peeling and the porches sagging.
I climbed out of my car and glanced around. There were two cars parked at the far end of the lot, but neither looked like it still ran, and the undisturbed layer of leaves on the ground indicated that nobody had left or arrived since it had fallen. The peeling paint on the buildings exposed bare wood underneath, and the effect was similar to seeing a skeleton beneath a grinning face. I could see that the buildings hadn’t been completely abandoned; as I walked across the parking lot, a curtain moved aside to reveal a white face. When I waved, however, the curtain was snatched back into place.
I went up to the first door and knocked. The sky-blue house had a dilapidated door and a rotting front porch. There was an odd grinding sound from within the house, and I leaned forward to see if I could detect anything through the window, but I couldn’t see past the lace curtains.
The door opened to reveal an old woman dragging an oxygen machine behind her. She gave me a sharp look, then shook her head and waved a hand in my face.
She was starting to shut the door on me when I moved forward and put a hand on the doorjamb.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Have you ever heard of Theodore Langley?”
She didn’t respond but took her cane and tapped it sharply against my fingers. I jerked my hand away, and she quickly slammed the door in my face. I heard the sound of laughter behind me.
I turned around to find myself facing a man in a plaid shirt and a heavy denim jacket. He had dark skin, light eyes, and white hair. He carried two bags of groceries and shrugged when he saw me looking at him.
“Tough luck, kid,” he said.
“I’ll try someone else.”
“Ain’t no one here willing to talk to you.”
“Why not?”
“You come from the outside.”
“All right. Thanks for your time.”
I could feel his eyes on me as I trotted down the woman’s steps and crossed the small patch of dead grass that sat between the houses. I walked up to the next house, a salmon-colored Victorian, and knocked on the door. A pair of curtains was snatched back, a dirty look passed out at me, but nobody came to answer the door.
I cast a quick glance backward to see the man leaning against the railing of one of the houses, amused. He looked like he was lounging and watching something funny on TV, and the expression on his face annoyed me.
“What do you want?” I asked, irritated.
“Maybe I know something,” he said. “Unless you’d like to try some more doors. Go on.”
“Talk to me about what?”
“Oh, someone like you comes along every few years,” he said. “I’m usually the one who ends up answering the questions.”
“Then let’s talk,” I said. I wasn’t willing to be grateful to him, not yet. He almost certainly had an angle of his own, something he wanted from me. “I’m Max Hailey. And you are?”
“Thibodeau Bisset. You can call me Tibo.”
“Okay. Tibo.”
“Tell you what. I’ll make you some tea. It’s not great stuff, but it’s what they have on markdown over at the supermarket. Sound good?”
More curious than anything, I agreed. Tibo turned down a narrow path behind the buildings, and led me into the back garden of the last house. He knocked on the door, then tried the door handle and let himself inside. Without hesitation, I followed him into the house.
The interior was dry and smelled like dust, but it was surprisingly warm. It was very dark and felt claustrophobic since the windows were blacked out with garbage bags. We were in a kitchen, but the counters were covered in cardboard boxes.
Tibo hummed as he made his way through the kitchen and out into a sitting area. The windows here were also blacked out, but the room was illuminated by a collection of lamps of all different sizes: retro lamps, tall standing lamps, miniature lamps in the shapes of flowers.
The room was very clean, but also tight, since it was walled in by more cardboard boxes. There was a little woven rug on the floor, and a low table. The free space in the room was about half the size of my kitchen.
Tibo was watching me with an amused expression on his face. “What do you think of Vermont?”
“Where do you get the electricity for all these lamps?” I asked. “I thought you were…”
“Squatters?”
“Yes.” I blushed.
“We sure are. The county shut off our power about three years ago. I work at the dump, see, and we see a lot of car batteries go through.”
“And you light your house with them?”
He shrugged. “I like light.”
“Why not take the bags off the windows?”
“Not safe. These buildings have to look empty, or we get child protection and other county services coming by. Sit. Have a clementine.” He took a paper sack from his pocket. “Go on.”
I accepted one of the fruits, then peeled it, watching his face.
“Probably surprised to see oranges in the freezing cold.”
“Someone told me that they’re winter fruit,” I said.
“That’s right, very good. Where you from?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Sometimes they come further than that.”
“Who?”
“The visitors,” he said. “We are the custodians of ghost stories, those of us who still remember. These rooms have seen a lot of heartbreak. Now that the children are grown, they come back looking to make sense of what happened. My mother was a nurse for the women, so I remember. I assume you’ve come because you’re looking fo
r someone.”
“I am looking for someone,” I said. “Two people, actually.”
He nodded.
“Do you know who Theodore Langley is?”
The man went on peeling his clementine, managing to uncloak the entire fruit without destroying the skin.
“You do, don’t you?” I pressed.
The man didn’t respond, or perhaps he didn’t hear. “What can I help you with?”
“I need to know if he was here,” I said. “Actually, I know that he was. I’d like to know why.”
“Maybe it was before my time.”
“You do know who he is. What was he doing here?”
“There’s a certain kind of confidentiality around here,” he said. “We keep to ourselves. You probably noticed yourself, outside.”
I passed him the photograph. “Do you know who this is?”
The look of surprise that passed over his face was so immediate and fragile that I almost reached out to steady him. He passed his thumb over the face of the young woman, ignoring Theo.
“You know her,” I noted.
“Where did you get this?”
“Let’s trade information.” I laced my hands together. “Tell me who she was, and I’ll tell you what I know.”
“I didn’t know what happened to her,” he said. “She left without saying anything.”
I rubbed my hands together. “Connie?”
“No,” he said, and then gave me a perplexed look. “Connie was her friend.”
I stabbed the photograph with a finger. “Who is she?”
“That’s Flannery.”
The surprise on my face must have been evident, because the man stared at me, and we were both quiet for a long moment.
Finally, he broke the silence. “Do you know her?”