“It’s a huge deal,” he said. “And you didn’t give it back, you gave it to Chris. Who knows what he’ll do with it?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you should have come to me,” he said.
“So you could yell at me?”
“I’m not yelling.” He drew in a deep breath. “What did it say?”
“The letter? What’s the difference?”
“Humor me.”
I didn’t want to tell him the part about her brother. Not when he was being like this. “It was just a bunch of stuff about that machine, and her needing to make a decision. And then there was, like, a poem or something. I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You don’t remember?”
“No, I mean it didn’t make any sense. Like it was in code or something. So I don’t know what it said. Satisfied?”
“You’re mad,” he said.
“You’re observant.”
He sighed. “I’m also an ass.”
At that, I softened. “It’s been a long week,” I admitted. “For both of us.”
“I’m just worried about you.”
“Trust me, I’m not as fragile as you seem to think.”
“No, I mean I’m really worried. Someone attacked the Hoff. The idea that you have something they want, whoever they are? It scares me. I wish it scared you.”
“Takes a lot to scare me,” I said lightly, wishing it were true. “Besides, the Hoff had a stroke. It’s sad, but nothing actually happened. There is no ‘they.’ ”
“You really believe that?”
“Yes,” I said, firm.
“Then so do I.”
I laughed. “Now who’s lying?”
He was so different from Chris, who didn’t acknowledge the existence of darkness. Max understood it. Maybe he was right, I thought, and I should try harder to let him understand me.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked.
“That you know it’s not your job to protect me. And even if it were, acting like a jerk isn’t really the best way to do it.”
“I know that.”
“Are you lying now?” I asked.
Silence.
“Are you shaking your head?” I asked, and had to smile.
More silence.
“And now you’re nodding?”
“I love that you know me,” he said.
“I love that you know me, too.”
“Are we okay?”
This time I nodded.
After a moment, he laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes.” And then, maybe afraid I was going to change my mind, he hung up without saying goodbye.
30
The Moores’ sprawling Victorian was the largest house on the block and the only one without any lights blazing, not even the fake antique gas lamps that dotted the lawn and winding driveway. The moon was a sliver, and a dense layer of clouds blocked out the stars. When I switched off my headlights, the night went completely black. It didn’t bother me; I’d walked the cobblestone path enough times to do it blindfolded. The door was open, knocking back and forth in the wind.
That bothered me.
“Hello?”
No answer. I was twenty minutes late, and presumably they were all gathered in the soundproofed basement in front of the giant flat screen, having started without me.
The door knocked against the frame again. I stepped inside and pulled it shut behind me. As I sealed myself into the darkness, I heard the breathing, sharp and uneven, like a panicked animal. Close.
A strange metallic scent hung heavy in the air. Familiar.
I was already reaching for the lights when a switch flipped in my head and I recognized the smell. I knew.
I saw the footprints first, red and shimmering under the track lighting, a trail of them heading straight toward me, past me, out the door. Then the drawing, finger-painted in blood, a dot between two curved lines, like an eye, with a lightning bolt speared through its center. There were other prints, not prints at all really, but blurry smears that could have been left by a foot, a hand, a knee, body parts scraped and dragged across the expensive tile.
Mrs. Moore would die when she saw this, I thought, feeling the strange urge to giggle. She was obsessed with keeping her tile clean.
I swallowed the laughter. It tasted like bile.
Chris’s house had a long entryway, the Great Hall, Mrs. Moore liked to call it. Opposite the door, a winding mahogany staircase led to the second floor, with its four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and former servants’ quarters. A step down on the left led to the kitchen and dining area, which had recently been featured in the Boston Globe’s style section under the caption “Country Splendors.” On the right lay a living room no one ever used, with its pristine white tiles, white couches, white walls. Chris liked to say it looked like a padded room in a mental institution, “therefore, perfect for my mother,” he would add, especially when she was in the room, because she loved his teasing as much as anyone.
He was lying facedown.
His left arm was flung out at an unnatural angle, elbow bent backward and splintered bone poking through the flesh. His right arm was crushed beneath him. He was so still.
And the blood.
Graceful as ever, Adriane perched in the center of it, a child in a puddle. Legs tucked into her chest, arms wrapped around them, face drained of color except for the red slash slicing across her cheek, she rocked back and forth.
Someone was screaming, and I needed it to stop.
I couldn’t think.
I didn’t want to think.
I closed my eyes. I closed my mouth and held my breath.
The screaming stopped.
But when I opened my eyes, nothing had changed. It doesn’t look like he’s sleeping, I thought. If he looked like he was sleeping, I could pretend.
“Adriane,” I said. The voice sounded far away. Calm. “Adriane, what happened?” Thinking, This is what you do, you pretend you can handle it, you pretend you’re in control, you pretend.
Thinking, Don’t you dare leave me alone.
She looked past me, eyes sightless, mouth open, small, weak noises punctuating the panicked breathing. No words, just noise. Like a baby; like an animal.
This is what you do, I thought, and called 911, and told them something had happened, someone was bleeding, someone was dead.
“Get out of the house,” the distant voice said. “Stay on the line.” And I meant to, but the man kept talking and talking and it was too hard to focus on his words, so I hung up.
I hung up and knelt beside Chris, knelt beside the body. Knelt in the blood, put a hand on his back, then pulled it away, sticky.
I grabbed Adriane, shook her, slapped her, my hand leaving a bloody print on her cheek, screamed again, begged her to wake up, to come back, to tell me what happened, please, God, just tell me what happened.
She had something crumpled in her fist. I forced her fingers open, and there it was, like a joke, like a bad penny, like a curse, E. I. Westonia, Ioanni Francisco Westonio, fratri suo germano, a stolen letter.
No big deal.
Then the bloody letter was in my pocket and the phone was in my hand again, Max’s face grinning from the display, because he’d promised to protect me whether I wanted him to or not, but the phone rang and went to voice mail and I hung up.
He’s dead, too, I thought—I knew. Everywhere I looked, Chris’s blood. Adriane’s empty eyes. “Please, don’t leave me here alone. Please.” I wasn’t sure which one I was talking to, not that it mattered. No one answered, because no one was listening.
Gone is gone.
PART II
The Ceremony of Innocence
Evocat iratos Cæli inclementia ventos;
Imbreque continuo nubila mista madent.
Molda tumet multùm vehemens pluvialibus undis
Prorumpens ripis impetuosa suis.
The sky’s inclemency stirs up the angry winds;
The turbulent Vltava, swollen with rainy waves,
Bursting, impetuous, breaks through its river-banks.
“De inundatione Pragæ ex continuis pluviis exorta”
Elizabeth Jane Weston
1
I have been here before.
2
I have been here before.
I have done this before.
3
Before.
There were flashing lights, before. Sirens screaming. Someone screaming.
There was blood, before, blood on the road, blood I imagined and blood I saw, blood that shimmered under streetlights as we sped by, tires crunching over broken glass, my father grim and pale behind the wheel, my mother with one hand cupped to her ear, like she was still hearing, or trying not to hear, the call that had summoned us from before to now, to after. There was blood on the road and there was blood on the torn clothes stuffed into the Ziploc bag, blood on his wallet and his sneakers and the button-down shirt he’d chosen at the last minute because this was supposed to be the kind of party where you were allowed to look, just a little, like you were trying.
There were cops, before, because of the blood. Because of his blood, tainted, proving it was his mistake, his fault, his crime. Or, as he would have said—because he had watched a James Dean movie in English class and then another with Catherine to dupe her into believing he had depth; because he had imbibed, embraced, finally inhabited the legend, living fast and dying young—his beautiful corpse.
The funeral was closed-casket. The blood on the road, the blood on the shoes, that was the last of him I saw.
It was not beautiful.
4
I have done this before.
Waited in waiting rooms—not the carpeted, cheerfully antiseptic, magazine-strewn rooms for waiters who needed to forget where they were, reclining in padded chairs and watching cooking shows on the ceiling TV, but rooms that were windowless closets for people whose need for denial had ridden off into the sunset with their hope.
Tried not to look at my parents looking at me. Tried not to shake. Tried to cry. Tried to bargain with a nonexistent God, beg for a reprieve or a miracle or a time machine, anything to go back, to bring him back.
I had done this before, so this time, I knew better.
And of course, this time, I had seen the blood seeping out of his body. I had seen his face, too swollen, too pale. This time, instead of a Ziploc bag, I had an ancient letter, streaked with dull red brown, as if parchment could rust. Those were the differences.
Everything else was the same.
5
They took me to the hospital because I was covered in blood. They let me stay because Adriane was there, too, her empty gaze unflinching as they stitched up the gash in her cheek, plied her with liquids and gentle tones, shined lights at her pupils, and finally, her parents flanking her eerily still body, ushered her off to “a special wing, better suited to her condition.” A special wing, I gathered, for the special kind of people who stared at walls, heard voices, leapt from windows, strung up nooses, sliced deep and bled themselves dry, the people who knew God.
Smart, I thought, though I didn’t want to think it. Leave it to Adriane, I tried not to think and failed, to find herself a shortcut, take the convenient off-ramp to crazyville, to leave me alone with the cops, with our friend who had become a corpse and his house that had become a crime scene, with the automated response that now greeted me when I dialed Max’s number: This mailbox is full.
A scrum of cameras and talking heads pounced as soon as we passed through the sliding hospital doors. My parents shoved me into the car. They shouted at the crowd. The crowd shouted back. Cameras flashed. None of it mattered. I slumped down in the leather seat, squinting against the glint of sun in the lenses. It was only then that I realized it was dawn.
I closed my eyes.
Opened them again.
There were too many things waiting in the dark.
6
There were two of them: the determinedly kind one who’d assured me an absurdly short time ago, at another crime scene, that everything would be all right, and the blond in his early twenties who looked like he’d failed the entrance requirements for gym-teacher college and, while none too pleased to have ended up in his spiffy blue uniform by default, would have to admit that the carefully buffed nine-millimeter tucked into his shoulder holster ameliorated the pain of a dream deferred.
“Tell me what happened,” the older one said. The room was white and windowless, the chair too hard. “Go slow. Start at the beginning.”
At the beginning, we didn’t know what it was, Chris and I. We didn’t know if stale pizza and a scratched Spartacus DVD—which mercifully froze after the first chariot race, freeing up the rest of the night for botched conjugations and several heated rounds of Egyptian ratscrew—constituted an awkward date, or just a night of shared homework between two people who seemed unlikely to share anything but a cafeteria table, and that only under duress. But even at the beginning, after that first and last painful attempt to satisfy convention—the awkward hand brushing, the mandatory gazing, the aborted attempt at a kiss, halted with his lips somewhere in the proximity of my nose, both of us flinching away at the same moment in simultaneous, horrified laughter—there was something between us: like at first sight.
They didn’t want to hear about that.
“We were supposed to watch a movie,” I said. “I came late.”
They made me run through it from start to bloody finish, and then again, once forward and once backward, wounds stitching themselves together, bodies rising, a horror film played in reverse, and each time I told the story, I let them think it didn’t hurt to reach the punch line, to say, again, and again, “He was dead.” They asked the same questions in different words, but I had seen Law & Order in all its iterations, and I knew liars were always more consistent in their stories than traumatized witnesses telling the unsteady truth. If I had been lying, they wouldn’t have caught me. These were the things I thought: How to lie, if I’d wanted to lie. Why there was no two-way mirror. Whether cops really did like donuts, and if so, whether I could get my hands on one, and whether I could eat without throwing up.
Not why is Chris dead?
Not what happened to Adriane?
Not where is Max?
They had taken away my phone.
“I didn’t do this,” I said.
“Who’s saying you did?” That was Cop the Younger.
“If I’d done this, you really think I would have stuck around and called 911?”
“No. We don’t.” Cop the Elder. “There were signs of a struggle. Blood not belonging to the victim. The perp would have defensive wounds. And someone your size …” He shook his head. “But you might know something that could help us. You want to help us, don’t you?”
Even without my Law & Order expertise, I would have heard what he didn’t say: That maybe I knew something because I was a part of it. That maybe I didn’t want to help, because I’d stood by and watched someone else get defensive wounds, watched Chris die.
I nodded.
They asked about Chris and Adriane, about their relationship (“totally committed”), how often they fought (“never”), whether they had ever cheated (“never”), whether I had been secretly in love with one, or the other, or both (“screw you”). They asked about the symbol painted in Chris’s blood, whether I’d seen it before, whether it meant anything to me, whether Chris had been involved in the kind of thing that entailed drawing strange marks in human blood. (I could already imagine the headlines: Sex Triangle Tragedy! Teen Orgy Death Pact! Bloody Pagan Small-Town Sacrifice!)
There were no windows, no clocks. Someone brought me coffee I didn’t drink, a wilted sandwich I didn’t eat. No donuts.
They asked about Max.
They asked a lot about Max.
“He was supposed to be at the house,” the older cop s
aid. “You say he never showed up. But he was seen fleeing the area shortly before the body was discovered. His prints are all over the crime scene—”
“It’s not the ‘crime scene,’ it’s Chris’s house. Of course his fingerprints are there. So are mine. So are Adriane’s. So are the cable guy’s. Maybe he did it.”
“If he’s got nothing to hide, why doesn’t he turn himself in?”
Because he can’t.
Because he’s dead.
I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t stop thinking it.
“We’ve attempted to contact his parents using the number the college has on file. It’s been disconnected.”
“So?”
“Have you met his parents?”
I shook my head.
“Have you met anyone who can confirm for you that Max Lewis is who he claims to be? Are you so sure you can trust him?”
In January, Max had driven me into the foothills, where a still lake mirrored smoky sky and deer tracks carved meridians in the snow. Stripped down and barefoot, we padded toward the water. “ ‘Do I dare?’ ” he whispered. T. S. Eliot, again, from the poem that had become sacred to the story of us. Did I? “You’ve lost your mind,” I told him, and took his hand. He didn’t lead me. We threw ourselves into the water together. It was torture. It was pain like no pain I’d ever felt, like my skin was on fire and my lungs were ice. But no sky had ever been so blue, no water so clear. And after, back in the car with the heater blasting, his wet arms around my shivering body, staticky Elvis on the radio because neither of us wanted to venture out from beneath the wool blanket to search for a new station, reveling in our aggressive weirdness, laughing even as we kissed, my wet hair sticking to his face, his lips tasting of lake, our skin still clammy and our hearts still thudding too fast, it was warm. He never had to tell me to trust him.
“Max is Chris’s best friend,” I said, knowing they weren’t hearing me. “Something happened to him. He needs help.”
Or he doesn’t anymore, like Chris doesn’t anymore.
The Book of Blood and Shadow Page 10