In the Handbook were several grainy photos of stiff and formally dressed peasants staring expressionlessly into the camera. In the corner of each photograph a dark-haired girl, blurred, seemed to be moving as quickly as possible out of the photographer’s range. And as if that weren’t enough, the girl had appeared to every man in the village, in the night, unclothed, demanding sex. Apparently, the men obliged her, however reluctantly, and during the act she bit them—a few on the neck, a few on the arm, and one, mercilessly, on the nipple, which she bit clean off his torso before disappearing. Each man died in a farming accident within a few weeks of the event.
But what Mira wanted the students to read was the part that followed this:
How the body was dug up, and how the body was found in her coffin, a year after the girl’s death, good as new. Her flesh was pink. Her hair had grown luxuriously around her shoulders. Her mouth was red, filled with blood. Her teeth had grown, and they glistened. Only her clothes had rotted away, revealing, of course, her beautifully gleaming breasts.
The village then managed to engage, at great expense, a cement truck to back up to the grave and fill it in, and the girl, whose name was Etta, never walked through the village again, and the farm accidents mysteriously drew to a halt—a fact the villagers attributed to the cementing-in of this tomb, not to the fact that their agricultural lifestyle was, within a few years, completely eradicated when a cardboard box factory moved into the village.
Melvin, the author, had been an ancient professor at Mira’s undergraduate institution and had given her the only B she’d ever received in college, but she still thought his was a brilliant analysis of the superstitions of the period and the move from an agrarian to an urban culture that fueled them. This story of Etta, he said in the Handbook, was the last real “vampire” story the world would ever know. In only another year or two, all the young adults who might have died tilling the land or harvesting the grain were working in that box factory or in shops in some Soviet metropolis, and the funerary traditions were forever changed. Instead of simple burials in wooden coffins in the churchyard, the whole commercial funeral business moved in, complete with embalming and sealed tombs and caskets that cost more than most families in the area made in a year.
“It’s a good book,” Mira said to Perry, handing it back to him. “I’m glad you thought to check it out.”
“I’ve read all the articles,” he said, “that you assigned, and—”
“Those aren’t assignments,” Mira said. “That’s the suggested list. That’s for supplemental research.”
“I know,” Perry said. “But . . .” He shook his head, and then he held up one of the photos of “Etta.” He’d had the page bookmarked. Mira looked at it and nodded.
It was possible, she realized, that this student was mentally ill. It was far from unusual. There were always mentally ill students, especially in the Honors College. Intelligence and ambition went hand in hand, it seemed, with some kinds of delusion. These days, too, Mira found that students who were perhaps only minimally depressed (and how many smart twenty-year-olds weren’t depressed?) had been medicated by their family doctors into a state of either apathetic insensibility or manic excitement. These kids carried their bottles of Klonopin and Xanax from class to class, and swigged their pills down by the handfuls with their energy drinks. Who knew what this particular kid might be taking, especially if he had, as he claimed, been close friends with Nicole Werner?
Mira nodded at the book, leaned forward, and considered the photo. The small gray girl in the corner was dashing out of out it while a grim-looking family stared solemnly into the camera, oblivious. Although it was 1952, this photograph was black and white, and there was an aura of antiquated severity about it that made it seem more like an image from the late 1800s. But Mira had been to villages near this one, and even in the mid-nineties, in broad daylight, in the spring, in real life, there was always something black and white about the places and the people, as if their joyless lives had drained the color out of the world around them.
She looked from the photograph to her student. His brow was furrowed. “Yes?” she said.
“I read the whole essay,” he said, “and the author’s analysis. And I understand what he’s saying about the cultural context, and the societal changes, and the folklore, but—” He stopped, seeming to search for words. He closed the book.
“But what?” Mira asked.
He reached into his backpack again, and unfolded a copy of the student newspaper on his lap. It was the front-page article that had run about Nicole Werner a few days after the accident. On one side of the page there was the now-familiar senior portrait of Nicole with a warm halo of studio light pouring over her blond hair, and beside it a photograph of the memorial orchard-planting that took place at her sorority. In that photograph, a group of slender sorority sisters in black dresses and sunglasses held one another’s hands, heads bowed, around one of the blooming cherry trees that had been planted. Perry Edwards pointed to this photograph, his finger on the tree—which looked, even in miniature and in black and white, like the lush icon of lost innocence it was meant to be. He slid his finger over the blossoms and then into the right-hand corner of the photo.
“Look,” he said.
Mira did.
There was nothing there.
She moved her eyes slowly from the newspaper back to Perry Edwards’s face, and shook her head.
“There’s a girl there,” he said.
Mira looked again, more closely—although by now she suspected where this was going, and that her hunch about mental illness had been right. She searched the grainy distance until, finally, just over the boy’s clean fingernail, she did see what looked like a gray figure of a girl moving out of the photograph.
She looked back at Perry, and shrugged. She said, “Okay. Maybe. Yes?”
Perry let the newspaper drop onto his lap, and then leaned over his backpack again and took a manila envelope out of it.
“I scanned the photo,” he said. “And then I enlarged it.” He reached into the envelope, took it out—glossy, gray, eight by twelve—and handed the photo to Mira. Now only the right-hand corner of the whole image remained—a few petals on a bough at the bottom, like a cloudy carpet, and, in the left-hand corner, the shining bumper of someone’s car parked in the sorority driveway—and, in the center of it all, the blurred girl.
She was wearing something filmy, either a mid-thigh-length dress or a shift over a miniskirt or shorts. Her arms were bare, and she was obviously in a hurry to get somewhere—one leg was bent behind her, like she was running. Her arms were swinging widely at her sides, or pumping. There was a flash of silver or gold around her wrist—a bracelet—and the side of her face had caught the sunlight, and the light obscured her features. Her blond hair was flowing behind her from her shoulders, lifted by a breeze or by her own momentum.
Certainly, from this distance, the girl looked like Nicole Werner, but so did half the other girls standing in the first photograph, in their black dresses, with their straight hair, holding one another’s hands.
So did half the girls on this campus, especially the sorority girls.
“Yes,” Mira said again, nodding, and handed it back to him.
She continued to nod as she tried to think carefully about what to say next. She’d made mistakes with students in the past, given them too much encouragement. She swallowed, and inhaled, and then said, “You’ve been through a terrible trauma. I understand that. I think, for that reason, this is not a class you should be taking right now. The material is too relevant, perhaps, at the moment, and it might be”—she used her hands to try to soften the word before it came out of her mouth, opening the hands on her lap—“suggesting things to you.”
Perry Edwards nodded, but he didn’t look away. He seemed to have expected her to say this, and was neither disappointed nor insulted.
He inhaled, bit his lower lip for a second, and then he said, “I understand what you’re
saying. But I’ve had this photograph since May. And there are other things.” He looked up to the ceiling, as if searching for the words, and then back at Mira. “Professor Polson, Nicole’s here. She’s still on this campus. I was here all summer. I’ve seen her.”
Mira sat back in her chair, a kind of recoiling she immediately regretted. The tone of his voice. It was so certain.
Perry Edwards reached into his backpack again, took out another envelope, and out of it, a second photograph—this one of a slender girl with shoulder-length brown hair emerging from one of the sorority houses on the Row. She was glaring at the camera. She looked ready to sneer an obscenity at the photographer, or raise her middle finger. He held the newspaper—the senior portrait of the blond Nicole Werner—up next to the photograph.
Mira looked from one to the other, and said, “I do see the resemblance, Perry, but, surely, you—”
“I know,” he said. “I know these girls all look alike to people who don’t know them. But, Professor Polson, I went all through school with Nicole Werner. We grew up in the same town. We went to Sunday school together. We were confirmed at the same church. I know what she looks like. I see her. She’s here. She’s dyed her hair, but it’s her. I don’t know how. And I didn’t expect anyone to tell me anything except that I’m crazy if I told them, so I haven’t told anyone. But, I thought—well, I read your book, Traditional Burial Practices and Their Folk Origins.” He pronounced the words carefully, as if Mira might not recognize the title of her own book. “And,” he said, “I thought maybe, if you’re working on a new book, a book like it, what could be better than if you had a campus equivalent of this?” he held up Melvin’s book again, open to the photograph of Etta. “I mean, even if you just think we’re crazy—”
“We?” Mira asked.
“That’s the thing,” Perry said. “There are two other guys who’ve seen her. Lucas Schiff. He’s a fifth-year senior. He was our resident advisor last year—”
“I know Lucas,” Mira said. Lucas Schiff. He’d been in her first-year seminar her first year on campus. He’d been busted for possession of a controlled substance then, but had gotten off on some technicality. He was one of those politically active kids who used their political activism as an excuse not to bathe, and to smoke a lot of dope.
“And also Patrick Wright.”
“I know Patrick, too,” Mira said. Patrick was clean-cut, from a small town in the northern part of the state. Nothing like Lucas Schiff. “He’s a junior?”
“Yeah,” Perry said. “He and Lucas—they’ve both been with her since she died.”
“Excuse me?” Mira asked.
“They’ve had sex with her.”
Mira put her hand over her mouth. She wasn’t sure if she was going to laugh or cry. Perry seemed not to notice the gesture. He went on.
“What my point is, Professor Polson. I mean, couldn’t you, maybe, write, say, something comparing Etta to—”
“Nicole Werner?”
“Yeah. I mean, if you’re working on another book. You wouldn’t have to believe us. Melvin doesn’t believe what the villagers are saying about Etta. He just listens. He analyzes.”
Mira looked at Perry Edwards carefully. For a crazy second she wondered if he’d spoken to the dean of the Honors College about her, if he somehow knew she hadn’t even begun the book she was going to have to have published in the next eighteen months. That she hadn’t even come up with a solid idea for the book.
No, of course not. He was just a bright, passionate, or maybe crazy kid. She inhaled. She said, “Why, Perry? Why do you want me to do that? What’s the point?”
“I need your help. There’s something here. I need”—something seemed to catch in his throat, and he swallowed—“a grown-up.”
“Perry,” Mira said, and then stopped, literally biting her tongue.
Although, later, she would try to tell herself that it was this last appeal to her as a “grown-up” that had brought the two of them together in their search for Nicole, Mira could already see, in her office that September afternoon, the book, published by a major university press, in her hands, the bright, smiling senior portrait of Nicole Werner on the cover, her own name underneath that photo, and the letter to the dean from the department chair, and the recommendation it expressed for her tenure.
What, at this point, did she have to lose? Did she have any better ideas?
“Professor Polson?” Perry Edwards asked after Mira was silent for a very long time.
She held up a hand to keep him from saying anything else, and then she put the hand over her eyes and forced herself to count to five before she looked at this boy again, and said, “Okay.”
Part Two
18
It was one of those soul-snatching, deadly dull days at the Chamber Music Society. The offices buzzed with it, literally. A fly caught between the window and the screen in Shelly’s office was tossing itself between the two barriers with exhausted fury. She watched it from her desk, its electrical droning competing with the sound of her dozing computer.
It was the end of September, and the weather was making a concerted effort to change. The sky was closer to lavender now than blue, and there was a smell of leaves sweetening, softening, giving way, shifting into a lower gear. As always, the change from late summer to actual autumn brought back for Shelly every September of her life—the dust swirling around her kindergarten desk, bobby socks and shiny shoes, straight through to her last year of graduate school, lugging an expensive textbook back from the store to her little efficiency over the Beer Depot—along with all the Septembers since then, the years passing one by one outside the window of her office at the university’s Chamber Music Society.
What, she wondered, was September like for people who didn’t work at an educational institution? Did the melancholy reminiscence of September simply skip them?
If so, Shelly thought, it would be a little like skipping one of the Twelve Trials of Hercules: you’d still be stuck with the Christmas despair, but you wouldn’t have to relive the end of every summer vacation of your life, that sad realization of your own mortality, year after year, as the kids swarmed back into your world with their freshly sharpened pencils and new sweaters.
No, she supposed, it wouldn’t be like that. They’d all gotten that calendar engrained on their psyches so early. No one escaped the mortality of autumn.
“God, you depress me,” her ex-husband used to say, and said for the last time on the day she left him, shaking his head sadly—and then, as if some switch had been flipped in his head, charging after her, fists whirling around them both as she stumbled out the back door, and he yanked her back in by her hair.
“Shelly?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think, you know, since we’re all caught up, I—”
“—could leave early?” Shelly tried not to let out an exasperated sigh.
“Yeah,” Josie said. She was twirling a strand of silken black hair around her index finger. She had her face tilted at a right angle, like a sparrow. “It’s Greek Week.”
“You’re in a sorority?” Shelly asked.
“Yeah,” Josie said.
“What house?”
“Omega Theta Tau.” Josie pronounced each Greek letter with irrepressible pride.
Shelly turned around in her chair to face Josie fully in the doorway, and asked, “Isn’t that the sorority Nicole Werner was in, the girl who was killed?”
Josie began to nod slowly and melodramatically with her eyes half closed.
“Did you know her?” Shelly asked. How was it possible that she’d not only not known that Josie was in a sorority but in Nicole Werner’s sorority?
Josie shrugged. She said, “We all knew her. She and I rushed and pledged at the same time. It’s not one of the bigger houses—sixty girls—so, yeah, sure, I knew her. It was a huge shock.”
Shelly stood up. She said, “Did you know—?”
“—that you were in a sorority?” Josie
brightened. “Yeah. You were wearing that Eta Lambda T-shirt the day I ran into you outside the gym, so I looked you up on their Plaque Wall when I was over there for a party, and found your name! That’s so cool. I mean, I’m sure it used to be a better house back when you—”
“No,” Shelly said, shaking her head, dismayed to feel rising the familiar defensive self-consciousness related to sororities you’d fully expect a lesbian in her forties to be far beyond by now. “No. That’s not what I meant. Did you know I was at the scene of the accident? Nicole Werner’s? I was the first one there.”
Josie bit her lip, and seemed to look upward, to scan her brain for this bit of information. Not finding it, she said, “No,” and then, eyes widening, “That was you. The middle-aged lady, the one who didn’t give directions to 911?”
Shelly felt her cheeks redden, burning, and her breath escaping her. She shook her head. She said, “No. I gave perfect directions. I was there when the ambulances arrived. I stayed until they took those kids—”
“Jeeze,” Josie said. “That must’ve been awful. I had no idea.”
Of course she hadn’t.
How could she have?
Shelly’s name had never even made the papers, where not a single detail of the accident had been reported correctly—except, apparently, that Shelly was middle-aged.
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