The Clairvoyants

by Karen Brown

  Anne was smart enough not to indulge the rumors about Del and William. “That’s very sweet of you,” I said. “Maybe the father will be supportive as well.”

  “Randy is trying. But I don’t think your sister is falling for it. She doesn’t seem like she wants a husband.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think she has many good examples.”

  Anne set her drink down carefully on the table, and I sensed her friendly facade falling away. She pushed the button on her cigarette box; the music played, and she retrieved the cigarette and lit it. She brushed the ends of her scarf over her shoulder like a swath of hair. William had been her protégé. Was she making it clear that she wouldn’t hear any disparaging comments about him?

  “Mary Rae and I had a get-together after she and William broke it off,” Anne said. “We’d grown so close. She was an absolute mess.”

  Anne blew smoke to the ceiling. What would she make of the news that William and Mary Rae had reconnected more recently? Was she assessing me—trying to gauge my own level of despair?

  “He made his choice,” I said, leaning back into the couch cushion. “I have to accept it.”

  Anne reached for her drink and took a sip. “He’s had a difficult life.”

  I tried not to correct her usage of the present tense. It unhinged me. Contrary to the last, threatening physical contact I’d had with him, William’s spectral presence was benign, and I’d grown used to imagining him tormented by his love for me.

  “He told me about his mother,” I said.

  Anne raised her eyebrows. “Did he tell you that his father abused her? That rather than let her divorce him he had her committed to the hospital in Binghamton? I knew his mother. She had a drinking problem.” Anne tipped back her glass and finished her drink. “But honestly, who doesn’t?”

  “Why did he drop Mary Rae?” I asked.

  She refreshed our glasses and stood with the shaker. “I’m going to check on the Wellington,” she said. “And make more of these. Come with me.”

  We went back into the kitchen, and Anne mixed another shaker and poured us new drinks. I told her I’d had enough, and she smiled.

  “One martini is never enough.”

  I didn’t protest, I simply took another sip, and another. The kitchen grew warm from the stove. I understood why the Milton girls gathered at Anne’s. It felt lovely to be taken care of, to have Anne’s attention, all of it tinged bittersweet. Each moment with her was special, and there wouldn’t be many more times like this, you told yourself. She asked me about my classes, about my own work. We talked for a while in the kitchen. Anne grew tipsy, laughing. She leaned over the stove and the ends of her scarf caught fire and she batted it out expertly with a damp dish towel, as if this kind of thing happened all the time.

  My bag with William’s portfolio sat on a chair nearby, and I wondered why Mary Rae’s images were separate from the others, why he hadn’t chosen to print one as a sample.

  “Did they have an argument?” I asked. “William and Mary Rae?”

  Anne put on oven mitts and leaned over to take out the roast. She stood, took off the mitts, and busied herself with a pot on the stove.

  “They had a misunderstanding,” Anne said. “It had to do with his work.”

  “The sleeping women.” I tipped the shaker over my glass but it was empty.

  I expected Anne to seem curious, to ask what I meant, but she did not. Her face flushed from the heat of the oven. “Yes,” she said, simply.

  The series wasn’t a secret to her at all.

  “You haven’t heard from him?” she asked me. “Not a word, after all this time?”

  We were finally getting to the point. “Have you heard from him?”

  Anne faltered. “No, I have not. But I’d only been seeing him with you. He’d stopped coming by. I thought it was too hard for him, with my illness.”

  “He told me we were through and not to contact him. I’m not going to crawl after him.”

  Anne swung the refrigerator open and then closed it without taking anything out. She did the same to a cabinet door, as if hiding her expression from me. I must have seemed the most horrible person in the world. Finally, she placed her hands on the counter in front of me. “He truly loves you,” Anne said. “I believe that.”

  How much I wanted this to be true. “I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken.”

  Anne reached for the shaker. I watched her tip it over her empty glass, then bang it down on the counter.

  “What do you really want from me, Anne?”

  She fiddled with her scarf. “Before he disappeared from our lives William mentioned some prints he’d made. He’d said you had them.”

  “He mentioned them?” I sat down in the chair at the counter bar.

  “Yes. It was months ago. He told me about the argument you had, how you’d seen the photographs, how he thought you might have, well, taken them.”

  I knew Anne, upset about Mary Rae’s disappearance and her death, had wanted her journals. I didn’t think her interest in the photographs was in any way related to William’s. I believed we might have a common interest.

  “I do have them,” I said. “With me, actually.”

  I went to my bag and pulled out the portfolio and brought it back to the kitchen island. Anne grabbed her glasses and came to stand beside me. She went through the prints slowly, looking closely at each one. She was unsteady, and my head spun from the martinis. The glass doors leading out to the backyard were black, and the cold seeped through. They were big, glass sliding doors and my gaze was drawn to them, waiting for someone to appear. Anne looked up at me, her eyes magnified behind the lenses of her glasses.

  “Where did you get this?” Anne seemed disappointed in me, as if she knew I’d stolen them.

  “It’s all of them—Alice, Lucie, Kitty, and Jeanette.” I pulled the portfolio over and leafed through the prints so Anne would see, but she wasn’t even looking.

  “Mary Rae was jealous of the girls,” she said. “She didn’t understand the photographs. William wanted her to be a part of the series, and she told him emphatically no. Silly, isn’t it?”

  “It takes a certain trust to fall asleep with someone watching,” I said. I paused at the photograph of Alice, her bare leg entwined with the sheet. “I don’t think they’re faking.”

  Anne closed the portfolio. “No, they aren’t.”

  She went over the stove top and stood looking down at the Wellington. “I’m not so hungry,” she said.

  She came around the island counter and placed a hand on the portfolio. “I gave him my sleeping pills. The girls were fine taking them. They all agreed. They thought it was a hoot. They loved the idea of it, loved their bodies. They loved William, too.”

  Beyond the sliding glass doors the snow had covered the terrace. Anne’s hand on the portfolio trembled slightly.

  “The more Mary Rae protested, the more he wanted her to pose.”

  Had William given me Anne’s sleeping pills that night at Del’s?

  “Don’t you think pills are a bit extreme?” I said.

  “You know how it is with him,” she said. “His work is everything. And look how these turned out. They’re beautiful—you have to admit it. Exceptional. I set up a show for him—a solo exhibition at a gallery in Chelsea. It’s a well-known place, one that’s made the careers of many artists. He felt the pressure of that, I think. He claimed the camera knew when the girls weren’t fully asleep—and of course none of them could fall asleep at the drop of a hat.”

  She took the portfolio in her arms and held it, and I had a strange feeling that she had gotten what she wanted from me. The meal, everything else was forgotten.

  “Mary Rae did pose,” I said.

  Anne shook her head. “No, she didn’t. She’s not among these prints.”

  I held out my hands for the portfolio, and she seemed reluctant to give it to me. I took the sleeve of negatives out of the back. “See.”

  Anne took the
plastic sleeve with a shaking hand and held it to the light. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, this just doesn’t seem right.”

  “You can see more clearly with a light table,” I said. “I have my loupe.”

  “The studio,” she said, her voice thin and anxious. She told me to follow her.

  We went back through the living room, grabbed our coats, and left by the front door. Anne led the way toward the dark garage, her bright scarf flapping in the darkness. Snow covered the driveway’s gravel, and the pretty bulbs that had come up would all be frozen now. Anne went up a set of stairs along the side of the building, and I waited below, unsure.

  “There’s a rock down there,” she called to me. “It’s a piece of granite. Get the key out of the back.”

  I looked at the base of the steps and discovered the rock. Beneath it was a hinged panel, like the one in the cigarette box. This was how the Milton girls all retrieved the key, letting themselves into this room. I took the key up the stairs to Anne, and she opened the door and flipped a switch. The snow that fell in the light that came on was fluttery—flakes that seemed to have lost conviction.

  “This is his,” Anne said. She stepped into the studio and leaned against a wall, as if she were usually prohibited from entering the room. A mattress covered in a white sheet lay in the center of the floor. If I hadn’t seen the photographs the setup would have struck me as odd. The photographs felt far more organic—their play of shadows, the sensual poses, and that he’d managed to create them would have seemed like a feat if you didn’t know the girls were drugged, that he could move their lifeless limbs into any configuration he wanted. After the dimness of Anne’s house, the room felt overbright, dazzling. A worktable stood against a far wall, and on it was a light box.

  “Over there,” I said, and I crossed the room to the table.

  Anne stayed behind near the door. “I don’t usually come here,” she said.

  I had no fear of William catching us, but Anne seemed worried he might.

  “Do you want to see these or not?” I said.

  Anne, usually a forceful presence, looked small and helpless in her flimsy scarf. “I don’t know if I want to see them,” she confessed.

  I set the negatives on the surface of the light box. When I looked through the loupe I could enter each image, its shadow and light reversed, the depth of each scene three-dimensional, like a diorama.

  “It’s definitely her,” I said over my shoulder. “I can see her necklace.”

  Anne made a noise from across the room. It was a sound like a sob or a gasp. She stood against the wall, both hands over her mouth. I had given something away—and I was usually so careful. Anne stared at me and let her hands drop.

  She crossed the room in a rush, and I handed her the loupe and she bent to look at the images.

  “These weren’t taken here,” Anne said.

  “The light is different, and the wall, and the wood floor,” I said. I hoped that if I talked about something else she would forget I’d mentioned the necklace.

  “And these at the bottom,” I said. “Some field. Do you know where this is?”

  Anne’s eyes were terrified and bright, her face chalky and lined in the studio lighting.

  “The Peterson field,” she said.

  Anne went to the door of the studio, and I gathered the negatives and followed her. In her hurry she neglected to turn off the light. We went down the snow-covered stairs and then back to the house, Anne scuttling along. Inside she dug through her bag, searching for something.

  “I can’t find my keys,” she said. “The keys to the Jeep.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked her. “What about the Wellington?”

  Anne ignored me. “We’ll just take the Mercedes,” she said. “It will have to do.”

  I couldn’t understand Anne’s reaction to the negatives. We stepped out into the night. The snow had stopped falling but the cold was piercing and viselike. I worried about Anne in her thin scarf, but she seemed even less concerned about the cold air than I was.

  We got into the little car and the space filled with our exhalations—white clouds ballooning out from our mouths. The windshield was hoary with ice. Anne turned on the heat and used the wipers to scrape it clear. I trembled in my coat, but as the heater did its work I felt my alertness overtaken by a dreamy malaise. “I have to cancel our plans for dinner,” she said, finally. “I’m going to take you home.”

  “Why are you so upset?” It didn’t seem as if she planned to explain anything to me.

  The tires slid a bit as we took off from the driveway.

  “I’m a fine driver under any circumstances,” Anne said, her gloved hand fumbling with the dashboard gauges. “I’m sorry about this. I really am.”

  “You haven’t told me what’s wrong,” I said.

  Anne drove on and passed under dark trees, the moon occasionally appearing between the boughs, the only sound the hum of the engine. Her demeanor had changed—from friendly to preoccupied, almost severe. I felt a slow, building dread. Her gloved hands clung to the wheel. We drove for a long time, it seemed to me, but I had become a poor judge of distance and of time. I grew warm in the little car, my unease building. I watched the side of the road but saw nothing familiar.

  “This doesn’t seem the way,” I said.

  “I gave Mary Rae that necklace,” Anne said.

  I’d admitted I knew about it. I suspected that the next thing Anne would ask me was how I knew. But she didn’t.

  “She’d seen it in a jewelry store window in Ithaca and told me about it. It was her birthstone, an early birthday gift,” Anne said. “The next day she was gone. No one could find her.”

  I was about to mention that I’d found the necklace in Geoff’s car, but then we hit the second patch of ice, and neither of us had much chance to even voice our surprise. From Anne, just a small “Oh.” I felt a swirling disorientation as we spun, and then the whipping and cracking of tree branches as the car slid sideways down what seemed to be a hill. We stopped, abruptly, a jolt that took my breath away.

  The headlights lit the underside of a pine, its branches laden with snow, and I wasn’t sure how we were situated. The engine had stalled and the silence of the woods we’d fallen into was thick, muted by the snowy boughs. Just beyond the headlights’ misaligned beams, a shadow flickered, and I imagined the elk and deer from Anne’s wall stepping delicately over the limbs we’d broken to nose the debris of the car that enclosed us. I watched, waiting to glimpse their bright eyes at the windshield. My cheek pressed against my own window, and the cold came through, numbing the side of my face. The inside of the car began to fill with our scent—a mix of fear and alcohol, of the beef Wellington that clung to our coats. Anne’s beautiful car.

  I pushed myself upright, away from the window, and shuffled my legs and shifted my hips. I felt for Anne and found her arm and I shook it and called her name. The two of us were wedged in the sideways-leaning car, the headlights weak beacons. In the dim light inside the car her face leaned close, her eyes hooded. The space was tiny and warm from our bodies. She reached out and moved my hair from my face and cupped my cheek.

  “Such a pretty girl,” she said. “You’re bleeding.”

  I must have banged my forehead on the window when we stopped. I felt the blood on my face.

  “Are you OK?” I said.

  “Just fine,” she said. She laughed a little. I felt her shift in her seat, and then she made a sound that frightened me—a small cry—and she fell still.

  “Anne?” I said. “Anne?”

  I dug around in my bag and found my cell phone, but the battery had died. I was as irresponsible as Del. My door was tight against a tree. I had to struggle with Anne’s door, and then clamber out over her into the snow, apologizing inanely for having to do it. We’d slid into a ravine. Briefly, I tried to pull Anne from the car, but I couldn’t dislodge her and figured that it was best to leave her there and get help. I managed, somehow, to cli
mb out of the ravine, clinging to saplings, sinking into snow up to my knees. Lit only by moonlight, I reached the road.

  I had no idea where I was, where Anne had taken me. I had been lulled into a martini stupor, and now Anne was trapped in her little car, with me her only hope of survival. A figure appeared ahead and I called out, believing it was someone walking their dog, or someone who had stepped out into the night for a cigarette. But the person simply stood in the road and my feelings sank as I approached and the figure materialized in the moonlight as Anne, or not Anne, a version of her that seemed to bubble and warp like an image seen through plastic wrap. She wore her skirt and blue sweater and black boots. Her scarf had fallen off, and her bald head shone cold and white, wisps of fair hair remaining in patches. On her hands she wore her black driving gloves. This incarnation of Anne didn’t care about her uncovered head, her damp, wrinkled clothing. More sorrowful to me than this evidence of her death was that her plan to come back as a cardinal had not come to fruition, and a terrible hopelessness stole over me, and I began to cry.

  Anne appeared to get her bearings, and then began to walk down the road. I knew she wanted me to follow. She wasn’t there to offer me any comfort, but she had a mission to fulfill, and I was the only one who could fulfill it. We walked for a length of time that grew to become indiscernible, and I was aware again that I was not paying attention to where we were. As we walked I said that I knew Anne believed William had lied when he denied seeing Mary Rae before she died. I said that he was the last to see her, that the necklace in the photographs proved it. And I told her he was dead, too, and that I was sorry she would have no answers. I had hoped that Mary Rae might reveal to me who her murderer had been, but even the dead had secrets. You were privy only to those they felt you were ready to hear.

  “I think I’m frozen,” I said. My head had continued to bleed, to flood my collar, which had begun to stiffen.

  Incredibly, I did begin to see lights ahead through the trees, and then mailboxes appeared along the side of the road, and Anne stopped. Maybe she’d been leading me to safety after all. We’d arrived at a long set of steps descending to a house below. Beyond the house was a lake, its surface vast and frozen and ringed with lights, a cold wind coming off it. The house at the bottom of the stairs, a wood-shingled cottage, was partially lit by a streetlight. The windows were dark, reflecting the sheen of the snow. Certainly, Anne couldn’t have meant to bring me here—to this dark house at the bottom of the long set of treacherous, snow-covered steps?