“I don't know what you're talking about.”
Michael dropped his hand. “What was the name of the guy who took you to your prom?”
She scowled. “Andy Hollings. He forced me to give him a blow job and I threw up in his lap.”
Her husband's face twisted in distaste, but then the contemplative look returned. “Talk to me, Jillian. For better or worse, remember? Have you forgotten other things? You forgot The Dick Van Dyke Show. What else? I've been trying to figure out why you've been acting so . . . why you haven't been yourself. I know you feel it. Well, what if it's something really wrong with you? Some chemical imbalance or . . . or worse?”
“Me? How's your head, Michael? You're the one who was seeing ghosts.”
“Jilly—”
She gave him the finger and turned her back on him, unzipping her skirt and letting it fall to the floor, showing him her bare ass. He swore under his breath, but it wasn't from admiration. She grinned to herself, relishing the flavor of the wine in her mouth and the warm tingling ache between her legs.
She tried to unbutton her shirt but the operation proved problematic for her fumbling, drunken fingers. She tugged the shirt off over her head and grabbed a clean T-shirt from her closet. When she pulled it on and turned toward the bed, Michael blocked her path.
“Get out of my way,” she snarled.
But Michael had been thinking. That was plain on his face.
“You don't want to answer, or you can't answer?”
“Get out of my way, Michael.”
“Who was your first-grade teacher?”
“Michael,” she muttered, warning him.
“What about fifth grade? Seventh? Who was your eighth-grade teacher, Jillian? What about high school? Who was the principal in your high school?”
Trembling, and furious at herself for it, she tried to push past him. Michael grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Rita Welch! My high-school principal was Rita Welch!” she cried, hating how shrill her voice sounded.
Michael closed his eyes and let out a long breath. He nodded and opened them again. “All right. Now we're getting somewhere. Do you remember what your mother bought Hannah for her eighth birthday? You were so jealous.”
“Of course I do.”
“What was it?”
She scowled and rolled her eyes again, stumbling a bit. Michael caught her. Jillian met his gaze fiercely, wishing now that she wasn't a little drunk. Wishing she was sober enough to outsmart him.
“You don't remember. Do you remember anything?” His voice rose to a panicked pitch. “Hannah? The beach house your family always rented on Cape Cod? The first boy you kissed? Chasing the ice-cream man? Do you remember the trip your family took to Florida when you were ten?”
“Of course I do,” she said, not liking the quaver in her voice.
Michael took a step away from her. “You've never been to Florida in your life. Not ever.” He ran his hands over his face. “Jesus, Jilly, what did they do?”
It was the same question as before, but this time she did not misconstrue it. The question had nothing to do with her absent thong or the pleasant throb up inside her. It was about something else. But Jillian was entirely mystified as to what that something else might be.
And it frightened her. What if there really was something wrong with her mind? A brain tumor or something?
“Jilly, please, just tell me. What's the earliest memory you have?”
She was still trembling, but now she began to shake her head back and forth violently. “Stop it,” she said. “Just stop it, Michael. Leave me alone! Stop with this psychoanalysis bullshit. I can't . . . I don't want to know!”
The words were out of her mouth before she knew they were coming. Once they had escaped her lips she gave a little hiss of surprise. Then she felt a change sweeping through her. Her head shook harder, her teeth grinding down, and her hands clenched into fists with such ferocity that her fingernails slit little crescent wounds into her palms.
“Jilly—”
“Don'tyoufuckingcallmethatyousonofabitch!” Jillian began to beat him then, raining her fists down on him. She caught his jaw with a hard right that felt like it might have broken a knuckle or two, but it was worth it. It felt so good she nearly came all over again.
Michael was off balance and Jillian followed through. She stepped after him, slapping and punching. Her left hand flashed out and she scratched his cheek, but he rolled with it and she did not gash him as deeply as she wanted to.
“Fuck you, get out of my house! Get out of here!”
She kicked him, aiming for his balls, but he moved enough so that she caught him in the shin instead. Michael hissed in pain, staggering back again. In a second she'd back him up against the bed and he'd fall down and then she'd have him. Fucking asshole. Son of a bitch. Who the fuck did he think he was?
“Who the fuck? Who the fuck?” she asked, turning it into a chant, saying it over and over.
“It's my house, too. I live here,” he said.
Jillian spit in his face.
Michael's mouth dropped open in abject horror.
They both froze.
“Get the fuck out of my house. And keep away from me.”
He shook his head with an expression of utter despair. A single tear slipped down his cheek. When Jillian saw it she scoffed, her upper lip curling.
“Pussy. Get out.”
She crossed her arms and watched him as he pulled on his blue jeans and a sweatshirt, threw some things in an overnight bag, and left. His footsteps went down the stairs and she heard the door slam. The rumble of his car starting floated up from the garage; she went to the window and watched as he jockeyed around her car, which was parked at an angle across the driveway.
Then he was gone.
Jillian picked up the remote control and raised it to change the channel, but then she froze, staring at The Dick Van Dyke Show. She was mesmerized, watching the actors. They were wretchedly happy and kind. The jokes weren't funny. The laugh track couldn't have convinced her otherwise. Where was the charm in this?
She lay down on the bed, still tender all over—the two guys at the bar had used her mercilessly and she had urged them on—and she watched that old black-and-white relic on the television. Within her was a vague awareness that something was missing, and that its absence should have hurt her. But she was only bored.
Bored, and cold.
Moments later she fell asleep, and slumbered on undisturbed by conscience, or by dreams.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Michael Dansky's world had been twisted so completely in the past few days that he could no longer look at anything the same way. The very fabric of things had been undone. Or perhaps it was only that the curtains of reality had been drawn aside and the real performance was only just beginning. The apparition of a little girl appeared and disappeared at will. Strange, malformed women spied upon him from the side of the road and appeared in the darkness of his bedroom to violate his flesh, to attack his wife. To taint her.
All that he had known for certain about the world now had to be unlearned.
And yet . . .
He drove from home to the office of Krakow & Bester with the window down, the November chill promising an early winter as it whipped at his face. WBZ news radio said nothing about the alteration of reality. There had been a double murder in Newton, a woman and her daughter killed by an unknown assailant. The weather was supposed to warm up in the morning, with the possibility of some rain. The Patriots were primed for another banner year. Ordinary life continued.
But the real and mundane had now become surreal to him. How the reversal had taken place, Michael did not know. But as he drove the winding road into downtown Andover his gaze shifted frequently to street corners and to the shadows between buildings, and he found himself surprised not to see ugly, emotionless faces staring back, watching him. There was no sign of the girl, either. Of Susan Barnes.
After a while, it began to wor
ry him. If she was no longer appearing to him, and those misshapen women were no longer watching, did that mean something further had happened? Had they caught her? It was a strange thought, but Michael felt certain the girl was thwarting them somehow by appearing to him.
Even as he turned left at the light in Andover center, a turn that would take him right past Krakow & Bester, he chuckled softly to himself at the perverse irony. He was anxious because the specters that had been haunting him were now leaving him alone. Despite Jillian's aberrant behavior, everything else seemed normal. He thought of a story he had seen on television about a teenage surfer girl who had lost her arm in a shark attack. The shark had come and done its damage, and then moved on, leaving the girl forever changed. Yet everyone behaved as if things could continue as if nothing had ever happened. Life would return to normal, somehow.
The sharks had come and they had mutilated Jillian, sure enough, though her wounds were invisible. And now things were returning to normal. But like that surfer girl, the damage was done.
And in this case, the sharks were still out there.
There was no traffic on the road. Streetlights went from green to yellow to red and back to green again in a silent display. Fluorescent lights flickered in shuttered storefronts. Others were dark behind metal gratings. It was after two o'clock in the morning and the world was asleep. An ordinary night. Yet no matter how ordinary the world seemed, for Michael life could not go on as usual. Things would never return to normal.
Not unless he made them.
Jillian had changed completely, and now he knew that those changes were more than behavioral. She had no recollection of her childhood. Michael felt certain that those twisted women had somehow destroyed part of her mind, that they had damaged her. He did not know if there was any way to help her, but if one existed, he first had to find out what they were, those shapeless figures. And the key to that knowledge was the lost girl.
Michael parked in front of the office. Before getting out of the car he took a careful look around. The street was deserted. Only one other car was parked on that entire block, several spaces back, and it had a couple of parking tickets under the windshield wiper. Whoever owned it wasn't coming back anytime soon. Idly, he wondered what had happened to the owner. It reminded him that other people were living their lives and had their own problems. Somewhere out there, he reasoned, there must be others who had touched the truth the way he had—or had it touch them. It made him feel less alone.
He left his overnight bag locked in the car. As he let himself into the building with his front door key and went up the stairs, he realized he had never come here in casual dress. With Jillian shrieking at him, he had dressed in blue jeans, sneakers, and a Patriots sweatshirt. Now he felt like a thief, breaking into the place. There weren't any lights on but when he unlocked the office doors and slipped inside, he found that the lights from the street outside provided more than enough illumination to keep him from crashing into filing cabinets or the copy machine.
More than ever, in that strange combination of gloom from neon and moon, he expected to see Scooter. Everything seemed washed in a dull golden glimmer. If ghosts were to appear they ought to come now.
But he was alone in the office with the hum of equipment that had been left to run all night. A refrigerator. The copy machine. Computers. Unfortunately the heat was not among them, and he shuddered with the cold that had settled into the office overnight. He did not want to turn a lot of lights on. It was unlikely anyone would notice from the street at this hour of the morning, but it still felt like a bad idea. The heat, on the other hand, no one was going to notice.
Once he had found the thermostat and dialed up a more comfortable temperature, Michael went to his own office. Inside were the remnants of the days he had been absent from Krakow & Bester. Mail was piled on his chair. The red light on his phone blinked rapidly, demanding he pay attention to the accumulated voice mail that must await him. Half a dozen yellow sticky notes adhered to his computer screen. He stripped them off, ignored the blinking light on the phone, and dumped the mail from his chair onto the floor, immediately forgetting all of it.
His eyes burned with exhaustion but he felt as though his mind had gotten a second wind. From his car he had made a call to the Hawthorne Inn, just a few miles away, and he knew a comfortable bed awaited him there. But he had things to do before he could rest.
“Miles to go before I sleep.” That was the Robert Frost poem, wasn't it? Yes. “. . . Promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”
Both so true.
In the darkened office he turned on the computer and typed in his password. Once it gave him access, he opened his Internet browser and began to search for Susan Barnes.
It was a massive exercise in frustration. There were dozens of search engines that promised results. Many of them required him to sign in, some with a credit card, and among those, some guaranteed an answer if he would just pay the one-year membership fee. It was a reckless pursuit. Susan was a girl; no child that age would have her own telephone or address listing. But an e-mail address—or photographs on a family Web site—those things were not impossible. He typed “Susan Barnes” into the most reliable search engine on the Net.
There were 45,700 results.
He bit his lip and nearly wept. For well over an hour he keyed in additional words and combinations. “Massachusetts.” “Missing.” “Abducted.” Even “death.” If she was a ghost, surely that word would be a part of any article about her. An obituary, even. But in all that time, his frustration only grew. The Internet was supposed to be the answer to every question a person might have. You could buy or locate anything that way. But though he found reference to hundreds of women named Susan Barnes, even girls, there was nothing that even hinted that any of the entries might be the girl he was searching for. Some had pictures and looked nothing like her. Most were far too old, or lived too far away, even in other countries.
The closest he came was an Amesbury real estate agent. She lived only fifteen minutes away, but her picture on the real estate company's Web site revealed her to be in her fifties. Her hair was dyed a strawberry blond, but as Michael studied the picture something made him take a closer look. If he was looking for a relative of the lost girl, of his Susan, there was enough of a resemblance to this woman that she would certainly be on his list. She was too old to be the girl's mother, but a grandmother or an aunt, perhaps.
He nodded to himself. That wasn't a terrible idea. If he could find a relative with the same name, that might be the lead he needed.
He hit the address and phone number search engines and developed lists of women named Susan Barnes, not only in Massachusetts but throughout New England. Rubbing his eyes, he checked the clock as he printed them up. Half past three. Reams of paper accumulated on top of his printer. If he had to call every single one of them, he would.
Exhausted, he sat back in the chair and scanned the pages. There was only so much he could do in one night.
Michael glanced at the clock to find that it was ticking toward four in the morning. The last thing he wanted was to still be here when the first person showed up in the morning.
Reluctantly he shut down his computer and stacked up the pages he had printed. Tomorrow he was going to search for the house again, while it was still light out. And then, tomorrow night, he would begin making phone calls. For now, though, there were things he didn't want to leave the office without accomplishing.
By the time Michael left Krakow & Bester, locking up behind him, it was just after seven A.M. on Thursday morning, the ninth of November, and the sun was on the rise. Already there was life on the street, people walking their dogs or jogging by, light traffic on the road, a short line inside Starbucks.
He had never been so happy to see the morning. It energized him, made him want to go out and search for the house right then, take full advantage of the daylight. But he had not slept in far too long, and just the thought of a soft mattress at the H
awthorne Inn was enough to coerce him.
Sleep. At least a few hours.
He hoped that he would not dream, or that if he did, he would not remember.
TEDDY POLITO HAD HIT THE snooze button on his alarm clock one too many times this morning. Running a bit late, he had foregone breakfast and regretted it the instant he pulled out of his driveway. One stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through later, he had remedied that situation. His stomach rumbled gratefully in response, but he left the cinnamon bagel in the bag while he drove the rest of the way into work.
With the Dunkin' Donuts bag in one hand and the biggest damn cup of coffee they dared to sell in the other, he marched up the stairs with the determined dignity of a condemned man. Work had sucked miserably the past week. Michael had fucked up the Newburyport ice-cream gig and Teddy was certain that when the campaign was reassigned, there wouldn't just be a new artist chosen, but a new copywriter too.
The worst part of it was that he couldn't really even be that pissed off. His star at Krakow & Bester had risen thanks to its being tacked onto Michael Dansky's, like the tail nailed to Eeyore's ass in the old Winnie the Pooh cartoons. Only Michael was anything but a donkey. Which made it all the more upsetting to Teddy the way he'd been behaving. He was no saint; his primary concern was for his own livelihood. But he was concerned about Michael as well.
He tugged the door open and walked into the agency's reception area. Brittany was behind the desk. Her eyes lit up as he entered, and he perked up a little. Brittany was the kind of girl Teddy Polito had never had a chance in hell of bedding, not even back in college, and to see the sparkle in her eyes as she greeted him, to know that she was fond of him, always gave him a lift in his step.
“Morning, Teddy,” she said.
“Good morning, Red,” he said.
Brittany rolled her eyes with a good-natured grin. She had been Red Riding Hood at the masquerade party and Teddy always enjoyed reminding her.
“Any sign of Dansky?” he asked, lowering his voice a bit.
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