by Laura McHugh
“Well, you might want to think about getting a mouth guard to wear at night, at least until your stress levels ease up. You don’t need a crown, but I’ll have to grind down the sharp edge.” He pulled the instrument tray closer.
I tried to sit up. “How much will it cost?”
“Relax,” he said. “This one’s on me. It’ll only take a few minutes.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I can pay.”
Ben smiled. “I know, but I won’t let you. I have a favor to ask, and this is my way of buttering you up.”
He leaned in, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t been in such close proximity to a man since Dr. Endicott. I instinctively pressed my arm against my ribs, the scars from my accident hidden like squirmy things on the underside of a log. I tried to keep my eyes closed while Ben worked, though it was hard not to stare at him, to compare this version of him to the one in my memory. It was similar, in a way, to viewing age-progressed images of the twins—the disconcerting sense that I was looking at a stranger who bore a slight resemblance to someone I’d loved. Ben’s hair was cut short, no longer sticking up every which way, and his face had lost its boyish softness. Dark stubble covered the acne scars along his jawline, and I remembered how badly he had wanted to grow a mustache the summer after sixth grade. We had ridden our bikes to the public pool almost every day that summer, and on the way home we would sometimes stop at an abandoned house at the edge of the woods, though I knew Grammy watched the clock and worried the entire time I was gone.
“I wish I could shave,” Ben had said one afternoon. We had spread our beach towels out on the sloping back porch of the house. If we lay down flat on our stomachs, we couldn’t see above the weeds.
“Why?” I asked. “It looks painful.” The one time I had watched my father shave, he’d nicked himself, the razor dragging a swath of blood down his neck.
“We’re gonna be in junior high. All the other guys are already shaving.”
“No, they’re not,” I said. “If they say they are, they’re probably lying.”
I was already resigned to the fact that I was a late bloomer. My body refused to exhibit any of the signs of womanhood I’d been promised in the health class film that the girls had watched while the boys were sent outside to play baseball. Some of the girls in my class had been wearing training bras since fourth grade, and many had graduated to real ones. That spring, I had fretted over the hard knots of tissue that had developed beneath the skin of my flat chest. Convinced that cancerous tumors were growing inside me, I had reluctantly confided in my mother. She had rolled over to grab a bottle of muscle relaxants from her nightstand, irritated that I’d woken her. It was four in the afternoon.
It’s not cancer, she’d snorted, tapping a pill into her palm. Don’t they teach you this stuff at school? Congratulations. You’re becoming a woman. The film had said we would grow breasts. It hadn’t mentioned anything about stony lumps that would, for me, take years to soften and expand.
“Feel this,” I had said, taking Ben’s hand and placing it on my flat, twelve-year-old chest as we lay on the porch of the abandoned house. His fingers rested uncertainly on my shirt, and I pressed them into my flesh. “You think not having hair on your face is bad.” His ears had turned pink, and he had smiled sheepishly, his hand lingering and then falling away.
—
When Ben finished working on my tooth, I ran my tongue over the smooth edge, the damage seemingly undone. “Thank you,” I said. “Now, what was the favor you wanted to ask me?”
I was hoping, irrationally, that he would ask for things to go back to the way they were, that we could somehow undo the distance between us, as simply as pulling slack from a rope.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “You remember my mother.”
“She’s unforgettable.”
Ben smirked. “Something like that. Anyway, she’s heading up the visitors bureau now, and she’s been up in arms over some report that named Keokuk the worst town in the state. She’s working with the historical society to set up one of those holiday home tours as part of an initiative to boost tourism and revitalize the town, and she would love to include Arrowood.”
“That sounds great,” I said. “But I don’t know about opening Arrowood up to tourists. I mean, I just got back myself.”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t want to pressure you. She wanted me to ask you, and I was going to wait until you got settled, but then you showed up today. I was thinking about how you were always so into local history, and all the old houses. Seems like a good fit, something you might enjoy.”
He was right about the old houses, though I doubted I would enjoy anything that involved his mother. “I’ll think about it,” I said.
He smiled. “Thanks. I’d better get back to work, but I’d love to get together and catch up soon. Want to do dinner this weekend? Maybe Saturday at the yacht club?”
My family had belonged to the yacht club before, in our former life, and we’d eaten dinner there dozens of times with the Ferrises. It wasn’t fancy like the name implied, just a clubhouse with a restaurant and some docks. My dad had kept a ski boat there. The boat had a glitter-flecked, ruby-red hull that reminded me of Dorothy’s shoes in The Wizard of Oz, so Dad had dubbed it the Ruby Slipper.
We spent a lot of time on the boat before my mother got pregnant with the twins. Dad would be in the driver’s seat, his back and shoulders deeply sunburned, a can of Coors in his hand. I would sit backward, the wind whipping my hair in my face, and watch my mother slice through the wake on her skis, her pale hair flickering behind her, the river calm but for us splitting the surface, our waves diminishing as they raced toward shore.
“Sure,” I said to Ben. “The club’s fine.”
“Great. I’ll see you Saturday, then. My cell number’s on there.” He handed me a business card with BENJAMIN FERRIS, DDS in glossy letters, his fingers curling around mine and then sliding away. “I can pick you up around seven.” My hand warmed where he’d touched me, like a match had been struck across my skin.
—
Back at the house, I stood at the kitchen sink and ate a Pop-Tart without toasting it. I was debating eating another one when I spotted Mrs. Ferris out in the yard near their carriage house, staring at Arrowood. I backed away from the window, watching her from the side. She tilted her head, as though looking up at the second or third story, and then she turned and disappeared into the carriage house.
I wondered how hard she would try to convince me to participate in her home tour. Maybe I should suggest that she’d have better luck organizing a tour of all the abandoned houses, for people who were into ruin porn. I was afraid, if I opened Arrowood up to strangers, that it would attract people for the wrong reasons, that they would be snapping selfies in Violet and Tabitha’s bedroom and looking for ghosts.
Still, part of me was enticed by the idea of having a holiday celebration at Arrowood. My parents used to throw a Christmas party every year, up until that last year when we were packing up to move. They had a twelve-foot-tall spruce delivered from a tree farm, and Dad would haul the Arrowood family ornaments down from the storage room on the third floor. In kindergarten I made a paper angel with my handprints as wings, and Dad had placed it at the top of the tree, so high up that I could barely see it from the floor.
While I had a composite image of those holiday parties, the only one I remembered with any clarity was the one when I was seven. The house smelled of spiced cider and fragrant pine boughs my mother had draped on the windowsills, banisters, and mantels. I wore a red and green Fair Isle sweaterdress with itchy red tights, and black patent leather shoes that I had outgrown. I grew tired of trying to get my mother’s attention to ask her if I could remove the uncomfortable shoes and tights, and eventually I snuck into the laundry room, peeled them off, and stuffed them into one of the closets. I put on a pair of gym socks I found in the dryer and hoped that my mother wouldn’t notice.
When I came out
of the laundry room I saw my father down the hall, standing under one of the sprigs of mistletoe my mother had hung for the party. He held a mug of cider in his hand, and he was kissing my mother, or so I thought. I hesitated, waiting for them to finish. Bing Crosby’s White Christmas was playing on the stereo, and I knew every song by heart. My father had been playing that album for the entire month of December. When he pulled away from the kiss, I saw that the woman was not my mother. It was Julia Ferris, Ben’s mom, her manicured fingernails gripping the lapel of my father’s jacket.
I still haven’t forgiven you, she said. You have to make it up to me. She gave his jacket a little tug, then let go and clicked down the hall in her high heels, back toward the party. Just then my dad turned and looked right at me, a pensive expression freezing on his face. He set his mug on top of Nana’s curio cabinet, next to the framed portrait of him and his brothers in matching blue sport coats and ties.
“Hi, sweetie,” he said, walking toward me. “Did you see the mistletoe?”
I nodded, staying right where I was. When he got close enough, Dad reached down and picked me up. He was warm and flushed from drinking, or because my mother had insisted on lighting fires in every fireplace on the first floor. His jacket smelled faintly of cigar smoke and Aqua Velva.
“Mistletoe means you have to kiss. Isn’t that silly?” He grinned to show me how silly it was. He carried me over to the mistletoe and I looked up at the little bundle of leaves. My mother had tied it to a long red ribbon so that it hung just above our heads. My father kissed my cheek. His skin was smooth; Mom had made him shave before dinner. He picked up his drink and took a sip. There was a snowman on the mug, its neck wrapped in a jaunty scarf.
“Want to try it?” Dad asked. He held the mug to my lips. It was warm, the liquid inside still steaming. I took a sip, but it didn’t taste like the cider my mother had given me earlier. It was bitter, and I swallowed hard to keep from spitting it out.
He looked me in the eye a moment too long and then set me down. I slid along the wood floor in my socks, back toward the laundry and up the rear stairs, my throat burning from Dad’s drink. I crept into the twins’ room. They were wearing matching footie pajamas, sleeping in identical positions in their separate cribs—on their tummies, with their knees tucked under and their bottoms in the air. I curled up on the floor, listening to them breathe. I couldn’t hear the party beneath us at all. Thick layers of plaster and wood silenced Bing Crosby and the clinking of glasses and my mother’s shrill laughter. The sturdy bones of the house absorbed it all before it could reach me.
CHAPTER 6
* * *
I arrived early for my Friday meeting with Josh Kyle. The roadside park had a swing set and picnic tables that looked out over the river, and I sat at one of the tables to wait, picking at the peeling paint and reading the graffiti that had been carved into the wood with fingernails and pocketknives. Bees swirled around the lone garbage can, McDonald’s wrappers and Dairy Queen cups spilling out onto the ground and stinking in the heat. Though it was nearly October, it was eighty degrees, and sweat dripped down my neck into my bra.
Across the road from the park, Riverside Cemetery nestled at the edge of a cornfield. Grammy and Grampy and most of my mother’s other relatives were buried there, though the oldest graves had been washed down the Mississippi long ago in a hundred-year flood. Grammy and I used to take a picnic lunch along when we went to pay our respects. I had always secretly hoped to be buried at Riverside instead of at the Catholic cemetery in town, because I didn’t want to lie next to the three other Arden Arrowoods. Why my parents chose to give me such an ill-fated name I couldn’t say, though I assumed they hadn’t thought it through in the way that I did, as a little girl reading my own name on the stones and guessing at my odds.
In the Catholic cemetery, the Arrowood family plot sat on a west-facing slope in the good part of the old section, where the markers were all upright and the grass still got mowed. My ancestors had favored decorative tombstones with lambs and weeping angels, torches and doves, large stone arches and pillars topped with draped urns. Three empty spots waited for my sisters and me, prudently reserved for us by Granddad in case we died young or failed to marry. There were two small marble angels for Violet and Tabitha, but no slabs engraved with their names, because no one wanted to set in stone something that might not be true.
I’d been waiting at the picnic table for about ten minutes when a white van with tinted windows pulled into the gravel lot. It was the sort of van I always avoided parking next to, because it looked like a vehicle you might use if you wanted to kidnap someone. Though of course I knew you didn’t need a van for that.
Josh Kyle emerged wearing the same hat and jacket that he wore in his website photo, both embroidered with the logo for Midwest Mysteries. It was too hot out for the jacket, and I figured maybe it was part of his investigative uniform, that he felt like he needed to wear it to look professional. He wasn’t wearing the sunglasses from the picture, though. Instead he had regular glasses with thick black frames. I hadn’t expected him to be so clean-cut and normal-looking, someone I might find attractive if I walked past him in a bar. He didn’t appear to be much older than me, though the hair sticking out below his cap was salt-and-pepper gray.
I stood up, and he reached out to shake my hand, his grip firm and businesslike.
“It really is you,” he said. His voice, too, was a surprise, low and soothing like a radio announcer’s. “You look just like your pictures.”
“What pictures?”
“They were posted by your school, something to do with the history department,” he said. “I have a Google alert that sends me anything that comes up with your name.”
“Really?”
“I promise that sounds creepier than it really is. It pulls anything with the word ‘Arrowood.’ Just part of the research.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my business, but—how old are you?” I didn’t feel too bad asking, considering how much he already knew about me.
One corner of his mouth turned up in a lopsided grin. “Twenty-six. I graduated high school the same year as you.” He took off his hat and raked his fingers through his hair. “Everybody asks. Completely gray before I turned twenty. Runs in the family.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, it’s great to finally meet you,” he said, putting his cap back on. “I’m glad you agreed to do it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m curious to know why you think I’m wrong.”
He gestured toward the picnic table, and we sat down across from each other. He leaned forward and planted his elbows on the table. “Well, you know I interviewed Harold Singer. And I’m guessing you’re familiar with that whole part of the case? With his story?”
“I know the police searched his house and found those pictures. Places he was casing to rob, supposedly. But they didn’t find anything connecting him to my sisters. I think that’s only because it took them so long to search his car.”
“So you probably also know that he said he wasn’t parked in front of your house at four. He claimed he was parked there earlier in the day, around one o’clock.”
Out on the river, a barge sounded its air horn, and gulls swooped low over the water.
“That’s what he said, but he had no witnesses. No alibi. Two people saw him there at four, including me.”
Josh stuck his hands in his jacket pockets. “I think I found proof that he wasn’t lying about the time. But I need your help to be sure. I was hoping you’d take a look at something for me.”
“I don’t mean to sound skeptical right from the start, but what kind of evidence could you have possibly found after all this time? That was missed by everybody else?”
“I got it from Singer,” he said. “Some pictures. From that day.”
“I’ve already seen the pictures,” I said. “They’re not even sure when he took them. There’s no way to know.”
“Not those. Not the pi
ctures of the houses. Those were from the film police found at his place, under the floorboards. There were other rolls of film, other pictures. When he saw they were looking for a gold car, he got nervous. He bundled anything he thought might be incriminating into a garbage bag, and he buried it out in the woods. It would have been smarter to just burn everything, but he wanted to keep the photos. That’s how it is with guys like him—they get a thrill out of something and they don’t want to give it up, even if it might get them in trouble.”
I was fairly certain I knew where the conversation was leading, but I had to ask. “What’s in the pictures, then?”
“Kids.”
Ice spread through my chest. “My sisters?”
“In one picture, yes.”
“If he has a picture of my sisters, why didn’t you go to the police as soon as you saw it?”
“Because I won’t know whether the pictures mean anything until you look at them.” His glasses had slid down and he pushed them back up. “Like I said, I think these images could prove his innocence. Or at least put his guilt in doubt, for you, anyway. They’re not…pornographic, or explicit in any way. Just close-ups of kids, playing. Riding their bikes, stuff like that. Your sisters are in one of them. Some are of you.”
My stomach twisted. Some are of you. I had always wondered why I had been left behind. Maybe he had planned to take me, too. Maybe he would have, if I hadn’t run to the backyard to get the dandelions.
“And how does that prove him innocent?” I asked. “Because if anything, it makes him sound worse than before.”
“If these were taken the day your sisters disappeared, I think there’s a way to determine what time of day he took them. I brought them with me—they’re in the van.”
I studied his face. The sun glared against his glasses, so that I couldn’t see his eyes. “Why did he show them to you?”