by Lisa Unger
Maggie leaned her head back against the leather of her chair, the brightness of the screen bothering her because of her fatigue and the headache that was increasing behind her eyes. Ricky had given her access to his account. Had he, on some level, wanted her to see these people? He couldn’t have thought she’d just look at Charlene’s page and not explore his. Hadn’t he told her that he didn’t know Char’s friends in the city? That he thought she’d been lying?
Maggie found herself somewhat guiltily scrolling through her son’s in-box, reading messages from friends and acquaintances. There was nothing that caused her concern. All the messages were from friends she knew well, concerning homework or band gigs, gossip, plans for the weekends. Even the notes between Ricky and Charlene were pretty PG-rated, almost, she thought, pointedly so. She’d always warned him against considering his online activities private. He’d obviously taken her advice to heart. Or, knowing that he’d given away his password, he’d cleaned up his in-box.
At the bottom of the list of mutual friends, she saw an image she didn’t expect: Marshall Crosby. She clicked on the picture, a dark photo, obviously taken in poor lighting by his computer camera. He looked slouched, and ghoulish around the eyes; the room behind him was a mess of books and tossed clothes, stacks of video games, soda cans in a line along a dresser, rock posters covering the wall. As his page loaded, she saw that most of the fields, like favorite books and films, were blank. Even the profile area glowed white, empty of the details she expected to see. The only area where he had seen fit to enter information was the status bar, and what he’d written there, thirteen minutes earlier, caused a cold finger to trace Maggie’s spine: Marshall thinks bad people should be punished.
In Maggie’s memory, it had snowed for days. But it hadn’t really. In fact, there was just the initial light snowfall that coated Sarah’s newly dead body so that when Chief Crosby first saw her, he thought she was a fallen branch, so thin and still and dark was her form. The days that followed were characterized by freezing precipitation-sleet, a light rain-the tentative spring abandoning The Hollows as the shock of it all settled and everyone found themselves shuffling stunned and stricken from assembly to counseling, if they wanted it, then to the horrifying open-casket wake and grim burial.
Maggie found that she could hardly take it in; none of it seemed quite real. Even now, she remembered it only in snapshots-Sarah’s mother collapsing at her daughter’s grave, her own mother clinging to her in a way she never had before or since, maintaining a grip on wrist or shoulder or elbow for days, it seemed. She remembered Sarah stiff and bloated in her casket, a waxen image of herself, not a girl filled with music, not a girl at all. The mortician had filled in the cuts on her face with some thick kind of makeup, but still you could see them there, a faint spiderweb of lines, like the cracks in the face of a porcelain doll that had been broken and glued back together. Her face looked painted on, hideous, a death mask. Maggie could still hear Sarah’s mother wailing if she thought on it, could feel the sound of it reverberating in her own chest.
She’d been younger than Ricky was now, in her sophomore year at Hollows High. She’d been sheltered, her schedule strictly maintained by Elizabeth. Home right after school unless she had an extracurricular activity, have a snack and relax, homework, then play with friends or watch television. Dinner was always at 6:30, bedtime no later than 9:00. She’d railed against all the rules, felt smothered by her mother’s constant questions. Rebelled by doing things to her appearance, like dyeing her hair, getting multiple piercings in her ears. Elizabeth had reminded her of this, not without a tiny bit of glee, when Ricky started his descent into gothic punk. Maggie realized she was every bit as on top of Ricky as Elizabeth had been on top of her, constantly talking, asking questions, maintaining routine. Well, she thought, there it is. I’ve become my mother.
“Do you think you would have been able to walk out the door after a fight?” her mother was saying as they drove to the meeting. She looked as tiny as a child in the huge passenger seat of Maggie’s SUV. Again, the heat was cranking; Elizabeth had always hated the cold. “That I would just let you walk off and not go after you? Ridiculous.”
“I know.” Maggie had called her mother after she learned about the meeting, and Elizabeth wanted to attend. She’d phoned Ricky at the record shop, and his boss had agreed to let him go so that he could be there, too. He was planning to meet them at the school.
“That girl,” Elizabeth said. Maggie knew she was talking about Melody, not Charlene. “There was always something about her.”
“She’s not a girl anymore, Mom. She’s a mother whose daughter is missing. She needs our compassion and our help.”
Elizabeth snorted. “You’re such a shrink, Magpie,” she said, mock-crotchety.
“Mom,” Maggie chastised, but she felt a smile turning up the corners of her mouth.
Her mother took a tissue from her purse and blew her nose.
“What do you remember about that time?”
“What time?” her mother asked, not turning to look at her.
“You know what I’m talking about,” Maggie said, annoyed that her mother was being purposely obtuse. She always did that when she didn’t want to talk about something.
“I knew you’d bring that up.”
“How could it not come to mind?”
“I remember everything about it. Every detail. Every ugly minute. It was the worst thing that ever happened to this town.”
Maggie waited for her mother to go on. Then, “They say your memory fades when you get older. I wish it were true. You forget things like where you put your keys or your glasses, you space out on doctors’ appointments. But the bad stuff stays, Maggie. The old things you’d rather forget, those memories move closer, grow more vivid.”
“Like what? What do you remember?”
They were stopped at a light. It changed to green without Maggie noticing until someone behind them leaned on his horn. They both jumped a little, and Maggie lifted a hand in apology, moved forward.
“Everyone’s in a big rush,” said Elizabeth.
Maggie figured that her mother was just going to ignore her question, that she’d have to press. And she was prepared to press. She wanted to talk about Sarah, for some reason. Since Melody had brought it up, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. Does Jones ever talk about it? Melody had asked. Why had she wanted to know that? It was such a strange question.
Maggie was about to push Elizabeth to answer, but her mother started talking.
“Of all the terrible feelings and awful memories from that time, you know what bothers me the most?” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I never believed that he killed her.”
Something about the way she said it gave Maggie a strange little jolt of dread.
“He confessed, Mom,” she said.
“I know he did,” Elizabeth answered, her voice flat. She cleared her throat and looked down at her lap. She smoothed out her skirt with two flat palms, a determined little sweep of her hands; it was a familiar gesture to Maggie, something her mother did when she wanted to avert her gaze.
“You never told me this.”
“What’s to tell? It’s just a feeling. I knew that boy. I just never did believe he had it in him. It’s always bothered me.”
“If not him, then who?”
Elizabeth released a breath. “Now, the answer to that might just be what kept me from asking the question in the first place.”
Maggie didn’t say anything, taking in her mother’s words.
There was never any doubt that Tommy Delano killed Sarah. There had always been something wrong with him. Everybody said so. Since he was a boy, he’d been unnaturally quiet, occasionally prone to blank but terrifying rages. As an adult, he had often been seen slinking about the garage where he worked, lurking in corners, watching in that quiet way he had. Or he might have been spotted walking aimlessly through town, or hanging around the arcade
or the pizzeria where the younger kids gathered. When people mentioned him, they used words like “creepy,” or “odd.” They said he had a way with cars, though. That he was a talented mechanic, a tireless worker. They said all those things about him, and so they were all true.
They also said that he killed his mother. It was an accident; a terrible fall from a steep staircase into the basement. His father found them. The boy sitting mute at the top, his mother in a heap on the floor below, neck broken, blood pooling. What precisely happened or how long he’d been sitting there was not clear. But the incident followed him through grade school, middle school, high school, and beyond. The story was whispered behind his back over two generations. He became a kind of bogeyman to some. He walks the woods behind the school, watches the girls. Watch out. Tommy Delano’s waiting for you.
But when Maggie saw him, she just thought he was a sad man, fixing the buses that sat broken in the yard. He didn’t seem frightening, with his narrow shoulders and grease-stained coveralls, barely raising his eyes from the ground. He was in the woods behind the school sometimes, smoking cigarettes.
Sometimes the senior boys would gather around the bus yard fence and taunt him. Why’d you kill your mom, Tommy boy? How horrible, Maggie remembered thinking, the children of people he’d gone to school with taunting him over an accident that had killed his mother. As a girl, she just didn’t understand cruelty, didn’t understand why some people felt good about making other people feel bad. Even now, she didn’t understand it much better. Maggie never saw Tommy react. Sometimes he’d just go inside one of the buses until the boys went away on their own or were reprimanded by one of the teachers.
After the first twenty-four hours passed, and Sarah didn’t return home and it was clear she wasn’t hiding out at the homes of any of her friends, Maggie noticed a palpable shift in energy; the twittering nervousness waxed to cold fear. Maggie spent an entire English class distracted by the empty seat near the window that would have been occupied by Sarah. It struck her as so frightening and strange that someone was missing and that Miss Williams still stood at the head of the class, giving her lesson about metaphor, and Vicki and Michelle were passing notes, and Trevor was doodling in his notebook. Maybe it was just a trick of memory, but by the second day-when the squad cars were parked in front of the school and the students were dismissed early-she remembered knowing on some deep level that Sarah wasn’t coming back, and that everything else would move forward anyway.
Maggie couldn’t remember when suspicion turned to Tommy Delano, but it was at some point after the psychic arrived. Eloise Montgomery looked just like anyone’s mom, with a plaid shirt and high-waisted jeans, a brown faux-leather purse clutched to her side. By lunch, the popular girls had already gathered to make fun of her hair, a blunt, unflattering cut that looked like a helmet. There was nothing else notable about her, not a searing gaze or a glowing aura. On her way to biology class last period, Maggie saw the psychic sitting in the music room, talking to Sarah’s teacher. The woman listened intently to whatever it was that Mr. Landtz was telling her, nodding slowly.
Maggie remembered dining alone that night with her father, who wasn’t much of a cook. They had fast-food hamburgers, eating them off the wrappers without plates. Since Sarah’s disappearance, her mother had come home late and left early-helping the police, consoling the family, and organizing volunteers. Maggie just wished Elizabeth would stay home.
“How are you doing with all of this?” her father wanted to know.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem real.”
“Hmm,” he said. “I know what you mean. Things like this never do, I guess.”
The next day Tommy Delano was taken into custody. The evidence against him was circumstantial. Sarah’s mother regularly brought her vehicle into the garage where he worked for service, often with Sarah in tow. Delano had been in the school office, collecting payment, and had had opportunity to hear Sarah’s phone call to her mother saying she’d missed the bus. They found a collection of newspaper clippings about Sarah in an envelope under his bed. Then, in the trunk of his car, they found a pair of underpants, which Mrs. Meyer identified as Sarah’s. By the evening, he’d confessed, just as that late spring snow began to fall. Then he told Chief Crosby where to find her body.
No, there was not a doubt in anyone’s mind that Tommy Delano killed Sarah. That he was waiting for her in the wooded area between Melody’s house and her own. We met in the woods. She was glad to see me. That he’d lured her into a vehicle and held her for more than twenty-four hours, hiding with her in an abandoned hunter’s cabin deep in the woods by Old Creek, confessed his love, repeatedly raped her. I made love to her. She wanted me to. He cut her face. I punished her for talking mean. And then, when her terror and rage started to feel like rejection, he killed her. She hit me, he reportedly told Chief Crosby with hurt and indignation in his voice. I only wanted to love her.
Tommy Delano was sentenced to life in prison, his time to be served without the possibility of parole. And The Hollows breathed a collective sigh: It’s over.
Maggie had waited to feel that sense of relief everyone else seemed to feel. But instead she just kept noticing, all year, that someone else came to fix the buses now. He was a big guy, with broad shoulders and close-cropped hair. The senior boys had nothing to say to him. And Sarah’s seat was empty and the world went on and on without her, as though she’d never been there all.
“You never said anything about this before,” Maggie said now to her mother.
Elizabeth didn’t answer, just kept looking out the window at the people moving slowly into the school.
“Mom?”
She waved a hand at Maggie. “Don’t listen to me. I’m just being silly and maudlin.”
But Elizabeth was not, nor had she ever been, silly or maudlin. Maggie’s mother wasn’t prone to drama, or to listing off regrets. But she did have a habit of forming cement judgments about people and never, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, changing her mind. And even if those judgments were rarely wrong, it was still not a quality Maggie appreciated in her mother. People changed. She knew this to be true, had witnessed it in others and even in herself. Still, something about what Elizabeth said bothered Maggie, caused an uncomfortable ache, made her remember something she couldn’t quite remember.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Elizabeth said. “They’re both gone now. At peace, I hope.”
“The evidence was clear.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Of course it was.”
They pulled into the high school parking lot and moved toward the entrance near the auditorium, where the meeting would be held. There were fewer cars than Maggie would have imagined. She’d expected the lot to be full, people milling about outside. But the doors were closed, though she could see people in the hallway through the small square window. She found a spot near Jones’s vehicle and parked.
“It’s snowing.” Maggie helped her mother out of the car. Elizabeth had railed at help until her last fall, which had fractured her hip and left her limping and relying on her cane. Now she grudgingly accepted the assisting hand, the proffered arm.
“So it is,” said Elizabeth. “So it is.”
16
Elizabeth Monroe had a secret. A thing she’d never told another living soul. It was a place within her, a whole other dimension to her memory that she rarely visited. It was a cold, dead region, which she could forget about altogether, like her husband’s grave. What foolishness it was to visit that place where his poor body was laid. He wasn’t there; his soul didn’t linger. She knew that, but she did her duty to the plot, tended it, laid flowers on the appropriate days: anniversaries of death and marriage, his birthday. Maggie liked to go on Father’s Day (another load of rot, if you asked Elizabeth, these greeting card-generated occasions). Her husband, the only man she’d ever loved, was gone. And visiting his grave did not make her feel closer to him. At all. People, no one tells you when you’
re young, fade as time passes without them-all the little qualities and tics, the happy times, the sweet moments, become blurry and vague. It’s the bad things that stay with you, the ugly things that nag.
Nighttime, not the late hours but the gloaming, when the sun was setting and dinner must be prepared and the long evening stretched out before her-that’s when the loneliness settled in like the ache in her hip on a rainy day, when the regrets, the bad memories, sometimes came to call.
She was glad for nights like this, even though the occasion was grim. It gave a purpose to the evening, something outside her own needs. When Maggie had called, she’d invited herself along to the meeting, though she couldn’t be of much help, maybe just a little support for Maggie and Ricky. God knows where Jones might be in all of this, following up leads, playing the good cop, the town hero. Everyone loved Jones Cooper, always had.
She’d taken her seat toward the front and tried not to eavesdrop on Maggie and Jones.
“I sent a car out to the Crosby home,” he was saying. “There was no one there. Patrol has their eyes open, though I’m using most of the guys for Charlene at the moment, so we’re pretty light out there tonight. And we’ll have someone at the school tomorrow.”
“Okay,” said Maggie uncertainly.
“It’s probably nothing.”
“I know. Except whenever anything awful happens, there are always these clues that seem to have piled up that someone’s about to snap. Clues that no one sees, or brushes aside. I don’t want that to happen here.”
Elizabeth’s son-in-law towered over her daughter, had an attentive hand on her arm. “We won’t let anything happen,” he said.
They were perfect for each other, cops and shrinks always on the front lines trying to save a world that doesn’t want to be saved, that tends inexorably toward entropy no matter what anyone does.
“Why are you frowning, Mom?” said Maggie, coming to join her. Elizabeth heard the edge of annoyance in her daughter’s voice.