by Andrew Pyper
“The one and only.”
“Thanks for agreeing to meet,” I say, and slide a five-dollar bill over the table at him. He looks at it a moment before stuffing it in the breast pocket of his jacket originally designed for carrying grenades.
“Nothing much better to do,” he says.
I watch him count to four while pouring a broad stream of sugar into his coffee.
“I understand that you were in the Literary Club with Krystal and Ashley,” I start, and measure a half-teaspoon of sugar into my own.
“In a way, yeah. I mean, we were the Literary Club. Just the three of us. And Mr. Tripp. But I never really went after the first few meetings, so it was more just them.”
“Why’d you stop going?”
“I dunno. It was boring, I guess. And they were sort of into it, talking about books, the characters they liked most and all the metaphors and symbols. You know? I couldn’t care less about that poetry shit.”
“So why’d you join?”
“To hang out with Ashley and Krystal.”
“You were friends with them?”
“I told you, man, I’m not friends with anybody. But they were O.K. They were a lot smarter than most, and definitely smarter than any of the other hot girls at school. But nobody was really friends with Ashley and Krystal except Ashley and Krystal, you know what I mean?”
“So they were pretty close then?”
“Like sisters, man. Better than sisters. Sisters without bitching over who took the last tampon or whatever.”
I glance over Laird’s shoulder and see the circle of girls still there outside the glass, guessing at my words.
“What about Tripp? Were they close with him?”
“Depends on what you mean. They’d talk to him, yeah, but that’s about it. They were pretty much the only ones who would talk to him after he got all zombied out or whatever. But they weren’t in love with the guy or anything.”
“You think he was in love with them?”
“He thought they were pretty cool, I guess. I mean, they were the only members of his little club, which was the one thing he seemed to care about. But if you mean a sex-love sort of thing, I have no idea. But I wouldn’t blame him if he did.”
Slurps at the coffee in front of him and pours more sugar into what remains.
“Do you know if Tripp ever took them to Lake St. Christopher before the day they disappeared?”
“Doubt it.”
“Why?”
“Doubt they’d want to. Everybody’s scared shitless of the place, man. Especially girls.”
“Why would they be scared?”
“Because they knew.”
Over Laird’s shoulder a kid throws a match into an ashtray piled high with crumpled napkins and in a second it’s sending up high spits of flame. But the girls outside the door don’t move their eyes away from where they’re set.
“I’m sorry. What did they know?”
“That there was some bad shit that went on up there a long time ago—like history, this old babe who eats kids or something—and now there’s all kinds of stories. Everybody believes at least one of them.”
“Yeah? Which one do you believe?”
“I believe them all, man.”
Laird smiles and it reshapes his face in a way that makes me hope he never finds anything amusing ever again.
“So, you’re saying that you think Ashley and Krystal would never volunteer to go up there?”
“Not unless they were with fourteen other people all stoned on some shit that made you totally fucking fearless, I’d say no.”
I look past Laird again to see the girls outside now pulling closer together, a single body blocking the way out.
“Fine. New question. Did you ever hear Ashley and Krystal talk about running away?”
“No. Not that they’d tell me.”
“What about Tripp? Did he ever say anything to you about them?”
“Not really. My brother had him for English like three years ago, and he was supposed to be really into all the great classics of literature and teaching and shit. But that was before. By the time we got him he was just walking around half-asleep or something. So no, I wouldn’t say he was much of a conversationalist.”
“Did you ever see Tripp and the girls together with someone else? When he’d drive them home after Literary Club meetings, for example. Was there ever a fourth person?”
“Not that I saw. Just those three, him up front driving and the two girls in the back. That was the way they always went. I thought maybe that’s because he didn’t want anyone to think he was trying anything creepy, you know. But maybe not. More likely they just wanted to sit together in the back.”
Looking at me through the glass. Eyes held open and so black with mascara they appear as a line of empty sockets poured full with oil.
“You O.K., man?” Laird asks, his own eyes magnified and squinting into mine.
“Fine and dandy.”
Fine and dandy?
“You just look a little—”
“It’s all the smoke.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So. Were they popular?” I ask, forcing myself to focus on Laird alone.
“Oh yeah. Guys wanted them and girls wanted to be like them. But I don’t think Ashley or Krystal gave a shit one way or the other. Still, you should’ve seen when they called an assembly in the gym at the beginning of term and the principal got up and told everyone that the school was undergoing a mourning process—man, the whole place broke down. I’ve never seen so much hugging and crying and snot in one place. Mostly the girls, right, all of them pretending that they were best friends with Krystal or Ashley. It even got kind of competitive.
“How do you mean?”
“Like everyone’s going around with these just-add-water personal memories, like ‘Krystal told me this big secret once’ or ‘Ashley said me and her would be best friends forever’ and other crap like that. For the first fifteen minutes everyone was sad, and then they all had to be the most sad of all. It got so bad they brought in like half a dozen shrinks to calm everybody down. Guys too, and some of the teachers even. Everybody saying how much they knew Tripp was the type, saw it coming a mile away, somebody should have done something. All of it such shit.”
“Thanks, Laird. I’ll leave you to your doughnut.”
I tuck my notepad back into my case and pull my legs out from under the table to leave but the kid raises his hand for me to wait.
“I brought this along,” he says. From his backpack on the floor he pulls out a crumpled folder and lays it on the table. Then he sticks his hand in and slides the bundled contents halfway out: a collection of handwritten notes with either ASHLEY or KRYSTAL printed at the top, clippings from the school paper with the names of the girls highlighted, photographs of them talking together in front of an open classroom door or kicking a soccer ball between them at the front of two lines of other girls in lime-green gym shorts, all taken with instant, develops-before-your-eyes film.
“I thought you might want to use this.”
“What is it?”
“I dunno. A collection of souvenirs, I guess. It’s all about them. I started out collecting things separately, one for Krystal and one for Ashley, but it didn’t work out because they were like a team really, not individual people. You know how some girls can be like that?”
“You collected this stuff yourself just on these two?”
“No, man. That would be weird.” He shakes his head, and the glasses slip down to the very precipice of his nose. “I keep a file on all the hot girls.”
I push the papers back in the folder, the barren light of the doughnut shop too garish for their inspection. Or maybe it’s only that I don’t want the girls at the window to see me lingering here with the school nerd and flipping through his mastur-batory archives.
“Can I keep it?” I ask, already tucking the folder into my bag. At the same time turning to look behind me down the hall. Yes. A back door.
“Sure, man, it’s yours. I don’t have any use for it anymore,” Laird says, and throws the last nugget of cruller down his throat. “I mean they’re both dead and shit now, right?”
FOURTEEN
The next night I enter sleep easily for the first time since arriving in Murdoch. Amazing really, what one evening free of the white stuff will do. Within seconds of pulling the covers up I’m off into that nearly forgotten zone of solid nothingness, all thought and image and word emptying out and I’m gone…
Until the tin bell of the front desk phone brings me back. One, two, three rings, the echo between each hanging in the air and then diminishing, promising it’s all over, that in a moment the last trace of sound will be absorbed into the ceiling, wallpaper and floorboards—and then another, more insistent than the one before.
I pull on the boxers, suit jacket and socks lying on the floor next to the bed and go out into the hallway where the ringing seems to come from more than one source, out from under the doors of neighboring rooms and through the air vents above and below. This time I’m definitely going to pick up. And when I’m done telling the caller which particular circle of hell to go to, I’m going to deep-six the thing out in the woods where it can make all the noise it wants and keep the slugs awake at night.
Slip down the hall to the top of the stairs, my head lowered to watch my footing in the sparse light of the wall lamps, and take the first steps down. The gaslight chandelier below dimmed to a useless flicker, dark sliding up the walls below. Let myself fall deeper into it with each step down. The air clotted shadow in my mouth.
And stop halfway down. On the step below, another’s leather shoes. Stand there for the length of an entire ring and the trace of it that follows before looking up.
“We meet again.”
It’s the peeler from the Lord Byron Cocktail Lounge, the young one from the other night. Through the gloom and shroud of her hair I glimpse her smile as she turns her head to me.
“Again. Yes.”
Another ring before I realize that I must look ridiculous, padding around a hotel in nothing but blazer and paisley boxers.
“I was just coming down to unhook that goddamn phone,” I say, hands searching for pockets that aren’t there.
“Someone must want to talk to somebody pretty bad.”
“Must be.”
She doesn’t move.
“You stay in the hotel?” I say. “To do your work?”
“I have a room.”
We stand there for the duration of another ring, then I squeeze myself flat against the banister to move past her.
“It’s bad luck,” she says. “Crossing on the stairs.”
“I don’t have much choice.”
“You could go back up with me.”
Then she takes my elbow and we ascend the stairs together, leaving the phone still ringing at the desk below. At the top she guides me down the hall to the opposite end from the honeymoon suite, unlocks the door to her room. Slightly smaller than mine, but the window just as tall, its pane lifted open and the night’s rain blowing in.
“Your window’s open,” I say, but she pretends not to hear. Directs me over to the bed where, sitting on its edge, she pulls herself out of her loose cotton sweater and skirt and lies back on the rain-soaked sheets. Despite the hard bites of water against her body she remains still, legs outstretched and arms haloed around her head. Skin nubbled with an almost powdery layer of sand, a crude stage makeup, pale as talcum. All of it washing away to expose an emerging web of ochre veins.
It doesn’t occur to me to leave. To do anything but throw my jacket off, step out of my underwear and lie next to her on the bed. But even in the few seconds it takes me to reach her the air has grown colder. The rain now spraying over the entire room, the walls, the length of our bodies.
“Shouldn’t we—” I start, but her kiss cuts off my words. Her strength surprises me, and although I don’t resist I know that if I tried I couldn’t pull myself away from the arms that lie over my back, fingers linked together at the spine. Her limbs chiseled bone over my skin.
But something’s happening.
Without her hands leaving my back or any movement of my own I’m inside her, and she slides beneath me in the growing puddle the weight of our bodies has created on the bed. Even when she rolls us both over the edge of the mattress, splashing into the half foot of water collected on the wooden floor beneath the window, I can’t push her back or rise up to meet her. Straddled above me she raises herself at the hip and a shaft of muddy streetlight casts across the side of her head. The smile still there, jagged and glistening.
I try to shout something and when I open my mouth it fills with the water that has risen further and now washes over chest and shoulders. Stay below as long as I can and then summon the strength to come up again, but each time I try to break through the water has risen higher. The only sounds are the crash of rain and, from somewhere above, the peeler’s laughter. Swallowing the water out of the air and the last ache of bubbles from my lungs and—
The phone.
I’m up. Eyes open but not taking anything in. Two sounds filling the room: a hoarse gasping and, from the floor below, the ringing of the front desk phone. Back in the honeymoon suite, in my bed alone, the windows closed against the light rain outside. A pain like a splinter of bone caught in my throat, but awake.
Pull the sheets back and slip on the paisley boxers, blazer and socks that lie together on the floor. Slip over to the door, down the hall. The stairs blanketed in shadow and the only light below coming from the gaslight chandelier which leaves a small orange circle on the faded carpet.
“Could somebody pick up the goddamn phone!” I shout down, although I’m certain there’s nobody there.
Let it ring another three times before I can move. Before I can pull myself down toward the orange light, telling myself there’s nothing in front of me. That there’s nobody there who I wouldn’t have seen or heard by now.
When I reach the bottom I move around the railing and squint the phone into focus, its black rotary dial staring back at me with a startled oval for a mouth. My own mouth hanging open as well, too small to take in the sudden need for air. The phone in its circle of light shrinking as though I’m being lifted away into the empty rooms on the floors above.
Another ring that brings me back. Then my own shattered voice.
“Hel-lo?”
Nothing on the other end, the line violent with static.
“Listen, can I ask you something? Do you know what time it is? No? I’ll tell you then. It’s fucking late, that’s what time it is, and if you—”
“I know you.”
A woman’s voice, faint beneath the crackling interference.
“Who is this? You want me to have this traced? Because I won’t hesitate—”
“I know what you like.”
“Yeah? Well, then you know I like sleep, and that you’re interrupting it right now, so why don’t you call up somebody else?”
“You like them young, don’t you?”
“I’m going to go now. You hear me? So if you ever want to call here again, I suggest—”
“Don’t you? Don’t you like—”
Slam the receiver down hard enough to make the bell inside ring. But it doesn’t start again. She doesn’t call back.
It’s only after I’ve hung up and am standing with both hands clinging to the edge of the front desk that I recognize the voice. The peeler from the hotel bar the other night. The one from my dream with the long hair and skin a powdered white.
FIFTEEN
It’s four days until I venture out again, and when I do it’s to visit the home of the presumably late Krystal McConnell, whose parents have consented to be interviewed by yours truly. This came as more than a little surprise. Generally speaking, the victim’s family doesn’t like to have anything to do with defense counsel for reasons that don’t require mention. In this case, I suspected the odds would be even more
acutely against me, given that Goodwin’s file showed the McConnells to be high-ups in the congregation at Immaculate Conception and described in almost every news story as “community leaders.” I took this to mean the kind of people who were first to set the match to books they’d wrenched from the hands of school librarians because they contained the word damn or scenes involving adolescent hands rising to adolescent breasts beneath angora sweaters. Further, from what I had gathered from my reading of The Murdoch Phoenix, Mr. McConnell was acting as spokesman for the victims, furnishing the press with tirades about the “many masks of Satan,” the hellfire awaiting Tripp in the afterlife, and the despair of living under a government that showed no intention of bringing back the death penalty.
The McConnells live in a massive Tudor rip-off on the street which, judging from the other dozen monstrosities which hunker on both sides of its length, is the address of Murdoch’s elite. They’re not new constructions; the ridged brickwork and Victorian gables suggest their having been slapped together sometime in the first quarter of the century. Perhaps then they were handsome, even majestic residences for the few that made money on the plundering of the town’s surrounding rocks and trees. But that doesn’t save them today from the intervening decades of infrequent paint jobs, the insurrection of gardens which have long since become thickets, the replacement of natural wood siding with aluminum. The McConnell place has faired somewhat better than others, its facade composed of a knobbly white stucco which, as I pull into the driveway, looks freshly clean through the dripping autumn colors of the front yard maple. McConnell himself, who opens the door before I have the chance to touch the doorbell, looks clean as well in creased navy slacks and gray cable-knit sweater pulled over his pregnant belly.
“Mr. Crane. Come in,” he says, extending his arm out across the front hallway but failing to meet my eyes. He makes no move to take my coat, so I’m left with no choice but to leave it on.
“May I say first, Mr. McConnell, how sorry I am for your loss. As strange as it may seem coming from me, I can only—”
“Perhaps the living room is a better place for discussion.” He steps behind me, looking up and down the street before closing the heavy front door.