Either way, the dead had secrets, and sometimes the living had a powerful interest in making sure both stayed on the other side, unseen, unheard.
Oddly enough, the local police kept out of this part of it, stepping in only when deeds and disagreements turned violent. People complained, but Bailey got the logic behind this—it would be that much harder to keep the peace when people started thinking you played favorites when it came to pilfering and petty theft of things left in plain sight, on public property.
If we want the privilege of speaking with the dead, she thought, we’re on our own.
So as long as she was here and dreaded going home, she decided to do her civic duty and take a turn on unofficial watch. She hoofed it a block away, to the Jittery Bean, where she bought a hot chocolate, and brought it back here to the square and settled onto one of the benches in view of the waiting scarecrow, to make sure it all stayed on this side of fair.
She could feel it already, while dodging people on the sidewalks to and from the coffee shop, and could see it now from the bench: the eagerness of morning giving way to the nervousness of afternoon. The day was darkening too soon, it seemed, the sun gone weak in the south, the clouds sinking lower over the town, like a roof to screen them from the eye of God. A deeper chill rode in on a blustery wind that rattled leaves and windows alike.
We should’ve moved, she thought. We should’ve moved away before Cody was born, the way we talked about. Drew would still be dead . . . but we wouldn’t still be waiting to see if he’s coming home.
From here, she could see the blue-and-white of the shirt, the red lacquer of the Pinewood Derby car.
Go on, she thought. Somebody come take them already. I’ll cut you some slack, sit right here and pretend I don’t see you.
Before long, she thought she might have had a hopeful prospect, a scarf-wrapped woman walking up to the scarecrow and giving the offerings a studious look without having brought one of her own. She soon drifted toward another walkway, in no hurry to leave. In profile and from behind it was hard to tell who it was, but once she sat down on another bench, Bailey could see her clearly, and realized that it was Melanie Pemberton.
She should’ve guessed.
Come Halloween time, Melanie was a reliable fixture here, ever since the year of that grim business with her younger sister Angela. Came early, stayed late, would’ve swept the streets, probably, if they’d handed her a broom.
Melanie noticed her now, for the first time, and saw that Bailey saw her, and there came the awkward moment of being unsure whether they should go back to pretending they hadn’t, or consolidate space. Oh, why not. Bailey pointed to the spot on the bench beside her, and Melanie came over.
She was dark-haired and the last three years had left her hard-faced bordering on severe . . . but Bailey thought she understood the ongoing need in her, and didn’t judge. If Drew wasn’t the one who came through tonight, she felt confident that that would be it. Free to move on. Not haunt the place year after year, seeming to hope for a replay. But, like Troy had said, with Melanie it was a whole different set of issues.
“Even as a girl, I always wondered why we leave stuff,” Melanie said. “Leave stuff, and walk away.” She was stressing the word stuff as though it were something unpleasant, like hospital waste. “We should be camping out here, instead. But no. We seem to accept it on faith that inanimate objects will do a better job calling back the people we’re supposed to love than we can.”
Bailey had never regarded it quite that way, and anyhow, who really knew what went into the founding of a tradition this old? Here, 162 years ago, if you weren’t spending every waking moment of October bringing in crops and preparing for winter, you were probably going hungry and cold long before spring.
Mostly, Melanie just seemed angry. She had good reasons to be angry.
“You don’t have kids, do you?” Bailey asked.
“And bring them into a world like this? Not likely. Not likely.”
“I was just going to say,” Bailey went on, “that before they get to a certain age, kids seem to see a soul in everything. Everything’s alive, on some level. So who’s to say they don’t know something we all forgot? And maybe the ones who’ve died, they remember it. So they’re just happy to see a familiar soul that . . . I don’t know . . . loved them unconditionally, maybe?”
Melanie sat there taking this in. At least she wasn’t chewing it up and spitting it back in Bailey’s face.
“Unconditional,” Melanie said softly. “That’s hard, isn’t it.”
Bailey swirled her cup and drained the cocoa, now cold, to the last dribbles. “Chocolate, that’s easy for unconditional love. Everything else . . . ?”
Melanie laughed a little, maybe just being polite. Then she fell back into the black hole. “The day she disappeared, Angie and I . . . we had the worst fight. We said the worst things to each other. Me, mostly. I said them.” She bowed her head in a prayer to nothing, then snapped up again. “Of all the days, huh? Of all the days.”
Bailey wanted to say something, anything, the kneejerk words that you thought nobody must have thought to tell her before now. But of course she would’ve heard them all, listened to them until she was sick of them, and sick of the people who kept spouting them at her like found wisdom.
Instead, Bailey kept her mouth shut and reached over to rest her hand across the back of Melanie’s, until she nodded, the understanding between them in no need of words, and it felt like time to draw her hand back again. Melanie looked at the scarecrow, and if longing alone could’ve done it, the thing would have come down off its cross and danced.
“That helped, actually. What you said.” She sounded surprised about this. “It really did. But you know? There’s only one thing that could ever make me feel like I could finally put it all behind me.”
“I know.”
Melanie stood and straightened her scarf. “Good luck tonight,” she said, a rare wish that could assume the form of such opposing outcomes.
Evening fell, and dragged the night behind it.
The streets began to fill well before dusk, permanently now, people staking an early claim for a good view instead of having to rely on hearsay filtering back through the crowd. Everyone Bailey had seen throughout the day seemed to return fivefold, tenfold, expanding out in a circle from the center of the town square. When the span grew too great for that, the latecomers were forced to clog the streets between the low brick buildings of downtown.
Hundreds, easily. Thousands? Probably. She felt their pressure at her back, their eyes and expectations. Cody? Oblivious. Like his father, he could tune out anything he didn’t want or need to hear.
She leaned close to his shoulder, thinking of his stated intention this morning to ask Drew to take him along.
“Have you thought about what else you’re going to say to Daddy, if he comes?”
Cody nodded, looking more pensive than a six-year-old should. “Uh huh.”
“Wanna tell me about the rest? Run it past me?”
Cody thought it over, then shook his head no. “That’s okay.”
It stung, yes, shut out again, but it was a thing to be proud of, too. Good boy, she thought. This day of the year, at least, don’t trust anybody.
Here at the foot of the cross, in the alleged position of honor, they were sitting on a blanket folded quadruple to keep from hogging space and, less effectively, to shield their bottoms from the chill of the moist autumn earth. On either side, all in a tight row, were the rest of the bereaved. Candace Hughey, eighty if she was a day, eyes fixed on her husband’s Purple Heart. The Ralstons, Ellis and Kristin, their true north that sad teddy bear; Kristin looked as if she’d recently finished crying and could start again if so much as a raindrop fell wrong. Others, more than a dozen by now, everybody too close for comfort in this quiet rivalry.
Cody was an hour coming down off the high of trick-or-treating, costume shed and stuffed into new clothes in a bathroom at the gradeschool rendezvou
s. He may not have needed it, but she poured him a hot chocolate anyway, from the Thermos she’d had filled at the Jittery Bean, to keep the inevitable sugar crash at bay a little longer.
She leaned in close again. “You know Daddy loves you very much. If it’s not him tonight, that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t mean any different. You know that, don’t you?”
“I guess,” he said.
“Where he is now, we don’t know what it’s like there. How they decide things. We’ve got our rules here, but we don’t know what theirs are. Do you understand?”
Cody looked at her with, of all things, suspicion. “How come we don’t know? How come nobody’s asked?”
She blinked, feeling that special kind of stupid that kids could make you feel. “Asked who?”
“The dead people from before. If it’s happened all these other times, then how come nobody’s asked one of ’em what their rules are?”
It was a good question. Maybe it was already on his shortlist of things to discuss with Drew, or maybe he was adding it now.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe people mean to, but then they get excited and forget.”
The mayor stepped up onto a small platform and said more than a few words, as the mayors always did. It wasn’t an address anyone seemed to want. This had been going on for 162 years, for god’s sake, so it wasn’t like there were people out there who needed a refresher on what the night was all about. This had gone on long before him and, presumably, would go on long after he became eligible to bore people from the other side.
The murmur of hundreds of conversations filled the night, a subdued sound considering the numbers. Expectant and alert, she felt electrified when something jolted her from the inside, then foolish when she realized it was just her phone, ringer off and set to vibrate. She slipped it out to find a fresh text message from Troy:
Anything yet?
No, she keyed back. Everything quiet as a tomb. Except Mayor Bob.
Thought I heard the wind pick up.
What r u doing now?
Movie nite. Wishing u were here to hold my hand during the scary parts.
Probably not all u wish I was holding, she keyed, and couldn’t believe she’d said it, sent it. This was wrong on so many levels. Sexting, here and now, of all times and places, like she was trying to psychically sabotage the very thing her son wanted most in the world tonight. The thing she wished she could want as much as Cody did, but couldn’t.
It came down to this, she realized: She had eleven years of memories with Drew, most good, some exquisite. And she didn’t want the final one, that desperate goodbye in the hospital, to be shoved aside by some new one, post-mortem, the man she’d loved now wrapped inside a creepy shell of straw and old clothes and burlap, struggling to communicate whatever he felt he’d left unsaid.
Something to dream of, Troy wrote back. Turning in early. Thought I’d be OK with this tonite but now I just want it over. Want it to be tomorrow.
Me 2 x 1000.
“Who was that?” Cody asked after she’d put her phone away. Looking vaguely annoyed with her, as if her lapse in concentration would cost him everything. She’d lost her game face.
“Just a friend.” Great—on top of everything else, guilt and lies. “She wanted to wish us good luck.”
The impatience grew, thick with apprehension, everybody here in the front row appearing to feel it on some level or another. Down on the far end, a middle-aged widower was doing some breathing exercise. Five-count inhale, five-count hold, five-count exhale—she could see him ticking it off on his fingers.
The chill plunged further and the courthouse clock tower chimed nine, the mechanical crash of the hammer into the bell sharp and deep and unnerving. The echo seemed to roll for miles, still lingering in the air when something else charged the night. Was it just her, or did everyone feel it? The crowd fell silent behind her for a moment, then a groundswell of murmuring picked up again, expectant.
Bailey looked up along the cross with the same dread that guiltier souls than she was might have felt for a headsman hoisting his axe. Although she felt no wind, the fingers of one stuffed glove began to twitch. Then the arm began to stir, sliding along the crosspiece that held the thing in place, and one leg started to flex, the heel of the boot banging against the post.
You could blame everything on the wind until the head lifted.
The other arm moved, the other leg stirred, the shoulders appearing to strain as it leaned forward and weakly, so weakly, tried to push itself away from the post. The head tipped back and looked to the sky, then around at the tops of the downtown buildings, and down again, down to earth, out over the rapt and waiting throng . . . and if the thing could be said to see at all, with its black button eyes, then yes, the sight appeared to hasten its sense of urgency . . . or of agitation.
It wasn’t the fact that it moved at all that most unnerved her. No, it was subtler than that. Everything breathed. Women and men, cats and cows, birds and apes. Everything breathed. But not this. Its chest and belly were as still as a corpse’s. She hadn’t realized how wrong this mimicry of life looked until now.
Beside her, Cody knelt tense and wide-eyed, hands clasped at his chin as he nibbled on the tips of his thumbs. When she put her arm around his rigid shoulders, he gave no sign of noticing.
Above them, the scarecrow finally succeeded in flopping one arm free of the crosspiece, then the rest of it followed, the entire faux being tumbling to the ground, where it landed on its side with a rustle of cloth and straw. It stirred for a moment, trying to right itself with the slow, helpless squirm of an overturned turtle. Then its glove caught, and it pulled itself over onto its belly, to crawl forward on elbows and knees, toward the gifts of its summons.
It inspected them for a long time, longer than she remembered this taking in the past. Every year it was always the same—when the scarecrow took the gift, found the link, that’s how you knew who it was. Up and down the row it crawled, seeming to sense that something was here, something it just wasn’t finding.
Finally it lingered . . .
And chose.
The cake. The old cake that, this morning, looked to have come from a freezer. She hadn’t known whose it was, and still didn’t. Beside her, Cody gave a groan of disappointment, so she squeezed him tight to her. This time he let her, then buried his face into her side and sobbed. She glanced left, right . . . and none of them were moving. In fact, they looked to be growing as mystified as she was.
Then who had set it out there?
She looked again at the scarecrow. With its clumsy hands, it was now pulling the cake apart, and something about the sight triggered a wave of revulsion in her. It had no mouth, yet it was going to try to eat? No, that wasn’t it—
Bailey became aware of a commotion behind her.
—it was ripping the cake apart to get to something inside—
She became aware of a voice trying to make itself heard above the swelling din of the crowd.
—pawing aside frosting and crumbling cake that had been packed around something inside, to pull out—
Melanie again. Melanie Pemberton, shouldering her way to the front of the crowd, past well-intended men trying to hold her back.
—a music box. Old, chipped, adorned with painted arabesques. A music box.
Angela? This was her sister Angela? Now, three years after she’d . . . ?
And then, apart from her own losses, maybe the most heartbreaking sight Bailey had ever seen: the scarecrow trying to wind the music box’s key, to hear its song once more, but unable to, its gloved fingers not nimble enough, strong enough.
“You all gave her up for dead! Remember?” Melanie screamed at the crowd, as she broke free to take her place at the front. “All of you! That made it easier for you to stop looking, didn’t it! ‘Oh, Angela has to be dead by now! What can we do, life goes on!’ ”
Oh god, Bailey thought. We just assumed . . .
“Well, she’s dead now!
And that’s on you! All of you!”
“Mom?” Cody looked up at her, his face pleading. “What’s going on, I don’t understand.”
Nobody did, apparently. It was the noisiest Bailey had ever heard the crowd on Halloween night, confusion rippling back and forth, ricochets of resentment. It surged with unease, like an animal on the verge of being spooked.
How could this have happened? They’d found a blouse with Angela’s blood; two days later, two of her fingers out by the highway. Then nothing. No word, no sign, no more evidence at all. Days passed, then weeks turning to months. The conclusion came by gradual default, spreading from person to person like a cold: The poor young woman was surely dead, the rest of her sure to be found someday.
But why the subterfuge? Why the cake, to hide something in plain sight . . . unless Melanie didn’t want to set out something that she feared someone else might recognize. But if that was it . . .
No. No, the notion was too vile to entertain.
Cody tugged at her coat sleeve. “I want to go home.”
By now, Melanie had managed to struggle around the end of the front row, circling to get to the scarecrow while pushing past the mayor, who must have thought he was helping by trying to stop someone he believed was making a scene. Melanie dropped beside the bundle of cloth and straw and burlap, touching it tenderly, as if anything more might drive her sister away, and it touched her back in recognition.
Bailey didn’t have to hear the woman to know what was coming next. It would be the questions Melanie had been waiting years to ask.
Who took you?
Where were you kept all this time?
Who killed you?
And, you had to consider, is he here tonight? And was there more than one?
Though they were head to head, could Melanie even hear what her sister would say? That was why the quiet of the crowd was so important. It wasn’t simply reverence or being polite; it was practical, too. Those who would know had told her that the voice of the dead sounded thin and faraway, as though it emanated from a realm within the scarecrow rather than from the thing itself.
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 27