Sara glanced questioningly at someone behind him. Hugh Weldon, the chief of police. He nodded at them and settled onto the stool. “Sara,” he said. “Mr. Ramey. Glad I caught you.”
Weldon always struck Peter as the archetypal New Englander. Gaunt; weatherbeaten; dour. His basic expression was so bleak you assumed his gray crewcut to have been an act of penance. He was in his fifties but had a habit of sucking at his teeth that made him seem ten years older. Usually Peter found him amusing; however, on this occasion he experienced nausea and a sense of unease, feelings he recognized as the onset of a premonitory spell.
After exchanging pleasantries with Sara, Weldon turned to Peter. “Don’t want you to go takin’ this wrong, Mr. Ramey. But I got to ask where you were last Tuesday evenin’ ’round six o’clock.”
The feelings were growing stronger, evolving into a sluggish panic that roiled inside Peter like the effects of a bad drug. “Tuesday,” he said. “That’s when the Borchard girl disappeared.”
“My God, Hugh,” said Sara testily. “What is this? Roust out the bearded stranger every time somebody’s kid runs away? You know damn well that’s what Ellen did. I’d run away myself if Ethan Borchard was my father.”
“Mebbe.” Weldon favored Peter with a neutral stare. “Did you happen to see Ellen last Tuesday, Mr. Ramey?”
“I was home,” said Peter, barely able to speak. Sweat was popping out on his forehead, all over his body, and he knew he must look as guilty as hell; but that didn’t matter, because he could almost see what was going to happen. He was sitting somewhere, and just out of reach below him something glinted.
“Then you musta seen her,” said Weldon. “’Cordin’ to witnesses she was mopin’ ’round your woodpile for pretty near an hour. Wearin’ bright yellow. Be hard to miss that.”
“No,” said Peter. He was reaching for that glint, and he knew it was going to be bad in any case, very bad, but it would be even worse if he touched it and he couldn’t stop himself.
“Now that don’t make sense,” said Weldon from a long way off. “That cottage of yours is so small, it ’pears to me a man would just naturally catch sight of somethin’ like a girl standin’ by his woodpile while he was movin’ ’round. Six o’clock’s dinnertime for most folks, and you got a nice view of the woodpile out your kitchen window.”
“I didn’t see her.” The spell was starting to fade, and Peter was terribly dizzy.
“Don’t see how that’s possible.” Weldon sucked at his teeth, and the glutinous sound caused Peter’s stomach to do a slow flip-flop.
“You ever stop to think, Hugh,” said Sara angrily, “that maybe he was otherwise occupied?”
“You know somethin’, Sara, why don’t you say it plain?”
“I was with him last Tuesday. He was moving around, all right, but he wasn’t looking out any window. Is that plain enough?”
Weldon sucked at his teeth again. “I ’spect it is. You sure ’bout this?”
Sara gave a sarcastic laugh. “Wanna see my hickey?”
“No reason to be snitty, Sara. I ain’t doin’ this for pleasure.” Weldon heaved to his feet and gazed down at Peter. “You lookin’ a bit peaked, Mr. Ramey. Hope it ain’t somethin’ you ate.” He held the stare a moment longer, then pushed off through the crowd.
“God, Peter!” Sara cupped his face in her hands. “You look awful!”
“Dizzy,” he said, fumbling for his wallet; he tossed some bills on the counter. “C’mon, I need some air.”
With Sara guiding him, he made it through the front door and leaned on the hood of a parked car, head down, gulping in the cold air. Her arm around his shoulders was a good weight that helped steady him, and after a few seconds he began to feel stronger, able to lift his head. The street—with its cobblestones and newly budded trees and old-fashioned lampposts and tiny shops—looked like a prop for a model railroad. Wind prowled the sidewalks, spinning paper cups and fluttering awnings. A strong gust shivered him and brought a flashback of dizziness and vision. Once more he was reaching down toward that glint, only this time it was very close, so close that its energies were tingling his fingertips, pulling at him, and if he could just stretch out his hand another inch or two…Dizziness overwhelmed him. He caught himself on the hood of the car; his arm gave way, and he slumped forward, feeling the cold metal against his cheek. Sara was calling to someone, asking for help, and he wanted to reassure her, to say he’d be all right in a minute, but the words clogged in his throat and he continued lying there, watching the world tip and spin, until someone with arms stronger than Sara’s lifted him and said, “Hey, man! You better stop hittin’ the sauce, or I might be tempted to snake your ol’ lady.”
Streetlight angled a rectangle of yellow glare across the foot of Sara’s bed, illuminating her stockinged legs and half of Peter’s bulk beneath the covers. She lit a cigarette, then—exasperated at having given into the habit again—she stubbed it out, turned on her side, and lay watching the rise and fall of Peter’s chest. Dead to the world. Why, she wondered, was she such a sucker for the damaged ones? She laughed at herself; she knew the answer. She wanted to be the one to make them forget whatever had hurt them, usually another woman. A combination Florence Nightingale and sex therapist, that was her, and she could never resist a new challenge. Though Peter had not talked about it, she could tell some LA ghost owned half his heart. He had all the symptoms. Sudden silences, distracted stares, the way he jumped for the mailbox as soon as the postman came and yet was always disappointed by what he had received. She believed that she owned the other half of his heart, but whenever he started to go with it, to forget the past and immerse himself in the here and now, the ghost would rear up and he’d create a little distance. His approach to lovemaking, for instance. He’d come on soft and gentle, and then, just as they were on the verge of a new level of intimacy, he’d draw back, crack a joke, or do something rough—like tackling her on the beach that morning—and she would feel cheap and sluttish. Sometimes she thought that the thing to do would be to tell him to get the hell out of her life, to come back and see her when his head was clear. But she knew she wouldn’t. He owned more than half her heart.
She eased off the bed, careful not to wake him, and slipped out of her clothes. A branch scraped the window, startling her, and she held her blouse up to cover her breasts. Oh, right! A Peeping Tom at a third-floor window. In New York, maybe, but not in Nantucket. She tossed the blouse into the laundry hamper and caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror affixed to the closet door. In the dim light the reflection looked elongated and unfamiliar, and she had a feeling that Peter’s ghost woman was watching her from across the continent, from another mirror. She could almost make her out. Tall, long-legged, a mournful expression. Sara didn’t need to see her to know the woman had been sad: it was the sad ones who were the real heartbreakers, and the men whose hearts they had broken were like fossil records of what the women were. They offered their sadness to be cured, yet it wasn’t a cure they wanted, only another reason for sadness, a spicy bit to mix in with the stew they had been stirring all their lives. Sara moved closer to the mirror, and the illusion of the other woman was replaced by the conformation of her own body. “That’s what I’m going to do to you, lady,” she whispered. “Blot you out.” The words sounded empty.
She turned back the bedspread and slid in beside Peter. He made a muffled noise, and she saw gleams of the streetlights in his eyes. “Sorry about earlier,” he said.
“No problem,” she said brightly. “I got Bob Frazier and Jerry Highsmith to help bring you home. Do you remember?”
“Vaguely. I’m surprised Jerry could tear himself away from his redhead. Him and his sweet Ginger!” He lifted his arm so Sara could burrow in against his shoulder. “I guess your reputation’s ruined.”
“I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly getting more exotic all the time.”
He laughed.
“Peter?” she said.
“Yeah?
”
“I’m worried about these spells of yours. That’s what this was, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” He was silent a moment. “I’m worried, too. I’ve been having them two and three times a day, and that’s never happened before. But there’s nothing I can do except try not to think about them.”
“Can you see what’s going to happen?”
“Not really, and there’s no point in trying to figure it out. I can’t ever use what I see. It just happens, whatever’s going to, and then I understand that that was what the premonition was about. It’s a pretty worthless gift.”
Sara snuggled closer, throwing her leg across his hip. “Why don’t we go over to the Cape tomorrow?”
“I was going to check out Mills’s garbage dump.”
“Okay. We can do that in the morning and still catch the three o’clock boat. It might be good for you to get off the island for a day or so.”
“All right. Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”
Sara shifted her leg and realized that he was erect. She eased her hand beneath the covers to touch him, and he turned so as to allow her better access. His breath quickened and he kissed her—gentle, treasuring kisses on her lips, her throat, her eyes—and his hips moved in counterpoint to the rhythm of her hand, slowly at first, becoming insistent, convulsive, until he was prodding against her thigh and she had to take her hand away and let him slip between her legs, opening her. Her thoughts were dissolving into a medium of urgency, her consciousness being reduced to an awareness of heat and shadows. But when he lifted himself above her, that brief separation broke the spell, and she could suddenly hear the fretful sounds of the wind, could see the particulars of his face and the light fixture on the ceiling behind him. His features seemed to sharpen, to grow alert, and he opened his mouth to speak. She put a finger to his lips. Please, Peter! No jokes. This is serious. She beamed the thoughts at him, and maybe they sank in. His face slackened, and as she guided him into place he moaned, a despairing sound such as a ghost might make at the end of its earthly term; and then she was clawing at him, driving him deeper inside, and talking to him, not words, just breathy noises, sighs and whispers, but having meanings that he would understand.
III
That same night while Peter and Sara were asleep, Sally McColl was driving her jeep along the blacktop that led to Smith Point. She was drunk and not giving a good goddamn where she wandered, steering in a never-ending S, sending the headlights veering across low gorsey hills and gnarled hawthorns. With one hand she kept a choke hold on a pint of cherry brandy, her third of the evening. ’Sconset Sally, they called her. Crazy Sally. Seventy-four years old and still able to shell scallops and row better than most men on the island. Wrapped in a couple of Salvation Army dresses, two moth-eaten sweaters, a tweed jacket gone at the elbows, and generally looking like a bag lady from hell. Brambles of white hair sticking out from under a battered fisherman’s hat. Static fizzled on the radio, and Sally accompanied it with mutters, curses, and fitful bursts of song, all things that echoed the jumble of her thoughts. She parked near the spot where the blacktop gave out, staggered from the jeep and stumped through the soft sand to the top of a dune. There she swayed for a moment, dizzied by the pour of wind and the sweep of darkness broken only by a few stars on the horizon. “Whoo-ooh!” she screeched; the wind sucked up her yell and added it to its sound. She lurched forward, slipped, and went rolling down the face of the dune. Sand adhering to her tongue, spitting, she sat up and found that somehow she’d managed to hold on to the bottle, that the cap was still on even though she hadn’t screwed it tight. A flicker of paranoia set her to jerking her head from side to side. She didn’t want anybody spying on her, spreading more stories about old drunk Sally. The ones they told were bad enough. Half were lies, and the rest were slanted to make her seem loopy…like the one about how she’d bought herself a mail-order husband and he’d run off after two weeks, stowed away on a boat, scared to death of her, and she had come riding on horseback through Nantucket, hoping to bring him home. A swarthy little bump of a man, Eye-talian, no English, and he hadn’t known shit from shortcake in bed. Better to do yourself than fool with a pimple like him. All she’d wanted had been the goddamn trousers she’d dressed him in, and the tale-tellers had cast her as a desperate woman. Bastards! Buncha goddamn…
Sally’s train of thought pulled into a tunnel, and she sat staring blankly at the dark. Damn cold, it was, and windy a bit as well. She took a swig of brandy; when it hit bottom she felt ten degrees warmer. Another swig put her legs under her, and she started walking along the beach away from the Point, searching for a nice lonesome spot where nobody was likely to happen by. That was what she wanted. Just to sit and spit and feel the night on her skin. You couldn’t hardly find such a place nowadays, what with all the summer trash floating in from the mainland, the Gucci-Pucci sissies and the little swish-tailed chick-women eager to bend over and butter their behinds for the first five-hundred-dollar suit that showed interest, probably some fat-boy junior executive who couldn’t get it up and would marry ’em just for the privilege of being humiliated every night…That train of thought went spiraling off, and Sally spiraled after it. She sat down with a thump. She gave out with a cackle, liked the sound of it, and cackled louder. She sipped at the brandy, wishing that she had brought another bottle, letting her thoughts subside into a crackle of half-formed images and memories that seemed to have been urged upon her by the thrashings and skitterings of the wind. As her eyes adjusted, she made out a couple of houses lumped against the lesser blackness of the sky. Vacant summer places. No, wait! Those were them whatchamacallems. Condominiums. What had that Ramey boy said about ’em? Iniums with a condom slipped over each. Prophylactic lives. He was a good boy, that Peter. The first person she’d met with the gift for dog’s years, and it was strong in him, stronger than her gift, which wasn’t good for much except for guessing the weather, and she was so old now that her bones could do that just as well. He’d told her how some people in California had blown up condominiums to protect the beauty of their coastline, and it had struck her as a fine idea. The thought of condominiums ringing the island caused her to tear up, and with a burst of drunken nostalgia she remembered what a wonder the sea had been when she was a girl. Clean, pure, rife with spirits. She’d been able to sense those spirits…
Battering and crunching from somewhere off in the dunes. She staggered to her feet, cocking an ear. More sounds of breakage. She headed toward them, toward the condominiums. Might be some kids vandalizing the place. If so, she’d cheer ’em on. But as she climbed to the top of the nearest dune, the sounds died away. Then the wind picked up, not howling or roaring, but with a weird ululation, almost a melody, as if it were pouring through the holes of an enormous flute.
The back of Sally’s neck prickled, and a cold slimy worm of fear wriggled the length of her spine. She was close enough to the condominiums to see their rooflines against the sky, but she could see nothing else. There was only the eerie music of the wind, repeating the same passage of five notes over and over. Then it, too, died. Sally took a slug of brandy, screwed up her courage, and started walking again; the beach grass swayed and tickled her hands, and the tickling spread gooseflesh up her arms. About twenty feet from the first condominium she stopped, her heartbeat ragged. Fear was turning the brandy to a sour mess in her stomach. What was there to be afraid of, she asked herself. The wind? Shit! She had another slug of brandy and went forward. It was so dark she had to grope her way along the wall, and she was startled to find a hole smack in the middle of it. Bigger than a damn door, it was. Edged by broken boards and ripped shingles. Like a giant fist had smashed it through. Her mouth was cottony, but she stepped inside. She rummaged in her pockets, dug out a box of kitchen matches, lit one and cupped it with her hands until it burned steadily. The room was unfurnished, just carpeting and telephone fixtures and paint-spattered newspapers and rags. Sliding glass doors were inset into the opposite wall, but most of th
e glass had been blown out, crunching under her feet; as she drew near, an icicle-shaped piece hanging from the frame caught the glow of the match and for a second was etched on the dark like a fiery tooth. The match scorched her fingers. She dropped it and lit another and moved into the next room. More holes and a heaviness in the air, as if the house were holding its breath. Nerves, she thought. Goddamn old-woman nerves. Maybe it had been kids, drunk and ramming a car into the walls. A breeze eeled from somewhere and puffed out the match. She lit a third one. The breeze extinguished it, too, and she realized that kids hadn’t been responsible for the damage, because the breeze didn’t blow away this time: it fluttered around her, lifting her dress, her hair, twining about her legs, patting and frisking her all over, and in the breeze was a feeling, a knowledge, that turned her bones to splinters of black ice. Something had come from the sea, some evil thing with the wind for a body had smashed holes in the walls to play its foul, spine-chilling music, and it was surrounding her, toying with her, getting ready to whirl her off to hell and gone. It had a clammy, bitter smell, and that smell clung to her skin everywhere it touched.
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