It might have been Sarah Talpey who drew me back because the things she'd said, and the way she'd said them, had posed more questions than they'd answered. Or I simply could have been bored, alone at the house (it was a Monday, and Erika always put in at least twelve hours at her shop on Mondays).
Sarah was in Granada that day. It was a bright, warm morning, the first week in April, and when I got out of the car, a hornet buzzed me once, and again, then found the interior of the car and got stuck there. I cursed, closed the door, decided to deal with it later.
I was in front of the pastel blue house where I'd discovered Sarah. She was just coming out of it, dressed in gray overalls, a white shirt, and a blue ski jacket opened at the front. She was carrying something under her right arm. She smiled, waved, said, "Hello. Jack, isn't it?"
"Yes," I said loudly. "Hi."
She came quickly down the battered walkway, extended her free hand; I took it. "I'm Sarah," she said. "Remember?"
"I remember."
She let go of my hand, noticed that I was looking at the thing she was carrying under her arm. She said, "I found this today," and held it out for me to see. It was a tattered brown suede jacket. She turned her head slightly, nodded, "In that house, in the attic. Under the insulation."
It was a child's jacket, that was obvious, and it was torn in several places. Around the collar it looked as if it might have been chewed.
Sarah went on, "It's a marvelous find, Jack. It belonged to one of the children who lived here—a boy named Robin." She held up the jacket's right sleeve. The name Robin had been sewn there in red thread. "Robin Graham," she went on, and tucked the jacket back under her arm. "He was eleven years old. A twin, I think. I'll have to check that. And he turned up missing one day." A flat, sad grin appeared on her lips. "He was never found. Lots and lots of people looked for him, and for quite a long time, too. Then his brother turned up missing, too, and he was never found, and things got pretty frantic. But that was just the tip of the iceberg, I'm afraid."
"Oh?" I said.
She nodded. "Uh-huh." She lifted her head, closed her eyes briefly, opened them, and smiled. "God, what a day, Jack!" She took my elbow. "C'mon, walk with me."
I spent several hours with her in Granada that morning. We did a lot of walking, more than I'd done in some time (my legs ached the next day from it), and she went into detail about Granada, why she was there, what had happened twenty years ago. And when she was done and was walking me to my car, I told her that she had scared the hell out of me.
"Good," she said.
"I don't believe a word of it, Sarah, but I enjoy a good story well told."
She smiled thinly, opened my car door. "So do I, Jack," she said, leaned over and looked into my car. "I'll get that hornet out for you. I think you're probably a little squeamish about that sort of thing."
"Thanks," I said. "I am."
Once, on a business trip to New York City, I had to spend an hour or so at Grand Central Station. I found that all the stories I'd heard about it were true. It's crowded, it's noisy, it's smelly, most of the people are rude, the cops surly. And it does not lack for crazies. There are probably a hundred or more crazies there at any given time. Usually, they're benign and predictable—people who carry on long and unintelligible conversations with themselves, people who wander aimlessly from place to place, people who accuse passersby of all kinds of immorality. But on this particular business trip I ran into a very rare type of crazy, the Imaginative and Articulate Crazy. He was a man in his late forties who called himself "The Late Dr. Bernie Swan." He was dressed very stylishly, looked as if he had money, and for a full hour and a half he told me, in wonderful detail, about the giant spiders that lived in Manhattan's subway system. He explained that they were "a heavily mutated species of arachnid and they subsist almost entirely on a diet of subway freeloaders." I found myself vastly entertained, and when he was finished I said that he should try writing novels or short stories. He shook his head slowly and seriously—he was a distinguished-looking man with a well-groomed black mustache, nicely coiffed hair, intelligent gray eyes—and said, "No, I'm afraid not. Those sorts of people deal in fiction, you see," then stood and strode off, to the Forty-Second Street exit, his gait quick and purposeful, as if he had places to go and people to see.
When I drove home after spending the morning with Sarah Talpey, I thought about him and his "heavily mutated arachnids," and I wondered if Sarah, too, got a big kick out of the stories she told, and if she believed them, as well. I remember hoping she did because I had grown to like her and I didn't want to believe she was bringing herself unhappiness.
"The earth produced us all," she told me. "I believe that, Jack. Do you believe that?"
"Sure," I said, though I had little idea what she was talking about.
"The earth and air and sunlight produced us all," she said. We were walking several hundred feet north of Granada on a narrow path. It was a deer path, she explained; as she talked she kept her hands folded behind her, Robin Graham's brown suede jacket tucked under her arm. She held her head down, wore a little frown. She was a very attractive woman, and I couldn't help looking at her often as she spoke, though she rarely looked at me. I got the idea that she was delivering a monologue. She went on, "The earth and air and sunlight produce all kinds of things, Jack."
"Uh-huh," I said.
She turned her head and gave me a quick, embarrassed grin. "That wasn't awfully profound, was it?"
I said nothing.
She turned back. "It's at the heart of all this, though."
"All this?"
She gestured obliquely with her free arm. "Yes. Granada."
"It is?" I heard the incredulity in my voice.
"Yes—Jack, do you want to know what really happened here? Twenty years ago." She didn't give me a chance to answer; she hurried on, as if in a sudden frenzy, "The earth reared up, Jack, and caught those people with their pants down. The earth swept them away. The earth produced its own"—she swung her arm wide—"and swept them away. Swept them away. Robin Graham, my brother—all of them." She paused. Then she whispered, "They were swept away."
"By arms of loving grace," I said.
She looked momentarily confused. "Maybe," she said. "I don't know. Maybe."
"And I don't know what we're talking about, Sarah."
"Arms of loving grace. That's important, Jack."
"Is it?"
She nodded once, earnestly, but said nothing. I asked, "Why is it?"
"Because we all come from the earth, Jack. And we all go back to it. So you see, there's no real difference between us and them."
"Oh? Who's them?"
Again she gestured behind her. "The ones who visited Granada twenty years ago."
"And did what?"
"And did what you see there." She sounded annoyed.
"Are you telling me you know who they were?"
"Yes."
"By name?"
"No. That's not relevant."
"Oh?"
"The earth doesn't give her children names, Jack. We do that. The earth does what it does. It produces."
"And what does the earth produce? Precisely."
"It produces people. Like you and me and my brother Norm and Robin Graham."
"But those are real people, and they have real names." I realized that I was humoring her and I didn't like it.
She grinned quickly, impatiently. "Yes, of course they do," she said. "Everyone has names." I got the idea, then, that she had begun humoring me. "People are given names. Or they take them. And they live with them, are known by them, and die with them."
"You're being awfully cryptic."
"No, I'm not. Listen to me. The things I'm telling you are true."
We got to the end of the deer path, and hesitated. I said to her, before we turned and started back, "But you haven't told me anything, Sarah."
"I've told you that the earth produces, and I've told you what it produces, and what happened here, J
ack. Listen to me."
But I didn't listen to her. I didn't listen to several people. Like Harry Simms, for instance, when he swept out of the woods and screamed that he couldn't breathe. I thought he was nuts. I thought he was playing a game. How was I to know what was happening to him?
And I didn't listen to Erika, either. Not closely enough, anyway, not in the way I should have listened to her. It wouldn't have made any difference, after all. Once the pail of water is thrown, you can't recall it. But I could have helped her through it, I could have eased her agony somehow.
And I didn't listen to my mother, either, although the knowledge she had was amorphous, little bits and pieces of suspicion that I doubt she'd ever have added up to anything meaningful.
It all adds up, now.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The master bedroom here at the house is big and rectangular, with high ceilings and two tall multi-paned windows, kitty-corner to each other (one has a southern exposure; the other faces west), a huge walk-in closet, and light green walls. It once had a fireplace on the north wall, but it was plastered over, so only its outlines show. Residue from the oil heat has collected in front of the wall studs, where concentrations of moisture attracted it—so, on certain days, the green walls look as if very faint gray bars have been painted on them.
Erika never liked this room. She says that she feels uncomfortable in it, trapped in it—I never understood why—so, after a while, I grew accustomed to waking very early and finding that she was not in the bed, that she'd gone into the guest room to sleep or into the music room, which has a cot in it and is warmer than the guest room, anyway.
The night after I talked to Sarah I woke at a little past 2:00 and found that Erika was not in the bed with me. I wanted her in the bed with me; I needed her with me. So I got up and went looking for her. I looked in the guest bedroom first. It's down the hall from the master bedroom. I opened the door, peeked in, and even in the dim light filtering through the heavy curtains from a spotlight over the side porch—which we kept burning for safety's sake—I knew that the room was empty. I said, anyway, "Erika?" and flicked the overhead light on. The room was empty, the bed untouched. I went downstairs to the music room, found that it was empty, too. I cursed. "Erika?" I called. "Erika, where are you?" I got no answer. I decided that I had better make a search of the house.
I found her in the dining room, seated at the head of the table, in the captain's chair, with her back to the large window that looks out on the side yard and the woods beyond. She'd drawn the curtains open on this window. And when I flicked the light on, she said, "No, keep it off, Jack," so I turned it off. She gestured with her head toward the window. "Look out there."
I looked. The spotlight over the side porch was lighting the whole area nicely. I could see our three crab apple trees—the closest had a distinct whitish cast to it, from the spotlight—and our bird feeders (two of which are miniature houses on long steel "squirrel proof" poles), the small gray picnic table that we'd brought from Syracuse, the aged wooden bridge over the narrow creek. I could see the tufted, hulking suggestion of the woods beyond, as well, and above them the belt of the constellation Orion, just barely visible in the glare of the spotlamp.
I'said to Erika, "I'm looking. What am I supposed to see?"
She turned in her chair, stared out the window for several seconds, turned back. "Oh," she said, her voice low and apologetic, "they're gone."
"They are?"
"Yes."
She stood. She was dressed in a sheer black floor-length nightgown that I'd gotten her for Christmas, and as she drew the curtains shut and the light from the spotlamp hit her, it came to me in a rush just why I'd gotten out of bed to find her. "You look awfully sexy, Erika," I said.
"Do I?" she said. "Thanks. You can turn on the light now."
"Uh-huh. But then, you always look sexy, of course." I flicked the light on.
"Of course."
I went over to her, put my hands on her waist. "What was out there?" I ran my hands slowly up and down her torso; my palms touched and lingered on her breasts.
"Deer," she answered, and paused for several seconds. "People, maybe."
I moved back from her a step, my hands on her waist. "People?" I said. "You mean the snowmobilers?"
She shook her head slightly; a little smile appeared on her mouth, as if she were vaguely amused. "No, Jack. Not the snowmobilers. Only a few deer. We've seen them out there before, haven't we?" It was true. When we first moved to the house, a small herd of deer liked to meander up the south side of the creek from across the road to the west; one looked like a fawn of six months or so—a spindly, cute, and skittish little creature. "And sometimes," Erika finished, "they can look pretty spooky, huh?"
"Sure," I said. It was true, too—if the deer were at the fringes of the glare of the spotlamp, as they often were, their coats reflected the light unevenly, and made them look tall, white, and quick-moving.
"Want a granola bar?" Erika nodded at the dining room table. I looked; she had half a granola bar on a blue saucer there, and an empty glass—it had obviously had milk in it.
"Is that why you got up, Erika? Because you were hungry?"
She nodded. "Uh-huh. Want some?"
"No. Thanks," I said.
"Oh?" She paused briefly; a sensuous grin started on her lips. "What do you want?"
"What do you think I want?"
"I think I want you," she said. "I think we want each other." It was a phrase we used to use quite a lot. "And I think that being spooked makes me horny, Jack."
She rarely used the word horny, and I liked it when she did. I whispered, "I didn't know that. That's nice to know."
She pushed against me—pelvis to pelvis. She said nothing.
"How horny does it make you, Erika?" I pushed back.
"Stop talking," she said.
"Sure," I said, and we both stopped talking for quite a while.
We got back to bed at around 3:00. I remember that she was shivering as we walked up the stairs and I asked her if she was cold. She turned and said, simply, "They were people, Jack." But by then it was too late, and I was too tired to care very much.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
At the end of the first week in April a stocky, moon-faced middle-aged man, wearing a yellow hunting jacket and carrying an over-and-under shotgun, came to the house and asked if he could use the phone. It was mid-morning, a little past eleven. He looked awfully agitated. He was even sweating a bit, although the temperatures that day hovered at just below fifty, so I asked him why he needed to use the phone.
He shook his head slightly. "No reason," he said. He smelled of gunpowder and cigars; his hunting boots were encased in mud.
"No reason?" I said.
He shook his head again, made a poor attempt at a Nothing's wrong, really! kind of smile. "There's been a little accident," he said, and inclined his head to the left. "Someone got shot."
"Oh, Jesus!" I murmured.
"So I need to use the phone"—another poor attempt at a smile—"I need to use the phone," he repeated, his voice quaking noticeably, "to call someone—"
I let him into the house, nodded at the phone on Erika's small desk in the library. "It's over there," I said.
"Thanks," he said, and went to it, picked it up, looked at it a moment, looked confusedly at me. "You think I should call the operator, and then she can call the sheriff, or you think I should call the hospital direct—"
"My God," I cut in, and went quickly over to him, took the phone. "Is the man dead?" I asked.
Another look of confusion. "What man?" he said.
"The man you shot, of course."
"I didn't shoot a man. I shot a woman."
"A woman? What woman?"
He shook his head. "I don't know. Some woman. I think she's dead."
"Where is she?"
He pointed toward the road in front of the house. "Across the road. In a gully." He grinned stupidly. "I thought she was a woodchuck. I sho
t her because I thought she was a woodchuck. What's your name?"
I put the phone down, put my hand on the barrel of the man's shotgun. "Leave that here, okay?" I said soothingly. "Leave that here, and show me where the woman is."
It had rained heavily the night before, reducing the last snow to sullen grayish patches at the bases of trees and around the garage and house. Much of the rest of the landscape was dark green, wet, and mashed flat from the weight of the snow.
At the crest of the mountain across the road the trees were white with ice. Now and again, the sun peeked out from behind a mantle of low, gray clouds, and its light danced crazily through the ice.
The hunter nodded. "That's real pretty, don't you think?"
We were halfway to the road then, halfway down the long, muddy slope of the driveway. I could see his footprints coming up it. "Where is the woman you shot?" I asked.
He pointed obliquely to the right, where the path leading up to Martin's house started. "She's over there, Mr. Harris."
"How'd you know my name?" I said.
He nodded at my mailbox. "Easy enough," he said.
I got my foot stuck in mud at the edge of the driveway. I tugged hard to free it, but without luck. I leaned over, pulled with both hands—which only made the suction stronger. The hunter didn't appear to notice this, and was at the road before he seemed to realize I was no longer walking with him. He looked around at me, grinned, lumbered back, shook his head slowly.
I said, "This is stupid."
"Suckin' you right up, ain't it, Mr. Harris?"
"This is incredibly stupid." I found it very difficult to believe that I couldn't get my foot out of the mud.
"You got to ease it out," he said.
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