“Is that going to be a problem?” Ian gave her a funny look, and Kate realized she was gripping the counter. She let go, giving herself a mental shake. There was nothing to be afraid of. The person who’d taken Lily Slocum wasn’t going to break into her house and Terrence Simnic was just a harmless eccentric.
“No problem,” she said. “Grace and I can manage.”
“Manage what?” Grace slouched into the room and looked suspiciously at her parents. “I hope you haven’t signed me up for something like that stupid pottery class.”
Her parents laughed and Ian said, “You enjoyed that once you gave it a try and stopped complaining.”
“Yeah, who doesn’t want to hang out with some freaked-out hippie lady whose place reeks of patchouli and get your clothes covered in gray shit so you can produce one lopsided ashtray.”
“Don’t use that language,” Kate said, handing her a fistful of silverware. “And I loved your lopsided ashtray even if none of us smoke.”
“Mom, I could snort into a Kleenex and you’d treasure it.”
Ian put his wineglass down. “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”
Grace rolled her eyes, but only after she’d turned away from her father, Kate noticed. Instead of challenging Grace’s statement, she simply said, “Set the table and pour yourself some milk.”
“I want a Diet Coke.”
“Milk.” Kate held up a hand as Grace opened her mouth to argue. “You’re growing, you need the calcium, and it’s nonnegotiable.”
Grace gave a put-upon sigh, but after halfheartedly setting the table, she clumped past her parents to grab a glass from a cupboard and the milk from the fridge.
“Did you practice today?” Ian asked.
“Of course.” Grace sounded exasperated, but Ian pressed on.
“How was school today?”
Grace shrugged in reply and slunk over to the table with her glass, which, despite her protests, she immediately began taking sips from.
“C’mon, what happened? What did you learn?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m going to ask for my tax money back,” Ian said with a smile, nudging her with an elbow. The old, prepuberty Grace would have laughed at this, but teenage Grace, the bad seed, screeched.
“Watch it! You’ll spill my milk!”
Kate silently gave her own put-upon sigh as Ian came to serve the plates.
“Boarding school,” he muttered under his breath.
“Are you kidding? Then we wouldn’t be able to monitor her at all. I’m sure she’d have Damien as her guest in under a minute.”
Kate had spoken in a whisper, but Grace managed to pick up on a familiar name. “What are you saying about Damien? Did he call?”
“We’re not talking to you, young lady,” Ian said. “Sit down.”
“No! I want to know if Damien called. Did he?”
Ian squared off with her, arms crossed over his broad chest. “First of all, Damien isn’t allowed to call—remember? Secondly, you don’t say no to me. Sit. Down.”
Grace hesitated, staring at her father with hatred. Ian took one step toward her and she dropped in her seat.
Kate passed out plates and took her own seat. “Well, bon appétit, everybody,” she said, trying not to imbue it with sarcasm.
The photographs of Lily Slocum preyed on Kate’s mind, the image of the still girl lying on the chaise contrasting with that young, smiling face. After reading the article, she followed Grace out the door every day, accompanying her down the porch steps and their front walk and standing on the sidewalk in front of their house to watch her make her way to the end of the block to catch the bus.
“I could drive you,” Kate had offered. “Now that we’ve got a second car you don’t need to take the bus.”
Ian had spearheaded the purchase of a silver Toyota Prius, and was as thrilled as if he’d built it himself. He’d insisted on discussing all the features, and bored Kate with a detailed description of how hybrid cars work. When he offered to drive the Volvo to campus every day and leave the new car with her, she had to hide a smile at the strain in his voice. When she politely declined, he couldn’t hide his own delight.
The purchase of the new car didn’t interest Grace once she’d established that Ian wouldn’t let her drive it until she was old enough to get a learner’s permit. She turned down Kate’s offer of a ride claiming that she liked to take the bus.
“I’m not a little kid, you know,” Grace complained for the umpteenth time as her mother followed her to the front door. “I don’t need an escort.”
“Tough,” Kate said, catching the screen door that Grace tried to slam and following her daughter out onto the porch. “Do you have your lunch?”
“Yes, Mom.” The words were drawn out, exasperated. She wore shades of black as usual, a charcoal T-shirt and dark jeans, her matching hair a tangled curtain blocking her face. She jammed her iPod headphones into her ears and stalked away without a good-bye.
Kate watched her go, peering past the green leaves of the oak trees to see her reach the end of the block. She felt another wave of anxiety as Grace’s steps slowed the closer she got to the other kids at the bus stop. Did she have friends? These kids were a preppy-looking bunch. What did they make of Grace and her urban-guerrilla look? Was she happy at her new school? Wickfield High School had a good reputation and high test scores to back it up, but so had the school Grace had gone to last year, and that had turned out to be a disaster.
Kate walked back inside and locked the door behind her, checking it again two seconds after she’d turned the dead bolt. She jumped when the doorbell rang five minutes later.
Switching off the teakettle, she tiptoed back to the front door, pushing aside the curtain to see who was there.
“It’s me, silly, open the door.” Margaret Newman grinned at her, pressing her face close to the window as if Kate were partially blind.
With a feeling of relief, Kate unlocked the door and stepped into the embrace of one of her oldest friends.
“Good Lord, you’ve gone Green Acres on me already,” Margaret said, stepping back and surveying Kate’s blue jeans and old T-shirt.
“I’m working,” Kate said defensively, self-consciously smoothing her hair.
“So am I,” Margaret said, indicating her hand-tailored brown suit, “but us city folk don’t slop the hogs.”
“I prefer to call it painting,” Kate said, but she couldn’t keep from laughing. Margaret always made her laugh. “I’m so glad to see you!”
“I promised I’d visit your country retreat and here I am.” Margaret hoisted an H&H bag she had resting at her designer-clad feet. “And I came with provisions.”
Kate led her to the kitchen, and while Margaret unpacked bagels and chattered about the charm of “the hinterlands,” Kate made a pot of strong, black coffee just the way her friend liked it.
“They do sell these here, you know,” Kate said, smearing an everything bagel with cream cheese.
“I’m sure they’re a poor imitation.” Margaret took a large bite out of a sesame bagel and picked a seed delicately off the corner of her lip.
They’d been friends for almost eighteen years, longer than Kate had been married to Ian. In fact she owed her relationship with Ian to Margaret, since she’d invited them both to one of the wild parties she’d thrown regularly when they were all in their early twenties and new to New York. At least Kate and Ian had been new. Margaret was a born and bred Manhattanite and swore that she’d never live anywhere else, though she complained often enough about the high cost of living. It was the one area of her life where emotion overcame pragmatism.
“How’s Ian?”
“He’s good. Busy with the new job.”
“I’ll bet he is.” Margaret took a sip of coffee. “Is it all the prestige he hoped for?”
“Ian isn’t like that.”
“Isn’t he? I thought that’s why he had to leave the city.”
Kate took a sip of her tea, hoping the
hot liquid would soothe the nervous twisting in her gut. They’d had this discussion before. “You know why we left.”
“You were getting better.”
“I wasn’t.”
“And Grace would have gotten over that boy.”
“She hasn’t.”
“Well, you both would in time. That’s my point,” Margaret insisted, tucking a strand of honey-colored hair behind a perfectly proportioned ear. She was a beautiful woman, but she had yet to find a relationship that satisfied her. “Discriminating” was how Margaret described her attitude toward men, but Kate suspected that deep down she was really afraid of compromise.
“We’re not that far from the city,” Kate said.
“Then why haven’t I seen you?”
“I’m trying to work. I’m overdue with that portrait I told you about.”
“You work too hard,” Margaret said. She’d gone to art school, too, but after three years of struggling had steered her career into the safer, shallower waters of advertising. “Starving isn’t really my color,” she’d said at the time. She finished off her bagel with one large bite and dabbed her mouth daintily with a napkin. “C’mon, show me your new studio.”
“Sure.” Kate tried to sound casual, but her stomach twisted again, the knot of anxiety tighter. She locked the kitchen door behind them and turned to see Margaret staring at her.
“I thought it was supposed to be safe up here.”
Kate flushed. “It is.”
“Then why are you locking the door?”
“Just habit, I guess.” Kate avoided her eyes, moving past her to unlock the studio.
It was obvious that she hadn’t been doing much painting. The portrait of the banker had barely changed, but Margaret just looked at it for a moment without saying anything, before examining the rest of the room.
“It’s got lots of natural light,” she said, stepping over to the window. As she stood there, a screen door slapped and Kate saw Terrence Simnic coming down his back steps with a large, black garbage bag.
“Who’s your neighbor?” Margaret asked watching as he hauled it into one of the metal garbage cans neatly lined up on the other side of the storm cellar.
“Terrence Simnic.”
“He seems”—Margaret seemed to be searching for a word—“colorful.”
Kate laughed, relieved to have something to laugh about. “Yeah, he’s kind of strange.” She told Margaret about the doll collection.
“How creepy!” Margaret said. “Very Norman Bates. Are you sure he doesn’t have his mother stored somewhere in that house?”
“I wasn’t about to stick around and find out.”
“That’s a big bag of trash for one man.” Margaret stepped away from the window and moved over to the shelves Kate had filled with paints and palettes and other supplies. She ran a hand over the brushes and flipped the pages of a drawing pad before looking Kate square in the eye. “How are you really doing?
Her question took Kate by surprise. “I’m fine,” she said, but she felt as if she were lying.
“You don’t look fine.”
“I’m not sleeping well.”
“Are you taking anything?”
“No!” At Margaret’s surprised look, Kate lowered her voice. “And I don’t want to. I’ve just got to get used to being in such a quiet place.”
“How are things with you and Ian?”
“Fine,” Kate said again, but Margaret just looked at her and Kate cracked.
“Okay, they’re not fine. We’re still not doing it. I can’t do it. We haven’t done it in over eight months. Happy?” Tears burned in her eyes, but Kate blinked them back.
There was silence for a moment, and then Margaret gave her a slight smile and said, “Honey, you’re not in high school anymore. You’re allowed to say sex.”
It made Kate laugh, the tears spilling over as she did, and she brushed them away, feeling the knot in her stomach easing a little. “It’s been hard,” she said. “Ian doesn’t understand. It’s not like I want to be this way.”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“You sound like him now.” Kate turned away from her friend, struggling to regain her composure. “I don’t want to see anyone again. It’s so boring. Talk, talk, talk. All the talk in the world isn’t going to change what happened.”
“But it might help you get over it.”
Kate could feel tears threatening again, and Margaret let it go, the way a good friend does, by steering the conversation onto mutual friends. They left Kate’s studio and went back to the house, spending a happy few hours gossiping about everything that had happened in the city since Kate had gone.
When her friend finally left, Kate was sorry to see her go. Margaret was laughing at a final joke as she headed for the shiny Lexus parked at the curb, but she paused and turned back to look at Kate, her face suddenly serious.
“I know you’ve been through hell in the past year, but you can’t make it better by shutting yourself off from the world,” she said. “Promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”
“I promise,” Kate said, and she managed to smile as if that comment didn’t hurt. She stood and stared down the street long after Margaret’s car was gone.
As she walked slowly back up to her house, Terrence Simnic came down his front steps lugging two shopping bags. He set them down to open the door of the brown sedan parked in the driveway. As he shoved one bag in the backseat, the second toppled over and clothes spilled out onto the asphalt. Women’s clothes. Kate stared at the bra and panties tangled up with some sweaters. Terrence Simnic scooped them up, muttering under his breath. As he shoved them back in the bag, he looked over and caught her staring. Kate tensed, locking eyes with his, her body prickling with apprehension. He shoved the second bag into the back of the car, still staring at her, and then, maintaining eye contact, he walked slowly around to the driver’s side.
Kate broke eye contact and ran into the house slamming and locking the door. She stood there, trembling, until she heard the roar of the car engine. When she peered out the front window, his car had disappeared down the street beneath a canopy of trees.
Chapter Seven
Grace lingered when the bell for second period rang, glancing out the windows that overlooked the front of Wickfield High and then up at the big, round, industrial clock fixed on the wall in the long hallway.
A teacher shooing latecomers into her class paused with her hand on the door to stare at her, and Grace turned swiftly, messenger bag banging against her hip, hurrying away before the woman could ask where she was supposed to be. Spanish class, but that was in the opposite direction, and it didn’t really matter because she wasn’t going.
Damien was coming. He’d promised. “Going to drive on up and get you,” he’d said when she talked to him the day before, calling him from a borrowed cell phone. She couldn’t call him from her own phone. That wasn’t allowed, hadn’t been allowed once her parents knew about him.
“He’s twenty!” Her mother had said, repeating the number as if that meant anything.
“So what?”
“So he’s too old for you!”
“Dad’s five years older than you!”
Her father was quick to answer that. “The difference between fifteen and twenty is much greater than the distance between twenty and twenty-five.”
They’d met Damien exactly once, one time when she stupidly asked him to meet her out front of their building to go to the movies and her parents happened to arrive home together just as he pulled up to the curb in his dark brown Mercedes. They’d been polite, she couldn’t fault them for that, but her father had immediately asked Damien how old he was and her mother had said that Grace wasn’t old enough to date.
Even though they hadn’t had a problem when she went to the eighth-grade dance with Matt Glick.
“Wasn’t that a date?” she’d demanded in the hours-long argument that followed her parents forbidding her to go out with Damien, but her mother hadn
’t been moved.
“Matt was your age, Grace. And you weren’t really dating.”
Which showed how little they knew, because she’d kissed Matt Glick in the closet at Emily Neeson’s party, though the quick, wet imprint of his lips against hers had all the romance of a postage stamp. They’d been playing spin the bottle in the family room, all giggling and hush-hush with Emily’s clueless parents just steps away, and someone nudged the bottle after Matt spun it so that it pointed at Grace.
Kid stuff. She could hardly believe that had been just two years ago. Things were so different since she’d met Damien. Not that it was Damien who made her change. That’s what her parents believed, but it wasn’t true. She was ready for change, thirsting for it, and maybe that was why the universe sent her Damien. Like he was her destiny.
He liked to talk about things like that, philosophy and stuff. Just because he didn’t go to college didn’t mean he wasn’t smart. Damien was really, really smart. She’d seen his acceptance letter to Princeton, so she knew it was true that he’d gotten in, and so what if once he got there he realized it wasn’t the place for him. Conformists, he’d told her. Conformists and wannabes, all of the students he’d met and most of the professors. “There wasn’t an original idea in the place.”
She’d told her parents this, thinking that they’d understand, that her mother, of all people, would share that sentiment, but her lips had tightened into a thin line and her father had said, “What a crock of shit.”
She hadn’t told Damien that, hadn’t told about the other words they’d used, like “posturing” and “insecure.” It wasn’t true, any of it. They didn’t understand Damien and they didn’t want to.
Grace walked quickly down one hallway, then another, both of them leading to the back of the school and the parking lot adjacent to the playing fields where she’d told Damien she’d meet him. Exiting the school was the easy part. She’d already scoped out the door near the gymnasium that she could use. Second period was good because for some reason no class had gym before third period.
The door to the gym teacher’s office stood open. Grace peered through the crack and saw Coach Wally Pembroke looking into the file cabinet, his broad back facing the door. She tiptoed past softly enough that she could hear his wheezing. He was supposed to be some sort of legend at Wickfield High. She’d heard other parents tell hers about how great it was that he was still teaching and how these kids were the third generation he’d taught in the town. Like it was some sort of accomplishment just to hobble about shouting, jowly cheeks turning red from the effort. He should be on an oxygen tank.
The Dead Place Page 6