At the double doors, Grace shifted her bag and took one last look back down the hall before pressing carefully against the handle and exiting the building. She held the door so it wouldn’t slam closed, before walking quickly along the side of the brick building until she came to a corner where, with any luck, nobody looking out a window would be able to see her. She walked feeling as if there were eyes boring into her, half-expecting someone to call her name before she got as far as the parking lot, but nobody did.
She headed for a cluster of cars toward the rear, hunkering down between a dusty red pickup and a blue BMW, which just about summed up the differences in the town’s demographics, and slipped off her messenger bag to rest beside her. She wrapped her arms around her legs and tapped the toe of one sneaker against the asphalt. It would take Damien at least an hour and a half to get up here from Manhattan. And that was on a good traffic morning. All you needed was one slowdown and it could turn into a two-hours-plus trip.
The sound of an engine made her pop up, but it wasn’t Damien’s car pulling into the lot. Some ugly old green car belching out smoke from its exhaust pipe. She slipped back down between the cars, this time lying back, bag wedged under her head like a pillow.
It was a beautiful day. She hummed a cheerful Mozart sonata, playing the notes on the ground until she got caught in a tricky section and couldn’t remember the next measure. She looked up at the big puffballs of white clouds moving lazily across a bright blue sky. She shaded her eyes and made out the shapes in the clouds, remembering doing that with her mother when she was little.
They’d been lying on a beach then, up at Cape Cod, with the sand gritty between their toes and the sun like a blanket on top of them. “Do you see the alligator, Gracie?” her mother had said, pointing. “Look at its sharp teeth.”
She could remember the feel of the breeze against her skin and the distant caw of seagulls and how her father had been sitting nearby immersed in a book, his dark head bent over its pages. She had her own little yellow bucket and a blue shovel and she laughed as her mother sprinkled water over her head, cooling her off.
“What do you see in the clouds, Gracie?”
Her mother’s voice lilting somewhere above her, and she could remember the feel of a warm kiss pressed against the top of her head. What had she seen in the clouds? She couldn’t remember. Grace closed her eyes, tired of squinting. She had to have seen something, but all she could remember was her mother describing the things that she’d seen. Always the artist, nothing Kate Corbin ever saw was ordinary. Jungle animals, five-layered wedding cakes, an Aladdin’s lamp. What had Grace seen?
“I see a dog.”
“What kind of dog?”
“I don’t know, just a dog.”
“Greyhound? Boxer? Terrier?”
She could remember shaking her head, shaking off her mother’s insistence as if it were a touch. “No, no! Just a dog!”
“Oh, Grace. You need to have more imagination.”
Grace frowned at the memory.
“Are you going to sleep all day?”
Her eyes flew open. Damien was standing above her, leaning casually against the Mercedes, looking hot just like always, tight jeans and cool black T-shirt and those silver aviator glasses that she loved. His blond hair was cut brutally short. A smile played on his lips.
“Hey!” She scrambled to her feet and grabbed her bag. “I didn’t know you’d arrived.”
“You were in la-la land, baby.” He accepted her quick kiss, but when she lifted her lips from his, one of his hands reached out and pinched her right nipple, popping out of her bra and against the thin fabric of her knit shirt.
“Ow!” She pulled back, but his other hand wrapped around to hold her pressed against him.
“You miss me?” He increased the pressure on her nipple, all the while smiling at her.
It hurt, but she liked it, too. She could feel heat flooding her face. “Yes.”
“Show me.”
She kissed him again then, tentatively pushing with her lips dry against his, and then he let his lips part and her tongue darted forward like a bird dipping into an open flower.
He circled the nipple with his finger and pushed against it as if it were a button. She moaned against his mouth, pressing up against him instinctively. Along with her love for Damien was a bit of fear. Not that she was really afraid of him, not that, but just a little anxiety about what he was going to do next. She knew he was capable of doing anything. Wasn’t he proving that now by kissing her in this lot and touching her so intimately out here in plain sight where anybody could see them?
She wriggled out of his grasp, and this time he let her go. “We have to leave before someone sees us,” she said.
She hurried around the side of the Mercedes, noticing that the panels were coated with dust and the wheel wells and tires were rimed with dirt. Damien took his time getting into the car and adjusting the side mirrors before he pulled out of the lot.
“You’re going to get me suspended,” Grace said as he sped out of the parking lot and out onto the road. Damien drove fast, weaving in and out of traffic and slipping through traffic lights in that split second between yellow and red.
“You afraid?” His gaze jumped back and forth from road to rearview mirror. She knew he was keeping an eye out for police.
“I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“Then don’t come with me.” It was said matter-of-factly, but Damien suddenly spun the wheel and the car sped over onto the side of the road, tires crunching through leaves, before jerking to a stop. He looked at her coolly, his face set. She could see her own face reflected in his sunglasses.
She tried not to squirm in her seat. “What?”
“Either you’re coming with me or you’re not. I don’t have time for this shit, so decide.” The voice was cool and disdainful. She’d heard him use that voice before, but never with her.
“I’m coming with you,” she mumbled.
Without a word he spun the wheel again and jerked the Mercedes back into traffic. She wondered what he would have done if she’d said she’d changed her mind. Would he have left her on the side of the road?
“Why’s the car dirty?” she asked, trying to change the subject.
“Had a little detour,” Damien said. He didn’t explain what that had been, and she didn’t ask, but a little smile played on his lips again. The squirmy feeling in Grace’s stomach eased.
“Where are we going?” she asked when they’d driven another few miles. Damien had turned on the radio and was tapping his hand along to the pulsing beat. She hoped it was back to the city. Maybe they could go to Bleecker Street Records. That’s where they’d met. She’d gone there with Campbell, the two of them having fun looking for some new music, but not so much fun that they hadn’t noticed Damien and his friend. Nobody could overlook Damien; he was too good-looking. She’d been aware of him the way you’re aware of light, a sudden presence in the store, and she’d looked up and seen him walking toward her, his hands reaching out to trail lightly across the racks of CDs.
She was sure he didn’t notice her, though she’d stolen glances at him, giggling with Campbell when she mouthed the word “hottie.” At some point Damien and his friend left and Grace could remember feeling a little bit let down, but then when she and Campbell left about ten minutes later, they found Damien and his friend smoking outside, and then Damien offered her a cigarette.
“You smoke?”
Those had been his first words to her. There wasn’t anything sexy about that, except that it was Damien who’d said them, his gray eyes cool and appraising, dirty blond hair falling forward over a chiseled face, a cigarette stuck between his own pouty lips.
And even though she’d never smoked, she nodded and took one from the outstretched pack, and then nudged Campbell, who took one, too. Later, when he kissed her for the first time, she’d tasted the smoke on his tongue.
Despite what her parents thought, they hadn’t slept to
gether. As in intercourse. She’d done other things with him, gotten as far as what Campbell still stupidly called third base, but she couldn’t go for home. She was scared of it. She’d heard it could hurt the first time, but mostly she had this overwhelming fear that protection would fail and she’d be toting Grace Junior along with her to geometry class.
Damien didn’t pressure her much, which just showed he was straight up, not that her parents would ever listen. He’d taken to calling her virgin queen, but he said it with a smile so she didn’t really care.
She cared more about the other girl she’d seen him kissing. It was just two days before she’d been forced to leave the only home she’d ever known, and the piano movers had already been and gone so she couldn’t vent her feelings like she usually did through her music. She’d skipped out on the packing and taken the train uptown to surprise Damien. It had been a really hot day and the subway was a steam bath. By the time she’d walked the final blocks to his building on the Upper East Side, she felt like the ice sculpture she’d seen melting at an outdoor wedding, all shabby and unrecognizable as it dissolved into a puddle of nothing.
Just as she turned the corner up to his place, she saw Damien come out of his building. The timing seemed like a sign. For one happy second she’d thought they must be psychically linked. Only then he swung toward her, and she saw that his arm was around some blond-haired girl. She was model-pretty, tall and super-skinny, and wearing a tiny white eyelet dress and these impossibly high sandals with ribbons that wound around her ankles.
As Grace stood there, stunned, Vogue Girl had leaned into Damien and kissed him with her full red lips. Worse, he’d kissed her back, not some polite little kiss either, but a full scene-stopper. Grace fled before it was over.
She still met him later, keeping their regular rendezvous at a school playground near Campbell’s building because Grace could always get permission to visit her friend. When he’d asked why she was being such a bitch, she’d confronted him about seeing Vogue Girl and he’d gotten mad, telling her that she couldn’t claim exclusivity if she wasn’t going to meet his needs.
Just thinking about it brought back the anger. It had ripped through her, bringing tears in a hot rush, and she ran away from him, dashing half-blind across the park. It might have ended there, but he’d chased her, yanking so hard on her arm that afterward she had a bruise. He told her that he loved her, told her that she could get to him like nobody else, told her that she was his true love. She noticed that he didn’t promise to stay away from Vogue Girl, but when he literally kissed the tears that ran down her cheeks, she’d been willing to forgive him anything.
He probably still saw other girls, but she didn’t ask. It wasn’t like she could complain anyway, since she was the one who had to sneak around just to see him at all. It had been easier when she lived in the city, easiest after her mother had been attacked. There’d been several weeks when her mom barely got out of bed, and Grace had taken advantage of that to escape and see Damien.
It wasn’t like that in Wickfield. Her mother was still acting weird, but it wasn’t like before. She didn’t hide in bed, she was just super-security-conscious. She’d gotten freaked out about some missing college girl, and now she was insisting on watching Grace walk to the bus stop. It was embarrassing, and it also made it hard to slip away and head for the train station instead.
She hated Wickfield. Besides Damien, Campbell and all of her other friends were back in the city. She knew her parents wanted her to make new friends. She could feel the pressure in all their questions. How was your day? How was school today?
“You look ugly when you frown.” Damien glanced over at her, then back at the road. “What’s your problem?”
“No problem.” She turned up the radio and closed her eyes, letting the music drown her thoughts. “No problem at all now that I’m with you.”
Chapter Eight
In the man’s arms was an offering, wrapped in a shroud and carried through the woods and out along the rocks to the water’s edge. He’d chosen the spot with care some months before, driving along remote roads and hiking deep into the forest rising up on either side, following the clear, rushing sound of water until the trees suddenly gave way to a strip of pebbled inlet and he found the creek.
The silence of a church surrounded him as he walked, breathing heavily under the weight in his arms, the wind rocking the branches of hemlock and pine, rustling the leaves of maples and oak that were just starting to turn. The dogwood had been in bloom when he was last here.
The bodies after the miner’s were a blur in his memory. Dozens of men and women, most of them elderly or at least middle-aged, victims of cancer or car accidents, their nakedness at once interesting and usual to the boy, who sometimes assisted his father and Poe, holding the hose they used to sluice out the body’s fluids, or sorting through jars of face crème to find the perfect skin match.
His mother thought it was morbid. She wanted to forbid him to go down there, but his father wouldn’t allow it, yelled at her to leave the boy alone, and wasn’t it natural that a boy should follow in his father’s footsteps, and was she ashamed of the work that put the food on her table and the clothes on her back?
He’d been eight then, scrawny and short still, a tow-headed chicken of a boy, but old enough to see and understand the expression that flitted across his mother’s face: the flash in the hazel eyes, the mouth opening to speak before it closed abruptly, her lips pressing against one another until they were nothing but a line across her face. She was ashamed.
He noticed other things after that. The way his mother turned her face from his father’s kiss so that it landed on her cheek, not her lips, and the small pile of pillow and sheets folded on the edge of the couch in his father’s office, and the way his mother’s lips pursed whenever his father talked about his work over dinner.
He saw the girl when he was ten, old enough to understand the death, old enough to hold onto the details like small treasures, carrying them around like marbles in a sack, pulling them out to play with one by one in his mind.
It was a rainy spring that year. Thunder showers all through April and most of May. He could remember his mother clucking over the daffodils drooping on the front lawn, and how he’d stood at the window and watched rain overflowing the cupped petals of tulips.
Flood warnings interrupted the music on the radio in the basement. They were working on an old man that afternoon. Ninety-some years of age, so old that the skin seemed to separate from the bones, like chicken boiled too long. Poe wrinkled his nose and said the man smelled sour. The rain had raised the dust in the basement, it mixed in the air with the smell of decay, and the boy wrinkled his own nose and left.
He slipped on his yellow slicker and went to send leaf boats to capsize in the current coursing along the gutters. Sheets of water pounded the asphalt, pushing the dust to the edges, so that the water he stirred with a stick was like silt in the river. He raced along the curb beside it, watching the new green leaves he’d torn from the chinaberry tree get sucked into the storm drain.
The roar of the water overpowered the police siren. He didn’t hear its high-pitched wail until the car was less than six feet away, and then it came rushing past him, splashing the water up and over the boy’s slicker as it turned hard into the driveway. A dirty white van pulled in behind it.
She was already on the table by the time the boy made it to the basement, the black rubber body bag she’d been brought in being carried, dripping, out the door by a young police officer who looked green.
The floor was damp and there were bits of grass and new leaves tramped in by police. The body was wet, too, which surprised the boy. Poe pressed his polished wingtip against the chrome lever that tilted the table and water spilled from the holes and circled the drain in the center of the floor.
“Jesus,” the man murmured, and the boy saw a mixture of horror and sorrow on the thin face that he’d never witnessed before.
His father st
ood on the other side of the table, blocking most of the body from view, but then he moved and the boy could see all of her. It stopped him in the doorway, his hand reaching out to grip the doorjamb to stop from trembling.
All these years later he could still remember what it was like to see a young female body laid upon that table, small breasts poking at the bodice of her soaking-wet dress. Later he would find out that she was fourteen. All he knew then was that she was young, her body newly developed.
“Barrett girl,” his father said. “They live down by the creek and the girl thought it would be fun to see how high it was rising.”
He sounded annoyed, and the boy would hear him mutter, “Stupid waste,” under his breath over the next two days. It was his way of dealing with grief, his own and the overwhelming grief of the Barrett family.
The girl’s skin was the color of his mother’s bone china, watery white, and traced haphazardly with the fine blue lines of veins. Her brown eyes were open, staring at the basement ceiling as if she could hear the heavy footsteps and loud weeping that was taking place overhead.
“I’ve got to get up there,” the boy’s father said to Poe, shaking his head, his mouth set in a grim line. He moved to the corner sink to wash his hands, and the boy stepped closer to the white porcelain table and noticed a twig in the girl’s long, wet hair. A piece of moss curled around the instep of her right foot.
“Tell them she’ll be pretty,” Poe said. “Tell them they’ll know her.”
The Dead Place Page 7