The boy watched, his tongue heavy in his mouth, as Poe took the scissors and cut through the thin white cotton of the dress. She wore tiny panties underneath, no bra. Poe cut away the underwear, too, little scraps of fabric parting to reveal a triangle of peach fuzz.
There was clattering on the steps, and the boy’s mother suddenly appeared. Poe looked up in surprise and the scissors slipped, nicking his hand.
“Why did you let him in here?” His mother’s voice was cold and hard. She didn’t wait for an answer, but grabbed his hand, jerking him after her up the stairs.
The house was filled with strangers, more were coming in the front door, and the boy’s mother frowned and pushed him toward the stairs to the second floor. “Go play,” she said. “You shouldn’t be seeing this.”
And something about her face made him loath to argue. Though as he turned, she suddenly pulled him back, crushing him against her in a fierce hug.
Later, much later, when he’d watched her pull away in their old Buick to go to the grocery store, he crept back down to the basement.
His father was dealing with the family in the upstairs office; as he’d crept past he’d heard the murmur of voices and the soft sound of a woman crying. Poe was alone with the body, searching along the shelves for face crème and makeup, and the boy didn’t speak, content to stand in the doorway and stare at the girl.
She was clean now, washed inside and out, flushed of the river and all impurity. Her white skin seemed to glow, and he remembered the word “alabaster” from a Sunday School lesson and how the teacher had tried to explain what it meant. He understood now. This girl was alabaster.
The excitement he felt was so overpowering that he had to touch her. He moved without realizing it, standing next to the table and placing his warm hand against the cool skin of her arm.
He shuddered with the force of the contact, the sensation of connection almost overpowering, electrical signals racing from his head to his feet and jolting his testicles on the way.
“Stop,” Poe barked, and the boy’s hand jerked from the body. He panted, surprised to feel sweat prickling his forehead and the back of his neck.
“Your mother said you weren’t supposed to be down here,” Poe said.
“You’ve always let me before,” the boy argued because it was Poe and not his mother.
“This is different. You shouldn’t see this, your mother was right.” Poe nodded at the door. “Go on now, get out of here, and don’t come back or I’ll tell your mama on you.”
The boy ran then, hammering up the stairs in his sneakers, going until he’d reached the safety of his room. He flung himself facedown on the narrow bed and clenched the quilt with his fists, grinding his hips against the mattress. He had to hold onto the girl, to relive the sensation of his skin touching hers. He squeezed his eyes shut and whispered, “Alabaster.”
The man’s feet crunched quietly along the pebbled bank until he found the place where the water ran un-obstructed, and he placed his burden down along the bank and unrolled the shroud. The water lapped softly against the strip of sand as he worked. When he was ready, he waded into its coolness with the offering once again in his arms.
A trio of crows, disturbed by the noise, rose like an omen, cawing and clutching at the sky.
Chapter Nine
Ronald Haupt liked the beginning of hunting season. He hiked along a trail in the hills high above Wickfield, Remington cradled in the crook of his left arm, right hand playing with the little pouch of extra bullets in the pocket of his flame-orange vest. He hadn’t bothered to shave before heading out this morning, and his hand stole up every once in a while to rub at the salt-and-pepper stubble across his chin.
More than forty years he’d been coming up here. First climbing the hills with his father and uncle, then with his hunting buddies, and now mainly by himself. He’d found he liked the solitude. It gave a man time to think, really think, without the constant chatter of everyday life.
The woods weren’t silent, but the noise of nature was soothing—bird calls, the rustle of small animals in the leaves, the sound of a branch cracking under his foot. He could handle the noise in the woods, all right; it was the noise of the office he needed to escape.
A CPA in a busy firm, he’d welcomed the relief of being somewhere that nobody could reach him. Just recently, though, he’d started carrying a cell phone when he went hunting. He didn’t like it, feeling the weight of it in his pocket like a constant reminder of financial responsibilities, but he carried it. Seeing Howard Sherman almost lose a leg last year had convinced him.
It was an accidental shooting, that’s how the local paper played it, though everybody knew that Howard and his hunting party had been drunk. Howard stumbled over a log and his rifle discharged into his leg. In the time it had taken for his hunting buddies to reach a phone, Howard’s makeshift tourniquet had slipped and he’d lost so much blood that it soaked through the stretcher they loaded him onto, leaving quarter-sized splashes of crimson along the trail and the asphalt parking lot where Ron arrived in time to see Howard being medevaced to the local emergency room. Ron couldn’t forget all that blood, or the sight of Howard himself, vomit splashed over his flannel shirt and eyes rolled back in their sockets.
Some people (like his wife, Janet) thought that since Ron was a hunter, he shouldn’t be disturbed by the evidence of a gunshot wound, but seeing an animal shot cleanly was different than that mess of Howard’s leg. It made Ron glad for the first time that a heart murmur had left him stateside during Vietnam. And it had been just the incentive Janet was looking for to convince him that he needed to carry a cell phone.
However, he kept it turned off. Otherwise, he’d have Janet calling every twenty minutes to ask him something trivial. She didn’t do this when he was at the office, he couldn’t complain about that, but she sure as hell thought it was okay to do it when he was hunting no matter how often he explained to her that a loud, shrilling sound scared away the deer.
“What if I need you?” she demanded, just like she’d been demanding for all the long years of their thirty-year marriage. She was a worrier by nature, predicting doom when their three kids trotted one by one off to nursery school, and making the same predictions years later when they fled the nest for colleges and jobs far away from home. She was a little black rain cloud; he’d sometimes called her that in the early years of their marriage when he saw her negativity as an amusing quirk and not a dominant and relentless force.
Janet was convinced that bad luck lurked around every corner where Ron always saw opportunity. People always said that opposites attract, but after thirty years he knew that opposites could drive each other away. Not that he’d consider divorce. He was offended by the very idea. Getting divorced wasn’t simply accepting defeat, it showed a fundamental flaw in character. He’d made a promise thirty years ago and by gum he would keep that promise, even if most days he wanted nothing more than to be left entirely alone.
He’d wished hard for that this morning while he got his gear together and Janet hovered around him quoting some morning TV news story about accidental shootings the first week of hunting season. Like he’d needed any reminder of Howard Sherman before breakfast.
He’d taken off without eating, carrying some foil-wrapped jelly toast she thrust into his hand along with a thermos of coffee. He’d kissed her because that was his job as a husband, and she’d pulled back from it complaining of being scratched by his beard, and then he’d pulled away in the Buick, waiting until the speck of her waving in the doorway vanished completely.
He drove from their comfortable split-level out to old Highway 87 feeling tense, and then his shoulders started to relax and his stomach unknotted as he took the turnoff for Sterling Forest, driving slowly up a long stretch of narrow paved roads until he’d found the lot where he always parked, the soaring forest spread around him like a playground.
It was coming on 12:45 and the toast was long gone, the foil a tight ball in his pocket. Ron’s stomach grumble
d and he paused for a moment, thinking. He hadn’t take a shot yet, though he’d had his bead on a buck, his finger pulling back ever so gently on the trigger when a clattering of acorns spooked the creature.
The buck leapt high, white tail like a flag, and disappeared like a distance runner before Ron could do more than release the trigger.
Still, it wasn’t all about the success of the hunt and he figured he’d earned his lunch. He thought it would be nice to sit down by the river that ran from up in the mountains and down through Wickfield before connecting with the Hudson and joining the ocean.
Ten minutes of walking brought him to a spot above its bank, and there he spent another five minutes unloading his gear before he could sit down on a boulder, rifle at the ready, and unwrap the sandwiches he’d packed for himself the night before.
He took a bite of gummy ham and cheese and munched contentedly as he looked down at the silvery water spilling over brown rocks. It was a pretty sound, that rushing water, and he watched the colored leaves carried like little boats along it, some of them whisking abruptly out of sight, others caught in eddies around the rocks, spinning helplessly.
Once in a while something bigger, like a fallen branch, came by, and Ron liked to imagine how it had ended up in the water, either falling from a tree or being tossed there by somebody.
He finished half a sandwich, and was just starting on the second half when something new caught his eye. Something large and pale bobbed slowly down the sweep of silver, and came to rest against the rounded boulder further up on the far side. Ron squinted, but he couldn’t tell what it was. He dropped his sandwich and got up to take a better look, shading his eyes and stepping close to the edge.
The sun kept peeking in and out of the trees, and it was too far for him to get a clear look. Something white. Could it be a deer carcass? Who the hell would throw that in the river? Unless it had drowned in flooding and was just now being carried down from wherever it had decomposed.
Yet something about the shape wasn’t right for a deer. Too big to be any other animal and the wrong color for bear. What the hell was it?
Ron stepped back from the ledge and went to fetch his binoculars. They’d been a gift for Father’s Day this year from his son, who’d made sure to tell him all about the many features—fully coated, image stabilization. Ron was delighted to have a chance to really use them. He imagined the conversation they’d have about it as he stepped back to the edge, his boot slipping a little and sending a shower of flaky stone and pebbles raining down on the wildflowers growing in the shallow, sandy soil far below.
The binoculars had 10 x 50 magnification, and he twisted the knobs impatiently, zeroing in first on that huge boulder and then moving down, down, and there! That was it! It was still out of focus and all he could see was something large and pale, so he twisted the knob again. Worked beautifully, everything becoming sharp and clear, he’d sure have to tell Jim about that, and then he saw it clearly for the first time.
“Sweet Jesus!” It wasn’t the body of a deer, but it was a carcass.
The naked body of a young woman bobbed against the far side of the boulder. She was on her back, arms floating at her sides, legs almost straight. She could have been out for a swim, except her head seemed strangely bent on her neck and bits of bark and green algae had traced lacy patterns across her waxy skin and were caught in the long strands of dark blond hair streaming behind her.
Ron stared at the gently bobbing breasts and the dark triangle of hair further down, and looked away, ashamed. There was nothing grisly here, no dripping blood or gaping wounds, yet he retched in the dirt, splashing the stone with the force of his revulsion.
He scrambled for the phone while he was still retching, and he knew, even as he tapped 911 with a shaking hand, that he would never, ever come into these woods to hunt again.
October
Chapter Ten
The discovery of Lily Slocum’s body was all anybody could talk about at the university president’s party the Friday night two weeks after the body was found. Even with that gap of time, there’d been talk of canceling it. Ian had been pulled into an emergency faculty meeting when the police officially identified the body pulled from the river. After much squabbling, the decision was made to proceed as normal with all classes and campus activities, but with the understanding that for the remainder of the semester every official university function would observe a minute of silence in Lily Slocum’s memory.
“She wasn’t an especially memorable student,” an aging professor of philosophy confided to Kate as soon as the minute was up.
They were standing on the back lawn of the president’s house, a pillared Greek Revival monstrosity that some of the faculty privately and mockingly referred to as “Tara.”
“A bright enough girl,” the old man said, “but not brilliant, not an original thinker.”
Kate twirled the olive in her martini and glanced over his balding head, contemplating an escape route. What was the man’s point? That Lily Slocum’s death wasn’t a great loss? That only original thinkers deserved to live?
Despite the drought in the summer and an equally dry fall, the president’s manicured lawn was still lush and green. She was surprised some student environmental group wasn’t protesting the overuse of water. Japanese lanterns hung in the trees, and young men and women wearing plain black uniforms circulated among the colorfully dressed crowd bearing trays of drinks and various canapés. It was all very pretty, very tasteful, and she very much wanted to leave.
“Did you have her as a student?” the professor asked, and Kate pulled her attention back to his froglike face.
“No, I didn’t know her. I don’t teach at Wickfield.”
He blinked in surprise, and she excused herself to go in search of Ian. She couldn’t spot him, and it was hard to navigate through the crowd. She jumped when someone laughed loudly near her, blushing when her nervous reaction caught another’s attention. Turning abruptly, she narrowly missed colliding with a rosebush as she tried to bypass a crowd loudly discussing evidence found at the crime scene.
She shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t as if Ian had asked, at least not in words, but she knew that he wanted her with him, knew that it was expected that a spouse would make an appearance at these events.
“It’ll be outside,” he’d said when he told her about the party, and she’d heard what he was really saying, that she should be able to handle a crowd outside.
Only she couldn’t. She struggled across the lawn, her heels sinking into the overwatered sod, her drink clutched in one hand, purse in the other, as she searched the crowd for her husband.
A large man hurrying the other way bumped into her and Kate lost her balance, falling forward. Martini and glass flew in a wide arc while her purse dropped like a stone, and in that split second between realizing she was going to fall and trying to brace herself, Kate was suddenly jerked upright.
“Steady there!” a man’s voice said, and Kate recognized Jerry Virgoli. His eyes widened in surprise when he realized whom he’d rescued. “Well, hello!”
“Hi.” Kate stooped down to retrieve her purse, brushing the last of her martini off her slacks. “Thanks for the save.”
“No problem.” Virgoli plucked her glass off the lawn and deposited it on a passing tray. “I was hoping I’d see you here.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, I wondered if you’d given any thought to my proposal.”
Kate’s head ached. What was he talking about? “I’m sorry?”
“For a show. Size to be determined by you, of course, but given the limited space, I thought a small selection of paintings might be best.”
“A show?” Kate repeated dumbly. She felt as if she were back in the assisted-living community where her parents had spent the last years of their lives, only this time she was the one suffering from dementia.
“Didn’t Ian tell you?” An expression of anger flashed across Virgoli’s face, a flicker that passed so fast
that Kate thought she must have imagined it. It startled her when he laughed. “I guess he’s just so busy.”
“What didn’t Ian tell me?”
“We’d like you to do a show at the gallery. It’s a small space, but we’ve had some nice shows and I’m sure we’d get a good response—”
For a minute Kate felt the desire, that familiar hum of interest in what she’d choose to hang and where. It was only a moment. Like a flashlight with dying batteries, the light burned bright for a few seconds before fading away to nothing.
“I’m not doing shows right now,” she said.
Jerry Virgoli nodded as if he agreed. “Of course, under the circumstances I completely understand. Ian explained that, but I wanted you to know that the possibility exists, that we do have a nice gallery in Wickfield.”
Kate nodded, forcing a smile, but she wondered what exactly Ian had told this man. It sounded as if he knew about what had happened to her. Did everybody know about it? What had Ian said about her? Did everybody know about the assault? Did he discuss it with other people?
Suddenly, the voices in the conversation next to theirs rose and she heard a man say, “They’re very hush-hush about the sexual-assault aspect, but we all know that’s what happened.”
Were they talking about her? Blood rushed to her face. She felt flushed and her head thumped like a metronome. She looked at Virgoli’s moving lips, but the only thing she could hear was the conversation nearby. “You can understand the need for discretion,” a woman said. “It’s not as if they’ve caught somebody.”
No, no, it wasn’t her. They were discussing Lily Slocum. Sound rushed back and Kate could hear Virgoli say, “In the future, of course, we’d like to have an expanded Fine Arts wing complete with a larger, university-funded gallery space, but that will require a consensus of faculty—”
He prattled on, and she could follow enough to know that he wanted something that Ian somehow had the power to provide, but she couldn’t concentrate on it, her mind flashing to the paint mixing on the floor of her studio and the scent of blood. The crowd seemed to press in on her and the thudding in her head grew stronger.
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