“Owen,” Sonia said, “wait.”
Red was still counting out crumpled ones and fives, but Owen paused and glanced up. Whatever had possessed him to get up onstage and play the song seemed to have fled. Now he only seemed bewildered, as if he’d been asked to choose his allies in a skirmish where moments before he’d thought everyone was his friend. Underneath it, though, buried not very deeply, she saw a low species of degraded need. None of those emotions reflected in the boy’s face. Now, as ever, Henry just seemed to be drowning in an ocean that only he could see.
“You sure you don’t want that coffee? On the house.”
Owen opened his mouth, and Red said something she didn’t catch.
“At least let Henry stay here. I’ve still got that bed in back. I’ll make sure he gets home all right.”
“Sure, kid.” Red ruffled the boy’s hair. “Have fun.” Then, to Owen: “You ready, compadre? ’Cause Uncle Red’s buying, all night long.”
“Owen,” she said, “you don’t have to do this.”
This time Owen didn’t even look back.
THE WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY of Round House stood absolutely still. Shadows from inside the house obscured the upper part of her face, but he recognized her voice at once, and even if he hadn’t, he would have recognized her smell.
“Hi, Scott,” she said.
“Colette?” His foot, the one that had been raised to step inside, came back down on the porch. “What are you doing out here? I didn’t see your car.”
“I parked around back, out of the snow.”
By the pond, he thought, remembering what Aunt Pauline had said. Colette stepped aside and he came in. From somewhere in the house, he heard a soft, steady tapping sound like water dripping on a cymbal, echoing outward, louder than before.
He took off his coat and draped it over the banister, knocked the snow from his boots, and saw Colette watching him from the entryway. Standing motionless next to the wall of the foyer, she looked as if she could’ve been part of the house herself, a wooden carving or figure engraved into the mantel—a permanent addition to the place. She was smiling, a distant, almost sleepy smile, with hooded eyes, and she was holding something, a long cardboard tube.
“I brought you something.”
Scott took the tube and opened it, sliding the brittle contents into the palm of his hand. “Blueprints?”
“I found them out in the granary,” she said. “They’re for this house.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t you want to look at them?”
I already did, he almost said, but something inside stopped him. Without a table to spread the pages across, he squatted on the floor and opened them up, Colette bending down opposite him to hold her side flat. She was wearing a low-cut blouse, unseasonably light, particularly given the lack of heat inside the house, and, as she bent down, Scott couldn’t help but notice the surgically bolstered swell of her breasts, their curvature accentuated even more with the help of a red push-up bra. Her nipples were erect, plainly visible through the flimsy veneer. Despite everything, their appearance had exactly the desired effect on him. Colette reached up with one hand, tucked a strand of fallen hair behind one ear, and looked at him.
“Did you see this?” she asked, pointing at the corner of the page.
Scott read:
Final Approved Layout—Round House Designed by Zimmerman, Vesek, Lister & Lynn, Architects, Manchester, N.H., for Mr. Joel Townsley Mast, 1871
A page he hadn’t seen before, or a detail he’d overlooked. Scott read it over three times and looked up at Colette. “It must have been my great-great-grandfather,” he said. “He built the house?”
“It was always in your family.”
“Then what were you doing with these?”
“I’m the town historian now.” With a shrug, Colette lifted her fingertip, allowing her side of the blueprints to scroll up. “I’m glad you’re back, Scott. You never should have left.” She started walking down the hall, and he realized where she was going—the dining room. “You’ve been a busy boy.”
“What …?”
“I’ve been reading your book while I waited. I hope you don’t mind.”
In the makeshift dining room office, Scott saw the pages of his father’s manuscript neatly stacked on one side of the air mattress. On the other side was the laptop, its screen bright, half full of text, where she’d come to the end of what he’d written. Next to them, a glass and the bottle of gin stood in what looked like the final dying ray of afternoon sun.
In the corner of the dining room, the oak door stood ajar. He went over and, very carefully, pushed it shut, hearing the bolt click.
Colette watched him. “Your father had quite an imagination.”
“Apparently it runs in the family.”
“Maybe I can help you get all this figured out. The McGuires have always supported the arts, and I’ve got a soft spot for lost causes.” Now she was turning around, her hands slipping out to find him closer than he’d expected to be. “Being one myself.”
“Colette …”
“Hush.”
“Listen—”
“Remember the night you brought over my prom dress?”
“Stop it,” he said thickly.
“This is our last chance.” Her tone had changed from effortless flirtation to something more desperate. “It might work this time, you know?”
“What m—”
Her lips were already on his, covering the last of the words, licking them up with soft, spruce-flavored flicks of her tongue. As they stumbled backward across the room, Scott felt himself responding thoughtlessly, a clumsy man falling into a dream. He could feel her fingers gliding expertly over the topography of his body, and then they were sliding back on the air mattress, papers spilling sideways, the glass falling over with a clink, out of the sunlight.
It wasn’t right. It didn’t matter. Now a wholly different part of his brain was in control, some animal element that something, maybe the medication, had numbed for years. She was already on top of him, heat and weight sloping forward to envelop him, his own body making decisions he couldn’t control even if he’d wanted to, and he didn’t. What he wanted to do was pin her down and maul her, yank her hair, abandon all pretense of uncertainty for one remaining thing that was hard and strong and uncompromised. And it was already happening. Even now their clothes seemed to be dissolving between them, falling away on their own, leaving nothing but the heat of her flesh brushing against his in an intoxicating rhythm of friction. Scott put his hand down between her legs, instantly aware of how wet she was, and slipped himself inside of her. She felt slick and tight, gripping him with the perfect amount of tension. Rocking his hips forward, he pushed all the way in.
“Oh God.” Colette locked her ankles around his hips and dug her nails into his back. “Oh my God. Deeper—come on. Do it. Hurt me.”
Her grasp on his shoulders was almost unbearable. He shoved her flat against the floor and thrust harder, ramming forward and down with all his strength. Moments later, naked and sweating in his arms, both of them slamming into each other, breathing hard together, she began to scream.
It caught him off guard and he stopped, but she grabbed him and pulled him on top of her even harder, the heat pouring up from her skin now like something beyond fever—almost as if she were going to burst into flames. When Scott finished, she lay back, gasping, staring at the ceiling. The house lay silent around them, listening.
“Burn it,” she said.
BURN WHAT? THE HOUSE? The book? The whole damn town?
Scott realized he’d been in a daze, perspiration drying cold across his chest, when she’d spoken. Feeling the air mattress bulge, he sat up and saw Colette sitting naked with her back to him, clicking through pages on the laptop, the milky purity of her skin showing the delicate shadow-knobs of her spine.
“I think we’ve had enough burning around here, don’t you?”
Click. Click. She kept scrolling upwa
rd without a backward glance.
“I talked to Red about the Bijou demolition project.” He stood up and started getting dressed. “Owen’s convinced that your people found something there.”
Click-click-click. “Did he say what it was?”
“A body,” he said. “Bones.”
The clicking noise stopped. Scott felt a breath of cold air winding through the room from the door in the corner, touching every inch of his still-damp flesh, and felt suddenly vulnerable, exposed. The cold was followed by a terrible smell, nauseatingly sweet, like a box of rotten chocolates. On his forearms, the hairs stood straight up. He was abruptly aware of his own breathing, an in-and-out relationship with life that could end at any moment, for any number of arbitrary reasons.
“That night of the fire,” Colette said, “I was there.”
Scott blinked. His eyes were watering. “At the Bijou?”
“I saw it all.” Colette turned around, legs bent, calves crossed, hugging her knees, and shivered. Had she felt the cold blast too, smelled that rancid smell? “The whole thing.”
“What happened?”
“With Henry’s mother,” she said. “I never told anybody this.”
“You knew her?”
“She was just a local nobody—small-town trailer trash from the ass end of nowhere—but her mother worked at our house as a maid. She and Owen had known each other for a long time. And the two of them … They must have found some time to be alone with each other, pretty early on.”
“What do you mean?”
“She and your brother had another child years before Henry, a son, back when Owen was only sixteen.”
Scott opened his mouth and couldn’t say a word.
“The girl herself was underage. Supposedly she had a brain tumor in her pituitary gland that had caused some kind of, I don’t know, precocious puberty at age thirteen. It didn’t matter. Owen was all over her. When he got her pregnant, her parents took her away to have it taken care of.”
“Abortion?”
“That was the rumor, but she must have changed her mind. A couple of years passed and I saw them in the theater that night, her and the kid. Owen didn’t know until he started running up the aisle. He grabbed the boy, but …” She shook her head. “He stumbled, lost his footing in the rush. The boy slipped away—fell from his arms… Owen lost him in the fire. He just kept running.”
“And you saw all this happen?” Her explanation felt incomplete, almost like an alibi. “Were you friends with this girl?”
“Are you kidding?” Colette snorted. “Her mother worked for my family—I treated her like shit. She was just like a toy to me, a cheap thing I could break and fuck with and nobody would even know, let alone care.”
“What happened to the girl after the fire?” Scott asked.
Colette licked her upper lip. “She disappeared again. From what I’ve heard, nobody in town saw her until five years ago, when she came back to Owen and he got her pregnant a second time … this time with Henry. That was the last anybody saw of her.” Colette shook her head. “You know what I used to remember most about her? She always looked exactly the same age she was when he’d first knocked her up. She was tall for her age. Gawky, with breasts and hips. I remember how she used to walk, like she was pigeon-toed or something. And she was always wearing the same cheap blue dress.”
Scott felt vertigo take hold of his inner ears. It rose up so fast that he almost fell over. “Blue?”
“Yeah, total Salvation Army special.”
“What was her name?”
“Enough talk.” Colette shook her head. “Let’s do it again,” she said, reaching over to touch his thigh. “Come on. It’ll be even better this time. I bet I can even make you scream.”
He pushed her hand away, never taking his eyes off her. “What was her name?”
For the first time since the conversation started, Colette dropped her gaze, tightening her grip on her legs as if she might somehow curl into a ball and disappear altogether. She was rubbing the inside of her wrist with her thumb, pressing down on the ugly little scar that Scott had noticed the first time he’d talked to her.
“Please don’t,” she said. “It’ll just ruin everything.”
“Tell me.”
“You don’t understand.” She was starting to cry now, and it was ugly, tears and snot running down her nose. “I can’t … If I do—”
“What was her name?”
Colette’s attention turned to the laptop next to the pile of manuscript pages spilled indiscriminately across the dining room floor. All the life had gone out of her. It happened just like that. “You already know.”
“How would I know?”
“Her name was Rosemary,” she said. “Rosemary Carver.”
OWEN LOST COUNT OF HOW many drinks Red bought him after the fourth round. The two of them were huddled in one corner of the Studio Lounge, Milburn’s other bar, where the gender ratio wasn’t quite so skewed and the drinks often arrived pink and sweet with a slab of pineapple dangling off the rim, if not an actual umbrella. At one end of the bar, a two hundred—gallon aquarium bubbled, and Owen found himself wondering drunkenly how it would be if that fish tank were your whole entire world. The treasure chest at the bottom of it, he wondered, would you think the gold was real?
“You ready for another one?” Red asked, tapping the empty glass.
“I ought to …” Get going was how that sentence was supposed to end, a simple enough sentiment, but Owen got lost somewhere in the middle of it. What he found instead was a fresh tumbler of bourbon, a sight and smell that he normally equated with pleasure, now making him feel slightly queasy. It looked as if the bartender had filled it up to the rim.
“Bottoms up,” Red said.
Owen shifted his focus from the aquarium to the ruddy blur of Red’s face in the foreground, smiling companionably, watching the Patriots slaughter the Redskins and occasionally flicking his gaze over at Owen. Right now Owen felt just drunk enough to ask about the demolition site, to confide in Red about what he’d remembered from the night of the fire, but—
But maybe he wasn’t drunk enough, because something stopped him, something in his gut told him not to raise the subject. Why? Wasn’t Red his friend? Owen thought he probably was, but at the same time, he sensed some hidden agenda in the evening, Red getting him drunk to find out how much he knew about the Bijou.
Why?
Owen didn’t know. Something to do with his wife? Crazy. Colette would never have said anything to Red. But he particularly didn’t like the way Red just kept feeding him drinks, watching how fast Owen put them away and making sure the bartender—a gangling corpse of a guy whom everybody called Old Vincent—kept them coming. When they’d first walked in, Red had passed Old Vincent a Visa Platinum card, put it down on the bar, and opened a tab. At the time, Owen had been sober enough to see that the name on the card was Colette McGuire.
No surprise there. Ever since he’d gotten remarried, everything that Red had, in one way or another, belonged to Colette, which meant that it belonged to the town. That was what people talked about when they talked about Red—how he’d been ass-deep in debt by the time the coroner’s reports came through on his first wife, how he’d come up here with Colette because he didn’t have a penny to his name. His truck, the house, the clothes he stood up in—all had strings attached to them, leading right back to Colette … and Milburn. Losing that would mean losing whatever he had left of the good life.
Like the Bijou Theatre demolition job.
“One more?” somebody asked, Red or Old Vincent, Owen wasn’t sure, and the glass magically refilled itself before his very eyes. When precisely had he drained the last one? He could sense what was happening, but it was foggy, like a reflection in the mirror after a long, hot shower. Owen caught a glimpse of the paperback that Old Vincent was reading behind the bar, a Star Wars novel featuring a stormtrooper’s severed head on the cover. The title of the book appeared to be Death Troopers. O
wen wondered when the world had become all about death.
The world was spinning. Ice cubes tinkled in the glass, something with a paper umbrella in it. Everything tasted like bourbon. One more and it would be time to roll.
“Easy,” Red said. “I gotcha.”
“Where we going?”
“Take a drive.”
Owen tried to nod, but the swivel mechanism in his neck wasn’t working: His head held still, and the rest of the world wobbled back and forth on faulty ball bearings. Cold air chewed a hole in the bourbon fog, and he saw Red leading him out of the bar, snow in the parking lot looming up fast, and Owen was staggering on roller skates, groping for something to hold on to. He found Red’s shoulder, as big and solid as a barn door.
“You’re my friend, right?”
Red just chuckled something that Owen didn’t understand, directing him into the passenger seat of the pickup. Before he got in, Owen caught sight of the gun case in the backseat, the lantern, and the rope. Suddenly every mistake that Owen had ever made in his life—from his first stolen pack of bubble-gum cards to his decision to follow Red out the door—seemed to be building up to this moment.
“Where are we going?”
Now Red’s reply was plain enough. “Walk in the woods.”
SCOTT TRIED OWEN’S CELL PHONE twice and both times was sent straight to voice mail. He hung up and dialed his next best guess.
“Fusco’s,” Sonia’s voice said.
“It’s me,” Scott said. “Is Owen around?”
“He left an hour ago,” Sonia said. “Maybe longer. With Red.”
Standing in the foyer with the phone, Scott could feel Colette’s eyes watching him from the dining room doorway, eavesdropping on the conversation. He expected that she would still be naked with her arms across her chest. But when he turned around, the room was empty.
“Where’s Henry?”
“He’s here at the bar, asleep in the back room,” Sonia’s voice was saying from the other end. Glasses clinked, conversation rumbled, along with a sibilant hissing he didn’t recognize, like the oscillating basket-of-snakes static you sometimes encountered on imperfect transcontinental calls. “What’s going on?”
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