The Halo Effect: A Novel

by Anne D. LeClaire

  I’d heard the front door open and called, “In here.” Minutes later, Sophie entered the kitchen. She had looked so happy, as she often did after a rehearsal with her chorus. She loved those kids, and the feeling was reciprocal. They even phoned her at home. I’d lift the receiver and hear a young voice asking for Mrs. Light. Many of them came to her with their problems or for advice, things they could have taken to the guidance counselor or their parents. I used to wonder if the administration knew the kids called her, if she could get in trouble for it. I knew how territorial educators could be. I’d tease her, ask her if the school paid her extra for the counseling. Once she had asked me if I thought Lucy minded this, this sharing of her mother, but the truth was Lucy was supremely confident in her place in both of our hearts and openly proud to have a mother who was so loved by her peers. The previous spring, before the prom, two of the senior girls asked if they could come by to show Sophie their gowns, and a boy called to ask whether he should buy his date a wrist corsage or pin-on one. Last summer vacation, two of the girls—altos in the chorus—had called her and told her they were pregnant, confiding in her even before they told their parents. She had been deeply upset by their news.

  “Imagine if it were Lucy,” she’d said.

  “Well, where were their parents?” I said. “Didn’t they know what was going on in their daughters’ lives? What were they doing, letting those girls run wild?”

  “Oh, it’s so easy to blame the parents, but it’s not that simple, Will.” She’d paused and reached out to stroke my arm. “I think we like to affix blame because it makes us feel safe. Like it couldn’t happen to us.”

  “Well, we don’t have to worry about it happening to us. To Lucy. She’s a great kid.”

  “That’s the thing, Will. These girls—Cassandra Lewis and Heather Church—they’re really great kids, too.”

  So that last afternoon, radiant as a girl herself, she’d come into the kitchen. She paused by the iPod dock, made a selection. A clarinet concerto. Von Weber, as I recall. “Hmmm,” she’d said. “Something smells delish.”

  “Lamb tagine,” I’d said and poured her a glass of the Cab.

  She took it, kissed me lightly in thanks. “Is this the same meal you made when the Rogerses came for dinner? With all the spices?”

  I was impressed she had remembered. We didn’t entertain much, and that evening with Larry and Jenna Rogers was more than a year before. “It’s the one.” I’d set down the spoon and crossed to her, stood behind her, and folded my arms around her midriff. I’d nosed her hair off the column of her neck, pressed my lips to her nape, inhaled. “Coriander.” I kissed the sweet spot of skin beneath her earlobe. “Cumin.” She tilted her head back, and a light moan slipped from her mouth. I shifted her, turned her to me, and slid my tongue down the underside of her jaw, tasting the salt of her sweat. “Ginger,” I said. I had a hard-on before I reached her throat.

  She pressed herself against me. “A chef and lover, too. Careful, Will, if the word gets out, you’ll have them lining up at the front door.”

  I kissed her deeply, pulled away only to unbutton her blouse. That was the last carefree moment we had.

  Her hand stayed mine. “Lucy,” she said. “Is she upstairs?”

  “Didn’t she come in with you?”

  We pulled apart. A flicker of unease but even then it was no more than that, a flutter, while we tried to sort out what lapse in communication there had been. Sophie buttoned her blouse.

  “I thought you were driving her home after French club and hockey,” I said.

  Sophie scowled. “No. She wasn’t there. I assumed she must have called you earlier to pick her up. I thought maybe she didn’t feel well. Remember how yesterday she said she thought she was coming down with something?”

  “I’ll check upstairs,” I said. “Maybe she slipped in earlier when I was in the studio. Maybe she fell asleep.” I allowed myself to be reassured by the knowledge that occasionally in the past Lucy had done that after school, fallen into a sleep as deep as that of an infant until one of us had had to wake her for dinner. She would be slow to stir, as if rising up from a coma.

  “I’ll go with you,” Sophie said.

  “No need,” I said. “I’ve got it covered.” But she followed me from the kitchen. As we crossed the hall, I checked the chair by the sideboard where Lucy often flung the blue L.L.Bean tote she used as a book bag. Not there. I forced myself to take the stairs calmly.

  “Lucy?”

  Her room was just as she’d left it that morning: PJs hanging on the door that led to her bath, the bed neatly made, teddy bear propped on the duvet, curtains pulled open. Everything in it was a reflection of her—our daughter—half girl, half woman. Another bear, this one an oversized panda, on the armchair next to a bed. Atop the wicker basket she used for laundry I saw a pair of balled-up pink underpants and the Boston College sweats she liked to wear while studying. Her iPod was on the desk next to an empty apple juice box. On the shelf hanging above the desk were small stuffed animals from infancy and plastic figures from cartoons and movies, a collection of the toys we had given her over the years. A small basket of cosmetics and another of jewelry were on top of the dresser flanked by two photos, one of Lucy with her best friend, Rain, and the other of the three of us, taken in Camden that summer, the rocky coastline a blue cradle in the background, Sophie and Lucy and me in the foreground, tanned and happy. A family.

  The room smelled of her. Nothing was missing. Except Lucy.

  I turned to check the bathroom, but Sophie was already ahead of me.

  “Lucy?” she called.

  “Lucy?” I said.

  “Where do you think she is?” Sophie asked, and still there was no fear in her eyes or in her voice, just the slightest apprehension.

  “Are you sure she didn’t say she was going to Rain’s after school?”

  “No, but that’s probably where she is.”

  We returned to the kitchen. I started to turn the heat off under the lamb, as if dinner was going to be long delayed, and stopped myself. Lucy would show up any minute. An hour from now the three of us would be sitting down at the table as we did every night, reviewing our days, sorting out where the mix-up had occurred. Sophie insisted on this. “Families that eat together stay together,” she said. And Lucy teased her about this. “What are we, the Brady Bunch?” But I knew she liked it as much as we did.

  I stirred the stew, fought a growing unrest. Until Lucy was born, I had never thought of myself as a person given easily to fear, but taking her infant body into my arms was like holding eight pounds and three ounces of naked vulnerability that was my charge and duty to protect. And I had. I held to all the rules my mother had enforced in my own childhood. No swimming for a half hour after eating. No running with a Popsicle stick. Or scissors. “If you’re not careful, you’ll turn her into a neurotic worrier,” Sophie had said. She was the more carefree one of us, more trusting that all would be well. Behind me she switched off the music and picked up the phone; I listened as she questioned Rain. “She hasn’t seen her since their seventh-period class,” she reported after she hung up.

  “Try Christy,” I said, but she was already dialing.

  I checked Lucy’s room again, as if we’d somehow missed her the first time, checked the bathroom, even looked in our bedroom. Sophie stayed on the phone. Other friends and classmates. The principal. Coach Davis. “He said she didn’t show up for hockey scrimmage,” Sophie reported, her voice tight. “No excuse or anything. She just didn’t show up.” She didn’t have to say what we both were thinking. That was not like our Lucy. So responsible. So dependable. Even last year on the officially sanctioned “Freshman Skip Day,” she had gone to class.

  At six we called the police.

  I would go over and over that morning, searching my memory for some clue I had missed and still not believing it possible that she was gone. The missing child. It was a story that was a staple for made-for-TV movies and on the big screen,
in novels and on the front page of city papers and the six o’clock news, horribly, unthinkably trite in its familiarity. A mother weeping, pleading for anyone with news of her child to call the police, a father—stoic and strong at her side, jaw tight. If you’ve seen our daughter . . . Kelly, please, if you are hearing this, please come home . . . Amanda, please come home . . . Jessica, we’re not mad. We love you . . . Please, everyone, please help us find our daughter. Please, if you have our daughter, bring her back to us.

  It was a standard plot line of fiction. And of heartbreaking fact.

  One you never thought could ever happen to you. Not to you.

  Seven months.

  I knew I should go home. I thought again of the promise I’d made to Sophie. No more heavy drinking. In the far corner where the men were playing darts, I caught the glimmer of steel as a missile flew toward the segmented board. Gilly waited for my order. The noise in the room grew in volume, and the ringing in my ears started again. Go home, I told myself. Make some coffee. Have a glass of wine. And then what? Sit before the television. Alone. Judge me for my weakness if you will, but then think, what would you do in my place? How would you go on if someone had murdered your child? You cannot imagine what it takes to go on. “Bourbon,” I said. “Straight.”

  “Bourbon?” Gilly said. “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  The barman paused. “Bar brand okay?” he finally asked.

  “Fine.”

  “You want something with that? Burger? Fries?”

  “Just the drink.”

  “Okay. Bourbon. Straight up. On its way.”

  Seven months.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Seven times.

  For the seventh time Rain counted backward from one hundred to zero. Nearly ten minutes had passed since her parents walked past her door, their steps slowing outside her room before continuing down to their own. When she had finished the counting, she opened her door and listened to the hush of the house. She knew her parents would fall asleep quickly, lulled by the dinner her mother had served—a totally disgusting meal, total carb city; she’d barely been able to manage two forkfuls—followed by an evening of mind-rot TV, one of those stupid reality shows with the pathetic contestants and a panel of has-been judges, the kind of show that asked the viewers to call in their votes. Totally lame. And fixed of course—any idiot knew that—but still her parents continued to watch, sitting there in the den as dull and patient as a pair of shoes. Seriously. She didn’t know how they tolerated their lives. Just shoot her now.

  Carefully, allowing herself to step only on the lurid peonies woven into the pattern of the worn runner, she crept down the hall away from her parents’ room. She was meticulous in this, as she was in everything. If she stepped off a blossom, as she occasionally did, she would return to her room and start over. Tonight there was no misstep, and she proceeded quietly to the end of the hall, then in darkness descended. She felt the pressure beneath her breastbone, the stretch of too-tight skin on her body, but she would not allow herself release until she had finished what she had to do. Once downstairs, she crossed to the front door. “Button lock,” she whispered and fingered the little brass bar in the knob to ensure it was set in the horizontal position, not the vertical. Check. Next she tested the deadbolt, made sure it had been shot home. Check. Finally she tested the chain. Check. Six more times. Button lock, deadbolt, chain. Button lock, deadbolt, chain. She intoned the order softly to herself. Buttonlockdeadboltchainbuttonlockdeadboltchain. Deep breath. Still the fist in her chest was clenched. The control box for the security system was affixed to the wall to the right of the doorframe. The alarm button glowed red, signaling that it had been armed. Earlier she had watched as her father triggered the sensors on the doors and windows, the exterior motion detectors but not the interior ones. Rearming it would cause it to beep, and that might rouse her mother, who had the hearing of a doe, so she had to content herself with tapping the box with her index finger. Seven taps.

  Finished in the front hall, she went to the dining room, finding her way in the dark. When she’d first begun her rounds, she’d carried a small Maglite until it occurred to her that someone watching from outside could follow her progress through the house, and so now she moved in darkness unless there was a full moon throwing its glow through the windows to light her way. He could be watching and waiting. He. The person who had killed Lucy. Tonight there was cloud cover blocking celestial light, and she crept through the dark room as she checked the two windows on the southern wall. Seven times she checked the locks. She repeated her ritual in the living room and the den, the kitchen. Finally she reached the back hall and the door that led into the garage. It too had three locks. Button knob, deadbolt, chain. Seven times she checked them.

  Recently she’d overheard her mother complain to her father, “How much longer must we keep this up? We’ve got this place locked up tighter than Fort Knox.” As if that could keep anyone from trying to break in. And what did they know about security anyway, about how robbers and kidnappers, rapists and murderers, thought? Seriously. The extent of their knowledge they got from TV shows. CSI. Law & Order reruns. Pathetic. Her parents were epically stupid. As she passed the basement door, she saw a line of light seeping beneath the bottom crack. Duane was down there glued to his computer, another mind-rot machine. Duane the Lame. She had no idea what her brother did down there. For all any of them knew, he could be clicking on porn sites. Maybe he was smoking dope. Or doing something hugely illegal. Or researching how to build bombs, like that kid in Oklahoma. Or those brothers in Boston. She imagined SWAT teams in full riot gear smashing down their front door, leading him off in chains, the disbelief on her parents’ faces. She imagined the town overrun with reporters—like right after Lucy had disappeared—platoons of them, interviewing neighbors and teachers and the other kids, all as clueless as her parents. “What will people think?” was one of her mother’s favorite cautions. Well, this would certainly give them something to talk about. She could almost feel sorry for her parents—raising two complete losers. Two noobs. Although, of course, her mother thought Duane was perfect. But maybe he was down there sleeping. Or cramming for final exams. She knew nothing about her brother these days. She thought he might slip out at night, because more than once she had heard their mother tell their father that he’d forgotten to set the alarm the night before when Rain knew it had been set. The only explanation was that Duane punched the code in and escaped the house. But where would he go?

  When she had finished her rounds, she returned to the second floor, again stepping only on the runner’s faded blossoms. The pressure in her chest was painful now, burning. In her room, she wedged a chair under the door handle. She’d asked for a lock, for some privacy, but her mother had said there was no need—privacy was a foreign concept to her mother—and that was the end of that, so she was reduced to this half-ass measure. She pulled the curtains tight across the window (always aware he—the murderer—could be watching) and then turned on the small bedside lamp. The light glared flatly, revealing the slippery-looking chintz on the spread and curtains, the god-awful furniture—fake French provincial. Her mother’s idea of sophistication. Rain’s idea of ugly. Ugly. Ugly. Ugly. The fist in her chest shifted to her belly, clenched so tight it was like a menstrual cramp.

  She opened the second drawer of her bureau and took out her pajamas, then stripped, turning away from the mirror so she wouldn’t have to look at herself. She didn’t need a reflection to know how she looked. Her thin body, her badly shorn hair that she’d cut with a pair of her mother’s sewing shears. A pixie cut, her mother had called it, in the way she always tried to transform a disaster into something else. Are you eating lunch at school? I can pack something if you don’t like cafeteria food. Her mother would rather eat fingernails than mention her worst fear. Anorexia.

  D-Ni-Al was her mother’s middle name. Seriously.

  Rain couldn’t wait until she was old enough to leave this house for goo
d, although sometimes she would see her mother standing in the kitchen or her father walking in from the garage and a memory from her childhood would surface—something as simple as her mother letting her eat a spoonful of raw chocolate-chip or peanut-butter dough while they readied a batch of cookies for the oven or her father hoisting her up on his shoulders so she would have a clear view of the Fourth of July fireworks over the harbor—and a swift tenderness would wash over her. And then something would happen—her mother would criticize her for something stupid or her father would fart right there in the room—and the unexpected surge of softness would evaporate, gone as if it never existed, and be replaced by disgust.

  It was her father who first noticed the scars. It had been a Sunday and they were having dinner. She’d grown careless and had worn a short-sleeved sweater instead of her usual long sleeves. She’d been staring at her plate, pushing the mound of potato around with her fork, wondering how she’d get through the meal, how soon her mother would let her be excused, when she heard her father say her name.

  He was staring at her arms. “What in the name of Pete happened to you?”

  “Nothing.” She’d hugged herself tightly, concealing her arms with their faint crosshatching of lines.

  “What do you mean nothing?” He reached for her arm, turned it over. “You’re all scratched up.”

  She had pulled her arm free, thought fast. “Oh, that. Dee’s cat. I was trying to pet her.”

  Predictably, her mother chimed in. “A cat? Did you wash with soap after? Cats carry diseases, you know. I don’t even want to think of what their claws have been in.”

  “Don’t worry. I washed and put on antiseptic cream.”

  When she dared look up, her eyes met Duane’s, and instantly she saw that he knew. Freak, he’d mouthed. She’d held her breath, afraid he’d say something, but for once he hadn’t. Once caught, twice sly, she had been careful not to slip up again. She let her arm heal, started cutting places concealed by clothes, places her parents wouldn’t see unless they demanded she strip. And for months she’d been successful, fooling everyone. Until one evening last week when her mother had walked into the bathroom just as she was getting out of the shower. Rain had whipped a towel around her body. “Pleeeze,” she’d said. “Can I have a little privacy here?” Too late. Her mother had stared at her thighs, the scars and scabs and fresh cuts, and for once was yanked out of the la-la land of happy thoughts and into a total freak-out.