The night after Kenzie’s rescue, I finally called Phil Cohen back in the city.
“Cassandra Android! There’s a horrible picture of you in the Daily News! What the hell happened up there?”
I gave him a thumbnail account. “Thanks for doing me another favor, Phil.”
“Jesus,” he said. I could hear the city around him—traffic, voices. Even at this distance, it sounded impossibly loud, compared to the wind and crying gulls above Burnt Harbor. “Hey, Neary—tell me there’s no causal relationship between all this shit and your being there?”
“No causal relationship whatsoever.”
I could tell from the silence that he didn’t believe me.
“So,” he said at last. “Did you at least get an interview before the old lady kicked?”
“Nope.”
“Photos?”
“Uh-uh.”
“So what the hell did you do up there? I mean, other than saving the kid.”
“Not a lot, Phil,” I said. “Listen, does this mean I don’t get a kill fee?”
“A kill fee?” He laughed. “I’ll see what I can do, okay? You could bank this story, you know that, right? You and the girl, that’s real Scary Neary shit, you could really—”
“Forget it,” I said. “I’ve gotta go. I’ll be back in a few days; I’ll call you.”
“Wait—!”
I hung up.
The following morning, Merrill Libby came to my cabin and said that Kenzie wanted to see me.
“What you did.” He stood outside the door, sweating even though it was starting to snow. “That was a good thing, Mrs. Neary.”
“It’s Ms. Neary.” I took his outstretched hand and shook it tentatively. “But thanks.”
Late that afternoon, Toby drove me to Collinstown. Heavy wet snow splattered the windshield as we crept along a gravel road. The pickup’s tires were bald, so we went very slowly. The house was a new modular, surrounded by scraped earth sifted white and starred with children’s footprints. Kenzie opened the door.
“Hey,” she said shyly.
Her aunt and cousins looked just like Merrill. But they were friendly and didn’t ask me any questions.
“Kenzie’s staying in Shannon’s room,” her aunt said. “I told Shannon to give you some privacy.”
She turned and told the kids to keep it down. Toby settled with them on the couch to watch TV.
“Thanks for coming,” Kenzie said as we walked down the hall. “I’m going kind of crazy here. They’re nice, but…”
We entered a small room. Pink walls, pink cartoon-patterned sheets, one bed and a sleeping bag on the floor. I sat on the bed. Kenzie flopped onto the floor and picked up a black vinyl CD case. She wore a new red hoodie with Tinkerbelle printed on it. The fretwork of scars on her face had already begun to fade, and while there were dark circles under her eyes, her cheeks were pink. When she looked at me, she smiled.
“I really want to go down to Florida to see my mom.”
“They won’t let you?”
“No, they will. In a few days, I think. It’s just boring.”
“You have a high threshold for excitement.”
She pointed at my eyepatch. “Does that hurt?”
“Not really.”
“Are you blind?”
“Nah. They just don’t want the stitches under it to tear. The skin there’s really sensitive.”
She smiled that sweet kid’s smile. “It looks really, really cool.”
“Yeah?” I touched the corner of the patch gingerly. “Maybe I should keep it.”
“You should.”
She stared at her knees. I reached for the CD case and began flipping through it. “Shit. Is this what you listen to?”
“Pretty much. My mom says she’s going to get me an iPod when I’m down there.”
I read some of the CD titles and grimaced. “Jesus. Well, these are okay—” I tapped Fire of Love and volume two of the Ramones Anthology.
“I like their early stuff better.”
“Yeah, me too.” I stared at the case for another moment then handed it back to her. “Listen, when I get back to the city I’ll send you some CDs to rip. You like Patti Smith?”
“I love her! ‘Dancing Barefoot’…”
“Forget that. Her first album, you have that one? No? I’ll send it to you. You’re online, right? Give me your email address, I’ll write and tell you some other stuff you should be listening to.”
“Really? That would be so great.”
I stood. “I better get back. Toby’s truck, it doesn’t do too good in the snow.”
I stepped to the door of the bedroom. Kenzie followed, hands shoved in the pockets of her cargo pants.
“Here,” she said. She withdrew her hand from her pocket and handed me something. “I made this for you.”
It was a bracelet of braided string and fishing line and seaglass, beertabs and red glass beads.
“Thanks.” I looked at her and smiled. “It’s beautiful. Really.”
She hesitated, then said, “They said you did a book? Like, photographs of stuff? I’d like to read it.”
“I would’ve thought you had enough of photography.”
“No. I mean, yeah, but not this kind. I’m going to get a digital camera. My father said I could, with the money we get from the article.”
“Yeah? That’s really cool. You do that. Send me your stuff. I’d like to see what you come up with.”
She walked me to the front door. Toby got up, and we walked outside.
“Thanks, Cass,” Kenzie called as we picked our way through the snow.
“I’ll send you those CDs,” I said and got into the pickup.
Toby backed into the road. I stared at the house. Kenzie had followed us out into the darkness and stood there, snow swirling around her pale face and settling onto her black hair. I rolled down the window.
“Bye Kenzie,” I said. She waved as we drove back to Burnt Harbor.
28
The next afternoon there was a memorial service for Aphrodite at the Burnt Harbor Congregational Church. I didn’t go, though Toby thought I should. He’d returned to the island after dropping me off the night before, and spent the night with Gryffin. Now it was two-thirty in the afternoon.
“You really should come to the service. You should say good-bye to Gryffin, at least.” Toby stood in the door of my cabin, wearing dark wool pants and a pinstriped jacket that smelled of mothballs. He’d trimmed his beard and rebraided his pigtail. “We’re going to dinner afterward at the Good Tern. You should come. You need closure.”
“Closure? I’ve had enough closure to last a lifetime.” I shook my head. “I already feel like the bad fairy at the christening. I need to get on the road.”
My car remained parked down in Burnt Harbor. I still hadn’t been back to it. I’d been sleeping way too much—I had a sleep deficit going back at least a week—but I figured if I left before dark I could get as far as Bangor, find another motel, then hit the road again first thing next morning.
This time tomorrow I’d be in the city again. It felt like I’d been gone a year.
Toby’s face creased. “Can’t you wait till after the service? So we can at least say good-bye? You’ll need a ride down to get your car at the harbor, anyway.”
I sighed. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”
“Good.” He brightened and stepped back outside. “We’ll come by afterward. See you then.”
“Toby.” He stopped, and I said, “I—well, just thanks, that’s all. For everything.”
“Oh, sure.” He stared at his feet, reached down to wipe snow from his boots, then with a sigh straightened. “Jesus. What a horrible week. Poor Gryffin. Poor Aphrodite. And Denny…”
“Poor everyone.”
He looked at the sky. “It’s supposed to snow later. A big storm. I heard eighteen inches,” he added. He waved at me and left.
It was almost three o’clock. It had been a flawless day, new snow glittering li
ke broken glass and the evergreens green as malachite against the cloudless sky.
But already the light was failing. I didn’t believe it was going to snow—there was a thin ridge of clouds to the west, but otherwise it was the nicest day I’d seen since arriving in Maine. I watched through my cabin window until Toby drove off. Then I sat on the bed and stared at my camera bag. Finally I withdrew the copy of Deceptio Visus and opened it.
Our gaze changes all that it falls upon…
Denny’s gaze certainly had changed things. Aphrodite’s too, I supposed; though as I looked through Deceptio Visus now, her photos seemed calculated and overdone.
And too easy. She’d photographed beautiful things—islands, clouds, the rising sun—and made them more beautiful. Whereas Denny had striven to capture something horrifying and make it beautiful, beautiful and eternal. For him, Hannah Meadows had never really died. Or maybe it was that she had never stopped dying. In all the years since he’d found her drowned corpse by that quarry, he’d never been able to look away.
I found the stolen photograph of Gryffin.
“I see you,” I whispered.
I closed the book and put it in the bottom of my bag. Then I got my camera, removed the exposed film and loaded it with my last roll of Tri-X, and went outside.
The dying light sent long, thin shadows across the snow. The pines were still sheathed in white. I walked into the woods that bordered my cabin, found a small clearing, and began to shoot.
I wasn’t trying for anything special. I just wanted to feel myself behind the camera. I wanted to see if my eye, injured or not, had changed.
And I guess I wanted to see if the world had changed as well. I shot most of the roll before I lost the light, black branches and the shadows between fallen leaves, a pile of punctured acorns like tiny skulls, gaps in the underbrush where it seemed that small faces stared back at me. Once I thought I heard something moving in the crotch of a tree overhead, and I stumbled backward and nearly fell.
But when I looked up there was nothing there, only a flickering shadow that might have been a squirrel or crow, or maybe something larger.
The light was gone when I walked back to my cabin. I went into my cabin and cleaned up for the last time and replaced my bandage. I checked to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind, then sat to wait for Toby.
It was past five when someone knocked at the door. I stood and opened it.
“Cass. Hi.”
It was Gryffin. He looked down at me, his face pale and eyes red. “Toby’s got Suze and Ray and Robert all crammed into his truck. So I said I’d get you. You have everything?”
“I think so.” I struggled to keep my voice calm as I put on my jacket, wincing as I stuck my bad arm through the sleeve. I picked up my bag and my camera. “This is it.”
We walked to where he’d parked his old gray Volvo, outside the motel office. I went inside—the door was open—and left my room key on the desk. Merrill was gone. There was a note he’d be back that night. As I returned to Gryffin’s car I saw that the sign now read closed for the season.
A few scattered snowflakes melted against the windshield as we headed toward Burnt Harbor. After a few minutes Gryffin glanced at me.
“That looks like it hurt.”
“Yeah.” I took a deep breath. He looked awful. Not merely exhausted but ravaged by grief and, I knew, something worse. “I—I don’t know what to say. Just, I’m sorry about everything.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he sighed.
“Thanks. It’s bad. Denny—well, you know. My mother was so enraged when he dumped her for that girl Hannah, his name isn’t even on my birth certificate. But I knew. Everyone knew. And the way they do things up here—well, no one ever talked about it. I haven’t had any contact with him since I was really young, but the police have been talking to me now, I can tell you that. It’s horrible. Beyond horrible. But—”
He peered out through the thin snowfall to the dark road winding ahead of us. “He’s gone now. I guess. I hope so, anyway. Now it’ll just be forensics and trying to figure out who all those other people were.”
“Will you be leaving too?”
“Leaving? I wish I could. I’ve got to stick around and go through my mother’s stuff. The state office is calling it an unexplained death with alcohol as a factor. But I still have to deal with her estate. And the police. And lawyers. Try to figure out what they can and can’t confiscate as part of the investigation. It’s a mess.”
We rounded a turn too fast; the car skidded toward the woods before Gryffin eased it back onto the road. He slowed to a crawl, reached into his pocket, and tossed me something. “Here. I think this belongs to you.”
I caught it and looked down: a roll of Tri-X film. Before I could open my mouth he said, “My box turtle shell—it had been moved, I noticed first thing when I got up that morning. I picked it up and I could feel something inside. I meant to give it to you then—I guess it was some sort of joke, right? But then I found my mother, and…”
He looked away. “I forgot about it.”
I ran my fingers across the roll then tucked it into the pocket of my leather jacket. “Well,” I said. “Thanks. I, uh—”
“Forget it.” For a moment he was quiet. Then he said, “That box turtle shell … it was the only thing he ever gave me. Denny.”
He glanced out the side window at snow slanting through the trees. “When I heard, I took it down to the beach and threw it into the water. It’s gone now. They’re all gone.”
He downshifted as we approached a curve. “These old Volvos are terrible in the snow. Rear wheel drive. Every year I tell myself I’ll buy a new car. Why’d you come after her?”
“Kenzie?”
“No. My mother. Why’d you come here to talk to her?”
I stared outside. “Because I loved those two books,” I said at last. “Deceptio Visus and Mors—they changed my life. When I saw them, that’s when I decided I wanted to be a photographer.”
“What made you stop?”
When I didn’t reply, Gryffin said, “I found a copy of your book online. I ordered it from ABE. It goes for two hundred dollars now. Did you know that?”
“Really? No shit? Two hundred bucks?”
“No shit. With all this stuff going on, I bet you could get a reprint deal if you wanted.” He gave a harsh laugh. “Good career move, Cass, all this.”
He glanced at me. “Cass. Listen. Why don’t you stick around here for a while?”
“I have to get back to work.”
“Oh yeah, right. The stockroom at the Strand. Like they’re going to miss you? Look, I’ve started going through my mother’s stuff. Her photos and letters and things like that. She kept everything. I’m already getting calls from dealers and collectors—this horrible thing with Denny, all of a sudden everyone is interested in Aphrodite Kamestos again. Not to mention Denny’s stuff. Some agent contacted me about a book.
“But I can’t stand to look at any of it. So I was thinking. If you were interested, if you could stand it—you could stay and help me collate things. Get a catalog together. I know about rare books, but I don’t know enough about photography, and it seems like you do. I couldn’t pay anything right off, but you could stay at the house, and then if we got a deal we could work something out. What do you think?”
I stared out the window into the woods, thinking. I shook my head. “No. Thanks, but—”
“But what?”
“Well, for starters, I don’t think I could hack living here.”
“Really? Seems to me you’ve hacked it pretty good so far.” He gave me that odd furtive look, shot with annoyance but also regret. “Well, okay. I thought it was a good idea. Keep it in mind, all right? I’m probably going to end up hiring someone. It would be good if it was someone like you.”
Ahead of us the lights of Burnt Harbor began to shine through the snow. We coasted down to the Good Tern and parked alongside Toby’s red pickup. A few people stood by the p
ier, looking across the water and talking. As we got out they turned—Toby, Suze from the Island Store, Ray Provenzano and Robert.
“Hey,” Suze called. She kicked through the snow to join us, hiking her long peasant skirt above clunky boots. A knit cap covered her blond dreadlocks. “That was a nice service, Gryffin. You did the right thing. As always.”
She hugged him then looked at me. “How’re you feeling?”
I shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Under the circumstances.”
She smiled. “You’re a local hero. You know that, right?” She tipped her head, indicating my eyepatch. “That looks nasty. Will you be able to see?”
“Yeah. It’s just till I pull the stitches out.”
She stood on tiptoe to kiss Gryffin’s cheek. He smiled wanly, and Ray put an arm around him.
“You’ll be okay, Gryffin. We’ll take care of you,” said Ray. He looked at me then added in his hoarse voice, “Well, you’ve had quite a little visit.”
Toby lit a joint and held it out. I shook my head. He passed it to Ray then said, “So. You got everything, Cass?”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
Suze rocked back on her heels and stared at the snow whirling down. “You oughta stick around. They already got eight inches in Portland, had to close 95 cause a semi went off near Bangor. ‘A tombstone every mile.’ Just like the song.”
Robert nodded. “We’re gonna get hammered.”
“Come on.” Gryffin touched my elbow and gestured to my car, parked in the shadows a few yards off. “You better get going if you’re going to beat the storm.”
We walked, my boots sliding on the greasy blacktop. I kept my head down so no one could see my face. We reached the car.
“Uh-oh,” said Suze.
I looked up. “What the fuck?”
The Rent-A-Wreck sagged, its carriage resting on the ground. I crouched to stare at the front tire. It had been slashed.
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