Spencer looked at me, his eyes flooding with panic. “What’s she doing?” he said. “Why is she talking about them?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“The Corys. Avri’s, and the quiet.”
“Mattie,” said Spencer. “Call her back.”
A new frozen exhausted sadness washed through me. The day I now had to face loomed ahead, towering and shrouded in mist, and I couldn’t even imagine the other side of it. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Let’s walk her home.”
“That’s it?”
“Spencer,” I said, feeling myself sink away, dissolve to nothing. “Look at her.”
We watched Theresa sway between us. Then we watched her glide to the back door, twist the handle, drift out into the yard, and the falling snow swept her away. We followed, of course. But we stayed well behind, watching as her white pom-pom bobbed on the dark as though she were being sucked out to sea. I expected to hear police and reporters and screaming parents as soon as we hit the street, but everything was quiet and motionless, empty even of shadows in the flat, featureless light. We stopped at the bottom of her yard and watched her pass through the trees, spectral in the snow. When she reached her back door, we turned without speaking and started home.
At the Fox house, I stuck out my hand and stopped Spencer. He stood beside me, jacket open to the cold, mouth slack. And yet he looked so much more alive than Theresa did.
“Let me go first,” I said.
“Oh, Mattie, what difference does it make?”
I couldn’t explain. Mostly, I just wanted to tell my parents alone.
“I’ll tell my parents,” I said. “Then I’ll come get you, and they’ll help us figure out what to do.”
Spencer broke down crying. I knew I should be crying too. But in the spot Theresa Daughrety had always occupied was a new and terrifying hole. No matter what I dropped in there, it would never hit bottom.
“Just let me get this over with. I got us into it. I’ll get us out. I’ll take all the blame.”
Spencer slashed a hand across his face and yanked his jacket tight at the neck but didn’t zip it. “They’re going to send me back to Ferndale,” he said. “Or my mother will make me go back. Operation Salvage aborted.”
I stared at him. I hadn’t thought of that. In one night, I’d probably lost both my best friends.
The look on my face must have satisfied Spencer for the time being, because he straightened his shoulders and nodded once. I watched him walk back toward the Fox house, hunched in his coat, head down. The snow kept falling, and light spread across the sky and hardened over it. One last time, I glanced toward the Daughrety house, eyes aimed into the wind. Under my ribs, loneliness beat inside me like some new and terrible organ.
Chapter 23 – 1977
I stood in the blowing snow, watching my shadow sneak from my body. If there was anywhere to go, I would have snuck away with it. Reporters were going to write about me; my parents would be furious; the police would clamp handcuffs around my wrists and haul me off to jail. Mrs. Jupp might even kick me out of school. But the worst, I thought, was over, or it was about to be. I took two steps down the street from the Foxes’ driveway toward my own, and then I looked up and saw the woman on our front stoop.
She stood hunched over in her long black overcoat. Her back was to me, but I could see her head moving slightly; she was talking, I thought. The front door was open, and it occurred to me that I didn’t want to be caught out here. I should be where I was supposed to be, so that when I told my parents what I had done, it would seem more like just a really bad idea than something I’d been planning all along.
I retreated behind the Foxes’ hedge and scurried through the backyards to our porch. We kept our key under a rusty metal watering can that my mother used for gardening. The can was heavy, half filled with snow and hard to move. Quietly, I slid it aside, scraped the frozen key off the bottom, unlocked the porch door, and edged it open. Then I slipped inside, past the table where I played Strat-O-Matic baseball all summer long, and back into my house. Peering cautiously around the living room wall, I caught a brief glimpse of my mother, who was standing in the front doorway, twisting the tie of her faded blue bathrobe and blocking my view of the visitor. My father slouched beside her, pallid and droopy as the stained yellow cheesecloth in his workshop. I waited just a few seconds longer, then slipped behind them into the back hall and from there to my bedroom.
Shedding my coat but not bothering to hang it, I sat down on my bed to wait. The wait was not long. My cheeks were still flushed with the cold, my heart still thudding in my chest from all the sneaking around, when my father appeared in the doorway.
“Good. You’re dressed,” he said. Then he motioned for me to follow him.
“Dad,” I said to his retreating back as I jumped off the bed. I wanted it over with. I wanted to confess right now. When he didn’t turn around, I said, “Dad, wait,” more loudly than I meant to. I stepped into the living room, and the woman in the overcoat turned around.
I recognized her instantly. Mrs. Cory’s cheeks bore the same strange, unmistakable gouge marks that most of Detroit had seen on television the night she had said goodbye to her sons. She couldn’t have been much older than my mother, but she stayed hunched over instead of standing up straight, and her claw-shaped hands never uncurled.
I very nearly fled. I could feel my skin melting off my bones. How do people know, I babbled in my head, that what they feel is an actual feeling and not something they’ve made up? All kinds of feelings were suggesting themselves to me right then, but I wasn’t quite experiencing any of them.
Mrs. Cory moved toward me in jerks, like someone in the early stages of a muscle disease. I wondered if her sons had heard her goodbye. Maybe the Snowman had let them watch.
Faintly, I heard my father murmur, “She said she needed to come.”
Mrs. Cory seized my chin in her hand. She held on to it so hard that I could feel my pulse beat against the webbing of her thumb.
“Little boy,” she said, in a much more commanding voice than she had used on the Special Update.
It’s a lie, I mouthed, willing her to understand what I could no longer bring myself to say. She had to have seen me do that. But she went on gripping my chin as if she were positioning me for the executioner. Then a flicker of blue and red light chased across the wall behind her, and I heard voices and the slamming of car doors outside.
“Little boy,” Mrs. Cory said, through a weight I could never even dream. “Lucky little boy in this house with these people loving you.” She had a German accent, and she was crying without making any sound. Her breath smelled like coffee and cinnamon gum. Mr. Fox’s breath had carried the same odors. Masking smells. “My husband, silly man, he thought I should not come. He said I would only hurt myself and everyone else. Can you imagine?” She stroked my cheek, then bent forward and kissed my forehead while my stomach convulsed and I ground my teeth together to keep from throwing up. Finally, she turned and lurched away toward my parents.
I didn’t just want everything to be over anymore. I wanted to be punished, and worse. I wanted to be made to pay.
Outside, somebody screamed. The mumbling and scurrying intensified, and suddenly everything went weirdly silent, as though the sound had been switched off for the entire planet. I stared at my father’s black speakers. The left one had inside wires draped across the top like a gutted fish.
“Christ, what now?” my father muttered, dragging himself to the door. Then he said, “Alina, I think you better get over here.”
My mother came blinking out of the kitchen, holding the cup of coffee she’d poured for Mrs. Cory, looking as though she’d been shaken from a deep sleep. I floated behind her, and we all wound up on the front stoop. I thought of the mob scenes near the end of Frankenstein. Then I stopped thinking anything at all.
Susan Franklin was stalking up our driveway in her gold overcoat through a crowd of reporters who fell from her path li
ke wheat before a thresher. When she got close, I saw the swollen black circles ringing her eyes. Her red hair lay smashed on her temples under a green wool cap. “Look what I found,” she said to my mother.
“Oh, my God,” my mother croaked. “Oh, Susan.” Then she broke down sobbing.
Mrs. Franklin was gripping Spencer so tightly that her fingers seemed to be squeezing through his skin. But she didn’t look dazed like my father or wracked like my mother or terrified like her son. Just sad and beaten and haunted. “He was just standing on that driveway over there when I drove down the street.”
Spencer, I saw, had begun to panic. I could see him wriggling, tugging, trying to get free. I started toward him, but my father yanked me back. Behind the Franklins, the crowd surged closer. Cameras clicked and whirred to life. One of Spencer’s wrists had come halfway free and was flailing at the air as if he were drowning.
“Let go!” he wailed.
“How did this happen, Alina?” Mrs. Franklin snapped, sounding as if she wanted to scream, or slap my mother, or just break down weeping. “How could you have let this happen?”
Spencer’s body was shaking so badly that he seemed to dance on each breath of wind like the paper skeleton on his grandparents’ porch. My father’s hand had been on my back, but it slipped from me now, and I glanced up to find him staring at me, expressionless.
“Dad,” I said. I wanted to explain. But his face was so blank that he seemed to be having trouble recognizing me. “We were just trying to help Theresa.” Then Spencer exploded into tears.
“It was all his idea!” he yelled, but I couldn’t look at him, and I didn’t even want to see what my mother was doing. Sirens shrieked at the end of our street, and three police cars screeched to a halt at the base of our yard.
“They were waiting for me when I got home,” Mrs. Franklin said. “They’re going to be there when I go home now. We’re never going to get free of this. None of us. Ever.”
“Go to your room, Mattie,” my father whispered.
It seemed like such a ridiculous punishment, given everything, that I almost laughed. Instead, I said, “Let me stay with Spencer.” Suddenly, I was all too aware that I might not see him again for a very long time.
“Inside.”
“Dad, please. You have to understand. There’s a reason.”
My father kept his voice low. “Spencer is going home. Now do as I say and get the hell in the house.”
I fled to my room. Once there, I crouched next to my window. Cautiously, I peered over the sill. At first, I couldn’t see anything but reporters and police officers clustered around our front stoop, but then the crowd parted to let Mrs. Franklin and Spencer through. Mrs. Franklin walked with her head up, her eyes boring straight into each camera lens until the cameramen fell back. One of them even lowered his camera. Spencer’s head was tucked so far inside his mother’s overcoat I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his fists pounding against his sides as his mother half-led, half-dragged him to her car.
“Mrs. Franklin, how would you characterize your son’s behavior? Especially considering the opportunities he’s been given,” I heard one of the reporters shout from the crowd. More questions struck her like snowballs, but she strode straight through them and never even turned her head.
“Mrs. Franklin, where is Spencer’s father?”
“Do you have anything to say to the families whose children have actually been killed?”
That stopped her. She looked bewildered, as if she were staring into a blinding sunset. Around her, everyone had gone silent. Even from the house, I could hear her say, “Do you? I mean, my God....”
Three policemen surrounded her and Spencer then. One of them was Sergeant Ross. He held up his hand to his fellow officers and leaned forward to talk to her quietly. Then he escorted them the rest of the way to her car. Spencer dove in the back and disappeared from sight. I saw the taillights wink on and watched them disappear down the block.
In the yard, the crowd was being herded toward the street. I spotted the president of our neighborhood association, Mr. Wetzel, standing next to the birch tree, buttoning his trench coat and staring at our house as if he’d never seen it before. He was joined by Mrs. McLean, and when they both turned in my direction, I ducked to the floor. A new voice blared out after a few minutes, and eventually I realized it belonged to Mrs. Wilkins, the woman who lived between our house and the Foxes with two sullen adult sons that no one seemed to know and three black Labradors she kept locked up in a woodchip-strewn pen beside the house. To my knowledge, Mrs. Wilkins had never been in our yard; I only knew her voice from hearing her snarl at the dogs. I peered out the window again and saw her gesturing at Mr. Wetzel and Mrs. McLean. She was wearing a black overcoat and black loafers and red socks, which made her look like the Wicked Witch of the East.
“I knew it couldn’t be the same man,” she said. “He’s got specific tastes, our Snowman.”
“Jesus Christ, Patricia,” said Mrs. McLean, hunching her shoulders together as if she were trying to squeeze herself shut.
I leaned against the heating vent and crushed my hands against my temples. The hall door crashed open once, but whoever it was just went into the bathroom and left quickly. When the front door opened again, I heard aimless padding feet, and I knew that both of my parents were back indoors.
My father was speaking. He sounded calm. “Alina, it’s over,” he said. “The worst, anyway. We’ll have to make it better from here.”
“By doing what?” my mother snapped. “Do you know a cure for what’s wrong with him? Do you realize how fucked up this is?”
“Alina, shhh.”
“I don’t care if he hears.” She raised her voice. “Are you listening, Mattie?”
I didn’t answer. I just tucked my chin against my chest and held my knees together.
“That’s enough,” my father said.
“Well, what the hell was he thinking? Help Theresa.” I heard her snort in derision. “What does that mean, anyway?”
“How the hell would I know?” My father was speaking so softly now that I could barely hear him.
“Oh, Joe.”
After that, I heard my mother crying, and then, for a few blissful seconds, nothing at all until a new roar of activity erupted outside. I crawled back to the window and saw Dr. Daughrety scattering the neighbors like pigeons. He had frost on his eyelids and snowmelt on top of his skull. Fe fi fo fum, I thought. Police fell into line around him, but none of them got in his way. I heard my father swear and sprint for the front door just as the Doctor spotted me. He stuck out his index finger and held it there as if he were aiming a rifle, then marched straight up the stoop. My first thought was to dive into my closet. Then Theresa’s frozen-scream face from the night before floated in front of my eyes, and suddenly I was out of my room and racing down the hall so I could stand behind my father when he opened the door.
My father grimaced when he saw me, but he didn’t send me away. He put his hand on my shoulder and positioned his body so he was blocking the doorway as he stared through the screen at the Doctor.
“Colin,” my father said evenly. “Can we help you?”
Dr. Daughrety’s voice seemed to scrape over his bones on its way out of his body. “Move, Joe. I’m going to speak with your son.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” I said tearfully.
My father glanced at me as Dr. Daughrety pushed past him. “Tears won’t save you,” he said. “If anything has happened to her, Mattie Rhodes, I swear on her mother’s grave that nothing will save you. Nothing. Do you understand? Now where is she?”
I gaped at him. But before I could say anything, he dropped to his knees like a troll puppet with its strings cut, his limbs twitching chaotically. “Where is she?” he whimpered. “Did she know about this,
about you and Spencer? Is she part of it?” His head tipped forward on his neck, almost as if he were praying. “What did she know?”
I saw Theresa’s face at my
window, saw her drifting out of the Fox house into the waiting, whirling snow.
“I have no idea,” I said. “She knows Spencer’s all right.”
My mother leapt at me then, sprawling over the Doctor as she kneed him aside. Her hands locked around both of my arms. “Where is she, Mattie?” she screamed, the words shooting from her lips like sparks. She shook me. “How did she know Spencer was all right?”
I couldn’t speak. My only thought was that my mother was going to have to dye her hair again soon. All at once, she stopped shaking me and allowed my arms to drop to my sides. She drilled her eyes all the way into mine until we were linked, the way she always said she had done when I was a baby to get me to stop crying.
“She came to my window,” I said. “Last night, really late. We just wanted to see her, Mom. She’s been gone for so long. We wanted to know she was okay. I went outside and took her to see Spencer—”
“Took her where?” she said. I’d never seen my mother look so scared.
“The Fox house. Spencer was hiding in the Fox house. I took Theresa to see him, but she hardly talked, and even that didn’t make sense, so we walked her home.” The terror that seized me then was brand new, a glacier that slid up my spine, through my limbs, behind my eyes until the whole world went white.
“She’s gone,” the Doctor mumbled flatly, as though the glacier inside me had spread through him too. He had slumped all the way into a sitting position on the slate floor.
“No. No! We left her at your back door. We walked her there.”
“What time?” said Sergeant Ross, his huge frame filling our doorway. I hadn’t even seen him come in.
“I don’t know,” I said. I was having trouble getting air through my teeth.
“Is this more of your prank?” the Doctor said.
My mother fell back. “Who the hell are you, Mattie Rhodes?”
Nothing about this made sense. “She has to be somewhere,” I cried. “The woods, maybe. Or the schoolyard. She might go there, if she wanted to be alone.”
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