See No Evil

by B. A. Shapiro

  The next few minutes were a blur of terrifying sensory tumult. Flashing lights and crackling cellular phones swirled around her. A stretcher and all kinds of equipment were brought in. More medics appeared. Someone starting administering CPR.

  Finally, they had Jackie on the stretcher. Her head was held rigid by a plaster contraption under her chin and her arms were clamped down. An oxygen mask covered her face. Lauren watched from the kitchen. Jackie looked so pale and so still.

  “Is she going to be okay?” Lauren asked the woman who had been the first off the ambulance.

  “We’re taking her over to Cambridge City,” the medic said, touching Lauren lightly on the arm. “You can follow us there and talk with the doctors.”

  Lauren’s blood turned to ice at the way the medic had avoided her question. “Can I go with her?” she asked.

  “The hospital’s just around the block. Why don’t you walk over and we’ll meet you there.”

  “But—” Lauren began.

  The woman looked over at her partner, who was hooking up an IV. “She’s not going to know you’re with her, honey,” she said. “It’ll be easier all around if you’re not in the ambulance.” Turning back to Lauren, she touched her arm again. “Believe me.”

  Lauren’s protests were silenced by the tired compassion in the woman’s eyes. She nodded and headed out the door.

  Lauren beat the ambulance to the hospital. When it finally arrived, they wouldn’t let her see Jackie and no one would tell her anything. Yelling something about “code,” two hospital employees in blue scrubs rushed Jackie through double doors marked No Admittance. The nice medic from Jackie’s house seemed to have disappeared, and although the receptionist at the emergency room desk was sympathetic, after she had gotten what little information Lauren knew about Jackie’s health insurance, she had no answers to Lauren’s questions.

  “One of the doctors will be out to speak with you as soon as there’s any information,” she said.

  Lauren went into the waiting room, which was tastefully furnished with cushioned sofas and love seats, two television sets, and a bank of telephones complete with a full complement of telephone books. It was also empty. Helene and Matthew, Lauren thought. She had to call Jackie’s children.

  But as she approached the phones, Lauren realized that she had left her backpack at Jackie’s. She had no money. When she explained her predicament to the receptionist, the woman smiled reassuringly, reached into a drawer, and handed her two quarters. Lauren’s eyes welled with tears as she thanked her and turned back to the waiting room.

  Which one to call first? Lauren wondered. Neither call was going to be easy. Jackie’s daughter, Helene, was in her early twenties and lived with her husband just around the corner. Helene was extremely close to her mother and quite high-strung. Matthew was the more mellow of the two, but he was still in high school and was staying with his father for the month of October in a complicated joint custody arrangement; given the hour, he was apt to be home alone. Helene, Lauren decided, grabbing the Cambridge phone book. Maybe her husband, Dan Ling, would answer. He was a grounded, steady guy—and a newly deputized Cambridge policeman to boot. Please, she prayed as she dropped the coin into the slot, let Dan answer.

  For the first time that day, luck broke on Lauren’s side and Dan picked up the phone. When he heard Lauren’s story and her description of Jackie’s symptoms, he was quiet for a second. “We’ll be right there,” he said, his voice breaking slightly. “I’ll call Matt and Simon.”

  After hanging up the phone, Lauren paced the small waiting room. A part of her was nauseated and terrified, while another part was removed from herself, watching the nauseated, terrified Lauren from the protection of the corner above one of the television sets. Then the scene began to replay in her head: Jackie’s gruesome door knocker; the silent, shadowy house; her growing sense of unease; Jackie sprawled on the edge of the dining room rug.

  Lauren closed her eyes against the pictures. Then her eyes flew open. The chronicle. Deborah had warned them of the curse. “Anyone who reads the chronicle and isn’t a member of the coven,” she had said, “will either die or go mad.”

  Lauren shook her head. It was too ridiculous. And anyway, Jackie wasn’t going to die. She had just hit her head on the leg of the table. It happened every day. If everyone who hit their head died, there’d be no people left on earth.

  Yes, she comforted herself, in a few days they’d be sitting around Jackie’s dining room table arguing over historical method and the possibility of reincarnation. Just a concussion, Lauren thought, tears pricking the backs of her eyes. It had to be. She dropped onto one of the couches and rested her head in her hands.

  It could have been hours, or only minutes, when Helene and Dan came rushing into the room and swallowed her up in hugs and tears and questions. She told them what little she knew, and Dan went off in search of an update. He explained to the receptionist that he was a Cambridge policeman, but he didn’t get any more information than Lauren had.

  “They’ll let us know as soon as there’s something to know,” he told them, flopping onto the couch next to Helene and putting his arms around her.

  Lauren had expected Helene to be hysterical, but except for the fact that she kept asking the same question over and over again, she was surprisingly composed. “She didn’t move at all?” Helene asked Lauren for about the fourth time since she arrived. “Not even a little?”

  Dan saved Lauren from having to answer again by pulling his wife to her feet. “Let’s go see if we can find a vending machine,” he said. “I need a cup of coffee.” When Helene began to protest, he gently turned her toward the door. “We’ll only be a minute, Hel. Lauren’s here.”

  So Lauren was in the waiting room alone when the doctor approached. She stood and faced him. He looked awfully young and awfully tired, and she knew from the expression on his face that his news wasn’t good.

  “It happens sometimes.” He shook his head in bewilderment. “Sometimes people walk away from car crashes that by all rights should’ve killed ‘em, and other times a simple fall is all it takes.” His eyes were filled with genuine sorrow. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We did what we could, but it was over before she got here.”

  Lauren dropped onto the couch as Helene and Dan walked into the room. One look at Lauren’s face and Helene let out a wail. It was an awful, keening sound, full of a child’s hurt and an adult’s loss.

  Lauren didn’t understand how it could be so cold and still rain. It was well below freezing, yet rain poured from the heavens, drenching her hair and her face and her parka. But she cared little that she was soaking wet. Jackie was dead. Nothing else mattered.

  Trudging down Trowbridge Street, Lauren couldn’t believe that just a few hours ago she had walked this same sidewalk, worrying about the lateness of the hour. Worrying about whether Jackie had found something in the chronicle that might negatively impact their book. As if their book mattered.

  Lauren stopped in front of the house, her hand resting on the gate. All the lights were blazing, and the medics had left the front door wide open. The farmer on Jackie’s door knocker grimaced in the hallway light.

  Lauren didn’t want to go inside, but she had to get her backpack—it contained her wallet and keys. And she had to close the door before someone stole all of Jackie’s precious belongings. Through the open doorway, she could see Jackie’s rag rug and her butter churn at the edge of the staircase. The tears Lauren hadn’t allowed herself to shed in front of Helene rolled down her cheeks. Jackie wasn’t going to need her belongings anymore.

  As she forced herself up the porch stairs, Lauren decided she should probably take the chronicle home with her for safekeeping. Deborah had said it was valuable. Lauren figured she owed it to Jackie to protect—and to read—the damn book.

  Stepping into the foyer, she closed her eyes against the images of the last time she had crossed this threshold: the shadowy room; the fading fire embers; Jackie dying on the f
loor. “Anyone who reads the chronicle will either die or go mad,” she heard Deborah say.

  Lauren’s eyes flew open and she looked at Jackie’s workplace at the dining room table. Although there were piles of books strewn all over the table, the spot in front of Jackie’s chair was empty. The chronicle was gone.

  Seven

  LAUREN HAD MANAGED TO PUT ON STOCKINGS AND A navy wool dress, but she was stymied by her shoes. She sat on the edge of her unmade bed and stared at her toes, all squashed and misshapen inside their tight nylon cocoon. They didn’t look like her toes at all, she thought. They looked like her mother’s.

  She glanced at the clock and, somewhere deep inside her, realized that if she didn’t put on her shoes, she was going to be late for the funeral. Jackie’s funeral. Resting her heels on the floor, Lauren lifted her feet toward her. Actually, now that she thought about it, her toes looked like Aunt Beatrice’s. Aunt Beatrice always wore stockings.

  Lauren stared at the sunlight pushing through the cracks in her yellowed shades. On the bottom of the far shade, the light splinters formed a design resembling chips of ocean waves. Todd would be here soon. He had promised to come by ten. He would find her shoes and put them on her feet. Then he would guide her into the car and drive her to the funeral. Todd would be her anchor, as he had been during Drew’s meningitis scare and her father’s heart bypass surgery. His very presence would allow her to sink into thoughts of squished toes and fractured waves, permit her to bob and drift through this terrible day.

  Lauren stood in the corner of Simon Pappas’s condominium, her back toward the crowd, sipping a drink she didn’t want and staring through a wall of glass at the high-rise office buildings of Kendall Square on the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The river was so bright and festive, sparkling under a cloudless autumn sky; it was painful to look at such a scene after having just buried her dear friend. From within the depths of her grief, Lauren knew that she had only begun to miss Jackie, that she hadn’t even started to understand the hole that had been rent in her life.

  Lauren turned away, forced back into the huge, soaring room she knew Jackie must have hated. It was a peach and teal monstrosity, two stories of chrome and glass and marble in which even the subdued voices of the mourners bounced harshly off the hard surfaces. The furnishings were so perfectly coordinated that she could imagine the word DECORATOR stamped in huge letters over everything. Nothing appeared to have been in existence prior to 1990. Lauren supposed that was the point.

  At least the funeral had resonated of Jackie: the dark, rich wood of the eighteenth-century chapel set on the edge of the university’s wide quad; the sunlight pouring through the stained-glass saints and casting jewel-colored shadows on the old pews; the regal procession of long-robed priests and serious-faced altar boys swinging smoking metal baskets.

  Lauren scanned the room for Jackie’s family so that she could say her good-byes. She was completely wrung out from the emotion of the day, for aside from her overwhelming sorrow, she was furious at Todd. A little before ten o’clock, as she had waited for him, bereft and shoeless in her bedroom, he had called to tell her he wasn’t going to make it. Although he’d had three days’ warning, he claimed his shoot had been “impossible to reschedule.” He was going to miss the funeral, but he had promised to come to Simon’s as soon as he was finished. Lauren wanted to leave before he arrived.

  Simon was standing on the other side of the bar, surrounded by a large group of men in dark suits. Lauren guessed from their clothes that they were business associates, then realized that all the men in the room were wearing dark suits. Helene was huddled in a corner with Dan, but Matthew was nowhere to be seen.

  Lauren squared her shoulders and headed toward Simon. But as several people stopped her to talk, she realized that walking across the room was a mistake. All day she had been treated like a macabre celebrity. Not only was she Jackie’s close friend, but she had been the last person to see Jackie alive—and the one who had found her body.

  At the funeral it had seemed that everyone wanted a word with her: her fellow graduate students, Jackie’s neighbor, the department secretary. And now Gabe Phipps, the chair of her department, the man whose craggy, handsome features were gracing this week’s cover of Time magazine, the man who usually just nodded in a distracted manner when they passed in the hall, was walking directly toward her.

  Gabe had always been well respected in the academic community for his many insightful articles in American Historical Review and the Journal of American History, and in 1990 he had achieved big man on campus status with the publication of his groundbreaking book, A New Social History of Colonial America. Now the surprising success of his PBS special on the Revolutionary War—currently running in eight parts on public television stations across the country—was catapulting him to national celebrity.

  Gabe seemed to be comfortable with his newfound fame, smiling and nodding as the crowd parted to let him through. A woman Lauren didn’t recognize reached out and touched the back of his jacket as he passed. Lauren felt heat rise to her face as he approached. She took a quick sip of her wine, spilling a few drops on her blouse.

  “Lauren.” Gabe came up beside her and took her empty hand in both of his, his usual charisma dampened by the strain clearly etched on his pale face.

  Lauren was touched by how shaken he was. Tears pricked behind her eyes and the lump that had been lodged in her throat for three days seemed to expand. She swallowed. “Dr. Phipps,” was all she could manage to say.

  “Please,” he said, “call me Gabe.” He glanced over her head at the panoramic scene outside the window and then turned quickly away from its brightness, just as she had. “Did you know Jackie and I started teaching the same year?”

  Lauren nodded awkwardly, wondering how she was supposed to respond and if he would ever let go of her hand.

  “How’re you doing?” he finally asked.

  “I’ll be better when this,” she extracted her damp hand and waved it, “is all over.”

  “So will we all.”

  Lauren took a sip of her drink and eyed the door. “Life must go on,” she finally blurted.

  For a moment Gabe’s worried face was transformed by his famous eye-crinkling grin. “Clichés can be surprisingly comforting at times like these,” he said.

  Thrown off guard by his smile, Lauren smiled back. She realized with a start that this must be the first time she had smiled since she had found Jackie four days ago. Dr. Phipps’s—Gabe’s—grin had that effect on people: It demanded an equivalent return. And although she knew it was both inappropriate and ridiculous, she felt a jolt of attraction when he looked into her eyes—despite the thirteen-year difference in their ages, and despite the fact that he was an inch or two shorter than she. Quickly downing her drink, she raised her glass and slipped toward the bar. He seemed reluctant to let her go.

  While the bartender poured her another glass of wine she didn’t want, Lauren edged closer to where Simon was standing. But before she could reach him, a second-year graduate student whose name Lauren couldn’t remember came up to her.

  “How’re you holding up?” the blond woman asked, morbid curiosity in her voice. “It must have been just awful.” Her eyes begged Lauren to share all the gruesome details.

  Reaching for her drink, Lauren shrugged and shook her head. “I’m on my way home,” she said before she realized how her actions contradicted her words.

  “Was that weird woman at the funeral one of the ones?” the young woman demanded.

  Lauren turned her glass between her palms and donned a perplexed expression, although she knew exactly to whom the woman was referring—Deborah. Lauren didn’t want to think about Deborah’s bizarre actions, or the fact that they might be linked to the missing chronicle. It was highly unlikely that the chronicle was actually missing, Lauren reminded herself. The more she thought about it, the more sure she was that the medics had moved the book in the tumult, that it was still somewhere in Jackie’s
dining room. She was so sure, in fact, that she had arranged with Dan to get into the house this coming Thursday so she could get the book and read it before returning it to Deborah, as promised, by that evening.

  “Well, was she?” the woman pressed. “You know, one of the ones in your book?”

  Lauren was filled with a growing unease as, despite her attempts to push away the image of Deborah at the cemetery, the episode came back to her with frightening clarity. The mourners had been huddled around the raised coffin, wrung out after the long mass, chilled by a cold wind off the ocean. The priest said a few words, then he took two roses from the lid of the casket and handed one to Helene and one to Matthew. Matthew clenched his jaw and stared straight ahead as befit a sixteen-year-old boy at his mother’s funeral; Helene flung the flower to the ground and buried her face in Dan’s chest.

  Just as the priest seemed to be ending the service, Deborah, her hair blown wild by the wind, sprang forward and placed a repulsive black-and-white “thing” on top of the casket. It was a plant of sorts, for there were white leaflike growths on its outer edges, but it was mostly a mass of exposed black roots, intertwined coils, serpentine and creepy, almost mobile in their sliminess. There was a collective gasp as the disgusting thing tottered on the coffin’s lid. The priest swung around in surprise.

  “Christmas rose,” Deborah said. “To ward off the evil spirits.”

  Lauren had stepped back, warily watching this woman who thought herself the reincarnation of a wronged spirit, who believed in black magic and cursed chronicles. Then Lauren found herself stepping forward again, her unease mingling with a compelling desire to draw closer. There was danger here. And power. It was almost palpable—and disturbingly seductive.

  The priest grabbed Deborah’s arm and tried to thrust her back into the crowd. But Deborah shook him off as if he were a pesky insect and, raising her arms wide, began to chant unintelligible syllables in a low, husky voice.