Crazy Love You (32 page)

“I heard you got into some art school in the city,” he said into the silence. He covered his mouth and gave a little cough. “Is that right?”

I shoved my hands in my pockets against the cold. I wanted to move past him and go inside. He was not my favorite person, and being around him made me uncomfortable.

“Yeah,” I finally said.

“Do yourself a favor.” He kicked at a stone with the toe of his shoe. “Go there and don't come back.”

I found myself nodding. The Whispers had started and I turned to look back at the woods. There was a strange pitch to the chatter now, angry and fearful. Cooper's eyes followed mine, but if he heard what I heard he didn't show it.

“That's the plan,” I said.

He looked at me a minute longer, with the searing, assessing gaze I had squirmed beneath too many times. He started moving back toward his vehicle.

“Good,” he said. “Have a nice life.”

That night I dreamed of Priss. She snuck into my room and climbed naked into my bed. The soft warmth of her enveloped me. She whispered:
I'm coming with you.

A haunting is a personal thing, a relationship. That's what Eloise had said. And I was finally turning this idea over in my mind. There is give-and-take in this relationship; mistakes are made. It's liquid; it changes and evolves. In the movies, the whole haunting thing seems very black and white. The haunting ghost is always evil, the haunted one is a hapless victim. But in nature, nothing exists in a vacuum. There is a constant energy exchange between separate entities, a net that connects us all.

The Hollows Historical Society was housed in a red clapboard building off the main square, around the corner from a yoga studio and down the street from the Java Stop, the trendy coffee place. It has been there forever, but I don't recall ever paying any attention to it.

The Hollows has actually turned precious since I was a kid, morphing from a backward, semirural, ticky-tack dump, to a faux-hip, tony little burg. That's what had so charmed Megan. She didn't know it was just a thin façade over the true face of The Hollows.

But it had fooled plenty of people. The Manhattan rich had discovered The Hollows, bringing with them their appetites for fine things, and the cash to motivate others to provide those things. Real estate prices had skyrocketed since the eighties, and even during the downturn they didn't falter overmuch. Certain people always have money. And for whatever reason, some of those people had decided on The Hollows as a retreat from the city. It boded well for me. Once I had torn the house down, I was going to sell the land. Then I was going to use that money to buy myself a place in Manhattan—even if it was just a shoe box on the Lower East Side. And I was never going to leave my city again.

But thinking about it made me remember how all my bank accounts were empty, and how I hadn't heard back from my agent or my editor, how Natalie had said I told her that my book contract had been canceled and how none of it made any sense at all. Oh, yeah, and my apartment had been on fire last I saw it. And how I was probably going to prison for the rest of my life for murdering a cop. Did they have the death penalty in New York? I didn't even know.

I felt the dawning of a migraine, which I hadn't had in years. A kind of halo was appearing around my vision and I could feel a tingling in the crown of my head. If it hit, I'd be incapacitated until it passed. I'd have to lie in a darkened room until the mind-crushing pain and waves of nausea passed. And that could take a while. I pulled the Scout over to the side of the road and put it in park. The little red house looked dark; I wondered if anyone was inside.

As I was getting out of the car, the phone rang: Zack.

I know what you're thinking. I should have dumped the phone, not been making calls. If the police were looking for me, an iPhone is basically like a tracking device. I was a blip on a screen somewhere. But I didn't have much choice. Besides, the phone was about to die. Once it did, I had no electricity at my house to charge it, no car charger. I didn't even have a wall charger to steal electricity at the library or the coffee shop. When my phone went dead, it would stay dead until my life returned to normal.

“Hey, man,” I said.

“Hey, Ian,” he said. “Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. You know my wife's pregnant? We had kind of a false alarm, thought the baby was coming early. But we're all good now.”

I felt a twinge of sadness thinking about Megan.

“Glad all is well,” I said. What had he heard? What did he know? Was it all over the news about the cop, the fire? I tried to be cool.

“So how's the work coming along?” he asked. “I can't wait to read those pages.”

“It's coming along,” I said. I was just going to go with the flow. “I'm having some technical difficulties. So I decided to leave town for a couple of days to try to knock out the ending.”

“Great idea,” he said. He sounded weird, tense. But maybe it just had to do with his pregnant wife. “Where are you?”

I ignored his question.

“This might sound crazy, Zack. But just humor me, okay?”

“Sure.”

He sounded suddenly excited, eager. He thought I was going to ask him about plot.

“Everything's okay, right? With my contract?”

There was a beat of silence.

“Yeah,” he said. He sounded perplexed. “Of course. This is the last book in your contract, and we discussed moving on after it to something new. Right?”

A wave of relief crashed over me. Okay, okay. That was good. I wasn't
totally
losing my mind. I was just experiencing huge gaps in my memory of how I was behaving with other people. But my whole
life
wasn't a hallucination. That was something, right? I know: the bar was very, very low on what I considered good news.

“Yes,” I said. “Right.”

“Hey, Ian, you doing all right, buddy?”

“Why do you ask?”

Why do you ask, Zack? I missed the most important meeting of the year. I've been calling you obsessively for two days. For all I know it's all over the news that I'm a cop killer and an arsonist. What could be wrong?

“You just seem—tense.”

“Well, you know  . . . the wedding, the deadline. And . . .” Should I tell him? Why not? “Megan's pregnant.”

“Wow,” he said. He let out a long breath. “Congrats, man. That's great. I know how you feel, though. It's all really big stuff, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.” I basked in the normalcy of the conversation.

“So, where did you say you were?” I imagined him sitting in a room surrounded by police, all of them leaning in toward the phone. There would be a bright light shining off frame, the cops just shadows, and Zack would be looking nervous, maybe flushed and sweating. My comic book imagination.

“Just out of town,” I said. “I needed to focus on Priss right now. On the ending, I mean.”

“Okay,” he said. He drew the word out, seemed to want to say more. “Just—stay in touch?”

“I'm going off the grid for a couple of days. I'll send the work when it's done. Thanks, Zack.”

I heard his voice carrying over the air, but I ended the call. Then I called Megan. Of course she didn't answer. I left a rambling message about how much I loved her and how sorry I was and how I was trying to make everything better. I am sure I sounded crazy and that it didn't help my position any. But I had to keep trying.

“I am
going
to be a better man,” I told her. “I'm facing the things that are working against me. I'm going to get help. Meg, I'm going to fight my way back to you and our baby. I swear to God.”

Then I hung up, that halo burning blue white around my world. I moved from the car and headed up the path toward the little red clapboard house.

•  •  •

The door was open and I pushed inside with the ring of a little bell. I expected to see an old woman, hair in a bun, wire glasses, sitting at some old-timey desk. She would have all the answers to my questions, like some soothsaying crone. That's what it would have been in my comic; that was the kind of librarian I was going to give Fatboy.

Instead, there was a smartly dressed, fit woman, with a neat black bob—a youthful fifty-something, maybe. She was still seriously fuckable, if I had those kind of thoughts—which I didn't. Much. She sat behind a long, low-profile worktable, a silver laptop open in front of her. I couldn't help but notice her nails, square and candy red, like little lozenges.

“Can I help you?”

She didn't look up from her work, tapping furiously on her keyboard.

“Eloise Montgomery said you could help me.”

I closed the door behind me and immediately was ensconced by the place—its aroma of roses, the floor-to-ceiling shelves of leather-bound books, the warm amber lighting. The swirling chaos of my world was firmly shut outside and something like relief washed over me.

“You must be Ian,” she said without looking up.

“Right.”

“I've done some preliminary research on the graveyard behind your house, and on your property,” she said.

She still hadn't looked at me. The noise of her keystrokes reached a crescendo and then abruptly stopped. She swiveled to me, gave me a quick glance, and reached for a tall pile of books and files on her desk. She rose, hefting the stack onto her hip.

“We have some study tables in the back of the library,” she said. She moved toward an archway to her right. “Follow me.”

I moved behind her past rows of vintage photographs—The Hollows' first school, first church, first iron mine. There was a group of miners with dirty faces holding various tools of the trade, smiling uncertainly for the camera. There was a group of men who I recognized from my school days as the town's founders. Stiff, angry-looking, and big-jawed, they were the kind of hard men who settled towns and blazed trails, blew holes in the earth to take from it what they wanted. The opposite of the kind of man I was. I couldn't even take care of myself, of the few people who relied on me. Again, I was blasted with thoughts of Megan and our baby, buffeted by waves of sadness, shame, and fear. What was going to happen to me, to them?

“I have here the sales history of your property, the church records of the graveyard behind your house. There are some news articles I thought you might find helpful, some books. There are also some journals that might be of particular interest to you,” she said.

She put it all down in front of me with a thud. I looked at it, enervated. It made me want to put my head down and go to sleep. What can I say? I am a child of the search-engine generation. I want to type my questions into a box on a screen and have the answer magically appear before me. I didn't necessarily want to work for it.

She seemed to sense my despair, took pity on me.

“There was only one person born in The Hollows in the last hundred years with the name Priscilla Miller. She had a short and unhappy life. It's all in here.”

“Where do I start?” I asked her.

She laid her hands on the pile, peered at me over the frames of her reading glasses. “Start at the top.”

I did.

Fatboy returns to The Hollows. It is a gray and miserable place, with a run-down town center and a ramshackle church. The recession has hit the area hard—homes are in foreclosure and clearly abandoned with dark windows and overgrown yards. “Out of Business” signs hang in the windows of the bookstore, the ice creamery, the antiques shop. The other shops on the square—the diner, the hardware shop, the grocery—are empty.

The Hollows only had one industry, the iron mines. And those mines ceased to yield decades earlier. Now there is just a network of abandoned and dangerous tunnels beneath the streets and homes, deep into The Hollows Wood, up into the foothills of the mountains.

It is a place of charcoal grays and dirty whites and dusty blacks. Even the sun is a misty ball of light. Only the moon has a slightly blue tinge. The sky always portends rain, the wind is always gusting. There is nothing cheerful, or sunny, or green about Fatboy's hometown. It is left fallow, abandoned by anyone who had anyplace better to go.

Fatboy arrives at The Hollows Historical Society building. It is housed in the old church and maintained by a bespectacled old gargoyle of a woman named Misery. Maybe she has another name, but no one knows it. That's what she has always been to the residents of The Hollows. She knows Fatboy and he knows her, even though he's sure they never met. But that's the way of The Hollows, everyone knows everyone.

“Well,” she says as he walks through the door. “It's about time. What have you been waiting for? An invitation?”

There is a towering stack of materials on her desk. She nods toward a long wooden table, indicating that he is to sit, and he does. She brings the reading materials over to him, and he starts to read, sifting through piles of news articles and journals, books, and city records. Who is she? What does she want? Slowly, this girl, this woman, this mystery, starts to take shape. He always thought that Priss was the person he knew best. He suddenly realizes that he doesn't know her at all.

First he finds her birth record, a tattered piece of parchment, faded with time.

Priscilla Miller was born on March 4, 1910, the six-pound daughter of Martha and Thomas. She entered the world at 3:33 a.m., born at home, which was the norm, attended by a midwife nun. The details are scrawled in black ink, a thin hand lettering that seems hurried somehow, dashed off. The document doesn't look quite real; it's flimsy and insubstantial.

Her family lived a hardscrabble life in a one-room cabin deep in The Hollows Wood. They were what the townfolk referred to as Hill People—isolated, uneducated, and strange. The Hill People were said to be the descendants of escaped slaves and criminals. They were shunned and hated, and so they kept to themselves, moving farther and farther back into the foothills of the mountains. All these details are noted in the midwife's journal. Mention is also made of the child's “unsettling” red hair as “very nearly a deformity.”