Crazy Love You (36 page)

“Jones Cooper isn't a cop anymore,” said the detective. “He's retired, a couple of years now. I'm afraid you'll have to talk to me.”

I knew Cooper was still in town, that he was working as a private investigator. I'd read about it in
The Hollows Gazette
during a visit a couple of years back. He'd saved some girl from drowning. When I'd been younger, he'd rescued a boy from a mine. He was that kind of guy, the everyday hero type, the guy you called when there was trouble.

“I'll talk to him and no one else.” I was in no position to be making demands. But I figured that they were pretty motivated to find Megan.

“You have to talk to me,” Ferrigno said again. He moved back across the room and leaned forward on the table between us. “Let me help you.”

I moved in closer to him.

“If you don't let me talk to him, we'll never find her.” My voice had come out in a kind of weird, crackling whisper.

A frown creased his brow, and he leaned back.

I saw that look, that confused, skeptical look I knew so well. It was the look people gave you when they thought you were nuts. Some kind of battle played out on his face as he assessed the situation, calculated his options. I held the detective's gaze until he got up and left the room.

•  •  •

Jones Cooper arrived within an hour of my request, looking fit and fresh-faced. Retirement agreed with him. And it was a relief to see him, someone familiar, someone honest. When he sat across the table, a dam burst inside me. I told him everything, really laid it all bare, the total truth about everything, then and now. He took it all in with a series of nods and affirming noises; a camera mounted at the far end of the room winked at me with a red eye. They were recording it all, I knew. And that was fine. I had nothing to lose at this point. All I cared about was Megan.

“So,” he said when I was done. “You're saying that Priss has something to do with this. You think she's done something with Megan.”

He didn't believe me; I could see that.

“I don't understand how it works,” I said. I sounded like a desperate, crazy liar. “But I know that she manipulates things. Like luring Marley into the woods, or my mother back to our house, in turn causing me to follow.”

“Okay,” he said. “I get it.”

“Eloise Montgomery told me that I need to figure out what she wants.”

I knew he and Eloise knew each other. I'd read about that in the paper, too.

“Did she?” he asked. He cleared his throat, got a little frown. He didn't like her, or he distrusted her—or something. Maybe she just made him uncomfortable, as she did me. “When did she tell you that?”

“Years ago,” I answered. “And just recently.”

He gave me a careful nod, seemed about to say something but then changed his mind.

“I have to go there to see her, back to the graveyard,” I said. “I think that's what she wants.”

He stood. “Okay,” he said. “Let me see what I can do.”

He paused at the door, again seemed about to say something. Then he turned the knob to exit.

“Do you believe me?” I said.

It was a childish question and one I'd asked many times of many people. I'd never yet gotten the answer I wanted.

“I believe that you believe it, son.”

“You said that you did,” I said. “All those years ago, you told me that you believed me, finally, about her. You told me to leave The Hollows and not come back.”

“I wish you'd taken that advice.”

“How could I?” I said. “This place. It calls you back. It doesn't like it when you try to leave forever. I think you know that.”

He pursed his lips and gave a slight shake of his head—pretending that he didn't know what I was talking about.

“You said you believed me back then.”

Cooper rubbed his jaw. “I told you that I know enough about this place to understand that there are things beyond my explaining. And that's why I'm here.”

It was all I was going to get from him.

“Okay.”

What had I expected from a man like him, so grounded, so locked into the real world. I envied him his solid footing, while I was sinking deeper into the quicksand.

•  •  •

He left the room then. When he came back a few minutes later, he unlocked the cuff that held me to the table. I rose, rubbing my wrist, which had a big, angry red mark on it, and followed him out the door.

Everyone in the station watched me go—including Binky and Julia. The two of them stood in an office, behind a big glass window, Detective Ferrigno beside them. Julia looked as if she'd aged twenty years; I wanted to comfort her, assure her that I'd never hurt Megan, but I kept seeing that Fatboy mask, that look on Meg's face. Shame has always been a wall between me and other people, keeping me separate, alone. Julia laid a hand on the glass. She was crying. Her eyes said:
Please, bring my baby home.
I made her a silent promise.
I am going to do that. I will give my life to do that.

I suppose they let me go only because they figured I would lead them to Megan. I knew no one believed me, not even Cooper. No one was trying to help me; no one cared if Priss was real or not, or what she wanted. Finding Meg was their only agenda, as it should have been. I didn't expect anyone to believe that it was
my
only agenda, too.

•  •  •

Outside, I climbed into Cooper's big maroon SUV. On his visor was a photograph of a pretty middle-aged woman and a young man who was a slimmer, cooler (tats, earring, punky hair) version of Cooper. The car was meticulously clean, dash shining, not a piece of lint on the carpet.

In my books, the detective is a bad man, someone corrupt and sadistic. He's quasi-obsessed with Fatboy, thinks he's the liar, the criminal who has escaped the detective's grasp. The detective is one of the book's villains. But Cooper was not a villain. He was a good man, the kind of man I wanted to be if I ever grew up. Why was it so hard to be that kind of man?

We drove through the gloaming and the world was pink and gold. The Hollows was a pretty place when it wanted to be, drawing you in, enticing you to stay awhile. It was lovely and welcoming, until you wanted to leave.

We pulled up to my house, and it was still and dark. I got out of the car and so did Cooper. The sun had nearly set, but there was still light glowing in the western part of the sky. Cooper moved around to my side of the car. I could see that he was armed, the leather of his shoulder holster visible through his open jacket.

“I have to go in alone,” I said.

He nodded, shoved his hands in his pockets. “I figured as much.”

I started to walk toward the woods.

“You know it's over, right?” he said. I turned to face him. He went on. “I mean, if you're trying to pull a fast one. There's no other way out of these woods. You're physically surrounded. There's the chopper, the state police, and all of their surveillance equipment. You're not just going to walk into those woods and disappear.”

“No,” I said.

He was right. But there was a lot more, too much, that he could never understand. I walked into the trees. The Whispers had gone silent.

Fatboy approaches the graveyard. The moon is a giant red ball, hanging low in the sky, and the night sky is starless pitch. The whole graveyard is washed in a shimmering orange, the light from the moon. An owl watches, eyes glowing gold. The Native Americans believed that the owl was a symbol of wisdom and strength, the great hunter. But other cultures saw it as the symbol of death and illness, the destroyer that sweeps in soundlessly to carry off your young. Its eyes follow Fatboy as he moves among the graves—Martha, Clara, Priscilla. And the tiny graves of the other children—who were they? How did they die? Miscarriage, illness, accident, murder. Death claims us all, even the most innocent among us.

He is still and watching as she emerges from the trees. Not the woman he knows, but the girl she has always been, will always be. Fatboy sits on a tree stump and the trees sway and whisper all around him. He understands now. All this time he has been coming into the woods, Priss has been comforting him, championing him, defending him. She does for him what she couldn't have done for herself.

He holds out his arms to her and she walks to him, seats herself on his lap, and lays her head upon his shoulder. He enfolds her, holds her as he would his own child, the one growing inside Molly.

“Tell me what they did to you, Priss.”

She lifts her head and whispers in his ear.

He sees her. She's just a little girl alone in the night, frightened in her bed. He watches as the door drifts open and a large, dark form snakes in with the light.

Oh, you're beautiful, so beautiful.

The little girl still remembers her father and how good he was. How he made her toys and carried her on his shoulders, and how she knew that nothing bad could ever happen when he was home. He had been strong, not like her mother, who was weak and frightened—shattered by the loss of her first husband and only son. Her mother was a delicate person, uniquely fit for caring for children and making a home but for little else.

“He'll take care of us,” her mother said of Mr. Paine. And after the long nights of listening to her mother lie with a parade of strange men—some of them polite, some of them angry, all of them dirty and ugly to the core, Priss hoped that her mother was right. Because someone needed to take care of them—even Priss could see that. She no longer went to school; she alone now cared for Clara because her mother was too tired, too lost to be of any good to them.

“
Don't judge me,” her mother begged.
“
A woman only has one source of power.”

Was that true? Priss didn't know.

Didn't her mother know what was happening to Priss? That the man who was supposed to act as her new father was putting his hands on her, using her body, making her dirty and sick inside. She didn't dare tell. He said she'd better not say a word, or he'd kill her—and there was Clara still, who was just as lovely, maybe even lovelier.

Then her mother found them. Him, that nasty old man, in her daughter's bed. And all she did was turn around and walk away, leaving them to it. Priss died inside that night. And her mother did, too. Priss could see her sinking deeper and deeper into that black place she went to. She stopped looking at Priss, stopped touching her. Even before they'd lost Daddy and her brother, her mother had sometimes gone so dark, a ghost moving through the house, not talking, not washing.

“
It's just the melancholy,” her father would say.
“
It will pass.”

And it always had before. But not this time. She sank deeper, further. She wasn't coming back.

And then Priss was walking up a darkened hallway toward the new indoor bathroom. She pushed open the door, and saw her mother leaning over the tub. Mama was singing the song she always sang when she gave Clara a bath:

Little flowers in the garden

Yellow, orange, violet, blue

Little angels in the garden

Do you know how I love you?

“Mama?” she ventured. But her mother didn't turn around. There was something so strange about her voice.

Little flowers in the garden

Growing tall toward skies of blue

Little flowers in the garden

Oh, your mama so loves you.

Priss walked slowly, the wood cold beneath her feet. When she drew near to her mother's narrow, bent back, she saw Clara, lying gray and still beneath the water's surface, her eyes open, mouth open. Priss saw the fear, the confusion on her sister's lifeless face. She drew in a sharp breath, everything in her running cold with fear, and started moving backward. But her mother turned and saw her.

“Time for your bath, Priscilla.”

She was dull and blank, not her mother at all, but a ghoul. In her eyes, there was a sucking, nightmarish emptiness. A hole without a bottom, swallowing the light. Priscilla turned and ran, with her mother shrieking after her. She stumbled down the stairs and out the front door, into the woods. She heard her mother thundering after her, screaming her name into the night.

Pleasemamapleasedon'tpleasedon't.

The words came out in the stream of her breath. She might have gotten away, found a place to hide, even made it to town. But she stepped on a stone and turned her ankle hard, falling to the ground. She got up and limped, but her mother was behind her.

She laid herself down finally, so tired and hurt. Her mother came to stand over her.

Pleasemamapleasemamadon'tpleasedon't.

All she remembers is her mother leaning down and picking her up, carrying her home while she wept. There was no fight left in her. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a dream.

The next thing she was aware of was the burning in her throat and lungs, and the leaden fatigue that numbed her mind and made her limbs feel like lead. And even though she saw the flames creeping toward their beds, there was nothing in her that could lift her from the bed. They were all gone—her father, her brother, Clara. Even the mother she knew had been inhabited by something dark, not of this world. Her real mama never would have hurt them so. And so when the flames came, she almost welcomed them, even though the final things she heard were the sounds of her own keening.

•  •  •

Fatboy sees the flames licking through the trees and Priss isn't on his lap anymore. He runs, runs toward the burning house where he'd first seen her standing in the doorway. He can hear her screaming inside, and he bursts through the door— for the first time in his life not thinking about himself.