In Search of the Rose Notes (19 page)

I checked the editorial box of the
Looking Glass
. Her name wasn’t there. No matter. She might have submitted anonymously. But then, she wouldn’t have known about Rose’s dreams. She didn’t even know Rose, as far as I was aware. On the other hand, the one with the smiling lions and the teeth wasn’t connected to any of Rose’s dreams. Maybe she’d written just that one? That didn’t explain its resemblance to the others, or the appearance of a Datsun in one of those others, but it was still possible.

Did the Pilkington kids still live around here? I knew that Brian had eventually gone to college—Sally must have mentioned it. Sally was my lab partner in chemistry class during junior year in high school. We weren’t friends, but we were cordial, and I’d probably never have passed the class without her. I did all the grunt work for the labs, and she made all the hypotheses and drew all the conclusions. Normally I’d been okay in science classes, but my brain had been particularly clogged with other shit that year. Thinking back, I realized she’d been very patient with me—probably more than I deserved. She told me before graduation she was looking for a job—not going to college—but I didn’t feel I knew her well enough to ask her why or press her on the issue. We’d kindly signed each other’s relatively naked yearbooks. Maybe it wasn’t such a crazy idea simply to contact her and ask her.

After printing a copy of the article, I parked myself in front of one of the library’s Internet-access computers. Cone Lady glanced at me as I did so. I suspected that no one had gotten this much mileage out of the Waverly Public Library’s myriad resources in quite a while.

I tried “Sally Pilkington” and “Connecticut” on the online white pages. One came up for Fairville, one for Wilton. Then I Googled her. There was a Sally Pilkington-Moore who was a veterinary technician in Fairville. The vet clinic’s Web site didn’t have pictures. I tried Sally Pilkington-Moore on Facebook, and there was a profile picture of a brunette woman and a baby. Same delicate little face, smiling with that telltale gap between her front teeth. The baby was smiling, too—one of those wildly happy half-moon baby smiles. Nice picture. Stalking really was so easy these days, I marveled.

I hit “Send Sally a message” and typed a message saying hi, that I was back in Waverly after many years, visiting Charlotte Hemsworth. After some hesitation I typed in that Charlotte and I were having a friendly disagreement about something—something we were trying to remember from high school, and I thought she might be the one to settle it for us. Maybe we could have coffee or something.

When I was done, I read it and reread it. It had that fake bubbly tone one uses on Facebook. Sally had been one of the least bubbly people I’d encountered in high school. If she was still anything like I remembered—and granted, what I remembered was pretty superficial—she’d probably hate it. I fiddled with the sentences for a few minutes, then saw that my allotted twenty minutes on the computer were almost up. I poised the mouse over “send.” Go for it? Or reconsider and redraft at Charlotte’s? Or not send anything at all? Probably the best choice. A message popped up on the computer saying I had two minutes left. I could renew my session or let it expire. I took a breath and hit “send.”

“Shit,” I whispered a second after I’d done it. What an idiotic message. Just what the now-mature and matronly Sally Pilkington-Moore needed. Then I read over the
Looking Glass
poems again. After my second reading, it seemed highly unlikely that Sally had written them. The references to a Jehovah’s Witness were mocking and superficial, the connection to her brother’s accident extremely vague. Sally was a thoughtful person who probably would’ve written very sensitively about her brother’s difficulties—who probably, now that I thought about it some more, wouldn’t have written about such things at all. I’d mentioned to Charlotte that I was not, in high school, someone who “put myself out there.” Well, Sally wasn’t either. Sally had seemed middle-aged by the time we were all thirteen. What had I been thinking?

At least I’d been vague. If she wrote back, I could perhaps dream up some other disagreement Charlotte and I supposedly thought she could settle. Chances are she’d just blow off the message. Batshit old Nora Reed. How embarrassing. Why hadn’t I fled Connecticut last night, after the 7-Eleven? What was I still doing here, picking at some crusty old high-school scab? What was it about this stupid old school literary magazine that kept nagging at me, kept pulling me back in?

Mind Over Matter:

November 1990

The police never talked to me directly. There was no reenactment with dolls, no
Nora, do you know the difference between the truth and a lie?
like I’d seen in the court scenes of some of my mother’s TV movies. Just my mother and me on Mrs. Crowe’s doorstep, explaining that Rose had walked me home as she always did, with nothing out of the ordinary. My mother doing most of the talking and me nodding in agreement.

By then it was common knowledge around Waverly that Rose’s parents were convinced she’d never actually arrived home the day of her disappearance. The details were in the papers. When her parents had come home from the restaurant that evening, her jacket and school bag weren’t there. And the package of pecan sandies her mother had left for her on the table was unopened—and therefore undiscovered, her mother was certain.

In any case, an unopened package of cookies was not enough to convince the chief investigator that he shouldn’t rule out the possibility that she’d run away or that he needed to frighten an eleven-year-old with intense interrogation.

Charlotte believed that I hadn’t seen anything unusual, but she also thought the police were making a big mistake.

“Maybe you don’t
remember
seeing anything weird,” she said to me on the afternoon bus, on the ninth day of Rose’s absence. “But that doesn’t mean you didn’t
see
anything weird.”

The black books were making an appearance again, taking on an unexpected second life—but half of them were brown books now. Charlotte had already been told twice this week to put her book away in class, and she’d begun covering the volumes with grocery-store bags to make them blend in with her covered textbooks.

“I know it’s not a totally accepted idea—hypnotizing witnesses for information. But you’d think in a big case like this the police would want to use every resource they have. Right?”

I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure what resources had to do with it. Resources were what we talked about in social studies, along with capital cities and national languages: lead, gold, maize, sugarcane.

Toby leaned in from the seat behind us. I hadn’t known he’d been sitting there.

“The police came to your guys’ houses, too?” he asked.

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “
Obviously.
They went to everybody’s house. They’d be stupid not to.”

“Do you think she ran away?”

I glanced at Charlotte, curious how she’d reply.

“Well, I was hoping Phil would help us answer that, but that didn’t exactly work out, remember?”

“Awww—” Toby groaned, leaning in closer to us apologetically.

“DON’T STAND UP IN YOUR SEATS!” the bus driver screamed at him. She was a thin, shrill blonde with a talent for making the bus rules seem terrifyingly dire.

Toby flopped back down in his seat behind us.

“Now, I found this little section, and I think it’s perfect for us,” Charlotte continued. “It gives directions on how to put someone under. Just real simple hypnosis techniques.”

“Do you have a pendulum?”

“I’m sure we could find something like a pendulum. Something on a chain. But for a lot of these techniques you don’t even need one. The pendulum is kind of an old-fashioned way of putting someone under, you know.”

She didn’t have to say that the plan was to put
me
under—not her. That was obvious. But to be “put under” sounded scary. Like drowning. And I wasn’t confident that this two-page glossy spread—with a small sidebar titled “Do-It-Yourself Hypnosis”—would give Charlotte sufficient expertise to pull me back up once I’d gone under.

“What if I never wake up?”

“Of course you’ll wake up. It’s not like you’re going to be in a coma. It’s very simple bringing someone out. Even more so than putting them in.”

Toby was now poking just his face over the seat, his chin on his hand.

“You’re gonna hypnotize Nora?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said, even though I didn’t think I’d agreed to it yet.

“Can I watch?”

“No. It’s not a show. We’re doing it for information.”

“What information?” Toby asked, looking skeptical.

“What she remembers about when she last saw Rose.”

“Oh. Well, do you have a pendant?”

Charlotte sighed and rolled her eyes. “We don’t really
need
a pendant.”

Toby considered this, scratching his nose vigorously, squishing it around with his palm. “Would you hypnotize me, too?”

Charlotte bit her lip. “No.
You
can’t be hypnotized.”

“Why not?”

“You just can’t.”

It was Toby’s turn to roll his eyes.

“Never mind,” he said, leaning back in his seat, glaring angrily out the window. “You’re so full of it, Charlotte.”

When we were left off at the Fox Hill stop, Toby raced on ahead of us as he usually did. He was always running for no apparent reason.

“Have fun, Nora!” he called back. “Don’t let her fry your brain!”

“Why can’t Toby be hypnotized?” I asked.

Charlotte glanced up ahead before answering, checking Toby’s distance from us.

“I didn’t want to say it in front of him,” she whispered. “But to be hypnotized, you need to have at least average intelligence.”

“Oh. I see.”

“You’re feeling very… relaxed. You’re feeling very… relaxed.”

Charlotte’s repetition failed to convince me. I struggled to keep the corners of my mouth down.

“Waves of relaxation are coming over…” Charlotte took a deep breath. “ . . . your body.”

Something about the word “body.” A giggle escaped my lips. I didn’t open my eyes, because I didn’t want to see Charlotte’s stern look of disapproval.

“Very… relaxed,” Charlotte repeated.

“Say something besides that,” I told her, doing my best to sound sleepy.

“Why?”

“That’s actually not very relaxing,” I answered, which was my nice way of saying she sounded stupid.

“You’re feeling a little… drowsy. Just a little on the sleepy side. You feel waves of sleepiness coming over you. Waves of… relaxation.”

Charlotte seemed to think she’d hit on something good. “Waves of sleepiness, waves of relaxation. Waves of sleepiness. Waves of relaxation.”

She kept alternating these phrases. My annoyance at her started to fade into boredom.

Finally she said softly, “Now, what I want you to do, Nora, is to start counting backward.”

I waited for further direction, but none came. “Backward from what?”

“Ten.”

I did as instructed. Charlotte seemed surprised that I finished the task so quickly.

“Um, okay,” she said. “Now, slowly, from thirty.”

When that was over, she whispered. “Now, Nora. Now that you’re fully relaxed, I want you to take me back to that day. To that Tuesday. The last day Rose walked you home.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

“So you’re leaving my house. What do you see?”

“I see your yard. I see Rose.”

“What’s she wearing?”

“Jeans. That jacket around her waist. Purple sweatshirt.”

“It was cold, wasn’t it? Why wouldn’t she have the jacket on?”

“I don’t know.”

I could hear Charlotte scribbling something on her pad of paper.

“So you’re walking away from my house, up Fox Hill. Are you on the sidewalk?”

“Yes.”

“Are you talking to each other?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you talking about, Nora?”

“Nintendo.”

“What about it?”

I could feel myself blushing. “We don’t like it.”

“Neither of you?”

“No. Rose thinks the music is really annoying.”

Charlotte paused, but I didn’t hear any scribbling.

“What else are you talking about?”

“Aliens and Druids.”

Charlotte sighed deeply—suspecting, perhaps, that I wasn’t taking this seriously.

“Rose believes in aliens,” I continued without prompting.

“Does Rose believe she’s ever seen one?” Charlotte asked, recovering quickly.

“No. I don’t think so. But she believes they’re real, I think.”

More scratching of Charlotte’s pencil on her notepad.

“About how long does it take to get to your house?”

“I don’t know. A few minutes. We weren’t rushing, but we weren’t walking real slow either. Just regular speed.”

“And while you’re walking—think hard about this, Nora—do you see any cars go by?”

“Umm… probably one or two. It was garbage day.”

“You’re not supposed to guess. Just tell me what you remember. Did you see cars or not?”

“Umm. Two went up the hill,” I said.

It seemed at least two probably had. Pickup trucks, probably. Townies with pickup trucks who knew the back way to the transfer station.

“Anything suspicious?” Charlotte asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Was either of them, like, a black van with a teardrop window?”

“No.”

“Either of them have tinted windows?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What color were the cars?”

“I don’t know. I was looking at Rose most of the time, since we were talking.”

“Was there anyone else walking around while you guys were on the sidewalk?”

“No. Definitely not.”

“Do you think maybe you were so busy talking to Rose that you might not have seen someone if they were nearby?”

“No,” I said. “There was nobody.”

“So you guys get to your house…”

“Yeah.”

“And does she say anything?”

“Well, she says a lot of things. And then she says good-bye.”

“Like, what does she say?”

“Just asked me about Druids. I don’t remember exactly.”