Pretty Is (17 page)

Hannah stuffed the books beneath her mattress. “Like he’d never look there,” said Callie, mocking. But he didn’t need to. They were sitting at the kitchen table playing Gin Rummy when he returned. “Find anything interesting?” The sharp edge they had noticed that morning seemed to have softened. He was himself again. “I haven’t been in that room for ages. The attic, we used to call it.”

We?
The hunting lodge was family property after all. A clue.

“I figured at the very least you could use a new supply of books.” He opened a kitchen cabinet, rummaged; he had climbed a small mountain, following unmarked trails, and a light, airy peace had crept into his limbs, his mind.

Callie and Hannah searched him for some sign of disappointment, if not anger. But no, it seemed they had done exactly what he expected them to do. Their relief was shadowed by something else: a sense of anticlimax, perhaps. Callie drew a five of clubs, slid it into the run she was building, discarded a jack of diamonds. Hannah followed her lead, resumed play, thought eagerly of the books she wouldn’t have to hide.

*   *   *

Spending the day curled in some corner with a novel was nothing new for Hannah; it was what she would have done at home to pass the long, school-free summer days. No one had ever minded her habit of burying her nose in a book for hours on end. But Callie became jealous when Hannah tried vanishing into the musty pages of the storeroom cache; she sighed, pouted, broadcast her boredom with exaggerated drama. Hannah offered another book from the box, but Callie argued that it would make more sense if they read the same thing, and Hannah couldn’t help seeing her point. Hannah suggested that Callie could read the book whenever she herself wasn’t, but that was impractical. They both wanted to read at the same time, during the long days when they weren’t permitted to go outside lest some hiker wander by and catch a glimpse of their (surely?) well-publicized faces. Cool mountain breezes drifted through the screens, and the pine trees swayed above the lodge like gaunt giants, keeping it cool and dim. Zed tended to sit on the porch, sometimes reading, sometimes staring off into the woods or up at the just-visible peaks in the distance. Even when he was reading, a long shiny gun rested across his lap. A different gun from the one Callie had told Hannah about, the one he’d kept in the glove compartment of the car. When it wasn’t on his lap he propped it beside him. It was never far from his reach. They imagined he slept with it.

“Do you ever hunt?” Hannah asked him one afternoon. He was reading on the couch that day, the gun propped against his leg. It looked like a hunting rifle to Hannah, though her knowledge of such things was limited.

Absently, he ran a finger down the barrel of the gun. “Why do you ask?” He got this way sometimes: blank, distant. Elsewhere, almost.

With the gun at his side, it had seemed a logical enough question to Hannah.

“Oh,” he said, as if the touch of the gun had brought him back to himself. “No, I don’t enjoy hunting.”

“Why?” pursued Callie, who had come up alongside Hannah. “What don’t you like about it?”

“Pulling the trigger, among other things,” he said, rising from the couch. “Don’t you two have something better to do?” His face had gone dark. He grabbed his keys and left; they heard tires crunch on the driveway a moment later.

When they could no longer hear the car, they ventured onto the porch. They perched daringly on the Adirondack chairs, squinting into the sunlight. Through the trees, they could make out a bit of the road at the end of the long driveway; it wasn’t likely that anyone would see them even if a car should happen to pass. Still, they made no effort to conceal themselves. They tempted fate; they weren’t sure why. But their hearts beat faster. “What would you do if someone pulled in the driveway?” Hannah said, as if she were simply making idle conversation.

“Why the hell would someone pull in the driveway?” Callie had adopted the habit of sprinkling her speech with mild profanities when she and Hannah were alone, in contrast with the demure persona she had crafted in the first days and still adopted at times; at other times she seemed to have cast herself as some worldly creature twice her own age, as if she should have a cigarette dangling from painted lips and a bit too much cleavage to be altogether tasteful. As if she had stepped out of the pages of one of the seamier detective novels from the attic.

“To ask directions, maybe.”

Callie squinted down the driveway. “Well, we couldn’t give them directions, could we? Seeing as how we don’t know where the hell we are. So there wouldn’t be much to say, would there?”

“Wouldn’t that sound suspicious? Besides, they might recognize us, don’t you think?”

“True,” Callie said thoughtfully. “Our pictures must be everywhere. I bet he checks the news when he goes into town.” She brought her feet firmly to the weather-worn floorboards. “We really shouldn’t be out here,” she said, and rose to go back inside. Hannah followed, unprotesting.

*   *   *

They did not venture out in the daytime again. On a dark, almost-rainy afternoon that offered barely enough light, they chose a tattered novel from their stash of musty storage-room mysteries and settled on the long stiff couch in the main room, bare feet folded under them, toenails beginning to need cutting. (Certain things Zed had not thought of.) Hannah began, reading in her best English-class style. She had just announced the discovery of a body when Callie reached out and grabbed the book. “My turn,” she said, and picked up the narrative. She read with considerable drama, throwing herself into the dialogue. “Teachers always ask me to read,” she said smugly when she finally came to a chapter break and passed the book back.

The plot unfolded quickly, enlivened by quirky villagers and curious domestic details. Hannah had half expected Callie to toss the book aside in scorn and boredom after a while, but she was surprisingly engrossed. A few chapters in, Hannah realized that he was watching them. Zed. Standing in the doorway, face inscrutable, he managed to give the impression that he had been there for a long time. She couldn’t imagine how he had entered the room so quietly that they hadn’t been aware of it; her skin tingled at the idea of being watched so surreptitiously. When Callie next looked up—after reading a great sentence in which someone remarked upon how unpleasant it was to have a body in the house—Hannah nudged Callie’s shin with her knee and cocked her head ever so slightly in the direction of the door; Callie glanced sideways and saw him too.

She snapped the book shut. “Take a picture,” she said, “it’ll—”

“Last longer,” he said. “I know.” He waved his hand. “Don’t stop on my account. The novel is trash, of course—but agreeable trash, and it beats playing cards all day. Carry on. But don’t spook yourselves to the point where you start seeing villains lurking behind every curtain and you’re afraid to go upstairs at night.” He crossed to the kitchen and began poking around in the cupboards.

The girls resumed reading, but now they were self-conscious. Zed returned a few minutes later with a plate of saltine crackers and cheese: a rare between-meal indulgence. He pulled up a rocking chair and placed the plate on the couch between them. “I’ll share if you let me play,” he said.

“We’re not
playing
,” said Callie. “We’re reading.” She handed him the book and grabbed a cracker.

“What’s the difference?” His tone suggested he was half joking but that the joke was with himself or perhaps with people in his head; it did not concern the girls at all. They knew that flicker of distant amusement by then. He flipped through the pages, found exactly the place where they had stopped, and began reading.

He sounded like a movie voice-over. As if he had written the book himself, or belonged to its world. He made it seem as if they were
in
that world, all three of them.
The body was upstairs. The murderer lurked nearby. They were all suspects. Everyone had a motive.
They could have listened to him forever.

*   *   *

Storms were rare that summer. Mostly the weather seemed to be toying with them. Thunder grumbled low in the distance, never coming nearer; or mute lightning flickered above the mountains, unanswered by thunder. Or the air would become bloated with rain, heavy and oppressive, even inside the lodge, and they would all listen, tense, for the first drops to spatter across the roof.
Needing
them to. And they would not.

Like them, the sky at those times seemed to be waiting. Straining toward something not yet within reach.

Callie was braver than Hannah with Zed. Hannah loved to listen to him—liked his low voice—and his slow, steady movements often soothed her, like wind in the trees. But she waited for him to come to them: to begin a conversation, propose an activity, make a request. Callie asked questions. She even provoked him, sometimes, as if to see what he would do; to see if there were limits, and what lay beyond them. Hannah could only admire Callie’s courage from a safe distance while she herself hung back, watchful and wary, wishing she were bolder, more reckless: that was the kind of girl she would have liked to have been.

Sometimes Hannah worried that Callie would go too far, though she couldn’t help wondering what “too far” was, and what might cause it to happen. And one evening as they finished up their macaroni and cheese by the glow of an old oil lantern and lightning bugs flickered outside the window, Callie pushed him as far as she could.

“So have you ever been married?” she asked, without preface, after gulping the last of her milk.

“No,” he said shortly, rising from the table.

“Why not?” she pressed.

“Clear the table, Hannah, if you’re done eating. You can wash the dishes, Callie.” His voice seemed steady and unperturbed, but Hannah, watchful, was sure she saw a shadow cross his face.

“Okay,” Callie agreed, “but why won’t you answer? I’m just curious. I mean, here we are, after all. And you know everything about us. It only seems fair for us to know something about you, right?”

Hannah stacked plates and silverware, balanced glasses on top, carried them to the sink. Her nerves jangled with alarm.
Careful, Callie.

They never mentioned the strange truth at the center of everything: that the three of them were not, in fact, a happy, normal family summering at a cabin in the woods. That he had kidnapped them—not even randomly, on a whim, but deliberately, efficiently, after much planning. That they were all participants in an inexplicable crime, that here was not where they were supposed to be.

Zed crumpled his napkin into a tiny ball, rose from the table. “Careful, my little friend.” His voice was calm, but Hannah sensed that his heart had sped up; she felt her own heart respond, keeping pace, and a drop of sweat trickled down the back of her neck.
Now,
she thought.
Now is when something will finally happen.
She set the dishes on the counter beside the sink, turned the water on, held a finger under the faucet so she’d know when it was hot. Callie stayed put.

“Is that what we are? Your little friends? Like your pets or something? You don’t tell us anything. Maybe we could understand you better if we knew more about your life.” Callie stood up and the lantern lit her hair in a fiery halo. She looked outrageously beautiful. Hannah, awed and envious, wondered how he could refuse to tell Callie anything.

He seemed to soften. “Let us just say that women have always disappointed me, one way or another. Don’t push it.”

“Are women more disappointing than men, do you think?” Callie still stood beside the table, making no move toward the dishes. Hannah noticed that the water had begun to scald her hand. She plugged the drain, squirted detergent, turned the water down low so she could hear the answer.

“Of course they are,” Zed said, his composure more alarming than open anger. “They’re more corrupt.” Hannah turned the faucet on full blast, hoping to discourage Callie from persisting. Goosebumps had sprung up on Hannah’s clammy arms. The danger in the room seemed to be bouncing off the walls.

“What do you mean by that? Corrupt how?” Callie moved slowly toward Zed, her eyes flashing.

Zed stood his ground, shadows shifting on his face as the lantern flickered. “Someday you may know what I mean. Or Hannah might be able to tell you.” Generally pleased to be drawn into Callie and Zed’s exchanges, in this case Hannah sensed an unearned insult. Why would she, now or ever, have more access than Callie to knowledge about corruption? Female corruption, specifically?
We aren’t even women, after all
.
Just girls
.

Was she corrupt already, or merely destined for corruption? How did he know? What did he know about her that he wasn’t telling her?

Hannah rinsed the dishes, one by one, and slid them into the soapy water. She wanted to throw off the balance in the room, somehow, but felt powerless. By this time Callie seemed driven—possessed, almost; Hannah wasn’t sure she could have stopped if she had wanted to. “What about your mother? Was she disappointing? Is she corrupt?” Callie demanded. Startled by the violence of the questions, Hannah allowed a plate to slip, strike the edge of the hard porcelain sink. The clatter jarred her nerves, but the others didn’t seem to hear. Callie was generating a tangible field of intensity. The room hardly felt big enough to contain her. Hannah turned from the sink, wiped her wet hands on her dress, let the lip of the sink dig into her back. Waited to see what would happen.

“Or your sister,” Callie added. “You have a sister, don’t you?” At last, his anger surfaced, flared. Hannah saw a vein pulsing in his forehead. He took a step forward; it hardly seemed voluntary. Callie had her eyes fixed on his, as if she were drawing him to her, exercising some mysterious power. It crossed Hannah’s mind in an unwelcome flash that Callie might, in some bizarre way, be trying to seduce him. A sickness coursed through her. They had excluded her, forged some electrical connection of which she was not a part.

But his face closed abruptly, breaking the spell. “My mother is not your concern, and I have no interest in discussing her with you,” he said coldly, and left them.