Shadows Gray (15 page)

“So, what did you want to show me?” I ask, after climbing back in the truck.  I kick off my heels and breathe a sigh of relief, wiggling my toes.

Luke starts the truck and pulls out of the parking space.  “I was looking at some photos I took this summer: still-lives and landscapes and stuff.  I spent some time out on the edge of town, photographing these old dilapidated buildings and farm houses.  There’s quite a few out there that are just falling apart, roofs caving in and windows boarded up, things like that.  Abandoned. They make great shots.  You’d be surprised at how many people want shots of that – old
Americana and stuff.  The most expensive shot I ever sold was one of this field that used to have a house; now there’s nothing left but the chimney in the middle of a field of wildflowers. Anyway, I remembered being there and this one house in particular; there was some garbage around and I thought maybe tramps were living there.  So I got a couple shots and got out. It got me thinking that if Rose is staying somewhere, it could be she’s playing house somewhere like that.”

“That’s a possibility,” I agree. “It’s not unheard of for the Lost to do that if we can find a place. I think that’s a great idea, Luke.” I’m getting excited. “Can you take me there?”

“Sure. Aren’t you working tomorrow?”

“I mean tonight! Please?”

“Gray, it’s late!” Luke laughs. “And it is REALLY dark out there.  No streetlights, no electricity. Nothing. You don’t want to go out there tonight.”

“But it’s on my bucket list!”

“Breaking and entering is on your bucket list? You really are a little criminal, aren’t you?”

“Please?” I say again.

“In those shoes?” He glances down at my feet. “This isn’t town living, Gray. The places I’m thinking of are way out there and you’ll break an ankle in the dark.”

“No I won’t, Emme made me practice until I could walk in these things on a tightrope!” I boast. Of course, I am completely lying. I almost turned my ankle twice in the art shop and had to grab at Luke to steady myself. I’m certainly not fooling him; he probably has bruises the exact shape of my fingers on both his arms.

He contemplates in silence as he drives.  But I have already noticed we are not turning towards my house; I’ve already won.

Thanks to the miracle of automobiles, we have left the paved streets behind us for country gravel roads in less than the time it takes for me to rummage through his glove compartment for a flashlight and develop a plan.

Chapter Thirteen

Our first trek out of the truck and into the darkness is fruitless.  We explore a rundown shack of a house that has no recent inhabitants other than bats and mice and raccoons.  Walking in darkness in heels is every bit as difficult as Luke forewarned. I finally take them off and carry them, hoping against hope that I don’t step in something questionable or disgusting.  Our flashlight beam isn’t the brightest, but it does illuminate enough to know that Rose isn’t here and never has been.

“There’s another up the road a couple miles,” Luke says, starting up the truck again.  I toss my useless heels behind my seat.  My stomach growls and I wish the art show had something more substantial to eat than olives and cheese and fruit in the shape of flowers.

The truck bounces along the gravel road.  We are silent.  I feel elated to be doing something to find my sister and scared both at the prospect of locating her or not locating her.  How will I convince her of who I am? How will she react? Will she come home with me? And what if I’m wrong and it isn’t Rose after all? What if the only person we find is a crazed serial killer escaped from prison who buries us under the floorboards, never to be seen again? My imagination has never been my friend in stressful times.

“There!” Luke leans forward in his seat, hunched over the steering wheel as he peers ahead in the darkness. “Did you see that? It looked like a light in a window.”

I lean forward too. If there was a light, it’s out now.

“Maybe it was the reflection of your headlights,” I suggest.  We are close enough now to see the outline of a two story house.  It’s definitely abandoned; half of it has collapsed from the weight of a fallen tree that still leans crazily into the rubble.  There are junked cars in the field next to it; their shapes eerie lumps that loom at me.  I expect the shapes to suddenly jump up and reveal their true forms: ogres and giants and trolls, but they are only cars. 

“Don’t park too close,” I whisper. “Here’s good.”  I suddenly feel as though I don’t want to drive up with our yellow headlights and scare her, if indeed she is here.

Luke stops the truck obediently and kills the engine.  My heart in my throat, I get out.  The dirt and weeds and rocks hurt my feet, but I don’t slow. I feel a premonition that I will find Rose here.  It’s not like the nervousness of the last house, where we crept along, Luke whispering in an exaggerated voice and me laughing when a bat flew over our heads.  I knew instinctively Rose wouldn’t be there and it was only a fun game we were playing.  I am not having fun here and we haven’t even reached the house.  I keep my eyes straight ahead, and I too, feel as though I see the briefest flicker of a yellow light, like a candle or a weak flashlight beam or lantern as it passes by a window, but it is gone so quickly, I can’t be sure.  I blink hard and keep walking.  Luke takes my hand in his this time, instead of my elbow.  I lace my fingers through his and hold tighter than is probably necessary.

“Hello!” I call out weakly. I clear my throat and call again, this time stronger. Only the silence of the night and my own echo responds.  Gingerly we reach the house and I reach out my hand to try the door, which I realize is silly as half the house has collapsed and we could just as easily go through the gaping holes in the walls if we wanted.  Somehow it seems disrespectful to do so. If there were a doorbell, I would ring it. It’s no surprise that when I turn the old knob, the door obediently creaks open.  Luke shines the beam of the flashlight inside.  Directly ahead of us is a staircase, to the right is the broken wing of the house where the floor is littered with boards and beams and broken glass, to the left is a small room with two doors.  Past the stairway is a hallway, but the collapsed section of the house has reached it as well and it is nearly impassable. Here and there is furniture, they loom and list to the side the way the abandoned cars did outside.  Their shapes are misshapen and lumpy and unrecognizable until the flashlight beam hits them and then they are clearly a chair here, a small end table there, a bookshelf with broken and missing shelves over here.  There is a book open, lying face down as though the page where someone stopped reading is being saved, on the couch. Some of the pages have fallen out and lie on the floor.  There is a line of cleanliness down the middle of a table, through the dust, as though someone’s finger had drawn along it as they walked by. Without knowing why, I shiver.

“Hello!” I call again, ignoring my cowardice. My voice sounds stronger and clearer than I expect it to. “Is anyone here?”

“Rose!” Luke adds his voice to mine. “Rose Gray, are you here?”

“Through those doors or up the stairs?” I whisper to him.  There is obviously no one here in this room with us, although the book and the line drawn through the dust suggest otherwise.

“Through the doors,” he jerks his head towards the first one. 

“Great, a closet,” I mutter once I get up the courage to open the door.  “No one here but moths.”

We try the other and it leads to the kitchen.  Luke shines the light around to reveal an old stove, a rusted and filthy kitchen sink, cans of unopened food on the floor where they had apparently tumbled out of the pantry and a broken chair lying on the floor. I could be wrong but it doesn’t feel as though anyone has set foot in this kitchen for years and years.  And yet, I still feel a presence in this house, a sense of being watched, a feeling that I am not the only
one holding my breath and listening.

“Do you think the stairs will hold?” I ask as we enter back into the living area.

“Beats me,” Luke replies, as he shines the beam of the flashlight up the staircase.  It must be my imagination working overtime again because I think for a moment that I see a flash of something moving in the dark. I take the flashlight from Luke and without a word, I begin the climb first. The stairs seem as though they should shake and tremble beneath us, like the fragile things they appear to be, but they hold our weight well enough and barely creak with our footfalls.  The more I climb, the more my flashlight illuminates and I can see the top of the stairway, the hallway to my left with doors to what I presume to be bedrooms over the kitchen area, and a gaping hole in to my right where the tree had crashed through and caused most of the roof to cave in. The cool night air comes through and lifts my hair, causing goose bumps on my arms and drying the nervous clamminess on my body.  We obviously can’t go to the right and so I wind the short corner and reach out for the knob to one of the bedrooms.  My fingers curl around it and I grasp it and try to turn.

It’s locked. From inside I can hear a scuttling sound, like something scraping the floor or a body pushing itself away in a hurry.

I look over my shoulder at Luke.  He shrugs.

“Hello?” I call softly though the closed door. “Is anyone in there? I won’t hurt you. Please open the door.”

Silence.  Nothing but silence.

I rattle the knob.  Still nothing.  I press my ear to the door and listen.  Is it my imagination or do I hear breathing on the other side?  Like the feeling I would get as a little girl after a nightmare when I would huddle under my blankets and swear I could hear the breathing of a monster under my bed.  I try to stop my own breathing but the harder I try, the more shallow and loud it seems and the more my heartbeat thuds in my own ears.

“Maybe we should just come back tomorrow,” Luke says in a normal voice.  Does he want the person behind the door to hear him? “Bring the police even.”

“No!” I shoo him away and put my ear again to the door.  My fingers have rested all this time on the knob and as if guided by instinct I attempt to turn it again.

This time, it turns.

The door creaks open.  There is no one there.

Chapter Fourteen

The let down and disappointment hits me like a ton of bricks.  My breath that I’ve been holding is let out in a rush.  My eyes take in the scene before me: a dingy mattress on the floor with a ratty blue blanket, a dresser with broken drawers hanging lopsided or fallen out completely, a box that looks to be filled with half packed and then forgotten knick knacks, a plastic crucifix on the wall.  A closet door, mostly open.  A window, broken and letting in night air.  I rub my eyes tiredly with all ten of my fingers.

“Are you alright?” Luke asks in concern.

“I just don’t know where she could have gone,” I reply in frustration. “Didn’t you hear her in here?”

Luke looks surprised and shakes his head. “No, I didn’t hear anything. Sorry, Gray. Want to get out of here?”

I nod, wordlessly.  The sense of Rose being here has diminished now, although I cannot shake the feeling of a presence in this room, listening to me the way I was listening to it.  An ear pressed to the inside of the bedroom door to match mine on the outside.  A single piece of pressed wood between us, so close I could almost hear the heartbeat, almost feel the breath, and yet as far away from my sister as I have always been.

********************

Back in Luke’s truck we are silent for several moments.  I feel foolish for thinking it would be so easy to find Rose, yet I also feel strangely as though we came close, though I have nothing substantial to base this feeling on. I wonder why this man is chauffeuring me around on my fool’s errand.  I steal a glimpse of him from under my eyelashes as he drives; his hands are both on the steering wheel, fingers drumming a bit as though he has a song in his head.  He has taken off his tie and it sits between us on the seat of the truck, sitting obediently like a tiny, quiet passenger.  Luke speaks.

“Well, it’s possible she was there and was scared of us.”

I don’t think he actually believes that but it is nice of him to placate me, I think.

“We could go back in the daylight,” he continues.  “Might not be so intimidating that way.”

“I suppose breaking and entering with a flashlight wasn’t the way to go,” I agree, morosely. I turn my attention to the window and watch the moonlight flit in and out through the trees, a slim slice of white in the blackness.  The way it dances and flickers make me remember other nights, long ago, in a different place, where candle light was the norm.  The way the flame would skitter and prance about if there was a breeze or if you breathed a little too close.  The moon between the pines looks like that to me.  Steadily the shape of the trees gives way to more and more housetops and roofs and buildings and before I know it, Luke has pulled up to the curb outside my house.  I pick up Emme’s shoes in my hand and am still thinking of our strange night and of Rose when I pull the handle of the passenger door.  It seems sticky and so I shove hard.  I hear a thud and a muffled exclamation as the door hits something solid before swinging the rest of the way open.  I jump out and peer around the door to see Luke sprawled on the sidewalk, scowling at me.

“Gee, Gray, I kind of thought you’d appreciate the chivalry of a man opening the door for you,” he rubs his chin and narrows his eyes as I look down at him.  “If you’re one of those feminist types you could have just said no, thanks, and saved me the broken body parts.”