The Dead Place

Elizabeth broke into a run. The car was coming. The engine noise grew stronger, and she imagined she could feel the heat of the motor. It approached in darkness, no headlights.

No longer caring how it would look, Elizabeth punched 911 on her cell phone and continued to run while holding it to her ear. Only it didn’t ring. She looked at the screen and saw zero coverage. She was in a dead zone.

The car rumbled closer. The edge of the park was coming. All she had to do was get past it and there’d probably be reception.

The car was at her back; then it pulled alongside her, moving so slowly that she knew the driver wanted her to know that she was being watched. She kept her focus ahead of her, blinking back tears and clutching the phone like a lifeline.

The car moved past, pausing at the corner before turning left and slipping away into the night. A half block. A quarter. The perimeter of the park was a stand of soaring pine trees. All she had to do was get past them and she’d probably have coverage. But getting past them meant landing on the street where the car had turned.

Something was wrong with the streetlight on that corner. It flickered on and off, on and off. As she approached it, the light went out again. She glanced at her phone. No coverage yet.

She didn’t see the gloved hand come out of the darkness until it settled on her wrist. The phone dropped, forgotten, onto the street. She screamed once before the other hand closed over her mouth…

No one thinks of death on a sunny day. The sky was the rich, translucent blue of the Caribbean Sea, and Lily Slocum looked up into its warmth and closed her eyes for a moment, thinking how great it would be to go to the beach. She was four blocks from the university and six blocks from home and the messenger bag filled with textbooks was digging into her shoulder and rubbing against her hip.

She didn’t notice the car idling at the stop sign up ahead. She couldn’t see the driver looking in the rearview mirror and even if she could, she wouldn’t have thought it meant anything more than an admiring glance from a stranger.

Lily Slocum will be described as pretty. Reporters will list the description her roommate gave the police: white, medium height, wheat-blond hair worn long and pulled back in a ponytail, brown eyes. Last seen walking just past midday on Bates Street, brown T-shirt and tan shorts, orange messenger bag slung over her right shoulder, green flip-flops slapping the concrete under her feet.

No one will mention the car that drove slowly past before circling back to follow her. No one will be able to give a description of its make or model or speculate as to the identity of the driver. No one will notice.

Certainly not Lily, who thought she might actually tan on such a sunny day and checked her arms to see if they were getting any color, the tiny bells on her silver bracelet tinkling. A bracelet will be mentioned and her roommate will say, yes, yes, she always wore a silver bracelet. She will also provide a description of her earrings and the small turquoise ring Lily wears on the third finger of her right hand.

A cell phone will also be mentioned. This one small detail will make it all the more remarkable. She had a cell phone. She was talking on a cell phone. So how did she disappear somewhere between Bates and McPherson, the street with the rundown student apartments where her boyfriend waited to celebrate an end-of-year lunch?

He called her as she traipsed along and she had to pause to dig the cell phone out of her bag. “Hey,” she said. “I’m on my way. You got lunch ready?” She walked a little more slowly as she talked and if she felt something at her back, she didn’t mention it. They were living together and their parents didn’t know.

He will rerun their conversation many times in his head. He will be forced to replay it for their parents and the police. He will repeat her last words to hundreds of strangers watching on TV, the camera zooming in so they can see tears overwhelming him: “See you in a minute, babe.”

He will describe her as a sweet, friendly girl. Her parents will add kind. Lily was so kind. When the car pulled up to the curb, Lily smiled at the man who asked for her help. “Sure,” she said, stepping closer to the car, shielding her eyes so she could see the map he was holding.

The weather will be talked about. It was a hot day. Unseasonably warm for May, the town overflowing with people because graduation was only a few days away. Lily had told her roommate she wished she were graduating now instead of a year from now. She wanted to be free of this small town. She didn’t know that the man smiling up at her from the car lived to grant her wish.

People don’t just vanish. They aren’t there one minute, walking along a sidewalk in the sunshine, whole and sentient, only to disappear the next. Only sometimes they do. Ask Lily.

The irony was that the people at the party probably thought the Corbins were the perfect family. Kate Corbin turned her attention from the speech being made by the head of the music department and glanced surreptitiously around the room, watching the large crowd gathered to welcome the new dean and his family to Wickfield.

A sea full of smiling faces in the wide, comfortable living room of Laurence Beetleman’s house. They were university folk mainly, but a few local business owners had been invited as well. “I guess I passed muster,” a bluff man with white hair and a booming voice had said to her earlier. A banker or lawyer, she couldn’t remember which, just that he wasn’t a professor. “Town and gown, you know,” he’d said with a hearty laugh. “Always that division between town and gown.”

Only she didn’t know. She didn’t know at all. They were Manhattan transplants and that division didn’t exist at New York University.

Laurence Beetleman rambled on about the lovely town of Wickfield and how the university community was like a family to him and would now welcome the Corbins into the family.

“We’re so happy we finally snared you,” he’d said to Ian when he opened the door to them, including Kate with his broad smile, shaking even fourteen-year-old Grace’s hand before ushering them inside his gracious, porticoed home, his plump and pretty wife standing radiant at his side.

Helpmeet, Kate thought. Wasn’t that what they called such a woman in Victorian novels? Was she the one responsible for the gleaming hardwood floors and well-dusted bookcases? There was a faint scent of furniture polish in the rooms, and Kate pictured Clara Beetleman lovingly rubbing the oval surface of the dark oak table and running her cloth up the curving feet of upholstered armchairs.

She thought of their own home—old home—in the East Village and how every surface carried a thin sheen of dust like the faintest sprinkling of powdered sugar, except when they gave the loft a hasty wipe-down before parties.

She glanced through the open door left of the crowded living room, and noticed with some satisfaction that a catering firm hovered in the Beetlemans’ kitchen, and then felt ashamed for feeling any animosity toward the older professor’s wife. Clara Beetleman seemed perfectly happy tending to her husband, and Kate had a sudden vision of her watering and pruning him just as she must the numerous glossy-leafed plants lining the windowsills, and had to stifle a giggle.

Ian glanced at her, a question in his blue-gray eyes, and she gave an imperceptible shake of her head. Behave, Kate. Now was not the time or place. Maybe they’d laugh about it later. At one point she would have been sure of their shared humor, but that was before. Things were different now.

“It’s been eight months!” he’d yelled at her that last night in their home. “Eight long months, Kate!”

And because she had no good answer to that, no way to pretend that she hadn’t recoiled when he’d reached for her, she’d resorted to the role of mother, saying, “Ssh, Grace will hear.”

As if Grace, a hallway away, cared about anything but how her life was being ruined by this move. Kate knew if they’d checked on her they would have found her hunched in a corner of her bed, her long, dark hair, so like her father’s, hanging like a curtain to block her sullen face from view, and plugged into her iPod so she could unplug from her parents.

If Grace slept that last night, Kate didn’t know. She only knew that she herself couldn’t sleep, watching Ian instead, his long lean body turned away from her. She’d wanted to touch him, but not in the way that he desired. She’d studied his back with its familiar constellation of moles, a smattering of dark spots scattered across the pale skin, grateful for the reassuring solidness in that long, lean muscled frame.

Yet when he breathed deeply, she spied the faintest outline of his rib cage and felt the immense fragility of the bones within that skin, knowing they could shatter, that the organs sheltered by them could rupture, that the machinelike working of his body could stall or stop.

This sense of his vulnerability was another frightening result of what had happened to her. Strange that something that had taken place so quickly—she’d been shocked to see on the police report that the span was at most a half hour—could completely alter her life. Their lives. It might have happened just to her, but it had affected all of them.

Hearing her own name pulled her out of her reverie. Dr. Beetleman was directing his smile at her now, saying, “—Kate will be sure to paint some lovely portraits of the good citizens of Wickfield.”

A ripple of polite laughter, followed by an undercurrent of conversation. People focusing those expectant looks on her now, not Ian, and some of them asking others what Dr. Beetleman was saying about the new dean’s wife?
The
Kate Corbin? Yes, of course, they thought the name sounded familiar, but they hadn’t realized the connection. She was the painter. Portraitist. Artist. Oh, but hadn’t they heard that she’d been attacked? Yes, but maybe it was just a rumor. She certainly looked fine.

Kate met their gaze, smiled wide enough to bare her teeth, catching the anxious glance that Ian threw her way. “Don’t worry, I’ll be the perfect wife,” she’d said with some bitterness when he’d asked for the fifth time if she was sure she’d be all right at the party.

“I can go by myself,” he’d suggested. “Or take Grace.”

“And wouldn’t people wonder where I was? What would you say?”

“I could tell them that you were painting.”

“But we both know that would be a lie.”

It was the same thing he’d said to her six months earlier, when she’d begged off the latest NYU faculty dinner party and suggested he tell people she was busy painting. “We both know that would be a lie, Kate,” he’d said, the first time they’d spoken about the fact that she wasn’t painting and hadn’t painted since it happened.

The reference hadn’t been lost on him. He understood perfectly what she was saying and responded angrily by demanding that she be ready to leave on time since he couldn’t afford to be late to his first official function in his capacity as new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Wickfield University.

So the three of them got dressed in more or less sullen silence, unearthing clothes from the boxes and garment bags still lining the halls of their new house on one of Wickfield’s tree-lined streets.

And here they all were, Ian in a pale linen suit and dashing blue silk tie, looking handsome and arty, and Grace with her long hair pulled back for a change, wearing a batik sundress instead of her usual black T-shirt and jeans, and Kate herself in a navy blue wrap dress and high-heeled strappy sandals that Ian had called sexy when she’d bought them a year ago.

They looked like the perfect family. Smile pretty for the nice people. She could feel the corners of her jaw aching with the effort.

Clara Beetleman touched her husband’s elbow, a tiny nudge that hardly anyone but Kate noticed, the unspoken signal between husband and wife that he’d talked long enough and needed to let their guests mingle.

Ian was pulled into conversation by a tall, stoop-shouldered architecture professor with a rope of beautiful African shells hung around her neck. Grace wove through the crowd, unconscious of her lithe beauty, exiting through French doors into the summer evening. Kate started to follow, but caught herself, and stopped by the window instead, looking out on the deck and the manicured lawn beyond it with its tiny iron lanterns winking among the hostas.

The windowsill was lined with immaculate pots of African violets. She stroked one fuzzy leaf, watching her daughter standing on the lawn looking at something out of Kate’s view, a drink clutched in one small hand. Grace’s hands remained a young girl’s, small and rounded, with short, bitten nails that she liked to paint black, green, or purple. Grace was changing in so many other ways—her figure maturing, her mood mercurial—that it was pleasing to Kate to see this last glimmer of her little girl.

“They grow up so fast.” Clara Beetleman stood at her side, beatific smile in place, hands folded serenely over her ample stomach. The aging Madonna, Kate thought, and saw the portrait in various shades of pale brown and gold. “Is she your only one?”

“Yes.”

“Not that there is such a thing as an only. One is plenty.” Her laugh was light and easy, but her eyes watched Kate with a birdlike intensity.

“How many children do you have?” Kate asked automatically because it was polite. She didn’t want to talk with this woman who looked as if she could worm her way to the heart of Kate’s insecurities. Did she know that they’d tried unsuccessfully for years to give Grace a sibling? She felt trapped against the windowsill, looking past the woman’s shoulder to try and catch Ian’s eye, but he was deep in conversation and didn’t see her.

“Three boys. All of them raised right here and educated at Wickfield.” Clara Beetleman laughed again. “I understand Grace will be studying in the music department?”

“Yes, she was accepted into Dr. Beetleman’s program.”

“She must be very talented if Laurence has taken her on. A piano prodigy?”

“Yes, I guess.” Kate tried to smile. She hated that term because it carried with it so much expectation. Weren’t prodigies the ones who burned out early, walking away from that which had once consumed them? She didn’t want Grace to experience her talent as a burden or a liability.

Her own parents had been good about that, their ignorance of an artist’s life keeping them from any expectations about her future. They’d been older than her friends’ parents and having given up on conceiving, were eager to help their only child follow her dreams even if hers was a passion they didn’t understand.

All they knew was that as soon as Kate could talk she’d spoken of color, that each and every Christmas letter to Santa had begged for crayons, paints, palettes, and easels. And as grateful as she was for the teachers who’d recognized her talent and helped steer her toward an education appropriate for it, she was still more thankful for those years when she’d enjoyed the gift she’d been given without being defined by it.

She’d tried to give this same freedom to Grace, but the truth was that she and Ian had the education their parents lacked. They could identify what they were seeing almost from the first moment, when Grace reached a chubby toddler’s hand above her head to carefully tap, not pound, the ivory keys of a friend’s piano.

A man wearing a dress shirt striped like stick candy joined them near the window. He had dark curly hair and large, square-framed black glasses. “Clara, you’ll have to scold Laurence for me—he completely forgot to tell us that Kate Corbin came along with the new dean.”

Before Clara could respond, the man extended his hand for Kate to shake. “Jerry Virgoli.” He smiled at her and took a sip from a balloon glass of deep red wine. It swirled in the glass, and she thought of carmine spilling onto a canvas, and had to pull her eyes back to his face. “I’m a big fan of your work.”

“Thank you.”

“I saw your show in Brooklyn—when was that?”

“A year and a half ago.”

“It was superb.”

“Thank you.” Her last show. For a while she’d wondered if it really would be her last. The months when she’d stared at the same blank canvas and been unable to pick up a brush. The months when all she saw when she looked at the pots of paint was how they’d been knocked to the floor of her studio when he’d slammed her back onto the table, and how she’d seen them swirling on the floor as she struggled, the colors rushing together, muddying the stained concrete floor.

She took a quick swallow from her glass of white wine. Therapy hadn’t chased those images away, but at least she could paint again. Halting progress, but still progress.

“Did you read the article about Lily Slocum?” Jerry’s voice lowered. Clara Beetleman nodded, but Kate asked, “Who?”

“She was a student at Wickfield,” Jerry began, but Clara corrected him.

“She
is
a student.”

“You don’t seriously think that she’s still alive?”

Clara shuddered. “I don’t know, but I hope so.”

“She disappeared in May,” Jerry Virgoli said to Kate. “Broad daylight, walking back to her apartment from campus, and she just vanished.”

Clara shook her head, whether in disagreement or regret Kate couldn’t tell. “Someone must have seen something.”

“The police would have found them by now.” Jerry Virgoli twirled his wineglass lightly in his hands. The nails were manicured and he wore a signet ring on his fourth finger. Light sparkled in the turning glass, glinted against the burnished gold of the ring.

“It’s been three months and they still have no leads,” Clara said. “It’s just horrible.”

“I’m sure things like this happen every day in the city,” Jerry said to Kate.

“I don’t think so.” His eyes seemed larger because of those boxy glasses and she felt exposed by them, wondering again how many of those at the party knew about what had happened to her. It had made the news, her identity revealed by a tabloid reporter. Once they knew the name of the artist who’d been assaulted, the other media decided they had free reign, and Kate had fifteen minutes of unwanted fame.

“Her poor mother,” Clara said, and Kate remembered the voracious reporters calling and visiting, their false sympathy and strident pleas to tell her story, some of them arguing that the public had a “right to know” and others that she should “warn others.” Warn them about what? That their lives could be interrupted by tragedy?