The Dead Place (7 page)

Just as she turned the corner up to his place, she saw Damien come out of his building. The timing seemed like a sign. For one happy second she’d thought they must be psychically linked. Only then he swung toward her, and she saw that his arm was around some blond-haired girl. She was model-pretty, tall and super-skinny, and wearing a tiny white eyelet dress and these impossibly high sandals with ribbons that wound around her ankles.

As Grace stood there, stunned, Vogue Girl had leaned into Damien and kissed him with her full red lips. Worse, he’d kissed her back, not some polite little kiss either, but a full scene-stopper. Grace fled before it was over.

She still met him later, keeping their regular rendezvous at a school playground near Campbell’s building because Grace could always get permission to visit her friend. When he’d asked why she was being such a bitch, she’d confronted him about seeing Vogue Girl and he’d gotten mad, telling her that she couldn’t claim exclusivity if she wasn’t going to meet his needs.

Just thinking about it brought back the anger. It had ripped through her, bringing tears in a hot rush, and she ran away from him, dashing half-blind across the park. It might have ended there, but he’d chased her, yanking so hard on her arm that afterward she had a bruise. He told her that he loved her, told her that she could get to him like nobody else, told her that she was his true love. She noticed that he didn’t promise to stay away from Vogue Girl, but when he literally kissed the tears that ran down her cheeks, she’d been willing to forgive him anything.

He probably still saw other girls, but she didn’t ask. It wasn’t like she could complain anyway, since she was the one who had to sneak around just to see him at all. It had been easier when she lived in the city, easiest after her mother had been attacked. There’d been several weeks when her mom barely got out of bed, and Grace had taken advantage of that to escape and see Damien.

It wasn’t like that in Wickfield. Her mother was still acting weird, but it wasn’t like before. She didn’t hide in bed, she was just super-security-conscious. She’d gotten freaked out about some missing college girl, and now she was insisting on watching Grace walk to the bus stop. It was embarrassing, and it also made it hard to slip away and head for the train station instead.

She hated Wickfield. Besides Damien, Campbell and all of her other friends were back in the city. She knew her parents wanted her to make new friends. She could feel the pressure in all their questions. How was your day? How was school today?

“You look ugly when you frown.” Damien glanced over at her, then back at the road. “What’s your problem?”

“No problem.” She turned up the radio and closed her eyes, letting the music drown her thoughts. “No problem at all now that I’m with you.”

In the man’s arms was an offering, wrapped in a shroud and carried through the woods and out along the rocks to the water’s edge. He’d chosen the spot with care some months before, driving along remote roads and hiking deep into the forest rising up on either side, following the clear, rushing sound of water until the trees suddenly gave way to a strip of pebbled inlet and he found the creek.

The silence of a church surrounded him as he walked, breathing heavily under the weight in his arms, the wind rocking the branches of hemlock and pine, rustling the leaves of maples and oak that were just starting to turn. The dogwood had been in bloom when he was last here.

The bodies after the miner’s were a blur in his memory. Dozens of men and women, most of them elderly or at least middle-aged, victims of cancer or car accidents, their nakedness at once interesting and usual to the boy, who sometimes assisted his father and Poe, holding the hose they used to sluice out the body’s fluids, or sorting through jars of face crème to find the perfect skin match.

His mother thought it was morbid. She wanted to forbid him to go down there, but his father wouldn’t allow it, yelled at her to leave the boy alone, and wasn’t it natural that a boy should follow in his father’s footsteps, and was she ashamed of the work that put the food on her table and the clothes on her back?

He’d been eight then, scrawny and short still, a tow-headed chicken of a boy, but old enough to see and understand the expression that flitted across his mother’s face: the flash in the hazel eyes, the mouth opening to speak before it closed abruptly, her lips pressing against one another until they were nothing but a line across her face. She
was
ashamed.

He noticed other things after that. The way his mother turned her face from his father’s kiss so that it landed on her cheek, not her lips, and the small pile of pillow and sheets folded on the edge of the couch in his father’s office, and the way his mother’s lips pursed whenever his father talked about his work over dinner.

He saw the girl when he was ten, old enough to understand the death, old enough to hold onto the details like small treasures, carrying them around like marbles in a sack, pulling them out to play with one by one in his mind.

It was a rainy spring that year. Thunder showers all through April and most of May. He could remember his mother clucking over the daffodils drooping on the front lawn, and how he’d stood at the window and watched rain overflowing the cupped petals of tulips.

Flood warnings interrupted the music on the radio in the basement. They were working on an old man that afternoon. Ninety-some years of age, so old that the skin seemed to separate from the bones, like chicken boiled too long. Poe wrinkled his nose and said the man smelled sour. The rain had raised the dust in the basement, it mixed in the air with the smell of decay, and the boy wrinkled his own nose and left.

He slipped on his yellow slicker and went to send leaf boats to capsize in the current coursing along the gutters. Sheets of water pounded the asphalt, pushing the dust to the edges, so that the water he stirred with a stick was like silt in the river. He raced along the curb beside it, watching the new green leaves he’d torn from the chinaberry tree get sucked into the storm drain.

The roar of the water overpowered the police siren. He didn’t hear its high-pitched wail until the car was less than six feet away, and then it came rushing past him, splashing the water up and over the boy’s slicker as it turned hard into the driveway. A dirty white van pulled in behind it.

She was already on the table by the time the boy made it to the basement, the black rubber body bag she’d been brought in being carried, dripping, out the door by a young police officer who looked green.

The floor was damp and there were bits of grass and new leaves tramped in by police. The body was wet, too, which surprised the boy. Poe pressed his polished wingtip against the chrome lever that tilted the table and water spilled from the holes and circled the drain in the center of the floor.

“Jesus,” the man murmured, and the boy saw a mixture of horror and sorrow on the thin face that he’d never witnessed before.

His father stood on the other side of the table, blocking most of the body from view, but then he moved and the boy could see all of her. It stopped him in the doorway, his hand reaching out to grip the doorjamb to stop from trembling.

All these years later he could still remember what it was like to see a young female body laid upon that table, small breasts poking at the bodice of her soaking-wet dress. Later he would find out that she was fourteen. All he knew then was that she was young, her body newly developed.

“Barrett girl,” his father said. “They live down by the creek and the girl thought it would be fun to see how high it was rising.”

He sounded annoyed, and the boy would hear him mutter, “Stupid waste,” under his breath over the next two days. It was his way of dealing with grief, his own and the overwhelming grief of the Barrett family.

The girl’s skin was the color of his mother’s bone china, watery white, and traced haphazardly with the fine blue lines of veins. Her brown eyes were open, staring at the basement ceiling as if she could hear the heavy footsteps and loud weeping that was taking place overhead.

“I’ve got to get up there,” the boy’s father said to Poe, shaking his head, his mouth set in a grim line. He moved to the corner sink to wash his hands, and the boy stepped closer to the white porcelain table and noticed a twig in the girl’s long, wet hair. A piece of moss curled around the instep of her right foot.

“Tell them she’ll be pretty,” Poe said. “Tell them they’ll know her.”

The boy watched, his tongue heavy in his mouth, as Poe took the scissors and cut through the thin white cotton of the dress. She wore tiny panties underneath, no bra. Poe cut away the underwear, too, little scraps of fabric parting to reveal a triangle of peach fuzz.

There was clattering on the steps, and the boy’s mother suddenly appeared. Poe looked up in surprise and the scissors slipped, nicking his hand.

“Why did you let him in here?” His mother’s voice was cold and hard. She didn’t wait for an answer, but grabbed his hand, jerking him after her up the stairs.

The house was filled with strangers, more were coming in the front door, and the boy’s mother frowned and pushed him toward the stairs to the second floor. “Go play,” she said. “You shouldn’t be seeing this.”

And something about her face made him loath to argue. Though as he turned, she suddenly pulled him back, crushing him against her in a fierce hug.

Later, much later, when he’d watched her pull away in their old Buick to go to the grocery store, he crept back down to the basement.

His father was dealing with the family in the upstairs office; as he’d crept past he’d heard the murmur of voices and the soft sound of a woman crying. Poe was alone with the body, searching along the shelves for face crème and makeup, and the boy didn’t speak, content to stand in the doorway and stare at the girl.

She was clean now, washed inside and out, flushed of the river and all impurity. Her white skin seemed to glow, and he remembered the word “alabaster” from a Sunday School lesson and how the teacher had tried to explain what it meant. He understood now. This girl was alabaster.

The excitement he felt was so overpowering that he had to touch her. He moved without realizing it, standing next to the table and placing his warm hand against the cool skin of her arm.

He shuddered with the force of the contact, the sensation of connection almost overpowering, electrical signals racing from his head to his feet and jolting his testicles on the way.

“Stop,” Poe barked, and the boy’s hand jerked from the body. He panted, surprised to feel sweat prickling his forehead and the back of his neck.

“Your mother said you weren’t supposed to be down here,” Poe said.

“You’ve always let me before,” the boy argued because it was Poe and not his mother.

“This is different. You shouldn’t see this, your mother was right.” Poe nodded at the door. “Go on now, get out of here, and don’t come back or I’ll tell your mama on you.”

The boy ran then, hammering up the stairs in his sneakers, going until he’d reached the safety of his room. He flung himself facedown on the narrow bed and clenched the quilt with his fists, grinding his hips against the mattress. He had to hold onto the girl, to relive the sensation of his skin touching hers. He squeezed his eyes shut and whispered, “Alabaster.”

The man’s feet crunched quietly along the pebbled bank until he found the place where the water ran un-obstructed, and he placed his burden down along the bank and unrolled the shroud. The water lapped softly against the strip of sand as he worked. When he was ready, he waded into its coolness with the offering once again in his arms.

A trio of crows, disturbed by the noise, rose like an omen, cawing and clutching at the sky.

Ronald Haupt liked the beginning of hunting season. He hiked along a trail in the hills high above Wickfield, Remington cradled in the crook of his left arm, right hand playing with the little pouch of extra bullets in the pocket of his flame-orange vest. He hadn’t bothered to shave before heading out this morning, and his hand stole up every once in a while to rub at the salt-and-pepper stubble across his chin.

More than forty years he’d been coming up here. First climbing the hills with his father and uncle, then with his hunting buddies, and now mainly by himself. He’d found he liked the solitude. It gave a man time to think, really think, without the constant chatter of everyday life.

The woods weren’t silent, but the noise of nature was soothing—bird calls, the rustle of small animals in the leaves, the sound of a branch cracking under his foot. He could handle the noise in the woods, all right; it was the noise of the office he needed to escape.

A CPA in a busy firm, he’d welcomed the relief of being somewhere that nobody could reach him. Just recently, though, he’d started carrying a cell phone when he went hunting. He didn’t like it, feeling the weight of it in his pocket like a constant reminder of financial responsibilities, but he carried it. Seeing Howard Sherman almost lose a leg last year had convinced him.

It was an accidental shooting, that’s how the local paper played it, though everybody knew that Howard and his hunting party had been drunk. Howard stumbled over a log and his rifle discharged into his leg. In the time it had taken for his hunting buddies to reach a phone, Howard’s makeshift tourniquet had slipped and he’d lost so much blood that it soaked through the stretcher they loaded him onto, leaving quarter-sized splashes of crimson along the trail and the asphalt parking lot where Ron arrived in time to see Howard being medevaced to the local emergency room. Ron couldn’t forget all that blood, or the sight of Howard himself, vomit splashed over his flannel shirt and eyes rolled back in their sockets.

Some people (like his wife, Janet) thought that since Ron was a hunter, he shouldn’t be disturbed by the evidence of a gunshot wound, but seeing an animal shot cleanly was different than that mess of Howard’s leg. It made Ron glad for the first time that a heart murmur had left him stateside during Vietnam. And it had been just the incentive Janet was looking for to convince him that he needed to carry a cell phone.

However, he kept it turned off. Otherwise, he’d have Janet calling every twenty minutes to ask him something trivial. She didn’t do this when he was at the office, he couldn’t complain about that, but she sure as hell thought it was okay to do it when he was hunting no matter how often he explained to her that a loud, shrilling sound scared away the deer.

“What if I need you?” she demanded, just like she’d been demanding for all the long years of their thirty-year marriage. She was a worrier by nature, predicting doom when their three kids trotted one by one off to nursery school, and making the same predictions years later when they fled the nest for colleges and jobs far away from home. She was a little black rain cloud; he’d sometimes called her that in the early years of their marriage when he saw her negativity as an amusing quirk and not a dominant and relentless force.

Janet was convinced that bad luck lurked around every corner where Ron always saw opportunity. People always said that opposites attract, but after thirty years he knew that opposites could drive each other away. Not that he’d consider divorce. He was offended by the very idea. Getting divorced wasn’t simply accepting defeat, it showed a fundamental flaw in character. He’d made a promise thirty years ago and by gum he would keep that promise, even if most days he wanted nothing more than to be left entirely alone.

He’d wished hard for that this morning while he got his gear together and Janet hovered around him quoting some morning TV news story about accidental shootings the first week of hunting season. Like he’d needed any reminder of Howard Sherman before breakfast.

He’d taken off without eating, carrying some foil-wrapped jelly toast she thrust into his hand along with a thermos of coffee. He’d kissed her because that was his job as a husband, and she’d pulled back from it complaining of being scratched by his beard, and then he’d pulled away in the Buick, waiting until the speck of her waving in the doorway vanished completely.

He drove from their comfortable split-level out to old Highway 87 feeling tense, and then his shoulders started to relax and his stomach unknotted as he took the turnoff for Sterling Forest, driving slowly up a long stretch of narrow paved roads until he’d found the lot where he always parked, the soaring forest spread around him like a playground.

It was coming on 12:45 and the toast was long gone, the foil a tight ball in his pocket. Ron’s stomach grumbled and he paused for a moment, thinking. He hadn’t take a shot yet, though he’d had his bead on a buck, his finger pulling back ever so gently on the trigger when a clattering of acorns spooked the creature.

The buck leapt high, white tail like a flag, and disappeared like a distance runner before Ron could do more than release the trigger.

Still, it wasn’t all about the success of the hunt and he figured he’d earned his lunch. He thought it would be nice to sit down by the river that ran from up in the mountains and down through Wickfield before connecting with the Hudson and joining the ocean.

Ten minutes of walking brought him to a spot above its bank, and there he spent another five minutes unloading his gear before he could sit down on a boulder, rifle at the ready, and unwrap the sandwiches he’d packed for himself the night before.

He took a bite of gummy ham and cheese and munched contentedly as he looked down at the silvery water spilling over brown rocks. It was a pretty sound, that rushing water, and he watched the colored leaves carried like little boats along it, some of them whisking abruptly out of sight, others caught in eddies around the rocks, spinning helplessly.

Once in a while something bigger, like a fallen branch, came by, and Ron liked to imagine how it had ended up in the water, either falling from a tree or being tossed there by somebody.

He finished half a sandwich, and was just starting on the second half when something new caught his eye. Something large and pale bobbed slowly down the sweep of silver, and came to rest against the rounded boulder further up on the far side. Ron squinted, but he couldn’t tell what it was. He dropped his sandwich and got up to take a better look, shading his eyes and stepping close to the edge.

The sun kept peeking in and out of the trees, and it was too far for him to get a clear look. Something white. Could it be a deer carcass? Who the hell would throw that in the river? Unless it had drowned in flooding and was just now being carried down from wherever it had decomposed.

Yet something about the shape wasn’t right for a deer. Too big to be any other animal and the wrong color for bear. What the hell was it?

Ron stepped back from the ledge and went to fetch his binoculars. They’d been a gift for Father’s Day this year from his son, who’d made sure to tell him all about the many features—fully coated, image stabilization. Ron was delighted to have a chance to really use them. He imagined the conversation they’d have about it as he stepped back to the edge, his boot slipping a little and sending a shower of flaky stone and pebbles raining down on the wildflowers growing in the shallow, sandy soil far below.

The binoculars had 10 x 50 magnification, and he twisted the knobs impatiently, zeroing in first on that huge boulder and then moving down, down, and there! That was it! It was still out of focus and all he could see was something large and pale, so he twisted the knob again. Worked beautifully, everything becoming sharp and clear, he’d sure have to tell Jim about that, and then he saw it clearly for the first time.

“Sweet Jesus!” It wasn’t the body of a deer, but it was a carcass.

The naked body of a young woman bobbed against the far side of the boulder. She was on her back, arms floating at her sides, legs almost straight. She could have been out for a swim, except her head seemed strangely bent on her neck and bits of bark and green algae had traced lacy patterns across her waxy skin and were caught in the long strands of dark blond hair streaming behind her.

Ron stared at the gently bobbing breasts and the dark triangle of hair further down, and looked away, ashamed. There was nothing grisly here, no dripping blood or gaping wounds, yet he retched in the dirt, splashing the stone with the force of his revulsion.

He scrambled for the phone while he was still retching, and he knew, even as he tapped 911 with a shaking hand, that he would never, ever come into these woods to hunt again.