What We Saw at Night (6 page)

Of course he was. That’s why he was ignoring me.

On day seven, I decided to capitalize on our shaken-ness.

Spending as much time in a hospital as we do, you learn a few things—namely that certain ER admittances must be recorded by the police, and while names are never given, you can deduce an identity from certain details: age, ethnicity, and reason for showing up in the first place. Juliet taught me how to access the police records the night we pushed Henry LeBecque into that open grave. (
Male Caucasian, 17 yrs old, intoxicated, admitted to Tabor Clinic ER for panic attack, 12:17
A.M
., November 1. Released 3:45
A.M
. after exam.)
I scoured the records for any sign of the woman with the gray
skin. But there were no matches. In fact, not a single woman had been admitted to the ER the night or morning of our little stunt. So if that guy with the blond lightning bolt had been trying to revive her, he must have succeeded.

On day eight, I found myself crying.

Why wouldn’t Juliet and Rob return my calls or texts? What had I done? Was I going to spend the entire summer—or worse, the rest of my life—without the two people who knew and understood me better than anyone in the world? That night, I even tried to sleep, which was a very weird feeling, trying to fall asleep without all the daytime sounds of Iron Harbor to provide my bedtime lullaby. I clung to the belief that Juliet and Rob were going through some variation of what I was going through, that both of them had to be missing me, but both of them were scared to talk about what we’d seen.

By that morning, crying felt like a job.

The word clicked in my brain.

It was summer. School was out. I should do what normal kids my age did. I decided to get a
real
job.

THE FUNNY THING: my own mother didn’t even need a job. We could have paid off our house and bought new clothes every season and gone to Italy in August on what my father sent. But for the very first time, I understood why my mother needed to work. She needed a goal, a distraction, a purpose.

Still, what could I do?

Literally, I had no talents. I could type people’s papers. I couldn’t work at Gitchee; Gideon lit the place like a hockey rink. I could be a server in a dark restaurant, like that one in California where the waiters were blind. None were dark
enough here. I could clean houses at night. I was good at harassing my little sister.…
A-ha
.

I decided I was a babysitter. I made advertisements.

REST EASY!
EXPERIENCED BIG SISTER
CAN BABYSIT AND CLEAN 4 U NIGHTS.
AMAZING REFERENCES

Okay. “Amazing” was pushing it. Not counting my mom, I had two: Gina and Dr. Andrew. I could add Juliet’s dad. He was a cop, although he’d never seen me do anything that required talent except paint my nails while eating popcorn.

I pressed send. Then I waited.

I GOT TWO calls that day: two more than I expected. There isn’t a lot of demand for sitters who only work the graveyard shift. One came from a single dad who was clearly drunk when he left the message. I didn’t call back and neither did he. The other came from a young woman, Tessa—a nurse at Divine Savior, no less, who worked midnights—with an infant named Tavish. (I had to ask twice if I was pronouncing it right. TA-vish.) She’d just moved to Iron Harbor into a building on Lakeshore Road. Although it couldn’t be the
same
building, as in
that
building (could it?) I decided to go and talk to her anyhow. We made a date for the following Tuesday.

And almost as soon as I hung up—at least that’s how it felt—Juliet called.

She sounded as chirpy as though we’d just spent the previous night on an online body-butter-buying binge.

“Rob and I went to Duluth to scout,” she said all in one breath. “We found some good stuff for us.”

I blinked. My throat caught. “May you be happy always,” I replied.

“It’s a long drive though,” I heard Rob chime in from the background. “You take an hour or more to get there, you don’t have much time.”

“But once you find spaces for traces, you have places to go to,” Juliet added. “You don’t have to search. You just sing.”

“And you have the soul of the poet!” I managed. “What about me?”

“We didn’t think you’d be into it,” Juliet said.

Right, but you were into each other
.

“So do you want to be into it?” Juliet said.

“Well, let’s see,” I said. “I’m busy. Cheer practice is Monday and Wednesday.…” Then I exploded: “It’s been ten days since we did that building but who’s counting and neither one of you bothered to do so much as text me more than five times, and that was only Rob! Why should I want to do anything with you?”

“We love you,” Juliet said.

I hung up.

THAT NIGHT, I found myself in the Jeep with Rob and Juliet. We weren’t going to do Parkour. We were going swimming.

Normally we’d borrow a boat from the snazzy side of Ghost Lake. But no one owned a boat that fit our needs: conveniently located and not very well tied up. We ended up in the bass boat owned by the gym teacher, Mr. Callahan—one of the few boats we used with the owner’s permission.

Once we were out in deep water, Rob and I jumped in. We gasped as we splashed. It’s never warm. It’s so cold in fall that you could die, like the people on the Titanic. In summer, it’s
cold enough to be a shock. The water always smells of pocket change, like old nickels and dimes, because of all the minerals in it. Minerals are why there are beaches on Lake Superior that have inches of black sand on them, and agates and garnets and gold that old people are always finding because this was all once a volcano. There was also a lot of glacier action and earthquakes and such that, for me, it was God’s way of saying,
This is not land meant for habitation, people! Move to the Twin Cities
 … but what do I know?

“I want to try Tabor Oaks again,” said Juliet, rocking back in forth on the boat’s little bench. Rob and I treaded water, teeth chattering, avoiding each other’s eyes. “They’ve put floors down now on the other building, to climb up.…”

“Forget to call me that night,” I said. “Like you have the last two weeks.”

“Fine,” Juliet said. “We’ll do it. It’s a good course.”

“Who’s we?” I spat, enraged. “Am I not part of ‘we’?”

“It’s good in a semi-sick way,” Rob said, ignoring me. “The course.”

“Somebody lives in that place now,” Juliet said. “It was probably just, like, the mover, or the new owner’s brother or something and his girlfriend.”

“How do you know?” I demanded.

She shrugged.

Again, later, long after, I would close my eyes in the dark, and see Juliet’s legs, the spokes of a starry-silvery-blue wheel, glowing in the dark that first night above Gitchee Pizza, and wonder,
how-did-she-know-how-did-she-know?

“Maybe it was some crazy drifter who dragged some random girl into an empty apartment on a stormy night,” Rob said.

“How would he get in there?” Juliet answered, seriously.

“I was kidding,” Rob muttered.

Juliet shook her head. “Rape is a crime of opportunity.”

“It isn’t usually, in fact,” Rob said. “You should know better, Juliet. Your dad being a cop and all. Some rapists plan very carefully. The smart ones do. They stalk people for weeks and months. If they’re really crazy, they work up this whole thing where the girl is coming out of her house—”

“You read too many books, boy detective,” Juliet interrupted.

“It’s a fact,” Rob said. Their eyes met. They both smiled. “I deal just in facts, ma’am.”

He ducked under the surface. Part of me hoped he would stay there.

THE NEXT NIGHT, I had my job interview. I needed my mom’s car. It was eight o’clock, and there was still plenty of light left in the sky, so I wore a ball cap with my ponytail poking through the gap, and a long-sleeved shirt.

The speed limit in Iron Harbor is 30. My mother’s car is a six-seat Toyota mini-van. Very used. But very sturdy.

“Be careful,” Mom warned. “No speeding.”

“Not even any drag racing,” I said.

“Be back by—”

“Morning. Yes, Mother. Do you know how many other mothers are saying, now, ‘Miss, I don’t want you out one minute after sunrise!’?”

“Don’t change the subject Do you think you should put gloves on? I can still see everything. It’s
light
out.”

“I already look like some old lady in an English mystery novel, Mom.”

She started laughing. “You do. You look like that woman on an old TV show who was always solving mysteries by
herself. I used to think, it was this little town in Maine and people were dying there like flies. How could there be a murder every week in a town that small?”

How, indeed?

I dumped my dinner plate in the sink, hugged Angie until her feet were off the floor and she was literally unable to breathe, and left my mother ranting at the beef stroganoff.

Out on Island Road, I turned off at Red Beach, just to look at the water, since I was too early for my appointment at 9
P.M
. The young mom had a certifying class, and it ended late. I’d learned I was going to meet Tessa’s mother, too, also a nurse—and of course, Tavish, the baby boy. I stopped for a while and just breathed. I rarely do this, but Island Road is a little strip that leads to the natural turn onto Lakeshore Road. That night, the lake was too breathtakingly beautiful to miss. Any scrap of daylight counts if you’re protected.

Some of the beaches are black sand. Others, besides being black, have particles of red in them. The other half of the people who work in Iron Harbor—those who don’t work at the clinic—are on the boats, the ones that carry iron ore all over the world. The town tries to cover up the pit mines with fast-growing trees now, birch and maple. My mother says this once was a paradise with everything a person could want (especially if the person wanted mosquitoes). In any other country, Lake Superior would not be considered a lake, but an inland sea.

When I tried to pull away from Red Beach, some asshole practically sideswiped me. So much for the peaceful feeling. I figured he had to be from Chicago, in the kind of Italian convertible guys use as metaphors for certain parts of their anatomy (or to overcompensate for the lack thereof). I took
a moment to breathe, to collect myself. The moon was on the horizon, laying down a strip of gold.

Finally I drove to the address.

Looking back, I have no idea why I chose not to acknowledge the connection until I pulled into the parking lot. (Actually, I do. I was overwhelmingly obsessed with what was going on between my two best friends.) Just to make sure that there weren’t two vintage condo buildings on the bluff right next to a modern condo building under construction, I pulled into what would be the lot of the building next door.

It was Tabor Oaks, of course.

Just staring across the pavement at the small lighted address panel next to the foyer door—not even up at that balcony—my heart thumped again. I thought of the platinum streak on the back of that otherwise dark head of hair. Why would he dye his hair in such a weird way? Maybe he wanted to be a blond.
Blondie
, I thought.

Maybe Blondie was Tessa’s husband. Maybe he was having an affair.

Talking to myself, aloud, like a crazy person, I said, “Allie, chill. Calm down.”

At that moment, I had a disquieting thought. I didn’t want to be here, but I was here. What were the odds of ending up in the same place? (The odds were actually not that bad, given that Two Harbors has a permanent population of six hundred people.) But what were the odds I’d get a call from a person who lived at the place where I had seen something so creepy? I stared up at the penthouse. There was someone living there. That whole floor must have cost a big dime, given the private beach and astonishing view. I almost didn’t hear the voice calling.

“Hello!”

I didn’t move.

“Are you Allie Kim?” The voice floated down from above. “Ring at 4B.” I looked up. It was an older woman, with short silvery hair, waving from behind a screen on the third floor, holding a little boy, who was madly waving, too. She said, “Crier!”

Was she talking about the baby? Who was a crier? I should have trusted my instincts and bolted.

I glanced around the parking area. There were about six cars in the ten slots. I even recognized a few of them, although I couldn’t have named the owners. Finally I forced my wobbly legs to march up to the door. There were ten address slots; except for two handwritten names, all but two were printed in uniform type. One of the handwritten names, the one for 4B, read CRYER.

I almost giggled. Tessa had never bothered to tell me her last name, or if she had, I hadn’t remembered. I needed to focus a little harder if I was going to pull off this babysitting gig for real.

The name for the penthouse, scribbled on a piece of envelope, read RENALDI. The thought that I might come face to face with “Blondie,” if he lived there, filled my throat with hot and undigested Stroganoff. But I shoved the thought aside and pushed the glowing 4B. The front doors buzzed open in return. I forced myself to relax as the elevator ascended and I got off on the fourth floor. The door at the far end of the hall opened, and the woman with short silvery hair popped out, holding the boy—who was by then yelling his head off.

She smiled as she closed the door behind her. “Are you from New York?”

“What?”

“You’re wearing a hat and sunglasses at night.”

I pulled them off. “No, I …”
Try the truth
, my mother once said.
It catches people off guard
. “I have XP. It’s a genetic thing.…”

Her eyes widened.

“You’re Jackie Kim’s girl.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yes.”

“I know her from work.”

“Oh, wow! Well, maybe you know then XP isn’t contagious. Parents of kids with XP insist that they wear the seven veils if they go out—”

“I apologize,” said the woman. “I acted like
I
was from New York. That was very rude! My name is Teresa Kaminski. I’m Tessa’s mother. And this is his majesty, Tavish.” The little baby abruptly reached for me and started to giggle. Without thinking, I let him come into my arms and pull my ball cap off my head.