Myles winced. “The things you say sometimes…,” he said, shaking his head. He rested his palm on top of her head, firm and heavy. “I hate that you had to go through this. And now Liza and Art—damn. It sounds like he cracked, Angie.”
Angela’s voice grew soft. “I saw him. He did crack.” She paused, deciding that wasn’t quite right; it was accurate, but it wasn’t enough. “Something made him crack.”
Gently, Myles’s fingers massaged her scalp. “I’m sorry you had to see that. I really am.”
“Well, the good part is, I was there for Liza. I keep remembering how Liza tried to put a sweater on me that day we found Corey. In July! I thought,Why does she keep doing that? Then she told me I was shaking, and I was. Head to foot.” Until today, watching Liza’s shaking, she’d forgotten about that, another misplaced memory from that day.
“Liza was lucky to have you there. We’re all lucky.”
Amazingly, Angela realized that the light dance of Myles’s fingertips on her scalp was setting off a burning sensation across her head. Shit. Even now, her hormones couldn’t keep quiet.
“I’ll check your water,” she said.
“No, leave it for now,” Myles said, closing his eyes.
If she weren’t so tired, if she had spent her day another way, Angela would have lost hope of respecting another woman’s dominion tonight. And even with things as they were, she couldn’t be sure of herself. She was having a hard time thinking of reasons to stay inside her clothes. She’d learned how to drown her sorrows in sex a long time ago, as a child. Except that sins were punished, weren’t they? Sins were punished, and sometimes punishment came without sins. Sometimes punishment just came.
“Can you see it yet, Myles?” Angela said. Speaking the words gave her goose bumps.
He opened his eyes, gazing at her to try to understand her meaning. Then, his head fell back against the headrest. “Yeah. I’m seeing something. Corey first. June McEwan tries to strangle her brother. Rick Leahy walks into a logging truck, grinning all the while. Now, Art drowns his son. A series of violent, irrational acts, like a slow mass hysteria. But what does it mean? What’s causing it? That’s what I don’t know.” Myles rubbed his temples, sighing.
No, he didn’t see it yet, Angela realized, disappointed. She would have to walk him through slowly. “It’s a curse, Myles,” she said. “It started with a possession gone wrong in 1929.”
Myles patted her head. “Listen to yourself, doll-baby. I can’t print that in a newspaper.”
“Does everything you believe have to be something you can print in a newspaper?”
“People are scared, Angie. They want to know what’s going on.”
“I’m just talking to Myles Fisher. What doyou believe is going on?”
Myles sat up straight, folding his hands between his knees. He looked reluctant to speak. “Angie, I wasn’t going to tell you this…”
Before he could finish, Angela felt herself withering. She thought of the song fromThe Wiz, “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” She was bearing up all right under the scope of her terrible knowledge so far, but she was full up.
“That story Liza told you, the one about the bathtub, isn’t true,” Myles said.
“How do you know that?” she said.
“In 1929, only one of Hal Booth’s six children was still living at home. The rest were all grown men, long gone. The youngest was his daughter, Maddie, who would have been sixteen.”
“Maddie…,” Angela said, on the verge of recognizing the name.
“That’s Ma. Her maiden name was Maddie Booth. Hal Booth was her father, and she would have been the one in the story. But she never said a word about it to me, not in thirty years, and Ma told me a lot of family history, especially once she started getting sick. She wanted me to know everything, the good and the bad. I don’t believe that bathtub incident happened, Angie—not to her, and not to her brothers. It’s apocryphal, some kind of town legend. And I’m worried that if you spend too much time chasing after old ghost stories, you’ll miss your chance to find the truth.”
Myles’s adoptive mother had been the one in the bathtub! It had never occurred to Angela that the child would still be living, but Ma Fisher was at least ninety. “She might not remember,” Angela said. “After the demon was cast out.”
Myles’s look was doleful, and she understood. He thought she was cracking up, too. If his mass hysteria theory was true, Angela was the perfect candidate as the next one to take a kid fishing, or to try waltzing with a truck. She didn’t expect it to be easy to bring anyone with her where she was going, but she hoped Myles would be the one. “You don’t consider it strange timing that this happened theday after Liza told me that story?” Angela said, slowly.
“Of course it’s strange timing. It’s all strange. But that doesn’t make the story true.”
“Would you believe me if I told you I smelled it today?” Angela said.
“You smelled what?”
“Whatever it is, the thing that made Art do that. I smelled it on him, Myles. We were on the stairs, and no one else could smell it. But I’m telling you, it was a smell that could not be missed. It was all over Art. Before Rob opened that bedroom door, I knew Art had done something. I smelled it on him. Iknew.” Angela saw concern creep into Myles’s eyes, which grew more alert. She must sound like a mental patient. And shewas a mental patient, wasn’t she?
“Adrenaline?” Myles suggested. “Art was nervous. He was probably secreting…”
Angela shook her head back and forth a long time. “No, Myles. This smell was something not human. Not living. Something from another place.”
He stroked her face with sad eyes. “I can’t follow you down that road, Angie. There’s almost always another answer. You just can’t process how monstrous this has all been.”
“But what if it’s real, and it’s right in front of us?”
“If I thought it was real, I’d find out how to fight it. I’d come up with a plan.”
“I have. I need to see Ma Fisher.”
“I knew you would say that. You can try talking to her, but you won’t get far. She’s lucid once in a blue moon, and I treasure those moments. But she hardly speaks. It’s gibberish.”
“I should visit her anyway.”
“Fine. Come by after I get off work tomorrow or the next day, if I have any brain cells left. It’ll be a good diversion. I’ll make dinner. I don’t think I’ve ever cooked for you. I’m not bad in the kitchen. Cuban dishes mostly.” His sentences were hurried, mumbling. Myles was exhausted, a sleeping man holding a conversation. Angela wondered if he’d had a drink on the way to her room.
“I’m sure you’re good at anything you put your mind to,” she said.
At that, Myles smiled. In the candlelight, Myles’s face looked like polished ebony, his teeth the white keys of a new piano. He was probably glad to be done with the crazy portion of the conversation, the part that made him wonder if she was all right.
Their gaze suddenly felt too long for comfort. Dangerous.
“Your water’s ready by now,” she said, getting up. She felt his eyes watching her walk across the room, and she wondered if the candles gave enough light for him to appreciate the curves of her buttocks through the silk pants. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath, which he could probably see full well. She thought about slipping out of her pants while she walked, but when she tried to fantasize about straddling Myles on the chair, all she could see was Glenn Brunell’s purple, swollen tongue. Then the memory of that smell came back.
Angela sought Myles’s face behind her in the mirror as she stood over the sink, hoping to drive away Glenn’s face and the knowledge of how evil smelled up close. “I’m glad you came,” she said. “I needed company. I just hope you won’t feel guilty tomorrow, Myles.”
“If I had a reason to feel guilty,” he said, “I wouldn’t have come.”
Touché. Angela poked his tea bag with the stirrer in the mug, irritated. Had
he trained himself not to look at her that way at all anymore, purely out of loyalty to someone he had dated for six months?
“Luisah’s not too happy with me right now,” Myles said, his voice thin.
Angela turned around, facing him. Myles was wrapping his necktie around one of his hands, agitated. “What do you mean?”
“Last night, she asked me the same question you did. If I’m in love with her.”
“And?”
Myles rubbed the corner of one eye with his index finger, quickly flicking his finger away. “I guess ‘I don’t know’ wasn’t the answer she was looking for. She said she’d like to get married. She’s been expecting me to ask. She asked me if I loved her, and I told the truth.”
Angela cringed for the woman, and for him. “What happened?”
“I think we’re taking a break from each other right now.”
Angela managed to feel sad for Myles, and a shiver of recollection came to her: Yesterday, watching her tree taken apart, she had told Art how much she hated to lose anything, and he had tried to comfort her. Sweet Jesus Christ.
Art was in jail. Art had drowned Glenn. New numbness spread across her chest.
“I screwed up,” Myles said. “I wasn’t aware enough, I got lazy, and I hurt her. And I hurt Art’s mom, too. I had the power to cause her a little less pain, to give her a few more hours to adjust before we went with that story, and I couldn’t do it. Because it’s news. So, some people right in Sacajawea who’ve known Art their whole lives are going to hear about it first when they open their newspaper in the morning, and that’s going to make it hurt worse. What Art’s mom called me was exactly right, word for word. I am a slick, opportunistic asshole.”
“Don’t believe that for a minute,” Angela said. “You’re not really all that slick.”
Myles smiled at her joke, but it was a tired smile. He wouldn’t have come here tonight if he’d had anywhere else to go, Angela realized. He was as opportunistic as she was, but that was all right. They were a matched pair. Quietly, she brought Myles his mug of tea, which he sipped from once before resting it on the seat cushion between his thighs. The coffeemaker heated the water barely beyond lukewarm, so he wouldn’t have to worry about scalding any tender parts of his body. Angela sat at the edge of the bed, studying Myles’s face, his electric blue shirt’s radiance against his richly colored skin, and the mug between his legs.
“When I wake up tomorrow,” he said, “I want this week to have been a bad dream.”
“Amen,” she said. “Except for right now.”
“Yes. We’ll keep this part. But only this part.”
They stared at each other a long time, and this time the gaze didn’t make her nervous. She didn’t feel a need to fill it, hide it, or question it. It justwas, and she enjoyed it. After a time—a long time—Myles closed his eyes. Then, his head drooped. Almost immediately, she heard his breathing draw out as he fell asleep. She’d forgotten people could fall asleep that fast.
Angela took in the sight of him for a while, studying his nuances in the candlelight. She could smell his cologne, weak after a long day, still clinging to him. His shoes were as shiny as Rob’s had been. He wore a silver wristwatch that looked sharp but not ostentatious. His skin was the color of dark, fertile soil. All in all, he was a marvelous sight, sleeping in her chair.
Still facing Myles, Angela curled up at the foot of the bed and closed her eyes. She had a new plan for getting to sleep: Whenever the ugly pictures came to her head and tried to drag her back to Glenn’s room—and then to the wine cellar and its bloody floor—she would open her eyes and see Myles there. She’d waited a long time for so simple a privilege. Angela would be able to open her eyes at any hour during the night and find a man she loved close enough to touch.
Nineteen
THURSDAY
MYLESFISHERawakened bleary-eyed in the chair in Angie’s hotel room at six-thirty with a bear of a cramp along the right side of his body. When he opened his eyes, he felt a creeping sense of unreality. He was in a strange room. He was wearing last night’s clothes. He must have slept for more than four hours, but he felt more tired now than he had when he’d come.
And he should not be here. That was the worst of it.
He saw Angie sleeping at the foot of the bed in gold pajamas, finally at peace. A line of sunlight from a crack in the curtains spilled across her face below her eyelids, making her cheekbones jump out at him, and he felt blood throb to his groin. Her face looked as soft as a child’s. Her shirt was loose at the top, and her bosom was visible where her breasts parted, an intimate view. Myles looked longer than he wanted to, then turned his eyes elsewhere.
It would take everything in him to stand up and kiss Angie’s cheek good-morning and walk outside to his car, rather than climb onto the bed and spoon himself behind her until she woke up and realized he was there. Maybe the bed had been his secret motive when he’d gotten here, but in the daylight, he felt a sobering dose of reality: Angie was going through a hellish time, and she was unstable. When Angie was unstable, she ripped his life to shreds. He should not be alone in a hotel room with her. Myles talked to himself that way for ten minutes, staring at Angie while she slept, trying not to look at the swell of her peeking bosom.
She’d committed herself. She hadn’t said so yet, but Myles was almost sure of it. When Liza mentioned the rumor that Angie had gone to a mental hospital more than a year ago, he had written diligently, trying to let her know she could confide in him if she wanted to. But she never had. He hoped she’d been able to get herself together after Corey’s death, even if she wasn’t willing to accept help from friends, but she was still troubled, as far as he could see. The timing was wrong, yet again.
Myles walked to the edge of the bed and kissed Angie’s cheek. He could smell her hair, a coconut fragrance in the oil she used. When his lips touched her, Angie stirred, opened her eyes. She smiled, seeing him. Her sleepy smile was unguarded. “What time is it?” she said.
“After six. It’s time for me to go, Angie.”
She looked disappointed, but he felt a surge of resolve. He’d been playing big brother to Angie since they were fifteen, even when he wasn’t feeling brotherly. He was beginning to understand that a brother was all he was supposed to be to her. Maybe that wasn’t so bad.
“Have breakfast with me,” she said. “Stay.”
“No, doll-baby. I shouldn’t have stayed this long. I need to get home to change.”
Angela’s smile grew coy. “I knew you’d feel guilty, Myles. You’re so predictable.”
“Just a little,” he said.
“Why?”
Instead of answering, Myles touched her forehead and smoothed her hair against her scalp, then tugged her ear gently. Touching her was fascinating, even the tiny hole in her earlobe where the needle had pierced her. “As much as I’d like to join you in bed this morning, Angela Marie, I’m afraid we’re not cut out to be buddies who sleep together.”
She looked surprised. “Who said that’s all we’d be?”
“Anything else wouldn’t be smart.”
“I don’t believe in always doing the smart thing,” she said.
There wasn’t enough time in a single morning to respond to that. She’d missed the past twenty-two years, so she hadn’t seen the wreckage: His trips to the therapist at Columbia because he hadn’t been able to sleep for two full years after her withdrawal. How he’d married Marta after college, enticed by her aspects that reminded him of Angie—the worst, stormiest parts. Angie didn’t know how close he’d come to loathing them both. Marta had made herself at home in Angie’s shadow, and now it was a shadow with no name. It followed him. He’d just lost Luisah somewhere in that shadow, he was certain.
“Doing the smart thing is my new policy, Angie. Blame it on age.”
“You think I’m a psycho, don’t you?” she said. Her eyes were earnest.
He smiled. “No.”Psycho wasn’t the right word.Broken was better; and Angie’s k
ind of broken was communicable, practically in the air.
“You promise?”
He kissed her lips, a peck. “I promise. I have to go. Call me if you need me.”
Outside of the hotel, Myles managed a dull, exasperated laugh. Last week, he’d congratulated himself on the tidy state of his life: friends, a girlfriend, a job he enjoyed more than he’d expected, his reunion with nature in the Pacific Northwest. It was hard to be with Ma Fisher, harder than he’d thought it would be, but experience made it easier all the time. Lying in bed with Luisah after lovemaking two nights ago, he’d told her howright his life felt. Now, Myles chided himself for his blindness. He’d been offering to share his life with her, without ever saying so.
A dying mother tends to cloud your judgment, he thought.
Outside of the hotel lobby, the morning’s newspaper was already waiting in the news box, sandwiched between the PortlandOregonian box and a stand for theNickel classified paper. He fished a quarter out of his pocket, but he could see the headline through the blue news box’s plastic shield:SACAJAWEA MAYOR HELD IN DEATH OF SON, 8 .
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