by Larry Crane
She parked at the side of the road. The area had clearly been built up only recently. The roads were newly paved with macadam, and good size houses, not mansions, were widely spaced along Fardale and up into a side road. The trees had been brought in and planted. Gavin was right. It was something like Naperville—only in Naperville, there were a lot more houses, some older. There was a school and a distinct downtown. Was it safer here than back in Illinois? Here, kids going to school would definitely be riding a bus. Here, to get anywhere on foot, you’d have to be walking along the side of a paved road. A for sale sign was planted in the yard beside the car. She drove out of the area the same way she’d come in. She worked her way through the towns of Wyckoff and Midland Park and Ridgewood. The traffic exponentially grew the farther east she got— kind of like driving east from Naperville toward Chicago. She got to the apartment in Weehawken an hour before Gavin got home. “What’d you find?” he asked, as he started to shed his business clothes. “I found Mahwah—even Fardale Avenue. Isn’t that where you were looking?”
“Exactly. You’d have to drive me to the train station, you know.”
“Okay. But, it’s nice. A little crazy though. Why would anyone want to trade in their perfectly good house and their perfectly good job in Illinois for an almost identical situation in New Jersey?”
“Because anyone might need a fresh start,” Gavin said. “Maybe it’s just that I need a fresh start.”
Not long after, Marcella and Gavin stood on the new sod front yard on Fardale Avenue in Mahwah—the spot she’d driven to and parked by when she was looking around—watching the men shuttle furniture from the moving van to the house. Their neighbor came over with a pie. Her name was Philomena. Her denim bib overalls were caked with mud from the knee down. She wore gardener gloves that rode over her denim work-shirt sleeves halfway to the elbow, and a wide-brimmed straw hat.
“The apples are from the yard. Not this year. Last. I put them up expecting there’d be some use I could make of them. You’re it. Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said. “I’m not dressed like this all the time. It’s just that there’s someplace I need to be. Just kidding. If you’re like everyone else in the neighborhood, you’re coming in from out of state.”
“Illinois. The Chicago area. I’m Marcella,” she said. “And this is my husband, Gavin.”
“Drew’s my husband. You won’t see much of him. He’s on the telephone most of the day tending to the business. Pork Bellies. He’s an expert. He trades on the telephone. I thought I’d come over with a little welcoming gift,” she said, offering the pie. “The rest of the neighbors are kind of standoffish, but I’m working on them.”
“Oh, how nice. Thank you,” Marcella replied.
“Enjoy. It’s pretty here, isn’t it?”
“Very,” Marcella said.
“Brand new. Everything. It’s amazing. They carved the whole subdivision out of what used to be Sam Braen’s sandpit. Trees and all. Before it was Sam Braen’s, it was a big showy estate. It’s got a bit of a mystery to it. Murder. The famous Edgar Smith case. Maybe you'd rather not hear about it. Probably not, in fact. But,I’m afraid I’m a wee bit obsessive-compulsive about the subject, meaning it’s definitely going to come out sooner or later. So… This is where he killed the girl,” Philomena said, pointing to the flower garden at the side of their garage.
“There, I said it. I'm sorry. Took place in 1957. It was huge,” Philomena went on. “Front page for weeks. This kid Smith was convicted of first degree—sentenced to the electric chair. He’s still in jail. Of course, he’s not a kid any more. They’re saying he somehow got William F. Buckley in his hip pocket—along with a bunch of high priced Washington lawyers. He’ll be getting out. He’s going to get away with it. Well, I've bombarded you enough for one day. Enjoy the pie. You might want to sprinkle a little cinnamon on top.”
By ten o’clock at night, they had the bedroom set up enough to sleep in it, had washed down half the apple pie with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and collapsed in a sodden heap. But Marcella couldn’t sleep. Murder. Sometime around three in the morning, she slipped out the front door in her robe. The sod was cool and wet. She went immediately to the flower garden.
She pulled the robe tighter around herself and stood still and listened. In the blackness she imagined the way the area might have looked before the subdivision went in. It was a sandpit? She pictured a mostly flat expanse, a quarry-like pit, and mounds, all of it devoid of trees or houses or anything much at all. She conjured a struggle, a scream, then nothing but heavy breathing. Nothing physical touched her.
No spooks. No phantom fingers. But it was Hannah she pictured as the murdered girl. Hannah wasn’t murdered. Certainly not murdered fifteen years ago in a state halfway across the country from Naperville. But, Marcella could feel it, therefore it was real. They hadn’t bumbled into this place randomly. There was a reason—the murdered girl had found a welcoming home, and she set up headquarters inside Marcella as she stood by the flower garden in the cold night—not in her heart but close-by—in the spleen where she could seethe.
I’ve always believed in a spirit world, she thought. Before Hannah’s calamity, spirits popped up out of nowhere as whimsical happenings to joke about. Funny or not, they were still real. There’s no other way to explain my lost earring that reappeared years later when I was at Carleton—falling from the ceiling and hitting my shoulder while I was absorbed in the stacks at the library. Nothing could convince the skeptics though.
Then the number one skeptic of all time, Gavin, saw two girls on the side of the road as we drove through a snowstorm just three years ago. The children were dressed in old-fashioned snow suits, the kind that are all one piece, with a zipper down the front, with matching caps that covered their head and snapped under the chin, the kind that no kid wore anymore. One girl was dressed in green and the other in blue. Such detail, so vivid. And coming from Gavin. When I insisted he turn around and go back, the children were nowhere to be seen. Of course, Gavin blew it off, saying it was his eyes playing tricks on him. That what he actually saw was a couple of traffic cones. That’s one explanation. Mine: it was time folding back over itself—and the girls were real kids from an earlier time.
So many things were piling up. She’d seen Hannah with her own eyes just now, out in the darkness, standing still, dressed the same, with that sad, condemning expression on her face. She’d seen the skin-walker mama coy dog atop the mesa. And how about the disk on the ceiling? She’d seen that a couple of times, the wavering egg-like thing. Then, there was this whole series of events that felt pre-ordained—Gavin zeroing in on this house, and she driving straight to it, and Philomena and her story of murder and the girl.
How can this not be connected to Hannah? Things happen for a reason. Gavin came to this spot and so did I—of all the places in the area. We were drawn here. It’s too relevant to us to dismiss—bad things happening to a girl like this. To ignore it is to be brain-dead. It is connected. But, I don’t need doubts about my sanity flying around. Can’t there just be this closeness, if that’s all it is, for me to hang on to? Can’t it just be a reminder that others don’t see? Isn’t everyone entitled to some comfort, no matter where it comes from? It may be just wild dreams, all a silly lie. But it also may be real. Hannah merged back into my body, the body in which she was conceived and from which she was born.
Chapter 14
In the morning, Marcella awoke in an empty bed. She rolled over and rubbed at her eyes. Hannah stood at the foot of the bed, wearing the same dress she wore that terrible morning months before when she went missing. The expression on her face indicated she would go on waiting if it took forever, but she didn’t speak. Marcella rubbed her eyes and when she focused again, Hannah was gone.
Gavin had gone to town and now was back with donuts and coffee. They cleared boxes of books from the coffee table in the living room and sat together on the couch to eat.
“You got up in the middle of the night,” Gavin
said. “Did you hear something go bump?”
“It was what the neighbor said,” Marcella replied. “The murder. I can’t believe the way stuff keeps piling up. How can we come halfway across the country to escape something awful of our own and fall right into the middle of this?” She was careful not to use the word spirit with Gavin. She stood and went to the front window with her paper coffee cup.
Gavin snatched a donut out of the box. “This what?” he asked.
“This sadness. Some girl murdered out there.”
“It’s not our sadness. Anyway it was a long time ago.”
“The year 1957 is not a long time ago. Why isn’t it our sadness?” she asked.
“Sadness is sadness? Okay. You’re right. It’s all weird and my fault. I found this place. I would never have—.”
Marcella interrupted. “Is it worse to know what happened or to know nothing?”
“I don’t know, Marce,” Gavin said. He went to the window and stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “It’s probably better to know nothing. I can’t imagine seeing our baby girl, dead. Ever.”
“You think she’s dead?”
“God, no.”
“Do you see that we can’t put her out of our minds? Even for a second?”
“Of course I do.”
“That girl out there cannot be ours, is not ours, but it feels to me as if she might as well be our Hannah. Allow me that. Tell me you’ll help me keep Hannah alive in our thoughts at least, Gavin,” she said, taking his hands in hers.
“I promise,” he said, pressing his face into her hair.
“I have to pursue this. I want to know more. I feel so hollow knowing absolutely nothing. A person doesn’t just vanish from the Earth.”
“Hannah, you’re saying?” Gavin said.
“Yes. We know nothing, and it’s impossible to even guess what happened. All we can do is wonder, and think the worst, or even to think the best—that she’s still out there, alive. But we don’t know for sure. It’s like a bad burn that won’t heal. I hate not knowing. But, with this girl, this other girl, there’s information waiting to be discovered. We can know. At least it’s something I can work on. Something I can do.”
“What do you want to discover about her? She lived, she was murdered. That’s all I need to know.”
“If no one cares to know what happened, it’s as if she just vanished—like Hannah did. It’s not fair.”
“Fair? It’s not fair that someone murdered her, of course. But that person is known. He’s in prison where he belongs. And that is fair.”
“Gavin, when I die. When I leave this earth, I want people to know what happened to me, exactly what happened—even if it’s as simple as: ‘She just didn’t wake up this morning. She didn’t suffer, there was no pain.’ The end is understandable and natural. It’s fair and square. Even a car accident or drowning. It’s horrible. But it’s understandable. But, murder is not normal life. Even if the murderer is known. It’s up to us to learn exactly what transpired. It’s only fair.”
Gavin grasped her shoulders and turned her around to face him. “Marce, tell me that you know that this girl is not Hannah—that by some weird reverse incarnation or something she’s become our baby in your mind. Tell me that. Okay?”
“Okay,” Marcella said, hoping the expression on her face did not betray her true thoughts. I’m not going crazy. I’ll humor you because you’re so sure that all these feelings I have are weird, but even if they are weird, they’re mine and make me feel a little better. So there’s something good that comes out of them. If you won’t give me that, I’ll just have to take it.
“Good,” he said. “You can relax a little then because, as you say, there are sources of all the information there is to know about this girl and what happened to her. Right? You can look it all up.”
“I guess so,” she said.
Gavin turned and surveyed the jumble of boxes littering the living room. “Some of these can just go down in the basement until we figure out what we want to do with all this stuff.”
“I wrote on the outside what’s inside each of the boxes,” Marcella said.
“We’ll need a knife,” he said, disappearing into the kitchen. When he returned to the living room, Marcella quickly turned away from the window she had moved to, hoping he didn’t notice. Gavin cut through the tape that sealed the top box of one of the stacks labelled ‘nuts and bolts.’ “Oh hell, it’s just a bunch of hand tools, nails and screws, a whole snarl of wire and stuff like that,” he said. “It doesn’t belong in here.” He picked up the box and carried it through the hallway to the garage door. Marcella followed him and stopped in the doorway.
Gavin put the box on the workbench. He began to look around at the dozen or so cardboard boxes stacked on the concrete floor. He approached the air compressor in the corner, took up the power cord and found an outlet for the plug.
Typical, she thought. He’s flitting from one thing to the next in his domain, the garage. Did the compressor survive the move? Obviously can’t trust the labels. What’s really in this box or that one? A million thoughts competing for his attention, and here I am with my one-track mind.
Marcella found the switch for the automatic door opener and flicked it. She watched the left one of the double doors roll up flat against the ceiling. The air compressor sprung to life, and Gavin tested it, directing the air hose nozzle at the floor. He turned it off and shifted his attention to the table saw. Marcella glided over to the open garage door.
She looked back at Gavin as he pressed the toggle switch on the saw. It erupted into a loud whine, and he quickly turned it off, and moved to the gasoline lawn mower. He was twisting the cap on the gas tank when she slipped outside. She looked up at the house across the street, turned to quickly look back into their garage, and then hurriedly crossed over to the other side. She went to the back door of Philomena’s house.
“Hi there,” Philomena called out. She was kneeling in a flower bed.
“Oh, I didn’t see you,” Marcella said, approaching.
“I don’t envy you all your work getting things straightened away. It took us a month to sort things out.”
“The pie was absolutely delicious. We devoured half of it last night,” Marcella said.
“I’m glad you like it.”
“Philomena, I wonder if I could ask you something.”
“Sure. Anything,” Philomena said, getting to her feet and tugging at her gloves.
“What we were talking about yesterday. It’s been on my mind.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, Marcella. I’m terribly sorry. I really am. The minute I meet you, I’m telling you all about our unusual neighborhood. And now I’ve caused you to have nightmares. I’ve been a little lonely, and here I am, losing another chance for a friendship. It’s just something I can’t ignore, unlike everybody else around here. Tell me, if you unknowingly bought the house where some bloody massacre took place, wouldn’t that fact permeate the whole area? It’s history.
“Uh-oh, there I go again with the graphic details. I’m basically shunned around here, and it’s because I had the impertinence to bring up the subject that this is the very place where the most sensational event that has happened in this county in two hundred years happened. It was front page news for weeks, and it’s coming up again. Just tell me to shut up and I will.”
“I don’t want you to shut up about it, Philomena. I’m interested.”
“Thank you. Drew and I come up with a quarter of a million dollars for our dream house here, and within a month of moving in, we find out it’s sort of haunted. We’ve been here for almost a year now. We’re not moving away. We couldn’t afford it. We’re stuck. So, what do we do? Have electroshock treatments to rid us of the facts? Or find out as much as we can, and turn the facts in a different direction—maybe find a way to shift the spotlight away from Edgar Smith and onto Victoria Zielinski—maybe even honor her memory or something. Wouldn’t that be nice? It certainly would be dif
ferent. I just know that refusing to accept the facts isn’t making them go away.
“So. Yes. The Edgar Smith case. Pardon me for going on about it right off the bat like I did. But I’m actually really pleased that you’ve approached me to learn more rather than running back to your house and slamming the door in my face. Most of the rest of the neighborhood wants to avoid the subject like the plague. As if that’s going to protect their investment.”
“If it’d been a hundred years ago or something, it’d be easy to pass off as an interesting little tidbit of history. But, 1957, that’s close,” Marcella said.
“And to have it right here, how could anyone ignore it?” Philomena asked.
“When you say right here…”
“Right here,” she said. “There’s a map that shows the exact location. Oh, I know when some event took place on a certain spot, and there’s a plaque or something commemorating it, people sometimes have trouble really connecting to it. It seems as if it could have happened anywhere in the general area. There’s nothing to grab you. It’s too far removed from today. Do you know what I mean?”
“The closer you get to the exact spot, the stronger the grip of it is on you.”
“Exactly.”
“So…?”
“It’s not going to freak you out or anything is it?” Philomena asked.
“Did it happen right where I’m standing?”
“Worse. The area is changed in appearance from ‘57, but the roads are all the same, paved now, but the same. They moved a little dirt around and planted trees and grass, but dig only a couple of inches down and you’ll be touching the original sandy soil.”
“Well, not precisely the same, Philomena.”
