by Karen Brown
“Not recently,” Kitty said, her voice hard.
Anne reached out for her sherry glass on the table in front of me, and I handed it to her. “Who was she seeing last?”
“We don’t know,” Anne said, bringing the glass to her lips. “She was taking a break from boys.”
“She only loved one boy her whole life,” Alice said quietly. Her hair had fallen partially over her face. She fiddled with the afghan fringe, her fingers as nervous as Mary Rae’s were spinning her locket.
Anne stubbed out her cigarette. It sent up a small spark that singed the couch cushion.
“And who was that?” I said. I knew, but I wanted them to tell me.
“She and Billy were a couple senior year,” Kitty said. “She never really got over him.”
“Everyone wanted to date Billy,” Alice said, abandoning the afghan fringe and brushing her unruly hair from her face. I sensed the word “date” was used for Anne’s benefit, that to say “fuck” might have been offensive to her. Del, slumped against Alice under the afghan, gave me a sad little smile that I didn’t want.
“Mary Rae kept thinking they’d get back together,” Lucie said.
Their voices were soft and seemed sorry to break this news to me. The boys in their fast cars took turns with all the local girls, and William played the elusive, handsome, older guy—though his hanging around with high school girls was a little disturbing. Was this why the Milton girls disliked me? Had I landed their star local guy?
“Alice, you saw her last,” I said.
Alice held her long hair in one hand, an unlit cigarette in the other. The wind rattled the windows in their panes, and the front door blew ajar. Everyone turned toward the door, startled, before Kitty got up and went to shove it closed. I waited for someone to ask me why I’d taken it upon myself to play amateur sleuth. I felt sorry for Mary Rae, I wanted her body found, her death declared. I wanted her to stop hounding me with her blue eyes and her anxious fingers on her locket. She refused to tell me anything, and like Sister in the barn, her silence weighed on me.
“She was supposed to go to work the next night and she never showed,” Alice said, her voice solemn.
Mary Rae’s bartending job at the Viking Lanes had been a new one. She stood to make a lot of money there, which she could use for school.
“Maybe she met someone there,” I said.
We’d driven past the place—it was on the way to Anne’s—a low white structure, the word “Viking” spelled out on the roof, and I imagined inside the roll of the balls, the eighties music, the smell of the bar.
“Someone knows what happened,” Del said. “Mary Rae knows what happened to her.”
A few of the girls flinched. Alice’s eyes welled with tears.
“We have to know what happened,” Lucie said.
Alice stood and shrugged off the afghan. “We do,” she said. “We’ve decided.”
“Maybe she’ll show up one night and surprise you,” I said. “Maybe she’ll walk right through that door and whip off her coat and say, ‘Hey! I’m back!’”
I didn’t mean to sound as heartless as I did. Del had instigated all of this. Anne gave me a pitying look. The Milton girls seemed to recoil from me. Lucie rose from the couch and began gathering glasses. Kitty collected the ashtrays to empty. One after another, the girls slipped down the hallway to the kitchen, until it was just Anne and I by the fire.
“I’m a fan of your work,” Anne said, her voice soft. “Each image seems to vibrate with something more than its parts.”
When I looked confused about her having seen my work, she said she’d sat on the admissions committee. “One of the last things I did before I took my leave.”
“Well, thank you,” I said, slightly flattered.
“When William was an undergraduate here I took him under my wing. It seems as if he is doing the same for you.”
I smiled but wasn’t sure how to respond, uncertain what she meant by that. I’d asked William about his relationship with Anne, and he’d told me she was his mentor, that she was his set of eyes when he wasn’t sure if something worked. I had shown some of my photographs to William, hoping to get him to reciprocate, but I could only convince him to reveal his older work—his Polaroids—pastel light, the figures dark, blurred, at a remove, and the settings overpowering—a rocky shoreline, a field rimmed by dense trees, a house’s roof against a wide, startling sky. I almost asked Anne now about his “sleep studies,” but William came into the room, forced out of the kitchen, I guessed, by the Milton girls. He had our coats, and I rose and went to meet him.
“It’s late,” he said.
Geoff followed him, pulling his car keys from his pocket. “Taking this group home,” he told Anne.
What kind of car had William driven when he was a local boy, and why didn’t he drive it anymore? I tried picturing him behind the wheel of a Mustang. He had told me about his Triumph motorcycle, as if that information should impress me, and it did give me a new image of him in a leather jacket and boots, leaning into the curves on Route 13.
We finished putting on our coats in the vestibule of Anne’s house. William wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in.
“Isn’t she something?” he said to Anne, who remained on the couch.
She gave us a wan smile. “She is that,” she said, and I had no idea what she really thought about me.
Del rode home with us. In the backseat I gave in to the effects of the wine, the cold air whipping into the back from Geoff’s cracked window. I paid little attention to the dark landscape, lost in worries about William’s past relationship with Mary Rae, and annoyed with Del.
She faced the window, her nose nearly pressed to the glass, and I tugged on her coat sleeve.
“What was that back there?”
“What do you mean?” she said. She was using a low, incredulous voice that infuriated me even more.
“That whole bring-back-Mary-Rae scene,” I said. “I mean, they did everything but light the candle.”
“You two aren’t going to have a fight now, are you?” Geoff’s voice was jolly.
Del turned back to the window, the snow-covered fields blurring beyond it.
“Why are you spending so much time with these Milton girls?”
Del began to sing then, quietly at first. It was “A Lovely Night,” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. As angry as I was, I started to laugh, and then we were both singing, and Geoff eyed us in the rearview mirror, and William ignored us, irritated, I supposed. Just then the car slid on a patch of black ice and spun, and we clutched each other, dizzy and shrieking, and I had a flash of fear that we would join the town’s list of the dead. But the car skated, smooth and untroubled, like a fish, into a small field, and Geoff quickly regained control, and the car lumbered over the grass, the frozen hillocks scraping its undercarriage, and we resumed our path, all of us silent.
17
Despite my misgivings, we continued to attend two or three dinner parties a week at Anne’s—food Del prepared from Anne’s vintage cookbooks or meals Geoff expressed fond memories of as a child in England, and that Del and I, exposed to our mother’s meager cooking skills, had never tasted before. Duck, goose, venison, lamb. Rice and plum puddings and cakes with sugary frostings. Geoff would roll joints on Anne’s antique tavern table, and the room would fill with the smoke and music, the hushed voices of the Milton girls, who did one another’s hair or flipped through issues of Glamour magazine. Preparations for the holidays included a large tree brought over in Joseph’s truck and decorated by Anne’s acolytes. There were the expected stories about holidays past with Mary Rae. William revealed no emotional connection to them. When someone told a story in which he played a part—the time Mary Rae bought him a puppy and hid it in a hatbox she decorated as a cake—he left the room, and in this way it was an unspoken acceptance that he had once dated her.
It was Del who worried me. She’d been cool to William from the beginning, barely talking to
him when we were all together. At times, it felt as if she were ignoring him entirely. At first, I assumed she needed to get used to the idea that he and I were a couple. But it was odd how long it continued. They would pass each other in a room as if they didn’t see each other. One evening at Anne’s, two weeks before Christmas, we gathered for a game of bridge. I wondered how Del had learned to play. Had my grandmother somehow taught her? Or had she played the game in the hospital? Bridge was a confusing game for me. I was never good at cards, and Del knew this. When we were children she always won—gin rummy, crazy eights, hearts. I only agreed to play at Anne’s because of William. He described his parents having friends over to play when he was a child. He’d told us his mother had made a toffee apple cake for bridge nights, and he’d snuck into the kitchen to steal slices.
For bridge night at Anne’s, Del replicated the toffee apple cake. Without fanfare, she cut slices of it onto our plates. William’s surprise was genuine. He reddened, whether with pleasure or embarrassment or the rush of nostalgia, I couldn’t say.
“This is exactly the cake,” he said, almost formally, his fork in his hand. “This is simply amazing.”
Del gave him a small smile and dealt the cards. I knew I should feel grateful to my sister for being so generous, but I felt suddenly cold. A draft had reached us at the kitchen table from the terrace, but this chill I felt seemed something else. I took a sip of my coffee—coffee was always laced with brandy at Anne’s—and my hand shook. Del paused in her dealing.
“What?” she said. “What’s wrong? Did I misdeal?”
She grew confused, and everyone had to give their cards back so she could start again.
She was too smart not to know what I felt that night. She’d orchestrated things perfectly as she always did, even as teenagers when it came to boys. David Pinney with his blond hair, the way it curled around the nape of his neck. His dark eyes, so striking against the sun-bleached hair, like two agates. I smelled the chlorine from the pool on his swim trunks, and I was afraid to glance up in Anne’s kitchen, fearful I would see David Pinney standing there, his trunks dripping water onto Anne’s slate kitchen floor. I surveyed my hand of playing cards, barely comprehending what I held. The old resentment rose up, and I knew I should discount this as childish emotion, and I knew that people rarely changed. Del, no matter her mental state, was still the sister who stole my earrings—she wore them now: Jane’s earrings dangled from her own ears. Yes, I’d stolen them myself, but once they landed in my possession, they should have been mine.
The game would end badly for our side, William’s and mine. I couldn’t focus on any of it. I spent the entire time caught up in the memory of David Pinney, and watching Del, waiting for her to give William some secret look. Every so often I swore I saw it—a tip of her head, her eyes—the look of a coquette in an old movie. I felt as if a hand had tightened around my throat. I could feel the pressure of the fingers.
Del and Alice won the game. “You’ll get better with practice,” William said. We all pushed back our chairs to rise from the table.
But something was off. Maybe the memory of David Pinney was edging out everything else that evening. I excused myself and slipped up the back stairs to the little bedroom with the pine bureau. But William did not look for me. I heard him downstairs, laughing, and then music came on—more classical music I couldn’t identify—and the sounds of the voices were lost under the tones of the bassoons. I lay for a long time on the bed in the darkness. I may have fallen asleep. When the door creaked open it was just Del, her face a shadow peering in.
“What are you doing in here?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said, dully, lying back down. “That music is so loud. I didn’t hear you on the stairs.”
I sat up on the bed. “Is someone with you?”
Del laughed, her voice almost silvery-sounding. “No.”
“But I hear someone,” I said. I did hear movement in the hallway, a shuffling, a disturbance of air.
Del slipped into the room and closed the door behind her.
“Someone is out there,” I said.
Del laughed again. “All right, it was Randy,” she said. “My God, Martha, you’re so nosy.”
She stepped to the bureau and turned on the little lamp. Her feet in woolen socks appeared in the circle of light. “I’ve been in here before,” she said.
“Where did you think I was?” I said.
“We all thought you left with Geoff,” she said. “He went to the liquor store.”
Geoff often asked if someone would ride with him to the grocery store, and I’d sometimes volunteered, to be kind, to get away from the Milton girls.
“I’ll leave the room if you want it,” I said. “I was feeling sick.”
Del reached out her hand and placed it on my forehead, and I shrank back. “You don’t have a fever,” she said.
I went to the door, opened it, and looked out into the hallway, but no one was there.
“Your boyfriend must have gone back downstairs,” I said.
“He’s not really my boyfriend,” Del said.
“Well, whatever he is,” I said.
“He’s shy,” she said. “You know that.”
Randy was quiet. When I spoke to him he looked at the floor. I rarely heard him in conversation with anyone. He mostly sat, amid the men, tipping back a beer, flicking his ashes into his empties. Not the type to let Del lure him up to this room.
I went down the front stairs and entered the living room. Anne sat in her spot on the couch, talking to Jeanette. Alice was by the fire knitting and flirting with a boy I’d met that evening—Hurley or Harley. Her knitting needles flashed, and she tipped her head and laughed, shaking her hair back. Lucie, and a new girl, Shenoa, who was a copy of the rest of the Miltons—long, dark hair, the same pretty features—sat on the other side of the green velvet sectional. When I’d told the girl, earlier, that I thought her name was interesting, she’d smiled that Milton girl smile—a grudging compression of the lips—and said it meant “dove.”
Mary Rae would have sat on the velvet couch twirling her necklace, bored by her friends, ready to move on. I knew their stories about her weren’t entirely true. Some nights I dreamed of her. I didn’t try to verify the information I learned through my dreams—though I might have. She wasn’t interested in working in a day care center; she’d changed her major to accounting. Once, she’d been in downtown Syracuse and watched a group of young people in expensive clothes in a Starbucks. One of the men had stepped behind her in the line, and she’d learned he was a CPA, that they were all working across the street in the high-rise.
“We’re pulling an all-nighter,” he said, laughing. “It’s tax season.”
Mary Rae wanted to be one of those people—a woman with highlighted hair and cashmere sweater sets. The more I learned about Mary Rae Swindal, the more I liked her and the more I felt aligned with her whenever I was at Anne’s, ignored, an outsider. Downstairs in the living room I didn’t see Randy or William.
But Anne was nearly as surprised to see me as Del had been upstairs.
“When did you get back?” she said.
“I never left,” I said.
And I headed off through the hallway to the kitchen. Del, who must have come down the back stairs, stood at the sink, rinsing out one of the many pans she’d used to prepare the meal. Beyond the sliding glass doors William, Randy, and Joseph stood shoulder to shoulder on the snow-covered terrace, their breath huffing out above their heads. Joseph held a shotgun in the crook of his arm.
“What are they doing out there?” I said.
“They saw something moving,” she said. “They think it’s a wolf.”
I could smell Anne’s Chanel perfume arrive in the room behind me.
“There have never been wolves in those woods,” she said.
I thought of the taxidermy heads on her living-room wall, and William saying they were her trophies. “You hunt?” I asked.
Her presence b
ehind me was slight, like a sliver of moon. “Oh, I did once,” she said. “It was a thrill to capture the first Windy Hill eight-pointer of the season.”
The outside light shone on part of the wide backyard. Beyond that lay the forest where the dead waited on All Hallows’ Eve. Maybe Mary Rae was out there now, maybe they’d seen her in the yard and mistaken her for an animal, though I’d never seen Mary Rae at Anne’s before. Or was it David Pinney out there? I stood at the door and felt the cold through the glass, and as if he could sense I was there, William turned and saw me. Joseph lifted his chin to the sky and howled like a wolf, and William and Randy shoved each other so that Randy nearly fell off the terrace. Geoff came in behind me, bustling to unload bags on the counter—three bottles of wine Anne had requested.
“Your ladyship’s special vintage,” he announced, the smell of snow coming off his clothes.
William looked back again, almost tentatively to see if I was still there, and when he saw me he smiled, a quizzical look on his face. After a few moments, the men all filed inside, and Anne began to oversee the uncorking of the wine. Randy slipped past me to the living room, his chin low, his blond hair a bright swath over his eyes. In the hallway I took his sleeve.
“Sorry I interrupted your little tryst,” I said.
“What?” He seemed baffled.
“Your meeting with Del upstairs,” I said.
I could hear everyone in the kitchen asking where I was. Randy’s befuddled gaze shifted to over my head, to William, who was suddenly there behind me, his arms sliding around me, reeling me in. His mouth was in my hair, searching for my neck. He growled, and then Joseph, who must have heard him, let out another howl in the kitchen.
Randy took that as his opportunity to slip away, his cowboy boots shuffling down the hall. If he’d been upstairs I would have heard him, at least retreating once Del discovered me—the sound of his boots impossible to miss. Del had told me he never took them off—he’d lost two toes to frostbite as a child. I felt the same cold I’d experienced during the bridge game and wondered if I really was sick.
