by Karen Brown
“The little kids call me Officer Paul,” he said. “The others do it to be funny.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t answer the door. I was asleep. I was up late last night, packing.”
And I showed him the piles of clothing and the boxes. He stepped into the door frame, but he didn’t come inside.
“You’re probably wondering why I was walking around in the Peterson field,” I said.
“We get morbid people up there poking around,” he said. Then he waved his hands. “Not to suggest that about you, of course.”
“I’m a photographer,” I said. “Abandoned places interest me.”
Officer Paul placed his hands on his hips. His belt was thick and slung low, weighted down by his holstered gun. “I don’t want to keep you,” he said. “I’m really inquiring about William Bell.”
“What do you need to know?” I’d managed to keep a level tone, though I felt weak with fear. I sounded so much like my mother I wanted to laugh, but of course I knew not to. “Can I get you anything? Water? Tea?”
“No thank you. Is William Bell at home?”
I tried to gauge from his expression what he suspected, whether he already knew William was gone and was feigning ignorance, whether he wanted to find him at home for some other reason. “I’m sorry,” I said. “He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Some of the girls mentioned you two got married,” he said. I’d long since removed the ring.
“We separated,” I said. “It didn’t work out.”
“I’m sorry,” Officer Paul said, and I believed he truly was.
“Can I help you with anything?” I said.
He explained that he was investigating the Swindal case, following up on a few things.
“It’s so sad,” I said. “I guess it wasn’t an accident, if you’re investigating?”
Officer Paul stepped away from the door toward the stairs. “We aren’t disclosing the cause of death yet.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re looking for clues.”
He thanked me for my time and began to descend the stairs, and then he stopped, and turned back.
“You wouldn’t know where I might find him?” he said. “I have some questions for him.”
Officer Paul’s radio issued a burst of static, and his presence transformed the familiar stairwell to reveal the worn banister, the railings’ peeling paint, the stair treads scraped of their varnish. “I haven’t spoken to him,” I said. “Not for months.”
It felt wonderful to tell the truth.
Officer Paul seemed convinced. Maybe that was all it took—a statement that wasn’t rearranged to stand in for the truth. He jogged down the stairs, and I was grateful that William’s hat was gone from the hook at the bottom.
Once Officer Paul had left, Geoff came out of his apartment. I had my door open. I sat on the floor, packing William’s things, eager to get them out of the place, but uncomfortable handling them. Geoff leaned in the doorway.
“What in God’s name was that?” he said. “Did you call him to report your theft?”
I folded a pair of corduroys, the knees worn, feeling disoriented. “He was looking for William.”
Geoff didn’t come in. From the doorway he rolled a cigarette and handed it to me, like a peace offering. I didn’t have the heart to refuse it. Then he rolled one for himself. William’s things were scattered about. We smoked quietly, tipping our ashes into a teacup.
“How did Anne ever meet the girls from town?” I said.
Geoff exhaled. “She was always looking for models for her paintings,” he said. “And I’d see a pretty girl in town, and start a conversation—get around to asking if she wanted to pose.”
“For Anne,” I said.
I hadn’t seen a lot of Anne’s work—the one nude of Mary Rae, a few studies upstairs in the guest room—but I understood that was her subject, and that William had, in a way, patterned his own work after hers.
“Funny how easily girls are swayed when you tell them they’re beautiful,” Geoff said. “When you say there’s an artist who wants to use them as a subject.”
Being approached by a wild-haired, older man with a British accent might have seemed thrilling to the girls. He’d invited Del and me to the All Hallows’ Eve party, and Anne had immediately asked us to pose.
“Not for William?” I said.
Geoff had wood chips in his hair from working in his shop. I resisted the urge to brush them out. “Why no,” he said. “What makes you say that? I thought he was more of a landscape type?”
“Maybe,” I said. Mary Rae must have known the girls were being pawned off on William, talked into being part of his work, and she’d resented them.
“He left a lot behind,” Geoff said.
I hadn’t thought about how it would look—having all of William’s things in my apartment, and I cursed myself for not getting rid of everything sooner.
I stacked folders of his notes one on top of another. “Well, he never came by for them, so I’m getting rid of them,” I said.
“Will you go now, too?” Geoff slid down the door frame and sat half-in, half-out of my apartment.
“Yes, I guess.” He would need to know the date I was leaving so he could rent the place. I flipped my cigarette’s ash into the cup and took another drag. The smoke burned the back of my throat, but I liked the light-headedness the cigarette gave me. I felt almost happy, almost free.
Geoff leaned over and grabbed the teacup. “And what about your husband? No chance he’s coming back?”
“Do you think he’ll come back?”
Suzie lay patiently near Geoff’s apartment door. The cool spring air came in through the window screen, smelling of lilacs.
“I’ll give him a piece of my mind, if he does,” Geoff said.
I laughed and dropped an ash into a box of William’s sweaters, and before I could put it out, it singed the wool. I dumped the box and his battered camera fell from where I’d hidden it at the bottom, the film dangling out its broken back. Geoff slowly extinguished both of our cigarettes in the teacup. He bent down and picked the camera up, hefted it in his hands. “He must have gotten a new one?”
“He must have,” I said. I gathered the sweaters and began to refold them.
“He wouldn’t go anywhere without this,” Geoff said, fingering the film.
“He probably has a new favorite,” I said.
Geoff dropped the camera back onto the pile of sweaters. “It’s funny, though,” he said. “Can’t see him letting his film get spoiled.”
We both knelt over the box, and Geoff’s eyes seemed darker, almost sly.
“No,” I said. “You’re right. He was very fastidious about his film. But I was also surprised he seemed so eager to move on.”
Geoff pushed off the floor and stood, his joints cracking. “As if he just dropped the camera and kept running.”
“Maybe,” I said. I finished replacing the sweaters in the box. Geoff held his hand to me and pulled me up.
“It’s a mystery,” Geoff said. “When someone disappears without any explanation, it’s like a death, isn’t it?”
I agreed with him, uneasily. The cool breeze came through the open doorway from my apartment. Then Geoff said he had to head back to the shop, and he turned, wearily, toward the stairs. After he left I decided to walk to the campus to have lunch. I had signed up for classes for fall, but I wasn’t sure what I’d be doing then. The woman who’d helped me after the accident had contacted me about returning my clothes. I wanted to tell her to throw them away, but she’d sounded so kind on the phone, I’d agreed to stop by to pick them up.
I stepped out on the porch. William was across the street in his usual spot. He wore his beaver-skin hat, a dress shirt tucked into khaki pants. I stood on the porch, watching him, almost hoping I might make out his expression, and then he spun on his good leg and started off down the sidewalk. Rather than let him go, I crossed the street and went after him. It was a beautiful spring day—the dogw
ood blooming and shedding its petals on the ground, the air warm and filled with birdsong. I kept a steady pace behind him, but he turned toward campus and joined a great throng of students. It was so unlike the dead not to wait for me. Maybe he’d simply disappeared. Or maybe at some point he’d taken off his hat and ducked into one of the campus buildings. Either way, I couldn’t find him. My heart raced—not from exertion as much as from anxiety. I knew I didn’t want to catch him. I had nothing to say to him. I suppose I could have cleared my conscience and apologized. Ordered him to leave me alone. I had the strange feeling that I wasn’t being haunted but stalked. The missing items in my apartment, the feeling that someone had been there and gone through my bureau drawers—the dead had never taken anything from me before.
That afternoon, after I’d eaten and spent an hour or so in the lab, I returned home to discover my apartment nearly emptied of its contents—William’s boxes and the remaining furniture had disappeared, and only my belongings and my suitcase were left. I examined the stair treads and the muddy footprints. Geoff was at work, so I knocked on Professor Whitman’s door, but he, too, was out. That night I made a pallet on the floor, and I slept there and dreamed I lived in the encampment, working as the local clairvoyant. The place was shrouded in green growth, the tarps stretched in the sun smelling of wood smoke and melting snow, the creek rushing its banks. In the dream, I went to bed and little strung lights left spangles on the canvas like stars. But it was a fake, like a stage backdrop. In the morning I walked out of my tent to the mud, and the smell of rot and decomposition.
I awoke, startled, and sat up. Gray light filled the window, and the tree’s leaves fluttered in shadows on the wall. The room with its cracked plaster and blown dust made me think of the asylum, as if I had come to live inside one of my photographs. The throaty rev of a motorcycle idled outside my window, and it took all I had to restrain myself from looking out. Downstairs, I found Professor Whitman at home, and he admitted that he’d come in the day before to witness an old box truck at the curb, and two movers on the stairs.
“Can you describe the men?” I asked him.
Professor Whitman adjusted his glasses over his nose with his age-mottled hands. “I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention. It’s that time of year, people moving in and out.”
When I talked to Geoff later that morning, he was lugging grocery bags up the stairs. “Your mother probably sent movers,” he said, huffing. He unlocked his apartment door and disappeared inside.
My mother had bought me an airline ticket. I tried to call her, but she wasn’t home, and I left a message. My flight left the next day, and I wasn’t sure what to do in the meantime. Then I remembered the woman who had helped me after the accident with Anne, her hopes that I would come by to pick up my clothes. I called her back, and we arranged to meet. Outside, I stood in the gravel drive under the elm’s shade. I looked into the tree’s branches. Once, I had imagined myself in love, my heart warm and rapt. The elm had chafed in its coat of ice, and the frozen world had held a silent promise. I went down to the end of the driveway and glanced at the back of the house. William’s Triumph was no longer there. Like my furniture, it was gone.
36
The woman’s name was Marcia Fuller, and her house was on a road that wound around Cayuga Lake. I drove, troubled by the missing furniture, the motorcycle, but told myself Geoff had been right—my mother had sent the movers. Someone had stolen the motorcycle, like he’d said—they’d seen it there, unused, and had wheeled it off in the dead of the night. I had a hazy memory of the lake from the night of the accident—the snow and the darkness, the sense of wind blown off a frozen surface. I’d followed Anne for what turned out to be over two miles, according to the officer who found her car. I recalled, vaguely, the house at the bottom of a long set of steps. The road now was bordered by verdant green—brambles and trees and heavy brush. Though I searched as I drove, I couldn’t find the place where Anne’s Mercedes went off.
I’d dropped Geoff at his shop so I could use his car. He’d gotten out and patted his pockets and realized he’d left his phone behind. “Don’t forget to come for me at five,” he’d said. “I can’t call to remind you.”
At two thirty I arrived at Marcia’s, a pretty mid-century ranch at the top of a long, sloping tarred drive. Nothing about the house seemed the same except the front door, painted bright yellow, a stand of white birch which that night had been lit in the landscape spotlights. I parked in the street and went up the front walk. Marcia answered the door right away and took my hand. I recognized her dark hair, her smell—like freshly ironed clothes.
“You look healed up,” she said.
“Thanks to you.” The scar on my forehead was all that remained from that night.
She drew me inside and offered me a drink, a glass of wine, a cup of tea or coffee. She had some crackers and cheese set out, and the late afternoon sun came in through wide windows at the back of the house in a cheery way. “Sit down,” she said. “I’ve thought about you a lot since that night.”
I asked her why, and she explained that she’d read the newspaper report of the car and the woman inside. “It was eerie, in a way,” Marcia said. “After you’d told us your friend led you here.”
Much of the night had dissolved out of a desire to forget. “Did I say that?” I said. I took a sip of the wine she’d poured me.
Marcia nodded, emphatically. “Oh, you did! We all heard you!”
“I must have been delirious,” I said.
She seemed a little disappointed. Something dimmed in her eyes. She had wanted me to confirm some ghostly evidence she might share with her guests like a party trick, and I would not. We talked a little about Anne and her work. There once was a showing in a gallery downtown, and Marcia had attended and enjoyed it. Then I told her I had to get going, and she left the room and came back with my clothing in a soft, laundered pile—the sweater I’d had on, the blouse and my jeans. I felt a welling of emotion I couldn’t explain, as if that incarnation of myself was lost forever. Marcia reached out and squeezed my hand. “You were lucky,” she said.
Then she took out an envelope and handed it to me. “This was in the pocket,” she said.
It was Mary Rae’s necklace. I’d lost track of it after the accident. I might drop it back into Geoff’s car for him to find again, its cycle as evidence completed.
“Thank you!” I said. “I thought I’d lost it.”
Marcia, trying to be kind, slipped the necklace out of the envelope. “Let me,” she said, and she undid the clasp and fastened it around my neck before I could really protest. I felt the weight of the stone, the cold, gold chain, and twirled the pendant in my fingers. Then Marcia saw me to the door, and I went down the walkway to the street. Here the trees shaded the road, and I felt the chilly presentiment of evening—even the summer evenings were cold. I paused at the car, placed the clothing inside, and then crossed the street to the long set of stairs leading down to the house on the lake. Faintly, music played. It was the same cello piece from Anne’s party on the night of All Hallows’ Eve. Orange lilies bloomed along the slate steps, and the trees were green and full, their leaves flapping. The night Anne died the snow had covered the grass, the stone steps. The trees had been stark shapes against the night. Along the lake that night I’d seen the lights of other houses. Now, the motor of a boat puttered past on the water.
The notes of the cello piece that drifted up the long flight of steps and the familiarity of the house frightened me. Yet, I gripped the iron railing and started down. Some of the house’s old clapboards, faded gray, were missing in spots. Paint chipped from the window ledges. On the terrace beside a pot of snapdragons I listened to the music. There was a wooden screen door, the main door propped open behind it with a doorstop, an iron dachshund. For some reason, perhaps because of the things I could see in the room beyond the screen, rather than knock I pulled the screen door open and stepped inside. The house was cool, with a breeze blowing through its open
ed windows. The sound of the cello played with the sunlight on the ceiling. The walls were covered with William’s photographs. His little metal tin sat on the desk, books of his lay on the coffee table. The duck-carved chair was tucked into a corner. A pair of his shoes were aligned in the mudroom as if he’d just slipped them off.
My heart beat wildly.
A table from my apartment was being used as a desktop. On it was my mother’s little clock, which I closed and held in my hand. Prints of sleeping women were spread on the tabletop, and I reached out, tentatively, and shuffled through them with my fingertips, recognizing those I had in the portfolio and others I’d never seen before. William had developed photographs of the asylum, but within the frame, placed in that empty, decaying place with its tumble-down walls and snow on the floor—was a superimposed image of a sleeping woman. There were several of these. The mattresses had been excised, and only the woman’s form, her bare arms flung out, her legs entwined with sheets, remained. One lay in the middle of a hallway. The chips of salmon-colored paint from the asylum walls surrounded her on the floor, a strange litter of leaves. I’d always suspected he’d photographed me, but it was a surprise to find this image of myself—the last afternoon sunlight striping my bare thighs, my arm thrown out in sleep—taken the day he’d slipped into my apartment. He’d placed this image of me into the photograph of the octagon-shaped room we’d seen in the asylum, the walls the color of the bottom of a swimming pool. Even in sleep I looked troubled, as if my dreams would not let me forget my waking life.
I set the print down, distracted by one beneath it of Del. Up until this point I’d not known for sure if she and William had been together, and not even the image of a nude Del tangled in sheets was evidence of that. She was asleep. But I knew she would not have volunteered to be photographed. She’d been duped, lured to sleep the way the other Miltons had been—only to awaken in the spare room the next day to Anne’s waffles and gourmet maple syrup. Del had mentioned an old tale to me weeks ago—“Sun, Moon, and Talia”—a version of Sleeping Beauty. A piece of flax beneath the girl’s fingernail threw her into an unconscious state, and she was placed in a country manor by her father, who could not bear to lose her. A king from another land was hunting in the woods, and when his falcon disappeared inside the manor, he broke in to retrieve it and discovered the girl. Overcome by her beauty, he attempted to rouse her, but when he could not he raped her and returned to his kingdom. The sleeping girl became pregnant.
