The Clairvoyants

by Karen Brown

  Across the open room, through a set of sliding doors out to a porch over the lake, William appeared. The glass separated us, and I thought of the dead that had appeared to me through windows and doors, staring in with their pining looks. William wore a gray T-shirt, faded jeans. His hair was long and his gaze through the glass level, calculating. Then he slid the door open, and he stepped through the doorway into the house. I could smell the soap on his skin. His face was flushed from the sun. He held a glass of water in his hand, and he set it down, carefully, on the top of the counter in the kitchen. He came toward where I stood in the living room, his leg with that perceptible drag, and he took a seat in the duck-carved chair, his head thrown back, listening to the anguished cello.

  “It’s Elgar,” he said.

  The sound of the concerto filled the room. I wasn’t the slightest bit relieved we hadn’t left him to die in the asylum.

  William crossed his legs at the ankles. He put his hands behind his head. “I’m not one of your spirits.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment how similar William was to David Pinney—the coldness behind their eyes, their need.

  “You thought I didn’t know that?” My hand shook holding the print of Del, and I set it down on top of the others.

  William moved his arms to his knees and leaned forward. “I’m not sure how you found me. Anne was sworn to secrecy.”

  “You have my chair,” I said.

  “I ran into Geoff, and he told me you were leaving. I figured you wouldn’t need it.” He patted the ducks’ heads on the arms. “We’re married. Equitable distribution.”

  He smiled at me, sadly. “That’s all you care about? A silly chair?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I’m so happy to see you.”

  “Really? Geoff seemed to think you were over me completely.”

  Geoff had been sworn to secrecy, like Anne. He must have told William that Officer Paul was asking for him. I looked around at the house, the pine wood floors, the light coming in through the glass doors.

  “You photographed Mary Rae here,” I said.

  William groaned. “Stupid of me to keep the negatives.”

  “She died that night,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. He rubbed his face in his hands. He leaned forward, businesslike. “It was an accident. We came here and after the shoot we argued and I went out to pick up some food and when I came back—I found her. I found the empty pill bottle.” His voice faltered. He’d planned out this story for Officer Paul, if needed. I was the first to hear it.

  “I panicked,” he said, his palms up.

  “Why didn’t you photograph her at your studio?” I stepped away from the table of photographs and stood in the middle of the room. I could see the lake beyond the sliding glass doors, the porch. Behind me stood the door I’d come in through—two exits should I need them.

  “She wanted it to be here,” he said. “Away from Anne’s.”

  Mr. Parmenter had waited for my mother at the Stardust Motel. What might have happened to her if she’d decided to go? And Mary Rae had been lured here for a final meeting, William maybe begging. I remained in line with the door, knowing Geoff’s car was parked on the road, that Marcia Fuller might glance out her large picture window, curious about where I’d gone.

  “What kind of person leaves someone for dead in a place like that?” William said. “Who doesn’t report her husband missing? I’ve had a lot of time to think out here.”

  “You were trying to hurt me,” I said. The accusation seemed childish now.

  He rose from the chair and walked over to the door. I felt dizzy with fear, the Elgar concerto an eerie accompaniment.

  “I got what I deserved? Is that what you’re saying?” He spoke facing the screen door, as if someone else were out there. “Have you ever spent the night in a freezing mental hospital?”

  “You left Mary Rae to die in that trailer,” I said.

  He stood by the screen door, his hands stuffed into his pockets, staring out at the little stone patio, the long set of stone steps up to the road.

  “Trusty Anne came to save me,” he said. “That was my backup phone in my bag. I had a phone on me. I like to be prepared when I head out to remote locations. Anne thought we’d broken up already, that I’d gone there alone.”

  “We used the same lie,” I said.

  William pivoted on his good leg to face me. “Elgar wrote this piece in a cottage like this one, in Sussex. They say that during World War I, he could hear the sound of artillery echoing across the Channel.”

  The concerto’s tempo slowed, and the piece ended with three haunting chords. The breeze blew the frames on the wall, a gentle thudding sound. Outside a boat passed, and the water from its wake rushed the grasses near shore.

  “This was my mother’s place, and her mother’s before her.” William grasped the door handle, as if for balance. “You weren’t coming to look for me, were you? You and clever Del thought you’d gotten rid of me.”

  “You took my photograph. My sister’s.” My voice sounded too loud. I couldn’t keep my indignation out.

  He tottered a bit on his bad leg, moving away from the doorway toward the table.

  “I have an exhibition next month. Anne set it up.” He carefully sifted through the prints on the table. “Tell me what you think.”

  “You drugged us.” I was wound tight with fear and anger.

  “I convinced Anne it was best if the girls were sound asleep,” he said, his voice soothing. “She didn’t know I’d photographed Mary Rae. I planned to stop, to forget the whole series, but the gallery owner wanted to set a date. And I thought I needed a couple more models.” William sighed. “I didn’t need any more.”

  Anne would have done anything for William’s art, whatever he needed. But did she realize she hadn’t been helping him with his art? William was attracted to girls sleeping, to us unconscious. I’d known it from the images, the poses, from the way the Milton girls blushed when they looked at their likenesses.

  “Did you have sex with all of them?” I said, slightly breathless.

  His face was such a mask of despair, I almost pitied him.

  “You’re sick,” I said.

  “I know,” he said.

  He came over to me and took my wrist and turned my hand to reveal my mother’s clock in my grip. “What do you have there?” he said. Then he chuckled. “Your little clock. I knew that would bother you.”

  I felt sure he could feel the race of my pulse. Then he reached to touch Mary Rae’s necklace.

  “Anne gave it to her, didn’t she?” he said.

  “It must have fallen off her in the car.”

  “Geoff’s car, yes.”

  “Anne figured out what you’d done, you know,” I said. “She was coming here the night she died.”

  He slid his hand up and down my arm. “A shame about Anne,” he said. “She might have had a few more good days in her.”

  I felt a chill on my skin, felt our pasts intersect with a terrifying speed, a shining zeroing-in. He’d tried to dress Mary Rae, fumbling with her clothes, then wrapping her in a blanket, carrying her up the long set of steps to the car in the cold. This had been the thing connecting us from the beginning. The weight of David Pinney’s body as we dragged it across the grass, under the barbed wire, beneath the willow. The cold of his hand in mine, our frightened breath, Del’s refusal to pull him, to touch him, and my pleading with her: “You can! You have to!” But William had transported a living body—one he’d only thought was dead. Mary Rae’s pulse, slowed by the pills, must have been nearly indiscernible. Even if she’d taken the overdose herself, William was a murderer.

  “You found the trailer for the two of you, like you found the cottage for me,” I said.

  “I still love you.” He shook his head as if these feelings disappointed him. He threaded his fingers with mine. “Even if you did try to kill me. Even if you didn’t waste much time finding someone new.”

&
nbsp; “You asked Mary Rae to marry you,” I said.

  He squeezed my hand. “You don’t believe that I love you?”

  I considered William’s eyes and the smooth curve of his shoulders beneath his shirt. You don’t ever know what someone is capable of. You can suppose, you can guess. Maybe he loved me once, or thought he did. I couldn’t tell anything from his face.

  “Do you ever wonder if it would be easier to confess?” I said.

  I felt his breath in my hair, along my neck.

  “I just did,” he whispered.

  Out on the water a bell sounded.

  “The church in Aurora,” he said. “It’s evening services.”

  “Bells used to be blessed,” I told him.

  He slid his hand to my cheek, and I tried not to flinch.

  “They were struck by lightning in the church spires. The bell ringers, too. The clergy believed that demons lived in the air and caused the storms, so the bells were blessed.”

  “Always the lightning expert,” he said, softly.

  And there was a moment, a slip of something fleeting and lovely, in which I imagined Del and my mother settling down in the old house, and another version of William and me, settling down in this place by the lake. I could imagine evenings during warm-lit sunset, watering the pot of sad flowers, the sound of the lake slapping the shore, the bugs pinging the screens.

  “Could two people stay together knowing what we know about each other?” he said. “You never told me what you thought about the prints.”

  I couldn’t erase the photo of Del, the fact of her pregnancy, her confusion about how it had happened.

  “They’re beautiful,” I said, and it was the one, true, honest thing.

  I felt him begin to gather me in his arms, and I let him lean in to kiss me before I shoved him away. He was unprepared and he lost his footing. I could have taken the iron doorstop and struck him. There were weapons at my disposal, a variety of ways I might have killed him, dumped his body into the lake, and let the currents sluice him into the northern marshes. I could have revenged Mary Rae’s murder, Del’s rape, the rapes of the other girls who had no idea he’d violated them in their sleep.

  I could have taken the candlestick from the mantel.

  But I had something better planned for him.

  He stumbled back against the duck-carved chair, and I left the cottage and ran up the long set of steps to Geoff’s car. I felt my progress slowed by panic, a heaviness in my legs I experienced attempting escape in nightmares. I’d left the car door unlocked. (“Nothing to steal in there, eh?” Geoff had always said.) I tossed the little clock onto the seat and started the car. William’s footsteps sounded on the stairs, and as he stepped out into the road I pressed the gas, and he leapt out of the way of the car. I could have run him over. All of these things might have been deemed self-defense. They would have fit into the story I planned to tell Officer Paul.

  I drove to my apartment first. I expected William to pursue me on his Triumph, to appear at any moment, but he did not, still confused, puzzling out his next move. He would call Geoff. But Geoff didn’t have his phone at work. The apartment was as vacant as I’d left it—my pallet on the floor holding my shape from the night before. I went to the closet and slid the cedar panel aside and slipped the portfolio and the journal out from their hiding spot. I got back into the car and noticed my phone had three missed calls from William. Rather than listen to his messages, I drove the long route into Milton, watching in my rearview mirror, my heart racing and jubilant. I arrived on Main Street not knowing where the police department was. I pulled into the Viking Lanes parking lot and clasped the wheel with my shaking hands. I wasn’t sure if I could do what I’d intended to do.

  I scrambled through my bag and found the scrap of paper Del had given me with Alice’s phone number. I punched the buttons, clumsily, getting the wrong number at first, redialing twice before she answered. Alice met me in the parking lot and together we took Officer Paul the negatives, the necklace, the journal. The Milton precinct was across the street from the Shurfine market, and I sat in a molded plastic chair and watched through the front window as women pushed carts across the uneven tar lot, loaded bags of groceries into their trunks. When Officer Paul came out I told him my story. I felt like a child again in elementary school—reciting the correct responses, watching the teacher’s face beam with pride. Paul put a hand on my shoulder and patted it. He wrote down the address to the lake house and promised to let me know immediately when all was safe.

  Alice and I went to her grandmother’s. It was late afternoon, and Alice’s mother, Erika, greeted us at the door in a bikini worn under a white linen shirt, looking like exotic evidence that, beyond the dark confines of Milton, bright oranges hung from glossy trees, and beaches stretched white and blinding—the water a rare green, like malachite. Erika grabbed each of us by the hand and ushered us into the house, through the living room to the kitchen. She mixed us gin and tonics, and we took them outside, where we sat in her lounge chairs in the backyard, telling our story until fireflies emerged, tiny, weightless embers bobbing over the place where Alice and Mary Rae had practiced their twirling.

  I told Alice and Erika how Del and I had held our séances on summer nights, a candle throwing our shadows onto the pool shed walls. Outside, the fireflies had dipped between horse chestnuts and honey locusts. Luna moths had flitted around the pool shed’s yellow outdoor light. For a dollar we’d communicate with the dead with the sole intention of collecting money for lip gloss and gum. Sometimes, I would know the color of a dress. I would smell lavender. I’d get an urge to sing part of a song I’d never heard before. I didn’t tell them that any of it had been real. I let them speculate—another clairvoyant’s trick.

  Alice and Erika and I sat outside until late, startling at any sudden noise, imagining William’s Triumph revving down Milton’s Main Street, his silent approach around the side of the house. Erika slipped inside to make up a bed for me, though it would be a sleepless night. I planned to call Del and tell her everything, so she would know that it wasn’t William’s ghost she’d seen but the man himself, but I did not. I sat on the bed and I played William’s messages—the first an angry attempt to reason with me, a promise not to reveal what had happened in the asylum. The second message was more of the first—spiteful, hateful, a threat to find me, to do what he should have done to me before. The third message was blank, at first. Then water sloshed against a boat’s sides, buffeted by wind, by William’s slow breaths. “Why couldn’t you love me,” he said softly, despondent.

  The next morning, under ash-colored skies, Officer Paul arrived to tell us in person that William’s body had been found in a small boat on the lake, a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

  We stood in the driveway, Officer Paul scuffing his dark shoes. It began to rain—a soft drizzle. “He won’t hurt anyone else,” he said.

  He ducked back into his cruiser, offering a quick nod of sympathy, imagining the ordeal I’d been through. Alice put a tentative arm around my shoulder. The rain misted the grass, the tar road, the metal street signs. All I’d ever wanted was to be loved. All William had wanted was for me to love him. Even Mary Rae, under the elm, had wanted something. As much a mystery as the appearance of the dead was the way none of our wantings could ever be aligned.

  37

  Del had her baby six weeks early, in July. She held him, briefly, then she took off with a man she’d met while pregnant, a yachtie who’d invited her sailing. At times I imagined she was fleeing Detective Thomson and his questions and, later, that she was running from the baby and the predictability of the life she would have lived with him. The baby—she’d named him Owen—was born blind. His eyes were like Del’s, the same color and shape, heavy with lashes. For five years I saw only photographs of him, and from those I couldn’t tell for sure if he was William’s son. I thought that on meeting him I would sense it, that I would somehow resent him. But by then he was school-age, sturdy and th
oughtful. I hadn’t been around children much and had no idea the things they taught you about yourself.

  My mother and I would get postcards and e-mails from various ports of call—Grenada, Tobago, St. Vincent—the boats Del was on and the men she was with constantly changing. When she was in town she went by our mother’s to visit, but only for an hour or two. My mother, when I asked how Del was, would say that she’d warned her to use sunscreen, but that Del had a dark suntan.

  “And what else?” I’d say.

  She’d shift the phone to her other ear, her hands busy in the kitchen sink. “Her usual impulsive self.”

  Del would bring Owen spice drops, watch him play, read him The Velveteen Rabbit, then go. Later, I would get an e-mail from Del about how the visit went—a humorous description of our mother’s attempts to satisfy Owen’s every whim, and play hostess. Tea on a tray, Del would write. For God’s sake. About Owen she said little. He is a clever little man, she wrote. He asks more questions than any human being I’ve ever met. Even You-Know-Who.

  We’d stopped hearing from Del in May—no cards or e-mails. Last we knew she’d been on a yacht called The Pearl, anchored off a small island in the Grenadines. My mother had put out inquiries, but Del couldn’t be located. We assumed she’d taken off with someone new. But it wasn’t like her to stay out of touch. Together, my mother and I had invented a story for ourselves: Del had decided to stay put on some island, and was eating papaya and roti, entertaining yachties at the island bar with her stories.

  The first week of June, my mother called and asked me to come home. Ordinarily, I would have made some excuse. This time I did not.