by Ilsa J. Bick
How many suspected? Or knew?
Instead, I slept like the dead the whole day through. Uncle Hank finally trudged in sometime after five, but I was still asleep and didn’t hear. For once, my sleep was dark and deep and if I dreamt, I don’t remember.
I awoke well after dark. The house was the only thing that was quiet. I lay there a moment, listening, hoping I was wrong. But I wasn’t.
Crap. I didn’t know how to feel about that.
My bedside clock read 8:15, and I was hungry. So still a little sleep-fogged, I stumbled downstairs. I dumped cereal— yeah, Cocoa Puffs—into a bowl along with some milk and ate standing up at the kitchen sink. Feeling almost human again, I rinsed out my bowl, rummaged around in the fridge until I found a carton of orange juice, and then downed a glass.
I held myself very still and listened. Food hadn’t really helped either. Not that I expected that it would. I thought I’d probably have to do something about this, and then I thought that, maybe, this was something Dr. Rainier and I should talk about.
That’s about when I noticed that the message light of our answering machine was having fits. The box said we had eight messages, but the first five were hang-ups, probably people in town calling to find out what happened. (Uncle Hank says they never seem to learn that law enforcement people do not have the affirmative duty to gossip.)
The sixth was from Sarah: “Hey, Christian, I heard what went down at the barn . . . well, some of it. I guess the GPR guys were talking in Gina’s or something. Anyway, that was way cool, and I hope you’re okay and don’t forget my party on Halloween, okay? That’s this week, just in case you forgot.... Saturday night about seven. We’ll do all sorts of stupid stuff, you know, bobbing for apples. Anyway, it’ll be fun. So . . . see you in school? . . . Yeah, well . . . okay. Bye.”
The voice that delivered the second message was a man’s and one I also recognized: “Christian, this is Rabbi Saltzman. We spoke on Friday? I was going to get back to you, but a Dr. Rainier beat me to it. She called earlier today, right after I’d finished with my Sunday school classes. I should back up.... I called the home on Friday right after we hung up, and so I know about David. I’ve been in touch with his executor, a lawyer and . . . oh, I’m going to run out of time here, aren’t I? Anyway, I gather from Dr. Rainier that there might be more remains of other family members? If so, I’ll be coming up to Winter soon to make arrangements, probably in the next week or so. Why don’t we meet then? Call me and we’ll set something up when I know with more certainty when I’ll be there.” He left his cell number and hung up.
Dr. Rainier’s message was to the point: “Christian, I’ll expect to see you in my office on Tuesday. We’ll talk about where we go from there.” A longish pause. “That was . . . remarkable. You’re very brave. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Another pause. “But do me a favor. Don’t make any decision, not yet, and for God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid out of guilt, you got that?”
I stood there as the machine told me there were no more messages. I was stunned down to my toes.
How could Dr. Rainier have possibly known that the muttering of those voices from the sideways place was back?
I kept my word. I didn’t do anything stupid. But I didn’t do anything about the door on my wall one way or the other either.
School was pretty much the same, sort of. Everyone still stared, and they were back to huddling in groups, throwing looks my way, and then whispering excitedly. A couple of people surprised me, though. Said hi, how’s it going . . . that kind of thing.
I bypassed the cafeteria at lunch like I always do and made my way to the art studio. Man, it felt like I hadn’t been there for a hundred years. I felt different, like someone I barely recognized. The charcoal of my mom was still on its easel, but I hesitated a good minute before drawing the canvas away from her many faces.
I stood, studying those eyes I knew so well, that face I’d imagined in waking dreams. Mordecai Witek’s brushes burned a hole in my hip pocket. Obviously, I wouldn’t use them on a charcoal drawing, but I felt this compulsion to hang onto them the way a drowning person grabs onto a twig.
So was I drowning? Was I about to be swept over the falls? Because I knew I could be, if I wanted. I sensed that the power lay within me. Yes, David had found me, but I had always had the power to use. Even in death, I’d been able to touch his spirit or soul—whatever you want to call it.
But David was gone now, forever. I felt that the way you know when you’ve dropped a quarter down a sewer grate and it’s gone for good.
But my mother—she was still out there, somewhere. All I had to do was dare to touch her soul....
I replaced the canvas without making a single mark.
I ate my sandwich, alone, sitting on the school’s back steps. The concrete was cold, and my sandwich tasted like sand.
Dr. Rainier said, “So tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking I don’t need to be here. It’s not that I’m angry or pissed off or tired of you . . . that’s not it. But I think we’ve pretty much established that this isn’t in my head, and I’m not some maniac kid who’s going to go all homicidal. This is a real ability with real consequences, and only I can figure out what to do with it.”
“Do you know what that is? What you want to do, I mean?”
I shook my head. As crazy as it sounded, I had toyed with the idea of being kind of a psychic ghostbuster. I mean, here I’d helped to solve a real-life crime and expose Mr. Eisenmann as an imposter. And there was that baby in the hearth....
I said, “Were you able to get it?”
She nodded and brought up a picture on her computer. “I snapped it with my cell phone, but I think I got enough detail.”
She had. “You see it, don’t you?” I pointed to the girl’s red hair band. “It’s the same as the photograph in Mordecai Witek’s wallet. And look at how tiny her jaw is. She and her mom look a lot alike.”
Dr. Rainier thought about it, then nodded. “So they both had Treacher-Collins? Possible. The hair band would hide that Marta didn’t have any ears, and her mother’s hair is styled to hide hers. Either or both would be deaf, of course.”
Both, I thought. Hadn’t Woolfe told Daecher not to worry about the noise?
And I knew that Marta had wanted to be an interpreter— not of something like German or Polish but sign language. That’s why she’d cawed in David’s memories; that’s why her hands were always moving.
Dr. Nichols said they could establish who the father was by comparing the baby’s DNA with David and his father. I was also betting that Eisenmann—Hermann Woolfe—was the father. But what happened to Marta or how she’d allowed her child to be taken by Woolfe, I’d never know because David clearly hadn’t. I was reasonably certain that Uncle Hank’s prediction had come true—that a servant was the mother—because I remembered what I’d learned in one of my visions: that Marta worked for Catherine Bleverton. (Of course, I couldn’t tell Sarah that, but the DNA would go a long way.)
There was also a lot I didn’t know and probably would never find out: why the Witeks’ house burned to the ground; why Daecher had never ratted Woolfe out (though maybe as Eisenmann, Woolfe had made Daecher’s silence very worthwhile); whether Catherine Bleverton had been murdered out on the lake because she suspected or guessed the truth.
I said all this to Dr. Rainier and added, “And don’t forget the synagogue. We have no idea what happened there either.”
“Some things will always remain hidden, no matter how much you dig. The question for you now is what to do with the mysteries you really care about.”
“My mom, you mean.” I eyed her curiously. “When did you figure it out? That I was hearing the muttering again?”
“I didn’t really . . . figure it out, I mean. I just had this . . . feeling. I guess you’d call it a premonition.”
I thought about her willingness to believe in me and suspend her own disbelief. So maybe she had empathy—a
nd a little bit more.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “She’s out there. They’re calling me. If it was your mom and she needed help, what would you do?”
She was silent a few long moments. “I would have to think long and hard. We’re not talking about dragging someone from a burning building. This isn’t the same as driving to the next city and giving her a place to live. You don’t even know if being in the sideways place hasn’t resulted in some fundamental change in who she is. She won’t be the mother you remember, not after all this time. No one’s mother ever is, not only because a mother changes but because a child does. Yes, you’ll always be her child, but that doesn’t mean you’re frozen in time. A parent’s job is to be left.”
“What does that mean?”
“The minute you leave home, things change. You can’t and shouldn’t want to go home again, and Hank would be doing a bad job of raising you if he insisted that you should.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but he seems to have a hard time letting me do things on my own.” I told her about the thing with the barn and Dekker. “By your definition, he’s doing a lousy job.”
“Don’t confuse ambivalence and regret with incompetence. Of course, he’s got mixed feelings. What parent wouldn’t? You’re his only blood relative, and his job means that he sees all the ugliness in life, all the things that can go wrong. I haven’t known a single cop who doesn’t worry more the longer he stays on the job. Remember: he’s alive. He’s right here. All you have to do is reach out and take his hand.”
We moved on to other things after that, like whether I would return to Aspen Lake. Dr. Rainier wanted me to; she really felt as if I was gaining some control over my . . . well, we just called it a gift, and she thought I could free up some of those other people, help them rediscover themselves the way I had with Lucy. The limiting factor was in my ability to protect myself from getting sucked into those maelstroms of rage and death. Or sucking them out.
“Otherwise, what are your options? Live like a hermit? Be by yourself so no one can touch you and vice versa?” She shook her head emphatically. “That’s not a life. So I want you to try as hard as you can to be present, and that means staying engaged, here, with us.”
I told her I’d try. I wasn’t sure I meant it.
Then, at the door, she said the weirdest thing.
“I know this is a dark time for you. I know you want to escape all this; that all you see right now is evil and what you feel most is regret and loss. Believe me, the world’s filled with dark places and the armies of the night are just waiting their chance. But remember this.” She took hold of my shoulders and squeezed them hard. “There’s also the light. Call it soul, call it God’s light, call it the human spirit, call it hope. It doesn’t matter what you call it. The only thing that matters is this. The light is here.” She bunched a fist over my heart. “The light is power, and that power is love, and love is strong.”
I gave a breathy laugh. “All you need is love?”
“You’re smart, so don’t act so dumb. You need a lot more than love, and you know it. What I was going to say is that love can also kill. Love, especially one that is so all-consuming that it overcomes reason, can be as destructive as any evil you can imagine. So be careful. You will beat back this darkness, Christian, I know you will. Follow your heart. Just don’t get lost.”
XXXIII
And then it was Halloween.
Uncle Hank always works on Halloween. Trick-or-treating is limited to the hours between six and nine, and the town has a big bonfire at the school at nine thirty. Curfew is ten o’clock. A little harsh for a Saturday night, but doing things this way really cut down on all kinds of vandalism.
So I biked over to Sarah’s at five to help set up. The Schoenbergs live out a ways on about fifteen wooded acres, but I enjoyed the ride. Her father wasn’t home; he’d gone to some kind of conference down near Madison and wouldn’t be back until Monday night. Mrs. Schoenberg had things pretty organized: a big tub out back for apple bobbing, about a million bales of hay and bunches of cornstalks all set up near a big steel fire pit and more near the house for people to sit on, a piñata chock-full of candy and coins, and stuff like that. It was kind of old-fashioned, yeah, but there was also a karaoke set up in the basement and a stack of scary DVDs for anyone who just wanted to stuff his face with candy and popcorn and gork out.
Sarah opened the door to my knock, and for a second, I thought I had the wrong house. She wasn’t just dressed up. She was beautiful. I mean, really beautiful. She wore this poufy, off-the-shoulder yellow dress with a very BIG skirt—like big enough to hide under—and a red rose in her hair, which she wore swept up in curls. A pair of white gloves reached all the way to her elbows.
“Wow.” I looked her up and down. “You really look nice.”
“Yeah?” She did a little twirl so her skirt poofed out like an umbrella. “I’ve always wanted to be Belle.”
Yeah, I knew that. Back when we were little, she had this thing for Disney, and I guess it hadn’t stopped even after she got popular. Or maybe Disney was something popular kids liked, I don’t know.
She stopped twirling. “You’re not dressed up.”
“Uh . . .” I looked down at my black jeans, black T-shirt, and black Chucks. Touching the black beret perched on my head, I said, “I’m a starving artist. See?” I withdrew Witek’s pouch from my hip pocket with a flourish. “I even brought my brushes. Hey, that reminds me. Didn’t you want me to paint something, like a mural, for the party?”
Her neck flushed with color. “Well, I got to thinking about what you’d said, and I didn’t want you to think that the only reason anyone would want to hang with you is for what they can get out of you, like, you know . . . work. You’re here to have fun and be with people.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Thank you. That’s really nice.”
“Yeah, well, don’t let it go to your head.” Then she grabbed my hand and pulled. “Come on and help me set up chairs.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to work.”
“Christian . . .”
So everything started out okay. Pretty soon there were about twenty, thirty kids, all doing different things. Everyone had dressed up, though a lot of them, like me, dressed down: hobos, gangbangers, things like that. I was the only starving artist, surprise, surprise.
Some of us made cookies with Mrs. Schoenberg—yeah, I know, it sounds lame, but it’s really fun, and I really like chocolate chips. We drifted on to karaoke. I didn’t sing, but Sarah’s got a beautiful voice, and I liked listening to her. She sang something about kissing in barley and swing, swing . . . something like that, and I got this warm feeling in my chest. It was nice, like she was singing to me. In between, we took turns answering the door for trick-or-treaters, who came in waves of cars with their parents because of where the Schoenbergs live. I had fun watching the little kids see how much they could grab with one hand.
So, yeah, it was good.
Night came on fast, and a couple of guys—football jocks but playing it cool—started a fire in the big steel fire pit the Schoenbergs had in the backyard well away from the house and about fifty yards from the woods. The air had been cool before but now turned chilly enough for our breath to fog. I was prepared and pulled on a thick black sweatshirt. Sarah changed out of her princess outfit into jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt, which was kind of a shame, although she kept the hair, which was classy and cute at the same time. Mrs. Schoenberg brought out platters of graham crackers, bags of marshmallows, and those humongous Hershey bars for s’mores, which I haven’t had since I was, like . . . well, I don’t remember.
Anyway, does this sound really lame? Yeah, I guess. But there was something about hanging around the fire, toasting marshmallows, getting a little queasy with all that sugar, and listening to the sputter of wood send red sparks flaring into the night like fireflies that made
me start thinking about how eager I’d been to get away and what I’d leave behind when I did. I tried to imagine what it would be like next year come May and June when I’d know about college—and I felt a little sad.
Right around then, I realized I was thinking about what it was like to fit in, if only a little bit. I mean, it wasn’t like a bunch of guys were elbowing one another to be my best friend or anything. I wasn’t the center of attention, either in a good way or bad. After people got over the novelty of seeing me there, I was just . . . there. I did some things. A couple of people talked to me. I was on the periphery, yeah, but there was this tiny opening I could see—because of Sarah. Like I wasn’t getting all mushy or anything, but I kept thinking about us growing up, being close, and talking, and I thought that before you could grow to love somebody, you need to know how to be best friends.
Weird, I know.
I should’ve realized all that was too good to last.
Around nine, we did the piñata. Big mistake.
The voices started in, loud, like cranking up the volume. Had they been there all along? Sure, but low, like white noise, you know? You stop hearing certain things after a while because you get used to them. Anyway, the muttering suddenly got clearer and louder. I had practice not showing much in the way of how I’m feeling, but I felt like crying. It was so unfair; I felt, like, leave me alone; I’m trying to be normal for a change . . . but that was too much to hope for.
I think it was because of the piñata. Watching people wind up and then let ’er rip, I had this, well, flashback, I guess, to the moment when Woolfe whipped that crowbar around and smashed in Mordecai Witek’s skull. I heard the crunch, I smelled the blood, my heart ramped up, and my palms were sweaty.
