“First things first, okay? Cross that bridge and all that.” Ramona rubbed her hands over the lap of her black skirt, and I wondered if she were wiping off sweat. If so, was it hormonal? (I remember Grandee’s trouble when she went through that time—sweater on, sweater off, on, off, laughing at herself as she did so and asking me did I know how lucky I was to be a boy.) Or did the sweating have to do with nervousness around me?
She told me to sit tight and said she’d be back tomorrow, and then they returned me to this cell, where I’m about to spend my second night listening to the snores of the drunk man and wishing I could sleep myself.
Ghostwriter
So what is this, opposite day?” Harper only halfway hoped that her mother, in the driver’s seat next to her, would take it as a lighthearted remark. “You’re supposed to be teaching me.”
She did not feel like giving her mother a driving lesson, especially at rush hour when the roads were slick. It was all she’d been able to do to get through school that day, even though regular classes were canceled and it was just a bunch of counselors coming into the rooms to ask if anyone had questions or wanted to share, and to tell the students they should reach out if they had issues concerning the tragedy, now or at any time in the future. None of them spoke Joy’s name.
“You’re not ‘teaching’ me.” Her mother gripped the wheel so tightly that Harper could feel the pressure in her own hands. “I know how to do this; I just haven’t practiced it in a while.” There was no benefit, Harper knew, in pointing out that her mother’s conception of “a while” was different from most people’s; she had not been behind the wheel of a car since the winter day she’d skidded off Reservoir Road on the way to pick up Harper and Joy from the season’s first skate at Elbow Pond when they were freshmen. That had been the start of her mother going downhill, which was how Harper preferred to think of it. Her brother called it mental. “You’re helping reacquaint me with an old skill.”
Her mother’s going downhill had blunted Harper’s motivation to get her own license. She still only had her permit, which was why Truman still had to drive her wherever she wanted to go. Though he always made a big fuss about it, she knew he didn’t really mind; driving was the one activity he seemed to be able to do without feeling the need to engage in magical thinking. (That was what their mother called it; Harper found it hard not to refer to it in her own mind as OCD, which was Truman’s nickname at school: OCD Boy.) So she imagined it was a relief to him, chauffeuring his mother and sister around instead of playing solitaire until he won, no matter how many hands it took. The rest of the family indulged him by pretending to believe that his objections to driving on demand were genuine. Truman told Harper that if she didn’t bake him whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it, he might “forget” to pick her up sometime when she really needed it.
She didn’t mind. She liked to be in the kitchen anyway, and it made her feel good to know that somebody appreciated her baking enough to request it, even if it was only her brother. She considered it practice for the business she and Eric Feinbloom talked about opening someday.
She’d planned to come straight home from school and pick out something to read at Joy’s funeral. She planned to pick out something to wear. But her father was at work, Truman had signed up for a shift at the dollar store, and it was so inconvenient for her mother not to be driving—the family had gone through such contortions, these past few years—that Harper knew she didn’t have a choice when her mother announced at breakfast that she thought it might be time to get back on the road.
“Stop!” Harper cried. They had come to the crosswalk in front of Hair Raising, and her mother stabbed at the brakes, causing both of them to be pushed a few inches toward the windshield. The blown-dry woman who’d just entered the street jumped at the screech of the sudden halt and glared at Harper’s mother, shaking her head.
“Oh my God.” Her mother clapped a hand to her chest. “Who is that woman?”
The car behind them beeped, and Harper’s mother jumped. “That wasn’t my fault,” she added. “She stepped off the curb without even looking.”
“You have to pull over, Mom. Either that or keep moving.” She thought her mother might refuse and tell Harper to take the wheel. But after waving in the rearview at the beeping driver, she managed to inch ahead a few car lengths to the first open spot. “Awesome, Mom,” Harper told her, when they were finally parked with the engine shut off. “You did it.”
Her mother’s expression told her that though she considered the congratulations pathetic, she relished her daughter’s words nevertheless. “Let’s take a break,” she suggested, and Harper assumed she meant that they should sit in the car for a few minutes before pulling back into traffic toward home. But her mother was unclipping her seat belt, her hand on the door as she said she thought they should get a treat at the Inside Scoop.
“Are you sure?” Harper said. “Won’t we ruin our appetites?”
“Appetites are meant to be ruined,” her mother said, and Harper thought, Who are you?
They sat across from each other in a booth and ordered hot fudge sundaes. “I think I know who that was.” Her mother gestured with her spoon behind them, toward the near miss on the street. “I think it was the police chief’s wife. Something Armstrong.” Harper watched her running names through her head until she came to it. “Helen.”
“Really?” Harper wished she’d taken more notice; she would have been interested to see what her English teacher’s mother looked like. From his questioning of her, she remembered Mrs. Carbone’s father all too well.
“You don’t recognize her? Her picture’s always in the paper. She’s always doing do-gooder things.”
Her mother saying “doing do-gooder” made Harper smile, remembering the old days when she was learning to read and they took turns reciting pages to each other from Dr. Seuss. Four fluffy feathers on a Fiffer-feffer-feff.
“So is Mrs. Carbone,” she told her mother. “I heard some of the other teachers call her Mother Teresa. But she doesn’t seem like a saint to me.”
She waited for her mother to ask her what she meant. Instead, her mother lifted a spoon of gooey fudge above her mouth and let it drizzle in slowly. “Why don’t we do this more often? I miss this kind of thing.”
Um, Harper wanted to say, Mom? We don’t do this because you hardly ever go out of the house. The meaner, more injured part of her added, Because you’re mental. Immediately she felt ashamed, disloyal, even though of course she knew her mother could not understand her thoughts.
Her mother sat back in the booth and said, “I wanted to talk to you about something.” When Harper shifted nervously in her seat, she added, “Don’t worry. I just wanted to say how proud I am of you for the way you’re helping with this investigation.”
“Oh.” How had it all gotten away from her like this? She looked down at the table and remembered telling the policemen the lie about having seen the black man wearing a mask. (Though each time she thought about it, it took another moment before she remembered it was a lie.) It had only been two days ago, but it seemed like much longer. She’d told herself she would call the police station, before things got out of hand, to say she’d been confused. But it was probably too late now.
“What happened to Joy, anyway?” her mother asked. “She did seem to change, toward the end. What was she doing hanging out with Delaney Stowell? Isn’t she kind of a troublemaker? I didn’t know they were friends.” She seemed surprised by the string of sentences she’d just uttered; she leaned back and caught her breath.
Harper felt tempted. Not only to tell her mother she’d lied to the police, but about the drugs she’d seen change hands at the Halloween party; about the police confronting Zach Tully at school, not long before Joy’s own arrest; and about how things had really been between her and Joy, especially since Joy had told Harper about her mother’s affair. She’d pulled away from Harper at school and said she was too busy to meet up after school or on weekend
s. Which wouldn’t have been so bad—they all had a lot of homework—except that Joy seemed to have time, suddenly, to spend with Delaney.
Her mother waited for Harper to answer. She could have said all of these things, or only a part of them. Instead she just said, “I hate Delaney.”
“It’s not nice to hate,” her mother said, then seemed to reconsider her own response. “Oh. I guess that’s the kind of thing you say to a child, isn’t it? I have to get used to thinking of you as an adult. I can tell you the truth about things.” Harper blanched—she very much did not want to hear whatever truth was forthcoming—as her mother leaned closer. “You know I’ve always wanted to write a novel, right? Well, it hasn’t worked out yet. I’m still trying, but in the meantime, I was thinking maybe we could do a different kind of book project. Together.” She dropped her voice as if she didn’t want anyone to hear her idea and steal it.
“‘Book project’? What are you talking about?”
Despite her mother’s shrug, Harper could tell that this was something she had given a good deal of thought. “A memoir, kind of. About the case.” It took Harper a moment to realize that the “case” was what had happened to Joy. “Apparently, it’s easier to get a contract for nonfiction. And people go for books like this. Murder in a small town, drugs and teenagers, that kind of thing.” Her mother leaned closer, and Harper smelled chocolate on her breath. She wanted to pull back but was afraid her mother would feel offended. “I’d do the actual writing, but we could tell people the book was by you. I’d just be your ghostwriter.”
“Why should it be by me?” Harper’s voice was louder than she’d intended because what she really wanted to ask was Why would you want to write a book about Joy being murdered?
“It would make it stand out, a teenage author. And you’re a witness. Not only were you best friends with the victim, you were one of the last people to see her alive. And you’re going to testify in the case.”
“We don’t know that for sure.” Harper felt her ice cream coming back up into her throat.
“Of course we do. You saw him there at the pond that day. With a mask! How likely do you think it is that he would be at the scene of the crime, and then the police find evidence at his house, if he isn’t guilty?”
Her mother’s conviction was contagious. Or was it just that Harper saw no choice other than to feel it sliding across the table, infecting her as well? What if Martin Willett had done it—killed Joy—and the lie was what they needed in order for him to be punished, to get what he deserved? Did it matter if Harper lied but the right outcome came from it?
“We’ll do it together. I want you to know I’m here for you,” her mother said. It was an expression Harper hated, because she knew it came from her therapy group. The counselors in school had said the same thing.
She was saved from having to respond when the waitress, a girl in Truman’s class, brought the check over. “Aren’t you the friend?” she asked Harper, not even appearing to try to hide the fascination in her face. Harper nodded as she slid out of the booth, pretending not to notice the look her mother gave her: See?
When they got home, her father was already there, working at the puzzle whose pieces were spread out across half of the dining room table. He looked up surprised when her mother followed Harper in, and Harper realized he’d forgotten about the driving lesson. She tried not to notice the excitement in his face. Don’t get your hopes up, she wanted to tell him, as she was telling it to herself.
They never ate at the table anymore, sitting down instead to eat in the kitchen individually or in groups of two or three but very seldom all four of them, so her father and Truman had taken over the dining room and spent hours there on nights and weekends, playing solitaire or fitting jigsaw pieces together. But today Truman wasn’t home from his job at the dollar store yet, so her father sat at the table alone. He’d brought the puzzle home from the factory, without the box it would have been sold in. He just dumped the pieces onto the table from a gallon-size ziplock bag and started searching for the edges. When Harper asked him once, he said he couldn’t even be sure all the pieces were there. “Doesn’t that drive you crazy?” she said, because she couldn’t imagine beginning a puzzle if she didn’t know she’d be able to finish it in the end.
Her father shrugged and said it didn’t matter. “I just like sitting here and trying things, moving the pieces around,” he said. Though he was halfway done by now, it was still hard to tell what the picture would be.
Harper sat with him for a while. Sometimes she told herself she’d stay until she found something he could use, but this hardly ever happened; too often she believed she’d made a match, only to have her father point out that she was mistaken—the colors were off, or there was just the slightest gap of space between pieces, instead of a perfect fit. Mostly she just kept him company and watched as he ran his hands over the pieces, leaned over the table to peer at them, picked one up, and either locked it in somewhere or tossed it into the pile again. Today he seemed distracted when she sat down, and without looking at her he said, “I’m sorry about what happened to Joy. I’m sorry you have to go through this.”
Why was the effect so different when her father said what he did from when her mother had? It was because her father did not want her help in writing a book; he was not getting anything out of what she was suffering. She thanked him and stuck her hand out to pick up a random piece, and miraculously, she managed to fit it into the middle of the puzzle. Her father reached out to high-five her, and not having the heart to tell him she didn’t think people really did this anymore, she high-fived him back.
Then she wrapped herself in the afghan and went to sit in front of her mother’s poetry shelf, where she began searching for something to read at the funeral. The task felt unreal; part of her wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, and she pictured Joy across from her laughing, too, her legs stretched straight out in front of her as she leaned against the bookshelf tossing a doll’s plastic head back and forth like a baseball or an orange. In life, she always caught it. But in Harper’s conjuring now, the head fell through watery hands and vanished, followed by Joy herself, though her laughter lingered.
She spent an hour looking, and during that hour she only found a single line that felt right. After the first death, there is no other. It struck her so hard that she had to sit back on her heels. It was about virginity, she realized. It had never occurred to her that there might be more than one kind, and that she’d lose hers without even having been aware it existed.
The Undead Forest
When she called Tom after the discovery of Joy’s body, Susanne asked him to meet her at the mall, but he requested that she pick a different place. He told her it was because it was too hard to find a parking space with all the Christmas shoppers, but really it had more to do with the fact that his mother-in-law spent so much time there during the holidays, picking out presents for migrant families or doing other work for charities she prided her association with. The last thing Tom needed was for Helen to spot him having a conversation with the mother of the dead teenager whose murder Doug was trying to solve—the case that could make or break his bid to move from interim to permanent chief.
So Susanne suggested they meet at Brewed Awakenings instead. When he arrived, she was the only customer sitting at a table; she was hunched over a cappuccino and wearing a Yankees cap with the bill pulled forward, and he realized it was her effort at a disguise. He tapped the stack of magazines on the table—People, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple—and asked, “You were reading these?” What he meant, he realized, was Can you read them? With what’s happening now?
“No. I just look at the pictures.” She twisted her mouth in what was probably an attempt at a smile, before it became a grotesque signal of her grief. She must have seen it reflected back in Tom’s expression, because she pulled up and into herself like a turtle not liking what he sees when he sticks his head out. “Thanks for coming,” she said. “I wasn’t sure w
hat to do. With—this.” She reached into her pocket, and for a wild moment Tom expected her to pull out a gun and shoot him. Even though he understood now that he had not failed to recover her daughter in the water that night, as he’d originally feared, he still felt residual guilt from the weeks he spent assuming he had.
He tried not to flinch as her hand came out of the pocket. But she was only holding a strip of cardboard covered with orange cloth, which she handed to him as she told him where she’d found it and where she had seen it first. “I have no idea why she would have had this,” she told him. “Where it came from. I mean, I know where it came from, but I have no idea why.”
Tom tried not to let on how hard his mind was working. The homemade bookmark was evidence—of something. Surely Susanne understood that the proper course of action would be to call the police. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but why are you telling me?”
She gave a smile now that appeared more genuine, less tortured, and said, “Don’t you take this the wrong way, but I’m not sure I trust that guy. I know he’s your father-in-law, but . . .” She trailed off, sounding uncertain as she searched Tom’s face. “If you tell me to turn this over to him, I’ll do it. But I wanted to ask you first.”
He understood; they had a history together. Two days after her daughter was presumed drowned, she’d called and left Tom a message, saying she’d seen his ad in the Classified section of The Chilton Free Press, offering his services as a private investigator. It was something he’d done—mainly, surveilling people who’d filed insurance claims, to make sure their injuries or illnesses were legit—because he thought it might, like his willingness to join the first responder and rescue dive teams, improve his standing when it came to what his father-in-law thought of him. Let me find out what you need to know, the ad went. Licensed/free initial consultation. No infidelity. He’d added the last because the guy he replaced in the gig for the insurance people had advised him to do so. Otherwise you’ll mostly get women wanting to catch their husbands in the act, and it doesn’t take long to lose your stomach for that shit.
How Will I Know You? Page 5
