Jane Was Here

by Sarah Kernochan

  HOURS LATER, HOYT wakes to the sensation that someone is looking down at him from above. He struggles to focus, but there is no moon to see by, the stars rubbed away by low-lying mist.

  Gradually, he makes out a head hanging over the rim of the sinkhole.

  The head is small, thick-necked, with flaps of long hair drooping down. Though he can’t see its eyes, he feels an opaque gaze on him.

  “Hey,” he croaks uncertainly.

  The presence starts to breathe fast. Staccato exhalations, like husky laughter: Heh-heh-heh.

  Hoyt’s hair stands up; his blood races as fear tightens around his heart.

  A low growl forms in the thing’s throat, growing louder, like a train emerging from a tunnel.

  Then a bark.

  “Pete!” Nearly swooning with relief, he stands and calls the dog. “Hey, boy! Go get help.”

  This is not a command Pete understands. He’s not a TV dog. If he were, he would run, get rope from Hoyt’s truck, clamp one end in its jaws, toss the other end down, and haul his master out of danger. But, Pete is stupid.

  Or, alternatively, Pete is smart: there is no rope in Hoyt’s truck.

  If the mutt can’t help him to safety, at least he can keep Hoyt warm. “Come on down!” He beckons vigorously. “Good dog! Jump!”

  Crouching, Pete readies to leap. Then, gauging the distance down, he changes his mind. He whines an apology, does a couple of spins to denote frustration. Then the smell of night prey drifts by his nostrils. With a bound, Pete’s racing away to better options than spending the night stuck in a hole with a man who has no food. Pete is too smart for that.

  Hoyt sits on the ground, leaning back against the wall again and closing his eyes. He hugs himself to preserve his body’s heat, every muscle tight with cold.

  As he passes in and out of consciousness, the haze departs, uncovering the stern stars.

  Whump. He jerks awake.

  The bank opposite Hoyt is calving like an iceberg. Whump. Another chunk of wall slides to the bottom.

  He sees something white embedded in the bank. A white head. Small, like a child’s skull. And it has eyes.

  He’s got to be dreaming. He yells, hoping to wake himself up. Instead, his bellowing causes the dirt to shift again, sifting away from the head to reveal its white neck. And he’s not dreaming.

  Another layer of soil breaks away. Two small white hands appear, thrust out stiffly. They seem to reach for him.

  Tamping down the terror building in his chest, Hoyt tells himself that if the thing is a skeleton, all it can do is frighten him. It can’t move: it’s inanimate.

  Crawling to the opposite bank, he touches the white head. Its surface is rough and cool. As he comes closer, he can discern its features.

  He knows that face! Roaring with fury, he grabs its neck, wrestling it from the dirt. Shoulders emerge—then a draped torso. Abruptly the soil releases the rest of it, and Hoyt falls backward, a four-foot, 100-pound chunk of heavy white granite on top of him.

  A slender woman, broken off at the knees, palms extended, veiled and robed, long lank hair, with that repulsive pitying gaze…He knows it too well. There are many versions of the Holy Virgin. This one on top of him is the Immaculate Mary—probably a garden sculpture.

  He remembers how his mother had all the Virgins, the way you collect action figures. Her statuettes were placed everywhere, even atop the washing machine. She prayed to them loudly. Sometimes she even crawled into Hoyt’s bed with one of them clutched like a teddy bear. He would roll over in his sleep and be gored in the stomach by the Holy Mother’s outstretched palms offering succor.

  He was just a kid who loved his mom. He swallowed her beliefs whole, and so he loved the Virgin too, passionately. The Mother of God was beautiful, and without stain. She bore a divine boy without having sex. She was always there when you needed her. And also, indestructibly, when you didn’t.

  Mary’s fall from grace came later, when his mother ran off. As months elapsed, Hoyt was reduced to scrounging for food in dumpsters, too embarrassed to call his father, dodging the landlord. Still he wouldn’t admit that his mom had abandoned him. Instead, the Virgin Mother was his betrayer, with her lying crafty eyes, her false innocence, her palms lifted as she shrugged: what do I care? He threw every one of the Virgins down the trash chute, hearing them crash to pieces at the bottom. At night, sleepless in his mother’s empty bed, he prayed, “Mother Mary, come to me so I can kill you.”

  Now, heaving the granite statue off, he smashes her to the dirt, snapping the delicate column of her neck. Her stone head rolls off.

  Later, after he manages to fall back to sleep, his arm will reach for her, and cradle her head to his bosom.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Shutting off the sprinklers, Silvio Pereira calls to his three nephews to stop unloading the mowers from the truck. The ground is too soupy to carry the weight. As little and light as the Brazilian is, his footsteps leave deep gouges in the grass, so he uses the flagstones to circle the Meltzer house.

  Rounding the corner, he sees the vast sinkhole out on the lawn. His boss’ voice is calling him from somewhere down in its depths.

  On the second floor of the house, Sylvio’s wife Honorata is about to start vacuuming when she hears shouts. Crossing to the window, she sees the men gathered around the pit. Looks like a bomb fell. Mrs. Meltzer won’t be happy. Maybe now Silvio will get Mister Eddy’s job. Then the Pereiras can buy that three-bedroom house on Lower Shad Street and bring her family up from São Paulo. She watches the men lay down planks to the rim of the hole.

  Silvio almost doesn’t recognize the frightened, diminished man at the bottom. Beneath the grime, Hoyt’s upturned face is ashy; his legs shudder beneath him as if he doesn’t trust the earth to sustain him.

  “Can you get me out of here?” Hoyt asks hoarsely.

  “You make the grass too wet,” Silvio says. “Now you gotta big hole.”

  “Thank you for pointing that out.”

  Though Silvio has a twelve-foot ladder for window cleaning in the truck, he leans over the edge instead. “Mister Eddy, you owe me money long time. When you gonna pay me?”

  Hoyt’s reply is barely audible: “Tomorrow.”

  “Now. Today you gonna pay me.”

  After he helps Hoyt climb out of the crater, Silvio follows him to his pickup, where Hoyt makes out a check with a trembling hand. Meanwhile the dog nonchalantly trots out of the woods, hopping into the truck bed as Hoyt starts the engine.

  “Mister Eddy,” says Silvio, “what you want I do for the hole?”

  “It’s your problem. You’re the boss now.” Hoyt drives off without another word.

  OFFICER BERNARD (Bern) D’Annunzio types up his report. Marlene Walczak came into the station yesterday to complain that someone had broken into her trailer. There have been five similar break-ins over the past two weeks, all with the same pattern. The intruder entered and left through an unlocked door, leaving few traces behind: a half-filled water glass, a banana peel, a bowl of milk with a few Cheerios still swimming in it, an empty yogurt container in the trash. One elderly lady found her bath towels damp and a ring of soap scum around the tub. Bern extracted a long strand of blonde hair from the drain. Since then, the Graynier Police have taken to calling the mysterious intruder “Goldilocks.”

  According to Ms. Walczak, Goldilocks murdered her dog. Bern leaves this out of his report; complainant admitted her pet was about 110 in dog years. Complainant also looked a little crazy, with all the telltale signs of being a meth addict: skinny, wired, paranoid, bad complexion. She had a weird mole on her cheek, not round but sort of smeared, as if someone had painted it on and then tried to wipe it off. (Bern’s cousin had something like that on her arm; the doctors biopsied it, then scooped a deep hole in her flesh to remove the tumor.) After she left, Bern’s partner told him that Marlene was the town whore.

  Bern is new in town, transferred six months ago from the country sheriff’s office in Quikabukket.
Graynier had never needed its own police, but now the town has a drug problem, and thus the new police station is temporarily housed in a Winnebago on Route 404. Bern is one of only four cops on the new “force,” and none of them is cut out for investigative work.

  They’ve petitioned the state to send in a plainclothes detective to ferret out where the meth is made and who the dealers are. Bern keeps expecting the guy to walk through the door.

  A man comes in, about 70, too old to be him. He hands his business card to Bern. Richard Fancher, Private Investigation. He has driven up from Roanoke, Virginia.

  Probably a retired cop, Bern guesses. Unsuited to the La-Z-Boy and floundering in excess energy, with a wife who hates having him underfoot. So the guy opens an office in his garage, puts up a website, more for pride than money. Not many bites; he’ll give up in a couple of years. Then it’s a short step to the geezer condo in Jupiter; he’s already wearing the untucked short-sleeve pineapple-print shirt. His bones creak when he sits down, handing Bern a photo.

  Bern doesn’t recognize the girl. The picture is a print out on a lousy printer with low ink. Soft-focus of a pallid, heart-shaped face on a thin neck. Hair could be blond or brown; she’s half-standing in tree shadow, unaware she’s being photographed.

  “Runaway?”

  “Yes and no.” Fancher looks cagey. “Let’s say she’s an adult who suddenly went off on her own, and my clients want to know where she is.”

  “What makes you think she’s in Graynier?”

  “By now she may not be. But when this picture was taken, she was.” Fancher slides another print-out from his attaché, a blow-up of the photo’s top corner, zoomed in past the girl’s shoulder. A blurred white vertical of a sign post, dappled by tree shadow; you can just make out the letters: “Graynier Ave.”

  “There’s only one Graynier Avenue in all of North America, and that’s in beautiful downtown Graynier, Mass,” the old man finishes slowly, as if educating a doofus.

  Bern doesn’t appreciate Fancher’s tone. He tosses the photos back to him. “Go by the post office and ask Thom Sayre. He knows everybody.”

  APPROACHING HIS FRONT stoop, Hoyt registers the jagged glass littering the steps, the missing window pane beside the door.

  The vandal is back. Found the door locked, took his revenge.

  Still dazed by his ghastly night in the sinkhole, Hoyt can’t muster any outrage at first. Crunching through the glass, he opens his door.

  Strewn over the living room carpet are shards of glass, glittering in the morning sun that pours through his empty window frames. Four windows have been smashed. Hearing the cheeping of birds in his bedroom, he goes in to find some sparrows and a cardinal ricocheting off the walls. The bedroom pane is shattered too.

  The agonizing pain in his neck has returned. Grabbing a pint of bourbon from the coffee table, he hurls himself on the sofa and drinks for dear life, firing up his wrath.

  Why me?

  Starting with the road accident three weeks ago, something demonic has pursued Hoyt: like that mythical black swarm of she-flies, the Furies, who feast on the guilty.

  Guilty of what? What have I ever done to deserve this?

  He’s not that interested in an answer. Revenge is all that matters. The vandal will be back, and Hoyt will be ready: locked and loaded.

  WHAT DID I DO to deserve this? Marly stares at her mole in the hotel suite’s bathroom mirror.

  As long as she can remember, she has had a “beauty mark” on her right cheek, a light-brown mole about the size of a pencil eraser. Then, a few days ago, it darkened. Now it is almost black, and sunk into the flesh, a depression whose ragged borders have expanded to the size of a nickel.

  Why is God punishing me? Her car banged up, her trailer broken into, her dog gone. Every night, the terrible dreams. And now this evil-looking mole. That cop couldn’t stop staring at it. How can she set foot in O’Malley’s Mare? Who would sleep with her? She is rotting like a piece of fruit on the ground.

  God never gives you more than you can handle. Things could be worse. At least the bleeding from her hands has stopped. At least she’s not hallucinating any more.

  She wipes away the tiny specks of food flung onto the glass by flossing guests, then goes into the bedroom to start vacuuming.

  Since Gabriella left to have her baby, Marly has been clean ing the Ellis Suite, the biggest, fanciest room in the B & B. The master bedroom of the old Graynier family mansion, it holds all the original furniture: fringed Victorian chairs, stained-glass lamps, carved rosewood armoire and matching bedstead, a marble-topped bureau.

  The last guest left the mirrored door of the armoire hanging open. As Marly swings it shut, her reflected image comes into view.

  She screams.

  The face in the mirror isn’t hers. It’s an old man with muttonchop whiskers, his thick mane of white hair raked into disheveled peaks. He glares back at Marly. A deep whorl of puckered scar tissue forms a hole in his cheek under one eye.

  Her screams bring the maintenance man. He finds her shaking uncontrollably, pointing at herself in the mirror of an old armoire, nobody else in the room.

  “UNH,” SAYS COLLIN, by way of goodbye to his grandparents, as he hands the cell phone back to his father.

  Brett tries to stay alert. His in-laws’ call woke him after only three hours’ sleep, following a long night at the computer.

  “What’s going on with Coll?” George Linwood’s deep, mistrustful bass rumbles in his ear. “All he does is grunt.” “Yeah, it’s just his way.” Brett rakes his fingers through his sleep-rumpled hair.

  “His way?” Veronda’s mother Olani is on the extension. “We know our own grandson. Don’t preach at us what we know. What you been doing with that boy?”

  He glances over at his son. Already dressed for the day, the boy looks away and retreats downstairs. “Lots of things,” Brett answers feebly, wiping sweat from his brow. Even at eight in the morning, the heat promises a scorcher. “He’s learning to swim.”

  “To swim? Collin never studied no swimming.”

  “Well, he says he can swim now.”

  “He says? Ain’t you observed him?”

  The front door slams. The kid doesn’t even bother with breakfast anymore, hurrying out every morning to meet Gita.

  George jumps in, “Who’s supervising this swimming?”

  Every day, Brett lets his ten-year-old son walk out the door unsupervised, and doesn’t see him again until dinner. Worse, he’s grateful; Collin’s defection gives Brett more time to obsess about Jane.

  Phone to his ear, Brett wanders down the hall. “He’s got a friend. A girl from up here. They do lots of activities together.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Gita.”

  “Gita? What kind of a name is that?”

  What kind of name is Veronda? “Indian, I guess.” He looks into Jane’s room. Her bed is empty. When did she go out?

  “What type of Indian? Whoopin’ it up or the other kind?”

  Every morning Jane packs up her belongings and tidies the room to look as if no one slept here. Ready to fly at a moment’s notice. He checks under the bed: her duffel is still there. He breathes a sigh of relief, tamping down his chronic fear that she has left him.

  Someone raps sharply on the front door.

  “Sorry, I’ve got to go.” Brett claps the phone shut, cutting off his in-laws and hurrying downstairs.

  The stranger on the stoop is an unsmiling, square-set elderly man with an attaché. Despite his tropical-fruit-print shirt, he has an aura of official business.

  Brett’s heart dips: is he here about Jane? Has something happened to her? “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Brett Sampson?” The man has a soft Southern accent.

  “Yes.”

  “Dick Fancher. I’m a private investigator.” He offers a business card, damp with sweat. “I’m told that you’ve got a young woman staying with you. Is this her?” He hands Brett a printout photo.r />
  Brett stares at the print-out snapshot of Jane, captured by his cell phone and posted, foolishly, on the web.

  Fancher notes his dismay. “Can I come in?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Brett Sampson is not a skilled liar. Dick Fancher, P.I., thinks it’s a safe bet that the girl Brett calls “Jane” did not leave Graynier yesterday on a bus to Montreal. Neither does he believe that the girl showed up unannounced, a complete stranger, and Sampson just took her in without hesitation; or that he learned practically nothing about her during the three whole weeks she stayed with him.

  Still, Sampson seems in no hurry to get rid of him. On the contrary, he wants to talk, or at least to listen. Inviting Fancher right into his kitchen, the guy sat him down, made coffee and French toast. After offering his phony information about the girl’s departure for Montreal, he started plying the detective with questions: where was she from? (Wyatt Bend, Virginia.) Who were her parents? (Bill and Karen Moss.) Why were they looking for her? (She ran away.) All asked with a heated curiosity, bordering on obsession.

  Fancher lets Sampson play interrogator, keeping his answers short to tantalize and draw the guy in further.

  “What reason would she have to run away?”

  “What reason did she tell you?”

  “Like I said, she won’t say anything about anything.” Sampson shakes his head in frustration, not realizing he’s just used the present tense.

  She’s still around; Fancher would bet good money on it. She might even be in the house, right now. He keeps an ear cocked for telltale creaks overhead, a toilet flushing, while Brett continues: “I mean, she’s not a minor, right? So how can she be a runaway? She’s free to go where she wants.”

  “Legally, yes. That’s why the police aren’t sitting here in your kitchen. But some kids—and a 23-year-old, in my book, is still a kid—they aren’t so well equipped for freedom. They can’t take care of themselves. And then we’re not talking about an ordinary kid either…” Fancher trails off coyly, waiting as Brett grabs the bait.