The Longings of Wayward Girls
Page 25
“You girls sure you didn’t notice anything unusual that day?”
Charlene kept her cigarettes and her ashtray on the window ledge near her chair. Her mouth was narrow and tense, and between small bites of food she squinted at Betty, then at Sadie.
“Nothing at all?” she said. “No cars on the street? What about the Filley boy? Did you see him? Was he anywhere around?”
Betty whined and sighed, imposed upon and humiliated. Sadie offered as much information as she could invent without giving herself away. She wanted to divulge the location of the pond, and she decided Betty’s mother was the conduit.
“The other day when Betty and I went looking for Francie and got lost, we did find this pond, a big one, on the edge of the woods.” She took a bite of pork chop and chewed.
Betty’s mother perked up. “Really? A pond?”
Betty’s father sighed and shifted in his wooden chair. “Charlene,” he said.
“But a pond? I don’t know if that’s been checked out. That’s a hazard, you know? The kids should be warned away from that.”
“The kids are smart enough not to go into a pond if they don’t know how to swim.”
“I swam in a pond once and they have mucky bottoms. Lots of weeds,” Sadie said.
Betty’s father took up two spaces at the table. His face, perennially red, made him seem as if he was always holding his breath. He gave Sadie a paternal look, his eyes kind.
“That’s true,” he said.
Betty’s mother set her fork down on her plate. “We should mention the pond to the police,” she said.
“The entire area has been searched. I’m certain the pond was—well, searched, too.”
“A girl did drown there once,” Sadie said.
“What, sweetie?” Betty’s mother said.
“In the pond,” Sadie said. “Back in the seventeen hundreds.”
Betty’s mother and father exchanged a glance. Betty’s siblings, their faces all a version of Betty’s—younger, shorter, thinner, with only slightly varying shades of hair color—all looked up at Sadie, then at their parents in turn.
“Who wants dessert?” Betty’s mother said, her voice high and sweet.
“I’m pretty sure it was that pond,” Sadie said. “A Filley girl.”
Betty elbowed Sadie. Her siblings were already stacking the plates, clearing the table, distracted by the mention of chocolate pudding. The rain came slashing against the window, pooled in the sill, and Betty’s mother quickly shut it. The second-to-youngest Donahue child, Joey, was afraid of thunder and lightning, and Betty and Sadie were required to take him with them to the subterranean level of the split ranch to distract him with a rerun of Wild Wild West. Sadie sat on Betty’s modern couch, the cushions stiff squares, the fabric a nubby tweed that left its imprints on her legs. While Betty’s brother sat immersed in the television she leaned toward Betty.
“What if she’s out there?” Sadie said. A wet leaf, ripped from a tree, pressed up against the high window. The temperature dropped with the storm, and the rain would wet Francie’s clothes, her hair. Her glasses would be smeared, rendered useless. Maybe she would huddle at the base of a tree, but Sadie remembered the warning about trees and lightning. There might be an old abandoned fort, a cave. Sadie imagined Francie in the trunk of a stranger’s car. The thunder sent Joey Donahue up onto the couch between them, and at the moment that James West in his tight pants thwarted Dr. Miguelito Loveless, the evil dwarf, the television clicked off, and the room, once lit by its rays, was thrown into darkness. Betty, Sadie, and Joey all shrieked, and from upstairs came Mr. Donahue’s lumbering footsteps.
“The lights are out,” he said. “I’m coming down.”
He appeared behind a wavering beam of light and showed them the way upstairs, where Betty’s mother was moving about the kitchen, lighting candles, telling the children who seemed to be glued to her clothes, “Don’t touch! Don’t touch!”
Betty and Sadie took a candle back down to the rec room and sat on the couch and watched the wax melt around the base of the candlestick holder. “Remember Old-Fashioned-Days House?” Betty said.
Sadie had been thinking more about James West’s blue eyes, his tight clothes, the vest he wore over his nice white shirt, than about wandering the woods in a long dress. The strangeness of these thoughts, their allure, made her feel oddly empty, as if the girl she once was had gone forever, and in her place was someone she was afraid to know. She stayed at Betty’s another half hour, watching out the window for a light to come on in her house, but it remained dark, and she dreaded going home. When Betty’s mother started calling the younger kids for baths, Sadie told Betty she should probably go, hoping she’d say no, but Betty didn’t invite her to spend the night, and Betty’s father gave her his golf umbrella and stood at the door watching her as she crossed the street.
The rain had slowed to a soft pattering. Sadie only pretended to enter her dark house, waiting for Betty’s father to leave his post at his front door, then walked down the street in the rain. The streetlights were out, but the clouds had moved on, and the street seemed as she’d once imagined it—magical and moonlit. In this strange light, Sadie saw a figure approaching—smallish and wet, covered in mud—and she stared in amazement, sure it was Francie finally relinquishing her hiding place, newly thankful for her warm house, her comfortable bed, still oblivious of what Sadie had done. Sadie stepped up her pace and almost called out. But as she got closer she saw the figure was Beth. She wore the oxford shirt she’d had on the afternoon of the lobster bake, now streaked with dirt, and a pair of shorts. Her shoes were caked with mud, her hair soaked to her head, as if she, and not Francie, had been outside these past two hours in the storm. Sadie held the umbrella for her, and Beth stepped beneath it, and Sadie felt Beth’s body shaking, the kind of uncontrollable tremors Sadie would get after swimming too long in very cold water.
“Where have you been?” Sadie said, shocked at Beth’s appearance.
“Where have you been?” Beth said, her voice quaking.
“At Betty’s,” Sadie said.
“At Betty’s,” Beth said, the strange hiccuping not masking her snide tone.
“Why are you mimicking me?” Sadie said. Betty’s younger brothers and sisters often mimicked each other. It became a game to see how long one child could keep it up until the other resorted to violence. Beth didn’t answer. Instead she continued her shaking and allowed Sadie to walk her up the street to her house, then up her driveway, through the iron gate, to the back door by the pool. As they stood there the power suddenly returned, and the pool was illuminated, the shrubbery surrounding it lit by carefully positioned lamps. The light by the back door had come on, too, and Sadie saw the true state of Beth’s clothing: the mud on her back, on the sleeves of her shirt, and on the front another smear—a rusty color, like blood.
“Were you up in the woods?” Sadie asked. “Are you hurt?” She wondered what Beth had been doing, if she’d been following Ray, like she always threatened to, or if she’d been frightened by something instead—kidnapped by the same person who took Laura Loomis and Francie, and made a narrow escape.
“What were you doing up there?” Sadie asked, desperate now to know. “Did you see something? Did you see someone?”
Beth stared at her, her hair wet along the sides of her face, her eyes dark and wide, and said nothing. Then she flung her back door open, and Sadie set the umbrella on the patio and followed her inside into a dim tiled hallway. She watched as Beth slopped mud across the white tiles into the laundry room. Here she kicked off her shoes, took off her shorts and her shirt, the whole thing performed quickly despite her uncontrollable shaking. She left the clothing in a sodden pile, glanced up, and seemed surprised to see Sadie still standing there, staring.
“Don’t look at me!” she shrieked, and slammed the laundry room door. For the second time that day Sadie stood outside a door, listening to sobbing.
PART FIVE
MOTHER TRI
ES TO GET ON WITH LIFE
Wintonbury—December 13, 1974
Six months ago, Laura Loomis’s mother took her and a girlfriend for an afternoon of swimming at the Wampanoag club pool. After, she dropped Laura at the friend’s house down the road with the instruction to be home by dinnertime. “I walked her to the door,” the girlfriend said. “I watched her go down the front walk to the road.” Though there were no signs of a struggle, Mrs. Cynthia Loomis, Laura’s mother, knows that Laura wouldn’t get into the car of just anyone. “Sometimes, I still can’t believe this has happened,” she said quietly, sitting at her kitchen table, looking out a window into a snow-covered backyard woods. Laura’s drawings are taped up on the wall. “Laura was a smart girl in school. She was very artistic—she loved to draw.” Mrs. Loomis hopes the FBI, which has been called in to the case, will provide some answers. Life at home will never be the same. “We can’t ever get over it,” she said. “You just find yourself waiting.”
August 30, 2003
BEA SIDELMAN PULLS THE GRAND Marquis all the way down the old Filley house’s gravel drive. The rain the day before has left the grass damp and green, and there are still puddles. Sadie has the window down and breathes in the thick air. “It’ll be a hot one,” Bea says. They pass a white Audi convertible parked in front of the house. Bea glances at Sadie and tells her that the car belongs to the sister, Beth.
“She’s always tooling up and down the street in it,” Bea says.
She pulls up to the barn and stops. She keeps her hands at ten and two on the wheel. “Take care now,” she says, back to her schoolteacher manner. “You were always a smart girl, Sadie Watkins.”
Sadie leans over in the car and puts her arms around Bea. She feels her narrow shoulders tense and then relax, and the woman’s arms come up and Sadie feels a soft patting on her back.
“Go on home,” Bea says, her voice breaking.
She watches while Sadie gets out and opens the barn door to reveal her car, and then she waits, the car’s big engine idling, while Sadie gets inside and starts the SUV up and pulls out. The smell of the barn—the hay, the oiled tools, the bags of lime—has seeped into her car’s upholstery. She watches Bea Sidelman disappear down the drive, and when she hears her accelerate out onto the road she pulls up alongside Beth’s convertible, climbs from the car to stand in the old house’s shadow, thrown now onto the grass. She feels a vague unease. She moves up the slate walkway, around the overgrown rhododendron, to the front door and knocks, the wait interminable. She knocks again but, impatient, tries the door and finds it open. She steps into the hallway, onto the old wide chestnut floorboards, and then moves farther into the house, hesitantly stepping into the open room with the fireplace—the parlor, Ray called it. Today the room is bright with sunlight. There is a couch pushed against one wall, an old television on a stand. A crystal chandelier throws prisms of light onto the plaster walls. The windows are open, and on the chestnut floors are swaths of wetness, as if they were left open during the storm and the rain was allowed to come in. Sadie imagines Francie peering in the window, her eyes eager behind her glasses, her hair hanging lank and dirty to her shoulders, looking like a ghost waiting for Ray, much as she stood at the fence in the kindergarten playground, expecting Sadie and Betty to bring her the candies they’d promised. Sadie could see her, defiant, her hands on her hips, her dirty face, her wide eyes and pale skin dotted with insect bites. Maybe she did keep running, Sadie thinks. Maybe she’s finally made a life for herself somewhere and is happy.
She turns from the window toward the fireplace and sees that a panel is swung open on invisible hinges to reveal a wood-framed space beside it. The hidey spot. Inside, in the shadowy interior, is a dull-colored pile of something she cannot discern and a bit of still-bright fabric. Pink and purple. Before she can step closer she hears footsteps, a sharp-heeled clicking down a staircase somewhere.
“What are you doing?” Beth says. She emerges from a doorway, her hands on her hips. “You just walk right in?”
Sadie notices Beth’s clothes—a flowered dress cinched with a belt, a stone necklace, and sandals with sensible heels. Beth looks the part of a schoolteacher, but Sadie remembers her as the sad, somewhat pathetic girl of her childhood. Her bobbed hair swishes along her shoulders the same, but Sadie notices once again that Beth seems much older—the grooves around her mouth deep, her eyes ringed with smudgy makeup, the skin crepelike. She is aged, beyond her years.
Sadie is aware of how she looks in her own wrinkled skirt and blouse. “I apologize for just walking in, Beth,” she says. “It’s me, Sadie Watkins?”
Beth clenches her jaw. Her eyes flit around the house, as if something has caught her attention—a fly or a bee caught in the room.
“I know who you are,” Beth says.
“I came to pick up something of mine,” Sadie tells her. “I left it here.”
“Here? I don’t know, I don’t think so,” she says. She stares wide-eyed at Sadie, a look that makes her old face seem childlike, guileless.
“It’s upstairs in Ray’s room,” Sadie says.
Beth smiles then, a false smile of the type with which Sadie has long been familiar and that in any other circumstance, from another woman, would have put her at ease.
“Oh, I haven’t seen anything of yours,” she says, her voice higher pitched, moving into the register of propriety. “And I was just heading out.”
Beth means to corral Sadie out the door, but Sadie brushes past her, down the front hall and up the stairs. Behind her she can hear Beth’s protests, the angry tapping of her heels. In the bedroom Sadie doesn’t look at the bed, its rumpled sheets, the imprint of Ray’s head on the pillow. She finds the suitcase, just where she last saw it, and she grabs it by the handle. Beth has followed her up and blocks the doorway. She stares at Sadie and laughs.
“That old thing?” she says. Sadie glares at her, and Beth’s expression falters. “You might be able to use those things since your mother couldn’t.”
But Beth’s voice has lost its conviction. The suitcase is like a charm or a portal to the past.
“At least we know now why you hated her,” Sadie says.
Beth shrugs, but her eyes fill with something like regret. “She made me hate her.” Beth is still the girl she was all of those years ago—she has never moved beyond that time. Sadie wonders if any of them have, and then decides she cannot let that happen to her.
“Their little love escapade never happened,” Beth said. “My brother had tucked that away in the closet. Not a very good hiding spot—” Beth stops. She looks as if she’s bitten into something hard and hurt her tooth.
Sadie pushes past her out of the room, and Beth follows Sadie downstairs, close on her heels. They stand in the doorway to the parlor. “Speaking of my brother, where is he?” Beth asks her.
Sadie suspects Ray is just waking up at Emma and Pietro’s, discovering her gone, and making up an excuse for her. “Oh, she has friends in the area,” he might say. And now he is driving up and down the narrow sandy roads in his truck, past the colorful towels on lines, the beach toys stacked under cottages, the smell of eggs and bacon, expecting to come upon her. He’ll run through everything he said, making sure he didn’t slip, making sure he didn’t say something that might have given his love for Clare away, although the night will be a blurry-edged thing he cannot bring into focus. He will drive back to the motel, hoping she will miraculously be there. He said he wasn’t coming back here, and Sadie now wonders if he meant that, if she will be forced to endure sightings of him in town, or if he truly has decided he’s shared this house with ghosts long enough.
The heat suffuses her, cottony air filled with the scent of the wet floorboards and plaster. Sadie hefts the suitcase from one hand to the other. She remembers the odd bundle in the hidey spot, remembers, suddenly, Ray’s phone conversation with Beth before they left yesterday—the way his voice rose in fury—and she looks toward the place again, trying to make it out. Beth turns to see
where she is looking, her face suddenly bright with alarm.
“Get out!” Beth shouts. “Just get out!”
Sadie is taken aback. She stares at Beth, a grown woman who has transformed into a frightened girl, and feels an uneasy sense that this has all happened before. She whirls on her heels and steps out the door onto the front stone steps. Beth is right behind her, her hand on the door. In the sunlight Sadie sees Beth’s dress is soiled. On the heels of her shoes are what seem to be divots of grass, as if she’s been hiking through the meadow in them.
“Where’s my brother?” Beth asks again.
Sadie ignores her and puts the suitcase in the back of the SUV, her chest tight. She remembers Ray describing Francie, the shorts with the purple flowers. Sadie feels suddenly weak, dizzy in the climbing heat. From across the field of waving grass comes a calling voice. Sadie pauses. She imagines it’s Craig, calling her name.
“What have you done with him?” Beth says. Her face is pale, shining with perspiration.
Sadie looks at her. She needs to get home, she knows that.
But first, she repeats the question she overheard Ray asking the night before. “What’s in the hidey spot, Beth?”
Beth’s hands ball tightly into fists. She wears a beautiful ring, a platinum watch. But beneath her fingernails are slivers of dirt, and on her face is the expression from the night Sadie saw her stripped of her clothes in her laundry room.
“He was letting her go,” she says, her voice soft, frightened.
And then there are two voices that rise out of the woods. A man and a woman, calling someone. Sadie realizes she is the one who is missing, and they are seeking her in the woods.
Beth hears it, too. Her eyes become glassy with tears.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” she says, her voice a near whisper.
And then she takes a step back into the house and slams the front door. The morning sun brightens the glass in the upper-story windows. The mica glistens in the trap-rock stones. Sadie feels an implausible sense of dread take hold of her. From the woods behind her she hears the voices calling, calling.