He tucked his hands under his arms and walked back to his car.
WITHOUT ANY REAL SENSE of where he was headed, Scott found himself pulling up in front of the Milburn Regional Hospital, a beige brick building that sat by itself beyond the northern outskirts of town. As a child, he’d been here only once, when Owen had fallen off the roof and broken his arm. His most lingering memory was the poor reception on the waiting room television. Today there were fewer than a dozen cars in the parking lot and an ambulance sitting in front of the main entrance.
Walking in through the sliding glass doors with his wounded hands still jammed in his pockets, he approached the desk where a heavyset man in a scrub top was checking his email. “Can I help you?”
“I don’t know,” Scott said. “Do you know if there’s a nurse here named Anne Tonkin?”
“Anne’s an X-ray tech. Let me see if she’s here.” He checked a schedule taped over the phone, picked up the receiver, and dialed. “Hey. Is Anne back there? There’s somebody here to see her.”
Scott walked over to the gift shop and browsed through greeting cards and balloons.
“Hello?” a voice said. “Were you looking for me?”
The woman in front of him was in her late twenties. She wore blue hospital scrubs and a white jacket; her face found its center in gold-flecked brown eyes so dark and intense that for a moment, as unlikely as it was, he thought she must have recognized him from somewhere.
“My name is Scott Mast—you might know my family.”
“Your father was Frank?”
“That’s right,” Scott said. “Actually, I wanted to ask you about a distant relation of yours. A man named Myron Tonkin?”
Anne frowned, then smiled, as if realizing she’d been the victim of a sly practical joke. “Oh my.” At this distance, Scott realized, she smelled like tobacco and butterscotch. “You’ve been talking to Pauline McGuire, haven’t you?”
SHE TOLD HIM THAT SHE had been on her way out for a cigarette, and they stood outside the hospital while she turned her back to the wind, cupped her palms, and expertly touched the tip of the flame to a Camel 100.
“Whatever that delightful old bat might have told you,” Anne said, “my great-great-grandfather Myron was the genuine article—the original bad seed. People in my family still talk about the time they caught him peeping at his own little sister, and this was a hundred and some odd years ago.” Anne lifted her gaze to examine Scott’s expression. “I’m not saying he deserved what happened to him, but everything I’ve heard about him, he was on his way to a bad end regardless.”
“How old was he when he went blind?” Scott asked.
“Let’s see.” Anne bit her lip, summoning up data. “Thirteen or fourteen, I think.” She inhaled again, held, and released a perfect smoke ring. It hovered between them for a split second and then vanished. “Let me guess—Pauline McGuire has you convinced that his old schoolteacher Mr. Carver struck him blind.”
“I wouldn’t exactly say I’m convinced.”
“There’s absolutely no proof of that. This was back in the dark ages, though, when people around here still sacrificed rabbits and crows’ eggs for a good harvest. I’m not kidding—you and I grew up in a very superstitious part of the country. Although I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.”
“So you don’t believe the stories?”
Anne smiled. “I’m not going to deny it makes a good story. But do I think that some old nineteenth-century warlock used black magic to school disobedient kids? The fact is my great-great-grandfather went blind in childhood, probably due to some kind of optic neuritis or macular degeneration, and as cruel as it sounds, it probably saved him from a life of crime.”
“What finally happened to him?”
“Nothing particularly interesting. From what I’ve heard, he lurked around home for the rest of his life, rarely left the house, never really learned to function without sight. Died relatively young, buried in the family plot.”
“What about the others?” Scott asked.
“What, you mean the girl who developed a speech impediment and the boy who got polio?”
“Pauline said he was trampled by a horse.”
Anne smiled again. She made it seem as if nothing pleased her more than standing outside a small-town hospital on a twenty-degree day, smoking and debunking family myth. “I’m sure she’s not above adding drama to the story where it might be required.” She looked at her watch. “I have to get back to work. Are you sure you don’t want me to get someone to look at your hands?”
“It’s nothing,” Scott said, and realized it was true. The pain had stopped a long time ago. In fact, during the course of his conversation with her, he had forgotten about it entirely.
FROM THE HOSPITAL, he drove east, circumventing town without really thinking about it, to Colette’s house, all without passing a single car. Although the threatened nor’easter hadn’t yet arrived, everyone in the area seemed to have already gone into hiding. The snow-swept emptiness made him think about one of those end-of-the-world movies in which the hero wanders down vacant streets peering through windows, looking for evidence of where it all went wrong.
Pulling up to the McGuire house, he was already beginning to feel the parasite twisting in his guts, a kind of hunger but not for food, the urge for something else. The possibility made him shudder. Thirty-four was an ominous age to be acquiring new appetites.
Colette’s convertible wasn’t in the driveway. He went up to the porch and knocked on the door, rang the bell, and waited. After a minute, he walked along the sloping, landscaped hill to the granary, half expecting to find her back there. But the grounds were deserted; even the iPod-wearing groundskeeper with his black knit cap was nowhere to be seen.
Scott opened the door to the granary and looked inside at the heaps of grimy books and disorganized boxes, all at once unsure of why he’d come. How much more did he expect to find? He took his swollen, bloodstained hands from his pockets and stared at them, the stippled cuts and punctures looking, despite their lack of pain, as if they should have been steaming in the cold air. You idiot, the Himalayas of paper shouted at him. Go home. But which home exactly? He ought to have insisted on taking Henry out and buying him lunch first. But he was in no frame of mind to insist on anything right now; his psyche felt as formless and unsteady as a bucket of water, given shape only by the thing that held it back.
Out of sheer desperation, he began sorting randomly through the piles, lifting them up and setting them aside into some kind of chronological order, a pathetic attempt to establish organization. The damp mildew smell grew more intense as he dug deeper, wrenching away whole heaps of old books, their water-damaged covers permanently adhered; he dropped them in one corner. Newspapers went into a different stack. There was an astonishing volume of loose papers, some shredded as if Dawn Wheeler’s rats had been making nests in it. But from the sound of it, he was the only living thing out here, and he worked with the steady, mindless concentration of a man compulsively avoiding his own thoughts.
Two hours later, he came across the blueprints.
AT FIRST, HE DIDN’T recognize even them. Holding the age-stained sheets of paper up to the light, he traced the outlines of hallways and rooms and doors with one finger, following them across the discolored and tattered pages until, all at once, a flashbulb burst in the back of his brain. He dropped the papers to the floor, stepped back, knelt down, and stared.
They were the architectural designs for Round House.
The plans deviated in peculiar ways from the finished product—the structure described in the blueprints was both familiar and uncanny. From what Scott saw here, there was much more to it than met the eye—hidden passages and whole subchambers that he’d never seen. It was as if this house had eaten a smaller one and was still digesting it a room at a time. Details that the contractors had decided not to execute; or maybe the builders had run out of money using plaster to cover up all their sharp edges.
&
nbsp; Or maybe you just haven’t seen it all yet.
The old pine boards creaked behind him, and Scott jerked upright with a start.
“Hey,” Colette said in the doorway. She looked bright-eyed and apple-cheeked, slightly out of breath, as if she’d just come back from a long run. Oddly, it suited her, made her seem younger and more vital. “What are you doing here?”
“Just looking around.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Sorry. I should have waited until you were home. I just thought—”
“Relax. I just got back and saw your car out front.” She craned her neck to look at the drawings on the floor. “What’s that?”
“Some kind of architectural designs, I guess,” Scott said, uncertain as always as to why he felt compelled to withhold information. For the first time, he noticed that the hunger in her eyes matched his own.
“Come on into the house.”
“What?”
“There’s something inside I think you ought to see.”
“I really can’t.” He thought of the aunt shriveled up in her bedroom, surrounded by old posters and glamour shots, enshrouded in imported tobacco smoke and local murder lore. “Actually, I should probably get going.”
“Why are you always in such a hurry?” Colette’s smile was vulpine but genuine; she looked as if she were on her way to a cannibal barbecue. “Come on, you jerk. Can’t you see I’m trying to help you here?”
INSIDE THE HOUSE, someone had thrown all the flowers away. The funereal reek of cloying blossoms that had clogged the air the last time he’d been in here was gone, replaced by the even worse stench of old burned things—fabric, stone, skin, hair. Once you burned it badly enough, did it matter what it used to be?
He stopped in the doorway of the living room and looked inside. Colette had set up a movie screen on one side of the room with a sixteen-millimeter projector pointed at it, the kind he remembered from elementary school phys-ed movies on the dangers of unprotected sex and drunk driving. Somewhere in the bathysphere of his consciousness, he felt the murk of his unease thickening into dread.
“Take a seat,” Colette said. “Make yourself comfortable.”
He pointed at the projector. “What is all this?”
“Today’s the anniversary of the Bijou fire.”
“I know what day it is.”
“Pull those curtains for me, won’t you?”
“What is this?” Scott repeated, aware that his voice was sounding a little strained, not just around the edges but everywhere, and thinking that under the circumstances, it might not be inappropriate. The kinds of movies that Colette McGuire-Fontana might want to show him weren’t necessarily the kinds of movies that he wanted to watch.
“See for yourself.”
She flipped a switch on the projector, and its sprockets started making that familiar whirring crackle, like a fan with something caught in its blades. A beam of bright light flared up across the room. On-screen, Scott saw the big white sans serif title HELPING HANDS come up along with a canned-sounding orchestral score. He realized that on some level, he’d been expecting this, exactly this, because, in a sense, it was what he deserved.
“Your great-uncle Butch’s movie,” Colette said loudly enough to be heard over the sound track. “The one you never got to see.”
“Where did you get it?”
“The Bijou. Your brother found it the other day under some debris up in the projection booth. It was almost completely intact.”
“Owen found this?”
“It is a part of the town’s history.” Her voice had a singsong tour guide’s inflection that made him feel a little sick. “Of course, Aunt Pauline insisted we acquire it for our town archives.”
On the screen, the camera was playing over rows of low-income housing that missionary teams headed by Scott’s great-uncle Butch were in the process of rebuilding. Great-Uncle Butch’s voice-over came on, quoting Scripture and beginning to describe the importance of hard work and Christian charity. Scott curled his fingers into his own wounds, clenching tight, reopening them; his nails came back satisfyingly bloody.
“Were you at the theater that night?” he asked. “The night of the fire?”
Colette didn’t look back at him. From where he stood, behind her and to the right, Scott saw the curve of her cheekbone and jawline changing colors with the shades of gray and white on the screen, a halo of hazy light around her hair.
“And where were you,” her voice asked from what sounded like far away, “on the night in question?”
“I was away at college.”
She turned and speared him with a long, hard stare.
“You couldn’t be bothered to come back?”
“You know what?” Scott managed. “Screw this.” His voice was shaking; his eyes were hot and headachy, as if he’d been staring directly into a spotlight, burning out his retinas. “I don’t need to watch this.”
“Then go,” she said, still smiling. “I’ll tell you how it ends.”
But he couldn’t move. Colette touched one of his hands, lifted it up to look at it in the dusty cone of the projector’s light. “Come on.” Her voice was gentle, almost kind. “I’ll get you a Band-Aid.”
SONIA DIDN’T NEED a calendar to know what day it was. When Owen stormed into Fusco’s and started ordering drinks two at a time, nobody said a word. After delivering his first Jim Beam and Budweiser, she watched it disappear in seconds while the patrons at the pool table looked on in fascination. A man’s self-destruction was always a good show.
“Where’s Henry?” Sonia asked as casually as possible.
Owen looked at the empty stool next to him as if he expected the boy to be there and shook his head. “Back in the truck.”
She got her coat and went out to check Owen’s pickup. Heavy flakes of wet snow were tumbling and swarming everywhere, clinging to her hair and eyelashes, smoothing over the edges and seams of the world and rounding off the corners.
“Henry?” she asked. “Hey, kiddo, are you—”
The passenger side door was open.
The truck was empty.
SONIA RAN AROUND BEHIND the bar to where she had parked the Corolla, under the sign EMPLOYEE PARKING ONLY, and pulled her sleeve down over her hand to swipe a thick hood of snow off the windshield. Despite the weather, the engine started right up, and she rolled out onto the street, hoping to catch a flash of Henry’s jacket somewhere up the sidewalk.
It wasn’t the first time that Owen had left the boy in the truck only to have him wander off. The last time, back in August, she had found him standing in front of a closed toy shop window with his nose against the glass, watching the electric trains. But it wasn’t summer now, it was the beginning of a blizzard, and the temperature was dropping by the minute.
She dialed Scott and got no answer. Then, reluctantly, she called Red’s cell.
“Hey,” he said, sounding far away. “What’s up?”
“Henry’s missing.”
“Who?”
“Owen’s little boy.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “You at work?”
“At the moment, I’m driving around looking for him.”
“Who, the kid?”
She felt a sharp finger of impatience prodding in her chest. “Where are you?”
“Doing a little online shopping. How do you feel about white gold?”
“Red, the kid’s only five,” she said. “He shouldn’t be out here alone.”
“Uh-huh.”
She sighed, realizing she had to spell it out. “You think you could possibly help me out on this one? Rouse yourself to action?”
“Where’s Owen in all this?” Red said, sounding irritated now. “No, wait, let me guess: halfway between the stool and the floor.”
“People were there for you when you needed it.” This wasn’t exactly true, actually more the opposite, but she was counting on him being sentimental enough to let it slide. “I’m wondering if you could at least call some of your friend
s in the fire department.”
“For Christ’s sake, Sonia, he’s not some cat stuck in a tree.” She heard a keyboard clicking in the background: at home all right, but probably Googling himself, a habit that he’d confessed from his New York days. “Call Lonnie Mitchell. Tell him he owes me one. If you don’t find the kid in the next half hour or so, let me know, I’ll see what I can do, okay?”
“Forget it.”
“Wait, princess, hold on a second—”
She hung up on him, turning left at the intersection of Norway and Aickman Avenue, heading back downtown. It wasn’t just getting dark out now, it was dark, the only light filtering from the few shops that were still open. Snow pounded the windshield in waves. Sonia turned up the car’s heater. There was an iron quality to New England darkness this time of year that she could practically taste. A little boy wandering around in this weather wouldn’t last through the night.
Red would help her if she forced the issue.
She turned left, heading out to the McGuire house.
THEY WATCHED THE MOVIE in silence.
There was something profoundly unsettling about sitting here in the McGuire living room with the smoke-damaged remains of the same film that his mother had been watching unspooling in front of him. Colette didn’t appear to mind—if anything, the silence seemed to soothe her. She sat beside him on the couch, sipping a glass full of clinking ice cubes and watching the footage wind through the projector.
Helping Hands started out mundanely enough, with grainy, discolored shots of Great-Uncle Butch’s missionary teams at work. These tasks encompassed painting and refurbishing old poverty-stricken homes in the Kentucky coal region, replacing roofs, windows, and whole rooms of old row houses whose owners had been too poor or shortsighted to do anything about it themselves. Cheerful, clean-cut young men and women in scarves worked with brushes, ladders, and saws, occasionally glancing up at the camera to smile or crack a joke the microphone didn’t catch. Throughout all of it, Great-Uncle Butch’s voice-over narration described his team’s commitment and the gratitude of the people whose homes they visited. Every so often, a Bible verse appeared on the screen, just in case the audience was unclear on exactly how the mission fit into the larger vision of God’s word.
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