In the Blood

by Lisa Unger

  No, I said. Nothing like that.

  She softened a little then, as if she remembered what she was dealing with here. I’m sorry, she said. We have to ask questions, to do everything we can to find your mom. We’ll find her, okay?

  Okay, I said. They wouldn’t find her. I knew that.

  My father was watching me so intently, I felt like he was trying to communicate with me telepathically. I put my head in my hand and started to sob.

  But I woke up dry-eyed. I didn’t cry anymore. There was an unpleasant tightness in my chest. Why did everyone in my life disappear?

  14

  It was the flashing lights that woke me up in the dim light of sunrise. The police had begun a search of the campus, looking for signs of Beck. The news of the online post was just a rumor, I’d learned when I got back last night. I already knew that Beck didn’t have a Fakebook page, and never would.

  But some of the other students on campus—you know those students, the ones who are always involved, jumping into the fray for Take Back the Night, or protesting against date rape, or a raise in tuition; those super-involved sorority sisters who are always raising money for Darfur, or running book drives for literacy, or baking for the hungry (let them eat cake!) —they had created a page for Beck (who had never spoken to any of them in all her years on campus): Find Rebecca Miller! There was a catalog of posts from the hundreds of friends Beck didn’t even know she had.

  People were bored. That was the problem with our culture. Life, real life, is essentially dull. Even unhappiness is mundane, lacks texture, the hills and valleys of true drama. People love a mystery, a tragedy, a shooting, a disappearance, a gruesome murder. They love to think about dead pregnant women floating in pools, children down wells, a subway bombing, husbands strangling wives and hiding their bodies in the woods. It titillates, excites, makes them a little grateful for their own boring workaday world. Even those that feign compassion, who rain tears and bring teddy bears and bouquets of flowers, sit vigils, are secretly thrilled to be involved in something bigger and more interesting than themselves. And the media just chums the water, but don’t get me started. Let’s come up with a logo and jingle for disaster! Twenty-four-hour coverage, a Dateline special, a made-for-television movie, an instant book! Okay, I’m done.

  After I took my shower, I noticed that my prescriptions were running low. Dr. Cooper is a psychologist but not a psychiatrist. She has a colleague, though, who prescribes for me. So before I headed to class, I called the office and told them I needed refills.

  “Oh,” said the assistant. I heard her clicking on her keyboard. “Miss Granger, I see here that you should have enough pills left for fifteen more days.”

  “No,” I said. “Just five.”

  There was silence on the other line. “Let me talk to the doctor,” she said. “And I’ll call you back.”

  I tried to figure in my head when I’d gotten the last refill. But I was extremely tired, tired to my core. I was really careful about taking my exact dose of medications. I knew what happened when I went off and it wasn’t pretty. I never messed with the dosage. Some people did, I knew. But not me. If pills were missing, it was because someone had taken them. And I bet I knew who. That would be a serious problem for me. Doctors and insurance companies were very, very strict with the kind of pills I was taking.

  But I didn’t have to worry about it with five days to go. I locked the rest of the pills in my desk and headed to class.

  The white noise in my head was so loud that I could hardly focus on what Langdon was saying at the lectern. There were a lot of people missing from class. As I had left the suite that morning, Ainsley told me that people were turning out to volunteer for the search. But she wasn’t and neither was I. We’d both been through it with Elizabeth, walking the grid in a cold drizzle. It had been like wading through a mire of fear and dread, hoping that someone would find a sign of her, praying that they wouldn’t. It was too much to go through again.

  The media circus had not yet begun. Outside our dorm there had been one local news van, and I’d heard there were a couple of reporters wandering around, asking questions. But Beck was no Elizabeth. She was not the all-American beauty, homecoming queen with straight As and a good relationship with her parents as Elizabeth had been. She was a tattooed, body-pierced, three-time runaway. Her picture, with spiky hair, lots of dark eyeliner, and exuding bad attitude, wasn’t going to arouse the requisite amount of empathy and envy to be truly titillating. The missing or murdered beautiful girl brought up so much emotion. Like the pretty and pure Snow White with the poison apple at her candy lips, or Sleeping Beauty, pale and virginal in her glass vessel, it was innocence fallen into the hands of evil that really brought up the ratings. No one gave a shit about the ugly stepsisters or the wicked queen.

  Not that Beck was ugly. In fact, beneath all that dark makeup and wild hair, she was one of the prettiest girls I’d ever known. Her skin was milk, her eyes almond-shaped and glittery green like the sea in summer. She was pretty in the truest sense and beautiful to her core, sensitive and kind (most of the time). But it was almost as if she didn’t want anyone to know it. She was angry, rough around the edges, always looking to make a statement with her appearance and actions, quick to rise to an argument. She didn’t always wash; her nails were bitten to the quick. No one likes a girl like that, a girl who doesn’t mold herself to expectations, who doesn’t work hard to please and attract. And so the national news teams weren’t buzzing around, waiting for things to get interesting. Beck was right to hide her truest self inside. The world didn’t deserve her.

  My mother had been a truly beautiful woman. Beautiful and sad, long-suffering, her life ended by the man she loved and to whom she had devoted her life. She came from violence, too, but to all outward appearances, she’d escaped the horror of her past. Until she was condemned to repeat it. Naturally, the narrative of her story was irresistible to news-magazine shows, producers of made-for-TV movies, feature writers, and true-crime authors. There was little that the world didn’t know about my poor mother, her tragic life, and her fucked-up family. The only thing they didn’t know was the truth.

  The other students were suddenly gathering their things, getting up, and leaving class. The movement jolted me from my reverie. I stayed seated in my place near the back and waited until Langdon and I were the only ones left.

  “Did you even hear a word of that?” he asked when the room was empty. The air was cool, and the lights seemed dimmer than usual. He stooped and wiped the whiteboard clean. Actually, I looked down at my laptop and saw that I had taken pretty decent notes with the one-tenth of my brain I had been using to pay attention to the lesson. It was all about the difficulty in diagnosing troubled children, the implications of leveling a damaging diagnosis on a child who might grow out of his symptoms.

  “I didn’t think you’d be here,” he said. “I thought you’d be doing the search.”

  I was still wondering why the detective never told me about it. It seemed relevant that he’d keep that information from me. And if I thought about it too long, I started to feel anxious.

  “I can’t,” I said. I bit back a swell of emotion. Better not to feel; I’d learned that the hard way. People were always telling you to express your feelings, work through them, explore them, release them. But that’s an abyss, a dark spiral into the self. Better to just repress, ignore, push back, and try to make it through another day. “I can’t go through that again.”

  I could still hear that scream, that surprised and horrified cry given by the girl who found Elizabeth. It rang through the afternoon like the calling of a crow. It was so raw, so primal; everyone around me froze in his tracks and looked toward the origin of the sound. It was an ugly moment. It was the moment we all knew.

  Langdon packed up his leather messenger bag and then climbed up the aisle toward me. He chose a seat in the same row, but ever appropriate, he left a few spaces between us.

  “That’s understandable,”
he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m fine,” I lied. “Really.”

  “So, tell me if you don’t want to deal with this,” he said. “But I’ve been doing a little research.”

  “Oh?”

  His legs were so long that they knocked against the seat in front of him. He ran his hands up and down the thighs of his velvety, brown corduroy pants. His nails were neatly trimmed, pink and square. He had clean hands that had only ever done good things—graded papers, made scrambled eggs. I wanted to reach out and grab one, to feel it soft but strong in mine. But I tucked my hands under my thighs. He leaned over and turned my laptop before I could stop him, examined my notes.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Lucky you’re a genius.”

  I waited for him to go on. But he turned the laptop back and just kept rubbing his legs. He kept his eyes on the seat in front of him.

  “So,” I said. “What kind of research?”

  “About Harvey Greenwald.”

  I’d almost forgotten about him. There were so many dark thoughts competing for my attention, he hadn’t come up in the shuffle yet that morning. That abandoned building in the graveyard seemed like weeks ago. I thought I’d told Langdon that I was going to stop playing the game, and that he’d agreed it was for the best. Why was he looking for answers? And why was he telling me about it? But there’s not a geek alive who can resist a mystery.

  “So you found out his secret?”

  “I did,” he said. “You want to hear it?”

  He must have read something on my face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It wasn’t my business. I guess curiosity just got the better of me.”

  Someone laughed long and loud in the hallway outside the classroom and we both turned to look but saw no one.

  I turned back to him. “Tell me.”

  “Harvey Greenwald was a cross-dresser,” he said. “He kept a shed out in back of his house with a wardrobe of women’s clothes.”

  Somewhere inside me, a door started squeaking open. It was the doorway to my dark places, the one I kept bolted. I felt my breath grow thick in my throat. How securely could it have been closed, if a child could undo the lock with a poem?

  I could almost envision Harvey Greenwald’s shed, a rickety wooden structure in the back of an ill-tended yard. It was filled with cheap enormous shoes, and tacky polyester dresses, maybe some hats. It would smell of mold and booze and cigarettes. It would be lit by a bulb hanging on a wire.

  There was a stone stuck in my throat; I issued a little cough to clear it. But it was lodged tight.

  “He’d go out there and dress up,” said Langdon. “His wife thought he was watching television. He had an old set out there and he turned it on to whatever game was playing.”

  “So that was his secret?”

  “The allegations against him turned out to be false,” said Langdon. “Two neighborhood kids discovered him one night. Apparently he chased them, threatened them—in full drag. The kids ran straight to their parents. They claimed he exposed himself, then later admitted it wasn’t true.”

  I kept my eyes on Langdon. His face was grim and serious. He took the pain of others very seriously.

  “Greenwald had a history of clinical depression,” he said, when I said nothing. “Exposure of his secret pain was more than he could handle, I imagine.”

  “That’s awful,” I said. It was awful. How many people carried around a secret pain like that, one that tortured them, eventually laid waste to their lives?

  “It is,” said Langdon. He turned to look at me. Then, gently: “Does it mean anything to you?”

  I shook my head slowly. “No,” I lied. “Nothing at all.”

  “So if it doesn’t mean anything to you,” said Langdon. “Then it must mean something to Luke. What is he trying to tell you about himself ? Because it has to be one of those two things.”

  “Why?” I asked stubbornly, even though I suspected as much myself. “What if he’s just a kid trying to entertain himself?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about this,” he said. “If Luke is a callous-unemotional child, with narcissistic personality traits, then a game like this is because he’s obsessed with you. Or because he has something he wants to reveal about himself.”

  “So you think he’s trying to tell me he’s a cross-dresser?” I almost laughed.

  “I have no idea,” said Langdon. “But he might be having some gender confusion. It’s not uncommon, especially with troubled children.”

  “How did you discover Greenwald’s secret?” I asked. I hadn’t found anything about it during my Internet search.

  “Online,” he said. He shifted his eyes from me. Was he being purposely vague?

  “I didn’t see anything about it,” I said. I have to admit to a prickle of competitive annoyance. Why had he found what I hadn’t been able to?

  He gave a little half shrug. “It was there,” he said. “A smaller piece that ran after his death.”

  I looked at the clock on the wall and moved to gather up my things. I had to go; I didn’t want to be late getting to Luke again. And he and I had lots to talk about, didn’t we? I had to take a cab, so I could ride my bike home later. I said as much.

  “I’ll take you,” said Langdon when I told him I needed to go. “My car’s right outside the building.”

  “I thought you wanted me to quit.”

  “Well,” he said, “since you’re obviously not going to, I’ll give you a ride.”

  For some reason, I hesitated. I had the weird feeling that it would upset Luke. But I quashed that. It was a silly thought and the fact that I was having it meant that I was already too involved with him. Like his mother, who obviously spent her whole life walking on eggshells around him, giving him so much power that she needed to lock him away when he raged.

  As we pulled out of the parking lot, there was a thick fog hanging in the air. The day was weirdly warm and damp. And the campus was suddenly glutted with police cars, a few more news vans, a bunch of cars probably belonging to volunteers. But we didn’t see any people moving about. Doubtless they had all headed into the haunted woods.

  Oh God, I thought. What will they find?

  She disappeared one night so long ago

  They never found a trace.

  The years went by and still no sign

  Just the memory of her face.

  Then one night, her son returned

  His mind ruined by secrets and lies.

  He started digging beneath the earth

  Where the truth so often hides.

  In the dead of night, he took his shovel.

  He dug deep into the ground.

  The deeper he got, the more he knew

  What he’d lost would not be found.

  Horrible, really. Utter nonsense. The kid was a terrible poet, and I was starting to hate him for it. I kept turning it over in my mind. His latest clue was more vague than the last one, not much to search on. My one stab at it: “Missing woman, son looking for answers, The Hollows, NY” brought up a slew of Web listings that didn’t seem to hold anything on first glance.

  I really wanted to tell Langdon about the next clue. But I had lied to him last night, and that part of me that was a little annoyed that he had figured out Luke’s clue when I hadn’t wouldn’t allow it. This game was a challenge issued by Luke, so any help I took from Langdon was cheating. And the fact that I’d had to cheat already meant that Luke was winning. And the stakes seemed suddenly very high, his hints and clues brushing against my secret places. I didn’t think Luke was trying to tell me anything about himself. Not at all.

  The heat was blasting from the vents in Langdon’s car and slowly the chill gave over to warmth. I felt better the farther we were from campus. A place that had once seemed like a retreat from the ugly world, it was becoming tainted, another place of chaos. When my aunt and uncle were trying to talk me out of coming to school in such a remote place, Bridgette said something that stayed with me: You can’t hide from who yo
u are. Not forever. I thought I had proven her wrong; I had hidden quite well from the person I used to be. When I think of my childhood, that kid seems like another person living another life, like a distant cousin, twice removed. My memories are like movies on a screen. It was the second part of her warning that I hadn’t considered. When you’re eighteen, four years seems like an eternity. But it’s a heartbeat. And that’s how long it had taken for the past to come back.

  I still hadn’t even dealt with the issue of my father. I’d ignored a call and a voice mail this morning from Bridgette, too. We’d just had our weekly catch-up chat, so if she was calling in the middle of the week, there was something she needed to discuss. Was it about my father? Had he reached out to her? Or had she heard about Beck?

  “Are you okay?” asked Langdon.

  I realized that I was frowning, and rubbing the back of my neck. “No,” I said. “You know, not really.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Understandable.”

  We pulled up in front of the house. There was still a half hour before Luke would get home. It was a half day at school today for some reason, which was why I had to go right after class. We’d have the whole afternoon together.

  “Be careful,” Langdon said, after I’d thanked him for the ride. “Don’t let him know he got to you.”

  “What makes you think he got to me?”

  He lifted his eyebrows, gave me a little half smile he seemed to have perfected—professorial and yet smart-alecky all at once.

  “Uh, you were out in the middle of the night, wandering around a graveyard shack where a guy killed himself—all because of a poem he wrote. I’d say he got to you.”

  I thought about offering a protest, reminding him again that it was just a game I was playing with a kid in my care. But I didn’t bother.

  He beeped his horn when he saw that I’d opened the door, and I felt a little wistful as he drove his gray Touareg off into the gray afternoon.

  Inside, I immediately set up my laptop and hooked into the wireless router. Rachel had given me the code so that I could go online. First, I tried to track down that article about Greenwald that Langdon said he found. But even after scrolling through pages of links, there was nothing. I knew he wouldn’t lie. I must have been doing something wrong. Or maybe he used a more powerful search engine; he would have access to LexisNexis at the library.