In the Blood

by Lisa Unger

  Langdon pulled up in front of my dorm, and he looked grim and disappointed in me.

  “I’m here for you,” he said. “You know that. Whatever you need.”

  “I know,” I said. I wanted to show him what was in the envelope. I wanted his help. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to pull him into my mess. If the last few days had proved anything, it was that I was better off alone. I got out of the car and watched him drive away. Why is it that no one you love ever seems to stay? Because I push them all away. No mystery there.

  My aunt was waiting for me when I walked in the door. She’d turned on the gas fireplace and was sitting huddled under a blanket nursing a cup of tea.

  “It’s freezing here,” she said. “How do you stand it?”

  “You get used to it,” I said. I liked the cold. It allowed me to bury my body beneath layers of clothes. Why don’t you get yourself a spiked collar? Beck had spat at me once. Just to be sure everyone knows to stay away.

  I sat beside her. Have I mentioned that I love my aunt? I think I’ve only said unkind things about her, made fun of her a little. But she looks just enough like my mother that I feel a desperate closeness to her. And she looks just enough like my mother that she causes me to be deeply, deeply sad and lonely. Because she is not my mother, and she never will be. But that’s the only wrong she’s ever done me. She has been unfailingly kind and present for me, and I have never once thanked her for it.

  She was pretty in the firelight, her golden hair catching the light as it fell around her face in soft waves. She had some lines around her eyes and mouth, a middle-aged pull to her skin. But she had good genes and money, looked forty-something when she was fifty-something.

  “Where were you?” she asked. She pulled the blanket tighter around herself.

  “Walking,” I said. Lies came so easily to me.

  “Is that safe?” she asked. She was one of those people that asked a question to which the answer was obvious, hoping to elicit the correct response, making you think in the process. It was annoying.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not.”

  “You’ve always done that,” she said. “Walked off on your own to think. But you’re not alone, okay. I’m here for you, whether you want me or not.”

  I nodded, looked at the licking flames of the fire. Everybody kept saying that. Why couldn’t I bring myself to take anybody up on it? “Thank you,” I said.

  “Listen,” she said. She sat up and put her teacup down. “Sky thinks we need a criminal attorney. He says the police believe you had something to do with Beck’s disappearance, and they’re reopening the case of Elizabeth Barnett.”

  I needed to tell her, I needed to tell someone about this last clue, about the necklace. But if I did that, I would have to tell everything. And I just couldn’t do that.

  “I think you need to come clean, sweetheart,” she said. “You need to go to the police and tell them who you are. They’re going to find out. They’re going to discover that you’ve changed your identity. And when they do, it’s not going to look good. They may already know everything.”

  I wondered at her calm, at how there was not even a note of fear or accusation in her voice.

  When I didn’t answer: “You need to tell them everything.”

  “Do you think I had something to do with Beck disappearing?” I asked.

  She kept her eyes on me, her gaze level and cool. Then she reached out her hand and I took it. “I changed your diapers,” she said. “You’ve had problems in your life, bad ones. There was a time when we didn’t know what would become of you. But I know you. I love you.” She closed her eyes, as if swept away by feeling.

  It wasn’t an answer. I think she was trying to say that she loved me no matter what I had done. Someone had changed my grandfather’s diapers, and my father’s. And they were monsters. Did she think I was a monster, too? Was I?

  “So, no,” she said. “I don’t believe you would hurt anyone. I don’t.”

  Was she naive? Or was she just in denial? Or did she know me better than I knew myself ? There was murder in my blood, in both strands of my DNA. I had done everything in my power to escape it, but no matter where you go, there you are.

  I lay down on the couch beside her and put my head in her lap. She ran a hand over my forehead, over my short spiky hair.

  “Sky has been in touch with one of his colleagues,” said my aunt. “She’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “I have to work,” I said.

  “Honey,” she said. “It’s not business as usual, you know.”

  I noticed how she studiously avoided using the name that was not really mine. She had always been awkward with it, but she knew I couldn’t tolerate the name my mother had given me.

  As soon as Rachel knew what was happening to me, would she really want me babysitting for her child? But I had to talk to Luke; unless I was told not to come, I was going.

  I fell asleep thinking about that poem and who had written it, about Beck’s necklace and the last words she said to me. I heard her screaming my name, my real name, as I ran away, as far away as I could get.

  23

  The crowds outside the dorm had turned into a throbbing, bloodthirsty mob by morning. Word that I had been taken in for questioning had spread farther and wider, and the media coverage was heating up. There were news vans and a large crowd of onlookers. I watched them from behind the curtain in my room, trying to pick out individual faces. People were drinking coffee, chatting, some had actually brought chairs. It looked more like a tailgate party than anything else. Were people this bored? Did they have so little to do?

  The dorm mother had come early and suggested to my aunt and me that we leave.

  “I’m sorry, Lana,” she said. She did look sorry, sympathetic and concerned. “But the other parents are making a fuss. People are understandably unsettled by all of this. Of course, I know that you had nothing to do with this. You’re a sweet soul, always have been.”

  When Sky arrived, he agreed that we should leave as soon as possible.

  “This is not good for anyone,” he said. He took a pressed, bright white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped at his freckled, bald head. What kind of man still carried a pressed handkerchief ? Obviously, someone too delicate for a situation like this. He handled money, which was quiet and never caused this kind of trouble. I was worried about him.

  His assistant had managed, through the magic of the Internet, to rent us a small house just outside the center of town. The plan was to sneak me out when things quieted down. But the crowd only grew.

  When I was a kid, I used to wish that there were underground tunnels. You could just climb inside from some kind of basement access where a tunnel buggy would be waiting to take you wherever you needed to go. I wished for that now. I wished I could just walk into a tunnel and disappear forever. I remember reading that about The Hollows. There were miles and miles of underground tunnels from the iron mines that used to be the major industry here.

  The police were going to have to make an arrest soon, I knew. Lynne and Frank had been on television last night, pleading for Beck’s safe return. I saw the footage that morning, and both of them looked ghostly, disheveled, dark circles under their eyes. I had two distraught messages from Ainsley on my cell phone, but I couldn’t stand to hear her voice, so worried and far away. I deleted them and hadn’t called back.

  There was a soft knock on the door, and Sky pushed in without waiting for me to answer.

  “I think we can get out back,” he said. “My assistant is bringing the car around. We can lay you down in the backseat and get out of here.”

  “How does that look?” I said. “I’d rather just walk through the fire, you know. Hold my head up and let them see me.”

  “But then they’ll follow us,” he said. He was calm and practical. “We want to get you and your aunt some privacy until this matter is settled. Get packed.”

  I took my medication and packed a small overnight
bag. And when I left my room, I looked it over as though I’d never see it again. How could things ever go back to being what they were before the night in the woods? They couldn’t. No matter what happened, the stigma of this would follow me. By tonight, I knew, everything I had successfully hidden for the last seven years was going to come out. It couldn’t help but be discovered; it was too raw, too sensational, it would sell too many newspapers, magazines, and TV ads. Because that’s what it’s all about now. We are a junk culture of voyeurs, planted in front of our televisions watching the worst and most wretched people make disasters out of their lives.

  I walked out of the room and heard Sky and my aunt talking in the kitchen. I tugged on my peacoat and shouldered my bag. I took a black wool cap from one of the hooks by the door; it was Beck’s. I pulled it over the mess of my hair, donned my sunglasses. There wasn’t a mirror in the front room, but the last time I’d dressed like this, Beck said that I’d taken my androgyny to a whole new level. The feminists say that gender is a social construct, something that doesn’t exist in the physical, but only in the imagination of our society. I am inclined to agree.

  Their voices were low, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. On the table by the door was the Mace that Ainsley had bought for me, and for the first time since she’d given it to me, I remembered to shove it into my pocket. The door to the hallway was open, and the next thing I knew, I was walking out into the empty hallway.

  It was always quiet in the morning, everyone in class or sleeping in. But it seemed unnaturally so that morning. There was a hush, a drawn-in breath. People had cleared out of the building. That’s what most sane people did when there was a murder suspect on the premises.

  Soon I was on the fire stairs, creeping down fast and quiet. Then I was pushing out into the cold, bright morning. I could hear the crowd in the front of the building. Something was going on, because the volume went up—someone was leaving or arriving.

  There was no one in sight out back. I walked, unseen, from the back door and headed straight into the woods.

  I came up behind the Kahns’ house. I rang the bell at the back door and waited, though I knew no one would be home. Rachel would be at the shop, and Luke in school. The air seemed to be growing more frigid, but maybe it was just because I had been out so long, walking and walking. It would have taken me twenty minutes to get here on my bike. It had taken me nearly two hours on foot through the woods, a route I chose in order to stay out of sight. After a few minutes, I tried the key I had. It did fit in the back door. I wouldn’t have to go around front, where I had a greater chance of being seen. I stepped with relief into the warm kitchen. I locked the dead bolt and pocketed the key.

  I dropped my bag by the table and I took out my cell phone. There were about a million messages, a list of alternating calls from Sky and Bridgette. I shoved the phone into my pocket and headed upstairs to Luke’s bedroom. On my way up, I peeked out the side window by the door. I half expected to see a crowd gathering outside, but it was clear. It was just the quiet street, trees bending in the window, windows dark, in a neighborhood where most people worked all day.

  Why was I here? What was I looking for? It was clear to me that Luke had not written that note. But he was obviously involved somehow with whoever had. So I was hoping to find something in his room that would tell me who it was. Somebody had seen Beck and me together that night. Who was it?

  I hadn’t forgotten Rachel’s journal, but that wasn’t why I’d come. So I passed her room and went straight to Luke’s. The locks on his door were even looser in their mounts, one of them dangling by a single screw. The door was ajar and I pushed it open. The room was tidier than it had been; it looked as if he and his mom had finished unpacking. The video-game system was no longer on the floor among a pile of games. It sat on an orderly-looking console, the game cases organized on one of the shelves. The bed was neatly made.

  His computer stood on the desk under the window. I sat in his chair and touched the mouse. He didn’t have an e-mail account set up on his computer, and I remembered Rachel saying that she hadn’t allowed him to have one or to do any social networking. It was too hard to control, too many ways he could reach people, or the wrong types of people could reach him. She also said that she limited his Web access. But I had a feeling he might be smart enough to get around that.

  I opened the Internet browser, went straight to his history. But I was disappointed. After a few minutes of scrolling through, I saw nothing but visits to online booksellers and video-game purveyors, gaming chat sites. He’d visited Wikipedia and some nature sites, probably for a report he’d been writing about bats. I kept thinking about Lester Nobody, the person who had posted on Facebook. Was it Luke? He had not, as far as I could see, visited any social networks, or any of the various Web-mail providers. But I kept clicking, back and back through his digital history.

  Way down, around the time that he’d given me the first clue, I found a visit he had made to the Web site for The Hollows Historical Society. He’d clicked on the “Haunted Hollows” link, and visited the pages about the caretaker suicide and the Marla Holt grave site. It impressed me suddenly how sick the whole haunted tour was—profiting as it did from the misery and tragedy of others. But maybe it was a way to drain horrible events of their power, to make them earthly, manageable. Maybe it created a kind of distance from the real terrors of life and the world, made them seem like make-believe, almost funny. Or maybe people were just totally depraved and fucked up. I would have voted for the latter.

  Next I checked the search-engine history. Again, at first glance it was pretty benign: questions about getting to the next level on his video game, general inquiries about bats in New York State, cool and scary scavenger hunts, killer chess moves (little bastard; I’d done the same thing). You could tell a lot about a person from his search-engine history. Don’t we all enter our questions into a little box on our computer screens? We expect all the answers to be there now, at our fingertips. Whatever ails us, worries us, interests us, makes us wonder. It’s all just a few keystrokes away, the whole universal net of knowledge accessible in a heartbeat. Our stream of consciousness is recorded now in digital form. Wading through Luke’s, I almost—almost—breathed a sigh of relief. He was just a kid after all. He found some spooky stuff online and he was trying to scare me. Any connection to the things that I was hiding was coincidence. I almost thought that. I almost had myself a good laugh.

  Then, down near the bottom of the list, I saw my mother’s name. The sight of it cut a valley through me. He’d entered it weeks ago. In fact—I did some quick figuring in my head—he’d entered the name into his computer a week before I answered Rachel’s ad. I sat, staring at the screen, struggling to piece together how that might be and what it might mean. I ticked back over the last few weeks, months, to think how he and I might be connected. But there was nothing, just a dark churning in my mind. He does know me, I thought. He knows who I am. And with this thought, I felt equal parts terror and relief. The weight of lies is a terrible burden. It’s always a relief to lay it down, no matter how horrible the consequences.

  There was a noise downstairs and I froze. I waited, feeling my heart thump in my chest. Then I heard it again and relaxed. It was the stupid icemaker, dropping cubes in the tray. I turned back to the screen and again began to follow the trail of his research. There was a mass of information about my mother and her murder—feature articles, entries on the crime Web sites, links to documentary footage, news-story clips.

  Naturally, there was also a wealth of information about my father. There was the group lobbying for his freedom, led by a private investigator and a journalist who had recently published a book. They believed that my father, due to the sensational nature of the case, didn’t get a fair trial. Because he himself had been an acclaimed journalist before the murder, the media feeding frenzy was significantly ramped up and the pressure on the police to make an arrest was high. There was another man, my mother’s alleged l
over, who was never found. The police, they claimed, arrested the most likely suspect even with a dearth of physical evidence, largely because of “the eyewitness testimony of a distraught and mentally disturbed child.” That would be me.

  The group had another member—my father’s fiancée. She was a lawyer who’d worked on his case and subsequently fallen in love with him. As you might imagine, I worked very hard not to think about any of this, ever. I never watched television. I had hidden myself away in a little school under another name, and Bridgette and Sky had worked tirelessly to keep me cloistered and protected. But here it all was, scrolling out before me on an eleven-year-old’s computer screen.

  I saw pictures of a much younger me, looking as grim-faced and pale as a corpse, blank really. That’s what the media kept saying about me: that I was blank, unemotional, odd. I was always sandwiched between my aunt and my grandmother (who died the year after my father was convicted. It took all the life out of her, really. You could see her draining, shrinking, growing gray).

  In the pictures, though it was more than six years ago, I didn’t look that different than I do now. I had the same short haircut, the same stooped, too-thin frame. I had always considered myself exceedingly ugly—and the taunts of my classmates had served to confirm my low opinion of myself. I was more comfortable with my looks now. I no longer imagined that people were gawking at my small body, my pallor. Because I’d figured out how to make these things work for me. And I’d figured out that no one cared, not really. No one gave a shit about anything but himself. People were addled by their own chatter, their own personal litany of fears and insecurities, self-loathing, and selfish desires. Hardly anyone could hear over that. I was invisible if I wanted to be. And that’s what I would have been if not for Beck. She was the first person to notice me, the real me. She was the first person who ever really wanted me, who wanted to love me.

  I pushed myself away from the computer. I couldn’t look at it anymore. I was about to leave, get my stuff and run as far away from this house as I could get when I noticed the light on in Luke’s walk-in closet. It beckoned me in.