Delia threw up her hands. “And . . . what? Peter accidentally shot himself?”
“That was the theory all three of them gave. And it probably would’ve gone over, too. But no gun was found at the scene. Should’ve been lying on the ground by Peter’s body if it had gone off in his hands, right? Somebody was there when he was shot, and took the gun with them when they left. They didn’t get help, didn’t do anything. The state police tore the woods and all of our houses apart looking for that gun. Without the gun or a confession, they said there wasn’t enough evidence to charge anyone with murder. Just a dead kid. And a town full of armchair detectives guessing whodunit.”
“This is when your family moved away?”
“Yeah. I started freshman year in Lincoln two months late. My parents thought I was still recovering and kept me out. I testified at the hearing in Bangor that winter, and that was the last time I saw Jason or the rest of them until this summer. Couldn’t get far enough away, honestly.”
But then, in Lincoln, the dreams had begun, drifting down those silent hallways in the snow. Obviously, there was no getting away from Bernier, she thought.
Somberly, they got their things together and doused the flames. Natalie drove; the Aspire’s stick handled like an International Harvester, and she was so focused on jockeying that she didn’t see the person on the roadside until Delia said, “Oh, Lord.”
Natalie recognized Grace, dressed in a camouflage tank top and cutoffs. She had a rolling sort of walk, her Converses dangling from one hand, a bottle from the other.
As the Aspire bumped over potholes, Natalie forced herself to say, “I can stop, if you want.”
Delia shook her head. “You’re driving.”
“It’s your car.”
Teddy spoke at last. “She looks wasted.”
Lips pursed, Natalie slowed. At least Grace was on Delia’s side of the car.
Grace leaned into the window, hands braced on her thighs. Her wet hair was combed straight back from her brow, revealing a pair of dangly silver earrings glinting like lures. The tattoo on her arm was a colorful jumble of numbers and symbols. Natalie wondered how many hours she’d spent under the needle.
“Grace? You okay?” Delia waited. “Where’s Jason?”
“Ah.” Grace waved, sloshing Captain Morgan’s. Her voice was low and smoky. “He’s pissed at me again. Same old thing.”
“He left you way out here?” Delia hesitated, sounding strained as she said, “Want a ride?”
Grace’s gaze drifted to Natalie’s face. Natalie didn’t look away. There was something magnetic about the girl’s wide-spaced, dreamy aquamarine eyes, completely unsuited to the rest of her; she didn’t seem to be trying to intimidate Natalie so much as see straight through to the back of her skull. Finally, Grace pulled back. “Nah. I’m good.” She gave her brief, shouting laugh. “Maybe I’ll go howl at the moon or something.” She thumped the window frame twice. “See ya, Dee.”
“Go easy on that bottle, girl.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Natalie watched the rearview mirror as they continued on their way. Grace Thibodeau’s vague outline blended with the darkness and was gone.
CHAPTER 16
Delia lived a short distance from the Grill, so after they dropped her off with her car, Natalie and Teddy walked back to the Grill to get their bikes.
“What do you think? We’ve still got an hour before curfew.” Natalie nudged Teddy. “We could ride out to the house and back in no time.”
“Call me crazy, but I don’t really want to go there in the dark.”
“Well, me neither.” The pull was relentless, overpowering any commonsense notion of dread. “But I also don’t want to miss a day.”
Teddy exhaled loudly. “Mom can’t find out. She’d lose it if she knew we took the bikes out at night.”
Natalie had a headlight attached to her handlebars, so she led the way down the back roads. There were no cars on the fringes of town at eleven o’clock, nothing but the singing of crickets and frogs and the occasional rustle of something nocturnal from the woods. On the way, without discussing it, they both braked in front of a two-story home with a garage sitting dark and silent among the trees. The owners must’ve gone to bed for the evening.
There used to be a sign by the driveway that read the mcinnis family, with ceramic donkey planters at each end.
“After Peter died . . . when did his folks move away?” Natalie said.
Teddy gave a small shrug. “Four, five months. His mother totally lost it. Mom said she drove past here one time and saw her sitting on the grass. Just sitting, staring into the woods. Like she was waiting for Peter to walk out of the trees.”
He shook himself and trained his gaze away from the woods.
Inside the house on Morning Glory Lane, their flashlight lit up arctic patches of wallpaper and crumbling moldings.
“What did you and Lowell talk about tonight?” Teddy’s voice sounded hollow in the silence.
Natalie didn’t look at him. “Not much.”
“Really? That’s all you’ve got for me. ‘Not much?’ ”
She shrugged uncomfortably. “Just . . . getting to know each other, I guess.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I’m not saying we’re besties now. But I don’t think holding a grudge forever has done anybody any good, do you?”
He scoffed, shook his head. “Whatever you say.”
As Natalie reached the left parlor, she stretched out her hand to open the door. It was enveloped in the light.
She sank into it.
#
Autumn 1948
By the time Vsevolod had shaved and dressed, the haze of English Leather around him was as suffocating as being locked in a tack closet in hottest July. A dollop of Wildroot Cream-Oil to fix the idiot kinks and whorls in his hair completed the look of a swell, out for a night on the town.
He entered the crisp evening. His ’34 Dodge sedan coupe was black, gleaming with fresh wax. He hardly used it, save for occasional drives where he thought and planned and looked for girls. He gripped the paper flyer that he’d torn from a telephone pole—Halloween Dance! Ten Cents a Head!—and set off, jingling his keychain along with the radio. On the keychain hung a memento, something of Sister’s that he’d taken when they were small.
It took an hour to reach the grange hall. The windows were bright, jack-o’-lanterns leering between the porch rails. Vsevolod parked on a side street and cut the engine. Strains of “One O’Clock Boogie” leaked into the night every time someone went through the doors. Vsevolod lit another Chesterfield.
The evening wore on. He smoked and waited. The final number played and the place began emptying out. It was only a matter of seeing which girl it would be. Some part of her could sense him coming, he knew it.
He drove up the road, trolling. A cluster of girls shrieked with punch-drunk laughter. A boy walked alone, fists thrust in his pockets. Farthest ahead, alone in the dark, was his girl. His blonde. She wore a green dress coat, and her hand rose like a pale bird’s wing as she shielded her eyes against the glare of the coupe’s headlamps.
“Hey, there,” he called out the open window.
She moved closer, a small-town girl who’d spent a lifetime recognizing every face in every car window.
“I’m Bill, Bill Ebbins. Out of Blue Hill? Heading home from the dance. Gosh, I got myself all turned around here.”
He’d gotten out a road map and smacked it now, making it crackle.
“Would you be willing to steer me in the right direction? I’ll give you a ride home for your trouble.”
Whatever she said in response was lost to him. What mattered was that her pale-bird hand was lowering, that she was passing before the headlamps, coming around to the passenger side door. Beside his trembling knee, his keychain, a tin
y painted matryoshka doll, swung with dying momentum from a noose of string.
#
CHAPTER 17
It was nearly ten a.m. when Natalie awoke. Muzzy from bad dreams (and lights flying, she thought, lights flying, though the phrase was senseless), she stepped out of the summerhouse and found a note taped to the door. Teddy’s square, precise handwriting read Meet me at the library when you finally get up.
It was hot outside, stagnant, but the library’s air-conditioning did wonders for her disposition after the bike ride across town. She found Teddy at the microfilm machine in the reference room. He didn’t look up when she dragged a chair over.
“Thought you’d never show,” he said. “Welcome to research hell. They haven’t transferred any of their newspaper archives online yet.”
Natalie looked at the stack of microfilm containers labeled bangor daily news 1948–1949, 1950–1951, and so on. “Wow. Find anything yet?”
“The librarian helped me.” He held out a copy of a newspaper article. “November 2, 1948. I’ve been looking for anything else, any mention . . .” He pressed the rapid-advance button on the reader. Newsprint flew by.
With a constricted feeling in her throat, Natalie skimmed the article titled sewall girl missing. “Irene Godsoe, age eighteen. Disappeared Saturday, October 31, while walking home from the Sewall Community Halloween Dance.”
Teddy dropped back against his chair, rubbing his reddened eyes. “The News never talked about her again. Trust me. I checked.”
“We need more than this.” Natalie thought. “If Sewall had a local paper back then, I bet they ran a huge story on it. ‘Hometown Girl Kidnapped?’ ”
Teddy was on his feet, hunting down the librarian with Natalie at his heels.
“The Coastal Reader. Went under in the sixties.” The librarian drew a bound volume marked 1948–1950 from a shelf with a sigh of exertion. “These books are all we have. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to be careful.”
They pored over the bound Coastal Reader editions, facsimiles of the original newspaper pages enlarged to twice their size. Not much had changed in the world of local journalism over the last forty years: small-town politics, human interest stories, advertisements—only instead of plugging Hannaford weekly specials, these ads plugged something called Bile Beans (“Be Thin and Fit!”) and pork loin for thirty-nine cents a pound at the local butcher. The date heading passed from summer 1948 into fall.
Irene Godsoe consumed the front page of the Monday edition. They’d printed her school portrait. Irene’s hair was side-parted and pin-curled. She was cute but not exactly pretty, her face rounded with a receding chin. She wore a fuzzy cardigan sweater over a blouse with a Peter Pan collar.
The article described how her mother had called the police late Saturday night when her daughter never returned home from the grange hall three miles down the road. A boy also walking home from the dance had reported seeing a car stopped on Dunne Hill Road. The driver had continued on before the boy drew near. The rural neighborhood was canvassed until dusk on Sunday, but no sign of the girl was found.
Natalie studied the picture. In her mind’s eye, Irene’s hair bloomed into a pale yellow, her cardigan, periwinkle blue. Another borrowed memory. “Her parents had this picture hand-tinted. They kept it in a frame on top of a piano.”
Teddy stared. “That’s insane. You really do bring something back.”
“It’s totally real. Like being there.” She kicked the table leg. “I hate this. We can’t do anything.”
“The house wants somebody to know what happened to Irene Godsoe, right? She never came home.” He tried to catch her eye. “This has to be a key to what’s happening at the house. Those girls calling out to you in your dreams . . . maybe Irene’s one of them. Maybe she wants you to know the truth.”
“What the hell can I do about it now? It’s been forty years. How can I explain to anybody how I even found out that Irene Godsoe existed at all?” Feeling gutted, Natalie dropped her chin onto her folded arms, saying softly, “I wish I knew what I’m supposed to do next.”
Lowell showed up at the Grill an hour before closing time, heading into the kitchen with his toolbox. Natalie worked with a nervous twist in her stomach. Maybe this “talk” of theirs was going to happen after all.
Lightning crackled over the harbor. The lights dimmed a few times, and customers began asking for their checks and heading home. Delia leaned on the counter, fanning herself with a napkin as she watched her only remaining table, a couple who had ordered nothing but bottled water and sat reading their respective newspapers in silence. “Couple of Rockefellers,” Delia whispered to Natalie as she passed.
Lowell had his head and shoulders in the dishwasher when Natalie went into the kitchen to take off her apron. She took her time untying the strings, studying the knobs of his spine against the thin fabric of his T-shirt, the inch or so of blue plaid boxer shorts visible above the waist of his jeans.
He seemed to sense her and leaned out. “Hey.”
“Hi.”
He wiped his hands on a rag. “I’m about finished up here. You got time?”
“Some, yeah.”
“How about we grab a cup of coffee.” He followed her gaze to the Bunn brewer with its stale pots of decaf and regular. “Different . . . coffee. Somewhere else.”
Natalie noticed that Bess was lingering by the soda fountain, watching them with interest. A hot flush rose in her cheeks, but Natalie tried to channel Delia. “You getting all this?”
Bess made a sour face. “ ’Scuse me.” She swished back out into the dining room.
Lowell smiled, picking up his tools. “Remind me to stay on your good side.”
“Who says you’re on it?” It felt so bizarre, sharing a joke with Lowell Emerick, but things seemed to be moving along with a momentum of their own now. She shifted her weight. “Let me check in with Cilla.”
When Natalie awkwardly explained where she was going, Cilla blinked, stunned. “Well. I should drive you.”
He came through the kitchen doors. “We’re not going far. Just coffee.”
Cilla looked at Natalie closely. “Okay. This once. But call me when you get there and when you leave. You two be careful in this storm. Lightning’s nothing to fool with.”
Lowell stepped over the threshold and held the door for Natalie. After a hesitation, she went through.
CHAPTER 18
Rain pelted down as Natalie followed Lowell to his pickup. She climbed in and yanked the door; it groaned but wouldn’t shut.
Cursing under his breath, Lowell reached across her and together they slammed it. “Damn thing needs grease, but . . .” Their faces were very close, and he sat back, humming tunelessly as he started the engine.
The cab was a mess, scattered with tools and fast-food wrappers. Natalie’s sneakers tangled in a set of jumper cables. “Thought I’d clean the place up for you,” he said, deadpan, as they pulled out into the street.
“So I see.” She pushed a Big Mac wrapper away with one finger. “Where are we going?”
“Dysart’s.” He glanced over when she gave a snort of laughter. “What?’
“Oh, nothing. Just something Delia said.”
They crossed the suspension bridge that spanned the Penobscot River and drove north to the town of Hermon, and Dysart’s twenty-four-hour truck stop. Lowell and Natalie didn’t speak until they were seated at a booth, the thunder like distant cannon fire beyond the plate-glass window.
Coffee came, and Lowell stirred for a long time, the spoon clinking against the ceramic cup. “You should go home.”
She stared. “You mean home-home? Lincoln?” She gestured to the coffees. “You could’ve told me to get out of town by sunset back at the Grill and saved yourself a buck.”
“I’m paying, huh?” He smiled slightly. Sitting this close, she noticed that he had
a small crescent-shaped scar on his chin. “This isn’t coming out right. Cilla didn’t know what she was doing, letting you come back to Bernier.”
“She’s been telling me to give you a second chance, you know.”
He shifted. “Some people don’t deserve second chances, though. Some people . . . I dunno, they’re like hornets. They’ll sting you a hundred times, they like it so damn much.”
“You’re talking about Jason.”
He rested back, one knee protruding into the aisle. “I’ve been thinking about the hearing lately. How after you testified, you and your folks didn’t stay for the sentencing. That’s when I finally got it—that it didn’t matter anymore, what happened to us. We’d changed all of our lives in one afternoon.” He smiled again. Natalie thought it was one of the saddest expressions she’d ever seen. “I remember you wore this black dress with white dots. I’d never seen you in a dress before. You had your hair pinned back, and when you cried during your testimony, pieces came loose. You kept pushing them behind your ears.”
“I was growing my bangs out. How can you remember that?”
“It’s a hard day to forget.” Lowell cleared his throat. “Everybody thought we should’ve had a murder trial, not some half-assed kiddy hearing. They still think it. But there’s nobody left to keep the lamp burning. Peter’s family’s gone. Moved out of state. What happened kind of hangs over everybody. Nobody talks about it, you know?”
Natalie took a breath. She wanted to sound blasé, light-years beyond caring, but instead, her question sounded like something a little kid would ask.
“Why did you hate us so much?”
He rubbed his eyes with one hand; when he looked at her again, his expression was raw.
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