“She left a note on the kitchen table,” the Doctor said. “It said, To the dwarves in the woods. Does that mean anything to you?”
The glacier inside me slid into my lungs. “She said something like that last night. I don’t know what it means. Maybe the woods behind our school?”
“It’s your fault,” he said, and stood. “Your fault.” To my amazement, he seemed to be talking to my parents, not me. “Take a good look at your son. Ask yourself how he got that way. A little casual unchecked jealousy of other people’s children, a lack of willingness to discipline, some unexamined lack of sensitivity to the rest of the world; mix them all together and you get the shining role models that you are.”
My mother stayed still, but my father stepped forward and put his hand on the Doctor’s chest. He looked weak, ineffective, like the crossing guards we always ignored in downtown Birmingham.
“That’s more than enough,” said my father. “You know we all care about Theresa, Mattie most of all. We’ll do everything we can to help.”
“That’s just fine,” the Doctor said. “Mattie’s been such a big help already.” His legs gave way again as he backed through the door, and my father grabbed him until he regained his balance. The Doctor glared at me one more time and then yanked the door shut behind him.
“Mattie,” said Sergeant Ross, pressing me backward into a sitting position on the couch. “I think you better tell me what’s going on here.”
Through the living room window, I could see Dr. Daughrety sitting down in the snow. My mother covered her eyes with her hands and shooed away my father with a moan.
“We didn’t plan it,” I said.
“Which part?” he asked. “Is any of this real?” Without taking his eyes off me, he extracted a licorice stick from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “Just start at the beginning and tell me all of it. You can’t make it any worse.”
“It just happened,” I said.
“How?”
Abruptly, I was back on my feet. “I have to go find her.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“We’re wasting time! We have to go.”
Sergeant Ross rolled the licorice stick along his lips like the end of a pencil. He spoke very quietly. “The best thing you can do for Theresa now is to sit down and answer my questions.” He leaned forward and put his huge hand on my shoulder, but he didn’t grab or press or squeeze, and a little of the reassuring tone he’d used the night before crept into his voice. “I’m just trying to sort this out for myself, Mattie, so bear with me. Now tell me how it happened.”
I slumped back down. “We were talking about Theresa. Or maybe we were just thinking about her. I’m not sure.” I told him everything I could remember about the moment I saw the Fox house and realized we could get in there and what we could do. Then I told him about Theresa coming to my window in the middle of the night, and her silence and her humming when she was with us. At the end, I said, “It’s all my fault.”
“Mmmm,” said Sergeant Ross. “So if I understand you correctly, you faked Spencer’s kidnapping and probable death because you needed a way past Dr. Daughrety to talk to your friend.”
It sounded awful, put that way. But I nodded.
“Because you were afraid that something bad had happened to her.”
I nodded again.
“Mattie, what were you afraid of?”
I felt like I had thrown my arm in the air in Ms. Eyre’s class in order to beat Theresa and then realized that I didn’t know the answer.
“I was afraid she was disappearing,” I finally said.
“She has disappeared,” said Sergeant Ross.
Frustration knotted behind my eyelids, and I slammed my fist into the back of the couch.
“We don’t have time. That’s what I mean. I’m telling you, she’s disappearing.”
Sergeant Ross watched me for a while as new tears sprang to my eyes and my fists fell open at my sides. I could feel my parents watching me too, but I couldn’t look at them.
“Mattie,” Sergeant Ross said, “let’s start again.”
I wanted to scream, started to, but then my breath shut itself off before I could finish. “Wait,” I said instead, and leapt from the couch. As I flew past him, I saw my mother sitting on the scratched-up slate by the hallway door with her head between her knees like a kid during a tornado drill. My father was standing beside her, silent and stiff as a palace guard. I scanned crazily around my room until I spotted Theresa’s notebook, grabbed it off my desk, and raced back to the couch.
“Theresa gave this to me at her house yesterday,” I said to the sergeant.
He took the notebook, turned it over twice, then peeled back the cover. The notebook’s front pocket was stuffed with press clippings: Snowman Psychological Profiles from the front page of the Free Press, articles about the victims and their families, together with step-by-step accounts of the investigation. Inside the back flap was a map of Oakland County with printed black circles all over it.
I was so curious about the markings on the map that I didn’t notice my mother right away. She had climbed to her feet, and now she was hovering over me.
“Mattie, what is this?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s Theresa’s. She gave it to me when we went to see her last night.”
“These locations,” Sergeant Ross said slowly. “They’re places the Snowman has been sighted, or supposedly sighted.”
“Not all of them.” I pointed to the winding Birmingham subdivision street where Amy Ardell’s body had been found. “No one saw him there.”
“No,” the sergeant agreed. “We just know he was there because of Amy.”
“What about there?” I said, pointing to a dark green star over Long Lake Road. I couldn’t remember anything connecting the Snowman to Long Lake.
The Sergeant squinted at the map, turned it in his hands, then shook his head in frustration. “No idea. Did she know something? Do you kids—“
“Good God,” my mother whispered.
“’He moves in circles,’” I heard myself say, as if Theresa’s voice had slipped inside my throat.
Suddenly, my mother was grabbing me around the arm again. “What the fuck are you three playing at?”
This time, though, my father materialized beside her and touched her on the back. “Alina,” he said, and she let go. She even let him ease her back a step.
I couldn’t answer her anyway. Even if I could have, I didn’t understand, not really, although the first chill of almost understanding had shuddered through me. As though nothing had happened, Sergeant Ross began coolly flipping the pages.
Each one was covered, front and back, with Theresa’s stately, perfect penmanship. There were street names, victim’s names, all sorts of random words like Covington Junior High Swimming Pool, 5:30-9:30, and Farrell’s Ice Cream that meant nothing to me beyond what I already knew them to be. There were blots of ink in unrecognizable shapes that may or may not have been intentional. There were words I didn’t recognize as English. The sentences didn’t make sense. Barbara Fox’s name stood all alone in the center of one page, first name in black ink, last name in red. Spencer Franklin’s showed up several times. My own showed up more. Seeing it gave me none of the thrill I might have expected in different circumstances. It was like seeing it on a tab in a school office folder where parent-conference notes and standardized test scores were kept. If anything, it made me feel even less significant. I was an entry in this file, a name without a star, someone to be categorized.
“Son, please,” said the sergeant, “you have to help me here. Do you know what any of this is supposed to mean?”
I thought I could almost smell her on the pages. A faint new-cut-grass smell. “She’s dead,” I said, “or she’s going to be.” Tears slid down my face once more, and I could feel myself bleaching away like a half-finished photograph jerked into the light.
“Jesus Christ, Mattie,” my father said. “Do yo
u think she might have figured out something about the Snowman somehow?” Swallowing, he regained control of his voice. “Something about who he is? Or where to find him?”
“Last night,” I said, my voice trembling, “she said weird stuff. Avri’s Deli and the names of some of the Snowman kids. I don’t know. I don’t know.” For a lone absurd second, I felt the same way I did on gum ball days or after a Mind War: jealous, mostly, of what Theresa was capable of. Then my thoughts went screaming back toward her face as Spencer and I tumbled out of the Foxes’ back hallway. I could hear her singing as I followed her into the house: Frère Jacques. Frère Jacques. Dormez-vous?
With Theresa’s notebook clutched against him, Sergeant Ross stood up and looked at me. “Don’t leave the house,” he said. He sounded exhausted. “For your own protection, I mean.”
“Actually, we were thinking about leaving town for a while,” said my father.
“Think again,” said Sergeant Ross, and he banged out the front door, leaving us alone.
Instantly, voices swelled outside as reporters rushed forward, but Sergeant Ross stalked through them down the driveway.
None of us moved from the positions the morning had washed us up in. I was sitting on the couch with my head bowed, thinking over everything I’d heard Theresa say, looking for some other clue. My mother sat back down on the floor and buried her face in her hands. My father lurked by the living room window, looking occasionally at his speakers as if expecting them to burst out in song. Finally, I heard my mother say, “Oh, Brent honey, no,” and then my little brother blazed into the room, racing straight for me, fists flying.
He got in two or three decent shots to my face before my father yanked him off. The last one caught me right on the cheekbone, drove my teeth down on my tongue, and my mouth began to bleed. I swallowed blood and did my best not to react. I considered spitting at him, at all of them, but I wasn’t sure why.
“Go to your room,” my mother said.
I started to rise before realizing that she meant my brother. Fists still quivering at his sides, face flushed and streaming tears, Brent stomped into the back hallway.
“Mattie,” said my mother. She came over and sat beside me, and I uncurled halfway out of the ball that I’d slowly been forming.
“Honey, not now,” my father said. “We’re all devastated. He is too.”
“Shut up.” My mother gagged once. “Mattie. You little shit bastard. You don’t know where she is. Do you?”
Horrified, I shook my head. “No,” I said, wishing I could touch my mother, say the thing that would make everything turn better. But I couldn’t imagine what that thing could be.
“What on earth were you thinking?” she said.
I couldn’t help her understand, and I couldn’t make her love me again, so I sat there saying nothing and a hard silence clamped down on the house. For the rest of the day and most of the evening, no one in my family said a single word, to me or to one another. Mostly, we waited for news. At some point, near dark, I moved to my room and stayed there. I heard my mother call Brent to the dinner table, but no one came to get me. After a while, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, leaving the door open so my family could see me. I kept brushing until my gums bled, then went back to my room and huddled in the sheets, though it wasn’t even dark. I felt nothing at all except dull, throbbing fear. I left my lights off and stared at the spot where Theresa’s face had been at my window. My reflection dangled there like a lure, but nothing rose to meet it. I didn’t sleep, and then I did, some.
The next morning, I awoke to breakfast sounds. I hadn’t dreamed, or couldn’t remember any dreams. Outside, the mourning doves that lived in our birch tree opened their throats to the daylight. I didn’t like the sound; it was too hollow. “Whoever they’re mourning,” my dad told me once, “must have died long ago.” So typically strange. Scrambling down from my bunk, I wrapped my robe around me and padded toward the kitchen, rubbing my eyes with closed fists, trying to look as young and panic-wracked as I felt. My mother didn’t glance up from the stove when I sat at the kitchen table.
I didn’t want to ask the question, because if there was an answer, someone would have told me already. But I couldn’t help it. “Did Theresa come home?”
My mother ignored that. But after a while, she set a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me.
“Can I call Spencer?” I asked when she returned to the sink. “Mom?”
“No,” she said. Then she spun around, dropping her spatula on the floor, and locked eyes with me. My heart ground against my lungs. With a moan, she reached out and pulled me to her. “Mattie,” she said.
My father came into the kitchen, his breath whistling through his lips the way it did when he was furious. “Want a paper?” he said to me, and dropped the Sunday Free Press face up on the table.
We’d made the blue section on the front page—generally reserved for psychological profiles of the Snowman—right under last year’s school picture of Theresa in a white ribbon with an echo of a smile on her face. The smile made her look more like an ordinary girl, the kind who wore hair bows and always looked startled in photographs. The article reported Theresa’s fondness for slot-car racing and the pickle sandwich at Avri’s Deli, that she’d been slated to be our district’s representative to the Outstanding Michigan Youth Summit in July. My own interest in slot-car racing was not mentioned, but the fact that I had once handcuffed a teacher was, along with sketchy details about my father’s “troubled” work history and his current “exile” at the future-research lab at GM. A complete description of what Spencer and I had done was included, along with repeated mentions of the frequency with which my name appeared in Theresa’s “diary.” That was the word, I realized after two or three readings, that the reporter had come up with for the notebook Theresa had given me. It wasn’t really a diary, I thought, though I couldn’t have said what it was.
That day, the second of Theresa’s disappearance, the only sound in our house, except for the mourning doves, was one fifteen-second burst of Beethoven’s Pastoral from my father’s stereo, which played actual music for the very first time. I recognized the piece right away. According to my parents, this symphony was the first music I’d ever heard. It hadn’t calmed me the way my mother’s staring eyes did, but they played it for me throughout my first year of life because it made me wiggle and, sometimes, laugh. Today, it just made me more afraid and even sadder, and I shut myself in my room and tried to keep my mind blank. My brother spent all day kicking his desk, as far as I could tell.
Sometime after dinner, a silver Buick Regal rolled up our street and coasted to a stop in front of our house. I returned to the living room and watched from the window as a gray-haired man in an open gray trench coat stepped into the light from our streetlamp. My father opened the door and peered quizzically into the darkness; then he murmured, “Shit.” The man in the trench coat stepped closer to the house, and my father spoke a little louder, sounding nervous and a little angry. “Mr. Fenwick. So nice of you to stop by.” I had never heard him use that tone before, but I recognized the name. He was my father’s boss, the one who told him, “You know, your dreaming could destroy your career.” My father had repeated that and shaken his head in wonder over and over to my mother last year. I had never met the man.
“Come in,” my father said.
“We’re on our way home,” said Mr. Fenwick, his voice rumbling, gravelly, like a tire spinning on rocks. “We just wanted you to know we’re all thinking of you.” He made no movement toward the house, standing halfway up our drive, as if we had something contagious. The front door stayed open, and I could feel the current of cold air sweeping through the room.
“Is this the kind of thing that destroys careers?” my father said.
Mr. Fenwick stared. Eventually, he shrugged. “I don’t know, Joe. I haven’t had much experience with this kind of thing.” He leaned back over the passenger door, and I could see the woman who had driven him here i
n the car’s dome light. She had white hair and a mouth that was way too red and made her look friendly but also sad, like a clown.
“See you next week,” Mr. Fenwick called, turning back in my father’s direction again.
This time, my father sounded distracted, much more like himself. “I’ll be in tomorrow,” he said.
“Don’t come in tomorrow,” Mr. Fenwick said, too fast. “For God’s sake, stay home a few days.” He climbed into his car without waving, and the white-haired woman drove him away. My father stayed in the doorway for a long time. When he finally shut the door, the cold breeze flitted around the room like a moth trapped indoors.
“You think he came by just to see if we’re all right?” he asked my mother.
“No,” my mother said. “He came to gape. Just like everyone else we know.”
As always when they talked about my father’s job, my parents’ lives seemed to spread out before me like one of the Great Lakes, something I could only view from the shore, impossibly big, vaguely threatening, and populated with people and events I would never know or even know about. Tonight, this sensation terrified me. I scurried back to my bedroom and shut the door. I wanted to call out, do something to shock them into remembering that I was there and that I hadn’t always done the things I’d done lately.
Brent beat me to it. He put his foot through the bedroom wall. His shoe didn’t get all the way into my room, but it blasted through the plaster on his side, causing tiny cracks to spiderweb from my baseboard. The first kick was enough to bring my parents running, and when he delivered a second, little flakes of white paint flew into the air. My own private snow flurry.
“You couldn’t hold off for one night?” my mother screamed at him. “You just have to make things more difficult?”
“You’re not doing anything!” Brent screamed back. “You’re just letting him sit there. Everyone hates us. Everyone hates him. He’s a freak. Get off, you’re hurting me.”
As quickly and furiously as it had begun, the screaming stopped, and in its place I heard low, intense murmuring. I crouched by the new cracks in my wall and listened, but I couldn’t make out the words. Soon the relentless horror of the day had a narcotic effect, and I began yawning. I crawled into bed and lay twisting in my covers, nearly asleep, jerking in and out of anxious dreams until my mother appeared at my bedside with a pair of my jeans.
The Snowman's Children Page 24
