A young girl, about nine years old, opened the door. She was stick-thin, her face a plane of sharp angles. Her fine, fair hair hung straight to her shoulders, though mussed on one side, as if she had been reading all afternoon and holding up her head with one hand. Fogged with condensation, her glasses obscured the brightness in her eyes. Unrolling her free arm like a wing, she welcomed them inside wordlessly.
They dropped their wet packs on the floor and gathered their bearings. Table lamps had been lit against the gloom and made the curious objects in the room appear yellowed with age. On all four walls, mounted animal heads stared back at them: two deer bristling with antlers, a black bear, a colossal ram with spiral horns. Whole fish glistened with shellac, swimming on wooden plaques. On the mantel, a fox flushed a bobwhite, a raccoon raised one paw forever above the mystery of a box turtle emerging from an acrylic stream. A red, white, and black Indian blanket woven in simple bold geometry had been thrown over the back of the wide sofa. A dressmaker's dummy stood in the corner, wearing nothing but a necklace of feathers; in another corner, an old-fashioned velocipede rested its handlebar against the wall like a loitering dandy. In a globed terrarium, a pale blue skink dozed beneath a blossoming white orchid. On the wall above hung a shadow box containing sixteen different bird feathers pinned in place. Another box showed eight desiccated butterflies, wings pocked with holes and tears. Glass-fronted bookcases were stuffed with old fairy stories, children's tales, the WPA Guide to Tennessee, A Brief History of the Natchez Trace, Birds of Appalachia, and an oversized Geneva Bible open to Ecclesiastes, a thick underline at chapter 7, verse 4. Erica and Wiley circled the room, taking it all in, dripping slowly on a corded rug, and when they realized the child had disappeared, they stopped marooned in the center.
“I'm cold,” Erica said, and drew close. Wiley made no move, offered no sign or word of comfort. A chill slithered up her jeans and down her blouse, so she wrapped her wet arms across her chest and shivered.
The girl came back with two thick towels and a pile of folded clothing in her arms and handed Erica a pair of slacks and a black sweater and Wiley a red plaid shirt and dungarees. “You may have to roll those pant legs, mister. He was taller than you,” she said. “You all can take turns in the bathroom, but please be quiet. Mee-Maw's having a lie-down in the bed. She always tires when it rains so.”
Dressed in the strange clothes, Wiley and Erica sat near the hearth to dry by a newly made fire, and the girl brought them bowls of clear broth. She said hardly more than what was necessary and seemed content to make them warm and comfortable. Daylight waned, and the window-panes were steeped in darkness. Complicities of fatigue and stress, the hypnotic fire dancing before him, and the close and musty air in the quiet room caused Wiley to fall asleep against one wing of the easy chair, and as soon as she noticed, the girl crept to his side and laid the Indian blanket across his lap. Erica watched this simple kindness with a waylaid sympathy, and then rose from her chair to study the curiosities in the glass cabinet until she became entranced by its enchantments. Taking down a book of fairy tales, she settled into the facing chair and soon dozed as well, her hands fixed to the pages of dreams. Outside, the rain hastened the fall into night. A door creaked open from the back of the house, then shut with an exclamation. Erica and Wiley awoke just in time to see an older woman, bent slightly at the waist and blinking in the light, enter the room and stop to focus on the strangers by the fire. “You're back,” she said. “We've been expecting you.”
13
Three in the afternoon, the hour when Erica usually came through the door on school days, passed without her. Margaret busied herself, checked the impulse to wait by the window, and muttered the same wish over and over as she wandered through the house attending to imaginary dust and scrubbing again the same spotless stovetop. After her strange experience with jumbled Shirley Rinnick, she had come home and dialed Paul at the clinic. He advised to check with the high school whether Erica had shown up for classes, and if they could not locate her, Margaret was to wait for the appointed hour when their daughter was due. “If she's with that boy,” he said, “and cutting class, I'm sure she'll show up like usual to make it seem like she was in school all day.” The hour came and went, and no sign. “Surely she'll be on time for dinner,” Paul told her when she called again. How can you be so calm? she thought, but years of living with him prevented the question from coming out. Instead she walked a mile inside the house, praying like a nun.
At four, a flock of starlings landed in the front yard, paraded like an undertakers’ convention through the dying grass, and through some telepathic signal flew off en masse.
At five in the afternoon, nothing happened.