So what did happen, in the end, in Bangor? Peter wasn’t a hundred percent clear about it. Not that Cassie didn’t tell him, because she did, but the telling made her upset, and she wasn’t particularly lucid. He didn’t want to belabor things, to make her go over the story, obviously so painful; for God’s sake, he’d figured there’d be time. He figured that even a day or two later, when she’d caught her breath and calmed down, he’d have her repeat the progression of events in such a way that he’d know he’d got it straight. So mostly he let her sob and snivel and swallow her words and leave gaps and double back and not entirely make sense.
As Peter understood it, or as he told it to me: after breakfast with the Swedish girls on Monday morning, using her Google Maps printout from the school library in Royston (a printout that Miss Barrocca wouldn’t suggest trying to trace until the following day, and that wouldn’t bear fruit until after Cassie had returned to Royston), Cassie walked the two miles to the Burnes house under a light but persistent April drizzle—needly in its persistence. Number 36 Spring Street turned out to be a little bald, in a neighborhood of newish houses with big, unfenced yards and no sidewalks, where a girl standing still in the rain might quickly be noticed; so she didn’t pause, on that reconnaissance visit, but walked right by and on for another quarter mile or so before turning and walking back to town. The house looked shabbier in real life than on the computer; maybe it was just the rain, or the end of winter, but the paint was peeling, and the concrete drive crazed like old china. The grass had lost the battle in places to patches of dirt that, in the weather, had dissolved into mud puddles. The house was dark—kids at school, parents at work. Cassie noticed that the basketball hoop over the garage was bent all the way down, as if someone had dangled from it, or tried to, but so that you couldn’t shoot a basket, anyway. Later, she remembered that.
When she went back again, the rain had long stopped (though her clothes still felt damp, in spite of the time she spent waving her sweater under the hand dryer in the basement bathroom at the Bangor Library); it was dusk; lights were on in the blue house and in their pooled glow she could see people moving through the rooms—like watching them on TV, she told Peter. But when he told me, I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong.
Of course, Cassie didn’t belong at that house in that moment. She told Peter that she chickened out then. She couldn’t ring the bell, she couldn’t even walk up the steps, she stood in the road in the darkening afternoon, peering up into the dioramas of a life that might have been, could have been, maybe should have been hers; until not one but two cars had to swerve slightly to pass her in the dusk, and she retreated.
The Swedish girls had left. The room was lonely, and Cassie had trouble sleeping. She woke before dawn to return to Spring Street before the day had begun: third time lucky. Tired in every way, tired of the situation and of herself, she wanted to make things happen, to make things clear.
It was barely light when she finally rang the Burneses’ bell. Just like the evening before, lights within illuminated the rooms, though differently: a new scene, possibly a new act, in the play. The oldest kid, Jason, answered the door, already in his Catholic school uniform, even a tie. Plumper than in the photos, a bit taller too, he had a mouth like cupid’s bow, and that dark down she remembered from the pictures. His lips were a little shiny—bacon, maybe? It smelled like it. She asked to speak to his dad, to Coach Burnes, and the boy looked her up and down—thinking her a kid from the high school, surely?—before he turned and hollered up the stairs.
“Hang on a minute,” he said, neither rudely nor politely. “If you can just wait here.”
From the house came the jaunty sound of the radio, and piping child voices, water turning on, a knocking pipe. The entrance where Cassie waited, small, was cluttered with boots, scarves, a couple of dropped umbrellas. It smelled of damp. The boy was gone a while, a couple of minutes, and when he clattered down the stairs again he wore a blazer over his shirt and tie, a crest on the pocket.
“He’s just coming,” he said, slightly breathless now, and retreated.
Outside, behind her, the sky had grown almost fully light, a lowering gray day that threatened more rain. Cassie pushed her hands in her jacket pockets, and her shoulders almost to her ears. She told Peter that she tried to slow down her breathing the way we’d been taught in drama class at school, breathing in and out slowly, counting to five at each passage. She figured he took about ten breaths to appear.
Arthur Clarke Burnes was a little guy—or, at least, not a tall guy—but he was solid. His gray tweed jacket pulled tight in the arms and his neck was red. Maybe he’d been freckly; maybe he’d been fair; now he was just ruddy and leathery and mostly bald. His eyes, light blue—like hers, Cassie thought at once—shimmered watery and veined . . . “rheumy-eyed,” I thought, when Peter told me. They looked, she said to Peter, like maybe he was a drinker, especially with the skin so red. And Coach Burnes looked annoyed. He fumbled with his shirt cuffs, his thick fingers tugging the shirt down inside the unwieldy sleeves.
“Yes?” he said, half-attending. “Do I know you? What is it?”
Right away, she told Peter, she knew it wasn’t what she’d wanted. The timing was off; the emotion wrong. This bullish little man, his fleshy neck spilling over his collar, his thin lips tight. He seemed like he might burst.
“My name is Cassie,” she began. She could hear her voice as if it were someone else’s. She could hear her voice trembling, as if on the cusp of tears. “Cassie Burnes.”
He didn’t register her surname; it seemed to make no impression at all. “Yeah?”
“I’m not from here,” she went on. “But I think you know my mother, Bev?”
“Who?”
“Bev. Beverly Burnes. Hospice nurse, Royston, Massachusetts, but formerly of Boston?”
“I don’t know a Bev Burnes,” he said, but he looked troubled now, Cassie told Peter, as if something hovered at the edge of his vision.
“About fifteen years ago?”
He frowned.
“I have a photo,” Cassie said, and reached into her backpack for her notebook. In it, she had both a picture of her mother, a couple of years old, and the snapshot of Clarke Burnes in his youth, the one blurry photo.
“What’s that?”
“I have a photo, a couple of them.” She fumbled for them. “Did you ever go by Clarke?”
“Sorry?”
“Did you ever use the name Clarke as your first name?”
“What’s this about?”
She held out his photo—she was sure from the expression on his face that it was his photo, that he knew at once where it had been taken, and by whom. Her hands were shaking; the photo fluttered in between them. She was almost certain.
“Where did you get this? What’s this about?”
“Art? Arthur, hurry now—your eggs are cold!” His wife’s voice, unconcerned, mildly reproachful.
“He’s at the door,” the boy called back. “Student from school.”
“What is this about,” he said, really looking at Cassie now, for the first time, his mouth a grim line, his bulk suddenly menacing.