Del came into the room and sat on the arm of my chair.
“The secondhand smoke won’t be good for the baby,” Alice snapped.
Del wrapped her arms around herself, as if to ward it off.
“Anne told me,” I said. I caught Del’s eye. “Sleeping pills.”
The Milton girls slowed their page-flipping.
“What are you talking about?” Lucie said.
“You’ve lost the plot,” Kitty said.
Geoff roused himself and inched forward on the couch.
“That’s ridiculous,” Alice said. She grabbed her hair in her hands and twisted it into a long rope. “I mean I don’t remember really falling asleep,” she said. “I remember waking up in the guest room.”
“Anne made breakfast,” Kitty said.
“I had chocolate chip pancakes,” Alice said quietly.
I was surprised they hadn’t discussed these experiences before. Had jealousy made them guarded?
Del left the arm of my chair and sat beside Alice on the couch. “They drugged you,” Del said. “The two of them.”
At Del’s dinner party, the night before the asylum trip, I’d been confused, fighting the sleep that overtook me despite my efforts to hold it at bay. I felt as if I’d had sex, though the details escaped me.
Tara stepped into the doorway from the hall. “I think it’s time you leave,” she said, firmly. “Anne is gone. You’ve paid your respects.”
This might have produced renewed crying earlier in the day, but now it did not. We got up, Del and I and the Milton girls. Del helped Geoff from the couch. He stood in the center of the room and looked around, as if he’d lost something. I tugged on his arm and he came along with us, reluctantly. “That’s it?” he said.
Had Geoff been involved in the sleeping pill scenario? His befuddled air, his sorrow, seemed to reveal that he had not. We left the house slowly, funneling through the front door, down the stone steps to the yard, aware that it was probably for the last time. Randy and Joseph leaned on the hoods of their cars. Randy approached Del, and she told him she’d call him later. He turned away, dejected, scuffing his worn-down boots. Del helped Geoff into the car and got behind the wheel. My head ached, and I couldn’t drive. I opened the door to the backseat, but it occurred to me that the girls might fill in part of the mystery of the night with Anne.
“Where’s the Peterson field?” I asked.
The girls, gathered on the lawn in a clutch of winter coats and long, dark hair, turned their white faces toward me, stricken.
Joseph pushed himself off the hood of his car, accidentally kicking one of his glass empties into the driveway. “They found Mary Rae in the trailer there,” he said. And then, to the girls, soothingly, “She probably didn’t know that.”
I hadn’t known. I got inside the car and, as Del pulled away, Anne’s farmhouse receded through the back window.
“The plot thickens,” I said.
But did it matter anymore? Even if William had murdered Mary Rae, he would no longer be a threat to anyone.
Del flashed her eyes at me in the rearview mirror. Geoff sat slumped in the passenger seat. Poor Geoff.
Tara had turned on the lights inside Anne’s house, and the Milton girls stood on the yellow grass, in the spring mud, like statues in the game of freeze tag we’d play as children. The town was a place to escape from, and in some ways they understood that and in others they were destined to remain prisoners—marrying the local boys, having babies who would grow up to fulfill the quota of the town’s tragic losses. On Anne’s lawn they made a tableau. Geoff’s car tires reached the asphalt of the road and left the gravel drive behind.
33
I called my mother and told her I wouldn’t be coming home for Easter. She said, “Oh,” and then the rusty spring on the screen door to the terrace grated, and the little finches that came around my grandfather’s old birdfeeder made their piping sound. “I’m sorry,” she said. She pulled out one of the iron chairs—the metal feet scraping against the slate—and sat down with her morning coffee.