Del would be there, I said. “She can stand in for the two of us.” I laughed, thinking of Del’s pregnancy, and my mother’s reaction to it, but when my mother asked me what was so funny I said, “Oh, nothing.” I wondered if she could hear my sullenness. I didn’t know for sure if Del and William had been together, if I’d killed an innocent man—loyal to me and unconnected to Mary Rae’s death—or a man who’d slept with my sister and killed a girl who by all accounts was devoted to him. Until I knew more, I decided to believe my sister.
Geoff began his quiet pacing at night again, perhaps in his grief over Anne. The breeze rubbed the elm’s branches, bright with leaves, against my window. Geoff’s footsteps shuffled across the wood floor, followed by Suzie’s clicking. Once in a while I’d hear something suppressed—a moan or a cough. And then the pacing. A few times I considered going to his door but lost my nerve. We had come full circle, back to a place from which I had believed we’d been freed.
Sleepless in bed, I listened for William’s footsteps on the stairs. Lover? Predator? Startled by a noise, I caught sight of myself in the little mirror by the door—my hair disheveled, my eyes blank, the awful mark from the accident branding my forehead. I went to classes but ignored the boys who seemed to surround me like bright coins. Back in my apartment, I burrowed into my bedclothes and read through Mary Rae’s last journal—sifting through the pages, obsessed and searching for clues; her handwriting, girlish and rounded, its own sad reminder of a future she’d once planned. With William. The baby. He’d been the last to see her. Had she told him she hadn’t kept her appointment for the abortion? How would he have reacted? Had they met at the trailer? Wouldn’t there be traces of William there? Del and I had scrubbed the concrete floor of my grandfather’s barn with the borax, erasing the blood, tossing the hay over the spot.
Though the Miltons hadn’t told me where the Peterson field was, I had my own sources. I called Jimmy at the Agway. It seemed the field could be accessed by an old railroad line that ran near the store, a line that had only recently been turned into a nature path. I met Jimmy at the Agway one Sunday afternoon. He wore a red ball cap pulled low, a T-shirt, and jeans. It was his day off, and he took my hand as if I were his girlfriend.
“The path’s through here. The field’s a ways down,” he said. “It’s a hike.”
“The weather is nice enough,” I said.
Jimmy was hesitant. But I assured him I only wanted to look from afar.
“That’s probably all you’ll get,” he said. “A look.”
The place was a crime scene—I understood that. We started down the path. The old ties had been taken up, and loose gravel marked the way through the woods. Every so often the sun broke through the canopy of trees. We passed families out walking, the little girls picking violets. The air was crisp, and snow lay beneath the low-hanging pine boughs. We crossed a trestle over a swift-running brook, and small birds darted about. Soon there were no more people. I felt as if I were in the middle of nowhere. Jimmy walked quietly by my side, nervous, shy. He wasn’t sure what to make of me or my interest in Mary Rae, and I almost wished I could tell him that she’d appeared to me and asked me to do this, but even that wasn’t exactly true.
Soon we emerged at a place where the path opened and fields stretched for miles on both sides. The sun was high and bright, and Jimmy stopped walking and pointed.
“Up there,” he said.
I could see the rise of the field, the grass waving, the bluets and buttercups, and then along the line of the woods batches of day lilies. If he hadn’t pointed it out to me, if the sun hadn’t hit the Silver Streak’s metal body, I would never have been able to spot it. I slipped my hand from his, and I stepped off the path and ducked beneath the farmer’s barbed-wire fence. Jimmy shook his head at me—a caution not to go, maybe a little angry that I’d lied to him. It didn’t take long to cross the field. A path led beside the trees that rimmed it. Every so often I looked back at Jimmy, and he waved his arm—whether in greeting or to call me back, I wasn’t sure.