He stumbled back against the duck-carved chair, and I left the cottage and ran up the long set of steps to Geoff’s car. I felt my progress slowed by panic, a heaviness in my legs I experienced attempting escape in nightmares. I’d left the car door unlocked. (“Nothing to steal in there, eh?” Geoff had always said.) I tossed the little clock onto the seat and started the car. William’s footsteps sounded on the stairs, and as he stepped out into the road I pressed the gas, and he leapt out of the way of the car. I could have run him over. All of these things might have been deemed self-defense. They would have fit into the story I planned to tell Officer Paul.
I drove to my apartment first. I expected William to pursue me on his Triumph, to appear at any moment, but he did not, still confused, puzzling out his next move. He would call Geoff. But Geoff didn’t have his phone at work. The apartment was as vacant as I’d left it—my pallet on the floor holding my shape from the night before. I went to the closet and slid the cedar panel aside and slipped the portfolio and the journal out from their hiding spot. I got back into the car and noticed my phone had three missed calls from William. Rather than listen to his messages, I drove the long route into Milton, watching in my rearview mirror, my heart racing and jubilant. I arrived on Main Street not knowing where the police department was. I pulled into the Viking Lanes parking lot and clasped the wheel with my shaking hands. I wasn’t sure if I could do what I’d intended to do.
I scrambled through my bag and found the scrap of paper Del had given me with Alice’s phone number. I punched the buttons, clumsily, getting the wrong number at first, redialing twice before she answered. Alice met me in the parking lot and together we took Officer Paul the negatives, the necklace, the journal. The Milton precinct was across the street from the Shurfine market, and I sat in a molded plastic chair and watched through the front window as women pushed carts across the uneven tar lot, loaded bags of groceries into their trunks. When Officer Paul came out I told him my story. I felt like a child again in elementary school—reciting the correct responses, watching the teacher’s face beam with pride. Paul put a hand on my shoulder and patted it. He wrote down the address to the lake house and promised to let me know immediately when all was safe.
Alice and I went to her grandmother’s. It was late afternoon, and Alice’s mother, Erika, greeted us at the door in a bikini worn under a white linen shirt, looking like exotic evidence that, beyond the dark confines of Milton, bright oranges hung from glossy trees, and beaches stretched white and blinding—the water a rare green, like malachite. Erika grabbed each of us by the hand and ushered us into the house, through the living room to the kitchen. She mixed us gin and tonics, and we took them outside, where we sat in her lounge chairs in the backyard, telling our story until fireflies emerged, tiny, weightless embers bobbing over the place where Alice and Mary Rae had practiced their twirling.
I told Alice and Erika how Del and I had held our séances on summer nights, a candle throwing our shadows onto the pool shed walls. Outside, the fireflies had dipped between horse chestnuts and honey locusts. Luna moths had flitted around the pool shed’s yellow outdoor light. For a dollar we’d communicate with the dead with the sole intention of collecting money for lip gloss and gum. Sometimes, I would know the color of a dress. I would smell lavender. I’d get an urge to sing part of a song I’d never heard before. I didn’t tell them that any of it had been real. I let them speculate—another clairvoyant’s trick.
Alice and Erika and I sat outside until late, startling at any sudden noise, imagining William’s Triumph revving down Milton’s Main Street, his silent approach around the side of the house. Erika slipped inside to make up a bed for me, though it would be a sleepless night. I planned to call Del and tell her everything, so she would know that it wasn’t William’s ghost she’d seen but the man himself, but I did not. I sat on the bed and I played William’s messages—the first an angry attempt to reason with me, a promise not to reveal what had happened in the asylum. The second message was more of the first—spiteful, hateful, a threat to find me, to do what he should have done to me before. The third message was blank, at first. Then water sloshed against a boat’s sides, buffeted by wind, by William’s slow breaths. “Why couldn’t you love me,” he said softly, despondent.
The next morning, under ash-colored skies, Officer Paul arrived to tell us in person that William’s body had been found in a small boat on the lake, a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
We stood in the driveway, Officer Paul scuffing his dark shoes. It began to rain—a soft drizzle. “He won’t hurt anyone else,” he said.
He ducked back into his cruiser, offering a quick nod of sympathy, imagining the ordeal I’d been through. Alice put a tentative arm around my shoulder. The rain misted the grass, the tar road, the metal street signs. All I’d ever wanted was to be loved. All William had wanted was for me to love him. Even Mary Rae, under the elm, had wanted something. As much a mystery as the appearance of the dead was the way none of our wantings could ever be aligned.
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