I understood that neither of them wanted to go alone with the other. I hadn’t begun the paper—hadn’t even planned to write it for another few days. It was a poor excuse. I set my book on the couch.
I changed into a pair of jeans and grabbed a sweatshirt. I took my bag with my camera. I met Geoff and Del downstairs, where Geoff’s car, an old Volvo, sat sputtering by the curb. The car had once been white, but rust, and a general accumulation of road dust and dirt, had transformed the paint into something dull and gray. It was a windy day, and the elm sent its bright leaves down onto the hood. In the tree’s shade Mary Rae stood, irresolute, twirling her necklace. I refused to look at her face, at that bald expression of longing, irritated that she would continue to appear to me, as if she might force my hand.
She wanted to be found. And I hated to envision the state she’d be in, what might have happened to her. I had no idea where she was, and the idea of coming forward with the details that I knew seemed ridiculous. In the days after David Pinney disappeared, we’d learned that no one had thought to look for him. His father, his only parent, hadn’t reported him missing immediately. “He’s had his share of trouble,” his father was later quoted to have said. “I figured he’d run off with some friend or other.”
I felt a chill in the air, and I knew the warmth of the last two days was gone and something else was blowing in. You could hear the Cornell chimes, ghostly and partly out of tune. Del was already in the front seat, so I climbed into the back, the door groaning on its hinges. The leather upholstery was cracked, and the floor mats were encrusted with dirt and dried leaves and sawdust that I assumed came from Geoff’s work in the furniture shop. I knew I was sitting in dog hair but was grateful that Geoff hadn’t brought Suzie along—possibly in deference to me. He lit a cigarette and headed out of town, down Route 13, so that it wasn’t long before we left the houses and the university, and Ithaca itself, behind.
“This will be a taste of the countryside,” Geoff called out. He had the windows down, and the air blew in and whipped my hair over my face, making it hard to see where we were headed. I breathed in the smell of the dried leaves and roadside grass. We drove for what seemed an endless time, the road swinging in long, lazy curves past an old drive-in, its white screen blocked by tall spruce; past Cinda’s Bridal Shop, where the dresses were lit up in the two front windows—fuchsia moiré and the white sheen of synthetic silk falling in cascades from the waists of headless dressmakers’ dummies. A growing sense of anxiety pervaded the whole outing—we knew nothing about Geoff, and he could have just lured us into his car, and was now transporting us to some remote location to do whatever he wished with us. Del and I would be two more missing persons on the news.
My chest grew tight, my face numb. The road went through harvested fields filled with stubble, crossed a bridge over a stream into a small village. Main Street consisted of turn-of-the-century houses decorated with mums and carved jack-o’-lanterns, a funeral home, the post office, a stone library. We approached the one intersection, its four corners occupied by a gas station, a diner, a church, and a grand Victorian house behind an iron fence. Geoff slowed and stopped for a red light, and we passed an old wooden three-story building with a sign that identified it as the Milton Hotel.
“This is Milton?” I asked him.
Geoff’s eyes, dark and alert, appeared in the rearview mirror.
“Yes,” he said. “My friend lives here. She’s a painter. She teaches at the university. It’s not far now.”
“This is where that girl is from,” Del said.
We hadn’t discussed Mary Rae, but obviously Del had seen the flyers, and possibly read the newspaper accounts. There’d been no new discoveries, no new quotes from the girl’s mother hoping for her safe return.
“You know, maybe she met someone and took off,” I said. “She might be sitting in a motel in Florida with some boyfriend watching the news reports.”
Geoff eyed me again in the rearview mirror. “Not likely she’d take off.”
I sensed he wanted to say more but thought better of it.
“I heard she was murdered,” Del said. “Macabre.”
Her earring caught the late afternoon sun, and I reached out and moved her hair away to expose it.
“You still have those?” I said.
Del shook her head and Jane Roberts’s Tiffany earrings flashed—pearls and tourmaline. “Mais oui,” she said. “I always carry them in case I’m invited to a party.”
The light changed and Geoff pulled away from the intersection, turning soon after down a gravel road that proved to be the driveway of a picturesque yellow farmhouse. Dried sheaves of corn leaned against a lamppost, buttressed by bales of hay and lit jack-o’-lanterns, their grins toothless, their brows arched in ironic expressions of fear.
“Welcome to Windy Hill Farm,” Geoff said.