Geoff was walking up the sloping lawn. “You two tending the bar?” he said. He uncorked the bottle of bourbon, and I could smell it, and smell the dead leaves, the drying hedges around the terrace, the bonfire smoke. “Come down to the fire. Get something to eat. It’s warmer.”
Del and I grabbed plates—vintage Spode china depicting an autumn scene—and stood in line for grilled chicken threaded on skewers with vegetables, warm bread. We followed Geoff back to the fire, and Del and I took open seats, separated from each other. Geoff introduced us to the people sitting nearby—a woman named Lucie, tiny, almost frail, wearing a man’s coat that seemed to dwarf her; her boyfriend, Joseph, burly in a heavy plaid shirt. I recognized Lucie’s voice as that of the woman at the porch party. A woman to my left introduced herself as Alice.
“This town is cursed,” Alice said. A tremor moved through her, from cold or fear, I couldn’t say. Her long, dark hair reminded me of Mary Rae’s—she wore the same style of curls.
Joseph, as if to corroborate, told about people they knew, presumably from high school, a litany of tragic ends—Jerry Zelnick in his blue Pontiac on Trumansburg Road, Cary Belton in his Camaro in Ellis Hollow—boys who thought it impressed someone to drive without headlights on dark country roads. Alice mentioned a teacher shot by his daughter’s boyfriend, the boyfriend’s subsequent suicide over his own father’s grave.
“Carl Sutton,” Joseph said.
“And maybe Mary Rae,” Alice said. She started to cry, softly.
A few seats down, Del wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold, and a boy sitting next to her gallantly draped his coat over her shoulders. The girl named Lucie rose from her chair and knelt down beside Alice and hugged her.
“Mary Rae is her best friend,” Joseph said to me across Lucie’s empty seat.
“I was the last to see her,” Alice said to me. “She spent the night at my grandmother’s house. We got drunk on beer from the cellar refrigerator, and then we went out into the snow in the backyard with my old batons. Mary Rae threw hers up and dented the house’s siding. God, we laughed so hard we wet our pants. We made snow angels.”
Alice briefly covered her face with her hands, like a child playing peek-a-boo or counting for hide-and-seek.
“When we couldn’t find her at first I just knew it was my neighbor who took her,” she said. “Me and Mary Rae used to watch him go out all dressed up. He wore these flashy silk shirts and polyester pants and aviator glasses. We watched him through my bedroom window and made fun of him. ‘There goes Lonesome Ricky,’ Mary Rae used to say.”
Alice’s eyes filled with tears again.
“One time we snuck into the drive-in—Bobby Sorel had his father’s car, some big sedan, and we both fit curled up in the trunk. When Mary Rae was missing I kept picturing her wrapped with duct tape in Lonesome Ricky’s old rusty Grand Prix, listening to him singing disco music.”
The wind rattled the branches overhead and sent sparks skittering out of the fire. I’d visualized nearly the same thing about Geoff—minus the duct tape—driving Del and me off in his car.
“I don’t know what to picture anymore,” Alice said. “It’s all a big nothing.”
Now might have been the time for me to mention the girl in the narrow room with the icy windows, but I doubted this information and its accompanying image would be welcomed.
“Did you tell the police about him?” I asked her. “Lonesome Ricky?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That poor man worked for New York State Electric and Gas for thirty years. His only crime was being stuck in the seventies.”
Geoff had left his seat and was up at the bar again. Del was talking to Anne, beside her, and I worried she would repeat her offer of our clairvoyant services. I caught William watching me, wearing the expression of someone trying to puzzle things out. Alice and Lucie kept me distracted with their reminiscences about their lost friend—how she’d gotten a job at the Viking Lanes bar, how she’d started classes at the community college, how on New Year’s Eve they’d all gone out to the Hill Top Inn.
“She looked so beautiful,” they said. In the photograph on the telephone pole, Mary Rae wore curls, a fancy dress.
They told me how they were all champion twirlers—competing all over the state in high school. “Mary Rae was so good,” Alice said.
“The best of the three of us,” Lucie said.
They described their costumes—the short skirts and sequins, the warmth of the gym during practice. I’d lost sight of Del—she and Anne had walked out of the bonfire’s ring of light. When I looked behind me, cold air struck my face. The house’s downstairs windows were lit up, and the sorrowful cello piece had come to its close.
Just then a man in a police uniform came around the side of the house. He approached the fire, his badge glinting, and I wondered if he was mistakenly in costume. Everyone quieted. Overhead, something dark took wing, and the man in uniform ducked, as if he, too, sensed it passing.