Alice held her long hair in one hand, an unlit cigarette in the other. The wind rattled the windows in their panes, and the front door blew ajar. Everyone turned toward the door, startled, before Kitty got up and went to shove it closed. I waited for someone to ask me why I’d taken it upon myself to play amateur sleuth. I felt sorry for Mary Rae, I wanted her body found, her death declared. I wanted her to stop hounding me with her blue eyes and her anxious fingers on her locket. She refused to tell me anything, and like Sister in the barn, her silence weighed on me.
“She was supposed to go to work the next night and she never showed,” Alice said, her voice solemn.
Mary Rae’s bartending job at the Viking Lanes had been a new one. She stood to make a lot of money there, which she could use for school.
“Maybe she met someone there,” I said.
We’d driven past the place—it was on the way to Anne’s—a low white structure, the word “Viking” spelled out on the roof, and I imagined inside the roll of the balls, the eighties music, the smell of the bar.
“Someone knows what happened,” Del said. “Mary Rae knows what happened to her.”
A few of the girls flinched. Alice’s eyes welled with tears.
“We have to know what happened,” Lucie said.
Alice stood and shrugged off the afghan. “We do,” she said. “We’ve decided.”
“Maybe she’ll show up one night and surprise you,” I said. “Maybe she’ll walk right through that door and whip off her coat and say, ‘Hey! I’m back!’”
I didn’t mean to sound as heartless as I did. Del had instigated all of this. Anne gave me a pitying look. The Milton girls seemed to recoil from me. Lucie rose from the couch and began gathering glasses. Kitty collected the ashtrays to empty. One after another, the girls slipped down the hallway to the kitchen, until it was just Anne and I by the fire.
“I’m a fan of your work,” Anne said, her voice soft. “Each image seems to vibrate with something more than its parts.”
When I looked confused about her having seen my work, she said she’d sat on the admissions committee. “One of the last things I did before I took my leave.”
“Well, thank you,” I said, slightly flattered.
“When William was an undergraduate here I took him under my wing. It seems as if he is doing the same for you.”
I smiled but wasn’t sure how to respond, uncertain what she meant by that. I’d asked William about his relationship with Anne, and he’d told me she was his mentor, that she was his set of eyes when he wasn’t sure if something worked. I had shown some of my photographs to William, hoping to get him to reciprocate, but I could only convince him to reveal his older work—his Polaroids—pastel light, the figures dark, blurred, at a remove, and the settings overpowering—a rocky shoreline, a field rimmed by dense trees, a house’s roof against a wide, startling sky. I almost asked Anne now about his “sleep studies,” but William came into the room, forced out of the kitchen, I guessed, by the Milton girls. He had our coats, and I rose and went to meet him.
“It’s late,” he said.
Geoff followed him, pulling his car keys from his pocket. “Taking this group home,” he told Anne.
What kind of car had William driven when he was a local boy, and why didn’t he drive it anymore? I tried picturing him behind the wheel of a Mustang. He had told me about his Triumph motorcycle, as if that information should impress me, and it did give me a new image of him in a leather jacket and boots, leaning into the curves on Route 13.
We finished putting on our coats in the vestibule of Anne’s house. William wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in.
“Isn’t she something?” he said to Anne, who remained on the couch.
She gave us a wan smile. “She is that,” she said, and I had no idea what she really thought about me.
Del rode home with us. In the backseat I gave in to the effects of the wine, the cold air whipping into the back from Geoff’s cracked window. I paid little attention to the dark landscape, lost in worries about William’s past relationship with Mary Rae, and annoyed with Del.
She faced the window, her nose nearly pressed to the glass, and I tugged on her coat sleeve.
“What was that back there?”
“What do you mean?” she said. She was using a low, incredulous voice that infuriated me even more.
“That whole bring-back-Mary-Rae scene,” I said. “I mean, they did everything but light the candle.”
“You two aren’t going to have a fight now, are you?” Geoff’s voice was jolly.
Del turned back to the window, the snow-covered fields blurring beyond it.
“Why are you spending so much time with these Milton girls?”
Del began to sing then, quietly at first. It was “A Lovely Night,” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. As angry as I was, I started to laugh, and then we were both singing, and Geoff eyed us in the rearview mirror, and William ignored us, irritated, I supposed. Just then the car slid on a patch of black ice and spun, and we clutched each other, dizzy and shrieking, and I had a flash of fear that we would join the town’s list of the dead. But the car skated, smooth and untroubled, like a fish, into a small field, and Geoff quickly regained control, and the car lumbered over the grass, the frozen hillocks scraping its undercarriage, and we resumed our path, all of us silent.
17