I closed the front door, and Del opened hers. The beam of her flashlight blinded me.
“Why are you down here?” she said, her voice lit with alarm. She came to me and put her hand out and touched my face. When we were little I would unconsciously frown and Del hated when I wore the expression.
“I was looking at the snow.”
I felt like a child with her cold hand on my cheek. I felt as if our roles were slowly revolving, reversing. In the darkness, with the wind rattling around outside, knocking off roof tiles, I thought about being Del, the uncertainty the world presented her, and I felt twinges of bewilderment as if I were now experiencing what she usually did.
“I want to see Mary Rae’s journal,” I said.
She pulled me into her apartment. She made me tea and laced it with brandy. We sat on the couch wrapped in woolen blankets with tattered satin edges, blankets that reminded us of the ones on our beds when were little. In the wavering candlelight Del was a small shape beside me.
“All of the Milton girls posed for him,” I said. “He has a series of photographs, all of them sleeping.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call them that,” Del said. “It’s disparaging.”
“You knew about the photographs?” I pulled away from her on the couch. The brandy made me light-headed.
“They brag about it when they aren’t around Anne. They keep talking about how there’ll be a show in a gallery, and they’ll be famous.”
“I thought they hated him,” I said.
Lit by the candle’s flame, the lines around Del’s mouth, at the corners of her eyes, were deep grooves that made her seem older than she really was. Her dark hair had grown out, and her blond roots were even more pronounced. “Maybe they don’t really hate him as much as they say.”
Around us, in other houses in town, students who hadn’t gone home for break gathered in groups to talk and dance, to laugh. How had I become so removed from them? Why hadn’t I ever tried to fit in? I hadn’t needed to. Del had arrived to keep me company in my strangeness. She looked at me over her teacup, her brow creased, her eyes worried.
“The journal?” I said.
She set her cup on the table and pulled the blanket tighter around her. I suspected she knew other things she wasn’t going to tell me, things she might have explained further, like the sandalwood smell in William’s office. My suspicions about the two of them together on the office couch were ungrounded. I knew I was mistrusting, spiteful.
Del retrieved the book, shelved among the professor’s translations.
“Are you sure you want to read this?” she said.
I took the journal from her hand and, using the flashlight, began to thumb through the entries, written in Mary Rae’s girlish script. Soon enough it was clear she’d been seeing William, that her dream of being back together with him had come true. She met him once in the Viking Lanes lot, and they sat in her car and talked until morning. The sun was coming up, and we were so surprised. We hadn’t noticed the passing time. He is different now. We are both different. She’d let him take her to dinner, in a restaurant in the next town. Had the necklace had been a gift from him? In December, there was a hasty entry: Made the appointment. Will says he will take me. And a week later: I went into the clinic, and then I couldn’t do it. “It’s not really anything yet, Rae,” Will says. Last time I was in high school, and he could talk me into anything, and then he left me. It’s a baby, a real thing. The last entry, two weeks before she disappeared, was angry, and cryptic. How could he? she’d written. What good is anything now? A pregnancy, and when she wouldn’t have an abortion, a final breakup. And maybe the New Year’s Eve out to make a show of being fine?
“Have you shown this to Alice?” I said.
“I hid it from her,” Del said. “She was desperate to find it. She knew there must be a newer one. She even went back to the house to look.”
“He said he hadn’t seen her,” I said.
We looked at each other. “Why does anyone lie?” Del said.
I was drunk on the brandy, and the wind howled. Del leaned against me, and I felt the urge to pull away and accuse her of being with William, but I had no reason, really, to do that, and I’d already driven one person away that night.
“Officer Paul would love to get his hands on this,” I said.
William, my new husband, would be a suspect. Detective Thomson had always had a particular look on his face as he leaned in toward me, the smell of starch coming off his shirtfront.
Where was your sister, Delores, on the afternoon of August eleventh?
At the Prison Store with our mother.
What time did she leave?
I’m not sure. Before lunch, I think.
How long was she there?
You’d have to ask our mother.
When did you see her next?
Later that day. She was on the back porch with the other kids.
The ones who’d been swimming?
Yes.
Who’d run up to the porch during the storm?
Yes.