“Maybe he had something to do with Mary Rae’s disappearance,” Del said, quietly.
I knew she wouldn’t go to Officer Paul. She’d kept the journal because of me.
“This doesn’t prove anything,” I said.
“You’re right.” She took the journal and returned it to the shelf. “He’s your husband. You would know.”
I ignored the sarcasm in her voice. We leaned into each other, our heads touching, and listened to the wind rattle the trees, the windowpanes. We watched the candle flame dip and flicker in the draft, and I felt as if we were reprising our old roles—the clairvoyants.
“I wish there really was a way for the dead to tell us what happened,” Del said.
I didn’t ever want to know things—how people died, what they felt, who they loved. I didn’t want to understand the dead’s complicated existence, or feel their ache of longing weighing me down. But the dead appeared, sometimes bearing an indecipherable message or an image of a place; a bed against an open window, the scrape of the sea on stones, a dark hallway with threadbare carpet, the smell of lilacs, or rot, or blood. I would never know who they all were. I supposed that one day I would recall them like old friends—confusing them at times with the living.
Mary Rae wanted to share something with me. I’d heard her voice at the encampment: “Oh, don’t, Billy.” I’d seen her outside the apartment, as if waiting for me. Sitting in the dark, neither Del nor I talked about David Pinney, or about that summer. That time in our lives seemed to have been snipped out by a great pair of shears—leaving a blank space we had never bothered to fill in. Wasn’t that the problem, though? There remained a dark hole either of us could fall into. I felt myself there—teetering on the edge.
Del fell asleep on the couch, and I left her apartment. I could understand William’s anger but not the desperation in it. I pictured him trudging through the snow to campus, his foot bleeding into his boot. Upstairs, I entered the empty apartment. I felt my way toward the cedar closet in the dark, and I took the portfolio from its hiding spot and sat in the duck-carved chair. I flipped through the images again by candlelight. I reached the last one and discovered a pocket in the back of the cover and, hidden away, a sleeve of negatives. I got out my loupe and went through each image. Despite the quality of the flickering candlelight, I could see they were of Mary Rae. Her hair covered one of her breasts, her mouth was pursed in sleep—a pouf of pretty lips.
Mary Rae’s death had yet to be deemed a murder. Her face came on the evening news, in the daily newspaper—the dimpled cheek, the soft hair—and now I pictured her with William, the two of them drinking wine at Anne’s, side by side on the velvet couch. I imagined her asleep in a room, and William’s camera whirring and clicking, or in the back of Geoff’s car. I’d hidden the necklace in a small plastic bag taped to the back of the bureau. I didn’t know where else to put it where it wouldn’t be found, though I hadn’t been sure who I was hiding it from. Was I more sure now?
Before I hid the portfolio away, I paged through it again. Each girl was lovely in her own way, unique—bare breasts, arms thrown over heads, sheets threaded between legs. There was a sense of the abandon that sleep provided, a stillness so like death. How had William managed to capture them that way? Spagna had used a time-release camera placed in the room. But these were from differing angles, as if he’d been beside them while they slept and chosen each shot. What had prompted him to take each one? The slant of light? Maybe something in the aspect of each woman’s face: the way her lips parted, the veins on her eyelids, the luminosity of her skin. Who was she, sleeping, but whatever he determined? He’d come into my apartment while I slept. Were we all someone he wished would awaken to love him?
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