What wasn’t fine were those screams.
Marcy didn’t remember running down the hall to Sarah’s bedroom. All she remembered was getting out of bed and then standing inside the open door of Sarah’s room and beholding her daughters, sitting bolt upright in bed and clutching each other in the light of the full July moon that came flooding through the window.
‘What?’ Marcy asked, looking around for an intruder. At first she thought he (surely it was a he) was crouched in the corner, but that was only a pile of cast-off jumpers, tee-shirts, and sneakers.
‘It was her!’ Sarah cried. ‘It was G! She said there was a man! God, Mom, she scared me so bad!’
Marcy sat on the bed and pried her younger daughter from Sarah’s arms and took Grace in her own. She was still looking around. Was he in the closet? He might be, the accordion doors were closed. He could have done that when he heard her coming. Or under the bed? Every childhood fear flooded back while she waited for a hand to close around her ankle. In the other would be a knife.
‘Grace? Gracie? Who did you see? Where was he?’
Grace was crying too hard to answer, but she pointed at the window.
Marcy went there, her knees threatening to come unhinged at every step. Were the police still watching the house? Howie said they would be making regular passes for awhile, but that didn’t mean they were there all the time, and besides, Sarah’s bedroom window – all of their bedroom windows – looked out on either the backyard or the side yard, between their house and the Gundersons’. And the Gundersons were away on vacation.
The window was locked. The yard – every single blade of grass seeming to cast a shadow in the moonlight – was empty.
She came back to the bed, sat, and stroked Grace’s hair, which was clumped and sweaty. ‘Sarah? Did you see anything?’
‘I …’ Sarah considered. She was still holding Grace, who was sobbing against her big sister’s shoulder. ‘No. I might have thought I did, just for a second, but that was because she was screaming, “The man, the man.” There was no one there.’ And, to Gracie, ‘No one, G. Really.’
‘You had a bad dream, honey,’ Marcy said. Thinking, Probably the first of many.
‘He was there,’ Gracie whispered.
‘He must have been floating, then,’ Sarah said, speaking with admirable reasonableness for someone who had been scared out of sleep only minutes before. ‘Because we’re on the second floor, y’know.’
‘I don’t care. I saw him. His hair was short and black and standing up. His face was lumpy, like Play-Doh. He had straws for eyes.’
‘Nightmare,’ Sarah said matter-of-factly, as if this closed the subject.
‘Come on, you two,’ Marcy said, striving for that same matter-of-fact tone. ‘You’re with me for the rest of the night.’
They came without protest, and five minutes after she had them settled in, one on each side of her, ten-year-old Gracie had fallen asleep again.
‘Mom?’ Sarah whispered.
‘What, honey?’
‘I’m scared of Daddy’s funeral.’
‘So am I.’
‘I don’t want to go, and neither does G.’
‘That makes three of us, sweetheart. But we’ll do it. We’ll be brave. It’s what your dad would have wanted.’
‘I miss him so much I can’t think of anything else.’
Marcy kissed the gently beating hollow of Sarah’s temple. ‘Go to sleep, honey.’
Sarah eventually did. Marcy lay awake between her daughters, looking up at the ceiling and thinking of Grace turning to the window in a dream so real she thought she was awake.
He had straws for eyes.
4
Shortly after three AM (around the time Fred Peterson was trudging out into his backyard with a footstool from the living room in his left hand and his hangrope over his right shoulder), Jeanette Anderson awoke, needing to pee. The other side of the bed was empty. After doing her little bit of business, she went downstairs and found Ralph sitting in his Papa Bear easy chair, staring at the blank screen of the TV set. She observed him with a wifely eye and noted that he had dropped weight since the discovery of Frank Peterson’s body.
She put a gentle hand on his shoulder.
He didn’t look around. ‘Bill Samuels said something that’s nagging at me.’
‘What?’
‘That’s just it, I don’t know. It’s like having a word on the tip of your tongue.’
‘Was it about the boy who stole the van?’
Ralph had told her about his conversation with Samuels while the two of them were lying in bed prior to turning out the light, passing it on not because any of it was substantive but because a twelve-year-old boy making it all the way from mid-state New York to El Paso in a series of stolen vehicles was sort of amazing. Maybe not Fate magazine amazing, but still pretty wild. He must really hate his stepdad, Jeannie had said before turning out the light.
‘I think it was something about the kid,’ Ralph said now. ‘And there was a scrap of paper in that van. I meant to check back on that, and it kind of got lost in the shuffle. I don’t think I mentioned it to you.’
She smiled and ruffled his hair, which – like the body under the pajamas – seemed thinner than it had in the spring. ‘You did, actually. You said it might be part of a take-out menu.’
‘I’m pretty sure it’s in evidence.’
‘You told me that, too, hon.’
‘I might go down to the station tomorrow and take a peek. Maybe it will help me put a finger on whatever it was Bill said.’
‘I think that’s a good idea. Time to do something besides brood. You know, I went back and re-read that Poe story. The narrator says that when he was at school, he kind of ruled the roost. But then this other boy arrived who had the same name.’
Ralph took her hand and gave it an absent kiss. ‘Believable enough so far. William Wilson’s not as common a name as Joe Smith, maybe, but it’s not exactly Zbigniew Brzezinski, either.’
‘Yes, but then the narrator discovers that they have the same birth date, and they’re going around in similar clothes. Worst of all, they look something alike. People get them mixed up. Sound familiar?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, William Wilson Number One keeps meeting William Wilson Number Two later in life, and these meetings always end badly for Number One, who turns to a life of crime and blames Number Two. Are you following this?’
‘Considering it’s quarter past three in the morning, I think I’m doing a fine job.’
‘Well, in the end, William Wilson Number One stabs William Wilson Number Two with a sword, only when he looks into a mirror, he sees he’s stabbed himself.’
‘Because there never was any second William Wilson, I take it.’
‘But there was. Lots of other people saw the second one. In the end, though, William Wilson Number One had a hallucination and committed suicide. Because he couldn’t stand the doubleness, I guess.’
She expected him to scoff, but he nodded instead. ‘Okay, that actually makes sense. Pretty damn good psychology, in fact. Especially for … what? The middle of the nineteenth century?’
‘Something like that, yes. I took a class in college called American Gothic, and we read a lot of Poe’s stories, including that one. The professor said people had the mistaken idea that Poe wrote fantastic stories about the supernatural, when in fact he wrote realistic stories about abnormal psychology.’
‘But before fingerprints and DNA,’ Ralph said, smiling. ‘Let’s go to bed. I think I can sleep now.’
But she held him back. ‘I’m going to ask you something now, husband of mine. Probably because it’s late and it’s just the two of us. There’s no one to hear you if you laugh at me, but please don’t, because that would make me sad.’
‘I won’t laugh.’
‘You might.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You told me Bill’s story about the footprints that just stopped, and you told me your story about the maggots that somehow got into the cantaloupe, but both of you were speaking in metaphors. Just as the Poe story is a metaphor for the divided self … or so my college prof said. But if you strip the metaphors away, what do you have?’