Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone (12 page)

Later, they would find the hinges torn loose from their splintering anchors, three panes of glass cracked; another, low and on the left, had disappeared entirely.

“We never found the pieces from this one,” he had said, looking over his shoulder and smiling with so much covered misery that it made my stomach hurt.

“Weird,” I said. I ducked underneath his arm, draping its heavy length over my shoulder and resting my head against his chest.

“The paramedics probably kicked it away,” he said, his eyes fixed on a place behind us and down the steps, seeing the path that her body had followed as it was wheeled from the house, prone on a stretcher with a sheet pulled tight over her gaunt, gray face. They had called for an ambulance, not knowing what else to do, forcing James to stand on the porch and wait for the white bus with its strobing band of electric red lights to trundle up the drive. He had been the one to walk to the driver’s-side window, his shoulders hunched and face contorted with grief, and explain to the surprised EMTs in their clean khaki uniforms that they could take their time. There was nobody here to save.

Beyond the bone-white outline of the faded wood, through the place where there should have been glass but wasn’t, a dust-shrouded banister lined the stairs to the second floor. The places where fingertips had pressed against the wood gleamed like oil, three- and four-pronged marks that trailed sharply upward and then disappeared. There were photographs on the ascending wall, pictures of a brooding, little-boy version of James. He was running through a pumpkin patch, a look of intense concentration on his small, serious face. He was seated on the lap of an elderly woman with veiny hands, skin like old tissue paper, coffee-stained teeth that were flashing in a broad, uneven smile. He was here, in this house, on this stairway, with his mother’s long shadow darkening the wall beside him.

I could still remember that photograph. In it, he was turned toward the place where she had been standing, beyond the reach of the camera’s eye. His face was an open shout of delight at the surprise,
Mommy
, whose body was blocking the light that poured through the east-facing window, whose curly hair was casting a tendril shadow over the toe of his sneaker. It could break your heart, if you looked too long—at the shadow, at the tiny face with eyes alight and open mouth, at the gleaming woodwork and unfaded wallpaper and sweet white dabs of sunlight that played on the floor. There had been a home here, polished and scrubbed, cared for. There had been a family. There had been love, and patches of light on the stairs. There had been a time before everything turned gray.

“Aren’t you worried about this?” I’d asked, standing on the porch and trailing my finger along the inner groove where the missing glass had been. “Somebody could come in . . .”

I looked back at the endless trees, the uninterrupted forest, as James smiled sadly.

“There’s nobody out here. That was why she liked it. It’s quiet; it’s private. My mom grew up in the city, did I ever tell you that? She grew up in New York, and she was always saying—” his voice suddenly broke and he stopped short, swallowed hard. His shaggy hair—unkempt, uncut, longer than a mother would have liked—fell over his eyes as he looked toward the ground and muttered, “Sorry.”

* * *

It had still been early, then. We were still only skimming the surface of “together,” still learning each other’s tics, getting to know the nuances of expression and tone that were second nature to me now. Then, I had been uncomfortable and the moment passed with needling self-consciousness, him swallowing so hard and often that his Adam’s apple bobbed under his skin as though it were alive, me rubbing his back in awkward circles and beginning to sweat with the pressure to say something. Anything. At times like this, and there had been more than one, I felt that his mother was there—standing to the side, watching us, all mournful eyes and slow-shaking head that this trespassing girl was here, on her front porch, in her private forest, and could not even comfort her son.

Finally, he had cleared his throat, and blinked, and said, “Anyway, we don’t worry about someone coming in. There’s nothing in here that anybody cares about.”

And I had held his hand, and touched his shoulder, and wondered what kind of hopelessness he must have felt—to make himself part of that nothing.

CHAPTER
14

O
n the morning of the arrests, exactly one month to the day after Amelia Anne Richardson’s body had made its prostrate pilgrimage from the dirty and dusty roadside to the cold, clean interior of the morgue, a dark, heavy wall of mounting cloud had appeared above the western mountains. A rising wind, insistent and tinged with the damp promise of a late July thunderstorm, blew coldly down the quiet streets and brushed its clammy fingers against the limp faces of the parched and shuddering leaves. The sun grew unsure of itself and fled the sky. Inside, people tiptoed through the tepid indoors of their carpeted hallways, stepped over their thresholds into the moving air, and sighed with relief at the promise of rain.

For a few short hours, it seemed that the unsettling presence of murder, mystery, and irreversible change that had haunted our streets all summer would finally, finally be washed away.

The news blew into town before the second set of handcuffs had clicked into place around the beefy, blue-veined wrists of the suspects, picking up speed as it raced through phone lines and over hedges, banging through front doors, barging into kitchens where it surprised families in the midst of their unhurried Sunday breakfasts. It rushed eagerly down the streets, richocheting off the bare, sun-faded faces of stately white homes and wrapping in a breathless tangle around the trunks of old trees. Beneath the austere ceiling of the hilltop Presbyterian church, gossip skipped up and down the aisle and murmured in the spaces between the worn wood pews, until the black-cloaked pastor, his flushed face and thinning hair grown shiny and damp with frustrated perspiration, paused midsermon and said, “Excuse me, but I must insist that the noise stop immediately.”

Later, long after the speculation had given way to sad and dissatisfying truth, it was discovered that three words had been scribbled in the margins of one of the ancient church hymnals. The hasty ink bled its black accusation back through ten parchment-thin pages, the letters growing fainter and then disappearing entirely on page one hundred and fifty-seven, just beside the first verse of “My Soul in Silence Waits for God.”

IT WAS THEM.

It had to be them. We knew it, we all did—the neighbors who talked from the sides of their mouths, the women who waited until the kids had gone to bed before phoning a friend to trade theories, the beer drinkers in the East Bank Tavern who turned on their stools, glasses raised, and toasted the untrustworthiness of outsiders. Because in a town like this, there were the people who belonged, and the ones who didn’t. And the dead girl, the one with skin like clean white paper and expensive highlights in her blood-soaked hair—that girl wasn’t one of us. If you had asked anyone, anyone at all, we’d have told you as much in a heartbeat. And who had killed her? Who could have? Who would have?

Them.

And just as they had done before, just as they always did, people came together and talked about what they’d always known.

Because there had always been something wrong with the summerers. They were too snide, too snobby, too suspiciously ready to throw their money at substandard lakefront property in a town with no real cachet. They talked to us using short sentences and slow language, pandering to grown men as though they were stupid children. Until they wanted something; then, they seeded their speech with four-syllable words and hoped that the lies in between would slip by unnoticed. They had driven up the prices in the grocery with their demands for imported foods, organic vegetables, strangely shaped and weird-smelling artisanal cheese that none of the locals would touch. They had cheated someone’s cousin out of his rightful claim to a lakefront lot. They had built those guarded gates and chosen the narrow-eyed assholes who staffed them. They called us “boy” and “hey, you” and “dear,” called us “honey” and “sweetie” in voices that rang with condescension and held no kindness.

They had always wanted to take what wasn’t theirs.

They had taken that poor girl’s life.

But better that it should end like this—when the guilty men were cuffed, dragged, shoved into the backseats of two police cruisers, and everyone knew the reasons why.

“He had an affair with her,” people said.

“She was obsessed.”

“She threatened to tell his wife.”

He had dragged her into the dark and savaged her there by the side of the road. He had hit her with a pipe, with a rock, with the bare blunt force of his dirty fists. Or that it had been both of them; they had raped her together, or one at a time, one man holding her thin arms while the other tore her dignity to shreds. It was a conspiracy. It was a reluctant cover-up. It was cold-blooded murder with a side of blackmail. Don’t say that I told you, but you can trust me.

I heard it from someone who knows.

Later, when the the truth came out—when it turned out that the men from Silver Lake were guilty not of murder, but of taking it upon themselves to beat the living shit out of a caramel-skinned landscaper who’d looked, as they later told the police, “suspicious”—the same eager souls who had excitedly spread rumors of resolution through the cool, breezy morning were finally forced to redial, recant, admit that the real story had been anything but. The sun reappeared with blazing strength in the five o’clock sky. It baked the sidewalks and streets until the heat rose in thick, shimmering waves and each blade of grass bowed its slender neck in dazed submission. It sucked in the air and spit it back at us, lung-clogging hot. People stepped outside, looked to the west with longing, and recognized the familiar deadweight of murder in the unmoving air. The sky was bare, the clouds vanished. The earth was cracking, and Amelia Anne Richardson’s body grew colder, drier, deader, in its anonymous plastic shroud.

And murder, standing just inside the open door, leaned closer and whispered, “It will never rain again.”

AMELIA

S
he woke with a start, curled up against the car door with the handle digging uncomfortably into her armpit. There had been a sound—some sort of bell, or chime—that had cut through her sleep, and she looked around for the source before remembering where she was. Outside the window, lit by the ghostly light of the high beams, were the gnarled trunks of tall trees. They waved lightly in the night breeze.

She was alone.

The car was stopped, silent, the keys dangling from the ignition, the driver’s-side door yawning open with nothing but impenetrable blackness beyond. The skin on her arms prickled and then broke out in gooseflesh as she stared at the empty driver’s seat, her mind pushing aside the cobwebs of sleep when she realized, with growing clarity and a sense of alarm, that she could not see Luke. Struggling out of her seat belt and shrugging off his sweatshirt, she fumbled with the door handle.

Behind her, there was a thudding sound. Someone had slammed the trunk shut. Crunching footsteps came next, moving around the car, and then Luke’s face suddenly appeared in the black emptiness beyond the door, his lips pulled back in a self-satisfied smile. In the yellowish light of the interior, they looked dirty—slimy, like rocks that had been sitting too long in still water.

Gross,
she thought, and then felt immediately guilty for it. He had let her sleep while he drove them all the way here, hours of navigating alone in the dark, and that was on top of the drive from school to his family’s home in New York. God, he had been behind the wheel steadily for—she looked at the clock.

And then snapped to attention.

“Luke, where are we? We can’t possibly be there yet, it’s too early.”

He kept smiling, his face looming like a pale moon in the corner of the open door. “That’s my math wiz,” he grinned. “I just had to make one more stop on the way.”

“One more— what’s going on?”

“Come outside.”

“I need to put my shoes back on,” she said, fumbling for them. One of them seemed to leap out of her hand when she touched it, diving away beneath the seat.

“Come on,” he urged, and disappeared. She saw him cross around the front of the car, the headlights sweeping his body as he passed through them. He beckoned again, still smiling.

She eyed him suspiciously, but complied. The breeze kissed her arms and neck as the door swung open, pressing the loose fabric of her dress tight around her body. Luke turned and walked away, striding past the glow of the headlights and into the dark beyond.

She winced as she unbent her knees, uncurling stiffly and putting her feet uncertainly on the ground.

“Ame?” Luke’s voice floated out of the dark.

“Coming!” she called.

Small rocks skittered away under her feet as she stepped carefully along the thin white beam from the headlight, her eyes adjusting slowly to the dark. There were trees here, hundreds of them, sailing up and away into a sky that looked like it was littered with tiny jewels.

She gasped and craned her neck to take it all in. There were so many stars, an incredible patchwork of glittering light in the blue-black openness above, more stars than she had ever seen. For years, her night skies had been filled with the orangey glare of city lights, skies in which only two or three points of light could ever break through the electric ambiance and low-hanging smog. In this sky, they were everywhere—as common and numerous as grains of sand.

It was only when she had lowered her chin, allowing the air to rush back into her nostrils, that she realized she could not smell the ocean. Wherever they were, it felt
inland
, surrounded on all sides by these trees, the night air loamy with the scent of earth, and something else . . . something sweet. Something heavy, floral, that seemed to float out of the trees and drape itself around her neck, tangling in her hair, caressing her face, and begging to be adored.

She could see him, now, standing just ahead. There was an opening, a sense of air and space, and she saw that he was standing just back from a ledge that overlooked the country- side below. Miles away and to the east, a loose grid of soft little lights seemed to be nestled comfortably in the trees.

A town—a tiny one—surrounded by miles of blackness.

“This must be beautiful in the daytime,” she said, stepping up to stand beside him.

“It is,” he replied. He put an arm around her shoulders, squeezed briefly, and turned to look at her. In the ambient light from the car and the cold, barely there glow of starlight, she saw him as a series of features—the straight, patrician nose; the unblinking eyes; the grim, tense line of his mouth.

“I used to come here when I was a kid,” he said. He dropped his hand from her shoulders and pushed it deep into his pocket, hunching his shoulders against a nonexistent wind. “My parents had a place, for awhile, on this lake. Silver Lake. It’s down there, you could see it now if it weren’t so dark.” He paused, frowning. “We should have left earlier. I wanted to be here at sunset.”

She watched him, half smiling. The idea of Luke as a little boy—a little, lake-house-having boy—amused her. She had always seen him as a child of extreme privilege, someone who took it for granted that each summer would be spent at the Cape, that each winter would bring a trip to Aspen or Jackson Hole. It fit his rigid nature; the idea that there was just one right way to live life, visiting the right places, knowing the right people.

He was watching her, waiting for a response. She shrugged. “Sorry, sweetheart. If I’d known—”

He shook his head. “No, no, I’m not saying it’s your fault. Of course you didn’t know.” He turned to look out at the vista, the endless patches of dark-on-dark-on-darker, the sweet sprinkling of lights that twinkled back amiably in the night.

“That’s a town,” he said, pointing. “It’s been a while, but I remember it was really small. Quaint, I guess—it’s got a quaint name, Bridgedale or . . . no, that’s not right. But something like that. You’d probably like it.”

“I probably would,” she replied. “But—”

“Anyway,” he rushed in, cutting her off, and she was glad in the dark that he couldn’t see her rolling her eyes, “anyway, I brought you here because . . . um. Because I really liked it here. My family used to have picnics up here, back when we still had the house, and we saw my dad a lot more then . . .”

She nodded but began to tune him out, listening to him ramble about the meaningfulness of this place—
Geez, Luke, you’re not the only one with a cute family who did cute things—
when he suddenly grabbed her hand.

“And I know things have been a little tense between us for the past few weeks,” he said, squeezing her hand. “But that’s over now. We’re all done with college, and now we can move on from all that stuff, you know?”

“Mm-hmm,” she said, squeezing back.

He barely seemed to hear her, talking faster now, “I was so worried all the time with all the studying, all those exams, and then trying to figure out about a job—well, I mean, all of it, I was just so stressed. But now it’s time to move on from that, and you won’t be so busy with the acting thing, that’s all done for you,” and he squeezed her hand again.

She didn’t squeeze back.

He didn’t notice.

“That’s kid stuff,” he said, “just kid stuff, and we’ve moved past it. And I love you, Ame, and I want to keep . . . well, moving on. With you. So, um—” he let go of her hand, which was damp with his sweat, and began fumbling in his pocket.

Oh, no
.

“I wanted to ask you—”

Her head had begun to shake, very slightly, back and forth.

Oh no, no, no.

“—if you would—”

Please, no. No, no, no.

He dropped to his knee. Even in the weak light, she could see the ring clutched in his fingers. There was the thin circle of gleaming gold, there was the square stone mounted high and proud on top. Glinting, glittering, cold and hard and embarrassingly big.

“—marry me,” he finished.

“I want you to be my wife.”