B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (10 page)

“Were you born with that?” I asked, pointing to it.

“What?” She looked at me, then touched the mark, ran her finger along it. “This?”

“Yes.”

I was surprised that she suddenly looked uncertain of herself, even shy. “Does it show really bad?” she asked me.

“No,” I said, honestly. “It’s not bad at all.”

“’Cuz sometimes I think I should try to cover it up with makeup. My mom and I talked about it. We even tried it a couple of times. But…I dunno. I’m not the makeup-wearing type.” She looked at me again. “It doesn’t look too bad, does it?”

“No, Lucy, it doesn’t look bad at all. Really. But what is it? It’s a birthmark, right?”

“Nah,” she said. After a moment she added, “I got cut.”

I studied her, looked closely at the brown line, realized she had to be telling the truth. It couldn’t be a birthmark; no birthmark was shaped like that.

“It must have been…pretty bad,” I said.

She shrugged. In the stillness I reached out to her neck, touched the scar gently with two fingers. I could feel her pulse.

“Does it hurt?”

“Nah. Not at all. I don’t even feel it.”

I ran my fingers slowly down the brown line, suddenly heartsick that anything like this could have happened to her, to
Lucy.

“How…?” I didn’t finish the question.

“Nothing,” she said, abruptly sitting up. “It was just a stupid accident. Hey, I got an idea.”

“What?”

“Do you want to be blood sisters?”

I thought about it. “Is that like blood brothers?”

“Yeah. Same thing.”

“I don’t know,” I said, a bit uneasy. “It seems kind of gross. I mean, you really swap blood?”

“Sure. Have you ever done it with anybody?”

“No.”

“Neither have I. I always wanted to, though.”

“Really?” I brightened suddenly as I always did whenever Lucy expressed affection toward me, even indirectly. She wanted to do something she’d never done. With me!

“How do we do it?” I asked.

“With this.” She brought her little billfold out of her pocket. It contained a couple of dollars and, to my amazement, a razor blade.

“Lucy, where did you get that?”

“My mom shaves her legs with ’em. I just took one.”

“You have to be careful,” I said. “You might cut yourself.”

She looked at me, shaking her head again and chuckling. “That’s the
idea,
Franny-Fran.”

“Oh. Right.” I was embarrassed, but only for a moment.

The blade glinted in the Saturday sunlight. “So,” she said, her voice low and excited, “are you sure you want to do this?”

“Well—can’t we just use a pin or a needle?”

“I’m fresh out. You got one?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

I studied her for a moment, then nodded. My breath came short.

“This is serious, you know,” she said. “Being blood sisters is serious.”

“I know.”

“I mean, it makes us sisters. Real sisters. We share the same blood. We’re bonded forever.”

“I know, Lucy.”

She looked closely at me. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “We need some paper. Like toilet paper or something. For the blood.”

“I have a paper napkin.” I brought it out of my pocket.

“Great. Should I go first?”

I nodded.

She looked at me and nodded back, raising her left hand, palm up. She pushed the edge of the razor into the tip of her index finger, causing a tiny droplet of blood to bead onto her skin.

“Now you,” she said, trying to hand me the blade. But instead I held out my hand to her.

“No, Lucy,” I said. “You do it.”

She nodded, smiling. I clenched my eyes shut as she took my hand and I felt a small sting, like a needle piercing my skin. When I opened my eyes I had a similar blood-bead on my finger.

“Now,” she said, “we press them together.”

We moved close to each other, pushed our fingers together so that the blood commingled. We stayed motionless for what seemed a long time, then slowly parted, little blood smears like Magic Marker streaks on our fingers. Lucy tore the napkin in two and we each dabbed at our wounds. Neither of us said anything; words might have broken the spell of the moment, the feeling of solemn sacrament.

After a while Lucy wiped the razor blade and put it back in the wallet. We sat there together for a long time, close enough that our arms touched, watching the tourists’ cars come and go in the parking lot. The light paled and then darkened across the grass. Finally we stood and brushed ourselves off, preparing to hop onto Lucy’s bike for the ride back to town.

I knew—I believe that we both did—that words like
love
and
sister
and
forever
were inadequate to the occasion, so we said nothing, then or on the ride back. At the end, when we’d reached our houses and were about to part, we didn’t kiss or hug or say friendship words. We just looked at each other, astonished at what we’d done, the importance of it, the permanence.

“Well—’bye,” she said finally.

“’Bye, Lucy.”

—Seven—

THE GRAVEYARD WAS less than two miles from Ms. Sparrow’s house, on a gentle grassy hill overlooking the town. There were few trees, making the place look—at least to my eye—a bit like a golf course. I disliked it immediately. (But who could ever really like any graveyard?) I could see the road that had brought me here far below, the traffic moving slowly by, much of it heading south, back toward where I’d come from, in a line I would soon be joining when I left here. I knew I would never return.

Ms. Sparrow had no hesitation in moving through the main gate and then following the various paths. She knew exactly where she was going.

“I come here every few weeks,” she said. “Always on her birthday. And on Christmas. The kids come sometimes too. I love them so much for that.”

“Why here, Ms. Sparrow? Why Mumford?”

“There’s no cemetery in Quiet, you know,” she said. “Or there wasn’t then. Just an old church graveyard that was already full. There’s one about twenty miles north of Quiet, off 101, but I didn’t like it. This was the nearest decent one in the county.”

I considered.

“And after that,” she said, “well, I met my husband. He’s lived here all his life. So I just never left…And that’s okay. I needed to be near my baby.”

We passed by various old monuments—angels and cherubs, very nineteenth century, though nothing was dated before 1920—and came to an area where there were several nondescript rows of ground-level plaques. Again she turned unhesitatingly, hardly looking.

“What about her father?” I asked as we walked.

“I heard he went to Alaska,” she said, “twenty years ago. To make his fortune—doing what, God only knows. He always had stupid ideas like that. I have no idea where he is now. He may be dead too, for all I know. I can’t say that I care.”

“And…” I didn’t want to say it, but I had to. “And McCoy?”

“Oh, they let him out, you know.”

That stopped me, literally, in my tracks. We stood in the late-afternoon sunshine. It was a beautiful day, clear, cloudless. The shadows were slowly lengthening, darkness sliding imperceptibly across the graves.

“They let him
out
?”
I said, aghast.

“Oh yes,” she said, bitterness creeping into her voice. “Didn’t you know?”

“Ms. Sparrow, I—I didn’t know anything, until I came here today. Nothing at all.”

“Well, they let him out,” she said. “He spent twenty-four years in that place. That mental hospital. Atascadero. And then they just…let him out.”

“But he—he
murdered
three girls!”

“Yes.” She nodded, looking at the ground. “We had a lawyer, of course, for the hearings. She represented all the families. She tried hard. But they let him out anyway.”

“Oh my God.” I shook my head, feeling sick. “Where—where is he now?”

“I don’t know. We can’t get any information. Privacy rights, they say.”

I looked across the grave markers. “You could probably find out,” I said, silently recalling what I’d begun to understand about why I’d come to Quiet, to this area. “I mean, if you wanted to hire someone—”

“We considered that.” She was silent for a moment. “But we finally decided it wouldn’t serve any purpose. You have to move on, you know. Never forget, but—but move on.”

She turned and started to walk again. At last we came to a simple black plaque in the middle of a row of plaques indistinguishable from it.
Lucille Catherine Sparrow,
it read, in engraved letters.

Ms. Sparrow knelt down, ran her fingers slowly across the name and dates. I stayed silent, waited for her to stand, then knelt and did the same.

“Hi, Lucy,” I whispered, but it felt wrong, knowing that I was talking to nothingness. Everything seemed wrong, suddenly. The flat, undistinguished plaque. The golf-course graveyard. McCoy walking under blue skies while Lucy had to stay locked in the dark forever, rotting, disintegrating to dust. It wasn’t right, I knew. It wasn’t
right.

Morbid thoughts raced through my mind. How many bits had he left her in? I wondered. And putting her in the coffin all those years ago—did they try to put her together again, in as close an approximation to a human form as they could? (A Frankenstein’s monster!) Or did they simply bag her remains, toss whatever was left of her into the box in a jumble, like so much trash to be dumped and forgotten? What would she look like now, after three decades? Would her flesh still cling to any part of her? Would it have dried and mummified, stretching tight across her bones? Or would bones be all that was left, the sole remaining evidence of Lucy Sparrow’s passage across this dark and merciless earth?

I stood finally. I couldn’t cry. What I felt was too deep, too bruising for tears. We stood there, the two of us, gazing down at the plaque.

“I don’t think I ever knew her middle name,” I said quietly.

Ms. Sparrow smiled slightly, not looking away from the plaque.

“It’s nice,” she said finally, “when the family comes. When Jack’s here, and the kids. Those are nice times. They—her brothers and sister—they bring flowers. Sometimes we sit around on the lawn here. We make her part of things.” She smiled again. “And then we say goodbye…and go have lunch at McDonald’s.”

I laughed, a little. “Really?”

She nodded. “It’s a ritual we got into when the kids were still small. It wouldn’t be a proper visit if it didn’t end at McDonald’s.”

The sun dropped lower in the sky. The plaques were enveloped in darkness now. I found myself wanting to talk, to say to her:
You never knew this, Ms. Sparrow, but I saw Lucy after you did. I saw her just before she left that night and never returned. She came to my window, Ms. Sparrow. She asked me to go with her.

But I couldn’t say it. Her daughter was at rest in her mind. It would have been the height of cruelty to open the door to that final night again, to reveal that other things had happened of which, for thirty years, she’d known nothing. No.

“Well…I’d better be getting back,” I said finally.

“Won’t you stay?” she asked. “I have plenty of room. You’re most welcome. I mean it, Frances.”

“No, I…I’d better not. I’d better go.”

She nodded. “I understand.” And I knew that she did.

I wanted to kneel down to the plaque again, say goodbye, but it was no good; no one was there. Instead I just stared at it for a long moment, then turned. We made our way across the paths again and toward the parking lot, where our cars were waiting. She walked with me to mine and when I opened the door she put her arms around me.

“Take care of yourself, Frances,” she said. “Thank you for coming to see us. Stay in touch.”

“I will,” I told her, knowing I wouldn’t. “Thank you so much for everything.”

I got in, started the engine, and pulled slowly out of the lot, looking into the rear view mirror where Ms. Sparrow stood waving to me, growing smaller and smaller until she finally disappeared.

Michael McCoy killed young girls by drilling holes in their heads. He used the power tools he kept in his basement to do this. Sears Craftsman.

He kept other things there, too; things that were only learned of later. The basement was completely outfitted as a torture chamber. There were chains mounted in the walls. There was a bed of sorts, with leather restraining straps such as one finds in the violent ward of a mental hospital, but this one had no mattress and was outfitted with a hole in the middle connecting to a pipe which led into the floor drain. There was an Inquisition-style “rack,” homemade with plywood, pulleys and rope which he bought at the hardware store in Quiet. There was a band saw. An acetylene torch. Hammers, nail guns, sharpened screwdrivers. And, for cleanup afterwards, a sink, garden hose, bleach, brushes.