Fragile (37 page)

“Charlene,” he said. “Call 911. I’m hurt bad.”

But her mother started shrieking to bring the fucking phone. And the sound of it, like an alarm, and the sight of all the blood shook Charlene to her core. She ran upstairs and fished it out of her purse. Why didn’t she dial 911 right then? She should have. She’d had a lot of time to think about how if she’d done that, nothing that happened later would have happened at all. But she didn’t do that one thing, the right thing. She never could do that.

She brought the phone downstairs. She still didn’t want to walk into that kitchen, so she slid it across the floor to her mother. Her mother stood up, pitching and wobbling like a drunk, though Charlene knew she was sober. Melody lifted the bat high over her head and Charlene started to scream,
No, Mommy, don’t!
Because she thought Melody was going after Graham. But then Melody proceeded to pound the phone to bits, yelling,
You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing to her? You
think I don’t see? It stops here, you stupid shit. How much further did you think I was going to let this go?

Charlene fell silent, drowned out anyway by her mother’s rant, and looked on, fixated, sick to the core with guilt and fear as her mother kept shouting, pounding on that phone, barely hitting it at all because it was so small and in so many pieces, until she seemed to just run out of gas and sank back down, weeping.

“I never touched her,” Graham said. He struggled to push himself up. Half his face was smeared with blood. “Tell her, Charlene.”

She shook her head, opened her mouth to speak, but wound up issuing a sob instead. Finally, “He didn’t. Mom, he didn’t.”

Melody looked up first at Charlene and then back at Graham.

“I know that,” she said. She had pulled her face into a nasty grimace, her voice more like a growl. “If you
had
touched her, you’d be dead.”

“Mel, please, get me to the hospital. I’m hurt.”

He fell back then against the floor, his eyes looking blank and glassy. The moan he was issuing almost didn’t sound human; it was otherworldly.

“Mom,” Charlene said. “We have to help him.”

Still, Charlene couldn’t bring herself to cross the threshold into the kitchen. Melody just looked at her, and Charlene was sure she was going to start raging about what a slut she was, about how she’d ruined all their lives.

But instead, Melody said, “I’m sorry, Char. I’ve failed you in all sorts of ways.” And Charlene didn’t know what to say to that; they both cried.

“I’m going to call 911,” Charlene said.

“No, Charlene.” Melody stood and wiped her eyes. She sounded calmer, stronger. “Just help me. Pull the truck into the garage and help me get him in. I’ll drive him.”

“I think it’s better—”

“Just do it, Charlene!”

And she’d done it, pulled the car into the garage even though her mother hadn’t even let her get her learner’s permit yet, and shut the door. Charlene had helped her heave Graham into the car, both of them
straining under the effort, while he continued to groan. The side of his face looked purple and swollen, but the bleeding from his head and his nose had slowed.

“Charlene,” Melody said from the driver’s side window, “Graham and I will work out what we say about what happened. You weren’t even here.”

“But—,” started Charlene.

Her mother lifted a hand. “Please, Charlene, don’t say a word about this to anyone. You
can’t
. Do you understand? Just pretend you weren’t here. Things are going to be different for us from now on.”

She didn’t like the frightened, desperate expression on her mother’s face; she looked unhinged. Charlene nodded her agreement.

“Mom,” she said. But then the garage door was opening, and Melody was backing down the driveway. And then they were gone down the street.

Charlene went inside. Looking back, she didn’t remember feeling anything then. She was just hyperfocused on the task of cleaning all that blood. She went to the computer and looked up how to do it. Then she got some of the cleaning supplies from the laundry room and managed to do a fairly decent job of it, though she thought she could still see the shadow of the stain in the linoleum. After a certain amount of scrubbing with bleach, she felt light-headed and sick. She threw everything—gloves, rags, and scrub brush—in the trash outside.

When she was done, she looked at the clock. It was after seven; she knew Rick was waiting for her at Pop’s. She could call him there, have him come get her right then. But no. She wouldn’t do that. Charlene knew somehow that she’d passed through a doorway with her mother. Rick couldn’t follow her through, and Charlene could never go back with him. Thinking about that, about Rick waiting for her, about how she couldn’t just go and have pizza with him, fool around in the back of his car, laugh and complain about The Hollows and their stupid parents—fear and sadness left her. Anger filled her back up.

She went to her room and threw some things into a backpack. She had almost a thousand dollars in her drawer, rolled up in a plastic Hello
Kitty bank saved over years from allowance, birthday, and Christmas money. She stuffed that deep in the bottom of her bag. This was it, the end of her life in The Hollows.

She wrote Rick a note and posted an update on Facebook. She tried to call Steve, the guy she was crushing on in the city, but he didn’t answer. It seemed like a bad omen. But she left a message, convinced herself he’d be waiting when she got there.

She remembered Marshall Crosby had promised her a ride anytime she needed it. She saw the way he looked at her, with a kind of desperate hunger. She knew he’d come and drive her where she needed to go. So she wrote him a message and didn’t wait for a reply. She didn’t want him to come to her house—she needed to be gone before her mother got back. And she needed to walk, to think. So she picked a random point between their houses and figured it would take her a while to walk there.

Then she left her room without a second glance. She remembered thinking that she had to get away from these people, this ugly life, before it killed her. And then she’d walked out into the cold night, alone.

“I did an awful thing, Charlene.”

They hadn’t really talked about that night. When Charlene had asked about Graham, Melody told her that they’d fought again in the car. He’d kicked her out and she’d walked home. He’d said he was going to go hunting and to think about the future of their relationship. He’d gone off and not yet come back, couldn’t be reached on his phone—and good riddance.

But Charlene knew, as daughters do, that this was a lie. Graham was in no condition to get up and fight again after they got him into the cab of his truck. And he was certainly in no shape to kick Melody out and start to drive. But Charlene didn’t call her on it. Besides, she wanted it to be true. She really did.

“What happened to him, Mom?”

Melody blinked at Charlene, as though she wasn’t quite sure what her daughter meant.

Then, “I’m not talking about Graham.”

Charlene felt confused. “Then what? What did you do?”

Melody put the car in reverse and backed out of the Coopers’ drive. Charlene looked up at Rick’s window and saw that it was dark. She wasn’t ready to see him yet, but she found she missed him more than she would have imagined. Maybe love, real love, wasn’t what she thought it was at all. Maybe it wasn’t a brushfire, a shift of tectonic plates. Maybe it was a held hand, a strong shoulder, a soft voice in your ear. Maybe it didn’t change the world; maybe it just made two lives a little better, a little softer, not so horribly lonely.

“I don’t want there to be any more secrets, Charlene. Can I tell you something that I’ve never told anyone?” Her mother wasn’t looking at her but at the road ahead of them.

Charlene was tired, feeling like the load she was carrying was too heavy already. But her mother looked so sad, so alone.

“Of course you can, Mom.”

She reached out for her mother’s hand. And, as she drove them home, Melody told Charlene all about another girl she’d failed, a lifetime ago.

Years earlier, Maggie had watched a documentary about psychics who solved crimes. It was a cable show, low-budget, lots of melodramatic music and bad camera angles. But Maggie watched it because it featured the solving of the Sarah Meyer case, with shots of The Hollows and interviews with people she knew.

It was the psychic, a woman named Eloise Montgomery, who’d led the police to Tommy Delano, who’d claimed to have a vision of Sarah’s murder. She had a connection to Sarah’s family, occasionally cleaned for them and other families in town.

His name begins with
T, she told them. A crackling recording of her statement made her voice sound otherworldly and strange.
He knows her well. He’s been watching her, wanting her. I see woods, a flight of terror. Oh, God. He’s so angry. She’s so terribly afraid. He’s sick. He wants to be close to women, to girls. But he hates them, too. He hates himself for wanting them
.

Eloise claimed to have had visions on the night Sarah disappeared, only to learn the next morning that Sarah was missing. It took a few days for her to convince the police to listen to her, and it was only desperation that caused them to do so.

But there’s more to the story. It’s unclear. It may always be unclear. But I’m sorry. She’s gone. She’s not with us anymore. She’s at peace. The dead see us with loving detachment. There’s no pain for her now. Just music
.

Once she said that the killer’s name began with the letter
T
, suspicion turned immediately to Tommy Delano. He’d been spotted on a road near where the body was found. When they went to question him, he’d already fled.

No one was sure why or how he knew suspicion had turned to him. They found his room full of clippings about Sarah, photographs of her and other girls at the school, her underpants in the trunk of his car. He’d disappeared on foot into the hills behind his house. It was a strange thing to do, when he had a car at his disposal.

He’s scared and tired. He wants to go home. He knows you’re looking for him. He just wants it all to be over. You’re going to find him. Very soon
.

And they did. His confession came some hours later.

Eloise Montgomery still made her living as a psychic detective, traveling the world to help police with cold cases and cases that couldn’t be solved. For some reason, her gift was limited to women and young girls—the missing, the murdered, the abducted. Her website made this clear: Please don’t contact me about any other type of case. My talents are very specific. A few years later, after another high-profile case, Eloise had teamed with the retired detective who’d worked Sarah Meyer’s case at the Hollow’s PD, Ray Muldune. Maggie recognized him vaguely from his photograph.

But there’s more to the story. It’s unclear. It may always be unclear
. Those were the words Maggie had in her mind as she drove in the twilight out of town. And then there was the odd feeling that lingered from the call she’d made. She’d found Eloise Montgomery’s number on her website and dialed on a whim, expecting to get voice mail. But instead, an older woman answered. Maggie could hear a television in the background, a dog barking somewhere distantly.

“Is this Eloise Montgomery?” Maggie asked.

“It is.” She had the tone of someone who was used to waiting patiently while people figured out what they wanted to say.

“This may sound strange,” she said. “But I have some questions about an old case.”

“What can I do for you?” Maybe that was her shtick, to sound as though she’d been waiting for your call, to sound as though she already knew what you wanted.

“It’s about Sarah Meyer. About her murder.”

“Ah,” Eloise said. “Yes.”

Eloise sounded as though she could go on. But she didn’t, and Maggie felt tongue-tied all of a sudden, didn’t know how to continue the conversation. She wasn’t going to tell this stranger what she’d found in her mother’s attic. Why had she done this? Why had she made this ridiculous call?

“You have new information about the case,” the other woman said. “You’re concerned about people close to you.”

Her voice was soft, almost coaxing. But Maggie still couldn’t get any words out. Her heart was a bird in a cage, flapping, panicked. She had the irrational urge to slam the phone down.

“I’m free now,” Eloise said into the silence. “Do you know where I live?”

Maggie was staring at Eloise Montgomery’s address on the website.

“I do.”

“Can you come?”

“I can be there in an hour.”

“Okay,” she said. “See you then.”

And Eloise ended the call. Maggie stood, gathered her things, and left her office before she could change her mind. The urge to go to this woman, to hear what she had to say about the case, was magnetic, a draw powerful enough to lead Maggie away from her family in an acute crisis. The part of her that was always tending, managing, fixing, controlling was quiet for once.

•    •    •

On the drive, she had time to rationalize the things Eloise had said. Probably most of the people who called out of the blue about old cases thought they had new information. A large majority of those people were likely motivated by concern for someone they loved. Maggie had heard that this was the technique of many so-called psychics, to play the odds, to use verbal and visual clues to make educated guesses about people. It wasn’t so different from being a psychologist. People were unique, each with an impossibly complicated inner life, a mosaic of personality, history, and perceptions. Their inner lives were vast, nebulous symbioses of memory and the present moment, no incident or experience standing alone from the incidents or experiences that formed them. But the problems people faced were often the same. And things like appearance, tone, body language, facial expression spoke volumes to the trained observer, to someone with empathy. Maggie’s fear and hesitance to speak must have told Eloise Montgomery everything she needed to know about why Maggie was making that call.

By the time she pulled into the short drive in front of a small white house, Maggie felt more solid, more in control of herself and her intentions. The house was off a narrow rural road about twenty miles from The Hollows. It sat prim and proper on a small rise; everything—white clapboards, black shutters, a red door—looked freshly painted. A few piles of raked leaves lay beneath the towering oaks on the property.