Promise Not to Tell: A Novel (6 page)

It was a small building, about twelve by fifteen feet, more like a toy house than an actual place where men once slept. The cabin was leaning precariously to the left, looking like it might come crashing down at any minute. It was sided with rough slabs of wood, bits of bark still clinging to them. The wood-shingled roof looked spongy and was green and black with moss.

“Want to see inside?” Nicky asked, looking at me.

“Is it safe?” I asked.

Del snorted and ran inside.

“Sure it is,” Nicky answered. He picked up his gun and strode through the doorway, which lacked a door. I followed him in.

The cabin smelled like rotten wood, mildew, and mice—the scent of all things forgotten. There was a cast iron pot-bellied stove, a torn blue couch, a coffee table, and four cots, one pushed against each wall of the room. A ladder at the far end, near the stove, led to a loft. Nicky tucked his gun under his arm and climbed the ladder. Once up, he leaned over the rail and grinned down.

“Coming?” he asked.

I started up the ladder while Del banged around with the cast iron stove.

A mattress took up most of the loft’s planked floor. There were candle stubs, a smudgy oil lamp, a book of matches, cigarettes, and a stack of porn magazines. On top of the magazines was a small knife with a fake bone handle in a leather sheath. Nicky sat down on the ratty mattress and lit a cigarette. He shouted down to Del.

“Quit messing with that damn stove! It’s eighty degrees in here!”

Del clambered up the ladder and made a sour face at Nicky.

“Give me one of them,” she ordered and Nicky handed her a cigarette. He offered one to me, but I shook my head. Del lit the cigarette and smoked it like it was the most natural thing in the world, something she did all the time. She even blew smoke rings, like the invisible ones I’d seen her play at making earlier that day. She blew them right into my face, smiling.

“So you gonna tell me your name yet, or do I have to guess?” Nicky asked me.

“She’s my deputy. She swears allegiance only to me,” Del said.

“Does your deputy have a name?” asked Nicky, taking a drag from his cigarette.

Del’s eyes went from her brother to me, then back again.

“Her name’s Rose. Desert Rose.”

“Like hell it is. That’s the name of the stupid color you wanted Daddy to paint your room.”

Del’s pale face grew red. “IF I SAY IT’S HER NAME, THEN IT IS!”

Nicky’s face crinkled, looked like it might fall in, then cracked into a big smile.

“All right then. Pleased to meet you, Desert Rose.” He extended his hand. His long dark fingers wrapped gently around mine. My own palm was sticky with sweat. His was dry as powder.

When the cigarettes were stubbed out in a tuna can, we went outside and Nicky showed us how to work the BB gun. We shot beer cans off stumps. Nicky stood behind me, his arms around my shoulders as he showed me how to hold the gun and aim. I’d never fired a gun before, but I hit each can dead center. Nicky said I was a natural. He smelled like sawdust, hay, and cigarettes. His body felt warm against mine. Del got impatient for her turn and practiced taking aim at the cans with rocks, knocking them down before we got a chance to shoot.

Afterward, we went back into the cabin and I smoked my first cigarette. I coughed and wheezed, sure I was going to die, while Nicky and Del laughed at me, making fun of me until I learned not to draw the smoke in so deep, to just hold it in my mouth awhile, then let it seep out. Del tried to teach me to blow rings—I imitated her as she worked her mouth in perfect circles like a gasping fish, but my rings were sad blobs, amorphous shapes. Nicky practiced throwing the little plastic-handled knife into a dart board nailed to the wall. He never got near the center.

A
FTER A WHILE
, Nicky said he had chores to finish and left us alone.

“What happened to your arm?” I asked Del, eyeing the ring of purple bruises.

“Nothing,” she said, pulling the sleeve of her yellow shirt back down and picking up the knife.

“I got an idea,” Del said as she threw the knife into the dart-board, hitting it dead center, right in the bull’s-eye.

I felt a little thrill of peril. It was being in the leaning cabin that did it. It was in the way the springs popped dangerously out of that mattress, the
thunk
of the knife’s blade each time it entered the wall, the way the rings of smoke from Del’s mouth drifted up, then disappeared, leaving behind only the stale ghost of a smell.

“Gimme your hand,” Del instructed.

I did. She held my hand, studied it like it was some strange wounded animal. In her other hand, she gripped the knife.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

“Are you going to cut me?”

“Trust me,” she said. “C’mon, close your eyes,” she dared, and I did, not wanting to seem afraid.

She cut quickly, without hesitation. My eyes flew open and I tried to jerk my hand away, but she held tight.

“Ow! What the hell?”

She let go of my hand. The cut on my pointer finger was short, but deep. Blood dripped onto the mattress.

I watched as Del used the knife to cut her own finger with the same swiftness and confidence. Then she took my hand and pressed our two fingers together.

“We’re blood sisters now,” she explained. “You got my blood. I got yours. Forever.”

My finger burned against hers. Del was a part of me then, and I knew that whatever path our friendship might take, there would be no going back. Not ever. Try as I might later to separate myself, Del and I were bound.

K
ATYDID
!”

My mother’s voice brought me struggling out of a deep, unsettled, drug-induced sleep. My mouth tasted metallic. I fumbled for my watch on the milk crate next to my bed—it was seven in the morning, but it felt like the middle of the night. I had been dreaming that Del and I were in her root cellar and she was giving me a tattoo, using the rusty point of her sheriff ’s star to write
Desert Rose
across my chest. There was someone else down there with us, too—a man—watching. He stood in the corner and I couldn’t see his face. Suddenly, as I lay there on the cot, I had this absurd feeling that if I turned around fast enough, I’d see him. That he’d been there, in the room with me, all night. But that was only a dream, right? So why was I so scared to turn around?

Magpie was curled up on my stomach, nose tucked under her white-tipped tail, and I was reluctant to disturb her soft, warm weight. I counted to three and made myself look at the back corner. Nothing. Just specks of dust dancing in the sunlight.

“No more sleeping pills for you,” I whispered to myself.

My mother called me again, using the nickname I hadn’t heard from her since I’d moved away. I rolled out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen barefoot, Magpie right behind me.

Every cabinet door and drawer in my mother’s kitchen hung open. The fridge door was ajar. The counter was cluttered with mixing bowls, bags of flour and sugar, jars of honey and molasses.

Hurricane Jean had made landfall.

A bottle of olive oil lay open and draining onto the floor. Magpie dashed over to it and began to daintily lap it up, walking in circles, leaving a ring of oily paw prints on the burnished wood floor.

I remembered how impressed I had been with the neat efficiency of my mother’s compact kitchen when I’d first seen it two years ago. If the woman who had painstakingly designed that space could see this mess now, she would weep.

“What are you doing, Ma?” I was stunned, both by the mess and by the fact that she’d remembered my old nickname.

“Making pancakes! Strawberry pancakes!”

They had once been my favorite—she had made them for me Saturday mornings in the tepee, cooking over an old Coleman camp stove. My mother’s memory, it seemed, had not been completely erased.

I peered down into the bowl of batter she was about to attack with the wooden spoon held clumsily in her bandaged hands—the gauze filthy and beginning to unravel. In the bowl were about half a dozen eggs (complete with crushed shells), a pile of flour, a square of strawberries still frozen solid, all topped with what appeared to be maple syrup. Julia Child, move over.

“Ran out of eggs,” she said as she began flailing at her mixture. “We’ll have to run down the street to the Griswolds’.”

“Ma, the Griswolds don’t live there anymore.”

“They don’t?”

“No Ma, they haven’t for a long time.”

Mr. Griswold died of heart failure twelve or thirteen years ago. The boys had all scattered to the wind.

“We’re out of eggs,” my mother said.

“I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we get cleaned up and I’ll drive us to town for eggs? Then we’ll come back and cook pancakes.”

“Have to go down to the Griswolds’,” she said again, reluctant to leave her bowl of batter.

I looked down at the mess on the table and, to my horror, saw that among the spilled flour and strawberries lay a small, black-handled paring knife.

“Where did this come from, Ma?”

My mother smiled as I held up the sticky knife, dripping red juice down my wrist.

“Needed to slice the berries,” she said.

I rinsed the knife in the sink, then found my key and locked it in the sharps drawer, all the while wondering what other surprises my mother had stashed around the house—more knives, matches even?

I helped my mother change out of her oil-and-flour-covered nightgown and into slacks and a sweater, then I set things up to change her bandages at the kitchen table. I soon discovered that it wasn’t only the mess from the kitchen that had dirtied my mother: her nightgown and socks were smeared with what looked like mud. And the gauze that was left on her hands was covered in dirt and bits of leaf debris. And was that dried blood under the fresh strawberry juice stains?

I gave her a cursory exam, and began unwrapping the dirty bandages.

“Ma? Did you go out last night? Did you hurt yourself somehow?”

“We need eggs, Katydid.”

I resolved that I would begin locking her door at night, as Raven had instructed me to. I counted myself lucky that my mother had found her way home and appeared, from my quick exam, to be unharmed. What a sight she must have been, wandering through the woods, white nightgown trailing, like the Ghost of New Hope Past, while I lay snoring in some drug-induced, nightmare-infested coma. I prayed Raven, Opal, and Gabriel hadn’t seen her. I wasn’t off to the best start as my mother’s keeper.

I studied her unwrapped hands, gently turning them in my own. Her palms were bright red and badly blistered. Some of the pustules were open and weeping clear liquid. I cleaned them, applied fresh ointment, and began to rewrap her hands.

“You’re a good doctor,” she said.

“I’m not a doctor,” I told her. “Just a nurse. A school nurse. About the only doctoring I do is passing out Ritalin.”

“You went to medical school.”

“I dropped out.”

“Why would you do that?”

“To marry Jamie.”

“Oh…Jamie. Such a nice boy. Where is Jamie?”

“Back in Seattle.”

“Why didn’t he come?”

“We’re divorced, Ma. Remember? We’ve been divorced for years.”

I suddenly wished I were the one with the Swiss cheese memory. It would be nice if you could have some control over it, deciding which memories would stay, which would be banished to the netherworld.
Poof
. Just like that.

My mother stared at me, smiled.

“I know you,” she said. I began taping the gauze in place.

“Tell me, Ma, how did you burn your hands?”

She thought for a minute. “In a fire?”

“That’s right. Tell me about the fire. The fire in the tepee.”

“It was the fire that gave me the stroke. Now I have a problem with my memory.”

“You didn’t have a stroke, Ma.”
But it’s quite possible that I might have one before all this is over.

“Fire stroke.” She nodded vigorously.

“How did the fire start, Ma?”

“Stroke took away my memory.”

“Ma, you didn’t have a stroke in the fire. You burned your hands.” I got up and began putting away the gauze and tape, locking the ointment back in the box.

“She was there,” my mother said while my back was to her, the firm tone of her voice startling me.

“Who?” I turned and stared at my mother. She didn’t respond. “There was no one with you, Ma. Raven and Opal weren’t home. Gabriel pulled you out. Remember?”
You bit him. Broke the skin with your teeth.

My mother looked at me, then back down to her freshly bandaged hands. She smiled.

“She was there. She knows who you are.”

W
HERE ARE WE GOING
?” my mother asked as we walked out to the car.

“To town to get eggs.”

She seemed satisfied enough by this answer and got into the passenger side of my little blue rental.

“Seatbelt, Ma,” I said. She made no move to fasten it. I leaned across her, reached for the strap, and buckled her in.

“Where are we going?” she asked again. I repeated my answer.

“The Griswolds have eggs,” she said. “Lazy Elk says they’re no good because sometimes they’ve got a speck of blood in them, but that just means they’re fertile.”

On the way to town, we passed the Griswolds’ old place. I slowed when I saw two green state police cars in the driveway along with a Channel 3 news van. Behind the house, way back in the field, near the edge of the woods, I could see more cars and a white van. It was all eerily reminiscent of how things looked the day Del was killed. My mother stared straight ahead, a contented smile on her face, apparently oblivious to all the commotion.

I stopped at the corner where Bullrush Hill Road met Railroad Street. They’d put up a stop sign just before I went away to school.

I studied the front of the Griswolds’ house, long abandoned, reminding myself that it was thirty-one years ago that Del was killed, not just yesterday.

So what the hell was going on?

I’ve never been a believer in the afterlife, but if I had to invent a hell for myself, it would look something like this: I’d be forced to relive my worst moments again and again, powerless to change their outcome.

“The Griswolds have eggs,” my mother reminded me eagerly.

The house itself was listing to one side, and the last of the chipped white paint had finally peeled away. A piece of plywood with a
NO TRESPASSING
sign had replaced the front door.

The three-sided stand in the front yard had collapsed, matching the barn behind it. The mailbox had been knocked over, by a snowplow maybe, or some kids out playing mailbox baseball with a Louisville Slugger. Beside the ruined mailbox, the old sign still swayed from its post on a rusted chain, the red letters faded:
EGGS HAY PIGS POTATOS
.

A state trooper came around the side of the house and looked over at our car, idling at the stop sign. I turned away, focusing my eyes on the road ahead, signaled left, and stepped on the gas a little too hard and fast. The tires gave a slight squeal as we drove off, down Railroad Street toward the center of town. An homage to Stevie, Joe, and their GTO.

I found a parking place right in front of Haskie’s General Store. Next to the store was the old brick New Canaan depot from the days when the L&S Railroad carted timber and passengers between Wells River and Barre. The old station was now an antique shop that had a neatly hand-lettered sign on the door that said
CLOSED FOR THE SEASON
—
SEE YOU IN THE SPRING
! It had been owned, since I was a little girl, by the Miller family. They made their money on the summer people and the leaf peepers who came up each fall.

I undid my mother’s seatbelt and walked with her into the store, which also served as the New Canaan post office. Jim Haskaway, the bearish man who owned the store, was town postmaster and chief of the volunteer fire department. It was an old-time general store with a few aisles of groceries, a case of guns and ammo, a good selection of hardware and camping supplies, and, of course, the obligatory displays of maple syrup and
I LOVERMONT
keychains. The wide-planked pine floor creaked, a coal stove burned in the corner, and Jim’s fire and police scanner sounded out chimes, with staticky voices reporting the latest disasters.

“Why are we here?” my mother asked. She looked around suspiciously.

“To get eggs, Ma, remember?”

“The Griswolds have eggs. Lazy Elk says they’re no good because they’ve got a speck of blood in them—oh, look! It’s Jim Haskaway!” She said this in the tone of delight and surprise she’d use if we’d run into him by chance at the San Diego Zoo, not in the store down the road from her home, the store he’d owned and operated for a good thirty years.

“Morning, Jean! How are we doing today? And Miss Kate, back in town, huh? Grown up to be just as pretty as her mom.” Jim gave us a wink. He stood resting his elbows on the counter. There were two other men talking with him in low voices. All of them wore plaid. They continued their conversation as I guided my mother to the cooler.

“Said the body was the same as that other girl. Same cuts. Naked,” one of the men reported.

“They’ve had dogs in those woods all morning,” another said. “Brought in the forensics van. I heard the F.B.I. is up there now.”

“The troopers picked up Nicky first thing this morning,” Jim said.

“Won’t keep him long,” replied the shorter, fat man. “He was drinking at Flo’s ’til closing. Made some trouble with a guy from outta state who come up to huntin’ camp. Yeah, you bet everyone at Flo’s will remember Nicky being there. It wasn’t him who hurt that girl.”

I grabbed a dozen eggs from the cooler, then fixed myself a large coffee, trying not to be too obvious about eavesdropping. So Nicky was still in town, picking fights at Flo’s. Old outlaw Billy the Kid. I had to smile.

My mother followed me around docilely, humming quietly. At the counter, I picked up the morning paper and saw the headline: “Murder in New Canaan.” There was a school photo of a pretty girl with shoulder-length blond hair, a smattering of freckles, and a slight gap between her two front teeth. Jim nodded at the front page as he rang me up.

“Happened right in those same woods. Right behind your mother’s little shack. Kids say it’s a haunted place up there. I say it’s a hell of a place to go fooling around in. Now this. Poor kid. Just thirteen. She wasn’t gone from the others fifteen minutes. They didn’t hear a peep. You all didn’t hear anything strange last night, did you?” The other two men studied me, waiting to gauge my response. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in plaid.

I shook my head, feeling inexplicably like I was about to lie. I thought of my mother’s dirty nightgown and socks, wondering when she’d gone out, where she might have wandered to, what she might have seen. Surely nothing. She’d probably just strolled around in the yard. Ghost of New Hope Past.

“Not a thing. We didn’t hear a thing. We just noticed the police cars on our way here. There’s a news truck there now, too. Channel Three.”

“Opal must be a mess,” Jim went on.

“Opal? Raven’s daughter?” I said.

Jim gave me a look of pity—which Opal did I
think
he was referring to?

“Lord, Kate, she was there in the woods. It was her best friend who got killed.”

“Jesus,” I said, shivering.

“Damn terrible thing,” said Jim. “They’re saying she was killed the same way as that Griswold girl all those years ago. You remember that whole mess, I’m sure. You went to school with her, didn’t you?”