The Damned (18 page)

She was bluffing. I'm no expert at these things, but even I could see how her eyes looked around me instead of at me.

“What if it's not just some stranger who got away with it?” I said. “What if it was somebody from here, from Royal Oak? Somebody who knew them?”

She released her lips from where they'd been clenched and they came out with a pop.

“You know what I think?” she said, reddening. “I think you should leave this shit alone. It's
done
.”

“Can't do that.”

“Because you've got people thinking you're a medium or something? You're Mr. Heaven, that it?”

“I'm not a medium. And heaven's not where Ash went.”

She seemed to listen to the ongoing noise from inside the house as though trying to discern a particular voice amid the advertising and cartoon sound effects and studio audience laughter.

“I can't talk to you,” she said finally. “I'm sorry about whatever is going on with you, but what happened back then—not that I
saw
anything—I'm not talking about it.”

She looked pissed off. But this was only where all her feelings ended up, worry and sorrow and love and everything else congealed into confused outrage.

“Maybe my life isn't exactly as I was hoping it would go,” she went
on. “But here's the thing—I'm still alive. I need to stay that way. For my boys. And bringing your sister up again—”

She didn't finish the thought.

“What about Michelle or Lisa?” I said. “You know where they live now?”

“Michelle's dead. Don't know about Lisa.”

“What happened to Michelle?”

“She tried to talk about your sister,
that's
what happened to her. Called me a few times,
remembering
her, wanting to
figure her out
, just like you. Then it's her mother calling to tell me she killed herself. You know what? I wasn't surprised.”

“And Lisa?”

“Last I heard she moved out west. Seattle or Portland or someplace like that. A photographer.”

Winona did something with her mouth that may have been a smile. Something unpleasant, whatever it was.

“You should look up her work sometime,” she said. “Bet you'd find it interesting.”

She started away. Backed up without turning around as if there were some threat of me taking a run at her.

“Why do you think she wanted to go on that bike ride?” I said. “What did she want you to see?”

“Good-bye, Danny.”

“But you have an idea, don't you? There's something you know that you didn't tell the police.”

“You have to
go
. Just—”

“Please!”

The door banged closed.

I made my way down the driveway to the sidewalk. Across the street, there was a commotion in the backyard of our old house.

The toddlers who were playing out there before were screaming now. Not everyday kid screaming, not the theatrics of a scraped knee or protest at a stolen toy. Screams of terror, wordless and pure.

Their mother rushed out the sliding doors, almost screaming herself.

“What's wrong? My God! What's wrong?”

I couldn't see because of the fence but one or both of the kids must have pointed at the far end of the yard, because that's where their mother's eyes went to. Where she saw the tire swinging as high as it could go, higher than a kid their size could push it, back and forth without lowering or slowing, stirring the smell of too-sweet perfume and spoiled meat around in the still air.

I
hadn't been to Woodlawn Cemetery since my father's funeral. Knowing what I know about where we go once we die, I'd never seen the point in leaving flower bouquets next to tombstones or talking to the ground. This was just where the bodies end up, and soon enough the bodies weren't even that anymore. The soul—or whatever you want to call the part that can't be buried—doesn't stick around these places for long. Why would it? There's nothing here for the dead but the dead.

Yet, even in this relatively neglected parcel, amid the tilting crypts and gravesites calling out for a weed-whacker, there were the flowers and ribbons and teddy bears and flags left behind. The living showing up for their own reasons, their own loves and duties and confessions.

Dad's stone was doing better than the other two. Funny how their monuments stood now as they themselves stood then: Dad firm and tall, Ash a mystery (ASHLEIGH ORCHARD 1973–1989), Mom
chipped away, the epitaph a proverb she'd chosen from a book when they'd reserved the plots.

The acts of this life are the destiny of the next.

When
The After
came out, I was asked to come here by TV producers wanting to film me standing at her stone, providing a thoughtful scowl for the camera as the voice-over explained how it was this grave where Mrs. Orchard was buried wearing her father's watch, the watch that her son was given in the afterlife and still wears today. They would have cut to a close-up of the Omega on my wrist then, Mom's tombstone soft-focused in the background. “Haunting and moving,” the producers promised me, trying to talk me into it. I refused every time. I didn't want to be moved, not as a public performance, anyway. And I was already haunted.

Now, though, alone in the flat field dotted by other stones, I brought the watch to my eyes. What did it say, other than the hour? That there was something that came after our time here.
The acts of this life.
And that my mother loved me. She loved me and wished she could have shielded me but she didn't have the strength.

That's not how I wanted it to end for me. I wasn't interested in sending a message from beyond. I wanted to help my family
here
.

And to do that, I would have to tell Ash who put her in the ground under my feet.

I
HEADED BACK TO THE
hotel and opened my laptop. The first thing I found on Lisa Goodale was her professional website. On the splash page, a self-portrait of Lisa. The kittenish features of her youth had given way to harder lines, a mournful widening of her nose exaggerated by the photo's stark lighting, so that she seemed to be trying to hide from the camera even as she stared into it.

Elsewhere, the rest of the site was a slick showcase for her work arranged in various galleries: Weddings, Portrait, Corporate. It's good.
Tasteful and restrained, with a strong leaning toward black-and-white. But it was the pictures I found when I clicked on Fine Art that took my breath away.

All of the images she'd posted involved a girl as their recurring subject. Always the same model, a blonde in her midteens with blue eyes that appeared to have been enhanced somehow, so that they glowed out from otherwise monochrome exposures, alien and cold. A girl who was illuminated in a kind of aura no matter what setting she was in, though the effect was somehow the opposite of angelic, the light something that would burn if you got too close. Looking directly into the camera from the back of a bus. Sitting on the roof of a car, her legs dangling over the driver side door. Laughing into a set of bathroom mirrors arranged so that a thousand of her faces repeated themselves, bending round into the glass.

She'd titled the series
The After
.

The other results I found were from news sites.

Missing-person bulletins. Stories reporting on how prominent Portland photographer Lisa Goodale, single and with no children, hadn't been seen since August 12, 2013. Two days after my heart attack on Cambridge Common.

They'll never find her.

She won't be taking any pictures that try to bring Ash back to life again, because she
was
alive.

And Lisa, officially missing, was already gone.

W
HEN
I
STOPPED BLINKING AT
the laptop's screen it was night again. I hadn't eaten since breakfast, so I walked out the front doors and found a place along Greektown's single touristy block of restaurants. After I ordered, I pulled out my phone to text Willa and saw there was already one waiting for me.

how's it going, sherlock?

It took the length of a beer to come up with an answer.

Think I'm on to something here.

Not a complete lie. Either way, I hoped she wouldn't ask for more. So I asked what I really wanted to know before she could.

How are you guys?

When the answer came I had to stifle a whimper that worked its way out of me just as the waiter returned to take my order.

Missing you. Both of us.

Once I finished eating I stepped out and felt the night around me, the air hard and cool. It promised to help me think.

I started out for a walk but kept to the perimeter of the reclaimed historical buildings that now housed the casino, assuming there was security to keep it safe, though as soon as I turned the corner away from the tourist strip there was nobody on the sidewalk. Two stories above, the People Mover tracks curved toward the office buildings a few blocks away. The trains still passing every couple minutes—almost empty during the day and totally empty now. With every coming and going I looked up to see if anyone sat in one of the fluorescent cars, playing a game with myself where I could only go back inside the hotel if I spotted a passenger.

In the meantime, I tried to pull something useful out of my conversation with Winona Quinlan.

Whatever secret she was keeping, Winona felt she was protecting herself and her boys by burying it. And maybe she was right. It couldn't be denied that she was still here and Michelle and Lisa weren't.

Who else was there to ask? I could always try to dig up an old Dondero High yearbook and search the names, firing out e-mails and calling whatever numbers I could find. Yet what would I say if anyone answered?
Hi! Danny Orchard here. Ash's twin who brought a watch back from the pearly gates? Just wanted to ask if you knew how my sister might have
been murdered. Oh, and remember . . . GO OAKS!
And how could they possibly reply?
Oh yes, now that you ask, Danny, I have the name of Meg and Ash's killer right here. Must have slipped my mind to share it with the police twenty-four years ago!

Still, I knew something that I didn't know before coming here. Winona told me, however indirectly. Her nervous face-blinks, her bit lip, her fear at the mention of Ash's name.

Even if it wasn't Winona herself, someone knew at least a piece of what went on in the house on Alfred Street.

Someone was there.

Above, like a roll of thunder, the People Mover came again. I looked up to spot a face at the window. A white girl. Alone, lost.

Chipmunk-cheeked and tiny-nosed, her hair parted in the middle, Midwestern-pretty in the era of leg warmers and roller rinks. Lisa Goodale, the way she appeared at sixteen. Except she was unsmiling now. Her eyes darting around in their sockets.

Until they found me.

The train whined into the Greektown platform overhead. It would linger there for a time, doors opened, before carrying on. Enough time to climb the stairs and make it onto Lisa's car.

Taking the steps two at a time seemed doable until the chest pain returned.

Is this where I end up falling? In the empty stairwell of a People Mover station? It was the sort of thing Ash would find funny.
Pathetic
, she'd call it. Pathetic being the way she liked to judge the world, the way all except her tried and failed, tried and failed.

And there I was. Trying.

To follow the bread crumbs left by the dead. To build a wall around Willa and Eddie. It's what started me up the stairs again, telling myself the pain was only indigestion, a souvlaki dinner gone wrong.

I made it onto the platform in time to see the doors close. The empty train moaning into motion, its interior lights casting shadows against the walls of the buildings snugged close to the tracks.

Neither Lisa nor anyone else in the cars, but there was the outline of hundreds drawn dark onto the brick. The heads of men and women and children, bearded, ball-capped, long-haired, earringed. Invisible passengers staring out at the city, stuck in an infinite commute, around and around. The empty train built for the dead alone.

I
n the morning, after a call with Willa in which I learned that Eddie was doing fine and that “there hasn't been any spooky business since you left,” I hung up wondering if it would be best for all concerned if I just stayed in Detroit. And I would do it happily—well, maybe not
happily
—if it meant Ash leaving Willa and Eddie alone forever.

But here's what I didn't mention on the phone but I suspected Willa knew anyway:
she won't
.

Which meant I had to show her I was getting closer to what she was looking for. Or at least looking like I was.

There was nowhere to go but back to Winona's.

I drove into Royal Oak, crossed the Amtrak line with the familiar
a-rum-de-dump
of tires over the rails. Years ago, it was a signal of being home. Safety. That was always the fantasy of this place. Harm was something that happened elsewhere. A protective spell cast by middle-class wealth and policemen whose names you knew and sweatshirts that announced which college people went to.

Perhaps it's why I was so surprised to see the yellow line of police tape tied across Fairgrove Avenue. An ambulance, police cruisers. Real detectives, so much more convincing than me in their leather jackets and unironic moustaches, speaking with neighbors who wore housecoats and track pants. A crime scene where the Quinlan house appeared to be the center of attention.

I parked a block south and walked the rest of the way up. Made it to the small group of onlookers as the paramedics brought the gurney out through the front door.

I was certain it was Winona even though a sheet covered the whole body. It was the look on her son Henry's face. Standing on the patch of lawn, watching his mother lifted into the back of the ambulance, the boy's lips moving in a search for words. There was the beginning of anger, too. The grown-up kind that will find no lasting relief, a vine no pruning will hold back until it's covered everything in its path.