The Damned (19 page)

Once Winona was slid into the back one of the paramedics closed the doors and the other got behind the wheel. All of us, even the detectives who looked, now that I was closer, a little
too
like detectives—too world-weary, too vainly aware of their grim audience—waited for the ambulance to roll away before we'd let ourselves say another word, pull out cell phones, move. Then, with lights still turning and strobing atop its roof, it bumped off the curb and turned left onto Farnum, the driver looking back at us as if he were considering shouting a distasteful, if irresistible, joke.

The mom who lived in the house across from the Quinlans', our house, stood slightly apart from the others. Her toddlers weren't with her, so that she had nothing to do with her hands except rub them under her eyes. When I approached she looked at me without recognition.

“Know what happened?” I asked.

“OD. That's my bet.”

“Oh?”

“A body can only take so much.”

“She had a history, I'm guessing.”

“Everybody's got a history.” She dropped the hands from her eyes. “You a reporter or something?”

“Just a friend. Of Winona's.”

“Friend,” she repeated. “Didn't know she had any of those.”

“Actually, I grew up in the house you live in now. Way back.”

She took two long steps back from me.

“You're the brother.”

“Danny Orchard,” I said, assuming she'd read my book, but it didn't seem to register with her. And then I realized she didn't know me by name, but because of what she'd seen in her house. The girl her children knew.

“You don't look like her,” she said.

“We were twins.”

“Are you . . .
like
her?”

“No. I'm not like her at all.”

She moved her head from side to side the way a pitcher shakes off a catcher's signal.

“She's dead, isn't she?” she said.

“Yes.”

It was clear this gave the opposite of relief. With a swipe of the air that resembled a wave but wasn't, she turned and started back into her haunted house.

I'
VE NEVER BEEN MUCH OF
a midday drinker.

When you grew up with the kind of mother I did, one who started refreshing herself with white wine spritzers to go with ironing my dad's shirts in front of
Good Morning America
, you tend to either grow into an all-day boozer yourself or barely touch the stuff, and never before five. I'm of the latter school.

Though now, returning to Main Street at a quarter to noon, I felt the overwhelming need for a drink.

Tom's Oyster Bar was already busy with the lunchtime rush, but there were still plenty of empty stools and I took one, ordered a large scotch (“You mean a double?”), and let my eyes blur over the
laminated menu the bartender left behind. It took a moment—and a full, burning swallow—before I realized someone was trying to talk to me. Two people, in fact.

“Danny!”

“Danny
Orchard
?”

“That you?”

“Over here!”

I spun around to find two men my age at a round table in the middle of the room, waving my way. They wore identical gray summer suits, the same short-cropped haircuts, both dissecting their way through the same plates of peel-your-own shrimps. The Wigg twins.

The Wiggs were identicals, the only other twins I remembered from growing up. They did the whole mirror-image thing: same sets of clothes worn on the same days, same chess club vice presidencies, same bowl cuts, same beady, superior stares. For class photos, they wore matching sailor suits from kindergarten all the way into their early teens, their faces indifferent to their ridiculousness, year after year. They would often ask to be excused from class at the same time, presumably to sit on side-by-side johns, counting down to launch their identical breakfasts at the same moment. It was said that the only way to tell them apart was by their erections: one with a slight banana hook, the other straight as a ruler. Though how this comparison was ever made—or how one might test its accuracy—I never knew.

“John? Rudy?”

The two of them grinned as though I'd successfully identified them, though I could no more tell them apart now than I could in high school.

“John,” the one on the right confirmed, shaking my hand.

“Let me guess. Rudy?” I said, indicating the one on the left.

“Twins know their twins,” Rudy said.

John pulled out a chair and I dropped into it.

I considered opening the conversation with the news about Winona Quinlan, but there seemed little point in me being the one to share it with them. “You guys work in town?” I asked.

“We went into practice together,” John said.

“Orthodontists,” Rudy said.

“The efficiencies are
phenomenal
,” John said.

Rudy tapped his whitened front teeth. “No business like a family business.”

“You guys stayed,” I said. “You didn't want out?”

“Out of what?” they both asked at the same time.

“I keep forgetting that not everyone had as fucked-up a time growing up as I did.”

“Nobody had the sister you had,” Rudy said, glancing down at my scotch.

I was trying to think of a way to politely leave—being around the Wiggs again, around twins, is pretty close to the last thing I need—when John took a deep breath and, against his better judgment, decided to confess something to me.

“I asked her out once, you know,” he said, waving Rudy off when he made an are-you-sure-you-want-to-go-there? face. “Probably half the guys in our year asked her out. Seriously, how could you
not
ask her out? But I thought, seeing as we were both twins, she and I—maybe I could understand her where other guys didn't.”

“But she was—how can I put this?” Rudy said, thinking hard. “
Mean
. She was
mean
.”

“She
laughed
at me! Right in my face!” John dotted his fingers over his nose and cheeks in a pantomime of spit hitting him. “Then she pretends to change her mind. ‘Maybe a double date! Twins on twins. The four of us! Question is, who gets my brother, and who gets me?' ”

“She was something else, no question. A beauty,” Rudy said, closing the subject. “But Danny? Your sister? Gotta say. She had a way of making you feel like shit like nobody else.”

Rudy sucked a third of his pint glass of cola up his straw, daubed his lips with an index finger, pushed his face across the table at me.

“So what are you doing here, Danny?”

“I'm investigating my sister's death,” I said, like it was the sort of thing anyone might be up to in a bar at noon. “My sister's murder.”

The Wiggs scrunched their noses precisely the same way.

“We've always had a theory about that,” Rudy said.

“The teacher,” John said.

They seemed to think I ought to know what they were talking about.

“What teacher?”

“She didn't tell you?” Rudy said.

“Ash and I didn't exactly share things—” I was about to say
the way you two do,
but stopped myself. “We weren't close that way.”

John nodded in what appeared to be real sympathy, the idea of twins not knowing everything about each other an unthinkable tragedy. “We saw them once,” he said.

“But we didn't tell anybody else,” Rudy said. “Guess we always assumed you knew, too.”

“Which means maybe we're the only ones who had an idea.”

An idea about WHAT, you freaks?
This is what it took everything I had to prevent myself from screaming into the corners of the room.

“I'm still in the dark here, guys,” I said.

“Mr. Malvo,” John said, the two of them starting a back-and-forth between themselves, finishing the other's thoughts.

“The drama teacher?” Rudy said. “The director of the play that year?”

“South Pacific.”

“That's it.
South Pacific
. Ash was, like, the lead or something.”

“She
was
the lead. Have to say, she was actually pretty awesome. Great pipes.”

“Great everything. Nice teeth, too.”

“Malvo and Ash in his car in the parking lot out back of the Caribou Coffee.”

“Kissing.”

“Kissing.”

I remember Mr. Malvo. At Dondero for just a single year, replacing Mrs. Regehr who was away on maternity leave. An actor himself. This is what everyone knew about him, because it was what he constantly reminded everyone of. He'd grown up in Sterling Heights, in
suburban Detroit “just like you,” as he said in his little introductory speech at school assembly, the
like you
dripping with the condescension of the motivational speaker, as if he was addressing a gymful of kids confined to wheelchairs and he alone had learned how to walk. After a move to the coast (never “Hollywood,” never “L.A.”) he'd made it onto a couple TV shows, bit parts on a soap and a cop show, both canceled. This lent him a glamorous authority we'd had no experience of. A guy in his midthirties who didn't wear a wedding ring and looked a little like a young John Malkovich if he had more hair and hit the weight room four times a week.

The next year, he was gone. Mrs. Regehr never returned after having her baby so there was an opening in the drama department he could have filled. But Malvo left Royal Oak sometime during the summer that followed his triumphant staging of
South Pacific
with its “electrifying” (
Detroit News
) sixteen-year-old star—the summer that same star burned to death in an abandoned mansion downtown—and was never heard from again.

“Ash was making out with her drama teacher,” I said. “Creepy. But not exactly evidence of foul play.”

“Meg Clemens was in the play, too,” Rudy said. “Think about that.”

“Four-eyed Meg who ended up in the same place Ash ended up,” John said.

“There were people at the time who said they saw Malvo and Meg together, just like we saw him with Ash,” Rudy said.

“So why wasn't he a suspect at the time?”

“He was on the list, or so I heard,” John said. “But there was no physical evidence, nothing more than circumstantial stuff.”

“And let's face it. It was probably a long list,” Rudy said.

“But I'm telling you, there was something wrong with that guy,” John said.

“Lucky sonofabitch,” Rudy said.

I asked them if they knew where Malvo might be these days, or if anyone might have more information about the director's relationship to his cast, but they admitted to having no way of knowing, not exactly being the coolest kids in school at the time.

“We were nerds,” John said.

“Gifted.”

“Same difference.”

Without noticing, over the course of our conversation, I'd finished my scotch. This middle-of-the-day-drinking thing was easy so long as you were motivated.

I declined the Wiggs' invitation to join them for lunch, thanked them for their help. Rudy wished me luck. John told me to come back anytime I was looking for a good quote on corrective dental work.

On the way out, I picked up their tab. It was the least I could do. Us freaks got to stick together.

H
ow to find Mr. Malvo? I figured my one advantage was that he was an actor. And actors leave credits behind like a mouse leaves turds.

It appeared, however, his life on the silver screen was cut short just prior to his coming to Dondero High. All the TV and movie websites tell the story of his sputtered career: there's the soap, and there's his name—Dean Malvo, the “Dean” striking me as fake—deep down the cast list of a couple second-tier action flicks I could sort of remember.

Henchman #3.

Waiter in Café (Paris).

Guy With Bomb.

It seemed that he was on his way up, the henchmen graduating to indie dramas where he earned an actual character name or two.

Then it all stopped in 1988. The year before he subbed for Mrs.
Regehr and was witnessed making out with my teenaged sister and Meg Clemens. From then to the present, there was no trace that Dean Malvo of Guy With Bomb fame existed.

He had another career, though. Drama teacher. As well as a possible side interest in seducing girls of an illegal age. The sort of activities that might also leave a trail behind.

D
ONDERO
H
IGH LOOKED MORE OR
less the same, but it wasn't Dondero High anymore. A plaque outside the main entrance doors explained that Royal Oak's two high schools were consolidated into one a few years ago, and that this building now housed a middle school. Before I went in, I walked around the property and the buried memories stuck their hands up out of their graves: there were the bleachers Todd Aimes pulled me under and smeared dog poo under my shirt because Ash told him to, there were the train tracks at the far end of the playing field where Ash made kids play chicken with oncoming diesels, there was the parking lot where she would stroll from car to car, visiting the older guys with their radios blaring, sticking her head into their Camaros and Mustangs to let them get a good look, a peek down her shirt, leave a whiff of herself behind.

Only then, standing in the place where it happened, did it occur to me to wonder if Ash
liked
having her teacher's hands on her. Or was he something she couldn't control, something that took from her and made her keep a secret? Did he hurt her?

The weight of sympathy I felt for her was so sudden I needed to sit on the lot's curb and rest my chin on my knees. She was the reason my life had been the malnourished thing it had been until Willa and Eddie came along. But she was also my sister. She may well have needed me back then without saying so just as I wished she were someone I could actually talk to, actually understand. It's why the idea of an outsider making her do something she didn't want to do made me feel like the failure was mine. I should have seen what was going on, read her brooding, lengthening stretches in her room as a sign. I should have saved her.