The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (49 page)

And just when she’s convinced herself that this is what she truly wants; just when she’s sure she can’t stand the heat of his hand on her skin any longer; just when she’s about to turn and wrap him in her arms, she feels his fingers slip away. Listens to his footsteps cross the room, in full retreat.

Keeping her back to him, she slips on the jeans she’s been holding in a tight knot in her hands. Finds a T-shirt.

“I’m going out to my studio,” she announces, turning to face him. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, not meeting her eyes with his own. Ashamed.

“Don’t you want dinner? I made shish kebabs.”

“Not hungry,” Tess says, walking past him, out into the safety of the hall. She pokes her head in on Emma, still glued to the TV, which has somehow ended up back on the shoot-em-up movie where every other word is
fuck
.

“Change the channel,” she orders. Emma gives a dramatic moan, reaches for the remote, and flips back to the octopus cartoon.

“Bed in an hour, Em,” Tess says. “I’ll be back to tuck you in.”

“Mo-om!” Emma says, rolling her eyes. “I can tuck myself in.”

“But if I do it, then I know you’re actually in bed and not watching some grisly movie where they seem to use every possible expletive for fornication.”

“Forni-what?” Her brow is crinkled, her pale eyebrows raised.

“Never mind. Bed in an hour. And cartoons until then. Sitcoms. The Home Shopping Network.”

Emma sinks down into the couch with a groan.

Tess stands, studies her for a few seconds. Nine years old and already so much her own person.

“Hey,” Tess says, “I love you.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Emma says, not taking her eyes off the TV.

Out in the front hall, Tess stops at the painting of Francis, looks straight into his eye, which, tonight, looks troubled and stormy. It looks, she thinks, like Suz’s eye.

“Coincidence,” she mumbles, turning her back on the moose and feeling that electric buzz again, all of her tiny hairs raised.

“D
ID YOU GIVE THIS
to her?”

Tess is holding a box of frogs. Rotten, bloated frogs.

“Henry?”

He tries to speak, but can only manage a soft, disgusted moan.

His eyes flutter open. He’s fallen asleep in her bed. The bed that was once theirs and now feels as strange to him as waking up in a hotel. The digital clock on the bedside table says it’s a little after nine.

He’d stayed in her room, trying to call the mysterious number left in his mailbox, but there’d been no answer. Somehow, he’d drifted off.

Tess is standing over him and he moves to sit up, but is halted by the stabbing ice-pick pain in his left eye. She’s waving a photo around. A Polaroid. He squints up at it. It’s one Spencer took of all four Compassionate Dismantlers.

“Give it to who?” he asks.

“Emma, Henry. Did you give the photo to Emma?”

“No,” he tells his wife. “Of course not.”

“It was under her pillow. I was turning back the covers and I found it hidden there.”

Henry shakes his head, mystified. “Under her pillow?”

“Do you know where it came from? Is it yours?”

“The barn,” he explains, his voice sounding small. “I grabbed some photos that day we went back to the cabin, the day Emma was born. They’re in the barn.”

He rises, shuffles down the carpeted hallway, and looks in on his daughter, who is in her bed with the covers pulled over her head.

“Have you been out to the barn, Emma?” he asks. She doesn’t answer. She’s playing possum.

Henry turns, jogs down the stairs, out the front door, and across the yard, Tess following. He pulls open the sliding door of the barn, steps inside, and throws on the lights. They point at the canoe, light it up, make it glow, all holy, a tiny ark. The pain in his eye is pulsing like a living, breathing thing. He covers it with his palm, and steps forward.

Henry goes to the old metal toolbox, jerks open the lid. He pulls out the top tray full of screwdrivers and wrenches. The stack of photos is there, but they’ve been moved. And the photo of the four of them is missing.

“They’ve been moved. Someone’s been through them,” he calls to Tess.

Suz’s journal is still there. The journal he hasn’t been able to bring himself to ever open. Not once. Under it, he feels the small Magic 8 Ball key chain with a single key, wondering if Tess would even recognize it now, or understand its significance. It was the one thing he took with him the night Suz died, and it had been hidden in the toolbox ever since. Without thinking about what he’s doing, he palms the key chain, balls it up tight in his fist, then slips his hand into the pocket of his pants.

“I don’t get it. Emma doesn’t play in here. She would never come in without me.”

“Well, she found the photos somehow.” Tess is suddenly behind him. He snaps the lid of the toolbox closed. Is he too late? Has she seen the journal that she has no idea he took? Did she notice what he just put in his pocket? He turns to face her, but she’s already headed out of the barn, which surely means she didn’t notice either.

Now it’s Henry who follows Tess back out of the barn, across the wide expanse of lawn, motion-detecting floodlights picking up their movement and clicking on. Tess sometimes complains it’s like living in a prison yard. Henry says he’s just keeping them safe. That’s his job, right?

“Safe from what?” Tess sometimes asks him and he never knows just how to answer.

They head back upstairs to Emma’s bedroom, flip on the light.

“Emma, honey, have you been playing in your father’s studio?”

“No.” She doesn’t look up. She pulls the covers up over her head and lays back down as if she’s going to sleep.

Henry glances around the room. It’s always so damn clean. Not a sock on the floor, or book out of order on the carefully alphabetized shelves. It smells of lemon furniture polish and fresh-off-the-line bedding.

“Okay,” Tess says. “Can you tell me where you got this?” Tess pulls back the covers, shows Emma the photo.

Emma looks at it, then starts picking at a loose thread on her comforter. “The woods.”

“Where?” Tess asks.

Henry digs his palm into his eye again, trying to press the pain away.

“The woods behind the garden,” Emma says, looking up from the loose thread to Tess’s face. “There are words on the trees.”

“Can you show me?” asks Tess, reaching out for Emma’s hand.
Emma nods, wraps her own small fingers tightly around her mother’s.

It’s dark out now, and they grab a flashlight from the hall closet. Henry is following them out the door when the phone starts to ring.

“Shit,” he mumbles, and he doubles back, picks it up thinking it could be one of his crews working late on a beast of a job that they were way over budget on already—he’d told them they needed to stay until it was done and asked them to call if they ran into trouble.

“Hello?” There is no response at first from the other end.

“Anyone there?” Henry asks.

Great. He’s about to hang up when he hears a man cough.

“Is this Henry? Henry DeForge?”

“Yes.”

“This is Bill Lunde. I’ve been hired by the family of Spencer Styles to look into his death.”

A lump forms in Henry’s throat.

“Are you still there, Henry?”

“Of course. How can I help you, Mr. Lunde?”

“I’ve actually just arrived in Vermont. I was hoping to set up a meeting with you. I’ve got a couple of appointments at Sexton tomorrow afternoon, so how about getting together in the morning? Around ten? I can come to your house or your office, whichever is more convenient.”

Henry swallows, trying to make the hard knob in his throat disappear. “That would be fine. The house is fine. I’ll be here. We’re out on Route 2 in Langley, about a mile past the center of town, on the right. Look for a white mailbox with pansies painted on it. It’s number 313.”

“Great, Henry. I look forward to it. If you have a moment, I wanted to ask you a couple of quick questions now?”

“Uh, sure. Of course.”

“Spencer’s sister told you about the postcard—do you have any idea who might have sent it?”

“Not a clue,” Henry says, pleased to be telling the truth.

“You wouldn’t happen to be in touch with a Valerie Delmarco or Suz Pierce, would you?”

Henry reaches into his pocket, pulls out the old key chain, gives it a shake. The white 8 is nearly worn off, and the liquid inside it has somehow darkened with time, making the plastic die inside nearly impossible to read.

“I’m afraid not. After graduation, Val went home to Boston. Suz was headed out to California.”

He gives the Magic 8 Ball a shake, imagines he sees the words
Liar, Liar
through the murky water.

“And Spencer—he went home to Chicago?” Bill asks.

“Yes,” Henry says. “I think so. I’m not sure, actually.”

“And he and Valerie were a couple?”

Henry could barely remember. He hadn’t really known them very well when they were a couple, only in the aftermath. He’d seen them on campus together, noticed that Spencer kept her on a tight leash. They were one of those couples where the guy does all the talking, all the decision making:
We’re not going to that party
.
We think Cubism is totally overrated.

“For a little while. They broke up senior year.”
Around the time Val became Winnie.
“She got together with Suz.”

“I see. All right. Thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Great,” Henry says, pleased to have gotten off the hook so easily this time. But he knows it won’t last. If this guy is any good at all, he’ll find something to prove Henry a liar. And what then?

The line goes dead. Henry’s hand trembles as he places the phone back in its cradle. Henry stands for several minutes, transfixed, remembering Spencer’s pointy face, the long black coat he always wore that seemed to have never-ending pockets. He’s still standing by the phone in the front hall when he sees Tess and
Emma coming across the yard, up the walkway, flashlight bobbing in front of them.

“Nine,” whispers Emma as she enters, a strange habit Henry doesn’t understand. Is she speaking German? Saying
no
each time she enters their home? No. Like something’s not right somehow.

Tess is pale, shaking. She looks like she’s seen a—

“Henry,” she gasps, “in the woods. Someone’s painted the trees.”

—ghost.

“Painted what?” he asks.

“Words on the trees.”

“What words?”

“‘
The Compassionate Dismantlers Were Here
.’”

Henry says nothing, just stands with one hand on the wall, holding himself up. He looks down at his daughter, who is concentrating very hard on the painting of the moose, staring it down.

“She used my vermilion paint,” Tess says, her voice faint, so faint Henry wonders if he misheard her, if Tess really said
she
.

“Who?” he asks.

“Maybe it’s the lady who painted Francis,” says Emma, her eyes still fixed on the moose. “Maybe she’s come back.”

And then, just then, out of the corner of his eye, Henry thinks the moose has moved, blinked, given him a little mischievous wink.

“Did you see…,” he starts to ask, and his daughter just smiles up at him in a way that makes him sure she saw it too.

T
ESS’S HAND IS TREMBLING
so hard she can’t get the key into the lock on her studio door. The red letters she saw in the trees are burning in her mind, their own neon sign:
THE COMPASSIONATE DISMANTLERS WERE HERE
. A confession. A warning.

“Y
OU HAVE A KEY
to Berussi’s house?” Henry asked.

Suz shrugged as she fit the key into the lock on the rough wooden door.

“Tell me you weren’t fucking him,” Val said.

Suz acted as if she hadn’t heard. A low growl rumbled behind the soon-to-be unlocked door.

“That’s Magellan,” Suz told them. “A German shepherd. He’s a real sweetie.”

The hairs on Tess’s arms rose. She didn’t like this. Yes, Berussi would be occupied teaching Sculpture as an Evolutionary Process until at least four o’clock—there was no way they’d be caught. But it felt wrong. And what were they even looking for here? Suz said they were just going in to do a little spying.
Enemy infiltration,
she called it.
Reconnaissance.

It was the spring of their senior year and Berussi was on the warpath, rallying to get the other professors and administrators behind him. Berussi was not a fan of the Dismantlers, and had done all he could to see that Suz not be given credit for her sculpture class last fall. Suz, true to form, persuaded the dean that this was ridiculous. As time went on, the battle between the two of them heated up, with Berussi leading a campaign to have Suz expelled. And now, he wasn’t just after her, but the whole group. At a school the size of Sexton, it didn’t take the administration long to figure out who the Compassionate Dismantlers were.

“It’s a fucking witch hunt,” Suz complained when all four were called into the dean’s office where threats of expulsion were made.

The dean had rattled off a list of charges: taking apart tools in the sculpture building, breaking the Hobart dishwasher in the cafeteria, removing spark plugs from faculty cars.

“You have no evidence,” Suz told the dean. “You expel us and we’ll hire a lawyer and sue the whole fucking school.”

“I’m not sure you’d have much of a case,” the dean said.

“You might be surprised,” Suz told him.

So maybe that was what they were doing here in Berussi’s house. Looking for something that they could use as ammunition against Berussi; something that might take the spotlight off the Dismantlers and put it on their number one detractor.

They’d parked in a dirt pull-off down the road and walked to Berussi’s so that there wasn’t a chance of a friendly neighbor telling him about seeing an orange van in his driveway.

“And what’s to stop Magellan the sweetie from ripping us to shreds?” Henry asked. In spite of the amazing sculptures he carved of them, animals made him nervous.

Suz smiled. “Don’t worry. He’s a vegetarian.”

“Right.” Val laughed.

“Seriously,” Suz said. “Berussi cooks little meals for him—
eggs, carrots, whey protein. It’s crazy. The guy is hard-core. It’s one thing to not eat meat yourself, but to inflict it on your dog? I mean, hello! A dog is a carnivore. Just look at its teeth.”

Suz unlocked the heavy door and stepped into the little house. Magellan leaped up on her, licking her face.

“Easy, boy, easy,” she said. Suz reached into her bag and took out the plastic grocery sack inside it, unwrapped a piece of raw steak, and threw it to the dog. “There you go, big guy,” she said, kissing the air in Magellan’s direction. “Who loves you best of all?”

They watched the dog tear into the steak. “Tell me that’s a dog who wants to be a vegetarian. I’m telling you, Berussi’s got no respect for autonomy,” Suz said. Magellan’s teeth crunched down on bone.

The house was tiny. The front door opened into the living room, the kitchen was to the left and the bathroom beside it. At the back of the house was a bedroom barely large enough for a twin bed. The floors and walls were unfinished, knotty-pine boards. The place was surprisingly neat, considering the unkempt appearance of its owner. And there just wasn’t much stuff. Shelves of art books, an old stereo system with a turntable, a collection of record albums, a futon couch, some framed prints. No television or computer.

Tess felt sorry for Berussi. She knew she shouldn’t but she did. Seeing his house, hearing about how he cooked meals for his dog, it made him seem kind of lonely and pathetic. She wanted more than ever to jump in the van, head back to campus, and forget all about this.

“Look at all this vinyl. The guy loves his jazz,” Henry said, holding up a Count Basie album. He thumbed through the rest. “Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker. He’s got some great old blues stuff too.”

Suz rummaged through drawers in Berussi’s tiny bedroom.
“Look,” she called. “His high school ring. Isn’t that sweet?” She held up a chunky gold ring with a burgundy stone. “It’s got his initials and everything.” Suz pocketed the ring.

“Won’t he notice it’s missing?” Henry asked. He’d left the records and joined Suz in the bedroom. Tess followed. The little room felt stuffy and airless. Tess sat down on the bed, which was covered in an old hand-stitched quilt with red and blue stars.

Suz shook her head. “Not right away. And besides, the guy’s a total stoner. He’ll probably just figure he misplaced it. Speaking of which,” she said, reaching into the top drawer of his nightstand and pulling out a huge Baggie of pot that she dropped into her knapsack.

“Now that, he’ll miss,” Henry said.

Suz nodded. “But what’s he gonna do? Call the cops? Say someone broke into his house, fed his dog a steak, and took his stash?”

There was a terrible wheezing squawk behind them. Val came dancing into the room with an accordion strapped to her chest. It was red and black with shiny mother-of-pearl-looking buttons and keys. “Look what I found in the professor’s closet!” she said, playing a few drawn-out, wavering, off-key notes. She wrinkled her nose, leaned down, and sniffed. “This thing stinks!” she said.

Suz came forward and gave the bellows a sniff. “Oh my god,” she chortled. “It totally smells like kielbasa!”

Henry and Tess had to agree. The thing reeked.

“I bet Mister Tree-hugging Vegetarian has secret kielbasa feeds here at midnight,” Suz said. “I can see it now: a covert meeting with a sausage maker down in Massachusetts—someplace nobody knows him—then he drives home, locks the doors, and fries it up; has a big old heaping plate of it with sauerkraut and the world is good.”

Val smiled at her, played a few notes. “Everyone has their secrets,” Val said.

“Indeed they do, babycakes,” Suz said. “Indeed they do.”

G
OD KNOWS
T
ESS HAS
her share. She stands in her studio now, the door locked behind her, as she holds the empty tube of vermilion paint.

The Compassionate Dismantlers Were Here.

There’s a quick rapping on the door. Tess feels her heart trying to jump through the wall of her chest.

“Hello?” she calls, voice shaking as she presses against the already locked door with all her might, holding it closed. It’s quiet for several seconds. The knob rattles as someone on the other side tries to turn it.

She can almost hear Suz’s voice now:
Open up, babycakes.

“It’s me,” calls Henry from behind the door.

Henry. Only Henry.

Tess lets herself breathe and opens the door. Henry squints in at her, one eye more closed than the other—he’s still got his headache.

“Emma’s asleep. I put on some coffee. I thought we could talk.”

Tess nods. “I was just thinking about that old accordion we took from Berussi’s. Do you remember?”

Henry stiffens.

“Remember how it smelled like kielbasa?” Tess asks, smiling in spite of herself.

“We shouldn’t have taken it,” Henry says. “Shouldn’t have even been there.”

“No,” Tess agrees, “but we were just following Suz. And she made everything seem so…so justified. Didn’t she?”

Henry bites his lip, nods.

“There’s something I didn’t tell you. Earlier, when you and Emma were out in the woods, that private investigator called. He’s in Vermont, Tess. He’s coming out here to see us tomorrow morning.”

Tess feels it again: the blind panic of something just outside the door, rattling to get in.

“What’ll we do?” she asks.

“He’s not the police,” Henry says. “He’s just some midwestern PI who’s only interested in what happened to Spencer. We’ll practice our story, tell it to him, and he’ll be on his way.” He gives Tess a warm, reassuring smile. It’s his best
everything-is-going-to-be-okay
look.

“Do you really think so?” she asks.

He nods.

Tess forces a smile, touches him gently on the arm. “Well then, let’s go get our lies straight.”