The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (70 page)

E
MMA HAS MADE A
sculpture of herself this time, a dummy, scarecrow girl out of pillows piled under her comforter. She rummaged around in the closet and found an old dolly that pees and put it up at the head, with just a tuft of its hair sticking out, the same light blond color as Emma’s. She knows that dumb babysitter, Laura, won’t even check. She’ll just stay downstairs all night flipping through channels on the satellite TV and smoking cigarettes. In between each cigarette, she sprays perfume into the air. Emma knows. She’s seen her. She also knows that Laura will pick her toes all night. Sometimes, she’ll lift a foot to her mouth and chew her toenails. She’s very flexible, Laura is. She can wrap her leg around the back of her neck. Her mother is a yoga instructor and Laura has been taking classes since she was two. She’s like a human pretzel.

Why does Emma even need a babysitter, anyway? Mel’s parents leave her alone all the time.

“Well, your mother and I aren’t Mel’s parents,” her dad said earlier when she tried to persuade him to forget about calling Laura.

Being at Mel’s today was a total disaster. When they got there, she followed Mel down into her basement bedroom and watched her light candles and incense, then smoke a gum-wrapper cigarette. Mel acted like Emma wasn’t even there.

“What do you want to do today?” Emma asked.

Mel just stared at the smoke she blew out of her mouth. When she finished her cigarette, she climbed up on a milk crate, opened one of the little rectangular basement windows, pulled herself up, and wriggled through it. Emma got up on the milk crate to follow, but Mel slammed the window closed and disappeared into the woods at the edge of her yard.

Emma stayed down in the basement all day, sneaking up around lunchtime to make a sandwich in the kitchen.

“Isn’t Mel hungry?” Mel’s mom asked when she found Emma spreading mustard on rye bread.

“She asked me to bring her down a sandwich,” Emma said. “She’s working on a new invention.”

Mel’s mom winked. “Let me guess…it’s top secret, right?” Emma nodded. Mel’s mom made a ham-and-Swiss sandwich, threw it on a plate with some chips. Then she got two cans of root beer from the fridge. “Even a mad scientist has to eat,” she said, handing Emma the plate.

Emma left Mel’s lunch on the table next to her bed, thinking Mel might show up any minute. She didn’t. Emma stayed alone in the basement until her dad came to pick her up at four.

E
MMA ADJUSTS THE COVERS
over the dummy in her bed. She knows she doesn’t have much time. Her dad is talking with Laura in the kitchen. He’s already tucked Emma in and said his good nights. Now he’s telling Laura to help herself to the chicken shish kebabs in the fridge.

Emma sneaks down the stairs and through the front hall, past the painting of Francis.

“Nine,” she whispers, then opens the front door gently, quietly, careful not to let it squeak, and pads out to the big company pickup her dad has been driving all day. She climbs up on the bumper and lifts herself over the gate, into the bed of the truck, where she scuttles all the way back against the cab and hides under an old painting tarp that smells of mildew and turpentine.

Earlier tonight, she picked up the phone to try her mom again (her cell’s been off all day), and caught her dad and Winnie. Her dad was saying, “Are you sure we should be doing this?” and Winnie said, “It’s too late to back out now.”

Emma couldn’t believe it: Mel was right. Her dad and Winnie were having an affair! It was all so obvious. And her mother must have found out and left him. Left them both.

The worst part of it is, it’s all Emma’s fault. She sent the stupid moose postcard to Winnie. It was Emma who brought Winnie back here. If she hadn’t been trying so hard to get her parents back together, she wouldn’t have done the thing that would tear them apart.

There’s only one thing left to do—stop them.

And that’s just what she’s on her way to do: to crash her father and Winnie’s little rendezvous and find a way to make them see that this thing between them is a horrible mistake. That it throws everything out of balance. And how that lady Suz was all wrong: art is not all about chaos, about taking things apart. True art, Emma will tell them, is about finding a way to make what’s broken whole.

R
UNNING LATE
, H
ENRY HEADS
for his workshop to grab the gas can. As he approaches the barn, he realizes the lights are on, which is odd—he hasn’t been out there since this morning, and he’s sure he turned them off then. He slides the door open slowly, stepping inside. The bright white halogen bulbs illuminate the empty wooden frame where the canoe had rested for over a year.

But the frame is not empty.

Lying there, faceup in the middle, like she’s been caught taking an innocent little nap of the damned, is the Danner doll.

Henry makes a strangled sort of gasping sound.

He circles around the doll to the workbench, walking on tiptoe, as if he might actually wake her. There, he finds rope. Bright yellow, thick-braided nylon. Knowing it makes no sense, it’s a ridiculous waste of time, but still unable to stop himself, he ties her. Henry lifts her arms, crosses her wrists and wraps the rope around tight.

Tighter, Henry. Tie it tighter.

Then, he does her ankles.

For the sheer fuck of it, he uses all hundred feet of rope, wrapping up her entire body, from his old Danner boots to the top of the blond wig, until she resembles a bright yellow chrysalis.

“Henry?” A voice in the dark outside. A man’s voice. “You in there?”

Shit. Bill fucking Lunde.

Henry grabs a painting tarp from the floor, hurriedly tosses it over the doll just as Bill slides the barn door open.

“Hey, Bill,” Henry says. He’s leaning casually against the frame that once held the canoe, smiling so hard his cheeks ache.

“The babysitter said you’d gone, but I saw your truck and the light on in here.”

“I’m just about to take off. I’m helping a crew finish a late job,” Henry says, lying without meaning to. But it’s too late to back out now.

Bill’s eying the black plastic stapled to the windows. “Not a fan of daylight, huh?” he says.

“Guess not,” Henry says.

“I was hoping to see Tess actually,” Bill says.

“Tess?”

“Yeah, I spoke with Julia at the Golden Apple gallery. I wanted to ask Tess about the woman who bought her paintings. Any idea where I can find your wife?”

Henry stiffens. “No,” he says. “Actually, I have no idea at all.”

“And you’re not worried?” Bill asks.

“Should I be?” Henry snaps. “She’s a grown woman.”

He takes in a breath, tries again. “Look, my wife and I…we’re sort of separated. I’m sure you figured that part out when you saw our living arrangement.”

Bill nods.

“I assume she’s dating someone. She’s probably off with him.”

“Well, when you hear from her, can you ask her to give me a call?”

“Sure,” says Henry. “Will do.” He looks at his watch—a not-so-gentle hint that he’s running late.

“So you got her out on the water, then?” Bill says.

“Huh?” Henry chomps down on the inside of his cheek.

Have to weight her down. So she won’t float.

“The canoe. How’d she handle?”

Henry lets out a breath, smiles. “Like a dream,” he says.

H
ENRY STANDS IN THE
driveway, watches the taillights of Bill’s rented SUV disappear as he takes a left onto the main road, back toward town.

Henry checks his watch. Shit. He grabs the cell phone from his pants pocket, punches in Winnie’s number.

“What’s up?” she asks.

“I’m running a little late,” he tells her. “Lunde was here. Tess never showed up, so I had to get a sitter.”

“That’s fucked up,” Winnie says. “For her to leave you and Emma like that.”

“Yeah,” Henry says. “Look, I’m leaving in about five minutes.”

“Great. Don’t forget the gas can.”

“I won’t. And I’ve got the doll.”
Tied up. I tied the fucking bitch right up.

“Perfect,” Winnie tells him. “I’ll see you at the lake in an hour. And wait till you see the latest present someone left for me.”

“What is it?” he asks.

“Suz’s old journal. It was here on the table when I came back from meeting you at the lake earlier. I’ll bring it with me and we’ll toss it in the moose.”

“One hour then,” Henry says, hanging up.

How the hell did the journal get from his workshop to the cabin? An absurd thought hits him: it was the doll. She took it there.

Jesus.

“Get a grip, Henry,” he tells himself.

He hustles back into the barn, grabs a corner of the tarp, and hesitates before pulling it back. What if she’s not there?

He chomps down on his cheeks, counts to three, and yanks up the tarp, feeling like a magician: now you see it, now you don’t.

But there she is, still wrapped in yellow rope.

And for my next trick…

When he finally lifts her, carries her fireman style over his shoulder to the truck, he’s once again amazed by the weight and heft. And he thinks, for an instant, that maybe he feels her move; her body going rigid, then limp again as he tosses her into the bed of the truck. His heart is hammering in his chest, his breath is wet and whistley. And that’s when he hears it, coming from the doll, a low, throaty hum: the static noise.

W
INNIE’S SITTING AT THE
table in the cabin, wearing the Suz outfit one last time. She’s exhausted, but the whole thing is nearly over. Earlier, she and Henry wrestled the canoe out of the truck and into the water, driving a huge eye hook into the front and running a rope from the hook to a nearby tree so the boat wouldn’t drift away from shore. Then, with great effort, they maneuvered the moose into the back of Henry’s truck, carrying it up a board ramp, then tying it down for the rough trip to the lake. At the beach, they performed the whole procedure backward to get him out of the truck and onto the canoe where they used boards to brace him upright. He was too tall, and made the canoe tip, so they cut off his legs from the knees down to give him a lower center of gravity. Even then it was a trick, balancing him just so; they had to put rocks in his belly, over on his left side, to keep the canoe from tipping.

Now, Winnie’s sitting at the table with Suz’s journal, which is laid out right next to hers on the table in the cabin.

She checks her watch: nearly 11
P.M
., minutes before she’s due to meet Henry. Fingers trembling slightly, she opens the journal to the last entry—Suz’s final written words.

Winnie closes the journal, sure she’s a living ghost herself. The veil between the past and the present is so thin in this place, so tenuous.

Outside, headlights come up the driveway. It could be Henry in his old orange van, coming back from town with Tess and Suz and a cardboard box full of supplies: tequila, drawing charcoal, oatmeal, coffee, and sugar.

She hears footsteps, stands and looks out the window, but before she can get a look, whoever it is is at the door, opening it. Coming inside.

Maybe, Winnie thinks, time is a layered thing and the past is always there, hidden right beneath the present, but somehow, they both exist in each moment. Maybe that’s what ghosts really are.

“You,” Winnie says.

The visitor smiles, says, “Who were you expecting? The goddamn queen of England?”