The Murmurings (14 page)

“I’m not really sure they could have helped us anyway,” I try to reassure him, but he just gives me a look.

“What were you expecting?” I ask. “ ‘Excuse me sir or ma’am? Can you please help us translate my sister’s modernist-style poetry to determine where her former boyfriend-slash-
conspiracy-theorist might be hiding out blogging in your fine town?’ ”

Finally, I unearth a smile from the usually affable Evan.

“Okay,” he says, hands raised in surrender. “You’re right. I was hoping I’d have some sort of a plan by the time we got here, but now I don’t have shit for ideas. I don’t have a clue where to start.”

“I know what you mean,” I say, pulling the poem out of my messenger bag for what feels like the eightieth time. “I thought instinct would guide us.”

I sigh and refold the poem a little more harshly than I’d intended, nearly tearing the frail creases with my impatient fingers.

“Shit.” I examine it for damage, relieved not to find any. I glance at Evan. If I look half as defeated as he does, we’re doomed.

“Are you hungry?” I ask.

“Always,” is his reply.

“I know a place.”

We walk in silence, taking in the scenery. I’ve been here a handful of times, but I’m acutely aware that this is Evan’s first visit. He greedily takes it all in—the pines and cottonwoods, so different from Phoenix’s paloverdes, olive trees, and cacti. The wind at this altitude is free and unencumbered, unlike
the swirling gusts that flow through the valley. The historic buildings from the late 1800s and early 1900s have clapboard exteriors and balconies laced with intricate woodwork, and are worlds away from the siding and shingled roofs of a modern sprawling city.

“Have they changed anything here since the city was built?”

“Sort of,” I answer, happy to be the one to relay some information to Evan for a change. “They’ve preserved what they could. There were fires—several of them, actually. They built the city around copper mines, which have been caving in at places, so some of the buildings kind of slid.”

“Slid?” he asks, looking at me like I’ve made a mistake.

I laugh. “Yeah. The old jail used to be across the street from where it is now.”

“Damn,” Evan says in awe. “So, who lives here now?”

As he asks, a couple walks by us on the sidewalk pushing a stroller, a kicking toddler squealing in delight underneath a protective sun bonnet.

“Families. A lot of them relatives of those who stayed around the mid-1900s. I think the population dropped to about fifty or something like that before tourism picked up. Then the artists moved in, so I think the town’s got about four hundred fifty residents or so.”

Evan cocks his head to the side.

“What?”

“Nothing. You just sound a little like you should be working in the visitor center.”

“Hey, you asked,” I say defensively. “It’s all online.”

“You could probably convince me to hang out here for a while. Hell, I might just set up camp to avoid going back down the hill.”

We’re quiet for a while longer, and I allow my mind to drift. That’s normally a dangerous endeavor, but something about the light, clear air and the fatigue from the drive makes me relax into it.

I think about the first time I saw the thing in the mirror—the night Nell cut herself in the bathroom. Was that really the first time? Surely I’d been hearing the murmurings before then. I had dismissed the sounds more times than I probably even realized. I couldn’t have been as young as Nell when she first started hearing them. I know that for certain. I would have given anything to be like her. If I’d had any opportunity to mimic her in some genuine way, to share a “grown-up experience,” I would have jumped at it. So what made the voices start murmuring to me? I’d always assumed it coincided with Nell’s breakdown, but why would that be? Adam’s blog didn’t really explain that, from what I could recall.

“Hey, when did you say Deb started hearing things?”

Evan looks a little bewildered, and I realize I probably just interrupted his own train of thought.

“I don’t know. When we were pretty little. What about your sister?”

I nod slowly. “Same.”

Then I remember something the Pigeon said the last time I was at Oakside.

Forty-five’s too old to be playing with toys if you ask me.

Kenny is forty-five. Forty-five and he’s still hearing things. Seeing them, presumably. I can only guess that he’s lasted that long because he’s complied with whatever it is the doctors want him to do in Oakside. They offer him some meager form of protection, if you can call it that. But what if he started experiencing things later in life? Even later than I did? It might not be significant, but I can’t seem to convince my brain of that.

Inevitably, my thoughts return to Adam and what answers he might have for us if we can track him down. Questions compound and multiply, racing incessantly through my brain. Who is Adam really? What was it that made him run away from Oakside with Nell and seek some sort of refuge in Jerome of all places? Why did he stay here?

Before long, Evan and I are standing in front of a
dingy-looking white cement building, bold black letters painted across the top: The Wicked Kitchen.

“I think I read online that it’s the oldest operating restaurant in the West,” I say more to the building than to Evan. “Anyway, we used to come here when I was a kid. They have great burgers.”

“Now burgers I can get behind,” he says, leading the way through the dirty glass doors.

The restaurant itself can’t be more than a thousand square feet, including the kitchen. I get the distinct feeling it used to be a tiny house in the early days. It has an enclosed porch for extra seating—seating they need, judging by the crowd. I don’t remember it being quite this bustling when I was little. Our waitress has brittle red hair, loads of makeup, and the fastest hands I’ve ever seen in my life.

“What’ll it be, kids?” she asks, a pad and pen materializing before we’ve even gotten menus.

“Um . . . burgers?” I ask Evan, who nods eagerly.

“Burgers and fries, and two Cokes, please,” I request, frankly a little intimidated by our waitress’s frantic pace. I can see at least three heads leaning from their tables in search of her. It looks like she might be the only one working today. Her nametag says
BONNIE
in big blue letters. I would not want to be Bonnie today.

“Coming right up,” she reassures, but I’m not holding my breath. I arch my eyebrows at Evan, and he smiles in agreement. If we were looking for a peaceful place to regroup, we sure didn’t find it. I was expecting the sleepy little town of my childhood—of several months ago, even—but I’m glad for the buzz of the surrounding crowd. It feels good to not be so alone.

“All right,” Evan says. “Let’s see that poem again.”

I sigh and pull it from my messenger bag. I know he’s right, but each time I look at Nell’s cryptic writing, I get more and more frustrated.

Evan’s amber eyes scan the page again, and I watch him concentrate. I’d like some of his determination to rub off on me. I don’t want to give up, but I’m just so tired from trying.

“I keep coming back to this line,” he points to Nell’s line, the same one he repeated in the car. “ ‘Cribs for babes whose cries make men flock.’ I don’t know why, but there’s something about that line that feels like it might mean something.”

“It
all
means something. That’s the point. That’s also the problem.” I put my head down on the sticky table, not liking the way my forehead adheres to the surface, but not caring enough to pick it back up.

“All right, all right,” Evan says. “Don’t get like that. We’ll figure it out. So tell me about how Nell liked to write,” he prods.
“Maybe that’ll help us figure out what she was getting at.”

“You mean what type of poetry she wrote?” I ask the table.

“Yeah. You said something in the parking lot about modern . . . modern-something-or-other.”

I lift my head up slightly. “Modernist. It’s a style of writing. Kind of like T. S. Eliot. He was her favorite.”

Evan gives me a look like I should know better. “Do I look like the kind of guy who sits around reading poetry? You’re going to need to help me along a little more than that.”

“Sorry.” I smile. “He wrote a poem called
The Waste Land.
It’s one of his most famous works. It’s super hard to understand, but Nell got it.”

“Okay, so what was it about?” Evan keeps trying to jog the conversation.

“It wasn’t so much what it was about,” I continue, understanding what he’s getting at now, “but Nell was really into the style. What that type of poem was trying to do.”

Evan looks relieved that I’m finally catching on.

“It was more what the poem wasn’t saying than what it was saying, you know?” Now I’m starting to get a little excited.

“No, I don’t.” Evan jabs a thumb at his chest. “Clueless about poetry, remember?”

“Think of it like metaphor. Like everything that the poet says stands for something else. It’s like trying to draw a giant
picture by using totally unrelated images to make up the larger picture.”

“Sounds a little indirect, but okay.”

Now Evan looks tired, but I think he is on the right track. Rather than trying to decipher individual aspects of Nell’s poem, maybe we need to understand what she was trying to say about the big picture.

“We’re pretty sure she was writing about the same stuff Adam’s blogging about now. About Takers and Seers and whatever Dr. Keller’s trying to do at Oakside,” I say. I’m shredding a flimsy paper napkin in my lap. I can’t seem to keep my hands still. For the first time, it actually feels like we might be getting close to understanding what Nell was trying to tell us.

Evan nods, wanting to follow my lead. “Yeah, that’s probably a safe bet.”

“Then we’ve got the big picture! And we know that something made her and Adam decide that they were going to be safe in Jerome, right?”

I turn the paper so we can both read it and point to the second line so Evan can see.

“ ‘Up there, the air is thinner, and it makes it harder to think.’ So we know what it’s about, and we know something about the
where
.”

Bonnie slides our burgers, fries, and Cokes in front of us so fast, I actually jump. She leaves the check under Evan’s plate in the same motion, the tail of the ticket flapping in her wake.

We eat in silence, our eyes glued to the poem in the middle of the table. We’re chewing lunch, but it feels like we’re chewing Nell’s words, slowly trying to digest them. Once we’ve finished eating our lunch, I feel satisfied physically, but my brain hurts with the effort.

Evan and I pool some cash and leave it on top of the ticket.

“So we’re right back where we started,” Evan says. “With Oakside and Jerome and cribs with wailing babes.”

“Oh yeah, cribs. Can you imagine what it was like back then?”

It’s Bonnie, not Evan. She’s reappeared out of nowhere to count out our change from a wad of bills in her apron pocket.

“Wait, you know what that means?” I ask.

“What, cribs?” Her frizzy red hair shakes under the air vent above us.

“Yes!” Evan beats me to it.

“Uh . . . ” Bonnie looks like she regrets engaging us in any sort of conversation. She eyes the full tables around us.

“What? What does it mean?” I plead.

“The Cribs district. Across the street in the back alley. It’s
where all the prostitutes used to hang out. You know, hawking their wares and whatnot.”

“Oh my God,” I stare wide-eyed at an equally wide-eyed Evan. “Babes. She meant prostitutes, not babies. I think that’s where she and Adam must have been hiding out!”

Bonnie frowns. “Not likely. It’s just a bunch of shacks now. And you two shouldn’t be messing around over there. Place is haunted or some crap like that.” She nods to a table across the restaurant. “Be right there, sweetie.”

“Bonnie!” I exclaim, reaching for her hand. “You’re a lifesaver. Thank you! Thank you so much!”

She yanks her hand from my grip with the same efficiency of motion she’d used to bring our food. “Whatever.” She hustles away from our table.

We leave Bonnie an extra big tip and exit the Wicked Kitchen in two seconds flat. The row of shacks across the street is easy to spot.

“Come on!” I prod, but it’s not necessary. Evan is already two steps in front of me.

“Shack” really isn’t the right word to describe the buildings in the alley. They’re more like gutted and abandoned brick rooms. Aside from one larger building, they’re not even big enough to be called houses. A placard at the edge of the road explains the alley’s history, and it’s much like
Bonnie described. The prostitutes started out on the main road, but after pressure from politicians, many of the lower-charging ladies were forced out of sight of Jerome’s commercial square.

“Well, this is one part of the town my mom and Aunt Becca never showed Nell and me,” I say, taking in what’s left of the old red-light district, weeds and desert shrubs crowding the ruins.

“I can understand why,” Evan says after reading the placard. “Well, let’s start looking.”

“You don’t think we’re going to pop our heads into one of these abandoned buildings and find Adam waiting for us, do you?” I ask, losing some of my excitement.

“No,” Evan says, dragging out the word. “I was kind of hoping we’d find a clue that they’d squatted here for a while. Something to tell us we’re on the right track.”

I look around at the weedy, crumbling brick-and-mortar structures lining the secret street. There’s hardly any protection here from the elements, let alone any privacy. I can’t imagine my sister trying to hide here from anyone.

“Come on,” Evan nudges my arm and ducks into the first doorway. I follow him into the dark one-room structure.

Light cuts through the cracks in the facade, forming tiny spotlights on the dirt floor. There are four walls (or what’s
left of them) and a deteriorated roof that’s partially open to the sky.

“Well, guess that’s all there is to see here,” Evan says, and I nod, doing my best not to sigh and tell him it’s pointless. I already feel defeated.