The Vanishing Season (7 page)

She shook her head.

Mr. Witte sighed as if she’d disappointed him and resumed his work as if they weren’t still in the room. Liam gave her a helpless look, as if to say,
That’s about how it goes
and then led her back to the front room, where they sank onto the soft rug by Pauline. “I think he likes you,” he said.

“Ha.”

“No, seriously,” Liam said, rubbing his jaw, embarrassed. “That’s him being friendly. Sorry. He’s grumpy and also convinced of his own superior intellect. But he’s sweet underneath it all. He’s a great dad.”

Maggie told them about the gramophone she’d found on her porch, and about Gerald from the Emporium, and they were both equally horrified.

“I told my mom it was you guys. I don’t want to worry her.”

“You should tell her. You should have him arrested,” Liam said.

“They can’t arrest a guy for leaving a gramophone on your porch.”

“Littering,” Pauline offered hopefully.

“I don’t even know if it was him. I called Elsa, and she said she’d have one of the guys at the Emporium talk to him. She won’t talk to him herself, because she thinks he’s the killer.”

Pauline let out a loud groan. “Everybody thinks everybody is the killer. The lady at the 7-Eleven says it’s that guy Sam from the Gill Creek Maritime Museum, because he has sinister eyebrows. I think it’s Liam.”

Liam stared into the fire. “I did it with s’more sticks.”

“Anyway, the killings weren’t anywhere near here. Sturgeon Bay is all the way down the peninsula. The whole thing will die down eventually,” Pauline said.

“Well, the people of Door County can rest easy now that we have your expert opinion,” Liam said flatly.

Pauline rolled her sock into a doughnut and threw it at him, and he caught it with one hand and gave her a look—they both looked angry and like they were going to laugh at the same time. There seemed to be this permanent electric tension between them—like a thread stretched from one to the other, pulling tight and loosening and pulling tight again.

“Do either of you want it?” They turned to look at her, confused. “The gramophone.”

“I’d love it,” Liam said.

“He’ll take it apart, and it’ll never go back together again. Like Humpty Dumpty. He disembowels everything to see how it works.” Something vibrated, and Pauline pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. “You get a signal around here?” Maggie asked.

“Hardly ever. Sometimes around Liam’s house. It’s basically just for telling time. Bleh.” She looked at the screen.

“What is it?”

“This guy from school, James Falk. He doesn’t notice that I don’t think he’s as amazing as he does.” Pauline tucked her phone away and turned back to the fire. She ignored Liam’s dark look and held her hands out in front of her contentedly. “The fire’s so nice and warm. Wouldn’t you love to live somewhere that’s warm all the time? I’d love to live in Austin, that’s my dream. I’d love to be one of those singer-songwriters who perform in all the bars and wear sparkly pants.”

“Are you moving there after you graduate?” Maggie asked.

Pauline wagged a hand in the air. “Eh. I don’t know.”

“Pauline doesn’t believe in planning.” Liam turned to Pauline with a chastising expression.

“But getting the things you want takes planning, if you really want them,” Maggie offered. This was her exact area of expertise.

“Yeah, but how can you really plan anything?” Pauline took another bite of s’more and spoke through her food. “Everything turns out totally different than what you plan.”

Liam kneaded one hand in the other, clearly frustrated with Pauline. “Well, I doubt someone’s going to come along and say, ‘Hey, come sing at my bar in Austin, and by the way here’s an apartment and a plane ticket.’”

“Are you so eager to get me to leave?” Pauline shot back, looking at him with a mock frown.

Liam laughed. “I just want you to have what you want.”

“Well,
you’re
not going anywhere,” Pauline said teasingly.

He sat leaning his back against the couch and expertly searing the edges of his marshmallow, meticulously, perfectly even.

“
I
don’t
mind
living up here. I like the cold. I like being near my dad. I could live in the north all my life.” He snapped a graham cracker and laid the marshmallow on top. “There’s stuff I’d like to
see
though.”

“Like what?” Maggie asked.

Liam thought. “Well, up in Michigan there’s this spring that’s really deep, but it’s crystal clear, forty feet to the bottom, like glass. It stays the exact same temperature all year, and you can see the springwater bubbling in through the sand on the bottom; the sand . . .
rolls
. My dad said it looks like the top of a volcano down there. And there are these big, silver trout that have lived in that tiny pond their entire lives. You’re not allowed to go swimming there, but I’d like to.”

“That’s what you really want to see?” Pauline teased. “In this whole gigantic world? A trout pond a couple of hours away?”

Liam leaned back against the couch, unfazed. “I never said I was ambitious, Pauline.” He raised his eyebrows at Maggie.

“What about you?” Pauline said. “Please tell me you have something more interesting planned than a trout stream.”

Maggie shrugged. “Yeah, I have a lot planned. Northwestern. Then get a job in finance, most likely in downtown Chicago. I get nervous if I don’t map things out ahead of time.”

“Wow, you’re such an adult,” Pauline said wonderingly, then squinted as she studied Maggie.

“I get that a lot.” Maggie was always the one her friends back home turned to for practical advice or Band-Aids or a nail file or hand sanitizer. (She kept supplies in her purse and backups in her backpack.) Jacie sometimes called her Grandma Mags.

“I actually can’t picture that you were ever a kid,” Pauline mused, resting her chin in her hands. Maggie was holding her half-eaten s’more unconsciously in one hand but paused as the comment hit home. It hurt a little. Quick as a fish, Liam darted his face to her hand and stole a bite. Then grinned at her. Maggie felt herself blushing.

“Let’s go down to the Roadrunner and get pizza,” Pauline said, suddenly standing and stretching, tall and skinny above them. “I’m starving.” Maggie marveled at Pauline’s appetite—she’d already had three double s’mores.

“Took the words out of my mouth.” Liam stood, pulled his coat on off the couch, then picked up Pauline by her waist and moved her out of the doorway, pretending to need to get to the pizza first. Then he turned back and held the door open for them, suddenly gallant.

They piled into Pauline’s car.

“Are you sure we can get through the snow?”

Pauline pinched Maggie’s cheek and smirked. “City girl.” The car started and stopped. “Sorry,” Pauline said, leaning over the dash. “She’s temperamental. Sometimes she goes. Sometimes she doesn’t. My mom keeps trying to buy me a new car, but this one owns my heart.”

She put the Subaru key on the dashboard, and Liam leaned forward from the passenger side and loosened the ignition by hitting it with the palm of his hand. He pulled it off, looking like a seasoned mechanic, fiddled a bit, then put the cover back on. This time, when Pauline tried the key, the car came to life.

“It’s called finesse,” Liam said. He fiddled with the knob, turned the heat on full blast, and kept fiddling with the vent so it would blow on her. Maggie heard something snap.

“Ugh.” Pauline threw a look at Maggie in the rearview mirror as they backed down the driveway. “He breaks everything.”

As they ate—standing outside the shop, staring out at the bridge that crossed over the strait into mainland Wisconsin—Maggie thought how much she missed real Chicago pizza while Pauline held out her car key to Maggie, showing her that it was scorched and melted on one side.

“I threw it in our fireplace once, when I was really annoyed with the car.” She tucked it into the pocket of her jeans, then looked up and over Maggie’s shoulder. “Hey,” she said, pointing through the glass wall of the pizza shop. “Look.” Inside the store everyone—every single person—was staring up at the TV. “Let’s go inside to hear better.” They trickled in, rubbing their cheeks to warm them up, and listened and watched.

A third girl had been found in White Stone. She hadn’t come home from school the day before, and they’d found her that morning in the water, about fifty yards offshore. The newscasters had started to use the word
serial
. An 8:00 p.m. curfew had been issued for the entire county for anyone under twenty-one. And the bridge between Gill Creek and the mainland would be put up tonight, in case the perpetrator was still on the peninsula and could be caught.

“Looks like you moved here just in time,” Pauline said, “for the whole county to start shutting down around us.”

That night, because Mrs. Boden was out at a town meeting, they watched movies on Pauline’s giant TV. Pauline looked to be half asleep when she seemed to remember something and went into the kitchen, then came out again and handed Maggie a piece of paper.

“Here,” she said.

Maggie stared at it. It was covered in pictures of Grumpy Cat, an angry blue-eyed cat from the internet.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Just a Grumpy Cat collage. I made it for you during study hall. I tried to capture all of his best expressions,” she said sleepily, laying her head on the arm of the couch and stretching her legs onto Liam.

“Um, thanks?”

Pauline conked out halfway through the first movie.

“Does she always fall asleep so fast?” Maggie asked.

Liam nodded. “She falls asleep at the movie theater.”

They turned back to the movie, then Liam went on, his voice low. “People think she’s kind of this wild girl. But she’s really just like a kid. She gets excited about everything, and then she crashes.”

“Do you think we should leave?” Maggie whispered.

Liam rubbed his finger along his lip, studying Pauline as if trying to decide. Then he stood up. Without a word he crouched and lifted Pauline off the couch and put her over his shoulder. Maggie stood and watched him walk up the first couple of stairs, staying where she was, until Liam looked over his shoulder at her.

“Come on up.”

Maggie followed him up the rest of the stairs and down the hall to Pauline’s room. In the dim light from the hall, Liam walked over to the bed and laid Pauline down in it, first pulling back the covers and then bending to drape her on the bed. He pulled the blankets all the way back up to her chin, and Pauline’s eyes fluttered for a moment and then closed again. She looked peaceful and, like Liam had said, kidlike. Liam touched his hand to her hair and kissed her on the forehead, and Maggie felt her heart beat faster, as if she were seeing something she shouldn’t. Finally she turned away and stared into the dark hall. There were pictures on the wall of Pauline and her mom and dad through the years. Her mom looked a lot less polished, in T-shirts and jeans, and a lot happier in the eyes. Her dad, apparently, was where Pauline had inherited her coloring and her high cheekbones.

Maggie felt Liam approaching her, and he put his arm on the door over her head.

“She likes to wake up in her bed. She says it makes her feel cozy. For all I know, she’s pretending she’s asleep just so I’d carry her,” he said.

He hovered there with his arm over her, and Maggie took a couple of steps backward. Stiffly she turned and led the way downstairs.

That night she pulled out her pencils again to have another go at the mural idea, but she couldn’t think of anything to sketch. She pulled out a book on rocks that she’d gotten for her geology lessons instead. She loved the book, because it had shown her you could crack dull, ordinary rocks open and find colors inside. She considered retrieving a hammer from her dad’s toolbox in the basement and taking it outside in the moonlight to rock hunt.

Despite being tired, her body was wide-awake. She found herself thinking about Liam Witte, who was not her type. She thought about the habit he had of rubbing his lip with his thumb.

Jacie used to say that Maggie was waiting until everything lined up
just so
before she really decided to live her life. But nothing about life on the peninsula was just so. Maggie wondered if this was how the
real
part of life started, with everything going slightly tilted and making you feel like things were rising in you, the thought of Liam Witte’s thumb moving in your mind like ripples and waves.

7

GILL CREEK REACTED TO THE DANGER IN ITS MIDST WITH FEAR BUT ALSO a slight bit of pride. The county had never been at the center of things before. Father Stone at Maggie’s church—which her parents had started making her attend every Sunday afternoon after work—had more fire in his step and more passion at the pulpit. More people came to church, maybe because there was safety in numbers. Reporters rolled into town, and cops patrolled in the evenings—which came earlier as the days got colder—to scan the streets for suspicious individuals. Maggie’s dad installed a home alarm, even though she reminded him that it wasn’t like the guy was sneaking into people’s houses and taking them out of their beds.

The tourists were completely gone by now, and in downtown Gill Creek, the seasonal restaurants and shops—the kite store, the Scandinavian dessert shop where the waitresses dressed up as milkmaids—had shut their doors, their windows dark and gloomy as Maggie passed them on her way to work. But the quiet also gave the town a certain warmth—in the year-round cafés, people gathered for eggs and fifty-cent coffee and huddled against the world outside, and others caught up on the mostly empty Main Street and talked in low voices about their theories on the killer.

At the Emporium business slowed, but no one seemed to mind. Elsa hadn’t gone into the antiques business, Maggie realized, to make money but to socialize, catch up with the people who came and went, and have something to do. She could have retired, she revealed one day, because she’d inherited some money that made her retirement comfortable. Maggie, it seemed, was the only one who desperately needed the job. And luckily Elsa kept the Emporium open rain or shine.