The Vanishing Season (8 page)

One weekend after the next, Maggie rang up one dusty thing and then another and another: a chamber pot, a Victorian hairbrush set, a yellowed copy of
Huck Finn
: proof—she figured—that Gill Creek’s long-dead residents had once pooped, combed their hair, and read books just like people today. She watched for Gerald, who came in only sporadically, and who Elsa said had denied everything, pointing out that he sold at least one gramophone every two weeks and that anyone could have bought one and left it on Maggie’s porch. Maggie knew he must keep a detailed inventory beyond the store’s price ledger, and she still planned to confront him herself, but she was waiting for a moment that felt right.

Meanwhile she got Elsa’s life story and all the local gossip: She learned all of Elsa’s sister’s annoying habits, she learned that the woman who lived in the white house at the end of Banks Street was a hoarder, that Ed who owned the fish boil was cheating on his wife, and that fishing in the northern tip of the lake was bad this year and everyone was drinking more than usual. She also heard, once or twice, about Liam and Pauline. She heard Pauline liked to sunbathe naked and that Liam and his dad sometimes sacrificed animals. Elsa talked about all of them the way she talked about celebrities. Maggie sometimes had to just tune her out.

At times like this, she missed Chicago, its largeness and anonymity. On a dare at a sleepover when they were younger, Jacie had once made her walk through Andersonville Park in a gold leotard and sling-on fairy wings, and no one had even stared. Maggie had been mortified, but Jacie had always been like that—loving and funny in a biting way. She wasn’t the kind of friend Maggie had seen in movies, who she felt like she could open up to about her deepest secrets. Jacie was the kind of friend who made you walk through Andersonville Park in a gold leotard and said she was trying to get you to lighten up, and who sometimes got jealous when you got more attention from guys than she did. But Maggie still missed her like crazy.

One afternoon as Gerald walked in, he came right past the desk without looking at her. Maggie watched him out of the corner of her eye as he passed. Studying him intently for the first time, she noticed that he limped just slightly.

“Elsa, is there something wrong with Gerald’s legs?” she asked, after he’d disappeared down the aisle.

“Well,
leg
. He’s only got one,” Elsa said matter-of-factly.

Maggie turned and looked at her, leaning on her hands. “Elsa, you said you thought he was the killer.”

“Well, he could be.”

“Don’t you think it’d be kind of hard to capture and drown girls when you’re that age and you only have one leg?”

Elsa shrugged. “I dunno how psychopaths do what they do.” She proceeded to pick up a true-crime novel she was reading. As if anyone was more of an expert on psychopaths than Elsa.

Maggie tried to picture Gerald lugging the gramophone onto her porch. It didn’t seem so sinister now. At worst, he was a creepy old guy with a crush, that was all.

The first week of November, summer ducked its head back in for a few last, rare days. Almost every day that week, Maggie could see Pauline and Liam out the window playing baseball in the damp, brown field in the evenings, Pauline winding up like a spider in water, Liam sizing her up in his serious, observant way before throwing his pitch. Sometimes she went to watch, and sometimes she stayed inside and worked on her schoolwork: comparative world lit, European history, advanced calculus, and French III.

“Sweets, can you pot all the geraniums and move them into the cellar?” her mom said on her way out one morning. “I want to bring them in for the winter. I wasn’t expecting that early snow, but I’m hoping they’re okay.” She crossed her fingers in the air. Maggie wondered why her mom had planted them when they were just going to have to bring them back in, but she guessed she’d just gotten carried away with having a yard for the first time and wanting to make it nice.

She walked out to the garden that afternoon and surveyed the property. All in all, they’d made some good progress. Her father had painted two sides of the house so far. The field was tamed, and the bushes had been neatly trimmed so that they no longer looked like they were swallowing the house. The porch had been sanded, with boards replaced in some places, and her mom had hung some yellow wind chimes. The mailbox was painted, and they had cleared a pleasant little pathway between some semi-well-shaped shrubs from the back door to the driveway. The house no longer looked derelict or unlived in. She would have upgraded it to “shabby but charming.”

Her mom had laid out all the planters. Maggie began to fill them—pulling out the geraniums from under the roots and tucking them into the potting soil—then hauling them toward the cellar door.

She turned at the sound of footsteps on the grass and found Liam standing there with a shovel.

“Pauline thought you guys might need some help. She saw your mom putting out the planters this morning.”

“Oh.” Maggie wiped the hair out of her eyes. “Thanks. I’m okay actually.”

She didn’t want to be alone with him. It made her feel prickly.

“Okay,” he said, and hoisted the next planter—the same size as the ones she’d been wrestling for an hour—into his arms like it was a feather. He lifted a second planter in his left arm and walked in the direction of the cellar. Maggie sighed and lugged one behind him.

They worked for about half an hour, digging, filling, hauling, until sweat covered their bodies and dirt covered their arms, legs, calves, faces. Gnats kept hovering around their sweat. Finally Liam laid the last planter near the cellar door and sank down on the grass. Maggie knelt a couple of feet away.

“So what’s in the cellar?” he said.

“Besides the washing machine and dryer, I actually don’t know.”

“You’re not curious?”

Maggie shrugged.

He opened the cellar door, and the smell wafted out to them, the cool air on their faces.

“Smells like the old days,” Liam said with a grin. He climbed in and then helped her down, and her feet landed with a
thud
on the cold ground. The room was low and tight—the ceiling just over their heads.

He’d been joking, but it did smell like the past—like dust and things that people didn’t use anymore: old oils, old metal, old leather, and air, Maggie imagined, that people had last breathed in the fifties, or the twenties, or the late 1800s. It was the kind of place where people used to store vegetables and jars and things like that. She could barely see more than a few feet in front of her—only the space illuminated by the open cellar door and then black beyond that.

They began loading the planters in, having to pile them farther and farther back. Suddenly, inexplicably, Liam closed the door and they were in darkness. There was only the tiniest crack of dim light coming from a small window on the wall to her right, covered in cardboard.

She could hear Liam breathing beside her, quiet as usual. “I just wanted to see what it feels like,” he finally said. “Do you mind?” Maggie didn’t tell him to open the door or say she was scared. Liam seemed comfortable with the silence, but it began to make her antsy.

“Isn’t it weird how you see colors when the lights first go out?” she said, to break the silence. “Right now I can see green dots following each other. Green-dot parade.”

“I just see red lines,” Liam said. “Pretty standard.”

“When I was a kid, it always frustrated me that when you opened your eyes, the dots disappeared,” Maggie admitted. “I wanted to catch them. Weird, huh?”

“Everyone who ends up on this peninsula has some kind of issue,” Liam teased. “Water Street is like the Island of Misfit Toys.”

They breathed and listened to the quiet of the cellar.

“How many years old is this house?” Liam asked. “Do you know?”

“My dad said it was built in the 1880s,” Maggie answered. “What are
your
issues?”

“Loving an unattainable girl my entire life,” Liam said easily, without hesitation. “Who
does
that?” He didn’t sound embarrassed. He seemed to want to go on, like he needed to explain himself, but it took a few seconds. “Pauline loves to go on and on about how life is short and how you have to live it up. But, I don’t know, I think it’s just her way of dodging real stuff sometimes.” Maggie could hear his feet shifting on the dirt in the dark. “She talks about her mom being stuck in the past, on what happened with her dad, but in a way she’s stuck on it too. It’s like she doesn’t think she has a future, just because her dad died young.” Liam paused, sorting through his thoughts. “She won’t make any real choices—I’ll bet you anything she ends up working at the tea company all her life, because she won’t decide anything big for herself. And I think her mom likes it that way. I don’t think her mom wants her to grow up and find her own path or anything. She just wants her close.”

“You think she’ll come around to you one day?” she asked.

“To me? I doubt it. But I can’t help feeling how I feel. I’m kind of a one-girl guy. I can’t help it; it’s like a curse, really. My dad was the same way, even though my mom didn’t stick around.”

There was a strange pause, and he moved closer to her. Reflexively Maggie stepped on the stair to open the cellar door and reached her arms overhead, pushing upward. Sunlight flooded in. In front of her, Liam was kneeling. He’d found something on the ground. He held it up to her. A delicate bracelet, grimy from dirt, with a tiny, cherry-shaped charm.

“I felt it with my foot,” he said, and smiled, friendly. “Here, for you.” In the light she could see his face was glistening with sweat from all the effort carrying the planters.

Maggie took the bracelet but didn’t say anything. Turning it over in her hands, she wondered how old it was and who’d left it, how it had fallen off. But she’d never know, she guessed. Liam was watching her curiously. There were too many things to like about him. Maggie could feel her affection being bound to him like roots, and she didn’t like it but didn’t know how to stop it from happening. Because it came with a desire to stand closer to him, the way he smelled affecting her pulse.

Out on the grass, Liam helped her bundle up the potting-mix bags, and Maggie took hold of them in a giant armful. “Well, thanks. See you.”

“Yeah.” Liam turned and started walking away.

She looked at the ground just to give her eyes something to do besides watch him walk, but just before he disappeared into the pines, she turned them on him until he’d disappeared, studying the form of his back, the outline of his arms. “Maggie, you’re an idiot,” she said to herself. As she walked inside, she stroked the bracelet in her palm.

Maggie’s heart is a darkening red; it’s slowly turning a different shade. I watch her lie awake and wait for something to plug up the hole that’s opened inside her, and it makes me wish that I could tell her what I’ve learned, being a ghost. I’ve seen enough of people stretching the years to know the things we want are bigger than what we get and as deep as outer space. Looking up at the cold, empty sky beyond the cellar door, I know that our longing can stretch at least that far.

It’s the bracelet that disconcerts me. It looks familiar—I already know it, where it’s shiny and where it’s dull. I know already that some letters are more faded than others. In other words the bracelet
rings a bell
, and that’s a feeling I can’t remember having. As Maggie holds it up to study it, I try to make out the faded name. Maybe it’s my name. But I have no more luck than she does.

Through the window I can smell the air coming down from Canada, breezes full of the Arctic. If you fill your lungs deeply enough, you’ll breathe the ice caps, moose breath, Eskimo campfires. A ghost town comes to mind, north of here, that was abandoned in the late 1800s—I don’t know when I saw it or why. It’s not the kind of ghost town you picture in the West, with tumbleweeds and shoddy, clapboard houses. It’s polished and sophisticated, with an avenue of clean, white houses and a courthouse, a dry goods shop, a mayor’s house, a capitol. It’s so impeccably clean that it looks like all the people left just the day before. Every time I think of it, I get a lonely feeling.

I drift out of my window, to go see where they’re digging the new grave of the latest victim; she’ll be buried in White Stone. I float out to the old cemetery, wander among the bones I can see under the dirt—some curled in balls in their tombs, some long and stretched out like they’re standing on a stage. I can hear their souls whispering in the trees sometimes. I’ve begun to suspect they’re here after all, and closer than they’ve let on. My empty, invisible, nonexistent heart picks up speed. Maybe it turns a darker shade of red too—I don’t know, because it isn’t there.

A late, last warm-weather storm is crackling somewhere far-off—I see the faintest hints of lightning.

And suddenly I see my first ghost. He’s one lonely-looking wisp of a man, sitting on a stone a few yards away; he’s transparent and—just as I’d pictured—glowing. He seems to want to tell me something, but I can’t hear him, and he can’t hear me. “Where are all the ghosts?” I ask, but no words escape my lips. He keeps looking at me as if there’s something important he wants me to know. “How can I keep people safe?” I ask. But he shakes his head. And then he floats into the woods and fades away.

I float home, over town after town, toward Gill Creek and Water Street. An occasional car drives below or a person walking through the woods or down the streets of town.

If I could show you the lives of the people below me—the colors of what they all feel heading into this chilling, late fall—they’d be green and purple and red, leaking out through the roofs, making invisible tracks down the roads.

8

THE COLD RETURNED SOMETIME THAT NIGHT AND STAYED. IT BLEW DOWN FROM the north and settled in for the winter. It blew across the fourth girl, found just before Thanksgiving in the icy slush at the edge of the lake in Sturgeon Bay. She was like the others—facedown, no sign of struggle. She had been gone a full week before turning up in the lake. Meanwhile, Gill Creek pulled together in the face of the threat. There were bake sales and benefits in honor of the families of the victims; there were indoor activities planned every Friday night for families to attend together. The town forged on with its traditions and small events: There would be a fall festival and a Turkey Gobble the weekend after Thanksgiving. “Faces of Gill Creek Past” was on exhibit at the Maritime Museum, and that Saturday Pauline invited Maggie to go.