The Clairvoyants(23)

The kitchen was as warm as its lights had promised from outside. Anne gestured to a bar stool beside her. “Sit,” she said. “I found your sister very intriguing—given my circumstances.”

I didn’t want to sit with Anne. I felt certain I should find Del, and Geoff, and head home. I kept picturing the dead waiting in the fragrant pine shade—souls who knew Anne, family members, friends, Mary Rae herself with her dismal longing.

“I’m looking for Del,” I said. “Do you know where she is?”

Anne took a sip of her tea. “I’m going to die soon,” she said. She set the cup down on its china saucer and gave me a look that startled me at first—it was the look the dead gave me, full of worry, and need.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Anne laughed then and did her weak wave. “Oh, well, it’s not your fault. I do wish I could work more—there’s suddenly so much I’d like to finish. I’m sorry about that. And this whole horrid thing about Mary Rae—such a lovely girl.” Anne’s eyes seemed questioning. “I’d like to stick around long enough to find out who did this to her,” she said. “I’m open to any little hints.”

“Del is full of stories,” I said. I measured the steps toward the glass doors to the patio and escape. “You can’t really believe the things she says.”

Anne continued to appraise me. “I do,” she said over the rim of her shaking cup. “I believe her.”

When you’ve spent a long time in hiding—quiet, resourceful, and almost always unsure, questioning yourself and your own sanity—and someone tries to coax you out, it’s a rush of emotions impossible to take in at once. I felt gratitude, relief, an overpowering surge of release, and then cautiousness. Anne’s voice turned soft, kindly.

“I believe you,” she said.

The kitchen felt too warm, and my head spun. “I really would like to find Del,” I said.

Anne set her teacup down in its saucer, where it settled with a brittle-sounding crash. “She met one of the local boys here in the kitchen,” she said, curtly. “They may have gone out front.”

I thanked her, and I felt a tinge of regret for not providing her with what she wanted. I didn’t know who killed Mary Rae, and I didn’t want to know those details. I couldn’t have realized then that they would become very important to me later.

I went back out the doors to the terrace, down the steps to the yard, and around the side of the house. Geoff was there in the glare of someone’s headlights.

“Oh, there you are,” he said. His voice was slurred. He’d had too many bourbons. “Your sister is taking off.”

Along the gravel drive the maple trees’ leftover leaves were like torn golden paper in a car’s headlights—a red Firebird, its dual exhaust fanning white smoke around our ankles. Del stood by Geoff, her face lit up. I suppose I knew what she would do before she did it, and still, there was nothing I could do to stop her. The driver reached over and opened the car’s passenger door and Del slipped into the car. I smelled pine tree air freshener. And then she shut the door without a glance back, and the car took off, careening down the gravel drive like a getaway vehicle.





9




Geoff wasn’t ready to leave the party, but he took pity on me and gave me the keys to his car to look for Del. I was panicked, and furious with her for taking off.

“I’ll stay here with Annie,” he said. “She can give me a ride home tomorrow.”

I suspected it was the bourbon that made him so generous, but I would come to find out that he was often generous with his car. Before I drove off he leaned down to my window, provided simple directions—a few landmarks for finding my way home—and said, “Randy’s a good sort,” referring to the driver of the Firebird. “Don’t get all up in arms.”

I made it down the gravel drive to the main road, and then circled around town, past the diner, past a park with an old-fashioned bandstand, its intricate woodwork glowing white. The streets were dark but dotted with children walking in groups, their Halloween costumes disarming in my headlights—genies in chiffon and spangles, princesses in blue satin, the long dresses dragging around their shoes. As I drove past them some looked at me from behind their masks—creatures with fangs streaked with blood, monsters with distorted faces, even more friendly cartoonish characters—but their eyes darted, alive and frightening, behind the molded plastic, and I felt a sense of being lost in some strange, in-between world. I had the window rolled down, and I smelled wood smoke and burned pumpkin. My fury at Del compelled me to circle the grid of streets, and looking, in Geoff’s Volvo wagon, like a crazed housewife—desperate and near tears.

Del didn’t have a cell phone, and I didn’t know the town well enough to find her, although I could guess where she’d gone with the driver of the Firebird—some unmarked road leading to a lakeside, or up a rutted, abandoned cart path to some dark field to have sex. I could only hope that Randy was, as Geoff suggested, “a good sort,” and I gave up, finally, and found the main road out of the village, following Geoff’s directions back through the empty stretch of open land, past the garden store with its sheds for sale, its lawn statuary, its jewel-colored globes shimmering. Del wasn’t an innocent. She always went after what she wanted, while I waited behind, the cautious bystander, embarrassed by the virginity I kept a careful secret. “Sister,” Del would call me, after our great-aunt, and it annoyed me just to think about her saying it.