The Clairvoyants(40)

I angled myself away from the fire and imagined the heat of it catching the loose pieces of my hair. I smelled the singed pelt of the stag mounted above my head. “Was she seeing someone?” I asked.

What if it had been a situation like the one in the movie Laura, in which a spurned lover decides if he can’t have the woman, no one will? In the dim room the pale faces of the Milton girls seemed detached from their darker clothes and hair, from the green velvet of the couches they sat on.

“Not recently,” Kitty said, her voice hard.

Anne reached out for her sherry glass on the table in front of me, and I handed it to her. “Who was she seeing last?”

“We don’t know,” Anne said, bringing the glass to her lips. “She was taking a break from boys.”

“She only loved one boy her whole life,” Alice said quietly. Her hair had fallen partially over her face. She fiddled with the afghan fringe, her fingers as nervous as Mary Rae’s were spinning her locket.

Anne stubbed out her cigarette. It sent up a small spark that singed the couch cushion.

“And who was that?” I said. I knew, but I wanted them to tell me.

“She and Billy were a couple senior year,” Kitty said. “She never really got over him.”

“Everyone wanted to date Billy,” Alice said, abandoning the afghan fringe and brushing her unruly hair from her face. I sensed the word “date” was used for Anne’s benefit, that to say “fuck” might have been offensive to her. Del, slumped against Alice under the afghan, gave me a sad little smile that I didn’t want.

“Mary Rae kept thinking they’d get back together,” Lucie said.

Their voices were soft and seemed sorry to break this news to me. The boys in their fast cars took turns with all the local girls, and William played the elusive, handsome, older guy—though his hanging around with high school girls was a little disturbing. Was this why the Milton girls disliked me? Had I landed their star local guy?

“Alice, you saw her last,” I said.

Alice held her long hair in one hand, an unlit cigarette in the other. The wind rattled the windows in their panes, and the front door blew ajar. Everyone turned toward the door, startled, before Kitty got up and went to shove it closed. I waited for someone to ask me why I’d taken it upon myself to play amateur sleuth. I felt sorry for Mary Rae, I wanted her body found, her death declared. I wanted her to stop hounding me with her blue eyes and her anxious fingers on her locket. She refused to tell me anything, and like Sister in the barn, her silence weighed on me.

“She was supposed to go to work the next night and she never showed,” Alice said, her voice solemn.

Mary Rae’s bartending job at the Viking Lanes had been a new one. She stood to make a lot of money there, which she could use for school.

“Maybe she met someone there,” I said.

We’d driven past the place—it was on the way to Anne’s—a low white structure, the word “Viking” spelled out on the roof, and I imagined inside the roll of the balls, the eighties music, the smell of the bar.

“Someone knows what happened,” Del said. “Mary Rae knows what happened to her.”

A few of the girls flinched. Alice’s eyes welled with tears.

“We have to know what happened,” Lucie said.

Alice stood and shrugged off the afghan. “We do,” she said. “We’ve decided.”

“Maybe she’ll show up one night and surprise you,” I said. “Maybe she’ll walk right through that door and whip off her coat and say, ‘Hey! I’m back!’”

I didn’t mean to sound as heartless as I did. Del had instigated all of this. Anne gave me a pitying look. The Milton girls seemed to recoil from me. Lucie rose from the couch and began gathering glasses. Kitty collected the ashtrays to empty. One after another, the girls slipped down the hallway to the kitchen, until it was just Anne and I by the fire.

“I’m a fan of your work,” Anne said, her voice soft. “Each image seems to vibrate with something more than its parts.”

When I looked confused about her having seen my work, she said she’d sat on the admissions committee. “One of the last things I did before I took my leave.”

“Well, thank you,” I said, slightly flattered.

“When William was an undergraduate here I took him under my wing. It seems as if he is doing the same for you.”

I smiled but wasn’t sure how to respond, uncertain what she meant by that. I’d asked William about his relationship with Anne, and he’d told me she was his mentor, that she was his set of eyes when he wasn’t sure if something worked. I had shown some of my photographs to William, hoping to get him to reciprocate, but I could only convince him to reveal his older work—his Polaroids—pastel light, the figures dark, blurred, at a remove, and the settings overpowering—a rocky shoreline, a field rimmed by dense trees, a house’s roof against a wide, startling sky. I almost asked Anne now about his “sleep studies,” but William came into the room, forced out of the kitchen, I guessed, by the Milton girls. He had our coats, and I rose and went to meet him.

“It’s late,” he said.

Geoff followed him, pulling his car keys from his pocket. “Taking this group home,” he told Anne.

What kind of car had William driven when he was a local boy, and why didn’t he drive it anymore? I tried picturing him behind the wheel of a Mustang. He had told me about his Triumph motorcycle, as if that information should impress me, and it did give me a new image of him in a leather jacket and boots, leaning into the curves on Route 13.