The Clairvoyants(42)

The game would end badly for our side, William’s and mine. I couldn’t focus on any of it. I spent the entire time caught up in the memory of David Pinney, and watching Del, waiting for her to give William some secret look. Every so often I swore I saw it—a tip of her head, her eyes—the look of a coquette in an old movie. I felt as if a hand had tightened around my throat. I could feel the pressure of the fingers.

Del and Alice won the game. “You’ll get better with practice,” William said. We all pushed back our chairs to rise from the table.

But something was off. Maybe the memory of David Pinney was edging out everything else that evening. I excused myself and slipped up the back stairs to the little bedroom with the pine bureau. But William did not look for me. I heard him downstairs, laughing, and then music came on—more classical music I couldn’t identify—and the sounds of the voices were lost under the tones of the bassoons. I lay for a long time on the bed in the darkness. I may have fallen asleep. When the door creaked open it was just Del, her face a shadow peering in.

“What are you doing in here?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said, dully, lying back down. “That music is so loud. I didn’t hear you on the stairs.”

I sat up on the bed. “Is someone with you?”

Del laughed, her voice almost silvery-sounding. “No.”

“But I hear someone,” I said. I did hear movement in the hallway, a shuffling, a disturbance of air.

Del slipped into the room and closed the door behind her.

“Someone is out there,” I said.

Del laughed again. “All right, it was Randy,” she said. “My God, Martha, you’re so nosy.”

She stepped to the bureau and turned on the little lamp. Her feet in woolen socks appeared in the circle of light. “I’ve been in here before,” she said.

“Where did you think I was?” I said.

“We all thought you left with Geoff,” she said. “He went to the liquor store.”

Geoff often asked if someone would ride with him to the grocery store, and I’d sometimes volunteered, to be kind, to get away from the Milton girls.

“I’ll leave the room if you want it,” I said. “I was feeling sick.”

Del reached out her hand and placed it on my forehead, and I shrank back. “You don’t have a fever,” she said.

I went to the door, opened it, and looked out into the hallway, but no one was there.

“Your boyfriend must have gone back downstairs,” I said.

“He’s not really my boyfriend,” Del said.

“Well, whatever he is,” I said.

“He’s shy,” she said. “You know that.”

Randy was quiet. When I spoke to him he looked at the floor. I rarely heard him in conversation with anyone. He mostly sat, amid the men, tipping back a beer, flicking his ashes into his empties. Not the type to let Del lure him up to this room.

I went down the front stairs and entered the living room. Anne sat in her spot on the couch, talking to Jeanette. Alice was by the fire knitting and flirting with a boy I’d met that evening—Hurley or Harley. Her knitting needles flashed, and she tipped her head and laughed, shaking her hair back. Lucie, and a new girl, Shenoa, who was a copy of the rest of the Miltons—long, dark hair, the same pretty features—sat on the other side of the green velvet sectional. When I’d told the girl, earlier, that I thought her name was interesting, she’d smiled that Milton girl smile—a grudging compression of the lips—and said it meant “dove.”

Mary Rae would have sat on the velvet couch twirling her necklace, bored by her friends, ready to move on. I knew their stories about her weren’t entirely true. Some nights I dreamed of her. I didn’t try to verify the information I learned through my dreams—though I might have. She wasn’t interested in working in a day care center; she’d changed her major to accounting. Once, she’d been in downtown Syracuse and watched a group of young people in expensive clothes in a Starbucks. One of the men had stepped behind her in the line, and she’d learned he was a CPA, that they were all working across the street in the high-rise.

“We’re pulling an all-nighter,” he said, laughing. “It’s tax season.”

Mary Rae wanted to be one of those people—a woman with highlighted hair and cashmere sweater sets. The more I learned about Mary Rae Swindal, the more I liked her and the more I felt aligned with her whenever I was at Anne’s, ignored, an outsider. Downstairs in the living room I didn’t see Randy or William.

But Anne was nearly as surprised to see me as Del had been upstairs.

“When did you get back?” she said.

“I never left,” I said.

And I headed off through the hallway to the kitchen. Del, who must have come down the back stairs, stood at the sink, rinsing out one of the many pans she’d used to prepare the meal. Beyond the sliding glass doors William, Randy, and Joseph stood shoulder to shoulder on the snow-covered terrace, their breath huffing out above their heads. Joseph held a shotgun in the crook of his arm.

“What are they doing out there?” I said.

“They saw something moving,” she said. “They think it’s a wolf.”

I could smell Anne’s Chanel perfume arrive in the room behind me.