The Clairvoyants(43)

“There have never been wolves in those woods,” she said.

I thought of the taxidermy heads on her living-room wall, and William saying they were her trophies. “You hunt?” I asked.

Her presence behind me was slight, like a sliver of moon. “Oh, I did once,” she said. “It was a thrill to capture the first Windy Hill eight-pointer of the season.”

The outside light shone on part of the wide backyard. Beyond that lay the forest where the dead waited on All Hallows’ Eve. Maybe Mary Rae was out there now, maybe they’d seen her in the yard and mistaken her for an animal, though I’d never seen Mary Rae at Anne’s before. Or was it David Pinney out there? I stood at the door and felt the cold through the glass, and as if he could sense I was there, William turned and saw me. Joseph lifted his chin to the sky and howled like a wolf, and William and Randy shoved each other so that Randy nearly fell off the terrace. Geoff came in behind me, bustling to unload bags on the counter—three bottles of wine Anne had requested.

“Your ladyship’s special vintage,” he announced, the smell of snow coming off his clothes.

William looked back again, almost tentatively to see if I was still there, and when he saw me he smiled, a quizzical look on his face. After a few moments, the men all filed inside, and Anne began to oversee the uncorking of the wine. Randy slipped past me to the living room, his chin low, his blond hair a bright swath over his eyes. In the hallway I took his sleeve.

“Sorry I interrupted your little tryst,” I said.

“What?” He seemed baffled.

“Your meeting with Del upstairs,” I said.

I could hear everyone in the kitchen asking where I was. Randy’s befuddled gaze shifted to over my head, to William, who was suddenly there behind me, his arms sliding around me, reeling me in. His mouth was in my hair, searching for my neck. He growled, and then Joseph, who must have heard him, let out another howl in the kitchen.

Randy took that as his opportunity to slip away, his cowboy boots shuffling down the hall. If he’d been upstairs I would have heard him, at least retreating once Del discovered me—the sound of his boots impossible to miss. Del had told me he never took them off—he’d lost two toes to frostbite as a child. I felt the same cold I’d experienced during the bridge game and wondered if I really was sick.

I told William I didn’t feel well, and we borrowed Geoff’s car and went home, leaving Del and Geoff to finish out the night with Anne and Randy. Maybe it was Joseph Del had lured upstairs while Lucie, who was drunk, chatted with Shenoa. Del was indiscriminate—everything to her was a game. On the drive home, when William asked me what was wrong, I didn’t know how to respond, and after a while he let his own silence match mine, and the car was filled with everything we wouldn’t say. Every so often he would look over at me, sadness in his gaze, and I felt almost cruel for suspecting him of anything but loving me.





18




A day later, the newspaper reported the discovery of a woman’s remains in an abandoned trailer in Cortland County, and while the cause of death couldn’t yet be determined, or a formal identification made, she was thought to be the missing Mary Rae Swindal. The trailer was an old Silver Streak Clipper—rusted metal abandoned in an area that hadn’t been searched in the early days of her disappearance. It sat at the edge of some woods in a snow-covered field marked with deer tracks, an area remote enough to be beyond, even, the realm of hunters.

I knew it was her—the narrow room, the field, it all made sense. After another few days she was identified, and the questions swirled about how she’d gotten there. Had she simply been lost, wandering, and stumbled upon the trailer? Or had she been abducted? There was simply no way to know until investigators did their work. At no time was it released to the public that she’d been nude, that her clothes had been piled neatly beside her—the jeans and the sweater, the down coat I’d seen her wearing under the elm.

Now the Milton girls were finally able to mourn. A service was scheduled three days before Christmas, and though William and I didn’t plan to go, Del came up to my apartment to announce she’d be attending.

“If you change your mind, you can ride with me,” she said.

“We aren’t going,” I said.

I wasn’t sure why Del wanted us there. William had said it was sad and tragic and he was sorry for the family’s loss, but he wasn’t going to sit in a church and watch everyone cry. “I knew her so long ago,” he said.

I’d never asked how Anne had grown so close to the Milton girls and their boyfriends. Had she met them in town? Did she know their parents? I suspected there was one girl she had befriended who brought the rest—and I guessed this girl was Mary Rae—but when I broached this with William, he said that the gatherings at Anne’s were new, prompted by Mary Rae’s disappearance and Anne’s imminent death. “I never saw Mary Rae there,” he said. He gave me a level look, as if he wanted me to take him seriously. “I hadn’t seen her in years.”

The next morning just after sunrise, I awoke to William moving around the apartment. We were on break from classes, spending a lot of time at home, and his early activity seemed curious. Through the fogged glass the day promised to be gray and cold. William stood in the center of the room, distracted. He’d been having trouble sleeping. His eyes were ringed with shadow. He had Geoff’s car keys in his hand, and I could tell that at some point in the middle of the night he’d slipped from the bed and left me and gone elsewhere.