The Clairvoyants(47)

“Hi, Alice,” I said.

She didn’t even bother offering her Milton girl version of a smile in return. She appraised me as if I’d worn the wrong outfit or said something offensive.

In the front seat Del was talking to Randy, pattering on about the funeral, and the parts she thought were nice, and then she looked at Alice. “I liked what you said about Mary Rae,” Del said.

“I made most of that up,” Alice said, quietly. “For her mother.”

Del smiled. “I thought so.”

Randy pulled out a fifth of blackberry brandy, and he passed it to the backseat to Alice, who tipped it back to take a long swallow. “What?” she said to me, though I hadn’t said a word. “We need some kind of fortification.” She held the bottle out to me. I accepted it and took a drink, the brandy sweet and burning the back of my throat.

We’d come to a streetlight, and Randy twisted around in the driver’s seat.

“Del said you weren’t a snob,” he said in his low voice.

We drove down Route 13 and into Milton, but we kept driving, Randy, Alice, and I drinking the brandy, and Del taking a rare sip, so that I didn’t feel the need to chastise her. We ended up at a local park, the lot recently plowed of snow, the woods surrounding us marked with hiking trails. I could hear the whine of snowmobiles, and Randy said how much he missed going out, how he had to sell his snowmobile to pay for technical school. “So I could have steady work for the rest of my life,” he said, without any hint of sarcasm.

We sat in the parking lot like teenagers. Alice lit a joint, and the car filled with the smoke. If Randy or Alice noticed the ring I wore, they didn’t mention it, and Del kept quiet about the whole thing, so that it seemed almost as if it had never happened. The sun came out for a moment above the bare trees and lit the inside of the car—the salt on the car windows, the strands of our hair, full of static and stuck to the upholstery—then disappeared again behind the masses of gray clouds.

“We should go,” Alice said. “She’s waiting for us.”

Randy put the car in drive and we headed out of the lot, down a narrow road piled high with snow. Mary Rae’s house was a white Cape with a detached garage. The picture window in front was lit by a lamp, and as we pulled into the driveway a woman rose from a couch and her shadow moved toward the front door. In each of the house’s windows was a candle with an electric bulb flame, a bit of holly wrapped around the brass holder.

“In colonial times they used to put candles in the windows when a family member was away,” I said.

“That’s so sad,” Alice said.

We were drunk and stoned, and climbing out of the car Alice slipped on the ice and fell, with a loud whoop, into a snowbank. By the time we got her up, Mrs. Swindal was at the storm door, her face in its makeup like a mask.

“Are you all right?” she called out.

Randy was stumbling up the path, and Del and I had Alice under both arms, all of us trying not to laugh. Mrs. Swindal held the door open and we stepped into her warm house, into the living-room lamplight, our footsteps muffled by beige carpet.

“Take your shoes off,” Mrs. Swindal said, sounding resigned.

How irresponsible we were being—showing up at this woman’s door smelling of brandy and pot, our boots bringing ice and snow into her clean house. I looked up at her to apologize and saw how much she resembled Mary Rae—her eyes, her hair, the shape of her mouth—all of it surprised me, as if Mary Rae had opened the door herself.

“What is it?” she asked me, concerned. She reached a hand out to touch my arm.

I shrugged off my coat.

Alice was crying now, wiping her eyes with her mittens, and Mrs. Swindal shifted her attention to her and asked us all to give her our coats.

“We’re drunk,” Alice said. “We’re sorry.”

Mrs. Swindal patted Alice’s head and offered us coffee.

We sat in the living room, Alice and I perched awkwardly on the Swindals’ reproduction Louis XIV armchairs, Del and Randy on a deacon’s bench. The house was filled with reproduction antiques—fussy things that seemed easily breakable, the windows hung with sheers and heavy drapes. Mrs. Swindal brought in the coffee and sugar and cream.

“Mary Rae used to decorate the house at Christmas,” she said to us, as if she felt the need to explain the absence of a tree, of windup decorative Santas and ceramic snowman figurines.

She told us to take our time and offered us food—there was so much food, she said, distractedly. Then whenever we were ready we could go up to Mary Rae’s room and have a look at the clothes.

“I’ve already taken what I want,” she said. “Her old Raggedy Ann doll. And her report cards. That sort of thing.”

She eyed Alice and then looked down at her hands. “She’s got shoe boxes of stuff—notes to friends—from high school, you know. I read it all last winter, thinking I could find some clues about where she might be. I gave it all to the detectives, but they brought it back, said it wasn’t any use to them, they already talked to everyone.”

Alice stared at Mrs. Swindal, wondering, maybe, what the woman had read, whether Mary Rae had written about the abortion the Milton girls had mentioned that day at Anne’s, or other things that might have shocked Mrs. Swindal about her daughter, about all of them. But the woman seemed calm. Medicated.