The Clairvoyants(48)

“I’m just going to go lie down,” she said now. “I get so tired lately.” She stood, and told us to let ourselves out after. Then she disappeared through a doorway, and we all eyed one another.

Del stood first. “Well, where’s her room?” she asked Alice.

Alice seemed unsure, her eyes filling with unshed tears, her nose red. “What are we doing?” she hissed. “This isn’t right.”

Randy had kicked his legs out in front of him and closed his eyes. He’d taken off his cowboy boots, and his sock was misshapen where his toes should have been.

“I like her idea of a nap,” he said, softly.

I sensed then that this visit was about something more than picking through Mary Rae’s hand-me-downs. “What is going on, Del?” I said.

She stood on the stairs, clinging to the banister. “We’re going to figure out what happened to her,” she said. “Alice says she kept journals. They’re hidden somewhere in her room.”

Alice’s face seemed drawn; she looked as exhausted as Mrs. Swindal. “I’m not sure about this,” she said.

“Alice said she was seeing someone,” Del said. “She wouldn’t tell anyone who it was.”

I rose from my chair. “Did you tell Officer Paul?”

Alice shook her head no. “Anne told us not to,” she said.

Del was resolute. “Come on,” she said, and she took Alice by the hand and pulled her up.

The three of us climbed the carpeted stairs, suddenly sober. Randy stayed below, like a lookout. Two doors were at the top of the stairs, and Alice opened the one on the left. Mary Rae’s room was dark. Alice flipped the switch on the wall, and we stepped inside, onto pink carpet, the room decorated with French provincial–style furniture, the bed neat with a flowered quilt. It might have been any high school girl’s room from a movie—she’d never redecorated when she left high school, and had clearly been planning to leave her mother’s house, to move on. I’d read that her cell phone had never been found, that her car had been left in the Viking Lanes lot. How had she spent her evenings bartending in the Viking Lanes, and returned here, to this childish room—Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Caddie Woodlawn, the shelves of girlish collections that Del and I had abhorred—jewelry, candles of all varieties in glass jars, little troll dolls with different colored hair and outfits, their ugly faces and glass eyes staring down at us?

Alice began pulling out bureau drawers, all of them emptied already by Mary Rae’s mother, who’d left the folded clothes in careful piles on the bed. Del felt under the mattress and checked beneath the carpet, as if she might find a loose board to pry up.

“This is a waste,” Alice said. “Everything’s been gone through.”

She opened the closet door, tugged a string, and a light came on.

There on the closet floor was a built-in wooden shelf, a platform for shoes, maybe, and I went to it and pulled the wood up and revealed a hidden niche. Alice rushed over, and from within this hiding place she pulled a journal—black faux leather, the pages gilt. She reached in again, and pulled out more, years of journals, the sort you’d see on the shelves of a bookstore—the covers brightly colored, embossed, decorated with flowers. She held the stack of books out to Del, who took them in her two hands and set them on the bed of clothes.

“Very clever,” Del said, eyeing me.

“Well,” I said. Neither Del nor I kept journals—we’d read Leanne’s and Sarah’s, and didn’t want anyone knowing our business. But I did have things I kept hidden in our bedroom in the old house, and they were beneath a similar built-in shelf. I almost pitied Mary Rae for this invasion of privacy. Even though she was gone, it still felt wrong. “You’ve got a lot of reading to do.”

“We’re supposed to bring them to Anne,” Alice said. She glanced almost longingly at the stack of journals.

“Let’s go,” Del whispered, and I reminded them that they were supposed to be picking out clothes, so they both sifted through and chose a sweater each, and then we went downstairs to awaken Randy on the bench.

Mrs. Swindal never reappeared. She’d probably taken a pill and was out for the night. I said we should pick up our cups, but Del and Alice were nearly out the door, Del grabbing the storm door before it could close all the way, letting the cold rush in.

“Just make it snappy,” she said.

I brought the coffee cups into the kitchen and discovered the Formica counters and the small kitchen table covered with casseroles—foil spread beneath each lid. The smell in the kitchen was of food slowly going bad—shepherd’s pie and lasagna and beef stew spoiling in their containers, leaving circles of condensation beneath them. I set the cups in the sink, and I stood in the kitchen, waiting for Mary Rae. Surely she would be here in her old house, in the room where she once opened cabinets to retrieve a cup or the ingredients for a cake recipe, where certainly she had once sat at the little table with her mother having a quiet dinner. There was a small glass ball hung on the end of the light pull over the sink, and I touched it, and the Silver Streak appeared to me, the fields around it filled with Queen Anne’s lace, and Mary Rae with a man whose back was familiar to me—broad and pale, the mole I saw every morning when he emerged from the shower—my husband’s.