The Clairvoyants(56)

She slid onto the couch between Alice and Lucie. Eventually other guests arrived—more Milton girls, more of Anne’s friends from school, one of my own professors, who asked me about work that semester and made a fuss over me, holding his wineglass and his cigarette. It felt strange to be socializing with them, and I noticed that William kept hidden away in Anne’s study. She’d lit a fire in there, too, and he and Geoff and the other men sat with brandy snifters, and cigars, discussing the hunt.

Before midnight, Anne flushed the men out of the study like the hares from the woods. After the usual fanfare—the uncorking and pouring of champagne, the countdown to midnight—she made another toast, and as I’d expected, she announced this to be her last year.

“The last year in this place, in this form,” she said.

None of the Milton girls protested. They raised their champagne flutes with solemn faces. We all sat in the living room, and most of the guests left. William was drunk, his cheeks flushed, and he leaned back in the couch cushions and nudged me with his shoulder.

“Martha wants to take a trip to the old Buffalo State Hospital,” he said.

I’d heard about the place from Charles Wu, who thought it might be a subject for my work. When I first mentioned it to William, he’d grown quiet.

“He’s in one of my classes,” William said. “Charles Wu.” He drew out the vowels in Charles’s name in a deprecating way.

As for my suggestion about visiting the place, William had said nothing, and I’d let it drop. Now he explained to the group at Anne’s that it was an old lunatic asylum, long closed down. “I used to see the place every day when I was in grad school, and always wondered about it. Tell them, Martha.”

I had no idea he had any knowledge of the place. “The main building is vacant,” I said. “It has been for years.”

“Urban spelunking,” he said. “We’ll sneak in and Martha can take some photos.”

Alice chimed in, drunk and merry. “I want to go!”

Randy agreed to drive whoever wanted to come along. Geoff said he’d rather not go.

“It sounds illegal,” he said.

“That’s the fun of it,” William said.

Lucie and Alice were already talking about the day. “We’ll bring the flasks,” Lucie said. “And a picnic lunch.”

I blamed Del’s subdued state on her earlier reaction to the dead rabbits, and I didn’t think anything of it. So what if I was suddenly, thanks to William, the instigator of a fabulous plan the Miltons were all rallying around?

That night I drank too much, refilling my wineglass so many times, I lost count. Everything became a bit of a blur—William helping me out to Geoff’s car, the cold of the car and the drive home, the stars overhead suddenly appearing and sliding around in the sky. I was lying in the backseat, and William was humming something, and my hand had fallen to the floor of the car. I felt among the bits of sawdust, and cellophane wrappers, a bit of cold metal. I put my fingers on it—a thin chain, and then the pendant, and I knew without having to see it that it was Mary Rae’s necklace. I balled it into my palm and put it in my coat pocket, and the car turned along the winding roads, William humming to some inaudible music, the Christmas lights of scattered houses glinting on the car windows. I felt with certainty Mary Rae had lain there, in that backseat, though when and why and where she’d been taken remained unclear. The necklace told me nothing. Had it been William or Geoff in the driver’s seat? Had she been alive—drunk, like me, half-conscious? Or dead?





24




Just after New Year’s a driving storm settled in the valley and wouldn’t leave. Snow blown by a bitter wind rattled the windows in their frames. It filled in the patches that had once, fleetingly, revealed strawlike grass. This storm had the suffocating effect of trapping us indoors for two days, William pacing, pacing, with a pencil behind his ear, his thick gray socks collecting dust. His hair was a mass of curls he kept cut short, he’d always said, so he wouldn’t look mythological.

“Like those statues of Apollo, or Bacchus. Or those paintings of satyrs.”

Since finding the portfolio, since the sex in his office, I’d begun to think differently about him, maybe even to admit I really didn’t know him. Was this what happened to married couples? Did they glance over at their spouses one evening and see a stranger?

The whole first snowy day I kept under the blankets on the bed, watching an old movie on television. The snow blew past the window glass, masking the world white. Buried cars lined the street, their forms hulking and misshapen. It grew dark quickly, and every so often we’d hear the snowplows, or a patrolling police car, the chains on its tires a soft clanking. When the power went out William paused his pacing in the sudden quiet. We lit two tapers in my grandmother’s sterling candlesticks, and he came over to the bed and slipped under the blankets. I felt myself tense with apprehension. He pressed his mouth to my shoulder, and then he kissed me, almost tentatively. I let him lift my shirt, allowed his mouth to roam over each of my breasts. He moved against me, his fingers groping to remove our clothes, and I remained a passive witness, letting him do these things, letting him think that nothing had changed. I assumed when he noticed I wasn’t participating he would stop, but strangely he did not. It was dark in the room, the candlelight eerie, and I was reminded of the light in one of his photographs—the shadows it left on the woman’s form—Alice, in that image. I pushed him away from me, my hands on his chest. He couldn’t understand at first. He leaned forward to kiss me, and I turned away. He grabbed my chin, his eyes dark beneath his brows.