The Clairvoyants(70)

The ice tapped against the metal roof. The wipers made their scraping noise.

“Remember the game we all used to play at the pool?” Del said.

We’d catch each other standing along the pool’s concrete rim, unaware, and push each other in.

“Have a nice fall,” Del said, her voice soft.

The surprise of it, the shock of the cold water, was thrilling. It was a great joke, and once it had happened to you, you were always suspicious. Always suspecting. It got so you had that tingling feeling all day, waiting for someone to trick you. It got so that if you were angry at someone, you could give them a shove and none would be the wiser.

“This wasn’t my fault,” I said.

I watched another tremor move through her, shaking her arms, her torso. “Something was off last night,” she said. “You sleeping like that. It didn’t make sense after you’d slept all day.” She sounded calm, but then she had probably been up all night, and that flatness in her voice was exhaustion. “The wine. He insisted on pouring yours. I couldn’t let him take you alone this morning.”

I felt my chest constrict and tighten. “You think he planned to hurt me?”

That was it—the easiest thing to accept. But I somehow doubted William had any sort of plan. I’d forced him to act when he wasn’t prepared, accused him of things and held on to evidence that might convince anyone—even Officer Paul—that he might be implicated in Mary Rae’s death. Del and I sat listening to the sleet, to the wipers grazing the melting windshield ice.

“This might be an efficient way to get rid of cheating husbands,” Del said. She slit her eyes at me. “He didn’t cheat with me. I don’t know where you got that. He did come to my apartment, but he was looking for his portfolio.”

Del had overheard our argument, my accusations.

“It was an accident,” I said.

“Maybe one of the other girls in his nudie photos,” Del said, tapping her nails on the steering wheel. “Maybe Jeanette.”

“You sound like you’re trying to throw blame on someone else to divert attention from yourself,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do it,” she said. “I didn’t even like him.”

“You made him a special cake,” I said.

“I did that to make you think I liked him,” Del said. “I was trying to be nice.”

We could go on and on and never arrive at the truth. I would simply have to choose to believe one thing over the other.

“Now that we’ve got that taken care of, I’m going to get us out of here,” Del said. “Unless you think we should wait to see if his spirit lights up the place.”

She put the car in drive and skidded out onto the road, into the middle of nowhere.

I looked behind me at the grounds, the stately trees, and the line of woods. I looked for the shape of him along the road, his figure in the headlights.

We drove through farmland spread for miles in either direction. Del fiddled with the radio, her hand shaking, and found a station playing Dixieland jazz, and we passed through a landscape distorted by the windshield ice—the wide open space, the few remaining outbuildings of an old farm, their gray, splintery wood darkened by the sleet, jutting like carcasses.

“There are bones of families out there,” I said. Spread under layers of soil, compacted in their separateness. The Dixieland band played its tinny hopefulness. We drove this way for a long time until we could see nothing of the land we passed through save an occasional kitchen light in a house set off the road. Then we reached an intersection, a small town, like Milton, with a gas station and a diner, and Del pulled into the diner’s parking lot. After David Pinney died we’d gone on, pretending he hadn’t. I could say we were murderers now. This didn’t happen to other people twice.

“We should eat something,” she said.

William would be hungry and cold in the asylum. Then I realized he would feel nothing, and that seemed even more oppressive.

The diner was in a wood-framed building with wide panes of steamed glass in front. A large exhaust fan spit out smoke from the fryer. Inside we stood in the warmth in our coats. A waitress told us to sit anywhere. She had on a rust-colored apron, black slacks, and a plain white T-shirt. The patrons spoke in loud voices, laughing, telling stories over their food. Del shrugged out of her coat.

“I want meat loaf,” she said.

We walked down the row of booths and picked one along the window. I took off my coat and slid into the booth across from her. From the menus, large plastic rectangles, comically large, Del ordered her meat loaf and I ordered a cheeseburger, French fries, coleslaw, an ice-cream soda.

“Remember the old Sea Shell Restaurant?” Del said.

It would be Del and Jane and me, and two or three of the summer boys, all of us wedged into the booth to eat greasy cheeseburgers and thick fries from plastic baskets. The time right before David Pinney died was solid and clear, but it was as if there were no memories after. The dead had begun to appear to me, their pitiful expressions reeking of lost love, and they erased any other memories that might have formed.

The waitress brought our food and we ate as if we hadn’t in days.

“I want to remember this,” I said. “This after part.”

Del put a forkful of meat loaf in her mouth and chewed. “You will.”