The Clairvoyants(78)

“I have work,” he said, and he sat on the bottom step and put his boots on. I watched him, his dipped head, the white place on the back of his neck. He pulled on a jacket. “Maybe I’ll see you later,” he said, as they all had. I told them that they probably wouldn’t. I didn’t want to foster closeness, to become attached.

They all said the same thing when I asked about Mary Rae—when I worked my way around to mentioning her name. Sometimes I wondered if I was inviting a murderer into my bed, but each of them replied the same way.

“I would have married that girl,” they said. “But she was in love with someone else.”

Mary Rae had refused to have sex with any of the boys, and I could only think what a waste it had been for her not to. We’d both been virgins until William, but she’d lost her chance with anyone else.

Before the boys left I always provided the briefest of messages to them from their dead: “Your aunt Lila is so happy her tulips have come up” or “Your grandfather wants you to major in music.”

This boy, Frankie, hesitated, unsure whether to kiss me in front of Geoff. I walked him out onto the porch, and then he pulled out a wool scarf from the sweatshirt pocket and leaned forward and draped it around my neck.

“The old guy,” he said. “I’ve seen him around somewhere.”

The sun wasn’t yet up, and it was chilly. “Really? Where?”

The boy shrugged, but he seemed uneasy. “Mary Rae didn’t like him,” he said. “We saw him talking to a group of girls outside the Viking Lanes snack shop one afternoon. She wanted to avoid him.”

“Did she ever say why?” I tugged on the scarf and wrapped it around my hands.

But Frankie only shook his head, sadly. “No reason to worry about it now, huh?”

Mary Rae refused to appear under the elm when I had one of the boys with me.

Inside, Geoff stood at the foot of the stairs, as if he were waiting for the boy to go. “Another one?” he asked.

I held the scarf over my face and breathed in Frankie’s smell. I told Geoff that when the boys left, they always gave me something. I didn’t say the gift was prompted by an unexplained relief at the message I provided, at having the sex turn out to really mean nothing more. “You’re sweet,” they’d say. I’d have put on his undershirt, and when I began to remove it he’d tell me, No, keep it. Small things. One gave me his Saint Christopher’s medal on a tarnished chain. Another his L.L.Bean windbreaker.

“You’re lucky they didn’t give you anything else,” he said, his voice harsh.

I wasn’t sure why Geoff was angry with me. He never seemed the type. I attributed it to his feeling something for William. “Good old Will,” he would always say. Maybe he felt torn to choose sides, and even my abandonment wasn’t enough to sway him to mine.





31




I could have predicted it. In April, Anne called me and invited me over. “I’d like it to be just the two of us,” she said. “A little tête-à-tête.”

As far as I knew, Anne’s dinner parties had continued without me and William. Del would relay the menu she’d planned, but like our mother and her halfhearted invitations, I was never expected to attend. Anne had gotten word from Geoff, and probably resented my involvement with other men—especially if she’d heard, as I suspected she had through Randy and Del, that they were local boys. So I was leery. Anne always had some ulterior motive. She would want to know where William was. She would quiz me about how we left things, about what was said. I could tell her William’s ghost was keeping a vigil and watching the house. I might say Mary Rae was beneath the elm, warding him off, waiting for me to solve the mystery of her death. When Anne said she’d pick me up, I agreed.

Spring had begun to show itself—the elm’s buds were bright. Crocuses sprang from beneath the spot where Mary Rae stood. Other bulbs—jonquils, daffodils, tulips—came up in surprising places along the perimeter of the house in beds I hadn’t known existed. The yellow grass grew spongy and speckled with robins. William’s Triumph leaned against the back of the house. It had begun to rust, and weeds had grown through its wheels. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it, so I left it there.

I planned to bring William’s portfolio to Anne’s. According to Del, the Milton girls discussed the photographs when Anne wasn’t around, which led me to assume Anne knew nothing about them. I hesitated to be the one to show them to her. But I decided to pretend William had left them behind. I got dressed and slipped Mary Rae’s necklace into my pocket.

Anne arrived at five o’clock to pick me up. It was dark and a surprising spring snow was falling in the lamplight. Her car was an old Mercedes-Benz—a beautiful blue two-seater. As I got into the car Anne said that if the snow got too bad I could spend the night at her house, and just then I wanted nothing more than to be fed and tended to. She drove expertly along the whitening roads, downshifting on hills we might not make it over. I told her I liked her car, and she gave me a little, secret smile. I worried she thought I had designs on it—another item I wanted her to leave me after she died.

“It was my mother’s,” she said. “My father bought it for her in 1960 from the New York showroom. I shouldn’t be driving it in this weather, but it was spring, wasn’t it?”