The Clairvoyants(94)

“Funny how easily girls are swayed when you tell them they’re beautiful,” Geoff said. “When you say there’s an artist who wants to use them as a subject.”

Being approached by a wild-haired, older man with a British accent might have seemed thrilling to the girls. He’d invited Del and me to the All Hallows’ Eve party, and Anne had immediately asked us to pose.

“Not for William?” I said.

Geoff had wood chips in his hair from working in his shop. I resisted the urge to brush them out. “Why no,” he said. “What makes you say that? I thought he was more of a landscape type?”

“Maybe,” I said. Mary Rae must have known the girls were being pawned off on William, talked into being part of his work, and she’d resented them.

“He left a lot behind,” Geoff said.

I hadn’t thought about how it would look—having all of William’s things in my apartment, and I cursed myself for not getting rid of everything sooner.

I stacked folders of his notes one on top of another. “Well, he never came by for them, so I’m getting rid of them,” I said.

“Will you go now, too?” Geoff slid down the door frame and sat half-in, half-out of my apartment.

“Yes, I guess.” He would need to know the date I was leaving so he could rent the place. I flipped my cigarette’s ash into the cup and took another drag. The smoke burned the back of my throat, but I liked the light-headedness the cigarette gave me. I felt almost happy, almost free.

Geoff leaned over and grabbed the teacup. “And what about your husband? No chance he’s coming back?”

“Do you think he’ll come back?”

Suzie lay patiently near Geoff’s apartment door. The cool spring air came in through the window screen, smelling of lilacs.

“I’ll give him a piece of my mind, if he does,” Geoff said.

I laughed and dropped an ash into a box of William’s sweaters, and before I could put it out, it singed the wool. I dumped the box and his battered camera fell from where I’d hidden it at the bottom, the film dangling out its broken back. Geoff slowly extinguished both of our cigarettes in the teacup. He bent down and picked the camera up, hefted it in his hands. “He must have gotten a new one?”

“He must have,” I said. I gathered the sweaters and began to refold them.

“He wouldn’t go anywhere without this,” Geoff said, fingering the film.

“He probably has a new favorite,” I said.

Geoff dropped the camera back onto the pile of sweaters. “It’s funny, though,” he said. “Can’t see him letting his film get spoiled.”

We both knelt over the box, and Geoff’s eyes seemed darker, almost sly.

“No,” I said. “You’re right. He was very fastidious about his film. But I was also surprised he seemed so eager to move on.”

Geoff pushed off the floor and stood, his joints cracking. “As if he just dropped the camera and kept running.”

“Maybe,” I said. I finished replacing the sweaters in the box. Geoff held his hand to me and pulled me up.

“It’s a mystery,” Geoff said. “When someone disappears without any explanation, it’s like a death, isn’t it?”

I agreed with him, uneasily. The cool breeze came through the open doorway from my apartment. Then Geoff said he had to head back to the shop, and he turned, wearily, toward the stairs. After he left I decided to walk to the campus to have lunch. I had signed up for classes for fall, but I wasn’t sure what I’d be doing then. The woman who’d helped me after the accident had contacted me about returning my clothes. I wanted to tell her to throw them away, but she’d sounded so kind on the phone, I’d agreed to stop by to pick them up.

I stepped out on the porch. William was across the street in his usual spot. He wore his beaver-skin hat, a dress shirt tucked into khaki pants. I stood on the porch, watching him, almost hoping I might make out his expression, and then he spun on his good leg and started off down the sidewalk. Rather than let him go, I crossed the street and went after him. It was a beautiful spring day—the dogwood blooming and shedding its petals on the ground, the air warm and filled with birdsong. I kept a steady pace behind him, but he turned toward campus and joined a great throng of students. It was so unlike the dead not to wait for me. Maybe he’d simply disappeared. Or maybe at some point he’d taken off his hat and ducked into one of the campus buildings. Either way, I couldn’t find him. My heart raced—not from exertion as much as from anxiety. I knew I didn’t want to catch him. I had nothing to say to him. I suppose I could have cleared my conscience and apologized. Ordered him to leave me alone. I had the strange feeling that I wasn’t being haunted but stalked. The missing items in my apartment, the feeling that someone had been there and gone through my bureau drawers—the dead had never taken anything from me before.

That afternoon, after I’d eaten and spent an hour or so in the lab, I returned home to discover my apartment nearly emptied of its contents—William’s boxes and the remaining furniture had disappeared, and only my belongings and my suitcase were left. I examined the stair treads and the muddy footprints. Geoff was at work, so I knocked on Professor Whitman’s door, but he, too, was out. That night I made a pallet on the floor, and I slept there and dreamed I lived in the encampment, working as the local clairvoyant. The place was shrouded in green growth, the tarps stretched in the sun smelling of wood smoke and melting snow, the creek rushing its banks. In the dream, I went to bed and little strung lights left spangles on the canvas like stars. But it was a fake, like a stage backdrop. In the morning I walked out of my tent to the mud, and the smell of rot and decomposition.