The Invited(85)

She looked away, took in a breath, told herself to be calm. Just one more little white lie. “It didn’t work out. It was in rougher shape than the ad described.”

He looked at her quizzically. Could he tell she was lying?

When had it gotten so easy, lying to her husband? She would have never considered lying to him back in Connecticut. Back then, they’d told each other everything. It was only a few months ago, but it felt like lifetimes.

    She looked at him then, his full beard, his tired eyes, and thought how different this man was from the man she’d been married to back in Connecticut—how different everything was.

“I’m sorry, Nate. If I don’t find anything that’ll work soon, we’ll just go ahead and order the shingles you want from the home center.”

Nate nodded, still frowning at the mantel.

“Nate, can’t we just bring the mantel in, put it against the wall, and see how it looks?” she asked. “Please?”

“Fine,” he said, and she got that little ping of satisfaction she got when she’d won a round.

Nate had agreed it did look great in the house, done some figuring, and decided they could put the stovepipe behind the stove, go straight into the wall, and then run the chimney up through the pantry so the mantel would not be obscured. They’d laid the mantel out on a tarp and Helen had cleaned it up, used some lemon polish on it, rubbed at the scuffed and scratched places, trying to imagine all the mantel must have seen: the years of Christmases, birthdays, celebrations; the coming of television; the decline of the farm; the fights; the murder and suicide.



* * *



. . .

Now, tonight, the mantel seemed to shine, to almost glow, in the dark of the empty house.

But the house was not empty. Helen understood that.

She held perfectly still and waited, listening. She heard footsteps on the plywood subfloor, felt the air grow colder around her. Her skin prickled. Keeping her eyes fixed on the mantel, she stared without blinking until her eyes teared, until a figure moved into view, came to stand beside her. Helen raised her eyes slowly.

The woman was wearing jeans; her dark hair was cut in a bouncy bob, the front of her pink sweater soaked with dark red bloodstains. Helen could smell gunpowder and the rich iron scent of fresh blood.

This isn’t real, Helen thought. I’m dreaming it.

She closed her eyes tight, then opened them wide, and the woman was still there. Helen could see the box of nails Nate had left on the floor beside the mantel. And there was his hammer. There was an unused roll of fiberglass insulation.

    This was no dream.

“Where are the children?” the woman asked, looking around, eyes frantic. She seemed to be speaking loudly, shouting even, yet Helen could barely hear her; her words came out like a cicada buzz. Then she looked down at her front, reached a hand up to touch the bullet hole, and started to scream. It was the most anguished, high-pitched keening sound Helen had ever heard.

“Please,” Helen said, trying to raise her head but finding it too heavy. “It’s all right.”

But as soon as she spoke, the woman faded like a gust of smoke being blown by a sharp wind.

She was gone.

But the sound remained.

Outside, the screaming went on and on.

It was the same sound Helen had heard that first night. The sound Nate had insisted was a fisher or a fox.

Helen curled herself tight into a ball, put her hands over her ears, tried to silence the screams.





CHAPTER 27



Ann Whitcomb Gray





MAY 23, 1980

Miss Vera with her blue hair in a tight perm comes every Friday at three, asks me to read the tea leaves, the cards, to gaze into my scrying bowl and see what the future holds for her, to see if she has any messages from the beyond.

“What do you see, Ann?” she asks. “What do the spirits show you?”

I gaze into the black water of the bowl, concentrate, furrow my brow and let my eyes go glassy by not blinking.

“Is my darling Alan trying to reach us?” she asks.

“Oh yes,” I say, peering into the bowl as if Alan were a goldfish circling in the murky water. “He’s calling from the Great Beyond. He wants you to know how much he loves you and that he’s okay.”

I don’t really see any of this, of course, but I’ve learned to tell the ladies of Elsbury what they most want to hear. Especially the old, the lonely. Poor Miss Vera with her humped back, her swollen arthritic fingers. The diamond engagement ring and white gold wedding band that rattle around, loose now, clearly fitted for a plumper, younger finger. And though I don’t see any spirits of the present, I can clearly picture the past: Vera as a young woman on the altar, beautiful and happy with Alan by her side. He slips the ring on her finger, takes her in his arms and kisses her, and that kiss transcends time and space, fills the air in this room now, nearly sixty years later. The kiss that came before everything else: before four children, the oldest of whom would die in a car wreck; before Vera’s breast cancer, which she survived; and before Alan’s lung cancer, which he did not. Two packs a day for sixty years will get you in the end.

“He’s here now,” I say, gazing into the cut crystal bowl filled with water and black dye—a few drops of RIT poured from a bottle.