The Storm King(84)

Over the woman’s shoulder, a piece of paper was taped to the cinder block wall.

Mama was supposed to kill us, but she didn’t.

Mama was supposed to kill us, but she couldn’t.

Mama was supposed to kill us, and she should have.



The woman followed Nate’s gaze to the odd note and snatched it off the wall with the speed of a cracking whip. She crumpled it into a ball and glared at Nate. “Get out, or I’ll call the police.”

Nate squared his shoulders. The basement stank of fear, and it wasn’t his. He recognized something familiar in the woman’s face. Something beyond the knotted hair and leather countenance.

“Do I know you?”

The woman snorted. She trudged past him to close the exterior hatch. With Medea banished, the tight space became close and quiet.

The woman’s presence tugged at something deep inside the archives of his mind. He flipped through faces in his head. She wasn’t a teacher or a store owner or the grandmother of a childhood friend. “How do I know you?”

“Who says you do?”

“You knew me well enough to yell at me last night outside the Empire.” Even then, Nate had sensed something when he’d looked at her.

“Kids never saw me. Even when I wanted them to. And I wasn’t ever there except after hours.” She picked at the floor, collecting the black-red envelopes and tsking at their every crease and blemish. “You did your clubs—yearbook and newspaper and model UN and what have you—but stopped with the sports after what happened to your arm. Never saw me save a half dozen times in four years. Even then you didn’t see me. Didn’t see any of us, I bet. The invisible people.”

“You were a janitor at the high school.”

The woman shot upright in shock, as if she’d forgotten that she’d been speaking aloud. She muttered something Nate didn’t catch and continued her gathering.

“What’s your name?”

“Names, names. Everyone asks for names. It isn’t what you’re called that matters, it’s what you do that counts. Bea told me that herself.”



“?‘Bea’?” Now Nate was the surprised one. “Beatrice McHale? My grandmother?”

The woman looked at him, and the folds of her face moved in a way that was impossible to read.

“Bea’s a strong woman. Someone that strong can change the world. You could’ve changed the world, too, boy. And you have, haven’t you? But for better or worse?”

“I’m an oncologic surgeon,” Nate said. He didn’t understand why this woman was talking about his grandmother any more than he understood this impulse to justify himself. “I help people every day.”

“You didn’t always,” the woman said. “One bad thing grows upon another, doesn’t it? How much pain did you plant those years ago? What will the harvest be?”

Nate remembered how the lady had berated him the night before. “What did you mean when you told me that I ruined everything?”

“Now that I see your eyes, I wonder about you all over again. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Maybe it really is never too late to be good.”

“What’s your name?” he asked again.

“Been called all sorts of things. But the best name I’ve had is May. One of the two prettiest months.” Her lips twinged into a smile that might once have been sweet.

“?‘May.’?” The woman was so unkempt that it was hard to narrow her age. She might have been a sun-damaged sixty or a miraculously fit ninety. But the black-red envelopes around the room were the same ones the Night Ship had used to mail their invitations. “Like May and June. The Night Ship Girls. Are you telling me that you’re Just June’s sister?” To someone from the Lake, meeting Just June’s sister was like stumbling upon a unicorn.

There was something else in the woman’s smile now, and it helped Nate see the beauty hiding within her face.



“You’re supposed to be dead. In all the stories they say that—”

“?‘Stories.’?” The woman snorted again. “Here’s a town where even adults believe in fairy tales.”

Morton Strong, Just June, the Boy Who Fell. The Lake loved its myths. Nate knew from experience that you didn’t want to be a character in one of them.

“My whole life is made of stories.”

“But what kind of story?” She pointed to the far end of the basement. Her swim must have limbered her muscles, but her gait aged as they cooled. Her steps to the rear of the cellar were mincing.

The back wall was a mess of newspaper articles and photos and drawings. Here was the collage of obsessive insanity Nate had been prepared to find in the chief’s closet. The lair of a TV serial killer or the walls of a crime procedural situation room. Lines of red string branched in radiating webs that sprang from a single point, rippling across the walls like a cat’s cradle played among a nest of spiders.

The woman picked at the wind-thrown magazines and clothes while Nate inched closer to the point of origin to which all the strings and images could be traced.

The item in the center of the wall was so yellowed with age and so thickly covered with red string that he could barely make out the headline of the newspaper clipping.

SOLE SURVIVOR OF HEADLANDS ACCIDENT