Good Girls (22 page)

Rebecca closed her eyes and thought of Jess's face: those eyes, clear blue as lake ice, always dry but rimmed in red. Then Rebecca thought of the photograph from the drawer, the smiles on the faces of both of those girls and the eyes on the dark-haired one, which had struck her so forcefully because they were so familiar. They weren't Jess's eyes. Not quite, though close. They were more like …

Mouth opening, Rebecca turned back toward the kitchen, the child in there, who stopped squawking the second she looked at him. With a grunt, she shut down her thoughts and returned to her duties. She draped a dry noodle across Eddie's high-chair tray and another across his forehead, so that he laughed and tugged it free of his face and split it in his fingers. She dumped sauce over the spaghetti on a plate, stirred it, poured a full glass of the disgusting sweet tea both Benny and Jess drank by the vat, and put glass and plate on the tray Jess had left waiting on the counter. Donning the baby sling Jess had left draped over the sink, she dropped Eddie into it, grabbed the tray, and headed back across the living room, past that photograph she'd left faceup on the couch. There they were, those mermaid-girls, staring up from their years-ago beach into the dead air of this house.
I have understood nothing,
Rebecca was thinking as she ascended the stairs.
About anyone
.
Ever
.

But she was learning. Finally. Today, alone, she'd learned more than she ever wanted to know, perhaps, about Jack and Joel, Amanda and Jess, Eddie and Kaylene, maybe even herself. The new knowledge felt hot inside her, rising in her ribs, as though her ribs were electric-burner rings she'd switched on at last. She was gulping for breath as she reached Benny's door. She knocked with her foot.

“Finally,” Benny said.

Nudging open the door with her shoulder, Rebecca edged into the bedroom, which was bare as the downstairs: an iron-frame bed with a drugstore reading lamp clipped to the headboard, an overhead lightbulb with no shade or fixture, a nightstand with three Raymond Chandler paperbacks piled on it. Right in the center of the bed—sideways, as usual, twisted up in the sheets, even though he couldn't really move his legs in their half casts—lay Benny, scowling the way he generally did when she came in with his food. His ropy shoulders sagged under his wifebeater. Prematurely white hair spilled out all over him like down from a ripped-open pillow.

“Hi, Benny. Brought you something.” She turned so he could see the sling, and so Eddie could see him.

Eddie gurgled. Immediately, Benny's smile caught, flared, blazed out of his train wreck of a body. “Bring that here,” he said.

Laying the tray on the nightstand, Rebecca set the boy on Benny's lap as Benny straightened. Steadying Eddie with his better arm, Benny took the iced tea Rebecca offered and sipped it greedily.

“Need some sugar with that?” she said, and for once, he kind of laughed. But he looked only at Eddie.

“Hello, son,” he said.

But not as if this were
his
son,
Rebecca saw now. She'd always seen, but she hadn't comprehended until today. Yet another new thing she now knew.

Eddie slapped at Benny's injured arm. If that hurt, Benny didn't show it. Somehow, he smiled even brighter. “Oh, yeah?”

Eddie cackled, and Benny laughed again, their collective racket almost enough to cover the sigh from the hall.

There wasn't any doubt, this time. That was a sigh.

Whirling, Rebecca ducked out the door, staring toward the banister, the empty staircase, the narrow hallway. The whole space was maybe ten feet square, with Benny's room on this side of the landing and two more doors on the other side of the steps, to the bathroom and the linen closet. Except, how did she know that second door was a linen closet? She'd never once been in there, never seen Jess going in or coming out.

The sigh had come from there.

Hadn't it?

“Rebecca,” Benny called, “what are you doing? Come back in here, please.”

But Rebecca stayed put. As she watched, the door down there seemed to slip farther back into the shadows that always gathered at that end of the hall like smoke, or the ghost of smoke. She heard no further sound, but that last sigh had snagged on something in her brain, and now it kept sounding. Sighing.

Abruptly, she was across the mouth of the staircase. She heard the alarm in Benny's voice as he snapped, “Hey. Don't go down there.”

“Tell me you don't hear that,” Rebecca snapped back, moving straight to the shut door, stopping outside it with her right shoulder and leg in light and the rest of her in shadow.

“Rebecca,
stop.
”

She twisted the knob and opened the door, which swung back into darkness. As her eyes adjusted, Rebecca made out a window on the far wall with a blackout shade, pulled all the way down. On the low ceiling, she could just see some sort of circular light fixture with no bulb in it. There was nothing else whatsoever in the room.

So what?
That was hardly surprising, given the Spartan nature of the rest of Jess's décor. Rebecca almost turned away, then moved forward instead, straight into the middle of the room. The darkness hadn't really shrunk back, that was just her eyes adjusting further. It wasn't holding its breath, either, or freezing on the walls like a watched spider.

Nope. This was just darkness, plain old emptiness, no matter how long she stood in it.

Why was she still standing in it, then?
She just was, and that's why this time, when the sigh came, she heard it loud and clear. It wasn't just a sigh, either. There was a word in it, stretched all out of shape, barely recognizable as language, except that it was.

Not only that, but Rebecca had heard it before, though she couldn't place where. Not yet.

“Colllldddd,”
it said. Right above her.

Rebecca's head flew back on her neck, and she finally saw the outline, unmistakable now that her eyes had accustomed themselves, carved into the flaking paint up there: a drop-down door. To an attic, no doubt. There was even a stub of rope to pull it open, but that had been clipped off and was just out of her reach. Retreating across the hall to the bathroom, she grabbed the stepstool she'd always seen tucked behind the door, there, without ever wondering what it was for.

Benny was shouting, now. “Goddammit, Rebecca! Rebecc—hold on, Eddie, wait—Rebecca,
stop.
”

But she didn't stop. She marched the stepstool into the dark room, planted it under the drop-down door, climbed up, and put her hand on the string.

Only then, and just for one moment, she did pause. She wasn't waiting so much as processing, making sure.

She was sure. Whatever she'd always heard in this house, it was up there. Not only that, but she now realized where she'd heard that voice before. That icy, stretched-out, chopped-up, alien murmur. In truth she'd been hearing it repeatedly, all day long. She'd heard it in Amanda's kitchen, in the Halfmoon House yard, in the woods. Anywhere Joel went with his Bluetooth speaker.

Expecting resistance, she yanked hard on the drop-down cord, but the door seemed to leap from its casing, flakes of plaster flying around it, the folded-up ladder on its other side almost cutting Rebecca in half as it plunged downward. She caught just enough of it with her hand and shoulder to keep it from driving her off the stool. Then she half-stepped, half-staggered down, the stool clattering away as she stabilized herself, eased the ladder to the floor, and stared up.

There was no blackness up there, just yellow, ordinary, electric light. It wasn't even flickering.

“Rebecca, goddammit,
get out of there
!” Benny yelled.

But Rebecca went right on staring at the hole in the ceiling. “Hello?” she called, and waited, and waited some more. Whoever was up there was holding still, maybe even holding his or her breath, as though that person, too, were making sure.

Then came rustling. Person-in-bedsheets rustling. And that was followed by a click, and the chopped-up voice stuttering to life once more.

“Hear you … KNOCK … can't come in…”

“Oh, I'm coming in,” Rebecca said.

Up she went.

 

17

Much to her surprise, by the time Kaylene finished her shift at Healing Together Women's Sanctuary, she actually felt a whole lot better. Despite her stabbing hangover headache, her epic fail of a pass at Jack, and the fact that she'd never even gotten her eyes closed this morning, let alone slept—because every time she lowered her lids, she saw the Sombrero-Man, tasted his dead-rat-and-whiskey breath, felt his fingers around her windpipe, the cold of them as dangerous as the pressure they exerted—today had proved weirdly successful. Kelly Kandace, who until this afternoon had taken every single meal since her arrival at Healing Together in her room, and removed her bathrobe only to layer still more rumpled, filthy sweatshirts atop her bruised body, had actually let Kaylene fold her laundry. She'd still eaten alone, but then she'd come out to the Common Room to join the other two ladies to whom Kaylene had been assigned as companion, laundry folder, checkbook balancer, conversation initiator, and cry-shoulder. Two hours later, Kaylene had left them all sitting together on the paisley Common Room couch alongside her boss, Mrs. Groch, each of the four of them clutching Sanctuary-owned iPads, failing epically and profanely at Butterfly Gauntlet, to which Kaylene had just introduced them.

“I warned you,” Kaylene called over her shoulder as she made her way down the hall toward the front door.

“Fuck you, Kaylene,
damn it,
” Mrs. Groch snarled, as yet another of her digital butterflies caught a windshield and splattered across her screen.

“A game worse than men,” Kaylene said.

“Worse than men,” muttered Kelly Kandace, and one of the other ladies laughed a furious, frustrated Butterfly Gauntlet–laugh.

Then Kaylene was out in the sweet summer twilight, the sinking sun a streak of too-bright gold across Halfmoon Lake, the trees and everything that lived in them awakening in what passed for a breeze. Somewhere across the water, over by Halfmoon House, a single loon let loose. Kaylene winced, felt her head throb, whispered, “Ssh,” as if that would shut that wild thing up. She was at the end of the drive, stepping onto the sidewalk, when she stopped, turned around, and stared at the white, shingled triplex that housed Healing Together. She put a hand up to her neck, felt the ring of cold the Sombrero-Man had left there, although she couldn't quite reach or locate the exact spot. Somehow, he'd gotten that cold
inside
her.

Dazed, she gazed at the
Sanctuary
sign over the door, with its crudely painted hands clasped around an even cruder candle. Only then did the thought finally come to her:

Holy shit
.
I'm one of you. I am a battered woman. Assaulted woman, anyway.

How strange, given everything she did with her time, that the idea that such a thing could happen in her own life had literally never occurred to her. She was Kaylene, mighty daughter of Laughing Dad on Skis and Mom of Perpetual Warm Bao and Sunday Crosswords, A− student without even trying, two-time Southwestern New England Dig Dug Champion, founding member of Jack and the 'Lenes, future nonprofit director of Something Useful, Human Curling magician. The fact that she was also, now, a
victim
seemed ridiculous. Impossible. Unreal. Infuriating.

Rat-breath, bad-hat fuckball
.
Whistling weirdo, who'd
kissed
Jack. Who'd held Jack's eyes, reached up to her throat, and …

No. Nope. She stood her ground, made herself stare at the house where she worked, the lake where she swam, the sidewalks she
owned,
as though together they formed a mandala. Her personal mandala.

No. Not me. Not here. Not us.

Jesus Christ, the police. Why hadn't any of them called the police?

Partly, she hadn't called them because even now, none of it made any sense. Where had the whistling weirdo even come from? Where had he gone? What, exactly, had he done or been trying to do? Strangle her? Sort of? Probably, yes.
Intentionally?
Yes, definitely, but to kill her? He could easily have done that. But he hadn't. So he'd meant to …
tease
her?

The only thing Kaylene was completely sure of was that he'd kissed Jack. And of course, he wasn't the only one who'd done that.

“Fuck,” she muttered. A shiver kicked up and fluttered over her, and not just her: the whole landscape rippled, especially the edge of the woods, as though all the wood rats in one of those astounding wood-rat pueblos in there had erupted from their holes at exactly the same time. As though something in there had rousted them.

Kaylene squinted into the gloom. She saw branches, branch shadows, ripples of movement already going still. Just her woods. The woods that lined her sidewalk. Hers, and Marlene's, and Jack's, and Rebecca's.

Rebecca.

“Fuck,”
she said again, stepping off the sidewalk toward the woods. She could cut through there, go by Halfmoon House and into town to that creepy house where Rebecca did her nannying, and have this out face-to-face. And by “have this out,” she meant throw her arms around Rebecca, squeeze hard, and somehow drag them both kicking and screaming and laughing all the way back to themselves.

Sounded like a plan.

She was maybe five steps from the break in the trees, the dirt path she'd strolled at least a thousand times since arriving in East Dunham three years ago, when the wind stirred again, galloping straight past her into the forest like a living thing, like something riding the wind more than wind itself. She literally
saw
it vanish into the wall of leaves.