Hanging by a Thread (26 page)

Open.

Inside he shut the door behind us, very carefully. The kitchen was dim, the blinds over the sink lowered, blocking out natural light. An African violet sat on the windowsill, along with bottles of prescription medication and a china figurine of a boy in a baseball uniform taking a swing. A pot of cooking utensils shared counter space with a set of canisters and an empty drying rack: no evidence of a recent meal. A newspaper lay unopened on the kitchen table.

The house, as carefully maintained as it was, felt sad. I knew I was probably projecting my own feelings, but as I looked around the sparse living room beyond the kitchen, the drapes shut tight so that only a few bars of sun slanted across the sofas and the entertainment center, I got the feeling that the people who lived here weren’t really living anymore. That they were just marking time, going to work and coming home and getting up to try to get through another day. It wasn’t like Mrs. Stavros’s home, where everything would have disintegrated even more if she didn’t have friends or family checking in on her, where grief and longing were as dense as perfume in the air. Here, it seemed as though Mr. and Mrs. Granger were just going through the motions.

And then I saw the pictures.

I’d missed them at first because it was so dark in the house, but as my eyes adjusted to the dimness I saw that every frame on the wall, the shelves, the coffee tables, the entertainment center—every one of them held photos of a boy, from infancy to age ten. Dillon. There had to be a couple dozen of them, some of them studio shots in nice
frames, many more baseball portraits and team photos. Candid shots covered the refrigerator and were tucked into the corners of cabinets.

And there—in plain black frames lining the hallway—were the newspaper articles. “Local Boy Lost to Cliffs Accident.” “Seacliff Road’s Deadly Twist Takes Another.” “Winston Mourns One Lost Too Soon.”

Two of the three articles featured the same picture—Dillon, laughing, in his baseball uniform—and the third showed Mr. and Mrs. Granger lighting a candle at a remembrance service. Mrs. Granger looked surprisingly young and pretty, despite the terrible grief in her eyes. She had attractive features, thick brown hair down past her shoulders, and her husband—his face completely blank, as though he were feeling nothing at all—stood slightly to the side.

“It’s like a tomb in here,” Jack said softly, coming up behind me.

“Let’s find their room.” I led Jack down the hall past a formal living room, where the only decorations were pictures of Dillon and a signed baseball in an acrylic display case, arranged around a crystal candy dish. We passed a bathroom that smelled like bleach, and a bedroom I assumed was meant for guests, with its bare, plain furniture and bed made up with extra pillows and a folded throw.

Jack opened a door that had been left closed and I knew immediately that it was Dillon’s room. Everything was as it must have been the day he died—there were baseball cleats on the floor along with a wadded pair of slider pants. Textbooks and papers littered his desk. The bed had been made,
a stuffed lion with a loopy yarn mane sitting on top of the pillow.

If the rest of the house was sad, this room was downright haunting. It was like the shadow of Dillon was still here in every corner, and of course that must have been why his parents kept the room like this. I wondered if Mrs. Granger came in here and just stood in the middle of the room, not touching anything, remembering the many times she had tucked him in at night, toweled him off from a bath, helped him pick up his toys, read him a book. I wondered if the room would still be like this next month, next year.

I turned away. “I’ll be down the hall,” I said.

“Okay. I’m going to look around in here.”

The Grangers’ master bedroom was as bland as the rest of the house, with beige carpet and drapes and bed linens. A man’s cargo shorts and polo shirt were draped over an armchair, and I guessed that Mr. Granger changed into casual clothes when he came home from work, leaving them on the chair when he went to bed. I thought of how angry he always seemed, and about the man he put in the hospital, and wondered if he took his anger out on Mrs. Granger too, maybe even here in this soulless room.

There were so many emotions in my head already, and I knew that I had to clear my mind if I was going to be able to do what I came here for. Enough procrastinating. I went to the closet—it was a large walk-in space separated down the middle into his and hers—and stripped off my gloves, stuffing them into my pocket, since I could only
read clothes when I touched them with my bare skin. I started with the golf shirts in a neat row on the top, reaching for a gray one.

Holding the fabric lightly between my fingertips, I closed my eyes. I concentrated on opening myself to Mr. Granger’s memories, but there was nothing. I moved slowly down the closet bar through the rest of his shirts, gently touching them and letting them fall back in place, but they were nothing but ordinary cotton and synthetic fabric.

I resented being here, resented the vision that had seized me when I touched the denim jacket, resented its insistence that I find out what happened. It wasn’t a job I had asked for. It wasn’t one I was well qualified for. I had never even met Amanda—but now I felt like I was connected to her, like she had chosen me.

At some point I had gone through all the shirts and moved on to the pants and shorts. None of this was what I needed. There were no visions at all. Whatever Mr. Granger had worn when he punched the dad from the other team, or threatened the referees and got himself ejected from games, he no longer owned. And if he’d gotten rid of all the clothes Amanda had worn, why would he keep what he was wearing? If he had any sense at all he would have disposed of those first, in case there was some sort of evidence on them. I didn’t know anything about forensics besides what I saw on TV, but they were always finding a fiber or a hair or something and solving crimes with them. Odds were that Mr. Granger was smart enough to throw the clothes away.

“Anything?” It was Jack, standing in the entry to the closet.

“No … not yet. Listen, I’m going to see if he’s got anything in the guest bedroom closet. Can you go through the dresser drawers in here and see if there are any T-shirts, I don’t know, maybe something that looks a little older?”

Jack put his hand on my shoulder as I passed, turning me toward him; I looked into his eyes and knew he was worried about me.

“Are you doing all right?” he asked softly.

I forced a smile. “Yes, fine. There’s nothing here. It’s just clothes.”

Jack nodded and let me go. I hadn’t told him the entire truth—that even without the visions, the experience of being in the Grangers’ home was difficult. Even if I was imagining the emotions that seemed to weigh down the sad rooms, my imagination was powerful and my feelings real.

In the hall I had a new thought—
What about the coat closet?
The weather along the coast could be chilly even in the middle of summer. Especially at night. The locals rarely went anywhere without a windbreaker or jacket, and everyone loved to make fun of the tourists shivering outside the Frosty Top on cool summer nights, eating their ice cream with goose bumps covering their arms.

The coat closet was jammed, and I reached for the hangers, meaning to push all the garments to one side so I could go through them one by one. But as my fingers brushed against the different fabrics, I was suddenly hit by a ferocious, body-slamming jolt.

It was like with Amanda’s jacket, except … sharper, somehow, and bitter. As my hand roved back, settling on the coat that had provoked me, it was bitterness that filled my mind, my gut, my senses. It was the taste in my mouth, like poison, like … vengeance.

And I knew I’d found the one when my fingers brushed against slick, vinyl-coated fabric that flamed with energy. Carefully I lifted the hanger from the rack, not touching the fabric, my heart pounding. It was a knee-length raincoat, constructed from a cotton or polyester blend that had been coated to make it waterproof. It was red, with a stitched-on belt and big silver-tone buttons, and it had a bit of flare below the waist. A nice coat, one that would have cost more because of the details but that was timeless, the sort of thing my mom would buy if it came in a boring gray.

I took a deep breath and grabbed two fistfuls of red fabric.

Rage
. My head split with it, my face burned with it; my fingers were clutched so tight my knuckles hurt. I was a thing of fury, my senses drowning with an anger that filled every cell of my being.

I could barely breathe, and I tried to let go of the fabric for a moment so I could catch my breath, collect myself before trying again. Instead, the coat seemed to clutch me tighter … and the vision tumbled into my mind.

Hair. Bright, glossy, reflecting … Or it was the moon? Amanda’s hair in the moonlight, tangled but still beautiful, dragging on the ground. I was dragging her. And oh, God, she
was heavy, but it wouldn’t be much longer, would it? Just a little farther. Just a little farther … rough, uneven earth. No path, just the dirt under my shoes. White shoes. Keds, with laces neatly tied. Amanda’s face … Dear God, what had happened to her face? One half looked like her picture, but the other half looked like—

Blood on my jeans. Blood on my Keds
.

Blood under my fingernails
.

Her face bloody, her cheekbone broken, I can see the bone protruding. Her mouth torn. Rage, I want to feel it again, crashing heavy down on that pretty face, that face that didn’t look where she was going, that face that killed my baby
.

Heaving. Breathing hard. Dragging. But there. There, finally, we are at the edge. The cinderblocks are there. Four of them … so heavy, so heavy, carrying them one by one, the edges ground into my chest, the soft skin on the underside of my wrists. My blood mixing with hers. Sweat is pouring down my forehead but the air is cold on my face
.

The car up on the dirt tracks. The weeds flattened, can’t help that. The edge of the pond lapping against the crusted dirt, like it took bites out of the shore. Pretty at night, silvery, shiny, but during the day it’s the dirt brown of every farm pond. Flat and still. No one would want to wade in this pond. No one would swim here. The skiff upside down on the dirt hasn’t been used in many months, maybe years. I’ll put it back where I found it. A few days of dust blowing will leave a coat of grit on its surface, no one will know about its journey tonight
.

There. Drop her arms. They make a smacking sound on the plastic tarp I’ve used to drag her, the one that kept the blood out
of my car. Her mouth is open. I use my foot to push her jaw shut, but not too hard. Into the skiff, dragging it into the water. Just a little, don’t want her getting any ideas, floating away without me. There’s the rope. Bristly. It hurts my scratched-up wrists but that’s okay, this will just take … Tying, tying, pulling tight, the skiff rocks when I drop the blocks in
.

Rest? No, I can’t. I wipe my forehead on my coat sleeve, gulping air. Push off. One oar … Should there be two? Is it lost in the bottom of the pond, well, soon it will have company. How far out: at first I think the middle of the pond but I am very tired now, just a little farther … I put the oar on the floor of the skiff as I pick up one of the blocks and dump it in the water. Her arm makes a cracking sound. I get the second block in and she is perched on the edge of the skiff now as though she is hugging it, holding on, and for a minute it’s like she doesn’t want to go and I feel sad for her. But then I think about what she did to my baby, my angel, and the other blocks seem to weigh a lot less. Splash. Splash. Gone
.

T
HE FABRIC FELL FROM MY CLUTCHED
fists, my fingers aching as I flexed them open. Had I blacked out? I was breathing hard, and the sweat on my face was real. I was leaning against the coat closet’s doorjamb and it was cutting into the skin of my shoulder. The red sleeve had fallen back against the coat, which had slipped partway off the hanger. I did not want to touch it again. I did not want to touch it
ever
again. I heard a sound and realized it was me saying something like “Oh God oh God,” and I swallowed, backing up, and ran right into something.

Someone. They stumbled from the impact and I thought,
Please please be Jack
, but I somehow knew it wasn’t. As she wrapped her arm around my neck I wondered how long she’d been watching me.

“I told her to be careful,” Mrs. Granger hissed against my ear. “I told her I’d be watching her.”

Her breath smelled like coffee and cinnamon gum, and she was surprisingly strong, or maybe it just seemed that
way because the vision had left me weak and shaky. This was Amanda’s killer, I knew it for certain now, and even though part of me knew that I was in terrible, terrible trouble, there was another small part that was at peace for the first time since I had opened the box and touched the denim jacket.

But I hadn’t been meant simply to find out the truth: I needed to stop Amanda’s killer from hurting Rachel. I twisted as hard as I could, and was rewarded with a sharp pain in my side.

“Don’t you dare,” Mrs. Granger said, and I saw the knife in her hand. “I’m not going to kill you on my nice carpet. Isn’t this convenient, me coming home just now, today of all days? Do you want to know where I killed Amanda? Right there, in my kitchen. I was ready for her. She didn’t even notice. I called her and told her I wanted to talk to her, and that evil girl was so hungry for forgiveness she was here practically before I hung up the phone.”

“Please,” I managed, my teeth chattering with fear. It was incredibly eerie to hear the hateful words coming from the woman who’d been so kind to me when she stood on my front porch, who’d greeted us so warmly at her son’s memorial.

Where is Jack? Shouldn’t he be finished in the other room by now?

Mrs. Granger pulled her arm tighter against my neck and I started to choke. Ordinarily I would have been a match for her, but I was shaking too hard, my arms and legs
rubbery and twitching with the prickly sensation I sometimes felt after a vision.