Wildwood Road (22 page)

Now he posed her so that he could take a photograph of her with the church in the background.

“I have a surprise for you,” he said from behind the camera.

“Oooh. I like surprises.”

From his inside coat pocket he withdrew a pair of tickets and held them out for her. Jillian snatched them from his hand, gazed at them, and her eyes widened.

“Oh, my God, Michael. I can't believe you did this. They were so expensive.”

“It's our honeymoon, Jilly. We're allowed to splurge a bit.”

The tickets were for
La Traviata
at the Vienna Opera House. Neither one of them had ever been to an opera before.

“Oh, shit. I don't have anything to wear. What am I supposed to do?”

Michael laughed. “Wear blue jeans, sweetie. You're an American. They don't expect much from us.”

And that's what they did.

They weren't the only ones at the opera house dressed down, but they were in the minority. Most of the people who attended
La Traviata
at the Staatsoper that night were in elegant gowns and tailored suits. As he and Jillian went up the grand staircase in that bastion of class and style, Michael found a kind of freedom in being there in a sweater and blue jeans. In a way he felt like a man who had just stepped back in time, as if he and Jillian had just transported themselves to an era when the arts were preserved and presented in a setting of opulence and wealth, kept for the nobility and the upper classes as though only they could appreciate it.

They sat in their box and watched the opera. Though he did not understand a word of Italian, the entire evening was a thing of beauty. He relished the French Renaissance style of the architecture. He watched the other people in their boxes and wondered what the dreams and lives had been of the people who had sat in those boxes a hundred years before.

When the opera was over it was quite late. They walked back along Kärntnerstrasse and found it transformed. There were still lights on, but the cobblestoned street was deserted, the shops closed. Only a handful of other people passed them, most of those also returning from the opera. At the end of the street they found themselves in the vast plaza in front of the cathedral, alone.

The moon hung full and storybook bright above the cathedral and bells rang the lateness of the hour. In the center of that courtyard, in the midnight shadow of the cathedral tower, Michael Dansky took the hand of his wife and together they waltzed in the moonlight.

They laughed a moment, but then the laughter died and their smiles faded, and they waltzed in perfect rhythm and with utter sincerity. In that single moment they knew that their suspicions had been correct all along.

They were meant for each other.

H
ALF A MILE AFTER
M
ICHAEL
had collected himself enough to drive away from the strip mall, he was struck by the realization of what he was returning to. Though it had been driven from his mind for a time—the only tiny mercy in a day that had completely unraveled all that remained of his faith in the world—now the memory of Jillian’s behavior the night before returned to him. This sweet woman, with whom he had waltzed in the cathedral square in Vienna, had been corrupted.

His mind was fraught with confusion. The memories that he had . . . tasted. What a strange word, and yet it felt correct. He had tasted some of Jillian's memories. That husk of a woman had forced a connection of flesh and mind. It had violated him to use him, to communicate, to warn him again or frighten him away. But his desperate fear for Jillian, and his anger, his hatred of them, had done something. Just as the thing had tapped in to his mind, he had tapped in to hers. He was sure of it.

Michael had felt its mind, and a terrible dark void inside, a black, yawning hunger, and then those memories had come spilling out of her. Memories Jillian had lost. He had experienced them firsthand, flooding into him as though they were his own memories and he was only now recalling them. Still they lingered in his mind. Though they were only a few fragments of what she had lost, it tore him open inside to feel so intimately the joy of Jillian's childhood.

How?
That was the word that haunted him now. What was wrong with Jillian wasn't brain damage. Somehow those things had stolen all of the memories of her innocent years. They had attacked her like rabid dogs, and the result was the absolute bitch she had become. Without the core of hope and pure happiness those memories provided, all that was left was bitter cynicism.

A handful of those memories had been in the mind of that soulless husk that had thrust her fingers into his flesh, and maybe it was just Michael's yearning for Jillian to be returned to herself . . . but some of those memories had spilled into him.

And then . . . others. Ancient memories. Dark and terrifying.
Moloch,
he thought. He had to make sense of those images, those memories. If he could understand what these husks really were, he might be able to help Jilly, to restore what had been stolen from her.

If there was any of it left.

He slammed on the brakes and swerved to the side of the road. A truck following too closely behind laid on the horn and his car shook as it thundered by.

What about the girl? Or the things you've been smelling and hearing?
He had no answers to those questions. Not yet. But already he was beginning to postulate. He had first caught those scents when he had entered that house the night he brought Scooter home. When Scooter was near, he had smelled some of them again. In the car, when he had first seen those misshapen women on the side of the road, he had smelled them again. The lost girl had been nowhere in sight, but now he wondered if she might have been there after all, with him, yet invisible to him. Trying to get to him, to make him see, to communicate.

She had touched his dreams. Had tried to speak to him when she manifested in his office or his bedroom. The letters in grease on the popcorn bag. He had promised to find her, had tried to help her, and maybe all along she had been trying to get back to him, to help him find her.

He didn't really understand how any of it was possible, or what it meant. All of his guesswork was not answering any questions. Not really. But it would lead him to answers, of that he was confident.

Another question occurred to him and his brow furrowed.
Why not me?
Rage and grief burned inside him. He had been the one searching for Scooter, for Susan Barnes, and yet they had gotten to him not by hollowing out his own childhood, but by stealing Jillian's. It made no sense.

Or perhaps it did. That other memory, that ancient memory, belonged to a girl whose innocence was being sacrificed to her city's god, to a monster. The husks themselves were women. Could it simply be that he was a man? There had to be more to it than that. Yet another memory struck him now . . . one of his own this time. He recalled clearly the vaguely dreamy expressions on the faces of the waitress and the other woman to whom he had shown his drawing of the house on Wildwood Road. As if they remembered it, but only from a dream.

“It's too much,” he whispered, barely aware that he spoke aloud.

His head ached, the front of his skull the worst of all. Part of it might have been the touch of that husk—who had withered to almost nothing even as she had forced those memories into his head—but he knew a lot of it was simple confusion. Too many questions. Too much new information to process.

There was a great deal he did not yet understand, a lot that still did not make sense to him. But it would.

Michael put the car in gear and pulled back onto the road. He drove slowly, watching both sides of the road and the rearview mirror for any sign of them.

All right, now what? So you understand, or you think you do. How does that help Jillian?

Once again, the answer came back to that night on the side of Old Route 12 and to the lost little girl who had made him promise to find her. Susan Barnes was the key. Those hollow husk women wanted to keep him from finding that house, wanted him to stop looking for the girl. Michael had thought she was a ghost, but if that was true, why would they interfere?

These were his thoughts as he drove down Old Route 12 past that classic gas station that was a relic of an ancient time, a little out-of-the-way spot that wasn't on any tourist map but would delight anyone seeing it for the first time. A perfectly preserved piece of the past. Nostalgia come to life. A memory.

Two blocks further on he saw a
FOR SALE
sign in front of an old Cape that butted up to the edge of the road.

Susan Barnes stood beside the sign.

Dusk was coming on and he could see the fad

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A cold rain began to fall as Jillian drove home from the train station, a frozen drizzle that spattered her windshield and coated the road with black ice. The urge to stomp on the brake, to test the slick blacktop, was strong. It made no sense, but this was just the sort of idiotic temptation that had been teasing her mind of late. She resisted, keeping her hands firmly clutched upon the steering wheel, but her mouth was curled into a sour twist and she fumed as she drove.

Another bitch of a day. Another day as a bitch.
For the second day in a row she had fired one of her paralegals. This time, however, it had been her call and not something demanded of her. Alisa Gordon had gone off to meet some girlfriend for lunch and had reappeared nearly three hours later carrying shopping bags from Neiman Marcus. There weren't any attorneys waiting on documents from her. She had recently completed a major closing and was just beginning the groundwork for a new one. But still . . . three hours? Jillian had never taken a lunch that long in her life. It was just blatant abuse of the relationship Jillian had tried to forge with her paralegals.

So she'd fired the idiot.

A ripple of surprise and indignation had gone through her department. Attorneys had come by to ask her what had happened—none of her paralegals had dared—and she had told them they could read it in her memo. Presumptuous assholes. She was aware of how icy she'd been with the attorneys and vaguely cognizant of the fact that this was a bad idea, but she could not seem to muster up much concern. Something had changed inside her, and she felt as though she had woken up from a long, pleasant sleep to a grim reality.

This was the world. Most people were stupid or incompetent, and the majority of those who managed to rise above the chaff weren't exactly scintillating company. A sick feeling had been spreading through her all day long, an ache in her gut that was part pain and part nausea. She wondered from time to time what had become of Michael, where he had gone when he'd left the house last night. A rancid bitterness boiled up in the back of her throat whenever she imagined his expression the night before. What kind of a man was he? What sort of loser was confronted with what he'd been confronted with and just took it on the chin, just packed a bag and walked?

It pissed her off, actually. He was her husband. If he was going to take off, they ought to at least have it out. All day she'd thought about the fight they should have had, about the screaming that hadn't happened and the way she imagined it would have been to hit him, and have him hit her. Not that she wanted to be hurt. But if he had a problem with what she'd done, he should have been willing to fight about it.

The November chill seeped into the car despite the heat. In the wake of her thoughts about Michael, her mind returned as it had all day to the night before, to sweaty, risky sex with two college boys in the men's room at a bar near Government Center. Images flashed in her mind of the rush she'd gotten, and of the way she had despised them and herself even as it happened. She'd relished every second of it—the filthiest, most wonderful sex she'd ever had. In her whole life, Jillian had never fucked or been fucked like that. She'd thrown one of them against the wall of the bathroom, grabbed the top of the stall, and hung there, riding him.

The car swayed as she turned a corner, tires sliding on black ice. Frozen tears struck the windshield like a shower of diamonds.

A smile crept across her face and a warmth spread up from between her legs as she became wet.

The twist in her gut spoiled it. A feeling lingered in her as though she was hungry, but no food would erase it. There was some hollow part of her she couldn't fill, and it was maddening.

Her smile disappeared and she slammed a fist on the steering wheel. The horn beeped, the wheel spun, and she hit the brake even as the car began to skid. Her heart sped and she gritted her teeth as she gripped the wheel. The car spun lazily in a circle, completely out of her control. The front tires bumped against the curb, and the back end swung around and knocked over a stop sign with a crunch of metal.

Jillian gripped the wheel, waiting for something worse, some impact. But nothing else happened. The rear driver's side would be dented, but when she gently pressed the accelerator, the car rolled forward. She turned herself around and continued toward home, knuckles white on the wheel. In those moments when she was out of control, anything could have happened. She had been lucky.

Lucky.
She understood the concept, but she couldn't feel it. Didn't know it.

Still, she was careful the rest of the drive home.

The house was dark when Jillian pulled into the driveway. The windows were like black eyes watching her approach. Ice had started to build up on the grass, making the lawn look like it was composed of sewing needles. It was too early in the year for this. Too early for ice, for winter weather, for nights when the sky forced you home.

Jillian killed the engine and sat in the darkness watching the house. Her head was all fucked up. Anger clawed at the base of her skull; it was an effort to prevent spite from curling her lip. She wasn't stupid. The conversation with Michael about her memories had not been lost on her. And it was true: She could not remember anything before the eighth grade.

But that bothered her less than the things she
did
remember.

Her memories of high school were intact. Of college. Of her job and her love for Michael. Love. She scoffed at the word, but a pang of something echoed in the hollow that was inside her. Jillian remembered laughing because she was happy. She could recall that it felt good when Michael held her in his arms. But these things didn't make sense to her, now. Just the thought of their honeymoon, how romantic they had been, filled her with self-loathing.

It was all bullshit. Pleasure was an ephemeral thing to be had from a moment's triumph or a durable lover. Nothing else mattered.

So why was she so empty inside?

A scowl tore across her face and Jillian let out a little shout of frustration. She banged her head on the steering wheel and pushed her fingers into her hair. Her chest rose and fell rapidly as she slumped, forehead against the wheel.

“Stop your fucking whining,” she whispered to herself, the desperation obvious in her voice.

Then she popped open her door, dropped her keys into her purse and slid out. She cursed again as she slammed the door. The urge to hit something was strong and she wished Michael were home. For that, and because it was so dark there, inside the house. And it seemed that though she could no longer understand certain emotions, loneliness was not among them. That one she could summon up just fine.

When she pushed the door open and stepped inside, closing it behind her even as she slid out of her shoes and dropped her bag, the only sounds from within the house were the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of the heat. Then, as if to greet her, the phone trilled.

Jillian jumped, startled, her pulse quickening. The sound came again and she strode over to answer it, annoyed by the noise and by the fright it had given her. Shadows shifted in her peripheral vision and she jerked her head around. Something had moved there in the darkness. Or had it?

The phone rang again.

Scowling, she picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Hi there, is this Jillian Dansky?”

Her brow furrowed. “Who's asking?”

“Mrs. Dansky, this is Harry Crenshaw from the
Eagle Tribune.
Bob Ryan gave me your phone number. He tells me you're running for city council and that you're going to be the candidate to beat next year. It sounds like you've got a lot of support. I hoped I could ask you a few questions, get your take on—”

“Now's not a good time,” Jillian interrupted, biting off each word.

Crenshaw hesitated. He was getting the message loud and clear. “Right. I'm sorry about that. We can set it up for another time. It's just that, well, Bob thought you'd want to get some press going right away, get your name out there early, and—”

“Bob Ryan should mind his goddamned business.”

“I'm sorry?” The voice was horrified.

Jillian bit her tongue. Her nostrils flared and she tried to keep silent. She knew she should say nothing, just hang up, but she was just so sick to death of people treating her like she was a character in the movie of their lives. Hannah. Every attorney at the firm. Bob fucking Ryan the worst of all.

“Look, Mr. Crenshaw, I told you that you caught me at a bad time. Beyond that, what do you want me to say? That I'm running? Yes, I am. But I need to do things at my own speed, in my own way. I don't want to be just another crony of the old boys' network, a chess piece on somebody else's board. When I want to announce, you'll get a press release. You want to talk then, fine. But just report the news. Don't do me any favors. Politics isn't supposed to be about favors and public ass-kissing. It's about time the city council learned that lesson.”

There was a pause. She thought she could hear a pen scratching on paper.

“Can I quote you on that?” Harry Crenshaw asked.

Jillian felt that sick twisting in her gut again. Her head ached. The hollow inside her seemed to grow.

“Fuck off!” she snarled, and slammed down the phone.

But she had not said no.

COME FIND ME.

Michael stood in the darkness in his room at the Hawthorne Inn, staring out the window. Frozen rain whipped against the glass. For some reason the sound it made reminded him of car tires rolling slowly over gravel. His breath fogged the window and idly he raised a finger to draw a smiley face in the condensation.

He blinked, glancing out at the night as though coming awake. For a moment he studied the view from the window, the gauzy veil of storm that had fallen over the night, preventing him from seeing clearly. It seemed to him that Scooter should be out there in the icy rain, on a corner, gazing up at him forlornly. But that made no sense, really. How could she be out there when she was in here with him?

Adrenaline still raced through him, so much of it that he felt as though his body was quivering. And maybe it was. A tiny smile he could not have explained flickered across his features and he turned to look into the darkness of his room at the inn. Even as he did so, he saw her, there in the dark corner between the bureau and the wall. She had her own ethereal glow and yet she was a vague figure, like the afterimage of the sun on the inside of his eyelids.

Then she was gone. His gaze swept the room. She was in the bathroom doorway. She was by the floor lamp in the corner. She was just beside him. The lost girl. In his peripheral vision at all times, as though her image had been permanently burned into his mind, or into his retinas at least. Haunting him. Every few minutes he would catch the scent of popcorn or hot cocoa and he would know she was still there. She was his constant companion now, so close, and yet further away than ever before. The hollow women had seen to that, somehow. They were keeping him from her, or her from him. Frightening her. Frightening Michael, too.

Oh, Jesus,
he thought, shuddering as he thought about them again, about their touch.

But no matter what they did, she had touched him, too. And she was with him now for the duration, he sensed. There in his peripheral vision, there on the outskirts of his reality. All along she had haunted him, yet he had no fear of her.

Haunting wasn't about fear. It had taken time for him to realize that, but he knew it now. Haunting was about sorrow.

Come find me.

“I'm trying,” he said to the darkness, to the girl who haunted the shadows at the edges of his eyes.

But that wasn't exactly right, was it? No, not at all. For spread across the bed were all of the papers he had printed up at Krakow & Bester the night before, the results of his search for the elusive Scooter, the finding of the lost girl. A girl who, maybe, was never really lost at all.

Michael frowned. How had it gotten so dark in here so quickly? How long had he been standing at the window? Night had been falling, certainly, but now it was here. Dusk had surrendered to the fullness of evening, as always. What was wrong with him?

Yet another question he knew the answer to.

“Shit, do something,” he commanded himself.

With a short, frustrated snort of breath, he went over to the nightstand and clicked on the antique blown-glass lamp. This very sort of thing was the reason he preferred an old inn like this to a traditional hotel. The place could have been cleaner, but it had personality. Someone had taken the time to decorate it, instead of creating a thousand such rooms in one pass, like the cubicle in Krakow & Bester he had worked so hard to escape.

Michael sat down on the edge of the bed and surveyed the papers laid across the floral bedspread. Too many names on paper. Names, addresses, photographs. Maps.

And the illustration he had drawn of the house on Wildwood Road. When he'd come back to the inn he had shown it, on a whim, to the woman behind the counter, asked her if she recognized it. At first he had thought she was going to say she hadn't, but then she blinked and wet her lips, her face gone a bit pale. She nodded.

“I think so,” she'd said. “I don't remember where. Your friend wants to buy the place?”

Michael had given her that same lie. He nodded. “Yes.”

The smile that had touched the corners of her mouth had been almost sickly. “You couldn't pay me to live there,” she had said. Then her eyes had gone wide with the realization that she had spoken aloud, that she might have insulted him.

He had thanked her and started across the lobby, more questions in his mind than ever. Nearly at the elevator he had paused. A pair of women sat in the lounge talking to one another animatedly over coffee or tea. There had been accents in their voices and a terrible idea came to him. He was almost afraid to approach them, afraid of the answer. They were visitors, clearly not local women. From their accents, he had guessed they were German or Austrian.