Wildwood Road (23 page)

“Excuse me,” he had begun.

The women had seemed taken aback. Only then had Michael wondered about his appearance. He'd been stumbling around the woods and it had been days since he had shaved. He had smiled nervously and quickly explained what he wanted.

“Very sorry,” said the older one, a thin blonde he had placed in her late forties. “We are not from America.”

Michael had held the drawing up, certain that the placemat with its grease stains would make them even more wary of him. “Maybe you've passed it, since you arrived?”

“No, I'm sorry,” the blond woman said politely.

But her friend had frowned as she studied the drawing. This second woman was dark-haired and dark-eyed, shorter and stouter than the first. “I do not know this house,” she had said, her accent thick. “But it reminds me of something . . . something . . .” She had glanced at the blonde. “A building in Düsseldorf, I think. Do you know the one?”

The blonde had paled, her eyelids fluttering. “Yes. I . . . they don't really look alike, do they? It is simply something about them. Was it in Düsseldorf, though? I can't remember.”

Michael had thanked them and walked away quickly, unnerved by their reactions and by their words. What did it mean? There was a house here that every woman he had approached seemed to vaguely recognize, as if from a dream, and seemed to dread. In Germany, there was another. How many others might exist?

Too many questions, and a lot of them distractions. There were many mysteries here, but in the end not all of them were important. His focus was the house on Wildwood Road, and what went on there. What concerned him was Jillian, and the lost girl, Scooter. There were questions he knew he needed to ask, but they would wait. First he had to find that goddamned house.

The paperwork was spread across the bed. His eyes avoided the one printout that he needed, but his fingers knew just where to find it.

Icy needles continued to pelt the window. The lost girl lingered at the edges of his vision. When he glanced toward the night-dark glass, it seemed she was torn away. He almost thought that if he closed his eyes he might see her better. It made no sense, but the thought was there just the same. His fingers slid along the texture of the page, a simple piece of paper he had printed off of his computer at work.

FOR SALE
.

It was no coincidence. The girl had haunted him from the roadside as he'd driven back to the inn. And she had been at not one, but half a dozen For Sale signs.

Michael held the paper closer to the lamp—the shadows seemed to want to crowd in nearer and nearer, encroaching on the light it shed—and he studied the photograph of the Amesbury real estate agent. The picture of a fifty-something woman named Susan Barnes. Her hair was bleached. Her face was that of a woman on the upward climb out of middle age. There were a thousand ways he could have denied that the woman in the picture had once been the lost girl he had picked up on the roadside, the cute blond angel in the peasant blouse that he had nearly run down in his car. But Michael wasn't looking for reasons to deny it. He could not.

It was her. The gossamer specter on the roadside had told him as much. She had been trying to tell him all along. Her real name.
Hilly couldn't say Susan, she always said Scoosan, and that's where Scooter came from.
The words echoed, only now fully remembered from a dream. The popcorn bag. And then, even as they tried to keep her from him, she had been there, on his drive back to the inn.

FOR SALE
.

No, believing it was her was not the problem.

Michael shook his head, letting out a long breath, and his gaze drifted across the page. There, beside the picture, was the address—97 Kingsbury Avenue—and a telephone number. He let the page rest on his lap and glanced at the telephone on the nightstand.

What was he supposed to say?
Do you know me? Did you ever live on Wildwood Road? Have you been . . . hurt?

He ran his hands through his hair, found that his fingers were still shaking. When he glanced at the window again, he thought that perhaps the spectral wisp of a girl lingered an instant longer. He could feel her eyes upon him, watching him expectantly, pleading with him. Her despair was an open wound, and she had put all her hope in him.

Grief cut him, then, and he closed his eyes, wincing. In his mind's eye he did not see the ephemeral figure of the little lost girl, however. He saw Jillian . . . the way she had looked at him on that first night, when they had made love on the roof of the library.

Come find me.

Michael was reaching for the phone even before his eyes were open. He snatched the paper up from his lap, cradled the phone against his ear, and dialed quickly the Amesbury telephone number on the page. It began to ring almost instantly.

“Hello?”

“Yes . . . hello, is Susan Barnes there?”

A male voice had answered. Young. It occurred to him that he had no idea how old the information was that he had found. A wrong number. He would have to start over.

“Who is this?” the voice inquired.

All of the adrenaline he had built up evaporated; he felt himself deflate. Michael ran his tongue over his lips and flexed the fingers that held the phone.

“She . . . she doesn't know me. But I'd like to speak with her about a house.”

That was true enough.

“My mother isn't a Realtor anymore. And she can't be reached at this number. You'll have to find someone else.”

“No,” Michael said, too abruptly. What was he supposed to say now? She was a real estate broker, but it seemed unlikely that this house—if it was home to those hollow women—would be for sale. But she had come into contact with the place somehow. He had to keep Susan's son from hanging up on him.

“I'm . . . it's not my house. I don't even know if she . . .” He hesitated, knowing he wasn't making any sense. “I just thought she might be able to tell me about it. Off of Old Route Twelve, way up on a hill around Wildwood Road.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line during which the only thing Michael could hear was the crunch of icy rain on the window of his room. It felt as though it were hitting his back. He shivered with the chill.

“Who the hell are you?” the man asked, bitter and angry.

Shit.
Michael did not understand what had set him off, but the man's tone made it clear that he had crossed some line. He had blown it. A moment later and there would be a click and the line would go dead and he'd be no closer to finding her.

“Look, just . . . I'm just trying to find your mother. Maybe if you could give me a number, or just take mine and ask her to—”

“I don't think so.”

“Please, you don't . . . it's hard to explain.”

“Good-bye. Don't call here again.”

“Wait!” Michael snapped. His hands were sweating. He glanced around the room frantically, and everywhere he looked, the shadows danced with the elusive image of the lost girl's ghost. “Please, just . . .”

Susan's son did not hang up.

“Look, just . . . can I ask you one question?”

Still no response, but he was listening.

“When she was a little girl, growing up . . . did she ever get lost?”

“What kind of freak—”

“They called her Scooter. Didn't they? Because Hilly couldn't say Susan, and it always came out—”

Click.

M
ICHAEL WAS DESPERATE.
T
HE GUY
had hung up on him, but that, and the mystery of why she’d given up selling real estate in the first place, were enough to give him hope. This was the path he was meant to be on. And it wasn’t going to end with someone else hanging up a phone. Not with the flicker of blond hair and forlorn eyes that existed in his peripheral vision, that ghosted around after him. Not with what had happened to Jillian.

It was an effort not to think about Jilly, not to let hideous images and whispered memories into his mind.
How is it fair?
he thought, time and again. He'd done the right thing, picking up that girl, trying to get her home. And then
Come find me,
she'd said, and she had haunted him. Obsessed him. Needing someone who would save her from whatever hell she was in, whatever the hollow women had in store.

You did the right thing,
he thought bitterly,
and all it cost you was Jillian.

Even that was bullshit. Yes, it had cost him his wife and their relationship, but that was nothing compared to what it had cost Jillian herself. Michael wasn't so selfish that he didn't see that. Just selfish enough to push such rationality away and hold his own pain close as a child with a security blanket.

How is it fair?
A grown man, in a cynical industry, with twenty-four-hour news channels galore telling him all the injustices in the world, and he still believed that life was fundamentally fair. How stupid was that?

The radio was off and the car rolled in silence save for the rush of warm air from the heater, the hum of the engine, and the spray of sleet-needles against the windshield. The weather hadn't improved. The roads were slick, deadly, but his mind wasn't muddled tonight as it had been that evening after the masquerade. It was clear.
Crystal
.

He felt as though he might jump out of his skin. Desperation ran through his blood like a heroin spike. His fingers were too tight on the wheel and somehow, despite the heat blasting from the vents, he felt cold. In the rearview mirror he could see traces of the girl in the backseat, a transparent silhouette.

“I think I'm beginning to understand,” he said aloud, hoping she would hear him. “I think I'm on the way.”

But first, he had a stop to make. Susan Barnes's son had hung up on him, so Michael was going to go there, directly, and confront him. He had to know. Had to speak to the woman the lost girl would grow to become. He had only begun to understand, but he thought he knew what he was going to find. Or had an inkling. But whatever happened, he wasn't going to let the guy brush him off. He would go there and knock on the door and ask questions and pray for answers.

Before that, though, he had to go home.

He had been avoiding even thinking about it, but he could not do that for long. Jillian was his wife. Hell, she was his whole world. Whatever she had done or said, he knew he had to see her. Jillian was not thinking or behaving rationally, and Michael was afraid for her. Afraid of what she might do.

She had already proven that she was capable of anything.

The storm kept people off the road. Sleet rained down in jagged curtains, twisted by the wind. The car rocked with the force of it. The night and the storm enveloped him, carrying the car along toward home. It was nearly seven o'clock when he came in sight of the house he and Jillian had shared, and it brought fresh pain to his heart as a thousand little memories cascaded through him like shattered glass.

Every light in the house was on.

For half a minute he just sat in the driveway with the car running, wipers shushing sleet off of the windshield. He glanced at the street atlas on the passenger seat with the printout of Susan Barnes's picture and address. The lost girl was a glimmer at the edge of his vision.

When he killed the engine and palmed his keys, the gravel-spray noise of the freezing rain on the car seemed to triple in volume. The windows were opaque with accumulation that sweated lines down the glass. But the house burned in the darkness so brightly with all of those lights it was almost like a mirage, teasing him with the promise of an end to the pain in his heart and the madness that haunted him.

Michael popped the door open and stepped out, slamming it behind him as he ran for the front door. He winced and brought his hands up to protect his face from the sleet, his keys still clutched tightly in his palm so he'd have them ready. Then he was on the front stoop, holding open the storm door, working the keys, turning the knob. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The house felt empty. That was the strangest thing. It was like being in the office the night before all by himself, or days when he'd come home from work and Jillian wasn't in from Boston yet. There was a void. A quiet. Every single light in the house was on—including one of the recessed lights over the fireplace that had burned out last week and that he hadn't gotten around to changing—but the place felt like a shell. Nothing seemed out of place, but he imagined that the odd sensation that went through him might not be unlike what he would have felt had they been robbed.

And Scooter was gone.

He blinked and shook his head, standing in the bright lights just inside the front door. Sleet dripped down the back of his shirt and ran down his back. Michael slid a hand through his hair, skimming the moisture, and flicked it at the doormat. He closed the door behind him, paused a moment, then started to make his way through the house. Any other night he would have taken off his coat and hung it from the finial at the bottom of the stairs, but not tonight.

He did not call out for Jillian as he moved through the rooms on the first floor. Somehow he did not think she would answer. The house was immaculate. Even the kitchen seemed undisturbed, as though the house had been abandoned. Not a dish in the sink. Not a spot on the counter. Michael made his way back around to the stairs and paused at the bottom, looking up to the second floor.

There was light in the hallway up there, but not like downstairs. Not so much that it could dispel all of the shadows.

The first step creaked as his weight fell upon it. How ridiculous that he should have lived in this house for years, noticed it each time, and then promptly forgotten. As he came up the stairs he could see the open door to the bathroom. The fan hummed inside, but as he crested the landing he could see the mirror. Jillian wasn't there, not even in the reflection of the bathtub. He'd thought she might be. It was often her retreat when she was at her wit's end.

The lights in the guest room were on but Michael ignored it and went instead to the master bedroom. Once upon a time he had carried Jillian all the way up the stairs and into their room, tumbling into bed, flushed with alcohol and desire. That seemed so long ago, now. He wondered if Jilly remembered.