Wildwood Road (26 page)

“Yeah. Yeah, of course. No way to justify it in this economy,” Michael agreed. But it still seemed like the place was a throwback to an earlier era. On the other hand, he had never been inside such a facility before.

They passed a glass wall on the right, beyond which was a long conference table with half a dozen chairs around it. There was a second identical room, but when they came adjacent to it, Michael saw that it was not empty.

A stocky female orderly stood in one corner. But she wasn't alone.

Susan Barnes sat at the table with her arms crossed like a sullen child. He had seen the resemblance in her Realtor photograph to the little lost girl who had been haunting him, but if it had ever been there, any similarity was gone now. She was too thin, her face gaunt, and her dirty-blond hair was fading to white. He'd never been able to establish her precise age, but he gauged it at just past fifty. Behind that glass wall, she looked sixty at least.

Then the woman noticed him and stared at him. Her face was so thin that her eyes seemed huge and luminous, and in that moment, any hesitation about her identity left him. Physically she looked nothing like the lost girl . . . like Scooter. But those eyes were unmistakable.

“You've got about ten minutes, Mr. Dansky,” the orderly noted, glancing at his clipboard again for Michael's name. Then a smirk twisted up the edges of his mouth. “If she gives you that long.”

He stood aside. Michael pushed open the glass door. The female orderly appraised him silently but said nothing, not interfering with the visit. When Michael realized he did not have to deal with her, he focused on Susan Barnes. Her arms were still crossed, and one of her eyebrows was arched. Her upper lip was curled back in the threat of a sneer about to be born.

Come find me.

A shiver ran through him and he felt his breathing quicken. Emotions welled up inside him and nearly spilled over. Here she was, this ordinary madwoman, tangible proof of all that he had been living through since that terrible night after the masquerade.

“Well?”

He blinked. So strange to hear her speak. He recalled that tiny lost-girl voice, remembered the golden-haloed angel who had been silhouetted in his headlights in her peasant blouse and blue jeans. Her foot had crushed his D'Artagnan hat. Michael smiled as he thought of it. He had no idea how that detail could have been lost to him, in spite of all the chaos. Of course she had been real, if something like that . . . but, no. There were variations on the word “real,” here, apparently. For this woman and that lost girl . . . they were the same and not the same at all.

“Hello? Who the fuck are you? Reporter? Lawyer? They said my son sent you. So talk to me, asshole. You dragged me away from my shows, so don't waste my time. The clock is fucking ticking.”

Michael opened his mouth, his lips moved, but he could not seem to form words. How could it all be? Seeing her there like that and knowing, remembering that night on the side of the road . . . it was worse, in a way, than the sweet lost creature haunting his eyes, worse than those hollow, twisted women with their frigid touch and the memories they had infected him with. The filthy violation of his mind.

This is what that lost girl became,
he thought. And he could not help but wonder if it was because he left her there at the house on Wildwood Road that night. If it was because he brought her home.

The female orderly was staring at him now. She had even taken a step away from the corner; he could see in her face that she was trying to figure out if he was going to be a problem.

“Scooter,” Michael whispered.

Susan Barnes sneered. “What the fuck did you say?”

“Scooter,” he rasped again. He shook himself, then slid into the chair across the table from her. “They used to call you Scooter. When you were growing up. Your . . . your sister couldn't say Susan and—”

A trace of fear breezed across her features before disappearing, buried once more beneath the sullenness and anger. “I don't remember much about growing up.”

“No,” Michael said, agreeing. “No, of course you don't.”

He was still partially mesmerized by her presence. At any moment he expected those women to appear, or for the specter of the younger Susan Barnes to loom once more in his peripheral vision. But neither occurred. It was just the two of them and the orderly and the ticking clock.

His time was wasting.

“How long have you been here?” he asked.

“Two years? Three? What does it matter?” Some small doubt showed in her eyes, then. “Do I know you? I mean, did I?”

Michael understood what she meant. Did she know him from once upon a time, from her childhood, that black oil spill in her memory that blotted out everything good and innocent about growing up, that smeared and tainted her heart, ripping away all the kindness that she would otherwise have had? He did not bother to point out that he was young enough to be her son, that she could not have known him then.

“No. No, you don't know me. Not really. But I did speak to your son Tom earlier. He thought you might be able to help me.”

She scowled. “That little fucker? Why would I want to help you? My son is an ungrateful shit, leaving me to rot in here. I'd like to rip his . . .” She smiled sweetly. “Did he tell you that I stabbed him?”

Michael shook his head.

Susan crossed her arms more tightly, smugly pleased. “You know those serrated spoons people used to use for grapefruit? One of those. I stabbed him in the leg with one of those. Little bastard. Wish I'd hit the femoral artery. Living in my fucking house with my fucking things, sleeping in my fucking bed. His wife left him. Bet he didn't mention that, either. She was a goddamn bitch, but I still can't blame her. Kid's a dildo.”

The stream of filth barely fazed him. Instead he felt his face flush warmly because of the freshness of his memories of Jillian. Once upon a time, Susan Barnes had been an ordinary, happy woman. Now she was this. Michael had been nurturing faith in the idea that he could help Jillian, that he could return her to who and what she had been. But seeing Susan Barnes like this . . .

He caught the orderly watching the clock.

Six minutes to nine.

Shit.

Panic raced through him. This was too important. Everything depended on it. His marriage. Jillian's life. And he was screwing it up.

“Look, Ms. Barnes, we only have a few minutes and I don't have time to dance around the questions I really want to ask.”

Something troubled her. When he spoke, she narrowed her eyes as though trying to see him through the filter of her eyelashes.

“So what are you waiting for, then?”

No
fuck
. That seemed odd. Like she had been distracted from her stream of profanity by something else.

Michael took a deep breath and nodded. “Not long before you . . . before you ended up here, you took an interest in a house on Wildwood Road. I've been to that house once, very late at night. I wasn't entirely sober. Well, now I think it's really important that I get back there. I think maybe . . . a lot is riding on me going back.”

Her gaze dropped and she seemed to want to look anywhere but at Michael. Her lips twisted bitterly and her nostrils flared. She wanted him gone. Her body language said as much.

“So? Go back.”

“I . . .” His mind flashed on the woods, the hill, those misshapen women chasing him through the trees. He had been studiously avoiding thinking about the house itself, about being inside and what that had felt like. The voices. Singsong jumprope voices, of lost little girls. Now it all rushed into his head at once, and it was overwhelming. Michael sucked in a breath and sat back in his chair, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes.

In the blackness inside his head, he saw a double image of Scooter as a girl, of the figure of that blond little angel going into that dilapidated old house and its door swallowing her whole.

“Shit,” he said, opening his eyes and seeing that the female orderly, who now looked very imposing, had crossed half the distance between him and her corner. She paused and waited to see what he would do next.

Michael stared at Susan, seeing the ghost of her little-girl self in her face. “You've got to help me. Maybe I can help you, too. My wife . . . something's happened to her. There's something she lost, and I think maybe you've lost it, too. But I've been searching for that house . . . even for Wildwood Road . . . and I can't seem to find it.”

In that moment he saw in Susan Barnes the same combination of pain and fury and hollowness he had seen in Jillian earlier that day. Her chest rose and fell and she played with her faded hair, wrapping a strand of it around one finger. But she was resolute in her unwillingness to look at him.

“I can't give you fucking directions. And you're not going to find it.” She uttered a little sickening laugh. “I could find it, but . . .” Susan waved her hands to indicate the glass wall. “I'm unavailable. Indisposed. Otherwise fucking engaged.”

Then, at length, she raised her eyes and met his gaze dead on. “But if I could find it . . . maybe if your wife lost something there, she could find it just as well.”

Michael stared at her, slack-jawed, hardly daring to breathe.

Her eyes narrowed. “I do know you, don't I?”

And it occurred to him that maybe a part of her did know him. Maybe some part of that lost little girl, the stolen piece of her that was hiding in the ether somewhere, hiding from those twisted women . . . maybe it was still tethered to her, and she sensed a connection with him.

“Nine o'clock, Mr. Dansky,” said his original escort from the hallway.

He glanced back at Susan.

“Does the name Moloch mean anything to you? Or a city, Kart-hadasht?”

Susan Barnes hugged herself and her gaze drifted, as though she had become lost inside her head. “They were so hungry, under the city. Moloch gave them scraps, but not enough. And there were so many of them. The Virgins of Carthage.”

Her voice was a thin whisper, the voice of a little girl, weighted with sorrow.

“Mr. Dansky,” the orderly snapped.

Susan's eyes cleared and focused. She frowned.

“What are they?” Michael asked her.

She seemed not to understand, as though she had not even been aware of what she had said. Susan scowled.

“Mr. Dansky, I'm going to have to insist,” the orderly told him, the warning clear.

Susan met his gaze. “Don't come back,” she said, as if the very sight of him was loathsome.

“No,” he said. “I won't.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It is the middle of April, more than a year before the masquerade and the trip to Wildwood Road. The past four months at Krakow & Bester have been both the busiest and the most rewarding of Michael's career. All of the hope that his employers have had for him since they brought him on board has come to fruition with the campaign for Athena Sportswear, a national rollout that depended entirely on the client's confidence in him.

He should be flying high, cruising on the adrenaline and momentum of the kind of personal victory that just doesn't come very often. Hell, for some people, it doesn't happen at all. But as he makes his way home in the thick of the traffic on Route 125, his stomach is in knots. The day has been full of congratulations—both from grateful bosses and from envious coworkers—and thank-yous. The first of the Athena Sportswear ads is testing extremely well, and the president of the company called him at the office this morning and sent a fruit basket this afternoon. It sits on the passenger seat beside him. There is some cheese in with the fruit and he's tempted to nibble, though he isn't hungry. How could he be, after the dinner Paul Krakow took him out for tonight?

“What am I supposed to say, Jillian? He's the boss. When the boss says he's taking you to dinner, you go.”

That little conversation from this morning has been festering in his gut all day. His skin has been tingling with a buzzing tension since breakfast. There is that old saw about not going to sleep angry . . . everyone has heard that one. But Michael thinks they ought to add that you should never go to work if you've had a fight with your wife and left it unresolved. All day he has been unable to really appreciate the current of good feeling coming his way because of his preoccupation with the argument.

Now, as he drives home far later than he had promised, streetlights strobing the windshield as he passes beneath them, Michael cannot help returning to the moments they'd shared that morning.

He had come downstairs in a hurry, rushing as usual. Jillian rose only a few minutes earlier than he did, but somehow she always seemed to be able to get herself ready without having to rush. Today had been no exception. He'd been putting on his belt with one hand, carrying his shoes with the other, and trying to figure out if his growling stomach would actually start to digest him from the inside out if he left the house without eating something.

“Hey, hey, sweetie, slow down,” Jillian had said as she poured yogurt on top of a bowl of granola. “It takes me a lot longer to get to work than it takes you. What's the hurry?”

Michael had sighed and plopped down on the kitchen floor to get his shoes on. “The results from the test group for Athena should be in first thing this morning. I want to see them before anyone else. Then, supposedly, Paul wants to take me to dinner tonight to celebrate. It could be a long day.”

Storm clouds had swept across her eyes. “When isn't it a long day? You've been working your ass off for them, Michael. The job is done now. Can't they cut you a little slack?”

He had been so tense for so long that his immediate reaction had been to go on the defensive. Michael had bristled and snapped at her. “They sign the checks, Jilly, or maybe you've forgotten that?”

“Oh, for fuck's sake!” she had muttered. “Look, I know you've been under pressure with this thing, but you're not the only one who brings money into this house. We don't compare the size of our paychecks around here, or how much work we're doing. Through all of this, you've been somewhere else, your mind on your work instead of at home. For the last couple of weeks I've been dealing with some really nasty crap at the firm. But have you even once
asked
me how things are?”

The memory of that question and the look on her face as she had asked it is haunting him now, as he passes the Dunkin' Donuts on the corner where he walks to get her coffee every Sunday morning. The radio is on, but he doesn't hear the music. He glances at the dashboard clock. It is nearly eleven
P
.
M
., and a small, guilty part of him hopes Jillian is asleep so they can finish their argument in the morning instead of tonight.

But he knows she isn't.

They don't fight very often. There might be the occasional argument over something her mother said, or where they're going to spend the holidays, but that doesn't really count. It isn't personal. But this . . .

He had stared at her, brows knitted. A nauseous little twist of guilt had begun to worm its way through his stomach. Jillian didn't curse a lot, so to hear her rattle off that language had made him flinch. “No. No, I guess I haven't. If I haven't been paying enough attention, I'm sorry about that. What's wrong? What's been going on?”

Then she had done it. Jillian had rolled her eyes and waved him away, dismissing the conversation. Dismissing him as though she could not be bothered. “It doesn't matter anymore. It's not important. It's been dealt with. Just forget it. Go to work.”

“You know, maybe it's not Krakow & Bester that needs to cut me some slack. You've got the number two job in your field in the entire state, Jillian. In all of goddamned New England. I'm clawing my way up to number one or two in my agency. You don't have any competition, or maybe you'd have a clearer picture of what that's like.”

They had fumed in silence as he finished getting ready, and though her commute took forty minutes longer than Michael's, Jillian had still been in the kitchen reading the newspaper when he had left, waves of antagonism radiating between them.

Now his headlights wash over the front of their house as he pulls into the driveway. The lights are out but there is the blue glow of the television in their bedroom windows. Michael shuts off the car but sits with his hand on the key in the ignition for a moment, dreading going inside. The engine ticks loudly as it cools. He feels like an ass. Jillian had been a little snippy, sure, but what she'd said was right, and he'd been too defensive to just apologize. He's going to tell her that now, of course, but she's had a whole day to get up a righteous head of steam and he isn't sure what to expect.

With a self-recriminating little chuckle he steps out of the car and pockets his keys. He goes up the walk and unlocks the door quietly, but not with any surreptitious intent. Now that he's here he doesn't want her to be sleeping. He just wants to talk it out, get it behind them, so he can slip into bed beside his best friend after a long day and just hold her. Michael Dansky has traveled around Europe and America; he's had blindingly good sex and some of the most exquisite food in the world. But for sheer bliss, there is nothing like the comfort he surrenders to every night as he climbs into bed with his wife.

Going to work angry had sucked. No way is he going to bed angry tonight.

Michael drapes his jacket over the banister at the bottom of the stairs and goes up. The bedroom door is open. He can hear the Channel Five news anchor running down the headlines as the eleven o'clock newscast begins. As he enters the room he takes in several things at once. There is a large suitcase on the floor, standing upright and zipped, but obviously full to bulging. Another suitcase, this one smaller, is open on the bed and Jillian is folding a pair of khaki pants.

Packing.

“Jilly?” he ventures, just the beginning of a horrid conclusion tickling the back of his brain.

Then she looks up and she smiles mischievously.

“Help me finish packing. We have to get up really early in the morning and we're both going to be exhausted.”

Her smile is infectious. Michael grins at her and shakes his head. “What are you doing? We're going somewhere in the morning?”

She finishes folding the pants and tucks them into the top of the suitcase neatly. “New Orleans.”

Michael can only gape at her. He's always wanted to go to New Orleans and has never been. “What are you talking about? I can't . . . we're saving our vacation time for the summer. And I haven't cleared it. I can't just disappear.”

Jillian picks up a hideous Hawaiian shirt that she had bought him once as a joke and begins to fold that into the suitcase as well. “Sure you can. I arranged it with Paul two weeks ago.”

“Paul Krakow? You arranged it with my boss's boss?”

“Gotta go to the top, babe. He's good, I have to admit, keeping it a secret while you guys were at dinner tonight.”

Michael laughs and goes to her, embracing her from behind as she tries to finish folding the shirt. She squirms, but not to get away from him. The way she moves she brushes against him suggestively.

“You're amazing, you know that?”

“Yes. I do.”

“I'm sorry about this morning.” His voice is softer.

“Me, too.” Her back is still to him and she reaches for a small stack of her bras and panties to stuff them in the suitcase. “But we'll have all week to make it up to each other.”

Pulling the bras and panties from her hands and letting them scatter on the bed, he spins her around to face him and their lips meet. He kisses her deeply, regretting every hour that has passed between this morning and tonight. His hands roam over her body and her fingernails run lightly down his back.

“Why wait until we reach New Orleans?” he asks.

Jillian's only response is a grin, and then she takes his hand and pulls him down to the floor. After all, there isn't room on the bed.

T
HE
D
ANSKYS
'
LIVING ROOM WAS
perfect in that way that only couples without children ever seemed to manage. Everything was dusted, and the knickknacks on the coffee table and the mantel were arranged just so. Even the paintings and prints on the walls hung straight. The irony was not lost on Teddy Polito. His friends led lives that, though filled with love and passion, were neat and orderly. And now something had happened to bring disorder into their house. It might not be visible in the meticulous arrangement of this room, but it was in the air. In the walls. And it was freaking him out.

Teddy sat in an overstuffed chair now and, despite its plushness, could not make himself comfortable. The television was on. After channel surfing until he was numb he had surrendered to the lure of celebrities behaving badly on the E! network. He fidgeted in the chair, his hands in constant motion as he tapped his fingers, then interlaced them, then slid them down beside him. He'd chosen this chair now because all he had to do was look to the left and he could see the bottom of the stairs. If Jillian came down again, he was sure to see her before she could startle him.

Bipolar,
that's what he had figured. It had to be. Not that his guesswork made the baby-sitting job any easier. Teddy had known Jillian for years, but he still did not know her well. Michael was his friend and coworker. Jillian was funny and intelligent and had always been nice to him, but over the years she had remained
Michael's wife.
They shared no intimacy. Teddy knew how she felt about certain social and political issues, but not what was in her heart. Not the sort of thing you revealed to your closest friends.

But this, right here . . . this felt pretty goddamned intimate. And not in any way that was pleasant.

He had the volume on the television up just high enough to drown out some of the noise from upstairs, but not so high that it was likely to bring Jillian downstairs to snarl at him. No, he wanted her to stay right up in her room. Teddy hadn't a clue what he could say to her if she came down. From time to time he heard her up there, cussing at the top of her lungs. Shrieks of “fuck you!” and “bullshit!” drifted down to him and there was a great deal of her stomping around. He heard something shatter at one point—a lamp, a mirror, maybe a window?—and managed to convince himself that it was nothing to worry about. The fifteen or so minutes of silence that followed had frightened him horribly. He dreaded the idea of going up there and finding that she'd cut her wrists with broken glass and was bleeding to death and he'd just sat down there watching drunken celebrities make obscene gestures at the paparazzi on TV.

This went on and on. In a real sense, Michael had not been gone very long. Less than three hours. But the minutes seemed to tick by with a purgatorial slowness.

Teddy shifted in the plush chair now. His stomach rumbled. Something in the cookie family of snacks would have been welcome, but he wasn't about to go raid their kitchen. There was no way for him to know what might set Jillian off.

He glanced to the left, checking the stairs for any sign of her.

No Jillian, but there was something there on the carpeted steps that hadn't been there before. A square or rectangular white something. Teddy frowned and narrowed his eyes, trying to figure out what it was. He felt that actually getting up and walking over to the stairs was asking for trouble.

Then, as he watched, another rectangle sailed down the steps.

“I don't know you!” Jillian screamed. Her voice came from upstairs but she had broken her silence so suddenly that he started in his chair. His focus had been on the photographs she had tossed down.

For that was what they were. The second one had made it further and landed with the picture side up rather than the white paper side. From what he could see at this distance it looked as though a portion of the photograph had been blacked out with heavy marker.

“And who the fuck are you? Who are
all
of you?”

There came a kind of roar from upstairs, a heartbreaking howl of grief and rage, and then a photo album came flying down the steps to crash to the ground, spilling photographs onto the floor, pages tearing out. A second album came tumbling down a moment later.

This was followed by the sound of Jillian's footsteps retreating along the upstairs hall and the slam of her bedroom door.

Teddy was tempted to get up and go over to have a look at those photo albums and at the pictures where she had blacked part of the image out. But his throat was dry and what he really wanted, he knew, was to get out of there and go home to a place where people were comparatively sane.