Wildwood Road (4 page)

Jillian.
He could imagine her face in front of him, her grin, the way she always seemed to have one lock of hair hanging in front of her eyes.
Oh, Jesus, honey, I just want out of here.

A door slammed. Michael spun, heart pounding, and let out a long, shuddering sigh when he saw that it was not the door to this room. He staggered into the hallway.

A trickle of sweat ran down the back of his neck.

Michael broke into a run for the end of the hall, for the top of that grand staircase. There were higher floors, more stairs that went up and up, to the very top . . . to that one window at the peak of the house where he had seen a light on. He didn't care about those stairs. He only wanted the ones that went down.

His boots thumped the floor as he ran, stumbling toward the stairs, building momentum.

Giggles erupted from the rooms he passed, but now he did not want to look inside them. Still, he could not avoid the images his peripheral vision sent to him.

A swing set, chains creaking as they swayed in some unseen breeze.

More graffiti . . . in every room. Names in chalk and crayon and marker, and maybe in other substances he did not want to think about.
Heather. Sarajane.
Michael picked up speed. The hallway seemed impossibly long.
Barbie. Alisa.
His arms were pumping, legs flying under him. The stairs were getting closer, at last.
Tracy. Erica. Scooter.

Scooter.

He tried to stop short, twisting himself around to get a better look inside a room on his right, a little study with a desk and bookshelves and children's names finger-painted in watercolor on the side of the desk. But he was running too fast. Michael tripped over his own legs and for a moment he was airborne. Then he hit the wood floor and slid. The fabric of his costume jacket tore.

He lay panting, eyes closed tightly, wishing it would all go away. Someone had given him something bad, and here he was running around some stranger's house like a lunatic. Scooter's house.

His eyes opened. The temptation to go back to that small study, to look at her name painted on the side of the desk, was strong. But he was through with succumbing to curiosity. It could wait until morning, until he was sober. Or straight. Until he got his head on right.

Michael pushed himself to his knees and glanced along the hall toward the top of the stairs. The whole corridor was dappled with splashes of moonlight and shadows, but there were other things there as well. Things that were neither light nor darkness. Silver things that shimmered like heat off the summer pavement, that only really seemed solid if his eyes were half closed.

They were between Michael and the stairs.

Without ever seeming to move, they came nearer. It was as though they blinked out of one spot and appeared in another, flickering from one gloomy place to another, becoming visible not in the patches of shadow or the shafts of moonlight, but only ever in those slashes of nighttime twilight where shadow and light met.

Michael froze, staring. His stomach lurched again and he gasped for breath. He shook his head and started to back away, moving down the hall. But images flickered in his mind, silver ripples he had seen down in the kitchen, and back along that hallway. He did not have to turn around to know that they were behind him as well.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see the open door of that little study,
Scooter
scrawled in lime green finger paint on the desk. Erica had used yellow, Tracy a metallic gold. Another picture flashed through Michael's mind . . . of his own finger, dipped in bright blue paint, tracing a capital M onto the wood. . . . His every muscle fought the urge to go in there.

But the ripples flickered nearer still.

The sounds had all but died in the house, but now they returned. The laughter was a madhouse cacophony, a schoolyard full of songs and giggles and jeers. And the scents, that carnival of smells . . . popcorn and cinnamon and baking pie, rosemary and roasting turkey, spring rain and flowers, smoke from a wood stove. Somewhere in the house he could hear calliope music . . . maybe from a carousel, but he thought he recognized the tinny buzz of this particular tune. It was the ice-cream man. The one from his street. His high-school English teacher, Mr. Murphy, owned the truck and spent his summers making the rounds. There had been a faded caricature of a clown on the side of the truck, its hair the same bright rainbow of colors as Michael's favorite sno-cone. The clown had scared him, despite the fact that the paint that gave it life was dim and chipped, as though time had taken steel wool to the image.

That was it. The calliope music of Mr. Murphy's ice-cream truck. He could almost taste that sno-cone. Almost see that clown, with its squat, ugly body and bulbous nose, and that leering grin that said,
Come on, kiddies, I'm your friend. Just mind the teeth, and you'll be all right . . .

He bolted, surging up from the floor. Feet still numb, he stumbled into the doorframe, slamming his shoulder hard enough to send spikes of pain through him. The room was empty. At least, for a moment it was. Then, once more, figures shifted in his peripheral vision. But these were not silver ripples, moonlight wraiths . . . these were glimpses of phantom children. There were pale girls skipping rope. A sullen dark-skinned girl in a corner. Another pair playing rock-paper-scissors.

No way out.

One final glimpse showed him an ocean of silver gathering outside in the hall.

He scrambled up onto the desk and hurled his body at the window, pulling his limbs close in hopes that he could shield himself from the glass as it shattered. Then he was falling, limbs flailing, glass shards glittering in the moonlight as they cascaded down around him.

The ragged grass seemed to rush up toward him.

The impact knocked the air out of him.

Darkness closed in, the shadows swallowing the moonlight.

His mouth was still filled with the rich, earthy flavor of stout.

CHAPTER FOUR

Tap, tap!

The first bit of awareness that slipped into Jillian Dansky's mind on that Sunday morning was the prickle of gooseflesh along her arms. She shivered from the cold, and drew her legs up beneath her, pulling into a fetal ball, yet there was no warmth to be had. Her nipples were painfully erect from the chill. She had neither sheet nor blanket to huddle beneath.

Tap, tap, tap!

As she slowly emerged from sleep, she became cognizant of the light beyond her eyelids. Simultaneously, she woke to the bone-deep aches that wracked her body. Her neck was stiff, and a line of dull pain ran up the back of her skull and panned out across the top of her head, settling into her forehead and temples. A tickle in her stomach was almost nausea, but not quite. More a whispered hello, putting her on notice that if she tried anything more ambitious than opening her eyes it might turn into full-on puking.

Jillian shivered again and let a tiny moan escape her lips. It was a sound born not of pain, but of regret. All she wanted, body and soul, was to stay precisely where she was. But she knew that the cold would never be abated if she did not move.

Tap, tap!

Eyes still closed, she frowned. What was that noise? She had heard it before, but had not registered it. It sounded like glass, like something rapping against—

“Rise and shine!” called an impatient voice. A man's voice. And it was not Michael's.

The pieces of this strange puzzle were all there, but her brain was slow in putting them together. Then, in an instant, the connection was made. The stiffness. The feel of the seat beneath her, and at her back. The cold. And that tapping . . . tapping on the window of the car.

Jillian opened her eyes. Late October sunshine made her squint, but she could see the blue uniform clearly enough. She was lying on the backseat of the car, peering up at a gruffly handsome young police officer who stared in through the glass at her with a disdain in his eyes that she had never felt directed at her before, and hoped never to feel again. An autumn leaf struck the window, blew across the glass in front of his face, then disappeared. Their eyes had made a connection, and that leaf had severed it.

“Oh, Christ. Michael!” she cried, sitting up too quickly, heedless of her hangover headache.

With a hiss she pressed the heel of her right hand against her temple and squinted against the pain. All of this was foreign to her. Jillian had been drunk enough to have a hangover perhaps three times in her life, and never one as bad as this. Certainly never one with which she had awoken in the backseat of a car. Her own or anyone else's.

The cop was tapping on the window again, motioning for her to get out of the car. Didn't the guy know she had the mother of all headaches? Her Elizabethan gown was stiff and unyielding, wrinkled and pleated in places where no pleats ought to be. She squinted her eyes even more tightly and then forced herself to open them again, to swing her legs beneath her and sit up all the way in the backseat so that she could lean forward and look into the front, where Michael lay huddled much the way she had been only moments before. Even the rapping of the policeman's nightstick on the window had not roused him.

“Ma'am?” the cop called, his voice muffled by the glass. “Please step out of the car. Now.”

This last was said calmly, but with such an air of command that it could not be debated. There was a second police officer, she noticed at last. He was on the other side of the car, the passenger's side, and he was trying to get a look at Michael in his torn, wrinkled D'Artagnan costume, a grave expression on his face. For the first time, Jillian wondered why her husband wasn't waking up.

“Oh, no,” she said, in a tiny little voice that did not sound like her, even to her own ears. She reached into the front seat and grabbed his shoulder, shaking him with all the strength her hangover would allow. “Michael! Michael, wake up!”

“Ma'am!” the cop shouted.

Jillian had been numbed by sleep and her hangover, but with this snap from the policeman, her heart leaped into a sprint. Her face felt flushed and she raised both hands to signify that she was surrendering to his demand. As she moved toward the door, Michael began to stir in the front seat. She felt a mixture of relief and fury. He was alive, that was good. But what the hell were they doing there on the side of the road in the first place?

Michael, what the fuck have you done?
she thought as she unlocked her door and eased it open.

The wind rushed in, whipping a cascade of chestnut hair across her face. She ran her fingers through it, pushing it away from her eyes, and hated how it felt, unwashed. Michael had begun to sit up in the front seat. There was a dark bruise on his face, covering most of his left cheek. She had no idea where he'd come by it, or the tear in his costume. But now wasn't the time to ask.

She had heard the hum of engines as she was waking up, but only now that she was out of the car could she see other vehicles passing by. Even now a gold minivan that looked vaguely familiar passed, and she prayed no one would go by who might recognize her, standing there in her costume. What would she say, then? Just thinking about it made her headache worsen.

“Ma'am?” the policeman said, and his voice was stern. “I don't suppose you've got some ID in that outfit?”

Jillian's cheeks blossomed with the heat of embarrassment. She looked down again at the wreck of her beautiful costume. A stray thought danced through her mind; she wondered what had become of the traditional half-mask she'd worn in front of her face for most of the night. At some point, she recalled having handed it to Michael, but somehow she doubted she would find it again.

“No, I . . .” She met the policeman's gaze, and stiffened. Her first impression had been correct. He was handsome, a broad-shouldered mid-twenties guy with a square jaw darkened by permanent five o'clock shadow, and the kind of eyes that could melt a girl's heart. But what had brought her up short was the look in those eyes.

He was pitying her.

It made her feel small. The tickle in her stomach wasn't quite so ticklish anymore. She felt sick, but not so much that she would actually
be
sick.

“I'm sorry. I don't. My purse is in the car”—
I think
—“I can get it.” She ducked back into the car before he could argue with her. Her headache sang a funeral dirge, and her stomach churned as she bent over.

Michael was wide awake now. Or, at least, he seemed to be. There was something unspoken in his eyes. He looked almost stoned, but Michael had smoked pot exactly once in his life, so that was out of the question.

“Jillian? Jilly, what—”

The cop on the other side of the car wasn't as polite or as patient as the one Jillian had come to think of as
her
policeman. Michael's policeman slapped his open palm down on the roof of the car, making them both jump, then bent to glare in the window.

“Sir, step out of the car now, please. Right now.”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “Yes. Yeah, of course.” He slid over to the front passenger door and unlocked it.

The policeman stood back, one hand resting on his holstered gun. Jillian didn't think Michael noticed that little detail, but it gave her an icier chill than the October wind. No, Michael wasn't noticing much. His expression was mystified. His eyes were wide, as though he had woken up to find himself lost in Oz. His hangover must have been even worse than hers, though how that could be she did not know. She wanted to scream at him, to hurl blame at him for putting her in this situation. Instead she just asked him to hand her purse back to her, and he did so.

“I'll need your license and your registration, please,” Michael's policeman said curtly.

Jillian stepped out of the car again, even as her husband got out on the other side. She pulled her wallet from her purse, then opened it and retrieved her license, handing it over. Her policeman glanced from the picture on the license to Jillian and then back again several times.

“All right, Mrs. Dansky. Stay right there a minute, please.”

He held on to her license as he made a circuit around the car. Jillian watched as he approached Michael and the other officer, and she realized that the two had separated them purposely. Probably just their usual procedure, but it made her feel even more isolated than she already had. Her policeman took Michael's license as well as the Volvo's registration, said something to his partner, and then started back to the police car. He slid behind the wheel; through the windshield, Jillian could see a gray silhouette as he picked up the handset for his radio. She had been stopped for speeding twice in her life, so she understood that he was checking to make sure the car belonged to them and that there were, God forbid, no warrants for her or Michael's arrest.

An eternity seemed to pass.

Her mouth felt full of cotton and there was a tight little knot in her belly. Though her hearing seemed dull, she caught some of the exchange between Michael and his policeman.

“. . . very late,” Michael was saying, “and I was falling asleep behind the wheel. My wife had had a little too much to drink—”

“What about you, Mr. Dansky?” the policeman asked, cut-the-bullshit in his tone. “You were nodding off at the wheel.”

Michael nodded. “I'd had a couple of beers, yeah. I don't think I was drunk, but throw in how late it was and the kind of day I'd had . . . I thought it would be better to just pull over and sleep an hour or so than end up in a ditch or wrapped around a tree. I never thought I'd end up sleeping until morning.”

“It's not the kind of thing we recommend.”

“Do you recommend driving when you can't keep your eyes open?” Michael asked.

At this, Jillian spun and stared at him. His tone up until that point had been conciliatory, but now Michael was staring at the cop, standing up to him, turning the whole damn thing around. His mother had always said he would have made a wonderful lawyer, and Jillian had often agreed. Michael Dansky knew how to win a debate. What was the cop supposed to say now? No, sir, you should have driven on home, no matter how tired you were or how much you'd had to drink? Never going to happen.

The cop glared at him. Jillian turned away before Michael's policeman could see the tiny smile that flickered at the corners of her mouth. But her amusement only lasted a moment. There was nothing funny about any of this.

She shivered. The wind was cold, but the sun was bright and warm. It was a beautiful Sunday morning in October. People were on their way to church, or to a farm to buy pumpkins or pick apples with their children. If there were any apples left on the trees. And here was Jillian Dansky, her humiliation on display. How would this go over with Bob Ryan and Benny Bartolini, last night's gunslinger and Mexican amigo, who wanted her to run for West Newbury City Council?

Not too well,
she thought. And a little piece of her heart broke off, leaving a jagged edge. Jillian had worked very hard to achieve what she had in her career. She loved the community she and Michael had embraced as their own. They wanted roots here. Wanted to have children who would grow up here. But something like this . . . God, if word got around it would haunt her forever.

For the first time, she glanced around at the police car parked behind the Volvo. North Andover. A tremor went through her as she saw the name of the town stenciled on the side of the car, and she spent a moment thanking God, in whom she did not always believe. They hadn't gotten all the way home to West Newbury. It was bad, but not as bad as she had feared.

Her policeman returned from the patrol car. He held the registration and Michael's license in his left hand, but he handed Jillian's ID back to her. His eyes, gentle and kind, searched hers. If she hadn't felt so ridiculous, she might have hugged him, for his eyes told her all she needed to know about what was going to happen next. The registration had not raised any red flags, and neither had their names. Any annoyance she'd felt at being pitied a few minutes earlier disappeared.

“You're free to go, Mrs. Dansky. Your husband broke a city ordinance about overnight parking, and there's a vagrancy issue that comes into play, but nobody wants to cause trouble for you here. I really hope this was a one-time thing, one bad night. I really do.”

There was a sermon waiting in his gaze, but he left it unspoken.

So do I,
she thought. But what she said was, “Oh, it is. Honestly. We're really very boring. We're not drinkers at all, but last night there was this masquerade, and—”

“Sort of figured that one out,” the policeman said. He smiled and gestured toward her costume.

“Of course. I just—”

“You have a good day, Mrs. Dansky.” He nodded to her, then started around the car.

Jillian glanced over at Michael, who looked on expectantly, brows knitted. She gave him an encouraging nod as the police officer approached him and they exchanged a few quiet words. The other cop was giving Michael a hard look, but Jillian's policeman handed her husband's license and registration back, and a moment later both officers were walking back to their car.

Jillian stood where she was and watched as they got into the patrol car and drove off. Her policeman waved at her as they passed. A moment later, Michael came to stand beside her on the roadside, car keys jangling at the end of one finger.

“Do you want to drive?” he asked.

“No,” she said, surprised by the venom in her voice. She and Michael rarely fought, and on those rare occasions it was more healthy debate than bitter argument. At the moment, however, she wasn't in the mood for a healthy debate.

“You drive,” she told him, walking around toward the passenger's side. “And on the way, you can explain what the hell just happened.”

I
N THE MONTHS BETWEEN HIS
junior and senior years at Emerson College, Michael worked a summer job at the secretary of state’s office, right up on Beacon Hill in Boston. He had grown up in Sudbury, thirty minutes west of the city, and the commute was a bitch. But he had spent enough time delivering pizzas and working in video stores, and wanted to have a real job on his résumé. As always when it came to city politics, strings had been pulled to score him the job. More than a decade earlier, his father had been a state representative out of Sudbury. The old man had been taken by cancer when Michael was in high school, but he’d been well liked and the connections remained. Teresa Dansky had made a few phone calls on her son’s behalf, and quick as you please he had a job.