Somebody Else's Music(120)

“I remember the year this was built,” Liz said as Bennis came around to her from the other side of the car. “Everybody in town was so impressed. Our own park. Our own lake to swim in. No need to go hauling off to Rogers Park in Kennanburg. You ever been to the Caribbean?”

“Several times,” Bennis said. “It’s not my kind of thing. I’m a sit-in-tavernas-and-listen-to-strange-music-all-night person. I don’t tolerate sunbathing.”

“Jimmy’s got this place in Montego Bay. Big Spanish-style house right on the water. We spent a couple of weeks there this past winter. Hot and cold running shrimp and great big avocados and great big drinks that came in glasses so cold that they have a sheet of ice coating them. You see, the thing is, I never questioned it. Never. Not even when Jimmy and Mark tried to tell me. And Geoff, too, God bless him. Even Geoff tried to tell me.”

“Tell you what? That you had heard something wrong?”

“No, no. About Maris. You come up this way. Go through the gate and then halfway down to the beach but not all the way to the water.”

Liz strode along ahead. Now that she was really here, she was having a hard time containing her agitation. She felt as if she had electrodes shooting all through her body. Every part of her wanted to twitch. She walked through the gates and halfway down to the beach and stopped. If the tall lifeguard’s chair was new, it had been built to look just like the old one, made of gray weathered wood with broad flat arms on either side of the seat so that the lifeguard could put down his Coca-Cola and his tuna-fish sandwich without having to worry that they’d fall on somebody’s head. The water looked as murky and cold as ever. The raft out near the center of it shuddered and shook on top of the water. Liz waited just long enough to make sure Bennis was keeping up. Then she took off again, up the little hill, into the trees.

It was dark when she got in among the pines, but it could have been pitch and she would still have known where she was going. She got on the path and continued upward without even glancing at the signs that told her which way the men’s rooms were and which way the women’s. The closer she got, the harder her heart pounded. It seemed to her that she had lived her life, her whole life, to a sound track of somebody else’s music. She’d been starring in the wrong movie. She’d been trying to make the lyrics fit. It was like Jimmy said about the CDs she kept at home and in her car. She was always singing along to the competition. She thought she was going to be sick. She came out through a stand of trees and all of a sudden there it was, right in the clearing, the outhouses. They hadn’t changed, either. This place had remained intact, untouched, for thirty years.

Bennis came chugging up the path, breathing heavily. “Is this it? Because I wasn’t really ready for physical exercise. Oh—hot damn. Is this it?”

“This is it,” Liz said.

“Are these the same ones? They can’t be the same ones, can they? Wooden structures like these, loosely built. They’d have to be new ones by now.”

“Would they? I have no idea. I suppose they must have replaced the door to the one I was nailed into. I wasn’t actually conscious when they got me out, so I don’t remember myself, but somebody told me later that they’d had to take the door off by the hinge. So there’s that. It was raining that night the way it was raining here earlier today. It was totally insane. I can still remember the thunder rolling in. They were nailing the door shut at the same time and I was screaming and it was hard to tell what was what, but it was thunder. And in no time at all, it started to rain. And then I heard her screaming. And that, you see, is the problem. I thought I knew who it was.”

“Who it was who nailed you in?”

“No, who it was later. Who it was who was screaming. I always knew who nailed me in. I always knew that Maris was a part of it, too. Jimmy thinks I kid myself about that, but I don’t. It was just—Maris was always so much better than I was, at everything. So much prettier. So much smarter. I always thought that she was the real thing and I was a kind of fake and that someday the world would get wise to it and my whole career would collapse and she’d be on her way. And then, when that didn’t happen, I felt guilty. So guilty. You have no idea.”

“I know you’re talking in the past tense,” Bennis said. “I’m hoping that’s significant.”

Liz walked around the outhouses in a big circle. They were just outhouses. Satan did not live here. She got back around to the front where Bennis was. “After a while when the storm really got going, I started to hear somebody screaming. A girl. A woman. Whatever. She was screaming ‘slit his throat slit his throat’ over and over again and it sounded like somebody having sex. Somebody having an orgasm. It was sick. It was nasty. It was depraved in a way we don’t use that word anymore. Morally corrupt at the core. And then when they told me in the hospital that Michael Houseman was dead and I heard a few of the details, I thought I knew what had happened. I thought I knew whose voice I heard. I remember thinking that when they heard about this, Vassar would rescind my admission. I don’t know why I thought that. It just felt as if it were my fault.”