Somebody Else's Music(16)

She went straight through town—if she ran into Betsy, she didn’t have to stop, and she didn’t think she’d run into Betsy. It was still very early—and only when she got out the other side of it did she start to slow down. Her parents’ house had been out this way when she was growing up, but she rarely came here anymore. Her parents hadn’t been poor, but they hadn’t been prominent, either, and this was what she had looked forward to leaving behind. Some of the houses were of a kind that would fetch serious money in a college town or major city: tall Victorians with round towers and gingerbread framing their broad front porches; Craftsman “cottages” with more square footage in their foyers than most of the newer houses had in their living rooms. Her parents, of course, had had one of the newer houses. Like a lot of people in their era, they had equated new with luxury and old with deprivation. They’d had a rec room in the basement, too, not a big family room built above grade on a lower level, like Chris had now, but a low-ceilinged space carved out underground for the kids to put their toys in. Chris had always hated her parents’ house. When she was in college, she’d been very careful never to ask her friends home to see it.

Past the houses, there were long patches of green, some of it belonging to houses built far enough off the road to be invisible, some of it belonging to the few small farms that still ran in this part of the state. Chris went past them all without paying attention to any of them, and then up a small hill whose road was entirely lined with tall pine trees. What she wanted was at the end of that—the wrought-iron gate to Meldone Park. Just outside the gate, there were places to park, slots left open in a big unpaved field where the grass had already shriveled into shards of paper brown.

Chris pulled to a stop as close to the entrance to the park as she could and got out of her car. She locked all her doors. The wrought-iron gates looked as if they had been well cared for. The grass at the edges of the park looked as if it had been mowed. As soon as she came through the little stand of trees, she could see the sandy beach and the small lake it circled, man-made by the town in 1967 so that the children of Hollman would have someplace to go that wasn’t a concrete public swimming pool. Chris took off her shoes and tucked them into the top of her tote bag. Thank God she wasn’t wearing panty hose. She looked across at the few people sitting on blankets near the edge of the water and counted three she knew. All three had been in high school with her, two in her class and one in the class behind. None of them had been important at the time, and all of them were now thick with middle age and ugly with bad hair coloring. It just went to show, Chris thought, that you couldn’t be too careful about keeping yourself up.

She skirted the lake and the back of the lifeguard’s seat—there was nobody in it at the moment, which for some reason figured—and went into the woods on the hill above it. The path she remembered was still there. A few feet down the path, there was something new: a pair of signs, wooden blocks with one end carved into a point to turn them into arrows, announcing that men should go in one direction and women should go in another. Chris turned toward the “women’s” outhouses—the old outhouses—and climbed through the pines to the clearing where the outhouses were. They had not changed, except that they’d been painted. They looked exactly as rickety as she remembered them, so that she wondered, yet again, what Betsy had been so frightened of the night when she had been locked in. It wasn’t as if she would have been entirely in the dark. There were enough cracks in the walls and doors to let in all the light in the Western Hemisphere.

She turned away from the outhouses and started climbing again, off the path now, through the pines. As she went, she began to feel that she’d made a mistake. She hadn’t been out here—all the way out here—since the night of the catastrophe. There couldn’t be anything left to see. She wasn’t going to stand still in the clearing near the river and hear that voice floating up over her head again, keening and wild. She wasn’t going to hear the rushing of the water, either. That night there had been too much water in the river because there had been too much rain over too many weeks. Now the river would be nearly dry. They hadn’t had a drop of rain in weeks. Ghosts did not haunt the places where they had become separated from their bodies. Auras did not cling forever to those places where murder had been done.

The real problem with the clearing was that it was so dark. The pine trees around it were too high. They blotted out the sun. If it wasn’t for the glint of sunlight that shimmered on the face of the water, she would have thought it was the middle of the night. Her throat was very dry, and tight. She felt dizzy. No, there wasn’t anything out here, nothing but pine needles on the ground and the whisper of the wind, like a voice, that was always just a little too far away for her to be able to catch individual words. The river was not dry, but close to it. A trickle of water slithered along the bottom of the bed, leaving the rocks above it dirty and untouched. If blood had soaked into this ground thirty-two years ago, it had soaked away by now, stolen by rain storms and snowstorms and small animals. Small animals would eat dead bodies if they were left to rot in wooded areas. She had read that in the newspaper, once, she didn’t know when. She really was dizzy. She was going to throw up.