The Raising

83

“Something happened to him,” Perry said, “after the accident. I know Craig. He can be an asshole, but he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He remembers everything. He can tell you all the presidents in order, their terms of office. He won’t admit it, but he can. He’s not going to forget what happened on that night.”

Jeff Blackhawk’s car rattled around them disconcertingly, but Mira felt oddly comforted by the rattling, and the smell of it: the Krispy Kreme doughnuts and old French fries. When they’d left her apartment Jeff was watching Sesame Street with the twins, a show Clark insisted was the opiate of the masses. (“This shit’s supposed to turn parents into asexual zombies,” he’d said when Mira suggested that a minimal amount of PBS might help the boys with some language acquisition.) “Look!” Jeff was shouting at the television, pointing. “It’s Elmo!”

“Elmo!” the twins shouted back, as if it were a name they’d known all their lives and had only been waiting until this moment to call out.

Jeff wouldn’t even let Mira thank him—not for lending her his car, not for watching her children. “Just get some great material for your book,” he’d said, “and thank me in the acknowledgments. It’ll be my claim to fame.”

Now Perry Edwards was sitting beside her, directing her to the lanes she needed to be in to get to the exits they needed to take to get to Bad Axe to find the mortician who’d accepted the mangled remains of Nicole Werner, and who had slid them into the white coffin Perry had helped to carry down the aisle of the Bad Axe Trinity Lutheran Church on the day of her funeral.

Mira said, “Of course, there are head injuries that will cause selective amnesia—”

“But there were no head injuries,” Perry said. “They did a CT scan. They did ten CT scans.”

Mira stared out Jeff’s cracked windshield. It was a small crack on the left side, making its way across the glass slowly but perceptibly enough that she could gauge the progress it had made since the last time she’d been in the car. Two inches. In four weeks, at this rate, it would traverse the windshield.

She tried to think.

Mira had seen skulls.

Plenty of them. Skulls in Romania. Skulls in morgues. Skulls in long, chaotic piles and heaps in the Paris catacombs:

Walking through that underground full of bones, Mira had been amazed. So many dead. She’d let her hand drift over the hundreds and thousands of skulls, breathing in the smell she knew was theirs (must, dust) while the dank ceiling dripped ancient water onto her head, and she’d let it sink in how truly flimsy that helmet that protected everything was. That fragile container of dreams and memories and longings and desire. Of everything. One well-placed blow with a tree branch could shatter it all.

The impression had never left her. When she was seven months pregnant with the twins, she’d told Clark (who’d rolled his eyes), “I want them to wear helmets when they’re old enough to ride bikes. And they won’t ever be playing soccer.”

But, if there’d been no head injury?

There was nothing, Mira knew, that a CT scan couldn’t show. If there was no head injury, no brain damage, how was it that Craig Clements-Rabbitt remembered nothing of the accident that had killed Nicole?

“Well,” Mira finally said, “there are substances. Drugs. Injectables. There’s something called the ‘zombie drug.’ Scopolamine. At high doses it kills you, but at lower doses it induces amnesia. Prostitutes have been known to use it to drug and rob their customers. In some countries they claim it’s used to drug mothers and take their babies, traffic them to adoption agencies. They say it makes people so docile they’ll help you burglarize their own houses—and long after the drug is out of their systems, they still have no recollection of the events at all.”

Perry was running his hand over his head. Mira had noticed the buzz cut was growing out. It was as dark as she’d thought it would be.

“They used to give Scopolamine to women during childbirth,” she went on. “Probably your grandmother was given it—just woke up, and they told her she’d had a baby. It completely blocks the formation of memory. You can’t even hypnotize the person to help them remember what happened, the way you can with date rape drugs, because the memory is simply never recorded.

“They think it’s been used for voodoo for centuries in Haiti. It’s given to victims who are then buried alive and then dug up and told they’ve died and been exhumed as zombies—and they believe it. They’re willing to live the rest of their lives as slaves or prostitutes or servants because they’re convinced they died and were brought back to life.”

Perry had stopped rubbing his head. Now he was drumming his fingertips on his knee. The jeans he was wearing were creased so nicely Mira thought maybe he’d never worn them before. It was hard to imagine a boy his age ironing his own jeans, but if any boy would, Perry Edwards would be the boy. He said, “Before he left that night, in Lucas’s car, we had an argument. No,” he interrupted himself, “we had an actual fight. A fight that ended up with him with a bloody nose and us on the floor. He never said a word about it again, either like it never happened or, like after everything else that happened, it didn’t matter. I’ve never known if he just doesn’t remember. How do you know about this drug?”

The good students, they always questioned you in the end. They would accept your word for it only so far.

“Well,” Mira said. She went on to tell Perry how, while working on her master’s thesis, she’d traveled to Haiti with the help of a small summer grant that she and another graduate student had received together for a proposal they’d made to meet with a woman the Haitian newspapers had tried unsuccessfully to debunk as the “Zombie of Port au Prince.”

The woman’s family had claimed she’d been kidnapped by neighbors who tried to extort money from them, and that when they were unable to produce the money, the kidnappers strangled the young woman and left her dead body at the side of a road. Passersby put the body in the trunk of their car and drove it to the police station. When the trunk was opened, the young woman’s eyes were open, so she was returned to her family. But her family refused to take her back. When they saw her they said it was clear that she was missing her soul.

When word got out that this zombie was being moved from her hometown, where they’d have nothing to do with her, to an institution in Port au Prince, the institution employees resigned, and mayhem ensued among the other patients. By the time Mira and her fellow student learned about her and applied for the grant, the zombie was living in foster care—the fourth foster care she’d been placed in. It didn’t help matters that she herself had insisted that she was a zombie.

It seemed like such a promising research opportunity, and Mira’s advisors had been excited and supportive, but Mira and her research partner, Alexandra Durer, got only as far as the airport in Port au Prince, where they were refused entry into Haiti because riots had broken out. Americans had been killed. Armed rebels were said to have taken over the capital. Mira and Alex were boarded right back onto the plane they’d arrived on—and, after a lot of fruitless imploring and phone calls, they just gave up and got drunk on a bottle of duty-free rum they bought at the airport.

That winter, the Zombie of Port au Prince died of pneumonia.

Before they left for Haiti, Alex and Mira had done extensive research on the zombie drug, and their loose hypothesis had been that the woman had been drugged by her kidnappers, and that her ‘rescuers’ had mistaken her drugged state for death, and that the reaction to her return from the dead had been so influenced by the Haitian zombie culture that the victim herself, having no recollection of what had actually happened to her, had been willing to believe that she was a zombie.

“It’s not unheard of,” Mira said, “to find Scopolamine on college campuses—date rape, of course, but other uses, too. Hazing?” She shrugged. She’d never heard of this, but it seemed far from outside the realm of possibility. “Nicole might have known Greeks with access to the drug. Were she and Craig experimenters?”

Perry shook his head. “He smoked dope. A lot of dope. Probably other stuff, back in New Hampshire. I don’t know about her. I always thought she was against all that, but there were other things I thought about her that turned out to be wrong.”

He seemed disinclined to go on. He turned his face to the slushy scenery outside the passenger window, and put a hand against the dashboard, the heat vent. It couldn’t have been more than forty degrees in Jeff Blackhawk’s car, and Perry’s fingers were very white, the fingernails tinged with blue. Mira would have offered him the gloves she was wearing, but she was afraid that without them she’d be unable to drive.

“Zombie drugs,” Perry said after a long pause. He tucked his hands between his knees, paused again, and finally said, “All Craig can remember about the accident is what they told him, and what was in the reports: that Nicole was so badly injured and burned they could identify her only by the things she’d been wearing, and that he’d left the scene of the accident without bothering to try to help. That’s our exit.” He pointed to a green-and-white sign up ahead that read, BAD AXE.

84

Shelly’s answering machine was blinking so rapidly and chaotically that she didn’t bother to count the number of messages it must have recorded. She hit Play, and then she pulled a kitchen chair up next to the phone table, sat down, and began to unlace her boots.

“We know about you,” the first message said, followed by a beep. A young feminine voice. Not familiar, but not a total stranger’s, either. Shelly stopped unlacing the boot and put both feet next to each other on the floor.

“We know about you. You don’t know about us. We’re smarter than you think we are. You can’t trace these calls.”

An amused-sounding laugh, followed by a beep, and then:

“We’ve got a surprise for you. A whole bunch of surprises.”

Beep.

“Shelly? This is Rosemary. Are you okay there, honey? I felt so worried after our last talk. Things will get back to normal, I promise you, but how about, until things settle down, you come stay with us for a while? I told the kids I was inviting you, and they’re excited. Please?”

Beep.

“Surprise!”

But it was a different female voice this time. Lower. Sexier. Quieter.

Beep.

“Maybe you should have a look around your house. There’s a present for you. It’s in the bedroom. We know that’s where you like to get your presents.”

Shelly stood up.

Beep.

“That’s right. Go on. Go see for yourself.”

Beep.

“Hey, Shelly. Keep going.” Josie. Shelly couldn’t have proved it—too few words—but something about the cadence, the consonants pronounced at the very tip of the tongue against the teeth, seemed nauseatingly familiar.

Beep.

“Mee-owwww.” And then there was laughter, hysterical laughter, but Shelly was heading into the bedroom now, hurrying, that laughter pouring down on her like glassy rain.

Beep.

“Here kitty-kitty-kitty.”

Beep.

“You’re next, you bitch, if you don’t look out. I’d say it’s time you got out of town. And don’t think you can trace these calls, because the cops won’t be able to figure it out, and there’s no—”

But Shelly was screaming now, yanking on the rope that was strung from the light fixture over her bed and wrapped around her cat’s neck, pulling his limp body down, cradling him in her arms, screaming his stupid, silly name into his blank face with his black lolling tongue and his glass eyes staring intently at nothing at all.

85

Mr. Dientz remembered Perry from Cub Scouts. His own son was many years older than Perry, so they’d overlapped for only a year, but he gave Perry a hearty handshake and said, “Lord. What did your parents feed you, boy?”

Perry asked after Paul Dientz, who was in mortuary school in North Carolina, and then introduced Professor Polson. Mr. Dientz was obviously surprised, and not necessarily pleasantly so (a quick raising and lowering and raising of his very bushy gray eyebrows) to find that the professor was a woman. A young woman.

On the phone, he’d said, “Perry, since I know you, and since you say you’re doing this ‘research’”—the word had come out of his mouth like something from a foreign language—“I’m willing to indulge you and your professor, of course, and have I mentioned how impressed I am that you’re attending our state’s finest institution?”

Perry had assured him that he had.

“But it’s a part of my job I don’t relish. The reopening of old wounds, so to speak. Perry, it would amaze you to learn how many family members and friends in the weeks, months, years after a funeral—especially in the case of cremations and closed coffins—become convinced that there has been some case of mistaken identity. They think they’ve glimpsed a deceased brother or son or daughter on the street, or in a magazine, or they’ve gotten a hang-up call in the middle of the night—and, if they weren’t at the scene of the accident or the one to identify the body or if there were issues of identification, because many untimely deaths, Perry, let me be frank, leave behind corpses that do not resemble the living person—well, they can become fixated.

“Again, in the interest of ‘science,’ I am willing to meet with you and your professor and go over the record, but I must admit I can’t recall all the details, except of course the terrible tragedy of it, and, as I recall, the Werners did not take our recommendation to view the body. In the case of their lovely daughter, it would certainly have been horrific, but there’s really nothing better for a sense of finality, if you know what I mean, than to see the deceased with your own eyes.”

“Well, welcome,” Mr. Dientz said, sweeping his arm toward two plush red velvet armchairs across from his desk. “I’ve gone through my files, and as soon as you’re settled, I’d be happy to show you the reconstructive photographs.”

Perry had no idea what reconstructive photographs would be, but he did know, because Mr. Dientz had told him on the phone, that the funeral home kept a digital library of photos and information about their ‘clients.’ He would be showing them photographs of Nicole? Now? Perry looked toward the door, wondering if he could excuse himself for a moment, but Mr. Dientz wasted no time booting up his Mac, and turning the screen toward Perry and Professor Polson, so they could see.

“You may well ask yourself,” Mr. Dientz said, his voice shifting into the tone of a man on a radio commercial, clearly getting ready to say something he’d said a million times before but that still held meaning for him, “why it is we would spend the many hours we spend here at Dientz Funeral Parlor reconstructing the likenesses of decedents who have been disfigured by accidents or illness when, in fact, most funerals at Dientz Funeral Parlor are now closed-casket, and, in especially the most extreme cases, even family members will not be viewing the bodies?”

He looked at Perry and Professor Polson with rehearsed animation, as if gauging to what degree they had each been asking themselves this question.

“Well, I answer you with an anecdote from my earliest years as a mortician,” Mr. Dientz went on. “A young man had been killed in a motorcycle accident. I won’t go into the details, but like your friend Nicole, identification was difficult. Injuries, burns, even dismemberment. Everyone in the family insisted, as so many so often do, that they only wished to remember their loved one ‘as he had been.’ Of course, someone had identified him at the morgue, but it was a distant relative, and the identification was done mostly from clothing and a ring. The family insisted that they didn’t want any kind of reconstruction, no embalming. They didn’t even care what the deceased would be wearing in his coffin.

“Still, this was a very traditional family, and after ascertaining that they would not object to reconstruction and embalming, I went ahead with my usual practice of preparing a body for viewing—although, I will tell you, I did not charge the family for these services, or even inform them that I was going ahead with them.

“As I’d imagined might happen, at the funeral there was a great emotional outpouring. The mother was beside herself. The father had become almost violently inconsolable. One of the brothers threw himself against the casket weeping, and one of the sisters became hysterical, insisting it was impossible—insisting that her brother wasn’t in the casket, that this was a terrible dream or a mistake, and this got the whole family and even some of the young man’s motorcycle gang friends making similar outcries. A fight nearly broke out before the father pushed his other son away and flung open the coffin.

“Perry, Professor, let me tell you that if I’d had that coffin locked or sealed—or, if I hadn’t and that young man had been in there in the condition the county morgue had delivered him to me—well, this is the reason I always insist on reconstruction if I am going to have a body in a casket at Dientz Funeral Parlor.

“Because of the reconstruction, the family and the young man’s friends were able to gather around his casket and grieve properly. He was the young man they remembered. He was dressed in a decent suit. His hair was combed, and I’d remodeled what I could of his face based on the photograph they’d run in the newspaper.

“Nothing, nothing, makes a death as believable as being able to see, to touch, the loved one’s body. We are physical creatures, Perry, Professor.” He nodded at Professor Polson. “And although much has been done to ridicule and malign the ‘death industry’ in America, I can tell you from experience that there is tremendous comfort taken in being able to view a body, in repose, nicely dressed, tastefully remodeled, eyes closed, clearly at peace. And I make it my job to be able to offer that comfort to those who may not know, until the very last moments, that they will need it.”

“But Nicole’s family?” Professor Polson asked.

Mr. Dientz shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nicole’s family couldn’t bear it.” He shrugged, as if to say, you win some, you lose some. “Now,” he said. “The photos!”

Mr. Dientz whirled around in his chair with a flourish fit for the unveiling of the Mona Lisa. He waved his hand over his keyboard, took up his mouse, and then clicked a file in the center that read, NWERNER, and then JPEG10, and in less than half a second an image opened and filled the screen, and before Perry even realized that he had seen it, he was scrambling out of his velvet chair and across the room with a hand over his mouth, and then out of the office and into the men’s room near the entrance of the funeral home.

86

“Craig,” Perry had said when he left for Bad Axe with Professor Polson. “Just stay here, okay? We’ll be back late. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Like what?” Craig had asked, forcing Perry to say it:

“Like going out looking for Nicole.”

Craig had tried not to. He’d paced around the apartment. Turned the TV on and off. He’d eaten a salami sandwich. Taken his second shower of the day. Gotten in bed. Gotten out of bed, combed his hair and gone next door to knock on Deb’s door, but there’d been no answer. Finally, he’d sat down next to the phone and willed it to ring, and, incredibly, it had:

“Hello?”

On the other end of the line, there was no sound.

Craig held the receiver closer to his ear, and said hello again.

Now he could hear something. It was very distant, maybe the sound of a car on a freeway. Maybe, very faintly, there was music playing on the car radio. Or maybe he was just hearing his own heartbeat.

“Hello?” he asked again. And then: “Nicole?”

Then the line went dead, and Craig stood up, grabbed his coat, and headed out to do the stupid thing Perry had told him not to do.

It was colder out than Craig had expected it to be. The snow fell in fat flakes that stuck to the sidewalks and to the roofs and windshields of the cars parked beside the curbs, although the traffic was churning it into a slick, wet shadow in the road.

It seemed to Craig that the streets and sidewalks were oddly thronged with students. Had he simply not been outside enough this fall to notice them, or were they out, for some reason, en masse?

As they passed him—walking two or three abreast on the sidewalk and in the streets and at the corners, it felt to Craig as if he knew all of these kids, or had at least seen them all before. They were whooping, slapping each other’s backs, pretending to be arguing, telling jokes. Couples were holding hands. Girls had their arms slung around each other’s shoulders. Everyone seemed happy. No one was dressed for the cold or even seemed to be noticing it, and Craig was painfully, completely, aware of how separated he was from the lives of his peers. He was like a ghost come back to haunt the scene of his last days. No one seemed to notice him at all.

He remembered that life, and what it had been like to be a part of it. He remembered Lucas with a flask in his back pocket, stumbling off to the fourth bar of the night, and Perry, disapproving, walking a few steps ahead of them. He remembered how they’d stopped to shout something stupid up to the Omega Theta Tau house. Something about fucking virgins.

He remembered loving it.

How dumb and wonderful he had felt.

He remembered that a girl had come out on the porch, and that she was all lit up from behind. Even from that distance he could see how beautiful she was.

He had loved being a stupid, drunk college kid. An asshole shouting up at a sorority house. He loved the girl standing there, looking down at them, and the house, and the sense that, inside the house and behind that girl, some solemn ceremony was taking place in candlelight. Chanting. Holding hands. He’d loved that there would be such a house, such a secret society of beautiful girls, and that he was outside of it, shouting obscenities at it, being a real jerk—an oaf—while a big equally stupid moon was hung over it all, and he was fumbling for the flask in Lucas’s back pocket as Perry walked off without them.

But this was all before Nicole. Before she joined this sorority. Before all of it.

Now he was passing the first of the terrible landmarks. The stone bench beneath the weeping willow where he’d slipped the amber ring on her finger, and where she’d given him the poem he still kept in his wallet:

He stopped, looked at the bench, at the layer of snow accumulating on it, and he was so cold, shaking so hard, that if he hadn’t had his jacket zipped, it would have rattled off of him, he thought. He blew a long scarf of frosted breath into the air above the bench before he continued to walk, and he didn’t look up again until he’d gotten to the spot where, on Greek Row, you could see the hill from which the brooding Omega Theta Tau house looked down.

How had it gotten so dark so fast?

How long had he been walking?

Craig looked from the house to the sky, where a big blank moon was hanging, and then he looked toward the house again, where, in the light of that moon he saw two dark-haired girls walking down the front steps in puffy winter coats but very short skirts, knee-high boots.

They were still far away, but he could see that they were laughing, tossing shaggy wool scarves over their shoulders as they emerged through a scrim of snow.

He took a few steps toward them. They hadn’t noticed him, but they were heading in his direction. When they were less than a block away, Craig rubbed his eyes to be sure, but now he had no doubt:

One of them was Josie.

Craig would have recognized that black silk hair, that pointed chin, anywhere. He could even hear her familiar laughter as she got closer. That high, sharp cackle. “Oh, my God!” she was saying. “You are totally kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding.”

Craig continued to stand in the center of the sidewalk, watching. They were directly ahead of him, and so close now that their shadows, stretched ahead of them on the snowy sidewalk, nearly touched him, would soon envelope him.

Yes.

He knew without a doubt that the one on the left was Josie, but he had to rub his eyes and blink the snowflakes out of them several times, shake his head, before he could be sure of what he was sure of:

That the second girl, the dark-haired one walking with Josie, was Nicole.

Nicole.

“Nicole,” he said.

She didn’t hear him, and she hadn’t seen him.

He stood where he was and watched her, taking all of her in. The way she walked and the corners of her mouth. The little folds at the edges of her eyes. The perfect little bump on the bridge of her nose.

The silky straight hair was dark now, like Josie’s.

But the tilt of her head.

The delicate ear behind which her hair was tucked.

Those were the same.

He’d have recognized them anywhere.

She was wearing a leather skirt. And tights with a silver sheen, and high-heeled boots. More eye makeup than she’d ever worn in—in what? In life?—and dark red lipstick. Her skin was pale in the moonlight, but her cheeks were bright, either with cosmetics or the cold, or maybe she’d been drinking. She seemed to stagger a little. She held a hand to her mouth to laugh at something else Josie had said, but Josie’s voice shouted over the sound of Nicole’s laughter, and Craig was grateful for that, because if he’d heard her voice, her actual voice, he might not have been able to stand it.

“Nicole,” he said again, and then he was walking straight toward her, saying her name over and over, shouting it, and he was sliding on the slick cement toward them, and then they saw him, and there was no denying it:

Nicole.

She saw him, too. Her eyes filled with alarm. She turned and ran with what seemed like incredible speed back from where she’d come, back up the hill to the OTT house. Craig ran after her, slipping on the sidewalk, stumbling like a drunken man but managing somehow to stay upright, to continue the chase.

But she was so much faster than he was. She did not slip at all. How was that possible? In those high-heeled boots? In his life, Craig had only ever seen a deer run that gracefully, that quickly, that wildly and swiftly and without a backward glance, across the freeway, into the woods, without a sound. He was, himself, a much clumsier, heavier animal, slipping after her, panting, not with exertion but with panic, excitement, ecstasy.

She was ahead of him, but he was closer to her than he’d ever really believed he’d be again. She wasn’t within reach, but she might have been. She might be, eventually. If he could only—

But then Josie Reilly had slammed her body fearlessly into his, knocked him to the ground, and then she was on top of him, pummeling him with her fists, straddling his hips with her legs spread, slamming her small, white, balled-up hands against his face, his head, his eyes. She tore off her soft gloves so she could claw at him. “You motherfucker. You asshole. You murderer. Get out of here. Get out of our lives. Get off this campus you fucking bastard.” He tasted blood, and though he heard the sound of a bone snap somewhere in his face, and although it seemed to Craig that the whole thing lasted for decades, he felt no pain—and suddenly, just as he was getting used to it, he opened his eyes, and she was gone, and he was alone on the sidewalk, staring up at the moon as it seemed to toss cold white flakes down on his throbbing face.

“Holy shit,” a guy in a Red Sox cap said, looking down at him. “You okay, dude? I hope whatever you did to piss her off was worth it.”

87

“Oh, goodness. That certainly wasn’t the image I intended to show you,” Mr. Dientz said. “I’m sorry.” He sounded as if he were apologizing, belatedly, for having absentmindedly forgotten to offer someone sugar for his tea.

Perry had come back from the men’s room and was standing with his head against the window, looking out onto the Dientz Funeral Parlor parking lot, which was shadowed by the casket-shaped rectangle of the Dientz Funeral Parlor sign.

Both of these things—the parking lot and the sign—he’d passed in cars and on his bike maybe ten thousand times in his life, and yet there was something so unfamiliar, so unreal, about them in that moment that he knew that, if he were asked to, he’d be utterly unable to read the sign, to name the function of a parking lot, to place these things or himself on the surface of the earth. Back in the men’s room, he’d rinsed his mouth out, but he could still taste the bile. Professor Polson came up behind him and touched his arm. “Perry.” She said it firmly, pulling him back from the window.

“Well, that must have been a shocker for you!”

There was no escaping the amusement in Mr. Dientz’s voice, and Perry remembered now Mr. Dientz standing over a table of Cub Scouts in the Bad Axe Elementary School cafeteria chuckling as the Scouts tried to pound nails into boards. What had they been building? Birdhouses? Toolboxes? The pine boards had been thick and incredibly hard, and the Scouts were all under the age of ten, and with every smack of the hammer, a nail would bend over dramatically instead of being driven into the wood. “Hah, hah. We aren’t too good at boys’ work, are we, girls?” Mr. Dientz had teased, and Perry remembered the screwed-up expression on his son Paul’s face, the watery glare he kept trained on the nail as he prepared to smack it again with a hammer, and the way, when the nail bent over a fourth or fifth time and his father began to laugh, he didn’t throw the hammer down or even drop it, but very carefully placed it next to the boards and walked away as his father watched and continued to laugh.

“This,” Mr. Dientz said, “is the image I meant to show you, the post-reconstruction photo. Very good photo, and nice work, if I do say so myself.”

“First, let me see,” Professor Polson said, letting go of Perry’s arm, and leaving him in the corner of the office.

“You can see, Professor,” Mr. Dientz said, “how much work went into this, I hope. There’s really no resemblance between the first face and this one, is there?”

Professor Polson said nothing. She was looking intently into Mr. Dientz’s computer screen. Perry could see that there was a small line of sweat at her spine, gently soaked through the red silk of her shirt. The blouse wasn’t tight, but the material clung to her back, and Perry could have counted the vertebrae from where he stood. The electric glow from the computer illuminated the hair around her face, causing it to look both black and blindingly bright. “Perry?” she said gently, turning toward him. “Do you think you can you look?”

Perry swallowed. He crossed the mauve carpeting again, took the seat beside her, rubbed his eyes, which were watery and blurred from vomiting, and then he leaned toward the computer screen.

“You can see,” Mr. Dientz said, “that it’s truly like sculpting, the kind of work that has to be done on a face in the kind of condition in which this particular decedent was delivered to me. Luckily, the skull was mostly intact, and provided in its entirety, so that the fragmented sections could be glued back to their original places.” Mr. Dientz inhaled, as if reexperiencing the exhausting task in his memory. “I was then able to use something we call mortician’s putty to cover the bone, and then of course, because of the burning and discoloration, I needed to use mortuary wax as a kind of masking. But after that, with some cosmetic work, she was really almost finished. The hair needed only some styling and a synthetic addition or two. That was lucky, considering the damage from the fire to her skin. In total, maybe five hours work? Sadly, until the two of you, no one except me has ever seen her.”

Perry leaned in closer.

The face of the girl in the digital photograph was like no human face he had ever seen.

She radiated something so purely radiant that he wanted to close his eyes and lean forward at the same time, to disappear inside it. He had the feeling that, if he put his hand to the computer screen and touched her, she might wake up. She would be startled, confused, perhaps, but she would be more alive than anyone else in this room.

She had her eyes closed, this dead girl in the photo, but Perry didn’t have the sense that she couldn’t see. He had the sense that she no longer needed to have her eyes open to be able to see. She was seeing everything. She was everything. He had to lean back in the plush velvet chair and close his own eyes, and then open them again, and then he looked from Professor Polson to Mr. Dientz, and back to the girl.

“Perry?” Professor Polson asked.

“It isn’t her,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not Nicole.”

88

She took only the things she’d need for a night in a motel—she couldn’t stay at Rosemary’s, not with her children there, not in the state she was in—but when Shelly closed the door behind her, she felt an intense moment of grief for the things inside the house: the teacups and the comforter and the prints on the walls and her shelf of CDs, things she felt she might possibly never see again. No one ever knew, did they?

She didn’t bother to lock the front door. It was such a safe neighborhood, she’d never bothered—a fact she’d shared with Josie.

Her hands were still cramped and shaking from the shovel, the hard early winter ground. As she buried Jeremy (with a blanket, because it was unbearable to think of him in the cold, in the dirt) and wept, she thought about whether she should call the police, and decided that, if she ever did, it could not be now.

The darkness was pale on the lawn.

The moon was full.

The snow was falling fast, and it made a webby froth on the grass.

There was what seemed to be an unusually large number of students out, walking in small groups or in pairs, girls in ridiculously high heels leaning against one another, slipping around, making their way to bars, she supposed, and parties, where exciting and terrible things would happen to them. There would be kisses, and accidents, and endearments, and bitter words exchanged. Someone would fall in love. Someone would dance all night. Someone would get drunk, get raped, get hurt.

Shelly had to wait for a couple kissing in the middle of her street to break apart (two beautiful blondes, the girl on tiptoes to reach the mouth of the boy) before she could pull out of her driveway. They noticed her taillights eventually, and laughed, and moved with their arms still around each other, to the sidewalk. When Shelly backed up and passed a few feet from them, separated by the rivulets of melting snow on the glass of her passenger window, the girl (whose scarlet lips were parted over her white teeth) gave Shelly the finger, and then the couple let go of each other, doubling over with laughter, slipping around on the sidewalk, headed away, lit up in the moonlight—two incredibly beautiful, pointless human beings with no idea what awaited them—and Shelly had no choice but to drive past them again, trying not to stare, willing herself not even to glance at them in her rearview mirror, but watching them anyway.

They had nothing to do with her.

She knew that.

She could stand out in the snow all night and lecture those two about the fleetingness of youth, the dangers of this world, the accumulating importance of every act in this life, the thin thread, so easily snapped, between death and life, or simply the importance of being respectful of one’s elders, and they would never hear a word.

89

“Go,” Professor Polson said, and handed Perry the keys to Professor Blackhawk’s car. “I’m going to stay and talk to Ted Dientz here about possibilities. Identification. That sort of thing. He seems willing to work with us. He seems intrigued.”

Perry agreed.

At first, when Perry said that the girl in the photograph was not Nicole, Mr. Dientz had stammered some defensive remarks about how even a miracle worker can’t make a girl who’s been burned over 90 percent of her body and who’s sustained massive head trauma look like she did in life. But when he realized that Perry and Professor Polson weren’t questioning his skills as a reconstructionist, but actually questioning whether or not this girl, in this photo, was Nicole, he seemed excited.

Perry could imagine Mr. Dientz perfectly, suddenly, as a reader of detective fiction—the kind of man for whom such a mystery offered an intellectual challenge, a thrilling possibility, and who wouldn’t think it was necessarily out of the realm of possibility that a dead girl could be exchanged for a living girl, buried in her stead. He at least wanted to entertain the possibility for a little while.

“You know,” he said, “stranger things have happened. I won’t even go into it, but let me tell you—”

He didn’t tell them what stranger things, but he did tell them that, just because so many stranger things had happened, in his years as a mortician he’d begun, years before, collecting the DNA of every body he’d had “dealings with.”

“The military paved the way. They developed such a simple system of collecting DNA that, in my humble opinion, anyone who deals with the dead would be remiss not to take advantage of it.”

He went on to explain that he made, for each body, a “bloodstain card,” and kept them stored and filed in his basement.

“The tiniest drop of blood carries the entire blueprint, you know. All the genetic information for a single being and his or her family going back to the origins of the species!”

Professor Polson nodded as if she knew exactly what he was talking about, and asked, “So, you’ve kept a bloodstain sample card for Nicole?”

“Of course. All I would need is about five strands of hair from her mother or a sister to positively identify whether or not the bloodstain I have on file belonged to a relative of one of those Werner females. Just get me the hairs and I’ll make a call to my pals at Genetech, and for eight, nine dollars, we’ve got our answer.”

Mr. Dientz and Professor Polson talked excitedly about how swift, how efficient, it had become to trace the dead to the living, or to each other. Mr. Dientz was clearly attracted to Professor Polson. Twice, he’d called her “my dear,” and when she was looking through her briefcase, safely distracted, Perry had seen him lean over his desk and peer at the place where the buttons of her silk blouse were undone, where a bit of cleavage could be glimpsed. It probably didn’t hurt either that, all along, she’d been expressing admiration for his work, for his facility, for his skills. She’d talked to him about other funeral homes she’d visited, a convention of morticians she’d attended, morgues in other states and countries, practices long forgotten and those still in vogue, and she’d compared his favorably to all those. Either Professor Polson knew this would make Mr. Dientz putty in her hands, or she genuinely admired and understood him.

“You know,” he told her, not looking over at Perry, “I feel like being honest with you. I don’t keep the DNA just for identification—because, honestly, how often does this happen. I mean, as I’ve said, it happens, but not frequently enough to warrant the trouble of keeping the kinds of records I have. You know, it occurred to me when I first heard about the military project: ah-ha, they have a plan.”

Professor Polson nodded, and he took a breath.

“DNA can replicate itself, of course, and how many years away are we, really, from learning how to build a human being, a clone, if you will, a replica from only the most microscopic sample? I thought to myself, this is how they’ll raise their armies in the future, now that American boys are getting so soft. Why, even my own sons—don’t get me started! There’s no way those boys could save our butts in a war. We’re not raising real men anymore in this country, and the military knows this. No. They’ve saved the DNA of the military elite, the fighting machines. They will raise their armies out of those as needed.

“And I thought, shouldn’t my dead have the same advantages? They may not have died heroes, most of them, but a mortician feels an affection for his dead, and, I’ve felt that, as the last one to whom their care had been entrusted, I owed them the possibility of this raising. Certainly their families were in too much shock and pain to take care of details like this. Plus, it only takes a few seconds. The cards are small. I’ve only filled one file drawer so far.”

Professor Polson’s mouth was open, but she said nothing. She blinked, seeming astonished, speechless.

“But!” Mr. Dientz said, “in the meantime, I have what we need to solve this mystery!” There was more color in Mr. Dientz’s face then than there had been even when he was discussing the marvels of reconstruction and his passion for the work.

Now he’d disappeared into his basement to find Nicole’s card.

Perry took the keys from Professor Polson.

“Go see your parents,” she suggested. “But if you feel like you can stand it, could you visit the Werners? Pay your respects, as it were. And—just see. We might need them, you know. Their cooperation, eventually. I’ll take care of things here while you’re gone, and then we’ll see what’s next.”

“Okay,” he said, although he didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to leave the funeral home, to face his own or Nicole’s parents, to drive off into Bad Axe, which, in this new context, seemed like an entirely alien place. But he nodded, and said, again, “Okay.”

“And if you do visit the Werners, Perry,” Professor Polson said, “it couldn’t hurt to bring something back. Everyone has a hairbrush, or a comb, or a few strands of hair lying around a bathroom sink. With all those sisters? All that hair? Mr. Dientz said he needed five hairs, but I’ve heard of this being accomplished with one. I don’t want you to do anything you feel uncomfortable doing, but it would save us having to tell them, right now, about any of this, if, until—”

“Yes.” Perry nodded.

It was early evening but already pitch-black outside. Snow had been falling all day, and now it looked like shattered glass all over the lawns and the sidewalks and the streets of Bad Axe. No one was out. The only signs of human life Perry glimpsed were behind curtains: shadows in front of flickering television screens, a lamp burning over a shadow’s desk. Some people had their Christmas lights up already. Blinking, blinking.

Every house, Perry realized as he passed them, had a story—and because it was a small town, Perry knew the stories. It wasn’t always death, but, over there, somebody’s grandmother had fought off her meth-addict grandson with a shovel when he came to try to steal her wedding ring. Across the street from that, Melanie Shenk’s house was dark. Her mother, Perry knew, had been put in jail for bank fraud. One of the houses on the corner belonged to the father of another girl Perry had gone to school with, a girl a few years older than he was. Sophie Marks. Everyone had pitied her because her parents were divorced and her father had custody and she dressed poorly, and often joked, herself, about not having had an actual home-cooked meal in her entire life. (“How is that different, ‘home-cooked,’ from, say hot dogs?”), but now she was a flight attendant, married to a pilot, and Perry’s mom had told him that Sophie flew her father, a retired postman, all over the world for free these days. “Last I heard he was headed to Singapore.”

Before Perry realized he’d done it, he’d driven past his own house without stopping, only glancing at it as if it were any other house on the block—lit up warmly from within, someone’s mother carrying a plate of something to a table. Someone’s father at the table. They would not be expecting a knock on their door. It would surprise them, concern them, to find their son, who was at college, at that door.

He was, instead, on his way to the Werners’. Left on Brookside. Right on Robbins.

He’d done this drive a hundred times, picking up Nicole for a student council carwash or debate team meeting. He’d had access to a car, and she didn’t. It was a small town. No one needed directions to anyone’s house. All you had to do was say, “Oh, he’s three houses down from the Werners,” or “Catty-corner to the Edwardses, and then across the street.”

The Werners’ house was lit up warmly, too. They already had their Christmas lights up. Blues and reds and whites and greens shone in little points along the eaves. The curtains in the front window of their nice little ranch house were closed.

Perry had been in that house many times. There were only a few bedrooms, he knew, and so many girls. The sleeping arrangements must have changed with the years, as one girl went to college and another girl got a room of her own. The house was small, but it had always seemed warm and clean. Perry had always had the feeling, as he waited in the living room for Nicole, that you could crawl around all day on your hands and knees in that house looking for a speck of dust and never find one. Of course, their restaurant was the same way. You could imagine it being run through a car wash every few hours. Blasted into perfection. Every surface shining.

But the Christmas lights seemed strange.

Had Perry expected black drapery over the windows?

Well, no. But he hadn’t expected early Christmas lights. And he was even more surprised to see, beyond the Christmas lights and the gauzy curtains, several female shadows gathered around the broad shoulders of a masculine shadow. They were gathered, Perry realized, after stopping the car in the middle of the street and staring long enough, around the Hammond organ in the Werners’ living room.

All the girls played, he was pretty sure, as well as Mr. Werner. Nicole had told him about the all-night caroling that went on sometimes on Christmas Eve.

He turned off the engine of Professor Blackhawk’s car after parking it in front of the house, and the whole rattle-trap—chrome, engine, upholstery—shuddered loudly before dying. It was more noise than Perry had expected to make or he’d have parked farther away, and someone in the house, apparently, had heard it, too. He watched as one of the feminine shadows (Mrs. Werner?) turned from the gathering and moved toward the window. Her hand parted the curtains, just at their edge, and he saw a face, silhouetted with the light from behind, peer out quickly before dropping the curtain. She seemed to have said something that made the others turn away from the organ and look at her.

Perry was glad, he supposed, that they knew someone was on the way, glad that there’d been a bit of warning.

He’d hated the idea of surprising them.

Even with their other daughters at home, even gathered around an organ, Perry imagined that the grief of the place would have its own texture—those shadows—and a smell, maybe the smell of the Dumpster in the parking lot behind Dumplings. When Perry was first learning to ride a bike, his father would sometimes take him to that parking lot on a Saturday morning before the restaurant opened, when there was no one there. It had a hill that sloped down into nothing but high grass, so it was a good place to practice turning, braking—better than the street in front of his house, where a car might be coming. Perry used to smell the Dumpster those mornings, and it wasn’t a bad smell. Just yeasty, tired, soft disintegration. Wet bread, he thought. And the scraped-off remnants of cabbage some child had refused to eat. Maybe half a piece of black cherry torte some woman on a diet hadn’t finished. Gravy in a garbage bag, bones.

Perry got out of the car and slammed the door loudly behind him (more warning), and then he took a slow step toward the door, which Mrs. Werner had opened before he’d even had a chance to knock—and although she looked happy and flushed (just as he remembered her from years before, bustling around her restaurant, bringing special treats of dark bread and homemade jam over to the tables where “my daughters’ chums!” sat), she did not look pleased to see him.

Perry glanced beyond her to the place where the family had been gathered, but there was no one in the living room now. Still, he could see a bright red electrical dot glowing over the keys of the Hammond organ.

The Hammond organ was on.

Perry thought he could hear it humming when Mrs. Werner, reluctantly, it seemed, stepped aside to let him in.

“Nice to see you, Perry. How are your folks?”

“They’re fine, Mrs. Werner. I—”

“What can I do for you?”

“I just came by to say hello. I—”

“I was just getting ready to go out, but if you’d like to sit down for a second—”

Mrs. Werner pointed to a white couch. There was a sheet of plastic over it, and Perry remembered the long-haired black cat, Grouch, who’d hissed at him once when he’d knelt down to pet it, and how Nicole had laughed like crazy. (“God, he likes everybody. He’s never done that to anyone! That’s why we call him Grouch.”) Perry had never bothered to ask her if she was just kidding—if, in truth, that cat hissed at everyone and she was being ironic, or if it was true, that the cat really was friendly, and the name Grouch was ironic. Now he wished he knew.

“Do you still have Grouch?” he asked Mrs. Werner—stupidly, he thought, as soon as the words had left his mouth. (After all that had happened, he was asking about their cat?)

“Why do you ask?” Mrs. Werner said, sitting down in a matching white armchair, also covered in plastic, across a glass-topped coffee table from him. Perhaps it had been a stupid question, Perry thought, but he was still surprised by her response, and all he could think of to say was, “I remember him.”

“Well, yes, we still have Grouch. He’s old. But a cat can live for over twenty years.”

“Oh, that’s great,” Perry said.

“How are your parents?” Mrs. Werner asked again.

“They’re fine, Mrs. Werner. They’re great. I mean, I haven’t seen them yet, but Thanksgiving’s just around—”

“You came up to Bad Axe to visit us?” Mrs. Werner asked, opening her eyes wide, her expression alarmed. Perry thought she looked as beautiful as any of her daughters ever had. Her face seemed nearly unlined, bright with good health. Her hair was gray, but it wasn’t the dry gray he remembered from the funeral, the last time he’d seen her. Now it looked soft. It fell in silver waves around her shoulders.

“Well, no,” Perry said. “But since I was here, I wanted to say hello.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Werner said, and clapped her hands on her knees, as if that sealed the deal. End of discussion. “That’s very kind of you, Perry. We always thought a great deal of you, and also your parents. We’ll miss them.”

“You’ll miss them?”

Mrs. Werner looked at Perry curiously.

“Oh,” she said. “I assumed you knew, that it was the reason for your lovely visit. We’ve sold the restaurant. We’re moving to Arizona. In two weeks.”

“In two weeks?”

“Yes. I know some people think it seems sudden, but we’ve been considering retirement for a long time. Mr. Werner and I are not spring chickens, and, well—”

“Of course.” Perry was being polite. What he felt was confusion, and a strange disbelief. Who was he to question the plans and the motives of these people? But all these generations in Bad Axe? His first school had been Werner Elementary. Now they were moving to Arizona? In two weeks?

Mrs. Werner stood up. She said, “I certainly appreciate this chance to say good-bye, Perry. It was delightful to see you, and if you ever get to Arizona—”

“Where in Arizona?”

Mrs. Werner cleared her throat and said, “That’s yet to be determined, Perry. Probably Phoenix. Of course, I’ll send word to all the good folks up here when we have a permanent address.”

The smile on her face was anxious, but not entirely false. She was happy to see Perry, he could tell by the warmth of her embrace, and she was sorry about something, too, but when he asked if he could use her bathroom before he left, the smile evaporated.

She stood looking at him for several seconds, as if she expected him to take the request back. When he didn’t, she said, “Well, dear, let me just take a peek in there first to make sure there aren’t any towels on the floor. You know, we’ve gotten sloppy, getting ready for the move, and I wouldn’t—”

Before Perry could object, say he really didn’t care about the state of their bathroom, she disappeared through a door in the hallway attached to the living room, and when she returned, she said, “It’s fine. Go ahead,” and Perry stepped past her, closed the door behind him.

There was light blue tile. Seashells on the wallpaper, just like the wallpaper his mother had hung one Saturday afternoon a few summers back (probably bought it at the same store: a sale, a promotion, at the same time). As quickly as he could, Perry got on his hands and knees on the white carpeting and began to search for anything other than black cat hairs (Grouch: they were everywhere). He couldn’t find anything. But when he stood back up, he saw it: a hairbrush on the shelf above the toilet tank. A brush with a tortoiseshell handle and white bristles. It was small, the kind of thing he could slip into his jacket pocket. He looked at it and saw that it was a treasure trove: There were long blond strands of hair floating ethereally out of it, and shorter gray hairs mixed in with those. A feminine nest, something made out of silk and breath. He took a Kleenex out of a box on the sink, wrapped it around the head of the brush, and put it into his pocket just before flushing the toilet, clearing his throat, opening the bathroom door, and stepping back into the living room.

“Okay?” Mrs. Werner asked. She held the front door open for him, despite the cold wind blowing through it, and there was no mistaking her fervent desire that, now, he leave.

Perry reached out and extended a hand to Mrs. Werner, who took it in hers and squeezed with genuine warmth, until he looked down, and she must have noticed him noticing the amber ring on her finger (it had not, he felt sure, been there when she’d taken his hand when he first arrived), and then she was pulling her hand back and closing the door without saying good-bye.

He went back to the car, walking as slowly as he could. He wanted to turn back, wanted to think up some good reason that he would. Was there any conceivable thing he’d “forgotten” to say to the parents of the girl at whose funeral he’d been a pallbearer only nine months before? Maybe We’re thinking Nicole is still alive? Or We think your daughter may have risen from the dead?

No.

He had to resign himself to getting back into Professor Blackhawk’s car, and starting it up, and driving it off.

But Perry had driven only a few blocks (past the Hollidays’—one of whose sons, the last Perry had heard, was a homeless violinist in Santa Monica—and around the corner on which Mrs. Samm lived with the children of her youngest daughter, who’d been killed in motorcycle accident) when he pulled to the curb again and turned off the engine:

A whole group of girls had been gathered around that organ, which Mr. Werner had been playing, and when they’d realized someone was stopping by, they’d fled.

It was a small house. Three bedrooms? Was the basement even finished? The kitchen was small enough, as he recalled it, to have been called a kitchenette. They had to have gone to the farthest bedroom. They had to have been holding their breaths. Had they sat at the edges of the bed, holding their fingers to their lips to remind themselves to stay silent?

Why?

It would have been crazy.

If they’d wanted to avoid him, all they’d have had to do was have Mrs. Werner say at the door, “We’re busy at the moment, Perry, or I’d invite you in—”

No.

They didn’t want him to know they were there.

Or was he the one who was crazy?

Perry got out of the car then and started to walk back to the Werners’.

90

Ted Dientz reminded Mira of a gym teacher she’d had, one of the few junior high teachers who’d seemed to really love his job, feel serious passion for his subject. Sometimes, even now, Mira thought of him while teaching one of her own classes, remembering the way he’d stood in front of a slide projection of an illustration of the muscles of the human body.

Rippling, himself, with muscles, Mr. Baker would point out the best ones, the ones that could be developed with “so little work you won’t even know you’re doing it.” The benefits of this, the beauty of weightlifting, sometimes seemed to overwhelm him as he tried to describe it. (“You won’t believe it. One day you won’t even be able to lift something, and in a short time, you won’t even feel like you’re lifting it.”) And although Mira had never become interested in weightlifting, she’d learned something about enthusiasm from Mr. Baker, and how a teacher can convey a sense of it to his students. It was Mr. Baker she’d thought of in her own freshman Latin class upon learning that the word enthusiasmus meant “inspired by a god.”

In the case of Ted Dientz, there was no doubt that it was the God of the Underworld who possessed him, but Mira understood as well as anyone what that was like. When he brought up the envelope with the bloodstain card from the basement, he said, “You know there’s very little that a few blood cells or a strand of hair can’t tell us any longer. You could be a master of disguise, but if I could compare a single one of your cells to a strand of your mother’s hair, I would instantly know who you are.”

He let Mira take the envelope from his hands, and said, “Go ahead. It’s in sealant. You can’t hurt it.”

Mira opened the envelope and slid out the card. It was a little bigger than a business card. The top half of it was white, and it had Nicole’s name and birth and death dates written on it in black capital letters, in a felt-tip pen. The bottom half was purple with a dime-size circle in the center, and in the center of that lay a dark and ragged little stain.

Ted Dientz tapped it and said, “That’s our girl.”

Mira looked at the little stain. Nicole, if it was Nicole.

“Everything there we need to know. Everything we’d need to bring her back to life, really, if we had just a bit more know-how. Well, someday!” He chuckled, and then he took the card from her, tucked it back into the envelope, and held it on his lap. It stayed there between them like a third person—not a ghost, exactly, just a presence—as they talked about Mira’s research, her book, her travels, and his travels.

Ted Dientz had, himself, as she had, visited Bran Castle in the Carpathian Mountains.

“Of course, my wife and I didn’t tell the folks around here that we were visiting Dracula’s castle. It would have looked bad for business.”

“So what did you tell them?” Mira asked, before realizing it might embarrass him, his lie.

“Well, we said we were on a mission trip. Orphanages and such.” (And indeed he blushed from his necktie to his forehead as he told her.) “But you can imagine my interest! As I can tell you understand, as so few people do, it’s not a morbid fascination; it’s a scientific one. I’m not interested in vampires, but I am interested in legends surrounding death. I have, myself, witnessed some extraordinary things.”

Mira nodded for him to go on, while resisting the urge to take out her notebook and pen.

“I’ve seen, for instance, corpses sit up and sound as if they were screaming. Of course, it’s biological. It’s utterly explainable. But let me tell you—” He laughed, and so did she. “And there have been bodies that seemed to withstand decay for strangely long periods of time, Professor. Others that disintegrated even as I moved them from their deathbed to a stretcher. And the differences have so little to do with age, with disease. Certainly, a more primitive people would have needed a way to explain this, along with other things, such as the sense one sometimes has of a presence. Sometimes malevolent. Sometimes desperate.”

“How do you explain it?” Mira asked.

“Well, I don’t,” Ted Dientz said a little sheepishly. “It might surprise you to know,” he added, raising his eyebrows, clearly hoping that it would, “that Mrs. Dientz and I traveled to Thailand after the tsunami and assisted in the preparation and disposal of bodies. The need for morticians and others in the death arts was extraordinary at that time. It was perhaps the most important work I’ve ever been able to offer.”

It did surprise Mira. It was easier to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Dientz of Bad Axe on a travel tour of Dracula’s castle than taking a plane to one of the most devastated places in the world.

Ted Dientz went on to tell Mira that during the weeks he’d spent in Thailand he’d met many people who believed they’d seen drowned corpses rise from the waters, walk onto shore, stride past horrified onlookers, and even hail cabs to be driven away.

“Did they think they were ghosts?” Mira asked.

“Some believed they were ghosts, yes. In fact, most cab drivers refused to make their rounds down by the beach in those early weeks, claiming they were being hailed by ghosts, or that they could see the dead tourists on the beach still looking for each other, or playing obliviously in the sea. One told me, ‘They think they’re still on vacation.’ But most people seemed to think these were actually reanimated corpses. It’s not an unusual belief, Professor, as you know. I have to tell you, you’d think a man like me, having spent his whole life in this business, would find that laughable, but I don’t.”

She nodded.

She felt her eyes welling stupidly with tears.

The simple honesty of this man, with her, a stranger. He had waited, she felt, a long time to tell someone other than Mrs. Dientz about all this. It meant something to him that she was nodding. He rested his hand patiently on the envelope containing the bloodstain card. He was a man made of patience, she thought.

Now she owed him her own story, she felt—or, she realized, too, that she needed to tell it, just as he’d needed to tell someone. So she started, the day she had stayed home from school, the vision of her mother in the pantry, the funeral years later, the strange and terrifying images that had inspired her entire life’s work. She had just finished speaking, and Mr. Dientz was nodding, quiet but fully attentive, when Perry came back through the door, out of breath, gasping for breath, holding the handle of a hairbrush wrapped in tissue and trailing a little white blizzard behind him.

91

Craig was halfway up the stairs to his apartment when he heard a door open and someone clomping unevenly toward the stairwell. “Oh, hello,” he said, when he recognized her, and then covered his face in his down jacket, which he’d taken off, when he recognized the look of horror on her face.

“Holy shit,” Deb said, rushing to him, holding the back of his head in one hand and his coat in the other, pressing his face into the jacket even harder, to the point that he was a little afraid that the tiny, goosey feathers might smother him. “What the fuck did they do to you?”

She hurried him as quickly as a girl on crutches could hurry someone into her apartment, pulled the door closed behind him, shoved him toward her bedroom, where, it appeared, she hadn’t done anything—changed the sheets, made the bed—since rousing him from sleep there the day before.

“It looks worse than it is,” Craig told her, but he knew the words were muffled by his jacket, and that there was blood all over the top of his head, so who knew what she thought he was saying to her?

“Oh, my God,” she was saying. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I’ll be right back. I’ll get some towels.”

Craig felt bad about it—he would ruin her towels with his bloody nose, he might stain her sheets with the blood running down his neck—but he let himself fall backward, hard, onto her bed, and the room swirled around him like a warm bath. Never in his life had a bed felt this comfortable. It would be fine, he thought, if she came back with the towels, but it would also be fine if someone just came in here and turned off the lights and let him lie like this forever.

“Here!” she screamed, tossing the towels toward him. And then, again, “Oh, my God!”

“It’s just a bloody nose, maybe broken,” Craig said—although he also knew that with his current nasal intonation, she probably had no idea what he’d said. “No big deal. I’ve had one before. Just gotta put a bandage on it if it’s broken. Maybe I’ll have black eyes.”

He took the jacket off his face, grabbed a towel, and could tell by the way she inhaled that he must already have black eyes.

“What happened?” she asked, and the way she said it was so serious that he felt, somehow, the need to suppress his own laughter. He pressed the towel harder against his face. He could almost hear the snow falling outside. Those flakes, big as little hands, had slapped him upside the head the entire walk home from Greek Row. The whole way there’d been the gasping of girls when they saw the little trail of blood he was leaving in the snow, and the “Whoa, dude” of the guys, and the whole time he’d felt this same urge to laugh right along with the urge to hit someone, to pummel someone, to punch someone in the face, the feeling he imagined boxers had—a profound love and joy and urge to do violence all wrapped up in one profound physical desire.

But he didn’t do it. He’d just kept walking. Laughing, and maybe weeping (was that tears or blood, and what was the difference now?) as he kept walking, thinking of her taking one look at him, running. She wasn’t dead. He’d seen her with his own eyes:

The fucking lying, cheating bitch hadn’t died.

She was the one who’d been calling. The postcards were hers. The beautiful girl he’d loved and killed had come back to life.

Deb left and reemerged above him with what looked like a washcloth full of rocks, or ice, and sat beside him on the bed, moving the towel gently away from his face and lowering her little frozen surprise toward his nose, making noises of empathy and disgust as she did it and demanding that he tell her something he had no idea how to begin to tell her, or anyone, because there were no words with which to express such a thing.

92

“I saw her, too,” Perry said, holding out the brush to them. “At the same time. Here. I saw her with my own eyes.”

“Perry,” Professor Polson said, taking a step toward him. “What do you mean?”

“I went back there. I left the car, and I got down on my hands and knees, and I crawled through the Barbers’ backyard, and I found a window with a little crack in the curtain, and I put my hands up to it—”

At first, he could see almost nothing through that crack, but every other window had a shade pulled so tight he could see nothing at all through those. So he’d stood there with his hands pressed against the pane long after his hands had gone numb, staring at a little place between what appeared to be a china hutch and the dangling chains of a cuckoo clock, watching the shadows come and go against it, listening to the muttering of voices, and a few high notes of laughter, but mostly serious-sounding voices.

Now and then Mrs. Werner passed before him—Perry recognized the gray-blue dress she’d been wearing, and then another female form: Mary? Constance?

There was a soft gray sweater.

There was what looked like a plaid skirt.

He saw one pair of female arms bearing what must have been Grouch in her arms, and a few times Mr. Werner came and went in a yellow shirt. Finally, Perry was about to leave. (What the hell am I doing? he’d thought.) The snow had soaked through his jacket all the way to his skin, and he realized that he was standing in the perfect place where, if one of the neighbors decided to turn on their porch light, he’d be illuminated for everyone to see, and there would be no way to get away except by scaling their picket fence, and then—

And then she was leaning over.

She was picking up something she’d dropped on the floor.

Her hair was the flaxen blond he remembered from elementary school—whispering around her face, curling around the curve of her upper arm.

Volleyball. Reaching up with that arm, to serve, to spike.

His bed.

She’d rolled over and swung it over his chest and said, “Craig would just die if he walked in here now.”

And he’d said into the nape of the neck he was staring at now, “And why does that make you laugh?”

And she’d laughed.

Now she laughed. Her familiar laugh. She managed to pick up whatever it was she’d dropped and stick it back into her flossy hair (a comb, a barrette), and just at that moment she turned to the window and fixed him with a look he also knew:

Hide and Seek in the Coxes’ backyard.

I see you.

Her lips were redder than he remembered, and her cheeks were flushed—not that different from the flush on the cheeks of her mother—and her eyes seem to flash in his direction, and she tilted back her head toward the ceiling, and when she laughed he could see her teeth brighten in the overhead light, and he could feel through his whole body the sharp stabbing pain of her laugh.

93

“Are you fooling around with Perry or something?”

“What?”

“How many times have I passed you on the stairwell just as I’m headed up to the room, and when I get there Perry’s either asleep or has just left for the shower?”

“I was up there looking for you, Craig.”

They were standing in the stairwell, facing one another, and the late winter twilight from the one little window shone on the linoleum, casting the shadow of its diamond panes across Nicole’s pale feet.

She was wearing flip-flops. She wasn’t planning to go anywhere outside. Her toenails were painted pink. She rested her hand on the wooden rail and began to smooth it with her palm. Craig looked at the hand. Her fingernails were also pink, and the way she was touching that rail—recently varnished, it seemed, so that it shone, while still bearing under that gleaming shellac job all the nicks and scratches and carved initials of about a million students. He wanted to pull her hand away from the railing. Jesus, how many germs from how many hands was she touching as she touched it?

She licked her bottom lip, and suddenly that familiar little tic (when she was nervous or upset or about to cry) seemed almost obscene to him.

Her cheeks looked flushed against the pasty stairwell walls, and her lips were very red. Craig thought he could smell her, too, even though she was standing several feet from him, and it wasn’t her usual baby powder smell, or the smell of her flowery shampoo. She smelled, he thought, like sex.

He looked down again at her hand rubbing the railing, and had to stop himself from grabbing the hand, making her stop.

“I went up there to tell you I’ve got to do laundry tonight. Josie and I are picking out dresses for the Spring Event.”

“But you knew I wasn’t there. You knew I was at the lecture I was assigned to attend.”

(Awful: An old professor who mumbled into a microphone for over an hour about the Post-Copernican Double Bind and the epistemological consequences of the Cartesian cogito—whatever the hell all that was. The undergraduates had started to file out at the same moment, like a timer had gone off or something in the middle of the lecture, and Craig had followed them, as the professor droned on. He’d hurried back to the dorm, imagining the poor guy still going on and on back there for the benefit of the two graduate students in the front row.)

“I just happened to be back early. You had no reason to think I’d be back in the room yet.”

“I’m sorry. I guess I don’t know your schedule well enough, Craig.”

“But this isn’t the first time.”

“You’re saying you think I’m—?”

Was he? Was that what he was saying? Did he really think she was—what? Fucking Perry? Was he really looking at Nicole and thinking to himself that there was even the remotest possibility that all this sweet virginity business, the promise ring she wore on her left hand—the amber ring, he noticed now, was not on her right hand tonight, but she said she had to take it off sometimes when she did a lot of typing—that it was all a joke? That not only wasn’t she a virgin, but she was screwing his roommate?

Perry?

He knew Perry wasn’t crazy about him, but they’d been getting along a lot better lately. Perry, the Boy Scout. Even if Nicole would do it, Perry wouldn’t.

Still, there was one thing Craig remembered from the lecture that night, and it bothered him at the moment, just as Nicole took a step toward him, and he could see that her eyes were filled with tears, and her blazingly red lips were trembling, and he knew that she was about to put her head on his shoulder, or press her face into his chest—something about Kant. How the human mind orders reality subjectively. The geezer had called it the “relative and unrooted nature of human knowledge.”

It was the only thing Craig had bothered to write down.

It was stuck now in his mind like a disturbing image, a catchy song.

But when Nicole lifted her tear-streaked face to his, he shook his head and took her in his arms.

94

For miles hers seemed to be the only vehicle on the freeway. Now and then a truck passed in the opposite direction, its wipers sloshing snow off the windshield with what looked like elaborate, sloppy showgirl boas and sweeps. Shelly imagined the drivers in those cabs. They would be hypnotized by the sound of their own wipers. They might be listening to talk shows, to the voices of strangers phoning in from other corners of the country, asking personal questions or expressing heartfelt convictions. Those truckers might be nearing sleep, or jangled up with caffeine and those energy pills they sold at the counters of gas stations. The snow seemed frenzied, suicidal, tossing itself into her path, but Shelly herself wasn’t lulled into any kind of sleep by the sound of the wipers.

She was more awake and alert than she had ever been in her life.

And although she realized that, really, she’d spent all of her adult years alone (or maybe every year of her life since her brother had died and her parents had fallen apart), this was the first night that she was acutely, completely, aware of how utterly alone she was.

She thought of Jeremy.

She thought of the James Joyce story.

The snow falling on the living and the dead.

There was no sense listening to the radio.

It was just more living and dying.

A few more miles, and she passed a truck jackknifed in the center median, surrounded by orange flares, and could see, heading toward it on the opposite side of the freeway, a police car’s flashing red and blue lights beyond the heavy veil of what now could only be described as a nearly total whiteout.

She should get off the freeway. If she could have stood to listen to the radio, she knew that was the advice she would have heard. She had just seen a sign for a Motel 6, a Cracker Barrel, a Quik Mart (Exit 49), and although she did not recall ever having pulled over on this particular exit, or being at this particular town (Brighton), she took comfort in knowing exactly what it would be like.

How many hundreds of Motel 6’s had she experienced in her life?

How many Cracker Barrels? Quik Marts?

Unlike many of her fellow academics, Shelly actually went to these places. She stayed in them. Ate in them. Purchased her snacks and beverages in them. She loved them for the very things for which her colleagues disdained them. Their kitschy sameness, and the way the girls at the cash registers always said something like, “Hi there! What’s up? Find everything okay?”

Shelly could pull off at this exit she’d never pulled off at before in her life, step out of her car blindfolded, and find her way to everything. The laminated menu. The check-in counter. The Slushy machine.

No. She wouldn’t pull over yet. Not at Exit 49. She would keep driving, and she did. Exit 49 blurred right past, and then Shelly realized where she’d wanted to go all along—and although she hated other people who scrolled through the addresses in their cell phones while driving in perilous conditions, she did it herself until she’d found Ellen Graham’s phone number, and then was hearing herself ask this poor woman, this nearly perfect stranger, if it would be okay if she stopped by (in the dark, in a blizzard) for the second time in a day.

95

“Are you okay, Perry?”

Perry nodded. Again, he had his hands against the fan, blowing its feeble attempt at heat on the dashboard of Jeff’s car. They should stop and buy him gloves, Mira thought, before leaving Bad Axe. There was a stillness to the air that made the snow seem even colder and more enveloping than it ordinarily would—and of course there was so little heat coming out of the vents that it seemed pointless to be idling in the funeral home parking lot, letting the car “warm up.” The car seemed only to grow colder as they sat in it, engine rumbling around them, interior lit up by the white electric Dientz Funeral Parlor sign, as if that pale light were lowering the temperature of everything it touched.

Still, Mira wasn’t ready to drive, and Perry had yet to speak since he’d said good-bye to Mr. Dientz.

When he’d first come back from the Werners’, he’d spoken so quickly, been so flushed and breathless, that he reminded Mira of the ranting “preacher” who sometimes stood on a bench on campus and shouted at the students as they passed. On every campus she’d ever studied or visited, there had been such a preacher. Always a cheap-looking suit, a good haircut, eyes so pale they seemed to be lacking irises. What this particular ranting man said usually made sense, sentence to sentence, but no sense at all when put together: Lightning was striking cell phone towers. The producers of television shows were trying to read our minds. People in gray coats were hard to see, and could sneak up on you.

Perry had seemed to be trying to hold back that same ranting passion, bordering on mania, insanity, when he came back saying he’d seen Nicole.

He’d seen Nicole, he said.

He’d seen her teeth.

But there was also something about a cat, and Mrs. Werner’s hair—how it was more beautiful than it used to be—and a Hammond organ and a game of Hide and Seek, and then he just quit talking altogether, and Mira knew she had to get him out of there. She’d said to Mr. Dientz, “It’s time for us to leave.”

It had been a day full of shock and awe, and Mira regretted the toll it had obviously taken on Perry—beginning with the horror of Lucas at the morgue, and then the discussion with the woman from the Chamber Music Society, and then the photographs on Mr. Dientz’s computer.

It was no wonder it had ended with Perry seeing a dead girl in her parents’ house.

Mira looked over at him and thought of the cliché “you look like you’ve seen a ghost”—but didn’t say it. She reached over and took one of the hands that was pressed to the heater and brought it to her cheek.

Poor dear, she was thinking, surprised by how cold the hand was to her touch.

96

“Hey there, Perry. It’s me.”

“Yeah, Nicole.”

“You alone?”

“Well, since you know my roommate’s every move, and you know he went to try to score some weed in Ohio with Lucas, I suppose you know I am.”

There was a click then, and a hum.

The hum was nothing.

It was the very song of what nothing was, Perry thought, holding the receiver to his ear long enough that he was still holding it when she knocked on his door, and when he opened it, she said, “Can I come in?” and he was breathing into her hair before saying yes, before he’d even taken a breath.

97

Ellen Graham was wearing the same hot pink bathrobe she’d been wearing earlier that day—although she seemed to have tidied the house a little, perhaps because she’d had some warning this time that Shelly was on her way. The piles of catalogs and envelopes that had been lying on the stairs were now stacked in a few loose piles by the front door. The white cat was lying in a pale patch of porch light that was somehow shining through a crack in the closed curtain. Eerily this cat looked a little like the kind of cat who would have avoided sunlight, anyway, in favor of this reflected winter light. Shelly felt a stab of longing, of grief, for Jeremy, poor Jeremy, who had so loved to bask in a pool of sunlight on the bed or on the kitchen floor.

“Sit down,” Ellen said, and motioned Shelly to the couch. “I’m glad you came back. I thought about you all day. I wondered if you’d had any ideas since you left, since our talk. Ideas about my daughter, where—”

“Again,” Shelly said, shaking her head a little, “I don’t want to mislead you, Ellen. I have no proof of anything. But I have had some more thoughts.”

“You look terrible,” Ellen said. “Has something happened?”

Not now, Shelly thought. She could not tell anyone, now, about Jeremy. That would have to wait. Instead, she said, “After I left here I went home, got on Google, and then I found the boy, the one who was in the accident with Nicole Werner. I went to his apartment, and we talked. There was a professor there, and another student who also knew Nicole. They’re—”

Shelly stopped herself before saying that they had gone to Nicole Werner’s hometown to speak to the mortician who’d buried her because of a suspicion that it might not be Nicole in that grave. Shelly knew that if she were Denise Graham’s mother, she would have known instantly what that meant. She took a deep breath and said carefully, “I believe you might be the only one who can institute any further investigation. I’m not saying that it might even lead us to—”

“Finding Denise.” Ellen nodded. Her eyes looked somehow clearer tonight. Her feet were still bare, and that struck Shelly as the saddest thing of all. It was so cold out, and even in the house, where the thermostat must have been turned up to eighty degrees, the floors were cold. She tried to look away from the feet, but she couldn’t. She thought of Death of a Salesman. Willy Loman. Attention must be paid.

The toenails were clipped neatly, but the toes looked gnarled, red—the toes of a woman who had, until recently, worn high heels every day of her life. Ellen Graham had been a woman who, proud of her long, slim legs, had probably worn knee-length skirts, too, and silk hose, just to go to the grocery store.

“As I told you,” Shelly said, looking from the sad feet to the face, so bright with hope, “I worked at the Chamber Music Society at the university until recently. What I didn’t exactly explain earlier today was that my work-study student this year was Josie Reilly—”

Ellen inhaled, as if willing herself not to scream at the sound of that name.

“Yes. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but it’s complicated by so many things.”

Ellen nodded, but her jaw was working on her anger. God help Josie if she ever crossed this woman’s path again, Shelly thought, not without some satisfaction. Eventually, she knew, she would have to tell Ellen the whole, sordid story, but it wouldn’t help either of them now, and might end with Shelly thrown out the front door and into the snow, having accomplished nothing at all.

Instead, Shelly started by telling Ellen what Josie had told her about the coffin, about the Spring Event. The hyperventilation. The EMT kept on hand for emergencies.

Ellen listened without seeming to be breathing.

She had, of course, like so many other mothers, assumed that the Spring Event was a party, a dance, a princess ball. There would be decorations, and hors d’oeuvres, and pretty dresses, and maybe a bit too much champagne, ending in giggling, and dancing around the OTT house in stocking feet.

Even after all that had happened, Ellen had not yet begun to suspect that this image might be entirely wrong.

“Were you ever in a sorority, Ellen?” Shelly asked.

Ellen Graham shook her head. “I didn’t go to college,” she said. “I married my husband right out of high school, and I worked as a secretary until he finished his MBA. And then I had Denise.”

Shelly nodded. “Well, I was,” she said. “It was over two decades ago, but some things are the same. Hazing, and—”

“Hazing is illegal,” Ellen said. “We would never have allowed Denise to join a sorority if we thought—”

“I know,” Shelly said. “But it happens. And being illegal has made it even more dangerous, even more secretive.” She went on to tell Ellen Graham, who held a hand to her mouth now as Shelly spoke, what she knew about the Pan-Hellenic Society and the pressures that could be put to bear by it on a university—a public university, the funding of which was dependent on the goodwill of the taxpayers, which its administrators understood so well.

“I questioned,” Shelly said, “how someone like Josie Reilly had come to get one of the work-study positions generally reserved for students who pay their own tuition and who come from fairly disadvantaged backgrounds. As it happens, the music school dean’s wife was an Omega Theta Tau sister of Josie’s mother. It took only a little bit of research to find out that the two of them are still very involved in the chapter. They would have a vested interest in preventing any scandal related to, say, hazing.”

“But what does this have to do with my daughter?” Ellen asked. From the change in her posture, the rigid backbone, Shelly suspected she already knew.

“I was at the scene of the accident,” Shelly said. She held her palms open, hands resting on her knees in a gesture she’d been taught to make by her mother when beseeching God to take care of her brother in Vietnam, and which she’d never made again after he died.

She looked down at her open hands then and said to them, “Nicole Werner wasn’t visibly injured. She sustained injury, certainly, since she was thrown from the vehicle. She might have sustained terrible, life-threatening internal injuries, but Nicole Werner was not—”

“Beyond recognition.”

Shelly could not look up from her hands until long after she’d nodded and Ellen Graham had already spoken again:

“But that boy,” she said, “the one who was drunk, why wouldn’t he have said something if—?”

“If there was someone else with them?”

Ellen nodded this time, boring her eyes deeply into Shelly’s, and Shelly felt an incredible wave of wild energy and bravery emanating from her.

To sit so completely still, with her poor feet pressed together, chapped hands folded sadly in her lap, waiting for Shelly’s answer.

“As I said, I spoke to him. Today. Finally. I don’t know what took me so long to go looking for him. He doesn’t remember anything.”

“But of course that’s what he’d say. They could have put him in jail for years for what he did.”

“Yes,” Shelly said. “I’m a suspicious woman, too, Ellen. I feel I have good radar for liars, cheats, cons—but I don’t think he’s one. He doesn’t remember. He truly does not know. Or he only peripherally knows. Something happened to him.”

Shelly went on then to tell Ellen Graham what Josie had told her about the ritual. The tequila, the hyperventilation, the coffin, the girl who would be “raised from the dead.” Reborn as an OTT sister. They kept a paramedic on hand. They knew what could happen. Wasn’t it possible, Shelly asked, that sometimes the girl did not come back, that the ritual might—?

“Kill a girl.” Ellen Graham did not nod this time. She closed her eyes.

“Yes,” Shelly said, trying to speak quietly. “And you can imagine the scandal for the sorority, the Pan-Hellenic Society, the university, and the lengths they might go to cover it up. Isn’t it possible that an accident might be—?”

“Staged?”

“Staged, or made to happen. Created? Devised?”

Ellen Graham opened her eyes now and looked from Shelly to the ceiling.

“Ellen, I was there,” Shelly said. “That boy swerved to avoid something, but only seconds later what he’d swerved to avoid wasn’t there. And the girl they say was killed, injured beyond recognition, burned with the car, I saw her. I would recognize her anywhere. She wasn’t dead. There was no fire.”

“Why are you telling me?” Ellen said, standing up, heading toward a buffet that sprawled in all its shining oaken splendor from one wall of the living room to the other. She yanked open a drawer by a flimsy brass handle and pulled out a pack of Marlborough lights. Her hand was shaking as she put a cigarette between her lips, but she didn’t light it. She turned back to Shelly, eyes blinking and blazing at the same time. “Why did you come here? You know so much. Why haven’t you told someone who can do something?”

“I’ve tried,” Shelly said. “I called the papers, I called the police, I waited for the police to call me, but—”

“Now what?” Ellen asked, tossing the cigarette back into the drawer with the pack, and heading back to the couch, but not sitting down. “You think that was my daughter then, don’t you, in the backseat of that car? Maybe she was already dead? Maybe they set it on fire? Maybe they buried my baby up there instead of this Nicole Werner girl? I’m sorry. I see what this means, what you’re saying about what you saw, except, if it was, if you’re right, where in the fucking hell is Nicole Werner now?”

Shelly took a moment before she spoke, before she could even consider speaking.

She tried to think of a way to phrase this thing, which seemed so insane, so that it would not sound insane. Finally, she said, “She’s still there. She’s at the sorority.”

Ellen Graham started to shake her head so quickly, so wildly, that, remembering those earrings Josie had snitched, Shelly imagined Ellen wearing them, her face lacerated by jewels, and Shelly held up a hand to try to stop her from shaking her head so violently. In the calmest voice Shelly could call forth from the depths of her own shaken self, she said, “I can’t prove anything, Ellen, but I believe they would have sheltered her, Nicole. I know now that they—the sorority, the Pan-Hellenic Society, the university—have enough power to drive the only witness to the accident out of town, to involve a dean in doing so, and who knows—”

“How did Josie drive you out of town?”

Now Ellen stopped shaking her head, and Shelly knew she had to tell her. As she spoke the words of the affair with the girl, of the photographs, of the last conversation she’d had with Josie at the Starbucks, Shelly opened her hands again, looking at her palms, and she thought, for no reason she could fathom, of sheep. Sheep with blood on their fleeces, with flies in their eyes. Maggots in their ears, in their anuses. She finished the story and stopped speaking, and then she brought the hands to her eyes. When she looked up again, Ellen was watching Shelly with a kindness that would have knocked Shelly to her knees if she hadn’t been sitting down. It was not compassion, or empathy, or pity. Ellen Graham was simply looking at Shelly as if the story hadn’t surprised her at all.

As if she’d been hearing such stories all her life.

After the silence, Ellen said, in the voice of the very competent secretary Shelly knew she must once have been, “Okay, Shelly. They got rid of you, if your theory’s right. But the boy was a witness, too.”

“Yes,” Shelly said, trying to regain her composure, to echo the all-business tone of Ellen Graham. “Yes, the boy, too,” she said. She nodded. “He doesn’t remember anything. But they are doing things to try to drive him away, too. Postcards. Ghosts.”

Ellen didn’t ask for elaboration. “Just tell me what to do,” she said. “Your story—frankly, Shelly, I hate your story. I hate everything it might mean. I think it’s crazy. But it’s no worse than all the stories I’ve invented in my mind. And you’re the first help we’ve ever had. We’ve gone everywhere, spoken to everyone. The state police, the FBI, the—”

“The FBI,” Shelly said, an idea forming. “Speak to them again. Tell them you believe there’s been a case of mistaken identity, and demand that Nicole Werner be exhumed, examined. I can’t do anything, Ellen. I have no credibility in this at all. But you’re the parent of a girl who disappeared. They might listen to you.”

98

Mira tried to warm up the car before they pulled out of the parking lot. But even as the fan blew hard, nothing but cold air came out. Beside her, Perry was shivering. In the cold electric light from the Dientz sign, Mira could see that he had his eyes squeezed shut. Could he be shivering in his sleep?

Ted had turned off the lights inside the funeral parlor, but his Cadillac was still parked beside them. He was still inside. Mira imagined him scrolling through more photos on his computer—his before and after images of the many disfigured corpses he’d brought back from the dead.

She didn’t blame him. If she had such a talent, she would be proud of herself as well.

She pulled out of the parking lot and headed for the freeway without speaking, and after a few minutes, Perry stopped shivering and seemed to have fallen asleep.

The drive back in the blizzard was slow and treacherous, and at every exit Mira thought, We should pull over. We should get off. There were no cars behind them, none ahead of them, none passing in the oncoming lanes, as far as she could see, as Jeff Blackhawk’s car rattled around them, and Mira became more and more vividly aware in the silence of the sound of the slick road just under their feet. Jeff’s car gave one only the slimmest illusion of being anything other than what you were: a soft and vulnerable vessel traveling at great speeds over hard ground.

The car warmed a little, anyway—if from nothing but their body heat and breath—and Mira hoped Perry could stay warm enough to sleep until they got back. It had been wrong, she knew, to bring him here. To encourage or include him in any of this. All of this had gone far beyond what she needed for a book. This had turned into something in which, if she’d really felt she had to take it on (for research purposes? to find Nicole Werner?), she should never have involved a student.

But Perry had been so eager, and he had not seemed to Mira to be what she would have called “troubled” or “impressionable.” In her years of teaching, Mira’d had many brilliant, troubled students—their brilliance fueled by brief intensities, always ready and willing to follow someone else’s lead. They were the kinds of young people who could easily have been seduced by their professors, or inducted into cults, or recruited to build bombs in townhouses for the revolution. But Perry Edwards had seemed different—although perhaps no less vulnerable for it. He had not reminded her of any of those students. If he reminded her of someone, Mira realized, it was herself.

When Ted Dientz had called up the final photo of the dead girl in all her blazing gigabytes, Mira thought instantly of her mother in the pantry that day, so radiantly alive. That image of her mother was with her always, wasn’t it? It was a kind of stubbornness. There was never a day that went by that Mira did not feel that if she could just go back to that childhood house at that moment, she would find her mother still there—shining and crying and studying the cans on the pantry shelf, alphabetizing them as she wrapped her brilliant white wings around her, getting ready to fly away.

Perry had that kind of stubbornness. Another word for it might have been faith. He believed in something, and he saw it. He would be, she knew, an academic. A scholar. A researcher. He would never be able to leave well enough alone, even when it would clearly be better to do so. She’d seen that about him during the very first sessions of the seminar, and already been reminded of herself at that age—how the other students would be headed off to the bars, but how she wanted, herself, to be bent over something dusty in some study room, inventing questions to answer.

Mira rested a hand on his shoulder as she took the exit toward campus. He didn’t stir. She vowed to herself that she would talk to him seriously about his academic pursuits, soon. Degrees and programs and courses of study. Soon she’d have to wake him, but not now. Now her only job was to drive them safely to the next stop. Through the whiteout, as he slept on.

99

Ellen Graham’s kitchen clock echoed through the rooms of her house as they talked on for hours. In the morning, Ellen would begin to make phone calls—the State Police, the university administration, the FBI—to speak to officials, to lawyers, to journalists, to start her final crusade. But for now she seemed to want company, so Shelly stayed.

Ellen told her about her separation from her husband six months earlier. (“Some couples grow closer with this sort of trauma, they tell me, but most don’t. We didn’t.”) They talked on about their childhoods, their pasts. Shelly told Ellen about her brother—the flag-draped coffin—and then, without intending to, she told her about Jeremy.

Perhaps, Shelly realized even as the story was coming out of her mouth, she’d never intended to tell anyone at all.

Perhaps until this moment, telling it, it hadn’t really happened.

But there was no taking it back now, or denying it, after Ellen’s reaction:

“Oh, my sweet fucking Jesus Christ,” Ellen cried out, and when she leapt to her feet, her own cat, which had sat like a statue through the entire evening, came suddenly to life and ran from the room. Shelly looked at the place where it had been sitting, and felt she could almost see its permanent aura still glowing where it had been.

Ellen began to pace then, and then she went back to the buffet, took out the cigarette she’d tossed into it hours ago, lit it with a shaking match, and dragged on it as if she were trying to smoke it down to the filter all at once. Afterward, she said, “I need a drink, Shelly. What would you like?”

Shelly never had a chance to answer. Ellen returned with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. She poured the wine. They drank in silence until Ellen said, “Your life is in danger, Shelly.”

Shelly said nothing.

“You’re not going back to your apartment, maybe ever, and certainly not tonight,” Ellen said.

“No,” Shelly said. “Tonight I thought I’d find a Motel 6.”

“Of course you won’t,” Ellen said. “For one thing, look at the snow.” She nodded toward the tiny crack between the curtains in her front window. “You can’t drive in that. Plus you have nowhere to go.”

Shelly felt the tears coming in to her eyes. Nowhere to go. But also the kindness, again, and from someone who’d suffered things Shelly could not, herself, begin to imagine. Such a surplus of kindness. Had Shelly ever met anyone kinder?

“No,” Shelly said. “I couldn’t.”

“Yes. I’ll make up the couch for you, sweetheart.”

Ellen poured more wine into Shelly’s glass then, and touched her lightly on the shoulder. She never mentioned Jeremy or Josie again—another bit of compassion for which Shelly was incredibly grateful.

Mostly they drank their wine in silence.

The wine was so pale it made the glasses—beautiful crystal goblets, surely another heirloom, or a wedding gift—look emptier than they had when they were actually empty.

100

“My roommate and I have been calling you the Cookie Girl for so long it’s hard for me to remember your actual name. And also, no offense, Deb, but you sort of don’t seem like a ‘Deb.’”

Deb smiled. Craig liked that there was the tiniest gap between her two front teeth. It was the kind of thing most girls he’d known would have had four thousand dollars’ worth of orthodontia work to fix, but it was cute on Deb. She said, “So, what do I seem like?”

Craig shrugged apologetically and admitted, “You seem like a Debbie?”

Her smile faded then, and she looked down into the mug of tea he’d made for her—or, really, that she’d made for herself after he’d nuked the water. When he couldn’t find a tea bag, she’d gone to her own apartment and come back with two.

She said, “I used to be Debbie. I changed to Deb when I came here. I thought it might make it a little harder to Google me. The whole story’s there, of course, and my photograph right along with it. But Richards is a common name. ‘Deb Richards’ confuses it a bit, or so I was hoping. At least it would slow someone down.”

Craig grimaced. “Sorry,” he said. He thought a minute and then said, “Maybe I could call you Debbie, like, in private?”

“If you must,” she said. “But can I call you Craigy then?”

“No,” Craig said. “Sounds like a negative adjective.”

She took a sip of her tea, and then looked at him and said, “You’re really smart, Craig.”

“Thanks,” Craig said. “But you also think I’m crazy.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think you’re crazy… exactly.”

They both laughed, but then she put the mug of tea on the floor and turned to him. She said, “But I do think you’ve been through something terrible. Something crazy-making. I used to see him around, too, Craig. I mean, I saw him every time I closed my eyes, but I’d catch him out of the corner of my eye, too. Like, at the library. I’d be on one side of the shelves and there’d be someone on the other side, and, you know how you can get a little glimpse between the books sometimes? I’d get that glimpse. This happened more than once, and it was always him. So I quit going to the library in town. I made my mom drive me into the city. I mean, it’s different with me. I didn’t know him before I—”

She stopped before saying “killed him,” but they both knew it was what she was going to say. They’d talked for hours. Never once had she called what had happened to her an “accident,” but the one time she’d spoken the words killed him aloud, she’d had to run from the room to the bathroom, where Craig had heard the water running in the sink for a long time.

“So it was easy to think that every guy about that age, blond, skinny, was him. And every time I saw a guy on a bike. Even still.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. Craig reached over and put his hand on her shoulder.

“I didn’t really think it was him,” she went on. “I didn’t think he was haunting me or anything, but it was like what you described tonight. It would just happen. I’d think I’d seen him, and suddenly everything would be different. Like, the whole world. My whole life. In that second. Instead of being horrified, I was happy, and the universe was suddenly operating with these completely different laws, and—”

Craig said, “I know.”

“And all the consequences, they were just nothing. It was like, for those two seconds, I was free, and—”

“I know,” Craig said. He was laughing now, despite himself, but she was shaking her head.

She said, “Except that I’d be wrong. It wasn’t him.”

Craig nodded. He took a sip of the tea. It was minty, green. It tasted to him like something a witch might have come up with to cure a broken heart or a bad case of hives. It tasted like a supernatural garden. He had always hated the herbal teas his mother tried to convince him to drink, but he loved this tea.

He inhaled, looked up from the mug, and said, “Except, Debbie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but this is different. I saw her. I truly saw her. This was Nicole.”

Deb gave him a sad little smile. Not happy, but not surprised.

“I’m going to go back there tonight,” he said. “If I have to sit outside the OTT house for five years, I’m going to talk to her. I’m going to ask her what the hell—”

Then, Perry opened the door, and Craig stood up, went to him, took him by the shoulders, and said, “I’ve got something to tell you, man. Something huge.”

“Yeah,” Perry said, sounding weary. “I’ve got something to tell you, too.”

101

“Hey, Perry.”

He could feel it, just like in the clichés, his heart sinking, his heart leaping. Was he ever as aware of that muscle at the center of his body as he was when Nicole Werner stood in front of him?

Now he could feel all four chambers, and the blood traveling in and out of them, and the valves squeezing open and shut.

She was wearing a grungy sweatshirt tonight, like that night he’d found her on the front steps of Godwin Hall feeling homesick, getting ready to cry. Now her hair was in a messy ponytail. Bits of it hadn’t been pulled back and gathered with the rest, and they fell around her face—but not artfully, not the way they would if she had, as he sometimes sensed she must have, spent hours at the mirror loosening just the most golden strands.

She wasn’t wearing her usual pearl earrings, either, and the tiny empty holes in her earlobes looked pretty, he thought, and strange. He looked at them.

Pierced ears: one of the hundreds of the odd customs of girls. He remembered asking Mary if it had hurt, getting her ears pierced, and how she’d rolled her eyes back, fluttered her eyelashes, and said, “Oh, my God, Perry. I can’t even tell you how much it hurt.”

“Can I come in?”

“Why?”

She shrugged.

“Okay,” he said, “come in,” and stepped out of the way. He turned, and sat down at his desk, and sighed. She sat across from him at the edge of Craig’s bed.

“What’s the point of this?” he asked her without looking at her. “Why are we doing this?”

She was silent so long he finally turned around. She was staring at the floor, but he could see that she was smiling.

“Are you sick or something, Nicole?”

She looked up at him then, and seemed to tuck the smile away so he couldn’t see it. She said, “You mean, like, mentally ill or something?”

Perry shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe. Like mentally ill.”

“Or, do you mean like evil?”

“Okay,” he said. “That sounds good, Nicole. Let’s say evil.”

The anger in his voice seemed to make her flinch, and he was immediately sorry, but it was too late to take it back.

She stood up. She took a step toward him. She said, “What about you? Are you? Are you mentally ill, or evil?”

Perry turned his back to her again and put his elbows on his desk, put his head in his hands. As he’d known she would, she came up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders.

He could feel the cool, smooth fingers near his neck.

And his heart—that pleasurable pain, all anticipation and dread.

When Mary had forced him into such places, he’d seen those girls at the mall (what was that store called? Claire’s?) having those little pistols held to their earlobes, flinching and crying out, and the stinging tears in their eyes, the smiles on their faces.

He felt her breath on his neck just before he felt her kiss, and when he stood and turned to her, for just a second he thought he saw what it was—in her eyes, in her face. It almost knocked the breath out of him.

He remembered (or was he imagining it?) turning once in the hallway at Bad Axe High. Mary’d had her arm slipped between his elbow and his side, and she was pulling him toward her, but he’d seen a shadow behind them, and for some reason it had made him turn, and he saw Nicole there, holding an armful of books in her arms.

She was just standing there, watching them with what looked like an expression of complete grief on her face, as if she were witnessing her own death, or the death of something she’d loved all her life.

He’d nodded to her, and the expression was instantly gone, replaced with that pretty little smile. Perry had been watching those expressions pass over her face like the moon’s phases for as long as he could remember.

And then she’d turned and walked in the opposite direction, and he realized that Mary had spun around to look at her, too. She huffed. She tugged Perry’s arm closer and leaned over to whisper to him, “That girl’s in love with you. She always has been.”

102

Deb said, “This is the worst idea I’ve ever heard, you guys. You can’t go sneaking into a sorority looking for a dead girl. You already know they’ve got an EMT living there. Who knows what else? I mean, if they’re hiding dead girls there, there’s got to be, like, a rent-a-cop there, too. There’s going to be weapons and alarms and—”

“Yeah,” Perry said. “I heard somebody crack a rifle on the porch the other night.”

Craig looked at him, but Perry didn’t say anything more.

“You mean you’ve gone sneaking around there in the dark before?” Deb asked.

Perry didn’t answer. He was sitting on the edge of the couch beside her, staring into his hands. Craig’s heart was beating so hard he was afraid to sit back down. He paced back and forth in front of Perry and Deb, and felt that if he sat back down on the couch, his heart might actually explode from the pressure of trying to slow it down.

“Something’s going on here,” Perry said, more to himself than to either of them.

“We’ve got to go to the house,” Craig said. “We’ve got to go to the house.”

“You guys are crazy!” Deb said. She leapt up and grabbed Craig’s arm. “She’s not there! She’s not in Bad Axe! She’s not on this earth because she’s dead!”

“She’s not dead,” Perry said with complete calm. “I know. She’s not dead. I saw her in Bad Axe.”

“No. She’s here,” Craig said. “You gotta trust me, man. I saw her, too. She’s—”

“Let’s go, then,” Perry said, and stood up, and Craig did not wait even the length of a heartbeat before grabbing his coat.

“Jesus Christ,” Deb said, and sat back down, defeated. “Please, just—”

Craig tried to turn and smile at her apologetically—she was such a sweet girl—but Perry was pulling him out the door.

The town, the streets, the lawns, the roofs: it was like a moonscape. As if the thing hanging over them in the now-clear sky had projected its surface onto the earth. No one was outside but the two of them, and the snow had swallowed up all the subtleties, all the edges, all the sounds. The branches of the trees looked heavy, but not exactly burdened, with all the snow with which they were loaded down. They appeared renewed, rejuvenated, by their white cloaks. The shadows they cast were smooth and very still on the ground.

Neither Craig nor Perry said a word until they came around the corner of Greek Row and saw it there on the hill:

Not a single light was on in the Omega Theta Tau house. It seemed to swallow up the light of the snow and the moon, casting no shadow, looking, instead, like a shadow of itself. Something scissored out of the air. A house made of outer space, of silhouette, of time past. They stopped walking and stood looking up at it, and Craig said, “You remember the first time we were here?”

Perry looked over at him, and Craig could see that he didn’t.

“Remember? We were here with Lucas? Lucas and I were drunk and screaming and shit, and you were all pissed?”

“No,” Perry said. “But that sounds like the way it would have been.”

Craig meant to laugh, but it came out sounding like a sob. “I’m sorry I’ve been an asshole for a friend, Perry,” he said, and Perry just looked at him, shook his head.

“You’re not,” Perry said. “You never really were. Let’s go.”

Craig and Perry walked on the side of the street opposite to the house, then crossed and trudged uphill along the tree line between the frat next door at the sorority’s rear entrance. Craig walked ahead of Perry because he knew the way. He’d been at this back door before, tossed out of it.

Once or twice Craig turned to look at Perry, and saw that his own footprints in the deep snow seemed to be making a ghostly path for Perry to follow. Perry wasn’t looking up at Craig, though. He was staring straight ahead, at the house beyond them. Still no lights. Maybe only a tiny glow from one room. Maybe the face of an electric clock, an iPod glowing in its dock, a sleeping computer’s screen saver light pulsing.

Craig reached the door and turned the knob, not really expecting anything—or maybe expecting the lights to flash on and sirens and alarms to begin wailing.

The knob turned easily in his hand, and the door opened silently toward him.

God, he thought. All that trouble they went to when they had parties—the bouncers, the girls stationed at every entrance—and now, in the middle of the night, a houseful of beautiful dreamers, and the door was unlocked, like an invitation.

The darkness inside was total. How stupid, he thought, not even to bring a flashlight—and then a bright zero of light shone on the kitchen floor, and he gasped before he realized that it was Perry. Perry had a flashlight. Of course. Eagle Scout. Craig turned, smiled, gave him a thumbs-up, but Perry just walked past him into the OTT kitchen.

It smelled like cookies to Craig. The kind his mother used to bake before she went back to work, sort of, and quit baking. Vanilla, he guessed. Maybe some kind of spice. Nutmeg?

Perry moved the flashlight around on the counters, scanning, and Craig caught glimpses of white china behind glass cupboards—institutional, heavy-looking cups and plates. He could imagine the heft of those. The sound of silverware on the hard, shiny surfaces in a roomful of girls eating salads or noodles or whatever skinny, pretty girls ate when they had meals together. He pictured Nicole—not Nicole as he’d known her then, but this new dark-haired Nicole of now—at the heavy wooden table in the center of the room, sitting down to dinner with her sisters. As Perry’s flashlight skimmed over the clean, bare surface of that table, Craig imagined her bright-white empty plate. Would Nicole, now, need to eat? And if she ate, what would she eat? Snow? Petals? The breath of her sisters?

He looked up then. He must have stared at the kitchen table too long because now Perry was gone, already slipped through a doorway and into a dark room. Somehow he’d gotten far enough ahead that Craig could see only the distant zero of the flashlight against the wooden railing of the stairway, and hear the first few stairs make a muffled groaning under Perry’s steps before he saw something else there on the stairs ahead of him.

Perry must have seen it, too.

He stopped climbing.

The flashlight froze on it.

Something so pale and lacy it seemed to have been created by the light of the flashlight itself—like something crocheted out of a bit of light there on the air. A nightie sewing itself in complicated patterns around a pale form. The pale form of a dark-haired ghost on the stairway.

A ghost holding something trembling into the beam of light. Holding it up, pointing it. Saying something Craig couldn’t hear. A whisper. And then the explosion.

And then the only thing Craig could see was the beam of the flashlight as it bumped down the stairs to the landing, where it blinked out just before all the lights in the house came on at once and Craig could see that Perry was there on the floor in a spreading puddle of his own blood, and the girl with the gun was screaming, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, I shot him, I shot him, I killed the burglar!” as a hundred other girls swarmed down the stairs and through the house and all around Craig in their white nightgowns crying and calling to each other as if they didn’t even see him, as if they didn’t even notice that Craig was there.

103

Jeff Blackhawk was asleep on her couch when Mira got back to the apartment. His socks were off, tossed on her floor. He had his jacket pulled over him as a blanket. She passed him without stopping on the way to the twins, who were just where she’d hoped they would be: in their cribs, asleep. Matty had his cow down at the bottom of the crib, by his feet. Andy’s rested against his cheek. She kissed their heads, breathed in the sweet sweaty scent of them. She closed their door softly behind her.

In the hallway, she hesitated, looking toward the couch. Should she wake him? Let him know she was back and he could go home?

But no one should be driving in this storm anyway, she thought. And, surely, if her opening the door, crossing the room, and clearing her throat hadn’t woken him up, he needed his sleep.

She would not, she decided, wake him.

She changed into a T-shirt of Clark’s and, after brushing her teeth quickly, got into bed.

“Jesus, Jeff,” Mira said to him in the morning. Her hand was trembling as she put the phone back on its cradle. “I can’t believe this. You’re never going to speak to me again. I’m the friend from hell.”

“No.” Jeff was shaking his head, rubbing his eyes. “It’s fine.”

“I’ll tell him twenty minutes. That’s it. I’ll be back before the twins wake up.”

“Believe me, if Fleming hadn’t called, I’d still be asleep until then myself. I may never have mentioned this, Mira, but I sleep like the dead.”

“Oh, my God,” she said, and put her hands over her face. “What does he want, Jeff? Why did he call me in the morning, at seven o’clock? What’s he even doing in his office at this hour? Didn’t he think I got enough of a reprimand yesterday? He’s hauling me back in already?”

Dean Fleming had said, “I need you to be in my office as soon as possible. I would prefer that it be within the hour,” and the tone had taken her breath away. She’d started to shake—although, in truth, she’d woken up shaking when the phone rang, with no idea where she was, and only the vaguest awareness that she had run out of bed to answer it.

“The man’s an administrator, Mira. He probably sleeps in his office. Or he doesn’t sleep. Who knows where administrators go when the lights go out?”

She liked that Jeff was making light of it without trying to make her feel stupid for being worried. Clark would have dismissed it, been annoyed by her “overreaction to every little thing,” but Jeff told her he’d be worried, too. “It’s creepy.”

But he didn’t seem to have any guesses, either, about what the dean could want.

Mira did what she could with her hair, her face. She pulled on a white blouse, black skirt, and a sweater. Jeff was asleep on the couch again by the time she closed, and locked, the door behind her.

104

Shelly woke in the morning on Ellen Graham’s couch. Outside, the sun had risen fully, and it was as if the volume on the whole idea of light had been turned up. There was so much sun on the snow out there that the curtains couldn’t keep it out. In the living room, everything seemed to be shining. The white carpeting, the knobs on drawers, the down comforter Ellen had given her when she made up the couch—and the cat.

That cat.

Had he (she?) simply come back to the chair and sat on it through the night, watching Shelly as calmly and nonjudgmentally as it seemed to be observing her now?

Shelly made the little kissing noise that always brought Jeremy to her side, but this cat didn’t move. This cat, Shelly thought, was as still as the Sphinx. She had an urge to ask it a question but was afraid Ellen might be awake, already up and around in another room, and if Ellen overheard she’d think she’d let a truly crazy woman spend the night in her house.

Shelly knew she would have to get up soon and use the bathroom, but for now she felt as if she’d entered some kind of eternity. With that sun reflecting so whitely on the snow outside, Shelly felt it wouldn’t surprise her to pull the curtains fully apart and find that everything was gone.

Erased.

Nothing left of the world but herself, and this white cat, and the brightness shining on some motes of dust between them.

The cat continued to regard her. Not even blinking.

This cat was nothing like Jeremy. This cat had none of Jeremy’s scruffy skittishness. Jeremy’s fur had been rough, and his eyes, unlike this cat’s eyes, had been a mottled olive, not this blazing marble green.

But here Shelly was, looking at this cat looking at her, and she felt certain of something she’d once or twice had an inkling of in the past: that each cat is part of some larger cat soul.

That this cat and Jeremy had come from the same place—whatever cat nothingness that was.

Shelly and the cat held that gaze in a trance of that certainty between them, and the incredible comfort it offered, and Shelly didn’t even startle and the cat didn’t move when Ellen called from the top of the stairs, “Are you decent? I was going to come down and make coffee.”

“Thank you,” Shelly called.

She would drink Ellen’s coffee, and then she would head back to town, find Craig Clements-Rabbitt, tell him this new plan, ask for his help.

105

The campus was empty. The sidewalks were slippery, lonely. The sun had come up on the horizon and turned the untrodden snow—the great mounds and blankets of it—into a blinding moonscape. Now, this was a perfect campus for ghosts, Mira thought. For the invisible. The gone. No one would be able to see them strolling along through this snow. There was no one to see them. The students were all in their beds, asleep. She thought of Perry, dreaming. She imagined his eyes moving rapidly behind his lids—that frantic dancing that was actually complete peace.

It was hard to walk through this much snow, and Mira tried to think but could remember no November snowfall like it in all the years she’d lived in this town. Luckily she’d worn flat leather boots. Although they were cold, with a bad tread, she could march through the snow on the sidewalks, trudge through the slush in the streets. It seemed that a few trucks and cars must have passed already through town, because she could see the tracks of their tires, but she didn’t see any vehicles now. At the corner she didn’t bother to stop for the Don’t Walk sign.

“Professor Polson,” the man said, standing as she stepped into Dean Fleming’s office. She had never seen him in person before, but she knew who he was from the photo on the university website, the photo that came up right next to the gold seal bearing the university’s dates and the Latin motto under its name (Utraque Unum: “Both and One”) every time she double-clicked on Home.

“President Yancey,” Mira said.

The dean was standing in the corner, as if he’d been banished to it. He didn’t meet Mira’s eyes.

“Sit down, Professor Polson,” the president said, gesturing to the seat across from him. He held a piece of paper in his hand. “This is very serious. Very serious indeed. Serious complaints have been filed against you by your students—” She sank into the chair across from him. He handed her the piece of paper he’d been holding, which she could only glance at before feeling as if she might faint, recognizing a few names and signatures beside them:

Karess Flanagan. Brett Barber. Michael Curley. Jim Bouwers.

“But the real news of the day,” President Yancey said—and there was no mistaking the hysterical little laugh in the way he said it—“is that one of your students has been killed. Shot. After a B-and-E at the OTT house—”

Mira was swimming through the initials, and found herself moving her arms at the same time that she stood up. “Who?” she said.

“Sit down,” the president said, pointing at the chair she’d just stood up from. “Sit down, now, Professor. I have no doubt you’ll be hearing from the police soon enough, but in the meantime you’re to clean out your office. In the meantime, you’re to tell me in all the detail you can come up with why it is that this student of yours, this Perry Edwards, this student with whom you were working closely, might have broken into a sorority at three o’clock in the morning and managed to walk straight into a terrified young lady with a weapon, and gotten himself shot.”

“Oh, my God,” Mira said, and fell back into her chair.

“Oh, my God is fucking right,” President Yancey said. “Do you have any fucking idea what this will mean, Professor Polson, for this fucking university?”