Sleep Tight

Chapter 8

The following morning, when she should have been resting, Mary decided to make a long overdue visit. She rang the doorbell and stepped back, her heart beating rapidly as footsteps inside the house came closer. The door opened, and there stood Abigail Portman, Fiona's mother.

Abigail had always seemed a throwback to a delusional fifties mom, the mother who had turned her back on a career to stay home and raise her only daughter. She wore aprons and baked cookies, and all the kids in the neighborhood seemed to end up at her house. And no matter how busy she was with all that cooking, and running Fiona from piano to cheerlead-ing practice, no matter how busy she was with PTA and the latest school fund-raiser, she always looked immaculate.

Back then Mary had often regarded Fiona's life with longing and wished her own could be more like it.

Poor Mrs. Portman's once beautiful Betty Crocker hair was gray and frizzy, and her eyes looked out from deep, lined sockets. Her white sweatshirt was stained and ragged. On her feet were slippers Mary suspected rarely left her feet.

"Hello, Mrs. Portman. It's me. Mary."

The woman's blank expression disappeared. "Mary! Oh, Mary!" She opened the door wide and pulled Mary inside.

It was like stepping into a tomb.

The hallway was dark and stuffy, smelling as if fresh air and sunlight hadn't touched the house since Fiona's death.

Abigail Portman wrapped her arms around Mary, hugging her tightly. "You're so grown up!" she said, stepping back to look at her. "I can't believe it! I always think of you just like Fiona-a perpetual teenager. Are you still with the FBI?"

"Yes. Actually, I'm in town on a case."

The light left Abigail's face. "Those girls."

"Yes."

"I've read about them. I keep thinking of their poor mothers. I wondered about dropping them a note, but what words of comfort could I give when there aren't any? I would just remind them that they aren't in the middle of a horrible dream and that ten years from now they'll still be in pain."

"Is that how it is for you?" Mary asked, sad to see that things were so bad.

"Frank and I got divorced. He couldn't take it anymore. Said I was always moping around. He wanted to sell the house and move out West somewhere. He begged me to go. I thought about it, but I couldn't leave. It's different for men. He didn't understand that this house is my connection to my daughter. I can't imagine anybody else sleeping in her room. I can't imagine children running down the hall, laughing and screaming. I don't want happy children here. It wouldn't seem right. Like laughing at a funeral."

"I understand."

"I think you do." She waved her hand. "Come in and have a snack with me. Remember how you and Fiona used to charge in after school for milk and cookies?"

Mary smiled. "I remember. You made the best chocolate chip cookies in the world."

"I don't bake anymore." It was a statement of the way things were. "I don't cook at all."

Mary followed her through a living room that was frozen in time. Being in Fiona's house gave her a weird feeling of dislocation. Nothing had changed. The furniture. The curtains. Where the furniture was placed. All the same. She almost expected to pick up a newspaper to see that it was dated the day Fiona had died.

The kitchen hadn't changed either. Same wallpaper. Same laminated table and matching chairs with plastic-covered cushions that left strange designs on a child's bare legs. Same bland motel oil painting on the wall. Abigail may have been Betty Crocker, but she'd never had an esthetic eye.

"Take off your coat."

Mary removed her trench coat and draped it over a kitchen chair.

"You became an FBI agent because of Fiona, didn't you?" Abigail asked, tearing open a bag of ginger-snaps and getting two cans of diet soda from the refrigerator.

"I think you're right." Why not be honest? "I'm sure you're right."

They drank the soda and munched the gingersnaps, which turned out to be atrocious. Abigail talked about Fiona as if she'd been waiting for this day, for someone who would listen, for someone who would understand without telling her she needed to forget about what happened and move on-which was the last thing people like Abigail wanted to hear.

The conversation turned away from the tragedy to the sharing of fond memories of a girl who would always be sixteen. Abigail dragged out scrapbooks. Together she and Mary reminisced. They went through page after page of newspaper clippings about the spelling bees Fiona had won, and about recognition by the mayor for the money she'd raised for the homeless. There was a photo of her accepting a plaque for a state speech competition, another for Academic Bowl.

"She was such a special person," Abigail said, stroking the photo. "I never pushed her. I was never one of those mothers who pushed her kids to do things they had no interest in. She pushed herself."

"She had so much energy," Mary said. "She wanted everything."

"She wanted to be the first female president. Did she ever tell you that?"

"Yes. And I think she could have done it." Mary recognized an echo of the old enthusiasm she used to have for Fiona's ideas.

The last photos in the album were obituaries, cut from several papers. There was even a photo taken at the cemetery of the grieving mourners. With a weird jolt of recognition, Mary spotted her much younger self standing with Blythe. Gillian stood a little to one side.

Mary turned the page. Abigail had also cut out every single article about the murder and trial-and finally the conviction of Gavin Hitchcock. There was a four-by-five photo of him staring at the camera, looking both scared and pissed off.

"He's out of prison," Abigail said. "I can't believe he had the nerve to come back here and flaunt himself. You'd think he'd want to move to a town where nobody knew him, where nobody knew what he did."

"I was a little surprised myself when he didn't go somewhere else," Mary said. She didn't add that there was someone who'd encouraged him to return to his hometown, someone who'd helped him find a place to live and a place to work.

"He shouldn't have been released. He should have died. It's not fair that he's alive and running around free when my sweet little girl is dead. I have half a mind to drive over and see him someday."

"I don't think that would be a good idea," Mary cautioned.

"Tell him what a useless piece of work he is. He never even said he was sorry for what he did."

Mary waited until Mrs. Portman was looking at her. "Would you want that? Would it really make any difference?"

She thought a moment. "No, I don't suppose it would. But I'd still like to talk to him. I'd like to see his face when he opens the door and realizes it's me." She let out a burst of laughter, then pressed a hand to her mouth. "Can you imagine his expression? Oh, it would be priceless."

Maybe, Mary thought, she shouldn't have come. Her visit seemed to have set the poor woman off. She closed the book and stacked it with the others. "Thanks for letting me see these. I should get going. My mother's expecting me." No matter how old you got, mothers were still a good excuse when you needed to end a visit.

"Would you like to go upstairs?" Abigail asked. "To Fiona's room? It comforts me. Maybe it will comfort you."

Mary would never have thought, Gee, I'd sure like to see Fiona's old room. But now that the invitation was out there, something inside her was compelled to say yes.

The steps that led upstairs were covered with the same green carpet, and they creaked in just the same way.

Nothing had changed. Except for an underlying mustiness, Fiona's room even smelled the same.

On the walls were the posters of unicorns. There was her music box collection. Her stuffed animals, many of them huge, won at the fair by a legion of admirers. Her scrapbooks, her yearbooks. Tucked into the edges of the vanity mirror above a pink, skirted dresser were photos, many of Mary and Fiona. Hanging on a closet door hook was her cheerleader uniform, behind it her letter jacket.

The canopy bed, with its cream eyelet cover, was strewn with gaily colored wrapped packages, some with birthday paper, some Christmas. There were even Easter baskets overflowing with candy.

"I get her a present every year on her birthday and Christmas," Abigail said, sitting down on the bed and picking up one of the wrapped gifts.

Along one wall more gifts were arrayed.

"Sometimes I come up here and just sit. For hours. It's so peaceful, don't you think?"

A life derailed. "Yes." Sad was what it was. Mary wished she hadn't come. The room was stuffy, and she broke into a cold sweat. She suddenly felt as if she might pass out.

"Would you like me to leave you alone here for a while?" Abigail asked. "It might be good for you."

Mary nodded, stifling the urge to run. What with the buzzing in her head, she wasn't all that sure she could make it out of the house under her own steam. "That would be nice," she managed.

"You can light a candle and say a prayer," Abigail said, motioning toward a cluster of red votives on the dresser. Mary had forgotten the Portmans were Catholic, and now she remembered Fiona saying her nighttime prayers, "so I won't get a venial sin on my soul."

Abigail left, gently closing the door behind her.

Mary sank down on the bed and put her head between her knees, fighting light-headedness. She'd lost consciousness twice in her life. The first time had been when Blythe told Mary her father was dead; the second was when she got shot. Finding Fiona's body that day in the woods had had the opposite effect, sending her scrambling and screaming for help.

It was too much for her, being in Fiona's room. Too immediate. Too real. For years she'd mastered the fine art of retreat, but she couldn't hide here.

She kept her head down until the blackness behind her eyes disappeared and her heart quit thundering. Gradually her breathing returned to normal. She leaned back, lowering herself against the pillow, her feet on the floor, and looked up at the canopy above her head.

There were the stars that glowed in the dark. She and Fiona had put them there one summer. A crescent moon dangled from a thread, and there was the tiny stuffed lamb with angel wings Mary had given Fiona for Christmas.

Life had been so perfect then. So innocent.

But not real, of course.

Lying there, Mary realized her own life had stagnated. Differently from Abigail's, but stagnated all the same. Something had shut off inside her the day she'd found Fiona's body. For years she'd understood that she was no longer the person she used to be, and that as time passed Mary Cantrell was fading, but she couldn't seem to summon the strength or will to do anything about it.

She and Fiona used to discuss the future. They talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up, what it would be like, and where they would live, where they would travel, what they would see and do and learn.

"I don't want kids," Fiona had told Mary one day. "Kids just get in the way."

Mary had been surprised, because she'd always seen herself getting married and having children. Now she had no plans.

Lying there took her back to the days when she'd thought about that kind of thing. Now she tried to picture herself with a child and found it difficult. Any existence beyond her current one seemed hard to imagine.

Dizziness gone, she got up and moved around the room, leaning close to the vanity mirror to look at the photos. One in particular caught her eye. It was of Fiona, Mary, and Gillian. Fiona and Mary were smiling happily. Gillian had her arms crossed at her waist, a scowl on her face.

Poor Gillian. She'd been so jealous of Fiona. It was a shame, because they could have had so much fun together, the three of them. But Gillian refused to share Mary with anyone, and Mary had refused to be manipulated by her sister.

Gillian thought Mary hadn't noticed, but her jealousy was impossible to miss. Gillian sticking out her tongue, and later, throwing the finger. Gillian never giving Fiona a chance. Once, when Fiona stayed the night at Mary's, Gillian put a laxative in her Kool-Aid and bugs in her pink sleeping bag. The next time she came, she left dog crap in Fiona's purse. It would have been funny if Gillian's pranks hadn't been so cruel and calculated.

For a long while, Fiona refused to stay the night at the Cantrell house, and Mary was relieved because she never knew what Gillian might try next-her jealousy was so out of control.

When Gillian got to high school she found her own circle of friends, and she and Mary didn't hang around together much unless it was a family function.

Mary lit one of the candles. She didn't pray, but she meditated, willing her mind to empty, allowing herself to drift… She began to sense the comfort Abigail had talked about, and it was with a touch of regret that she finally blew out the candle and left the room.

"You'll come back, won't you?" Abigail asked, downstairs.

"I'll try." Mary retrieved her coat from the back of the kitchen chair. The visit had been cathartic, but she wasn't sure she could do it again. "Would you mind if I walked in the woods behind the house?"

"Oh, my." Abigail put a hand to her throat, horrified. "Why would you want to do that?"

"I think about the woods sometimes. And dream about the tree house. I thought it might be good for me to actually see it again."

"I can't go into those woods. That's one place I haven't been able to go. I hate those woods." Abigail put a hand to her hair, as if to smooth a style that no longer existed. "Developers are always hounding me, wanting me to sell the land. You'd think I'd want to, the way I hate it. It's worth quite a lot, you know. But even though I can't go in there, I can't sell it either. And what do I need money for?"

What, indeed? To buy more gifts for a dead girl who could never open them? "Do you mind?" Mary repeated gently.

Abigail waved her hand, shooing her away, looking irritated now. "Go ahead, then. I just don't know why you'd want to."

"Dark light," her grandmother used to call the weird cast the sun took in the fall. Mary always felt a tug of sorrow whenever she noticed the change. She never knew if it was simply because it signaled the passage of time and the end of summer, or because the sun had been low on the horizon the day she'd come upon Fiona's body, the trees casting long black shadows.

Today was cool, the temperature in the high fifties. Where the sunlight cut through bare trees, it offered no warmth. It had rained the night before, and the fallen leaves had been packed into a soft, damp cushion beneath Mary's feet. The magnificent scent of earth drifted up to her, and for a moment she was a child again, experiencing the woods with the innocence that came before the bad times.

When she was young, the woods had seemed huge and endless-as big as a small country from one end to the other. With the jaded eyes of an adult, Mary could see that the property was not more than four acres.

She deliberately avoided heading toward where she'd found Fiona's body. Instead, she circled around the edge of the woods, following a faint path made by deer and other wild animals, until she finally reached the tree where they'd spent so much time.

It wasn't as big as she remembered either.

The tree house her father had built with the permission of the previous owners was still there, at least the floor and most of the walls. The windows were just a memory, the glass gone, probably shattered and buried by years of fallen leaves. Sometime during their middle school years, she and Gillian had attempted to spend the night in the tree house, announcing themselves brave and independent enough to survive the wilderness alone. Less than two hours into the evening, Gillian had had enough. When Blythe came to check on them, she ended up carrying her frightened, clinging daughter home with Mary trudging behind, disappointed but resigned.

When Fiona arrived in the neighborhood, Mary took her to the tree house, and soon they were spending hours there talking about boys and music. There they fearlessly remained all night long, tucked into sleeping bags. If Blythe came to check on them, they never heard her.

Now that Mary had decided to immerse herself in the past, she wanted to do it totally.

For years she'd avoided even the faintest memory of this place, and here she was, wallowing in it. She was like the people who couldn't stop cutting themselves. The only difference was that they cut themselves as a distraction from reality. She was finally facing what she'd spent years avoiding. It hurt, but it also felt good in a weird way. Because even though she was where bad things had happened, she felt a strange sense of distance. Maybe time did heal. And unlike Fiona's mother, Mary had moved on. She was a functioning adult. Maybe not fully functioning, but functioning all the same.

The ground around the base of the tree was bare- a sign of activity. A new generation of kids probably came there to play. Maybe they could feel the energy of the young girl who had died nearby but interpreted it as something else, as the magic of the woods.

Mary was a practical person, but she'd been in enough places where evil lurked and powerful tragedies had occurred to know that such violent events could leave their imprint on a place-on the ground, in a building, or even in the air.

She wanted to climb into the tree, to look into the house her father had built, but there was no way she could do it without using her injured arm.

It's probably for the best.

But if she wasn't able to get up into the tree house, she was ready to find the spot where Fiona had died.

The leaves were thick under her feet, and the woods had changed since she'd played there. The deeper she walked, the denser the undergrowth. Multiflora rose, the bane of uncontrolled timberland, had taken over, spreading like cancer across the ground, choking out grasses and even small trees, suffocating the wildflow-ers and jack-in-the-pulpits. Sharp thorns caught on Mary's trench coat and snagged her corduroy pants. They caught in her hair and scratched the back of her hands.

Everything was so overgrown that at first she didn't think she'd be able to find the spot. And then she saw it-a white wooden cross stuck into the ground. She approached until she was able to read the lettering.

WE WILL ALWAYS MISS YOU

WE WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU

Mary didn't remember the cross. But then, she didn't remember much of anything that had happened in those weeks after finding Fiona's body. For a time, her brain had simply shut down, her body moving on autopilot.

What struck her as odd now was the condition of the cross. It looked as if it was either fairly new or had recently been repainted.

She stepped closer, standing in the approximate area where Fiona's body had lain. There, at the base of the cross, was a bouquet of dead red roses. Beside it was a small stuffed teddy bear with a delicate gold chain around its neck. Mary crouched down. On the necklace was a charm shaped like a cheerleader.

She straightened and grabbed the top of the cross. She tried to wiggle it. A cross placed there ten years ago would have been rotten at the base. This had been driven firmly and securely into the ground. The bouquet couldn't have been over a week or two old; the stuffed bear looked to have been outside about the same length of time.

Who would be coming here, fighting the tangle of thorn bushes, to decorate the place where Fiona had died? Mrs. Portman would be the logical person, but Abigail said she never came into the woods.

Mary examined the ground, only to find that rain and falling leaves had obliterated any footprints. The sound of a breaking twig made her look up. She squinted through the undergrowth and strained her ears, listening for the sound to repeat.

Nothing.

She felt under her coat for the reassurance of her gun and remembered it was one of the rare occasions when she'd left it at home, not wanting to wear it when visiting Abigail.

She was being ridiculous. A grown woman, an FBI agent, jumping at every sound in the woods. It could very well have been a twig she'd heard, broken by a wild animal.

Nonetheless, she walked back as quickly as she could, while bushes grabbed her with their thorns. When she reached the street, she was a little out of breath.

At the Portman house, the shades were drawn.

Mary pulled out her cell phone and dialed a number she remembered from childhood.

Mrs. Portman answered.

It was probably a little silly, standing in front of the Portman house, talking to Abigail on the phone, but Mary didn't feel up to another face-to-face meeting at the moment.

"Do you know who put a cross in the woods?" Mary asked.

"A cross? For Fiona?"

"Yes. And also a stuffed animal-a bear, along with a bouquet of roses."

There was a pause as Mrs. Portman digested the information. "How odd," she finally said.

"Can you think of anyone who may have done it?"

"I haven't the vaguest idea. I mean, most people leave things at the cemetery."

"Thanks, Mrs. Portman. Sorry to bother you."

Mary hung up and crossed the street to her house.

Gillian went for a five-mile jog. By the time she was on the return path, it was almost dark. Approaching her apartment, she noticed an unfamiliar car parked in the driveway, a man standing beside it. She slowed to a walk and kept her eye on him.

"Oh, shit," she said once she was close enough to recognize Sebastian Tate. She was thinking about swinging around to the back door when he spotted her.

"Gillian!" He gave her a big wave and headed in her direction, meeting her halfway.

"What are you doing here?" she said.

"I have tickets to the Dylan concert tonight." He pulled them out of his coat pocket and held them in the air. "Wanna go?"

She'd tried to get tickets months ago, but the concert was sold out. She continued walking. "No, thanks."

"Oh, come on." He fell into step beside her. "I'll bet you like Dylan. Everybody likes Dylan. Plus, the show's at Northrop Auditorium. We could walk from here. No need to fight traffic. What do you say?"

"Did you get the tickets from a scalper?"

"I made a trade. I had something somebody wanted."

"What?" Detective Wakefield was always telling her to ask questions.

"Some photographs." He shrugged. "I'm a photographer."

So he said. "I don't want to go to the Dylan concert, and I don't want you coming around here again."

He followed her up the front steps. Mary had told her to call the police if he bothered her, but Gillian felt sure she could handle him. "Leave," she told him, with no intention of unlocking the door while he stood so near, afraid he might force himself inside. "Now."

He struggled to control his mounting anger. "I don't even like Dylan," he finally said, raising a hand as if to strike her. "I got the fucking tickets for you!" He threw them in her face, strode to his car, and left.

"Asshole." She bent and scooped up the tickets. Inside her apartment, the door locked, she grabbed the phone and called Ben Collins, the talkative intern from work. When he answered she asked, "How would you like to see Bob Dylan? I managed to get my hands on a couple of tickets."