After Life (13 page)

My mother began in honesty, and ended in fraud; I began in fraud, and ended in something at least close to truthfulness.

By the end of that week, the forensics specialists and archaeologists, working together, had discovered a few facts about the body at the construction site. I followed the story in the
Wallamee Evening Observer
and watched the evening news. So did my mother.

It was a male, they said, between twenty and twenty-eight years old, and most likely Caucasian. He had been buried for more than three years but less than fifteen, probably about seven years. The body was partly mummified. Fatty tissue had been preserved in the area of the skull, the spine, and the arms. There was not much to help identification—a little dental work, but no bones had ever been broken. There was no obvious sign of the cause of death.

The only reason murder was suspected, the news stories said, was because of the place the body was buried. How could a body show up there by accident? One theory entertained was that the man had drowned in a bog years before, and that the land had dried up since. That theory only lasted a day or so, until Mr. Hennessey, owner of the property, said that the clearing had been exactly the same since he bought it in 1954, and no one could have drowned in it then unless they’d gone and dug themselves in.

5
cryptesthesia

I was working in the library on Friday morning when a police officer came around to talk. It was only nine-thirty, so the library wasn’t open yet, but from where I sat at my desk I could see him come up the stone walkway. He was a small young man with a pale stubble of hair. I unlocked the door and let him in.

“Miss Ash?” he said, holding out his hand. “Officer Peterson. I’ve been going around talking to folks this morning. We’re doing a little investigation across the lake there.” He gestured with his head. His hair was so short you could see right through to his skull, which was lumpy and coarse. “Would it be all right if I came in?”

“Sure,” I said, shutting the door behind him. “We can sit in there.” I showed him into the reading room and sat down in one of the big wicker chairs.

“This place is real old, isn’t it?” said Officer Peterson. He held his hat behind his back and peered at the spirit photographs on the walls. He stared for a long time at one by a man named Mr. Skoog; it was of two normal men shaking hands, with the tiny face of Edgar Allan Poe looking over one man’s shoulder. The floorboards squeaked under Officer Peterson’s feet. The reading room was my favorite place in Train Line. It had tall windows and wicker chairs with feather cushions and two large oak tables with lamps on them.

“It was built in nineteen twenty-five.”

“That’s old.” Officer Peterson looked about twenty-two. His face was still stuccoed with acne.

He asked me what my job entailed, exactly, and said that a couple of people had told him I might be a good person to talk to. Was it true that I saw a lot of the people who came through Train Line?

“Yes, I guess so. Though I don’t necessarily look at them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m a librarian. I mostly only notice people who annoy me.”

He laughed a little at this, unsure if he was supposed to. “But you worked at the gatehouse, too.”

“That was a few years ago.”

“We’re talking about a few years ago.”

“Yes, then.”

“Does anyone stand out in your mind? Anything odd or peculiar about anyone?”

From one of the windows I could see the gatehouse, just down the hill from the library. The geraniums in its window boxes were dead. I tried to think.

“Well, you know, an awful lot of strange people come through here.”

“For example?”

“There was man who had conspiracy theories. He’d hang around the gatehouse all day, telling me things. The government had a file on him, the army flew over his house every day in planes undetectable by radar.”

“Describe him.” Officer Peterson sat down and took a little notebook out of his pocket. He held a pencil in an odd way, between his thumb and pointer finger.

“Short, muscular. He had a tiny ponytail. Dark hair. Maybe thirty. He talked too fast. I think his name was Paul.”

“And this was…?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Eleven or twelve years ago.”

“Do you know what happened to this guy?”

I shook my head. “People come and go all the time here. If I’d never seen him again I wouldn’t think anything of it. I don’t think anyone would.” This was true. When Peter went missing, no one in Train Line seemed to notice. That hadn’t surprised me, but I’d expected Peter’s family would come looking. For years I waited for them, my gut lurching every time the phone rang, but I’d never heard from them. I rubbed my forehead, pretending to think about Paul. “I might have seen him two summers in a row.”

“But only in the summers.”

“Not many people are around in winter.”

“Would you call this winter?”

Startled, I turned and looked out the window again. “I don’t know. Yes, I guess I would. Everyone’s left for the year. Or a lot of people have. More will leave before Christmas.”

“But you don’t leave.”

“No.”

“How about the rest of your…business? Any unusual customers?”

“That’s private.”

He nodded slowly, marking that down in his book. “Okay, then. Anything else you recall, unrelated to business?”

I racked my brains. I told him about the old Australian woman who claimed she was walking around the world, and how after she’d been lurking around for three days someone found her sleeping under a bush behind the lecture hall. I told him about the man who called up the main office and told them he was about to come down with a gun and shoot everyone, because we were all Satan worshippers. He said he’d heard about that one.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Twenty-one years.”

“Since you were real little.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve never left?”

“Not for any length of time. I went to Cape Cod with my mother once, and some other little trips like that.”

“Do you like it here?”

“I’m not sure what that has to do with your investigation.”

He shrugged. “It probably doesn’t have anything to do with it. I’m just trying to get to know you. Is that all right?”

“That’s fine,” I said. Officer Peterson, I noticed, had wide, almost beautiful shoulders, and a narrow girlish waist. I came close to imagining putting my hands around it, then stopped myself.

“Good. So,
do
you like it here?”

“I do.”

“What do you do for fun?”

“I have friends. I go for walks. I read books.”

“No hobbies?”

I did not understand why he was asking me these questions. They made me irritated and hot. I told him about Vivian and my mother and the details of my job. While he walked around the reading room I explained the theories behind spirit photography. He seemed to get bored with me all at once.

“I guess I’ve taken up enough of your time.” He tucked his pencil in his pocket but made no move to go. “So,” he said. “So tell me something.”

“Yes?”

“Is this all for real?”

“This?”

“This whole town. Is it real? Or is it all fakers?”

I looked at him right in the eyes. “It’s real,” I said. “It’s as real as you are.”

After Officer Peterson left, I couldn’t concentrate enough to read. I still had an hour before the library had to be open, so I locked up and went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.

CLOSED
! said an index card taped to the screen door,
BACK IN FIFTEEN MINS
.

So I took a walk up the path that ran around the edge of Train Line, behind the last row of cottages and through the woods. The trees were tall there, huge spreading firs and maples. It was, supposedly, one of the few stands of virgin woods in the county. It smelled delicious: damp, fresh, but decayed. This path connected up with the one that led to Illumination Stump, where message services were held in summer, but I took another branch, one that led to the pet cemetery.

It always struck me as strange that there was a pet cemetery in Train Line, but no cemetery for people. When people died in town, they were either sent back to where they came from—lots of people had houses somewhere else, many in Ohio, for some reason, and many in Canada—or were buried in Wallamee. Spiritualists were fond of cremation, too, and of scattering their ashes. But pets could stay.

The paths in the pet cemetery were arranged in a series of loops, with some loops the exclusive domain of one family. The Lawrences had numberless German shepherds, and they were all here, each under its own concrete tombstone. Their names had been scratched with a stick into the wet cement,
CINDER
, 1966–1972;
BARBARELLA
, 1979–1982 (hit by a car; I remembered that);
POOPER
1976–1988. I’d never had a pet, myself, so I hadn’t buried anything here. One of the minor controversies at Train Line was whether there are animals on the spirit plane. Most of the mediums were—like my mother—softhearted where animals were concerned, and believed there are. I tended to believe that spirit is a human thing, exclusively, but opening my mouth on that subject would gain me no friends.

I walked around, checking to see if there were any new graves. There was one, a very small one marked with a tongue-depressor cross, under a spiraea bush off the main path. I knelt down to take a look at it.
SNIPPY
it said, in ballpoint-pen ink. 1996–1998. Oh, no.

Snippy was Jenny’s bird, a fat green-and-yellow budgie. I didn’t like birds, birds in cages especially, and Snippy in particular. Jenny kept it in her room most of the time, but sometimes she’d bring it downstairs and let it fly around the living room, where it would smash into lamps and try to attack its reflection in the mirror, then leave white streaks across the glass. And it screamed. Jenny was devoted to it. She thought the bird was cute, the way it screeched when we turned the radio on (“Oh, listen! Snippy’s singing!”). Most of the time I wanted to kill it. If it was absolutely still and quiet I could see how you might call it “cute,” with its little tilted head and its pointy little beak, but it had no purpose other than to make noise. Once when it wouldn’t shut up I put its cage in the closet, and then forgot about it and left for the day. Jenny never mentioned it, but I wondered what she did when she came home and found it gone.

But now Snippy was dead. I hadn’t even known it was sick. I was up before Jenny so I hadn’t seen her this morning—I was, in fact, avoiding her—but she must have buried the bird sometime since. The arm of the tongue-depressor cross was stapled on. It must have been my stapler, and the tongue depressors Ron’s. What a tiny, careful grave. Of course, there was something absurd about it—tongue depressors!—but nevertheless it gave me a bad feeling. When I stood back up again I felt dizzy, and the trees spun. The pet cemetery, I decided, was not charming at all, but tragic. It made me think of something Peter used to ask me, something he brought up often. How come, he asked, spiritualists get so upset when someone dies? Why do they care at all? If it’s just a “change of form,” and all that? Usually I told him, we
don’t
get that upset. But once in a while I said, well, we can’t help it, we can’t help but miss the body sometimes.

“So, there is no death, but death is sad,” said Peter. “They call that a paradox in my neck of the woods.”

“You and your pair o’ ducks,” I said.

I was walking back toward town when I spotted someone up the road ahead of me. I slowed down, trying to figure out who it was. It didn’t take long—he was wearing a cop uniform. My friend Peterson.

He was reading his notes, his head bent over his notebook, walking distractedly along Seneca Street. He scratched his pimply cheek, stopped, and looked around. I stepped behind a tree. I didn’t want him to think I was following him.

But I did follow him, all the way down Seneca and into Ferd’s Groc-n-Stop. When he’d been in there five minutes or so, I went inside and bought a box of doughnuts, pretending not to notice him. He was sitting at the back counter with a cup of coffee, laughing it up with the old guys.