As Simple as Snow (25 page)

After the taping, as we were filing out of the studio, an assistant approached me and asked me to follow him. Carl said that he’d wait outside; without asking any questions, I went along with the assistant. I was led to Preen’s dressing room, where he was sitting on a leather couch, sipping a cup of hot tea. At first he didn’t look at me. “Why did you lie to me?” he said, as he shot his gaze toward me.

“I don’t know. . . .”

“There is a code,” he said. “You shook your head when I said it. Who are you working with? Are you working with Dr. Ryan?”

“No.”

“But you’ve talked to him? He’s helped you, instructed you?”

“No,” I said. “He wouldn’t talk to me.” It was true. I had e-mailed him, told him some of my story and the fact that I was going to try to be on
The Channel
, but I’d never heard from him.

“What do you want?”

“I think I’m being contacted,” I said. “Things have happened that make me think that an attempt at contact is being made, but nothing more than that. I want to make contact. Real contact. I want to know what happened and what’s happening.”

He put his cup on an end table and got up from the couch and approached me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “I can help you.”

“How?”

“Do you know what happened to this person?”

“No,” I said. I was a little annoyed—I had just told him that I didn’t know.

He looked at his cup for a long time and then swung his dark head back to me. “She’s passed. That’s how I’m able to know what I’m going to say to you.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “She’s dead, but she is still trying to tell you something.”

How could he know that she was really dead? It took some balls to say it, and I was angry that he had. I didn’t know where this was going. I didn’t know why he was telling me all this, maybe to save face, maybe to get me back on the show. I didn’t know. Once again I tried to keep calm, but I wanted to hear what he had to say. I wanted to hear what Anna had to tell me. “What is she trying to say?”

“She says that you’re not trying hard enough. That you’re not trying. That’s what I’m getting.”

“Who is saying this?” I said.

“A.C.”

“What’s her name?”

He paused. He closed his eyes. “Is it Anne, or Abby, or Alice?”

“You have to tell me,” I said. I wasn’t going to supply any answers.

He looked at me with his hard gaze again. “It’s Anna.” “What does she want to tell me?”

“That you’re not trying enough.”

“What else?”

He closed his eyes again, and his face contorted slightly in what was meant to be intense concentration. When he opened his eyes, he seemed to have come to a sudden realization. He looked surprised.

“It’s something simple,” he said. “That’s what she wants to tell you. Something simple.” He paused and concentrated again. “That’s the code. Something simple. Something simple.”

He looked at me for confirmation. I wanted him to continue. I wanted him to get everything. I wanted him to tell me everything. But that was it. He was finished.

“What else?” I was practically pleading with him to get it.

“The code is simple. Isn’t it?”

“You have to tell me,” I said. “What is she saying?”

“Would you be willing to come back?”

“You can’t tell me what I need to know,” I said.

“I think I can. This isn’t the right time or place. With a little more preparation, and a little more receptiveness on your part, I think we can help each other, and help Anna deliver her message.”

I was in a corner. I wanted him to go on; I thought for a moment he was going to get the code, get the start of her message. He was close. How could he get that close and not get closer? I wanted him to continue, but he was finished. He almost had me convinced, and I would have agreed to come back; but then I thought that he was stalling for more time, so he could talk to people I knew, read up on what had happened to Anna, and then use that information. I could imagine Preen’s people snooping around town, sticking their noses in all of our lives, digging up just enough stuff to convince a TV audience.

“I can’t,” I said. “It was hard enough to come this one time. I can’t.”

Preen looked sadly toward his cup. “I’m sorry,” he said. He walked me toward the door. “Let me leave you with one thought. The greatest gift you can give Anna is to acknowledge that she is with you always.” It was one of those things that sounds profound the moment you hear it, but if you think about it, it’s really meaningless. A lifetime with my father had prepared me for sayings like that. Preen hadn’t provided any answers, only platitudes and playacting.

 

 

 

Carl was waiting near the door when I left the building. “How’d that go?” he said.

“Strange.” I told him most of what had happened. “What do you think about this Preen guy?”

“He’s done some amazing stuff, I think.”

“You think so? You think he can really communicate with the dead?”

“I don’t know,” Carl replied. “But I think it’s possible to communicate with the dead, so why not Preen?”

“How do you think it’s possible?”

“Some people are blessed with better senses, or are in tune with things we don’t notice, like dogs that can hear sounds we can’t. The crazy thing about the mind is that it’s more capable of things than the mind itself can imagine. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This might have been a big waste of time.”

“That’s not true. You tried. That’s not wasting time.”

 

 

 

The lights went out as the train inched its way through the tunnel and out of the station. Long rows of bare bulbs hung from the tunnel ceiling and cast a harsh glow that barely reached the ground but made the tracks glisten in the darkness. Water dripped from the ceiling in a number of spots, and I wondered where it came from. Was it from just overhead, or was it rain or snowmelt that had worked itself from the sky down to the street and then patiently squirmed through minute cracks and fissures until it found release all this way underground, where it fell for a brief moment and was trapped on the floor of the tunnel? Or did it continue, wriggling down into great free-flowing rivers below us, or even greater confinement, moving from one spot to another—freeing itself from one trap only to land in another, over and over until it evaporated and returned to the air to start the process again?

On the ride home I tried to sort out what had happened. Had Mr. Preen gotten lucky, or had he actually received something? He didn’t seem to know what he had. He used the phrase “something simple” four times but didn’t seem to know what it meant.

 

 

 

After they found Anna’s dress, I had stopped going to the third floor at school every morning. I would go there a few times a week, to see Claire, but I couldn’t stand to be around Bryce and listen to him talk about what he thought or felt. When I got back from the
Channel
taping, I stopped going to the third floor entirely. Instead, I hung out on the eastern end of the second floor, talking with Billy Godley. He knew that I was talking to him only in case he had any information from his father, but he was nice enough to tell me if he did. Sometimes Claire would join us; this usually made the other kids scatter like birds, flitting off to safety elsewhere.

 

 

 

No one was looking for Anna, Billy told me. He said that she was considered just another missing person and that the police suspected she was a runaway.

“I don’t believe that,” Claire said. “Why would she go through all the elaborate setup, with the dress and the hole and all that?”

Billy shrugged. We’d had the same conversation over and over. Sometimes I thought that we might be the only people who talked about her still. It had to bore Billy, since he had never known Anna. He barely knew Claire or me. He patiently listened to us until the bell rang and we headed off for class. Sometimes it even bored me; I would rather have spent my days thinking and talking about anything else, but if I had stopped thinking or talking about Anna she might have been gone forever, and whatever hope I had of making contact might have slipped away, lost.

 

 

 

A couple of weeks after the taping, a man from Gerald Preen’s office called the house. “We were wondering if you could come in and meet with Mr. Preen,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I replied. I didn’t see the point.

“We have an item we think you might be interested in taking a look at.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a photograph of you and your friend.”

Anna and I had never had our picture taken together.

“Are you sure?”

“That’s why we want you to come in. We think you’ll agree it’s a very interesting photograph.”

The man had a menacing tone, as if threatening me. Did he think he could do something worse to me than had already been done? Good luck, I thought. I told him I’d call back, but I never did. The same guy called the next day, and the day after that. Then a woman called. She had a different tone. It turns out that they wanted my help. Why couldn’t the man who called before have told me that, instead of going through all the drama and mystery? The woman said that the people at the show wanted my help with a photograph they thought was of me. I agreed to go and we made an appointment.

This time my father went with me. I didn’t know what Preen’s people might try to pull, and I figured my father could help me. I told him about the taping and how I had met with Preen afterward.

“So what do they want with you now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to think.”

We went on a Saturday, and they made us wait in the lobby of the building for twenty minutes. My father was almost ready to leave after ten. “They can’t keep an appointment?” he said. “This isn’t the doctor’s office, for Christ’s sake.” It was a good thing he hadn’t been with me for the taping. He paced back and forth in the lobby. Finally we were led to Mr. Preen’s office. Three of his assistants, dressed identically in black pants and black turtlenecks, were there, but no Preen. They motioned for us to sit on the couch.

“How old is your son?” one of them asked my father.

“He’s sixteen.”

“He has lost someone recently, someone close to him.”

“Yes,” my father said. “Get to the point. What’s this about?”

“Mr. Preen made a strong connection with this individual, a connection that seems to have manifested itself in a very real way. As we explained, Mr. Preen has come into the possession of a particular photograph. One that we would like you to identify.”

The assistant showed us the photograph. It was the one Mr. Devon had taken on the train. I was staring straight at the camera, and in the background, looking through the window of the train, was a ghost. It was blurry image of Anna’s face, looking at me.

“Where did you get this?” my father wanted to know.

“Mr. Preen is an avid collector of spirit photographs,” the assistant said.

“Where did you get this?” my father repeated.

“We just want you to verify that this is the friend, behind you in the photograph.”

My father shook his head. “If you’re not going to answer my question, we’re leaving.” The assistants said nothing, and we left.

By the time we reached the street, my father’s face was red with rage. “What the fuck is going on?” he asked.

 

 

 

On the ride home, we went over my trip to the city with Carl and the earlier trip with Mr. Devon. I told my father most of what had happened, but I didn’t tell him everything. I didn’t tell him the specifics of Preen’s conversation with me after the show, and I didn’t tell him about Mr. Devon’s taking me to a bar or his getting drunk.

“Let’s have a talk with Mr. Devon,” my father said when we got home. I called him on my cell, and we drove to his house.

“I need an explanation,” my father said as soon as Mr. Devon opened the door. “I need to know how a photograph you took of my son winds up on a TV show.”

“What photo? What TV show?”

I told him about the photo and that Preen had it, but not on his show.

“I don’t know how that could have happened,” Mr. Devon said. “I took the picture of your son, but that’s the end of what I know about it and the end of my involvement.”

“How did the Cayne girl’s picture get in it?”

“Someone probably put it there.”

“How?” my father asked.

“You used to need two negatives to create the effect, or you had to double-expose a single negative. But now, with a computer, it’s easy to create what I think you’re describing. I’d have to see the picture, and even then I might not be able to tell how it was done. If it was done well.”

“And how would they have gotten the picture in the first place?”

“I don’t know about the picture of Anastasia, but I have photographs and negatives all over the classroom, my office, and the darkroom at school. Any one of a hundred kids could have come across it and taken it.”

“Why?” my father asked.

“You’d have to ask them,” Mr. Devon said.

“So someone just stole something out of your classroom and you shrug it off.”

“Dad, you don’t understand,” I said.

“I understand that this guy doesn’t have any control over his students.”

“It’s not like that,” I said.

“What is it like?”

“We make a lot of different kinds of artwork in class,” Mr. Devon said, “using all sorts of materials, pictures from magazines, old photographs people bring from home, pictures that I’ve taken or that the students themselves have taken. It’s not that I don’t have control over my students, it’s that someone happened upon this particular photograph and decided to use it for this particular purpose. Maybe they meant it as a prank or a hoax, or maybe they were just trying to get attention. Other than that, I’m not sure what harm’s been done.”