Harmless (12 page)

When he got back to the fire Jane said they should try Derek’s number.

“If he was over with Ruby today, the girls might have walked there. It’s an hour’s walk.”

“What about Derek’s cell?” Alex asked.

“I’ll try it,” Mike said. “He’s probably out somewhere on a run.”

Liz and Jane rushed off to call Derek’s house while Mike texted his cell. This was good. Joseph imagined Franny’s
return, the desperate hug on her arrival, anger disappearing at the sight of the girls’ faces, the exchange of stories. It was madness to tease his imagination like this, but he was weak, his nerves shredded. He checked his fingers for blood. There were flecks under his nails. He’d pulverized the chicken’s head.

A few minutes later Jane and Liz returned. Liz had her arm around Jane, whose face was sickeningly white, even gaunt, as if she’d suffered the effects of a three-day flu in the time she was gone.

“We had a scare.”

“
I
had a scare,” Jane said, grabbing Alex’s arm, her earlier anger replaced by shock.

“We went into the house to make the call.” Liz did that box-making thing with her hands again. “No one’s home at Derek’s, but I left a message. Jane was going down the front stairs.”

“I stepped in blood!”

“Not human blood. We searched.”

Joseph wanted to run away before they said it but it was too late.

“We found a dead chicken.”

“Its head was ripped off!” Jane’s face in the firelight was demonic—hooded eyes and sunken cheeks, a slit mouth quivering.

Joseph caressed the egg in its handkerchief. It was cool to the touch. He should tell them the truth, that he’d murdered a harmless creature because he couldn’t find his daughter, but they’d be angry, and scorn him for acting according to type, mistaking a chicken for a monster.

“The head was just … gone,” Jane said. “The body wasn’t touched. Whatever killed it didn’t want to eat it.”

“Or it was interrupted.”

“You don’t know what it was, Liz. Don’t say you do.” Jane buried her face in her hands. “Oh God. It gets worse. There were three lines
drawn in blood
on the door frame!”

Alex pulled Jane into his arms, agitating her further.

“On the door frame,” she said, pulling away. “Three lines the width of a man’s finger. Three stripes, like a message, a symbol.”

“What kind of sick fuck—”

“It’s probably a coincidence,” Joseph said, thanking God they couldn’t dust for fingerprints. “An animal killed a chicken, and in the struggle blood splashed onto the door frame.”

“Three fingers!” Jane spat the words at him.

“You don’t know it was fingers. We’re all fucked up, so we see patterns.” He wasn’t getting his point across. “It’s like those faces of Jesus that appear on the side of barns. It’s just random lichen growth—”

“So Jane
wants
to see blood on a door frame?” The fury was back in Alex’s eyes.

“I meant, in our state we’re bound to be
predisposed
.”

“Something bad’s happened. I know it has.” Jane spoke with prophetic certainty. Abandoned by her feckless father for a second marriage, left with an embittered, depressive mother who died of cancer when Jane was nineteen, she’d been waiting ever since for the final pillar to fall and bring the sky crashing down on her.
We made it through another day
, she used to whisper to Joseph after sex, lying beside
him on his futon in that hot, cramped apartment, reminding him of the daily miracle. Now the long-awaited catastrophe was upon her, and she was no better prepared for having anticipated its arrival.

“God, it was so
blatant
,” she said. “And then we heard something in the bushes by the fence.”

They couldn’t blame
that
on Joseph.

“We heard twigs cracking,” Liz said.

A thought began to nudge into Joseph’s mind, gently but firmly, like a body pressing against a locked door. Something about the twigs.

“You probably surprised a raccoon,” Alex said. “It ran into the bushes.”

“What about the message in blood?”

“You don’t know—”

“Stop fucking patronizing me, Liz.”

“Jane, listen.” Alex spoke to her as if she was awakening from an anesthetic. “All we know is that you found a dead chicken and heard a noise in the bushes.”

There it was again, the pressure in Joseph’s head, the
almost
memory. He stared into the fire, a glowing orange-and-black mound faintly throbbing like the hide of a sleeping tiger. What was he forgetting?

“What are we going to do?” Jane shouted, pulling herself free from Alex’s grip. She turned to Joseph. “What are we going to do?”

He moved his lips without speaking, matching her husband’s uselessness.

“Call the police,” Jane said.

“Hold on a second.” Alex nodded slowly, his head making
a strange circular motion, a snake charmer’s trick. “There’s got to be an explanation.”

They’d all seen this in the movies, the rationalist trying to ward off catastrophe with disclaimers:

This boat has got through worse storms than this
.

Werewolves are just an old wives’ tale
.

No man can take three shots to the gut and survive
.

“Jane, let’s talk this through.”

“The girls are
missing
!” she shouted into Alex’s face. “You said it when we got back:
The girls are missing
. I believe you now. Happy?”

“What?” He raised his hands as though to freeze her words in the air.

“You wanted me to admit that we’re in a fucking
crisis
! Well, it’s a crisis! And it’s all my fault.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“So whose fault is it? You’re so good at assigning blame.”

“We all made mistakes.”

“I didn’t,” Mike said.

“You have to be alive to make a mistake,” Alex said.

“God, what are we even doing in this fucking place?” Jane was pressing her fingers into her temples. “In the middle of fucking nowhere!”

Alex’s hands grasped at the air as if he were searching for guard rails to hang on to. “You
wanted
to move here.”

“
You
wanted to!”

“But we—”

“There was no
we
, Alex. Never! I went along with it. What was I going to say?
You can’t get a fucking job in the city now, but we’ll be fine …
”

She was knocking inches from Alex, every sentence passing through him like a freshly sharpened thresher. Joseph wanted to feel sorry for him—first his daughter rejected the life he tried to build for her in the country, and now his wife was turning on him—but the pity wouldn’t come. There was blood in the water. They all smelled it.

“We should call the police,” Joseph said.

“The nearest cop shop is twenty miles away.”

“What’s the matter, Mike? Afraid a visit from the police will tarnish your and Liz’s
profile
in the community?” Joseph was crossing a line. It felt good.

“You know that’s not it,” Liz said, refusing to tolerate another attack on her husband after he’d embraced the safe role handed to him by the crisis. “It’s too early for the cops to treat this as a missing persons case.”

“It’s
dark
!” Jane said.

“It’s barely past eleven o’clock.”

“Okay,
don’t
call the cops. Let’s just wait until whatever’s happened to our daughters is over. Good plan, Joseph?”

“We have to do something,” he agreed.

“Hear that, Alex? We have to
do
something! You’re always saying,
Why doesn’t anybody
do
anything
?”

“Look, even if we do call them—” Alex began.

“Don’t
if
me. Call the police!” Jane nearly tripped into the fire. She recovered and held on to Joseph’s arm.

“Okay,” Alex said. “But it’ll be at least a half-hour before they get here.”

A knot popped in the fire, the embers cooling into ash and freckling Jane’s tight, pale face. Joseph reached out and brushed the ash away with his thumb, leaving a grey
trail against her cheek, before she pushed away his hand as if to say,
Don’t touch me in front of these people, not so soon after …

A memory loosened deep in his mind, so close to consciousness he could see its outline. He saw trees. Shadow. The fire popped again, a loud snapping noise that riveted Jane’s body into a fight-or-flight stance. He almost had it, what he so badly needed to remember. Trees. Shadow. A twig snapping.

Joseph remembered, and he wished he hadn’t: he and Jane lying naked in the clearing. They hear a twig snapping. Jane sits up and peers out toward the pasture, still faintly lit by the sunset. She sees something move, a shadow or a silhouette. Her body tenses.

He couldn’t take the scene any further. He’d been looking at Jane when the twig broke, and he had as much chance now of seeing what she’d seen as a bug fossilized in amber did of turning its head.

It didn’t matter. He knew. Jane had seen the blur of Franny and Rebecca running away from the clearing after snapping the branch. The supporting details rushed into place: the girls had followed the stoned adults into the fields, keeping just out of sight as they cracked jokes about the adults’ stumbling progress. But then somebody’s daddy went into the bushes with somebody’s mommy and what was
that
about? The girls walked to the edge of the clearing, and what did they see but Jane and Joseph fucking on the ground. Where could the girls go after they fled the scene? Back to the house
to wait for Jane and Joseph to return and pretend nothing had happened? No, they needed a safe place to talk, so they walked until they found a path to follow into the woods. The story scanned.

Liz was guiding everyone through a compromise plan to search the road and
then
call the police. Jane listened, shaking her head “no” at every point and ignoring Alex and Mike when they repeated the plan like a pair of disaster-relief workers. It was all pointless. The forest was a black strip beneath the dark sky, and behind the wall of trees Franny was afraid, in shock, unable to find her way out.

“Call the police or I will,” Jane said.

Joseph studied her stricken face. She didn’t remember seeing the girls, not consciously, but her
mind
knew—how else to explain that pucker of flesh on her forehead, as though an invisible finger was pressing there with force?

“Did you guys see anyone following us?” he asked. “When we were out walking.” Everyone but Julian and Amber frowned at him. “Well, did you?”

They wanted to know:
Why this question, why
now?

“Are you sure you didn’t see anyone?” He couldn’t help but direct the question to Jane. “Did you see anything?” he asked Julian and Amber. “The girls might have followed us. They wouldn’t want to be seen—they wanted to, you know, sneak up on us.”

Julian nodded. It was possible.

“Why would the girls follow
you
?” Alex said, so angry his bottom lip quivered.

“I don’t know. Why would they go for a walk on the road? It’s just as likely they decided to follow the old folks
for a laugh.” He had to monitor his tongue here. The urge to confess was strong. “Maybe they followed us and then got bored and went for walk in the woods. It was still light out.”

No one knew what to say. Did he sound too sure of himself? Only Jane stood near him, her face turned down toward the fire, their proximity like the mark of Cain on their foreheads.

“Jane, did
you
see anyone? Can you remember if you did?”

“Why?” Why was he picking on
her
?

“You and I walked a little behind everyone else,” he said, pushing her through a plausible version of events. “
I
didn’t see anyone, but my eyes aren’t that good.”

He tried to bore words into Jane’s eyes:
You heard the twig snap. You saw shadows move
.

“You said you saw movement, near the trees. You thought it was a coyote.”

Just tell them you saw something. We have to give them a reason to search the woods
.

“When everyone else was up ahead looking at the sunset.”

You’re the best liar I’ve ever met. You can talk your way out of anything
.

“You said it was probably nothing.”

Do I have to make up the whole fucking story for you?

“Jane, do you remember?” He was trying to sound like Liz and Alex—firm, focused, patient—but there was a squeak in his voice.

She was still staring at the fire, but she seemed to stand straighter, as if a surge were moving up her spine. “You don’t think …”

“When we
stopped
!” He was almost shouting. “We were near the woods and you saw something.” He was too deep into the story, the roles too established, to suddenly remember that
he
might have seen the girls following them.

“Joseph, I don’t think she saw anything.” Liz, being helpful.

“If you saw anything—
anything
.”

Just say you saw a shadow. I’ll take the story from there
.

Jane was bending toward the fire.

“Think!”

Our girls are lost in the woods
.

Jane knelt on the stones and released an almost-languid sigh that might have come from deep within the fire. She touched a smoking log to test its heat. She was composing her story. She would roll the log back into the fire, then stand up and tell them,
Yes, I did see something moving near the treeline
. She hadn’t thought about it at the time, but it was probably the girls, and yes, they might have detoured into the woods.
We should start searching there right now
.

Jane stood up holding the log, which was honeycombed into glowing orange cells at the far end, her eyes still locked on the fire. He followed her gaze, trying to find what had fixated her. He didn’t see the log coming until it was too late to stop it.

W
hen Joseph came to he couldn’t remember the words she’d howled at him before the log struck his head. She’d set her mark upon him—a bloody lump behind his ear—and now the log lay on the ground, still smoking with righteous anger. And there was a terrible noise. Jane screaming. Liz was holding her by the waist, and Alex by her shoulders. Joseph sat up, the band of pain shifting in his head like a heavy box.