In Search of the Rose Notes (30 page)

Then there were footsteps on the tape again.

“This is where I went to the bathroom,” Charlotte confessed. “I also peeked in Toby’s room. He has a poster of Alyssa Milano. Isn’t that
gross
?”

I nodded.

Then silence on the tape, then more footsteps. Then a guttural, sighing sound came out of the recorder.

“Rose. Roooooose. Where’s ROOOOOOSE?”
the voice asked abruptly, startling me for a split second before I realized it was Toby.
“Nobody KNOOOOOOOWS.”

“I’m gonna strangle him,” Charlotte said, rather casually. She was now painting the other fingernails on her left hand.

Toby repeated his words again, then was quiet for a moment, then started humming slowly, deeply, perhaps as he thought a ghost would hum.

Then the ghost voice started singing “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison.

“God, Toby’s so
lame,
” Charlotte declared.

The song performance went on for quite a while, with Toby repeating the same lines several times and skipping the ones he couldn’t remember. Then he began imitating the song’s tinny guitar solo, getting really into it, forgetting he was supposed to be a ghost:

“Neenerneener-neenerneener-neenerneener-NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

I cringed as Toby screeched right into the microphone.

“What a dork,” Charlotte said, looking at me expectantly for agreement.

I agreed somewhat but felt it would be unkind, even disloyal, to say so. I thought about Toby and me below the trampoline the afternoon before. When it was just him and me, he knew how to be normal, how to be quiet. So quiet I could picture that silver forest while he was sitting right next to me. So quiet I could’ve gone to sleep right there under the trampoline and barely even remembered he was there.

But his singing was so loud and so awful I could barely remember that quiet now. His voice was deep like his brother’s and slow like his dad’s. And maybe a little sad.

Just when I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand it a second longer, his song came to an end. Then I could hear him clucking his tongue, probably trying to think of some other obnoxious thing a ghost could do. It took him about a minute to come up with something.

“Who… Who? Who was the last?”
He spoke in that low, throaty voice that death-metal singers use—that always sounds like a really mean Cookie Monster or a deranged Santa Claus.

“Who. Was. The Last. To See. Her. A-liiiiiiiive?”

“To see her ALIIIIIIIIIIIVE?”
the death-metal voice asked again.

“Really in poor taste,” Charlotte said in her best imitation-teacher voice.

“WHO. WAS. THE. LAST,”
he started again, this time more rhythmically.

I clenched my hands into fists and tried to ignore him. I stared at my perfect Easter Island picture. This was the second time Toby was wondering who was really the last to see Rose alive. The stupid death-metal voice didn’t scare me—just the question he insisted upon asking again.

“TO SEE HER AL-IIIIIIIIIVE?”

I got up from the carpet.

“WHO—”

I jumped over to Charlotte’s desk and stopped the tape.

“What?” Charlotte said.

“
I
was,” I insisted. “I WAS!”

Charlotte wrinkled her forehead, not understanding.

“He’s almost done,” she said. “After this he goes downstairs again.”

I ejected the tape from the player and held it in my hand for a moment. Charlotte could listen to this over and over and never really hear Toby, because she didn’t know how to listen the way I did. She didn’t know that Toby was trying to say something. He was a boy, and he didn’t have big words like she did—so he could only say it in a stupid boy way. She didn’t know how to hear it, and I didn’t
want
to hear it—ever again. So this tape was useless.

I pinched a bit of the brown tape out of the rectangular hole in the bottom of the cassette and flung a stream of it sideways.

“NO!”
Charlotte screamed, bounding out of her chair and tackling me.

After I’d hit the floor, I kept pulling the tape out, as she grabbed at me, scratching me, getting fresh pink nail polish on my hands, arms, and face.

“What are you
doing
?” she screamed. “Are you crazy, Nora? What’s wrong with you?”

She managed to snatch the cassette from me. I grabbed a piece of the tape off the carpet and twisted and pulled and bit at it till it broke in half.

“Oh, GREAT!” Charlotte moaned, falling back on the carpet. “Now we’ll never get to listen to it again. All that research!”

“What do you care?” I said. “You’ve already listened to the whole stupid thing anyway.”

“So? So that means you get to ruin my tape?”

“I’ll buy you a new blank tape.”

“You better.”

“I will.”

“Fine.”

Charlotte sat up and stared at me. “You’re mad at Toby? For messing up the tape?”

I didn’t reply.

“Did you hear something?” she said, lowering her voice.

I stared back at her. She wasn’t all that mad about the tape, really, now that she’d caught her breath. How could I explain to her that I’d heard something terrible in Toby’s voice? And that she’d heard it, too—she just didn’t feel it the way I did. I didn’t understand it, but I felt it, and she clearly didn’t.

Maybe that was why I’d been angry at her for so many weeks. She knew things. But sometimes she didn’t feel things.

“I heard the same thing you did,” I mumbled.

We sat together on the carpet for a minute more, Charlotte looking at me, me looking away. I gazed across the room to where her black book lay open on the floor, still turned to the Easter Island page. I thought of finally asking to borrow the book but decided against it. I didn’t think I’d be coming back here tomorrow.

“I don’t feel well,” I said. “I should probably go home now.”

“You gonna throw up or something?” Charlotte wanted to know.

“Maybe,” I said, since puke was at least something we both understood.

And then she let me go.

Chapter Twenty-one

May 27, 2006

I don’t know how long we sat on that tennis court together. The sun was bright, but there was still a breeze. A bird in a nearby maple tweeted cheerily. Toby didn’t lift his face from his hands.

“Like I said, I wished it was you,” he said into his hands, finally speaking. “Everyone thought maybe you had some dark secret inside you, something you’d seen, something that haunted you. Something about Rose. Too deep and dark to even remember, much less tell. I wished it had been you, not me. Like everyone thought. So how does it feel now, to actually have the kind of secret everyone thought you had?”

I breathed in and out carefully—the way Charlotte had taught me so long ago. Back when I was her subject. Slowly, the trees around the courts began to look like trees again. My heart finally stopped racing.

I didn’t answer his question.

“It’s not too late, Toby,” I said instead.

“It’s too late. I moved her. I hid her. Not when I was twelve, or even seventeen. Twenty-eight. I’m twenty-eight years old. It’s too late.”

I stared at the short, dark hair on the top of his head. So different from his almost-mullet when we were kids. It was a younger look than he’d had as a kid. I reached out and touched his ear so he would look up at me.

“It’s not too late for it to be me.”

Toby shook his head.

“Say I found that notebook somewhere,” I said. “Like the Hemsworths’ house. Rose was always leaving crap there. Maybe we just discovered it in Charlotte’s box of black books, just this week, when we were skipping down memory lane. But, Jesus, it practically describes how she died. It’s almost all there. And when I read it, say it all came tumbling back. What I’d seen, what I’d heard. Rose in the road in the dark, with her Walkman.”

Toby’s lips twitched as he considered my words.

“What kind of car was your father driving? That old truck?”

“Yes. His old red Ford.”

“Surely with all your automobile expertise, you know of a truck with a similar build, a similar height that could have hit her in the same way.”

“Well, lots could. Depending on the height of the tires. Chevy Silverado. Toyota, GMC, whatever. Even a minivan could—”

“Okay. So I was wandering around the neighborhood, waiting for my mom to get home. I saw Rose with her headphones, but I didn’t understand it. And then, a little while later, I saw a black truck with GMC across the back go up the hill, before I went inside. Listen, Toby. I’m really considered a witness. Not just some bozo walking in off the street with some crazy theory.”

“An eleven-year-old girl and you remember
GMC
? You’re crazy.”

“I’d say it was a big black truck. The Bankses would at least know what happened. They’d at least know she didn’t suffer long.”

“But they wouldn’t know who did it.”

“Does it matter who did it? It was an accident. The hardest part of it is still true. How much does the driver matter, when you know Rose’s part of it? So the one who did it was a guy in a black truck, not a red one. Put her in the back and carried her away. Maybe I even saw that part. And apparently he buried her later. They just won’t be able to find the guy.”

“I don’t think you can lead the police into all that, Nora. I don’t think they would believe that you would have—”

“Forget what they think of me. Forget what crazy things I’d have to say about myself. A lot of people around here still think I’m a little crazy. Makes it all the more believable, doesn’t it? No one could figure out what screwed me up so bad that year I never got over it. It makes twisted sense, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Toby said. “Not really.”

“Well, I don’t have to tell all that if you don’t want me to. I could just give them the notebook. Or just mention the truck.”

“A truck would implicate my dad eventually.”

“Maybe,” I said slowly. “But would that be so bad?”

“What?” Toby said.

“Your dad’s gone now. You don’t need to protect him. Maybe he moved her just before he died. Would he have known how little time he had left? Maybe he moved her to protect you? Maybe at least
you
didn’t know anything.”

Toby bit his lip, looking thoughtful. “Maybe,” he said softly.

“And you’ve already been punished enough. Do you need to protect your dad anymore? Maybe it was all your dad. Maybe I did see a red truck if you want it that way. But maybe you’re as shocked to hear it as anyone else.”

“Maybe you ought to think about this a little more.” Toby still sounded doubtful. “You wouldn’t come off looking very good.”

“Who cares how I look? If I saw everything—if I saw your dad—it’s all believable. Because it’s all true. And there’s Rose’s own words to back it up. And if they believe that your dad could hide the body, they sure as hell can believe he moved it.”

Toby avoided my gaze.

“C’mon,” I said. “Just think about it.”

“And what about Charlotte?” he asked. “You gonna include her in this plan?”

“I don’t know. Does it really matter? I haven’t thought about it that far yet. I just came up with it.”

“If you’re going to say you found that notebook at her house,” Toby said, “you’d have to let her in on it. Or risk making her family look suspicious.”

“Oh,” I said, considering this.

“Why don’t you sleep on it? Think about it. Spend a little more time with Charlotte this weekend. Think about that part of it. Because, you know, if you make this confession and she thinks you’ve been keeping this from her all these years, she’s never gonna talk to you again.”

“But she’ll be happy her dad won’t be under suspicion anymore.”

“Her dad,” Toby said, shaking his head. “That’s right. Her dad. I heard. I’d forgotten about that. Might look a little funny that the person coming out of the woodwork with this nutty story is a friend of the daughter of one of the people they’ve been questioning. Have you thought of that?”

“I’m not a person coming out of the woodwork. I’m the prime witness. I’m the only one anyone ever thought could’ve seen something.”

“Well… listen. You’ve started me thinking. But we should talk more. Way more, before you think of doing anything. Don’t do anything stupid, okay? Don’t talk to Charlotte yet. How about we talk about this again tomorrow?”

“All right,” I said.

“Where does Charlotte think you are anyway?”

“Nowhere in particular. She fell asleep. So I kind of ran off.”

“Maybe you ought to get back to her. Can you have coffee tomorrow? How about Denny’s?”

“Sounds good,” I said, relieved I didn’t have to keep trying to sound convincing. I wasn’t at all certain I could pull it off. But I was going to have to, somehow. I owed him something. I wasn’t sure what that was, exactly, but this was the best I could come up with.

Toby got up and put his hand out. It took me a moment to realize he was helping me up.

“Nine o’clock?” he asked as I stood.

Something about the feel of his callused hand in mine made me hesitate to answer. Something about his loosening grip, or the lukewarm temperature of his palm. I tried to hold on to his hand for an extra second, but then he let go.

“Okay,” I agreed hoarsely.

“I’ve got to go buy some ribs,” Toby explained, stepping toward the gates of the court, “take care of my brother. I promised him a little barbecue.”

It seemed to me a bit bizarre, after all he’d told me, that the next step would be to go home and grill some meat with his brother.

“All right,” I said anyway.

We didn’t talk much on the walk back up the hill.

“Nora?” he said when we reached the Hemsworths’ place.

“Yes?”

“Whatever happens, and whatever anyone thinks of you—I can tell that you turned out all right. You did what you needed to do, and you turned out all right. Just like you said. You’re all right.”

He said it wearily, and with a hint of obligation. The way you tell your host the food is delicious or a bride she looks beautiful.

I hesitated, wondering whether I should thank him or tell him he needn’t say such things.

“Good-bye, Nora,” he said, and continued up the hill.

Mystic Places:

January 1991

By now Charlotte knew not to try to walk home with me when we got off at the bus stop. For weeks I’d been sitting at the very front of the bus so that when it stopped, I could flee out and up the hill, several paces ahead of anyone who got out after me.

But this time Toby was second off the bus, and he ran to catch up with me.

“Hey, Nora,” he said.

“Hey.”

“Why do you always walk so fast anyway?”

“It’s really cold out. I’m just in a hurry to get home.”

“How come you don’t walk with Charlotte anymore? Did you have a fight?”

“Ask her,” I mumbled, staring down at the icy sidewalk, trying to step carefully.

Toby shook his head. “She asked me to ask you, actually.”

I didn’t have a reply to this. “I just want to get home,” I repeated, shrugging.

“Are you guys investigating Rose anymore?” Toby wanted to know.

“Definitely not,” I said, quickening my steps to get ahead of him and then slipping on the ice, falling hard on my butt.

“Oh, crap!” Toby said, trying not to laugh. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking away from him.

He put his hand out to help me, but I pretended not to see it.

“Haven’t you heard? She just wants us all to leave her alone,” said Charlotte, who had now caught up with us. She was walking with Sarah Boswell, the fourth-grade gymnastics prodigy from up the street.

“I’m not bothering her,” said Toby. “I’m just helping her up.”

Charlotte gazed at me sadly as she passed, then continued to talk to Sarah.

Toby stared down at me, his bad eye seeming particularly crooked. I hated looking at that stupid droopy eye. Why was Toby taking so much longer to get the point than Charlotte had?

“Just let me help you up, and then I’ll leave you alone,” he offered. “How about that?”

I looked away from him again, lowering my voice to a growl. “Skip the first part.”

“But—”

“Just leave me alone, Eyeball,” I snapped, so loudly it surprised even me.

“Oh,” he said, startled.

Then he stepped past me gingerly, glancing back at me for a moment before continuing up the hill.

I looked around me before I got to my feet. Everything was January-ugly now. The dull white of the icy sidewalk. The crust of dirt the plow had left on the snow at the roadsides. The gray of the sky and the thin fog that floated from my mouth as I sat there sighing.

I knew that spring was supposed to come someday, but it seemed too far away to be believed. This year was different that way. I just didn’t think it would ever come. The snow seemed too high and the ice too thick to ever melt. This year springtime was like Atlantis. I wanted to believe in it, but I couldn’t. I’d believe it when I saw it. And I had a feeling it was going to be winter for a while.