In the Blood (13 page)

After the detective left, and Lynne and Frank returned to their hotel, I was more than a little grateful for the distraction of Luke’s poem. Otherwise, I’d have just lain there staring out the window at the moon and ruminating on all the dread possibilities. The doctor had warned me about too much down time, where that catastrophic thinking of mine had room to grow, expand, wrap around me like a strangling vine.

So I took the card and key from my jacket pocket and reread the poem, held the old key in my hand. I was surprised to find myself hoping for a challenge, something to occupy my busy brain, but it didn’t take me very long to figure out Luke’s poem. After all, mad genius or not, he was still an eleven-year-old boy who would sit in his room and play video games all day if he could. How creative could he really be?

I opened my laptop and started searching: “Hollows, New York, Suicide.” The first listing on the search engine was for The Hollows Historical Society Web site.

I already knew that there were lots of supposedly haunted places in The Hollows. So many that the historical society offered a “haunted tour” in the weeks leading up to Halloween as a fund-raiser for preserving some of the town’s oldest buildings. And people came from all over to creep themselves out.

For weeks, there were small white buses carting people around the town. There were walking tours, Segway tours (oh my God,
really?), and kiddie tours that ended with hot cider and pumpkin muffins at the Old Mill. There was even a stop on our campus. (Naturally, the fraternity boys
lived
for this tour.) Once upon a time, our college used to be a convent, and our dorms were the cloisters where the nuns had lived.

In the early 1900s, one of the young novices managed to get pregnant. She was apparently able to hide it for the duration, and then died trying to give birth by herself. The baby was given away for adoption. Residents of the Marianna dormitory had, for decades, claimed to see her wandering the halls, looking for her lost child. It’s the last stop on the tour. As the guide dutifully tells the sad tale, the Delta Phi boys inevitably turn up draped in sheets and smelling of beer, and walk by, moaning. It’s usually good for a big laugh from the tour group, who are apparently quite aware of the silly nature of the whole thing but enjoy it anyway.

I scrolled through The Hollows Historical Society Web site, scanning their list of haunted sites—complete with an album of photos, creepy music, and a well-written history of each location. It took me about five minutes of reading to find the place on which Luke had based his lousy poem.

Within its walls,

For a hundred years,

People have learned and prayed and died.

Now, some believe, a tortured soul is trapped inside.

I read about a small, dilapidated building, erected in 1901, that sat sad and abandoned in the old cemetery down by the high school. It had lived several lives, first as one of the original schoolhouses in The Hollows, later as an Episcopal church, then finally as the office
of the cemetery caretaker and a storage facility for the equipment needed to keep the grounds.

During the 1918 influenza pandemic, it had been used as a makeshift hospital, and five people died there. There was a colorful description of each of the five ghosts—a man, a woman, and three children. They wandered about at night: the children who happily play among the tilting headstones, the woman who is searching for something, forever looking behind trees, and the man who stands stock-still always beside the same grave.

But there was only one brief sentence about the caretaker who in 1995, as Luke so eloquently put it, drank a bottle of whiskey and ate the barrel of his gun. Another caretaker had never been found, and now it was the people of the historical society who through volunteer efforts maintained the graveyard.

Of course, the Web site had an agenda to run, to make things sound scary enough to attract but not frightening enough to repel. So the mention of the relatively recent suicide was brief and underplayed. It was as if only old ghosts were permitted to wander The Hollows, harmless shades who passed hundreds of years ago. The spirits wandering around The Hollows were just harmless tricks of light, and the wind through the trees, and the idea that maybe, maybe there might have been something moving in the dark. Certainly nothing real or terrifying, nothing horrible enough to keep people away, only enough to draw the curiosity seekers in. A suicide, the ghost of the man who in terrible psychic pain committed suicide, is not among the featured, harmless Hollows shades.

Why did he do it?

What secret did he hide?

But, of course, there are no secrets anymore. Not in the electronic age, where we lay everything bare or it is laid bare for us.
Every ugly thing on earth is just a few keystrokes away. That’s why you must be so careful.

As I continued to move through the listings on the search page, I found a news item about the man who committed suicide in the graveyard shack, Harvey Greenwald.

He was a wretched man, a crooked golem with a deeply lined face, and wet, wide blue eyes lashed thick like a girl’s. It would be easy to say he was a convicted pedophile, a porn addict, facing yet another accusation, because according to the newspaper article I found online, he was all of those things.

But he was also a husband, a father of two young girls. I know, from bitter personal experience, that there is always so much more to people than what is written about them in police reports and newspaper articles. They never get it quite right, as if the retelling of a life makes it less than what it is—or was.
He was a good man,
his wife was quoted as saying.
What they say about him, it isn’t true. It can’t be.
He left a note with a brief single sentence:
I’m sorry.

In the articles about the investigation, a familiar name kept popping up: Detective Jones Cooper. He was Dr. Cooper’s husband, and he’d also been the lead investigator on Elizabeth’s disappearance. It was odd to see his name. I remembered him; he’d made me nervous. He’d asked a lot of questions of me, seemed to think I was hiding something. Of course I had been.

Ainsley had taken an Ambien, turned on her whale sounds, and donned her lavender-scented eye mask in a hale effort to get some sleep. It had been hours since Lynne and Frank had left, both of them looking dazed and worried. I didn’t see any of the vitriol between them that Beck had so often described. They seemed to share a sad and tender connection. He kept a hand on the small of her back as they left the room. I’d seen him take a strand of her silken
blond hair, she touch his tattooed arm. Beck’s name was tattooed around one of Frank’s wrists, in linked letters that looked more like a tribal pattern than anything else;
Lynne
on the other. They didn’t seem like people about to get divorced. I could see why Beck found them so confusing. We hate our parents for having their own lives, don’t we, for making decisions for themselves that don’t seem to take us into account. They’re not people, not really. They’re parents; how dare they live and love and die without us?

I looked out the window to see that the snow, which had fallen earlier, had all melted away, and the precipitation had stopped. But I didn’t have my bike to ride over to the cemetery. That’s what you were supposed to do, right? Go to the place and find the next clue? I kept looking for the key with my fingertips, feeling the warm metal now and again like a touchstone. What would that key unlock? What was the secret that Harvey Greenwald hid? What kind of an agenda was Luke running? And why did I care?

My friend was missing. My homicidal father wanted to talk. I had big problems that needed attention. Still, I felt that same urgency to play Luke’s game that I had when we were playing chess. Maybe, like in the chess games we played, he was way ahead of me—his moves already planned, and my demise already assured. Still I couldn’t keep myself from playing. I
wanted
to know what Harvey Greenwald’s secret was. I
wanted
to find that next clue. In that moment I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. Maybe I just wanted to win. Or maybe, really, I was just looking for a distraction, a temporary escape from the ugly things looming. Or maybe, even then, I sensed that this scavenger hunt was more than just a child’s game.

I thought a moment about how I could get there, since my bike was still at Luke’s. I could use Beck’s bike; she wouldn’t care. I went
into her room, which I knew had been tossed by the cops and her parents. Her mother had found her weed and confiscated it. Her dad found a pack of condoms in her makeup bag.
Jesus Christ,
he’d said softly.
At least she’s being safe,
Lynne said, and then started to cry.
The only time we ever learn anything about our daughter is when she disappears.
Really, I thought. Is it news to you that Beck sleeps around?

I felt bad for them. But I couldn’t answer any of their questions. Was she seeing anyone? Where would she go if she was angry or upset or trying to get even with them? She’d been talking about California over the summer, they said. She was thinking about looking for an internship at a movie studio. Might she have taken off for L.A.?

Our relationship had been strained this year; the truth was, we hadn’t been talking very much except to argue. And the first conversation we’d had since break was a fight. I had no idea what was in her head. I told them as much. Only Lynne didn’t quite seem to accept this. There was something narrow and untrusting about her gaze. I avoided her eyes.

Most people don’t see me. But there are always those that do, usually mothers. They see what I am trying to hide, even if they’re not quite sure what it is they’re seeing. I can tell by the way they can’t pry their eyes away. With my innocuous, androgynous wardrobe, my slight frame, my plain face, I usually just blend. Neither boys nor girls usually give me a second look. But sometimes, the sensitive, the keenly observant . . . they see me.

I slid open the narrow drawer in Beck’s desk and found the bike-lock key in the little corner pocket. I was slipping it out when something else in there caught my eye. I tugged on the corner of a piece of paper, a printout of a news story she’d obviously found online.
I read the headline and I literally felt a pain in my chest. I thought of that bag of hers, which was now in the hands of the police, along with her laptop, journal, cell phone. What else was in there?

I folded up the piece of paper and shoved it angrily in my pocket. I could still smell her in that room, her perfume and hair gel. Why did she have to search and pry? Why did she want to know me so badly that she had to dig up the past? How was it possible to love someone and hate her at the same time? I was thinking this as I bundled up and headed outside. It was stupid; I knew this. But I had to get out of that room, out of my head. The scavenger hunt was the only thing I actually wanted to think about. Sad, I know. Maybe more than sad. Sick.

The cold air bit at my cheeks and any flesh that was exposed—my ankles, my wrists. I unlocked Beck’s bike, which she always kept right next to mine on the rack outside the dorm entrance. Everything was clattering—the bicycles, my teeth, my bones. It was so cold that the world seemed made of ice, everything brittle and wanting to break into pieces.

I kept looking around as I struggled with the lock. I kept expecting to see Margie the dorm mom come to the door, or Ainsley run out panicked and bleary-eyed. But it was dark and deserted.

As the lock fell away in my hand, I felt a shiver move through me. I lifted her bike off the rack and thought about Beck. Would she become one of those lost girls? A
48 Hours Mystery
or a
Dateline
story of the week? Where no one ever knew what really happened to her? Or would they find her broken body somewhere like Elizabeth? Or her bones a decade from now? I just wanted to hear her voice, for this all to be over.

Look, I can’t keep going like this.

What are you talking about, Beck? Just leave me the fuck alone.

You know what I’m talking about. Don’t you? Come on. Don’t you?
I had never seen her cry before.