Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls (11 page)

They thank him, give him a card with a phone number to call in case he remembers anything later. Yeah, sure, he'll definitely call them.

He watches the detectives walk down the street, probably heading for the Luccis' house to talk to Paul. Paul won't mention seeing him at the party. No one will. It was dark, the girls were the only ones he spoke to. When they laughed at him, scorned him, mocked him, he left. Quietly. The way he'd come, the way he'd entered the woods yesterday.

He's a fader. He disappears into shadows. He wears mental camouflage. He's Mister Death, the man you meet on the stairs. The man who isn't there.

I'
M
alone in my room. In bed even though it's only nine thirty and not quite dark. I want to sleep but I can't.

Everyone else is downstairs watching Sid Caesar. I can hear canned laughter. My parents and Billy laugh too. How can they laugh? How can anyone? I wish they'd shut up. It's all I can do not to open my door and scream at them.

I keep thinking of a poem I read in English class. I don't know why I liked it so much, but I copied the whole thing in my diary so I could read it whenever I wanted to. Maybe I knew someday I'd need that poem.

It's one of the Lucy poems by William Wordsworth, an English Romantic poet who lived in the Lake District, a place I would very much like to see someday if I live long enough to get there. It's supposed to be very beautiful. You can visit the cottage where he lived with his sister Dorothy, and you can take long hikes on the fells like he used to. Of course he's dead now, but unlike Shelley and Keats, he lived to be old and boring. I know all this because I wrote a report on him in tenth grade.

He wrote the poem while he was young, before he got boring. I can say it by heart now:

 

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem'd a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

 

That's what it's like to be dead. No motion, no force, you neither speak nor see, you're rolled round, rolled round, you're rolled round and round forever on earth's diurnal course. Not a word about God or heaven, just rocks and stones and trees. Rocks and stones and trees.

Before I got in bed tonight, I tried to draw a picture of Lucy in her grave, but as usual when I'm drawing, I couldn't get what I saw in my head on paper. I tore it up because I was scared Mom would find it and think I was crazy. What kind of person draws dead girls?

The worst thing is—what I can't stop thinking about—the blood. Billy told me about it. The police found blood on the path, their blood in the dust and in the grass where Buddy dragged them. It was in the paper, which I still won't read.

Ellie and I and who knows who else stepped in their blood and never noticed. We walked in it, it was on our shoes, and we didn't know. When I got my sneakers back, I threw them away. Mom found them in the trash and asked why I'd thrown them out, she'd just bought them in May and they were perfectly good. I didn't tell her about the blood, how could I? She'd think I was crazy. I shoved them in the back of my closet, and I wear my old moccasins even though I've worn holes in their soles, holes in my soul.

But the blood, it's like Lady Macbeth, all the perfume in the world. See, the thing is, Ellie and I were talking about Cheryl, we were saying how come Ralph likes her so much—first Buddy, then Ralph? She had a big pimple on her chin this morning, Ellie said, did you notice? and we sang the Clearasil song.

Now I think about the pimple and the bullets and the blood.

We also said she wasn't all that pretty, her teeth were too big, and then I think of the bullets again, of how he shot her in the face.

Why did we talk about her like that?

And why didn't we hear the shots and why didn't we notice the blood and how come Buddy was on the bridge? If he did it, why didn't he hide when he heard us coming? Why didn't he shoot us, too? He could have. If he did it, that is. If he had a gun.

But I remember him sitting there, smoking that cigarette, he didn't look any different, he didn't look like someone who'd just killed two girls.

If he didn't do it, who did? What if the real killer is still out there in the woods? With a
gun
? What if he's outside my house right now, waiting to kill me?

A mockingbird is singing in the holly tree outside my window. Tomorrow a cat could kill him, tomorrow I could die, I could be shot or hit by a car. I could be struck by lightning, I could fall down the stairs and break my neck or fracture my skull, I could drown at the swimming pool. So many ways to die. Poison, suffocation, choking, bleeding, automobile crashes. So many ways, it's a wonder anybody lives to grow up.

I remember an essay we read in tenth grade. A newspaper editor wrote it about his daughter, Mary White. She was riding her horse somewhere in Kansas, and she turned to wave at someone. She hit her head on a tree limb and it knocked her off her horse. She probably never knew what happened. There she was, about my age, riding along, happy and smiling and waving to a friend. And then, just like that, she was dead.

It was the saddest essay in the world. When I read it, I cried and cried because Mary White was a lot like me, a tomboy who didn't want to grow up, and she died on a sunny day in Kansas when Death hid in a tree and took her like he can take anybody anytime, including Cheryl and Bobbi Jo, and why not Ellie and me and whoever else he wants.

I wish I hadn't been at Ellie's house, walking to school and talking about Cheryl and stepping in her blood that we never saw, never knew was there until Billy asked me if I'd seen it. And no I didn't see the blood and yes I must have stepped in it and yes I was jealous of Cheryl because she had blond hair and boyfriends and wanted to fix Bobbi Jo up with Don, the boy I loved even though he thought of me as a nice kid and who likes nice kids? I was someone to tease in art class, not to date.

Why couldn't she have fixed me up with him? But Bobbi Jo was much cuter than me and didn't act silly and immature and goof off and snort through her nose when she laughed and wasn't almost six feet tall and skinny as a broomstick and just about as curvy.

But still alive, every inch of me—at least right now.

But they're not. They're both dead and I have to see them at Hausner's Funeral Parlor tomorrow and go to their funerals the next day, and I don't want to see them, I've never seen a dead person. Or been to a funeral. When my grandmother died, Mom said I shouldn't go to the funeral, I was too sensitive, it would upset me, I'd have bad dreams. Guess what. I had bad dreams anyway.

I don't want them to be dead and I don't want to die and I'm so scared my heart might stop beating right now, which is why I can't lay me down to sleep. I might die before I wake and the Lord my soul will take—but maybe not, maybe he won't want my soul.

The mockingbird keeps singing and my room is hot. I kick off my sheets but then I feel so unprotected lying there and I pull the sheet over my head and curl up small and close my eyes and think of darkness, unending darkness, of rocks and stones and trees, of being caught in the roots, roots holding me tight, rocks and stones pressing against me, and I can't sleep, can't sleep, I think I'm going crazy, I think I
am
crazy, and I start crying and I cry so hard my pillow is wet, and I stop crying and throw the pillow on the floor and the mockingbird keeps singing.

I lie on my back again and stare at the shadows on the ceiling, I lie on my side and stare at the Virgin Mary on my bureau, she stands there, her head down, her arms by her sides. My mother gave her to me one Christmas. I used to pray to her for all sorts of things—Hail, Mary, full of grace, don't let me have impure thoughts, don't let me flunk chemistry, let Don ask me to the junior prom. I passed chemistry but I think that was because Mr. Haskins thought I couldn't help being dumb. The other two prayers she didn't answer.

I can also see the photos I keep in the frame of my mirror, mostly Ellie and me acting silly, some I took at parties at Paul's house, down in the rec room. There's one of Buddy and Cheryl grinning at me, their arms around each other. I should burn that one, I don't want to see it. I should put all the pictures in a shoebox and hide it on a shelf in my closet. They belong to a time that doesn't exist anymore.

Will I ever sleep, will I ever forget the blood, will life ever be the same as before...?

T
WO
days before the funeral, the police release Buddy. They held him for forty-eight hours. They gave him two lie detector tests. They questioned him, but he said he didn't do it, he was looking for the girls, that's why he was at the bridge. And he kept on looking for them, driving up and down Forty-Third Street, back and forth between Eastern and the park, looking looking looking.

"And all along, all the time he was
looking,
" Ellie says, "he knew exactly where they were. He shot them, he hid them in the bushes, he left them there. How could he do that?"

"How could
anyone?
" I ask. I'm wondering if I should say What if it wasn't Buddy, what if it was somebody else?

We're sitting on my back porch, drinking cherry Kool-Aid and eating Oreos. It's more hot and humid than yesterday—if that's possible. Insects buzz in the maple tree. Mom has gone to the store. Billy is playing with his friends. We're all alone. Just us and our ghosts.

"I can't believe the police let him go," Ellie says. "We saw him on the bridge, he has a gun, he was mad at Cheryl. What more do they need to charge him?" Her voice is bitter.

I wrap my arms around my knees and draw them close to my chest. "Buddy's gun wasn't the same as the murder weapon," I say. "The
Sun
said it was just an air rifle."

Ellie narrows her eyes. She's getting mad, I can tell. "Are you on his side or something?"

"No, of course not." I stumble over my words. "I just don't understand it. No one in his right mind could do something like that and then sit there on the bridge in plain sight, drive us to school—"

"He's crazy," Ellie interrupts. Her mind is made up: Buddy did it, he did it, he killed them. "He should be locked up forever."

I hug my knees tighter. "But he was in my photography class. He signed my yearbook." I lift my head and stare at her so hard, everything behind her goes out of focus, just a green blur of grass and leaves. "What if he didn't do it?"

Just asking the question makes me dizzy. Everyone believes Buddy did it. They want him in jail so they don't have to be scared someone's still out there with a gun. Solve the case, get the killer off the streets, make us safe.
I
want to believe Buddy's guilty for exactly that reason. But he says he didn't do it. What if he's not lying? What if he really was looking for Cheryl and Bobbi Jo? Maybe he wanted to say he was sorry for getting mad, maybe he was still hoping she'd give him another chance. Isn't that what he asked us in the school parking lot?

I remember a picture he took of Cheryl sitting on a picnic table in the park, her jeans rolled just right, wearing her Eastern warmup jacket with her name embroidered on the front, her blond hair backlit by the sun, flashing a big, toothy smile. It was a good photograph. Buddy had a nice camera, a thirty-five millimeter, he told me, not a Kodak Hawkeye like mine. You need a good lens to take a good picture, he'd told me.

"What do you mean, 'What if he didn't do it'?" My question has shocked Ellie. "We both had the same dream," she reminds me. "Cheryl and Bobbi Jo
told
us Buddy did it. Everyone thinks he did. My parents, the Boyds, the Millers,
everyone.
"

"But what if he didn't?" My voice comes out small and whiny, a kid's voice. "What if it was that guy he says he saw in the woods?" "Good grief, Nora." Ellie stares at me as if I've lost my mind. "He never saw anyone, he made that up."

I crunch the last piece of ice in my glass. Maybe he did make it up, but I'm thinking of last winter, in Paul's rec room. Buddy's dancing slow, swaying with Cheryl, his arms around her waist, her arms around his neck, their bodies so close you'd think they shared the same heart. The lights are low, the song is "Only You." Cheryl's wearing his class ring on a chain around her neck. He's whispering in her ear, she's smiling.

I'm sitting on the couch drinking a Coke and watching them, wishing I had a boyfriend who'd dance with me like that. Love me like that. The Platters' voices blend. They sing of love and destiny and dreams. My heart aches with loneliness.

That girl smiling in the photograph, that girl kissing Buddy ... how can she be dead? How could Buddy have killed her?

I start crying again. I can't stand it.

My tears set Ellie off, and she cries too. We're back in that day, that endless day in the park.

Monday, June 18

 

H
E
reads the morning
Sun.
They've let Buddy go. They think he's innocent after all. Forty-eight hours of questioning and lie detector tests, but no murder weapon. No confession. No witness.

He's never liked Buddy, tough guy with his greased-back ducktail and Levi's riding low on his skinny hips. Not smart, probably never read a book in his life. He knows the type—a hot rod magazine is his idea of literature. Or the lyrics to something like "Blue Suede Shoes."

No, not lyrics. Words, the words to "Blue Suede Shoes."

He thinks Buddy's not feeling so tough now.

To shake things up, he decides to make an anonymous call to the police. He tells them he saw a teenage boy in the picnic grove that morning firing a rifle, at least ten shots, maybe more. The police ask him to come in and talk to them in person, but he hangs up, amused by his own daring.