The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (41 page)

N
ine one thousand, ten one thousand. Ready or not, here I come!”

Pat raises her head and scans the yard. The sun is blinding. Sweat prickles her forehead. Her chest and stomach itch. Heat rash. Maybe later, when Mamma gets home, they can go swimming.

Pat crosses the yard, pokes around in the vegetable garden, peers behind the row of giant sunflowers, the little patch of sweet corn. She checks the rain barrels (dry…), and the toolshed. No Birdie. Then, turning away from the house, she scans the cedar hedge that borders the yard. There, in the corner, a flash of red. Birdie’s dress. Pat pretends not to see. Goes closer, then walks right by, mumbling, “Where can she be?”

Then, turning quickly, she shouts, “Found you!” and reaches through the hedge to tag her baby sister. “You’re it!” Birdie laughs, pulls away, slips out the other side and right into the road.

“YOU’RE IT!” THE
soft white paw of the rabbit lands on her shoulder, touching the red dress once more. Birdie looks up, laughs, and takes off through the headstones after Peter, who runs in slow
motion, hip-hip-hopping until, at last, the little girl catches up, grabs hold of a leg, and pulls him down to the grass.

She’s perfected the trick and doesn’t need the suit now. She has become Peter Rabbit.

The rabbit sits in a jail cell, waiting. People come and go. The public defender. Jim. They ask the same questions over and over. They want to talk about motive. About Birdie. About the little shoe they found tucked in a box in the bottom of the closet in Pat’s office. A shoe wrapped in white tissue paper, like a present Pat made herself unwrap each day, a blood-soaked reminder of what she’d done. What she’d failed to do.

They say the psychiatrist will come soon. An evaluation.

Peter Rabbit says nothing. Just nods, eyes focused on something no one else seems to see.

And when the rabbit sleeps, the dreams are good.

Peter’s on Rabbit Island and both his Birdies are there. He hop-hop-hops, chasing them in games of tag and hide-and-seek that go on for hours. And they laugh. God, how those little girls laugh.

When he catches them, he takes them both in his strong furry arms, and holds tight like he’ll never let go.

They’re all safe. And they’re going to stay there forever. There on Rabbit Island.

D
ANIEL WAS BURIED
next to his father in the St. Anne cemetery. Buried in the coffin he’d built himself:
It’s better to burn out than to fade away
…

They had all gathered at Clem’s after the funeral, and were eating casseroles, drinking cocktails, and telling stories about Daniel. Daniel and the peanut cart. Daniel and his crazy ideas. Daniel the Easter Bunny.

Lizzy went to lie down. Everyone agreed it was a terrible strain on her—back in town to bury her long lost father. Peter sat on the couch, while Tock stood behind him, massaging his shoulders. Justine picked at the remnants on her plate: bits of three-bean salad and cheeseburger casserole. Suzy and Kim were on the porch, playing Go Fish and drinking ginger ale with maraschino cherries.

“I’m gonna get another beer,” Clem announced, standing. “Anyone else need anything?” Everyone shook their heads.

Rhonda stood up, stretched, and followed her father into the kitchen.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

He got that far-off look in his eyes. “You know, for a couple of years, I didn’t speak to Daniel. Right after I found out about him and Aggie and realized Peter was his son. I met your mother, tried to forget about everything that had happened before. Then, the fall after you were born, I was sitting right out there on the front porch and up he comes like some kind of phantom.”

Clem looked longingly out the window, took a long sip from the bottle of beer he was holding.

Out on the porch, the girls giggled.

Clem continued. “Daniel came sauntering up the brick walk-way, holding a six-pack of beer out in front of him like an offering. We sat and drank the six-pack, talking about our baby girls, about Peter. We just fell into our old rhythm. Like there’d never been a breach in our friendship.”

Rhonda nodded, thought about how good it felt to be talking to Peter again. How familiar and comfortable. Like going home.

“After Daniel disappeared, I kept going out to the porch. I’d sit there for hours some nights over the years, smoking, staring off down the road, waiting for him to show up with another six-pack. Now I know he’s not going to. And I suppose there’s some comfort in finally knowing, but it still doesn’t seem fair.”

Rhonda nodded. Her father teared up. Looked out the kitchen window onto the porch, like there was still hope his best friend would show up and say the whole thing was a hoax.

The girls outside giggled. “Go fish!” Suzy squealed.

THE POLICE SEEMED
to be going on the assumption that Daniel had been killed by one of two men he owed a great deal of money to: Shane Gokey or Gordon Pelletier, both of whom were now
dead. Everyone seemed glad to accept this version of events—an answer, however horrible, was better than simply not knowing. Crowley made it clear that the case was by no means closed, which meant, to Rhonda, that there would always be the possibility of being caught. Rhonda was no idiot. She knew that with modern forensics, some small piece of evidence—a hair or a button—and they would be caught. Even Rhonda, who hadn’t known about the murder but had helped to hide the body, and later, when she learned the truth, said nothing. She also knew that the truth had a funny way of surfacing when you least expected it. Ten years down the road there might be a knock on her door, and there would be Crowley to say, “I know what you did.”

“THE WORST THING
is,” Clem said, “we may never know what really happened. And of course there’s part of me that’ll always kick myself in the ass for not loaning Daniel the money he asked for that summer to pay back those guys. The money that might have saved his life.”

The little radio in the corner of the kitchen was playing softly, and Van Morrison came on. Clem walked over and turned it up. “God, Daniel loved this song,” he said. He held the radio in his hands, swaying a little as he gazed out the porch window, his eyes focused on an imaginary figure in the distance.

He has no idea
, Rhonda thought. No idea what Daniel was doing to Lizzy, about what had really happened that last night. And if Daniel’s best friend didn’t know, maybe their secret was safe.

Justine came into the kitchen, wearing a sensible black dress—no sweat suit today. Her arms were loaded with dirty plates and bowls. She set them down in the sink with a small crash, stirring Clem from his dreams.

“Need some help?” he asked his wife.

She shook her head, started to fill the sink with water, squirted in the soap, her back to Clem, Rhonda, and the radio.

Rhonda remembered the third degree her mother had given her each time she came back from spending the night at Lizzy’s house:
What did you do? How late were you up? Was Aggie there? Peter? Daniel?

Daniel.

Oh my God, she knew all along.
Rhonda nearly said the words out loud. For an instant, she imagined placing her hands on her mother’s square shoulders, turning her around so that they were face-to-face, and saying,
You knew what Daniel was doing, didn’t you?

She gripped the back of a kitchen chair instead.

“You sure we can’t give you a hand?” Clem asked. “There’s a lot of cleanup.”

“That’s okay, dear. Cleaning up is what I do best,” Justine said.

A chill ran through Rhonda, beginning at the scar on her forehead and racing all the way down to her toes.
Cleaning up
. Was it possible that Justine knew not just about the abuse but about what finally ended it? Had throwing away Lizzy’s bloody clothes been more than just simple housekeeping?

Rhonda squeezed the chair tighter.

“Can you turn that up?” Justine said, her back still to them. “I want to hear the weather.”

Clem turned the radio up and the DJ came on to give the top of the hour news. The lead story was that Ernestine Florucci’s body had been found by some campers on the north side of the lake early that morning.

Rhonda let out a squeaky sigh, felt her fingers slip off the chair.

“I’m sorry, Ronnie,” Clem said, still holding the radio in his hands. He set it back down on the counter carefully, like it might be a bomb.

Rhonda went out to the porch, where Suzy and Kim were giggling over their cards. “You girls want to take a walk?” she asked.

Suzy nodded, said, “I know where there’s a submarine.” Rhonda’s stomach went cold as she followed the skipping girls across the yard and down the path that led to their old stage.

Rhonda hadn’t been into the woods in years. Shortly after the play, they’d all stopped using the path that connected their houses, choosing to walk back and forth the long way, down the road. Now Rhonda understood why.

The woods seemed smaller, to Rhonda, closer somehow. The trees had grown, filling in and making the clearing darker than she had remembered, even on a bright day. She looked up, trying to recall which pine it was that Tock had shot her arrow from. She thought she could pick it out, but couldn’t be sure. They all looked nearly the same.

The girls climbed into Clem’s old Impala and Rhonda followed, squeezing into the front seat beside them.

“Where are we going?” Rhonda asked. Suzy was at the wheel in her dark funeral dress, her hair held back with a ribbon.

“To see the octopus,” Suzy said, matter-of-factly.

Rhonda looked to her right. The disarranged pile of wood that had once been their stage was black and sickly green with decay and moss. The police had pulled boards aside to expose the hole beneath. Rhonda turned away, unable to make herself look down into the hole they had once all taken turns hiding in. The hole where they changed costumes and which they used to make the most dramatic entrances and exits. Rhonda remembered falling in her dreams, how she thought she might never stop. She thought of her old retainer, pulled from that hole, held in an evidence bag now, packed away beside the remnants of Daniel’s T-shirt and jeans. She scanned the ground, wondering where they’d buried the bogeyman, struggled to remember what she’d written on her
piece of paper. What
had
she been afraid of then? Peter not loving her? That she would grow old and forget things? Had she written something as simple as
spiders
? Or something far more sinister?

Under a few boards off to the side, Rhonda spotted a torn bit of cloth and recognized a piece of the painted scene from the play. Blue waves, a bit of palm tree, now blotchy with mildew. Their Neverland, was, Rhonda realized then, a lot like Ernie’s Rabbit Island.

SUZY BROUGHT THE
sub gently to rest on the ocean floor. She, Kim, and Rhonda got out and sat in the bed of pine needles, which was actually soft sand. They sipped tea and ate small cakes. Rhonda looked around at the ruined stage, at the trees that enclosed the clearing. She thought, for a moment, that she had seen the flash of Tock’s flaming arrow pass in the corner of her eye. A bird squawked, and in its squawk Rhonda heard Peter Pan’s crow.

The octopus was a fine host and said many things that sent Suzy and Kim into fits of giggles. “Silly octopus,” they said. Then, all at once, Suzy got serious.

“The octopus says you can tell us about Grandpa Daniel now,” she said.

Rhonda froze, imaginary cake in her mouth, the invisible cup of tea spilled onto her lap.

“What about him?” she asked, her voice as calm as she could make it.

“Tell us a story about him,” the little girl asked.

“I’m sure your father could tell you lots of stories,” she said to Suzy. “And your mother, Kimberly, she could tell you what you want to know.”

“But we want
your
story,” Kim whined. “You knew him too.”

Rhonda thought about it. About these little girls, who had just
watched a man they never met be buried. A man whose body the police had found bludgeoned to death in the woods. Their grandfather. Of course they were curious.

“Well, let’s see,” began Rhonda with some hesitation. “Once upon a time, your Grandpa Daniel decided that his son Peter—that’s your daddy, Suz—should be able to fly, so he made him a pair of wings…”

So Rhonda told the story, leaving out the part about Peter alone on the workshop roof, about Aggie coming at Daniel with a shovel. She found herself stretching the truth a little to say that yes, maybe Peter had flown that day, just a little bit, just enough. And, as Rhonda told the story, she thought: this is how the past gets passed down. This is how memories are made. Half-invented, embellished, given a touch of whimsy. Daniel would be a saint now that he was dead. A beautiful man who made his child wings.

RHONDA AND THE
girls got back in the sub and began moving toward the future, somewhere off at the edge of the horizon. They rose up out of the sea that was the past, out of the swell and surge of memory. Suzy was pulling at the gear shift, turning the steering wheel. Rhonda worked imaginary hand cranks and stopped occasionally to hold her two hands in front of her face, making them turn the periscope as she searched the horizon for some sign of the familiar.

“Land!” Rhonda finally shouted.

“Surface,” Suzy ordered. “We’re home.”