We didn’t talk much on the drive back to my house. McAffrey looked angry, but whether at me or himself I couldn’t tell. When we pulled up to the house there were two surprises—the drive was plowed and my car was parked in it.
“My car!” I said, surprised at how glad I was to see the seven-year-old Honda Civic. The front hood was dented, giving it a disreputable air, but it looked drivable.
“My big surprise,” he said. “I was over at the impound lot signing release forms when I got the call on the radio. I had a friend bring it over and plow the driveway so you’d have someplace to keep it . . .” His voice trailed off and he looked embarrassed.
“Do you do that for all your suspects when they’ve been proven innocent, Sergeant McAffrey?”
He smiled. “You called me Joe before.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling embarrassed myself now. “I thought you were about to fling yourself in front of that truck.”
“So it takes a life-threatening situation for me to achieve first-name status?”
“I guess that is what it took,” I admitted.
“Well, now that you’ve started there’s no going back to Sergeant McAffrey.”
“Okay . . . Joe. As long as you call me Nan.”
“Okay . . . Nan.” He held out his hand to shake mine. His grip was warm and firm. When I let go and turned to go into my empty house I could still feel the heat of it cradled in my palm, like the live ember ancient Romans carried into their homes to light their hearths on sacred days.
* * *
I needed all the warmth I could get. Joe (I said his name to myself like a teenager doodling her crush’s name on her school notebooks) had been right. The wind, which had been blowing all day, had brought in colder air with the night. I turned up the heat and closed all the windows tight and made a fire in the woodstove. I sat next to it, bundled in a SUNY Acheron sweatshirt and sweatpants, drinking hot tea. I thought of adding a shot of Glenlivet to it but then I thought of Joe’s face when he said he thought I’d seen enough and I didn’t want to prove him wrong. Maybe there was still time to change what my future looked like.
In the spirit of starting over I sorted through all the papers from the semester, burning what I didn’t need anymore—extra syllabi, campus memos and flyers—and filing students’ papers. When I came across one of Troy’s, though, I sat back in the rocking chair and read it.
It was the first draft of a story about a young man named Uli wandering around Poughkeepsie one night. Troy had taken my Margaret Atwood quote about making the risky trip to the Underworld to heart and based his story on The Odyssey, which he’d read in my Great Books class the year before. Uli was clearly supposed to be a modern Ulysses, and his travels through the streets, bars, twenty-four-hour convenience stores, derelict houses, and projects of Poughkeepsie were supposed to be his odyssey—his ten-year journey home from the wars. The spelling and grammar were abysmal, but the dialogue was great and the scenes were funny updates on the wanderings of Odysseus. Uli is detained by a witchy ex-girlfriend named Calinda Lipschitz. He and his best friend, called Jay Crew for his preppy attire, wander into a bar called Circe’s Den. The bar is shaped like a ship and adorned by a wooden figurehead of a buxom woman that the locals call the Sea Witch. There they meet three Siren-like prostitutes who lure them into an alley and steal Jay Crew’s wallet. Uli escapes, but then must navigate his way between a patrol cop’s cruiser and an angry dealer named Scully—so named for a skull tattoo on his shaved head but also an obvious nod to the monster Scylla—to whom he owes money. He descends into the “underworld” of the projects, looking for a friend to loan him the money to pay Scully back and take the bus to Ithaca where his girlfriend, Penny Lopez, a freshman at Cornell, has been posting pictures of herself at a frat party with a bunch of drunk frat boys. The story ended with Uli lost in the projects. I’d written Troy a long comment, praising his dialogue, sense of scene-building, and inventiveness, suggesting he clean up his spelling and grammar, and urging him to finish the story for his final assignment. I’d made a copy and given him back the original. At the bottom I’d written, “I want to see Uli make it home!” and added, “I’m assuming that while based on personal experience much of this is fictional. But if there’s anything you want to talk about, my door is always open.” I’d added a smiley face. It wasn’t a winky face, but it might as well have been. The story made it clear that Troy had interactions with dangerous drug dealers, but I’d pretended that the work was strictly fictional. But what was I supposed to do? Turn Troy’s story over to the counseling center?
It was one of the quandaries of teaching writing to undergraduates. I often saw things in my students’ stories that reflected troubling circumstances—drug use, depression, abusive families. If I turned every one of them in to the counseling center I’d lose the trust of my students. Over the years I’d referred three students there—one who had admitted to being depressed and wrote a story about killing himself, one who had written a story about shooting everyone he knew, and one from a girl who wrote about an abusive sexual relationship. The depressed student had dropped out, the “shooter” had laughed in my face and written on his student evaluation that “for a writer Professor Lewis has a fundamental lack of imagination and sense of humor,” and the girl in the abusive relationship had thanked me for making her face her problems.
So when I read Troy’s story about drug dealers in Poughkeepsie I thought it was likely based on some real life experience but that it was probably exaggerated. I knew he was a fan of hard-boiled crime writers like George Pelecanos and Richard Price. A lot of my white students affected black street language and clothing. When we workshopped Troy’s story, Aleesha had rolled her eyes and asked why “all you white boys try to sound black.” But she’d also admitted that Troy sounded like he knew the neighborhood. “Circe’s Den is Noah’s Ark, right? I live right around the corner.” Leia had said—
What had Leia said?
I sat, staring at the fire, trying to remember. I pictured my students sitting in a circle, Troy slumped in his chair, hood up, listening to the comments with a bored look on his face, which I could tell was as much an affectation as the gangsta language in his piece. I could tell by the jitter in his leg that he’d been nervous about being critiqued and from the way his body had slowly relaxed that he was pleased with the way the workshop was going. His peers really liked the story. Then Leia had said something that made everybody laugh. What had she said?
“I’d sure like a tour of the underworld.”
And Troy had smiled a slow, seductive smile and said, “Anytime, Leia, I’ll be your Virgil.”
I remembered at the time being proud that Troy remembered that Virgil had been Dante’s guide to the Underworld and thinking that Leia would be a good influence on Troy.
But what kind of influence had he been on her?
And what had Leia seen on her odyssey to Poughkeepsie? Something that Troy didn’t want anyone to know about? Something worth killing Leia to keep secret?
I read Troy’s story over twice, looking for some clue, while the wind wailed outside like a pack of Furies bent on vengeance. A cold draft snaked in through the curtains. I went to draw them closed and found a horrible, grimacing face staring back at me from the glass. Even when I saw that it was only a pattern etched in ice my heart still pounded. It looked like the ice hag had pressed her face against the window and left her icy impression on the glass. I thought of what Hannah had told Joe about seeing the ghost wandering the woods behind my house. The reason it had frightened me so much was that it made an awful sort of sense. The ice hag was a bereaved mother who had taken her life in her grief. Why should I survive the death of my child? What was I still doing here, the wild wind demanded of me as I climbed the stairs, which groaned under my feet as if the very house resented my presence. Why was I inside, safe and warm, while Emmy and Leia were dead and Troy was out there in the cold? Gone to ground, his father had said, like a hunted animal.
It was that last thought that haunted me through the night. No matter what Troy might have done I still hated the thought of him outside on a night like this. Whenever I drifted off to sleep I dreamed of him wandering through a driving blizzard like Kristoff and Anna in Frozen and I would startle awake, shivering in my drafty house.
In the morning I called Joe to ask if he had found Troy or heard anything. He hadn’t. I told him about Troy’s story and the locations in Poughkeepsie he mentioned. “Maybe he’s hiding down there.”
“I’ll check it out,” he said, “but don’t you get any ideas of looking for him. That’s a pretty dicey neighborhood around Noah’s—and there’s a snowstorm coming tonight.”
“I wouldn’t begin to know where to look,” I said. “I’ll leave that to you.”
When I got off the phone I realized I hadn’t asked about Ross. Was that because I didn’t want to bring up my ex-lover with Joe? Ridiculous, I told myself. As if it would matter to Joe McAffrey. I considered calling him back to ask if he’d heard anything about Ross but then realized that was even more ridiculous. I could call the hospital myself—although they might not tell me anything over the phone—
Or I could go there. Vassar Brothers was only a half-hour drive away. I had my car back. I didn’t have anything else to do and I didn’t relish the idea of lingering around the house listening to the wind shrieking and imagining the ice hag lurking around my windows.
The ice hag had done a number on my car. There was an inch of ice coating the windows and the lock was frozen. I had to pour hot water over the keyhole and the seams of the door to get into the car and then run the engine with the defrost on high and scrape the windows for twenty minutes. I considered giving up and going back inside, hunkering down by the woodstove. With a glass of Glenlivet, the ice hag whispered in my ear.
I’m laying off, I countered.
Then why haven’t you poured the rest of it down the drain? she jeered back.
I kept scraping to drown out the voice. When I was finally about to drive the car I took the turn at the bottom of Orchard too fast and skidded onto River Road. Luckily the road was empty.
There wasn’t much more traffic on Route 9. People were staying off the roads on this frigid Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s. Or maybe it was the gathering storm clouds over the Catskills that were keeping people off the roads. With little or no traffic I got to Vassar Brothers in less than half an hour. I parked in the visitors’ lot and hurried into the building. The lobby had the sad look of public places after Christmas, the artificial Christmas tree beginning to droop, the smiles of volunteers, with their holly pins and reindeer sweaters, strained. Who wanted to be in a hospital at Christmastime?
“Mr. Ballantine has been moved out of intensive care but he can only have one visitor at a time and there’s someone with him now,” a woman with short silver hair in a red sweater set and plaid pants told me.
“It’s probably a colleague of ours from work,” I said. “Couldn’t I go up and wait outside the room?”
“I suppose . . . since it’s so quiet.” She gave me directions to his room that I immediately forgot when I got off the elevator. Why were hospitals so confusing? I wondered, walking down a hall with a green stripe on the floor—presumably to guide the way—and generic photographs of cheerful landscapes and happy children. I’d gone to visit my father almost every day when he’d been in the hospital and I’d still gotten lost in the hallways. They all looked alike. And they all smelled like death.
What finally led me to Ross’s room was a familiar voice—“and you’re not to worry about the house. I went by this morning and set the taps to drip and opened the cabinets under the sinks so the pipes won’t freeze. And I called Charlie Maynard to come by and clear the ice dams in your gutters. They say the temperature will remain in the single digits through New Year’s—the river is almost entirely frozen.”
I followed this companionable chatter to a private room, where I found Dottie sitting beside Ross’s bed, her hands working busily knitting a colorful afghan square. Ross’s eyes were closed and his mouth was covered by plastic tubing. I couldn’t tell if he was conscious or not.
“Dottie?” I said softly as I came into the room.
“Nan! Look, Ross, Nan is here. I told you she’d come.”
Ross’s eyes flickered open. They were an alarming shade of red. I moved quickly to his side and took his hand. “You’re awake,” I said. “You gave me quite a scare.” I felt like I was reading from a script, a stupid smile pasted to my face. He responded with a soft moan.
“Does he have to have that thing over his mouth?” I asked Dottie.
“Until they’re sure his lungs are working all right.”
I turned back to Ross. “Do you remember what happened?” I asked.
He nodded, then grimaced at the pain the motion must have caused. “You’re tiring him,” Dottie said, tugging at my sleeve. “The doctor said he shouldn’t be stressed.”
I pulled Dottie a few feet from the bed and whispered in her ear. “I need to know if he tried to kill himself.”
“Why?” she cried. “Why can’t you leave it?” I’d never heard Dottie sound so upset.
I took her hand. “If he didn’t do it to himself then someone tried to kill him.”
“Kill Ross? Why would anyone . . .” Dottie’s eyes grew wide. “You mean if he knew who killed Leia?”
“Yes.”
“But who?”
I considered telling her what Joe suspected. She saw the doubt in my face. “I see. You still don’t trust me because it was my fault it got out about Ross and Abbie—but I had to tell Abbie that Ross was a suspect—”
“Of course you did, Dottie. It’s not that. It’s just that it’s a police investigation and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to tell.” Then I recalled Troy giving Dottie the finger and realized that if I didn’t tell her and something happened to her I would never forgive myself. “Sergeant McAffrey thinks it might have been Troy Van Donk.”
Doubt flickered across Dottie’s face, her loyalty to Troy’s father warring against Troy’s insult to her. Loyalty won out. “I don’t believe it of Troy,” she said firmly.
“Well, then I’d better ask Ross what he remembers because Sergeant McAffrey is out looking for Troy right now.”
We went back to Ross’s bed. His eyes were closed. I was afraid he’d drifted off while Dottie and I conferred, but his eyes struggled open when I took his hand.
“Ross, I need to know what happened to you. Can you answer some questions?”
Instead of nodding he lifted his other hand, pinched his thumb to his forefinger, and waved it in the air. It took me a second to realize he was miming the motion of writing. I dug in my bag for a piece of paper, but Dottie had already pulled out a small memo pad with a quilt design on the cover. She braced the pad up under Ross’s hand and gave him a pen. Ross’s face tensed with concentration as he moved the pen across the page. I felt a pang recalling the ease with which he’d signed his name at bookstore signings, but then, as he wrote, I saw his face relax. This was what Ross loved—writing, telling a story.
He might have been penning his memoirs from the exhaustion on his face when he at last dropped the pen and pushed the pad away. I took the pad from Dottie with a shaking hand. Would he confess that guilt over his affair with Leia had driven him to try suicide? Would he name Troy as his attacker? I looked down at the page. For a moment I thought I was so nervous that I’d lost the ability to read. But then I heard Dottie gasp.
“It doesn’t make any sense at all,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “It’s all gibberish!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It took me ten minutes of walking around in a blur to find my car in the parking lot. That Ross, a brilliant and eloquent literary man, had been reduced to writing in gibberish struck me cold with horror. It had been one of my worst nightmares—before I learned what nightmares really were—that something would happen to my hands and I wou
ld be unable to use a pen or type. But this—writing gibberish—was worse. And it wasn’t just the writing. When I asked him point-blank if it had been Troy who had led him to the garage he stared at me with vacant eyes. Would he ever regain his faculties? What would become of him if he didn’t? I couldn’t imagine Ross without the ability to write.
By the time I found the car I was weeping loudly and openly. I could barely see to navigate my way out of the lot and onto the streets of Poughkeepsie where the falling snow limited my vision even further. I headed north toward Route 9 but after a few blocks realized I must have missed the entrance. I was in a neighborhood of modest two-story houses that had once been beautiful Victorians but now featured discolored aluminum siding and sagging porches. I could make out Route 9 below me to the left and beyond that the frozen river. I kept going, assuming that I’d eventually come to an entrance. I passed an apartment complex named for Harriet Tubman and then a desolate-looking park. I crossed an arterial thoroughfare that had been built in the ’70s and, according to an urban planning lecture I’d once attended, gutted downtown Poughkeepsie, hastening the decline of the city from the days when it was a thriving ferry and train destination. Despite its neighborhoods of once beautiful Victorian houses, a major train station, and nearby colleges (Vassar was west of the city, and Marist College and the Culinary Institute of America just north of it), the city had one of the highest crime and welfare rates in the state. It was no place to get lost in—but that’s what I was. Every time I tried to head toward the river I was turned back by a one-way street. I passed an abandoned establishment called Spanky’s and a church building with crackled paint that reminded me of the rectory in The Exorcist. I saw the train station and headed there, figuring I could ask someone how to get back to 9, but then an outlandish figure loomed up ahead out of the snow—a bare-breasted woman with hair blown back and skirts flapping in the wind. I skidded to a stop and stared at her. It was a ship’s figurehead, carved out of wood and painted in bright colors. She was mounted to the brick façade of a river-facing building as if to a ship’s prow, breasting the snow as she once might have parted the waves. She was a strange sight in these derelict streets, but the reason I stopped was that there was something familiar about her, something I should remember . . .