And the students, of course.
There was Brent Stone, a nice boy from Muleshoe who wanted to be a gym teacher, and Mary Bright, whose name, unfortunately, did not in any way describe her. These could have been any of Mira’s students, in other classes, at other places, and she supposed she could have been anyone to them in return. They looked at her and thought, she supposed, Aunt Molly, Ms. Emerson, my mom.
Types. Ideals. Reproductions. Representations. Nearly exact copies of one another.
Perry Edwards, of course, was everywhere, but Mira was used to that after all these years. Really, she took comfort in it now when Perry passed her on the highway in his pickup, or said, “Hello, ma’am,” to her from behind the counter at the grocery store. By now, Perry Edwards would have been the age she’d been herself when she met him—but, instead, he was always the age he’d been the night she said good-bye to him in the snowstorm in Jeff Blackhawk’s car.
Sometimes she saw him at a movie, maybe a row or two ahead of her, his arm around the shoulder of some girl who looked like Nicole Werner or Denise Graham, or any of those girls, his hand in the popcorn bag between them. She tried never to think of him laid out at Dientz’s funeral parlor. The nice suit. The lovely job Ted Dientz would have done to make him look as if he hadn’t been shot a few days earlier by a panicked sorority sister with a gun (given to her by a father who firmly believed every pretty girl on an American college campus needed to have one), who had been up late that night reading a book about Ted Bundy when she heard footsteps in the hallway and came out of her room in the dark to find a stranger on the stairwell of the Omega Theta Tau house.
Mira would have gone to the funeral, to see Perry for herself, but Ted had told her that the family had politely requested that she not come—and she’d also received a letter from the university lawyers saying she was not to speak to the media, the students, or the families of the students about anything that had happened. And she was never to write about it.
Mira’s own lawyer had said, “No one has a right to establish these restrictions. Last time I checked, this was a pretty free country. If you want to write a book about it, write the book and we’ll stick it to them then.”
But as it turned out, Mira had no interest in writing about death, ever again.
Over the years, until he died one Christmas morning, Mira had kept in close touch with Ted Dientz. He’d become obsessed, as she’d known he would. (She’d thought they were alike that way, but as it turned out he was much more passionate than Mira had ever been.)
The DNA test had proved (“Incontrovertibly!” he’d shouted over the phone) that the body he’d buried in Nicole Werner’s coffin, the one from which he’d taken the sample for his bloodstain card, was in no way related to anyone whose hair strands had been found in the brush Perry Edwards had taken from the Werners’ house.
“Unless Nicole Werner was adopted, or that hairbrush was used by someone other than Werner women, there is no way the girl I buried in that coffin was a daughter or a sibling of any female in that family.”
By then, Mira didn’t care about Nicole—where she might have been, who might have been buried under her headstone instead of her. Perry was dead, her husband had left her, and she’d lost her job in an explosion of accusations and suspicion and hatred.
Still, she told Ted to call her after the exhumation. There would be, she knew, no talking him out of this. He was determined to dig her up. When Nicole’s parents couldn’t be located, permission had to be granted by Etta Werner, Nicole’s grandmother, to exhume the grave. (Etta was a feisty old woman who’d attended nearly every funeral in Bad Axe for the past eighty years, and the idea of digging up a grave didn’t seem to bother her at all. She never even asked for an explanation.) And, afterward, when Ted called Mira with the news, she had to sit down to keep herself from passing out when he told her that there was no one, nothing, in that coffin at all.
“Empty,” he’d said, sounding empty himself. “And no one anywhere to explain that fact to me, or with the vaguest interest, it seems, in investigating it—except for me.”
And although Ted Dientz devoted all the last years of his life to solving that mystery, he never managed to uncover the truth about anything. He closed down his funeral home, wrote letters to newspapers, called authorities and experts everywhere in the world. He became possessed by the empty grave, by Nicole Werner’s DNA, by other missing sorority girls all over the state. And then all over the country.
It was amazing how many there were!
They could have formed their own private sorority house somewhere: some large old mansion hidden behind a shadowy hedge, where they built floats out of tissue paper flowers and styled one another’s hair and sang songs and took secret oaths for all of eternity.
Ted believed that someone from the university, or from the sorority, or both, had been trying to hide a hazing death and had come in the night and spirited away the remains of the dead girl so that her identity could never be determined. They were professionals. They’d done it with surgical precision. The grass over “Nicole’s” grave, the crucifix, the stuffed animals—all appeared to the naked eye never to have been disturbed.
But, later, when none of the hundreds of relatives of the Werners’ in Bad Axe were able, or willing, to reveal the whereabouts of Nicole’s parents so that they might be told the news that their daughter’s grave was empty, Ted came to suspect not only Nicole’s parents but the entire Werner clan. (Even Etta: Hadn’t there been something almost gleeful in the way she’d given her permission to exhume her granddaughter’s corpse?)
He thought most of them knew exactly where Nicole was, and that she hadn’t been the girl in that grave.
But there were other possibilities Ted Dientz was willing to consider, especially as the years passed. He had worked with the dead long enough, he told Mira, to know that strange things happened. This world was more than a material thing. Was it impossible that he had buried Nicole Werner on her funeral day, and that, somehow, she had escaped from her grave?
What could Mira say?
Ted Dientz died without answers, and Mira had no idea what his wife and children might have done with the bloodstain cards he’d kept all those years in the basement. All those souls he’d wanted to bring back, that army of his dead he’d been waiting to raise—he was with them now, she supposed. There were so few answers in this life, and what few there were often scattered with winds. And only now and then little bits of belated justice.
It took a decade, but eventually some sharp sophomore who wrote for the university newspaper dug up the story of Denise Graham, of Nicole Werner. The student managed to pass herself off as an Omega Theta Tau pledge for six months, and then to expose the rituals for what they were.
The sorority sisters were not, as it happened, drinking tequila and hyperventilating and passing out before their raisings in the coffin. They were being injected by an EMT from the local ambulance service with Scopolamine, the zombie drug.
At the right dosage, the sophomore reported, as Mira already knew, the drug causes you to sleep and then awake feeling born again. At higher dosages, it makes it impossible to form memories of anything that has happened in the hours before and after the injection. At the wrong dosage, it kills you.
Mira followed the story on the Internet from Texas. She would have been lying if she hadn’t admitted that she wanted to see some administrators fired, but they never were. She’d hoped at least that the Omega Theta Tau chapter would be shut down. But it wasn’t—receiving, instead, a hefty fine, and its members, counseling.
Mira hoped they might be able to prove that Craig Clements-Rabbitt had been injected, himself, with Scopolamine, and that’s why he remembered nothing of the accident. She was herself convinced that the car he’d been driving with Nicole in it had been chased off the road by someone trying to cover up for the sorority, someone who knew that Nicole and Craig had the dead, or dying, Denise Graham in the backseat. Someone who knew that they we
re trying to get her to a hospital and who was trying to keep them from getting her there.
Craig and Nicole were run off the road, and the car was burned later by those trying to cover up the hazing, the overdose.
Nicole’s death was faked. Denise had been her stand-in. Being a good sorority girl, Nicole went along with it.
Craig Clements-Rabbitt was blamed, and he’d taken the blame. He’d been drugged, and he’d been in love, which is its own zombie drug, especially when mixed with guilt and grief.
You could still Google Nicole Werner, and still find bloggers who claimed to see her ghost at Godwin Hall.
And there was evidence to be found on the Internet, too, that students had never managed to squelch the fascination with Alice Meyers, either. Every year, there were the cutters. Every year there were fewer and fewer applicants to Godwin Honors College—a fact that would have been officially blamed on the laziness of today’s students, Mira knew, but which she suspected was because parents didn’t want their kids, especially their daughters, living in Godwin Hall.
But there was always one such hall on every campus, wasn’t there? It used to be Fairwell Hall they shunned, as Mira recalled.
Here at South Plains College there was an Alice Meyers, too—a girl who haunted the auditorium where, it was said, she’d hanged herself from the rafters.
And there was also a Nicole Werner:
Here her name was Sara Bain. One day she’d been holding on to her boyfriend’s back on his motorcycle, and they’d hit—who knows? A squirrel? A rabbit? A rock in the road? The details didn’t matter. Sara Bain was thrown from the back of the motorcycle. She landed in the median, where her boyfriend, dazed and bloody, had rushed to her side.
A small mound of stones ringed a cherry tree in the South Plains College courtyard. Every spring, a group of girls was rumored to huddle around the cherry tree on the night of a full moon to cut themselves, and sing songs, read their poetry aloud. In the morning some horrified faculty member would find blood splashed on the stones. There would be talk of chopping down the tree, of carting away the stones, but no one ever did.
109
Karess got lost somewhere south of Bad Axe, and by the time she found her way off the freeway she was exasperated and wondering why the hell she’d thought this was a good idea, and what it was she’d been hoping to find or lose by coming back to this godforsaken state after all these years away in search of a boy she’d barely known.
But somewhere inside herself she also knew, even as she threw her ruined map (coffee spilled on it, and wrinkled to shit) behind her into the backseat of her rental car, why:
Somewhere inside her Perry Edwards was still alive.
Of course, she didn’t think about him every day. That would have been crazy. It had been over a decade. A decade and a half. She’d dropped out the semester he got killed and finally finished up her degree at three different schools on the West Coast. She’d been married, divorced, and she liked her job. She was completely sane. She didn’t drink.
But she often found herself thinking, He was the one.
“Of course the one that gets away is always the one,” her friends would say.
But Perry Edwards hadn’t gotten away.
He was everywhere after he died. He was in every guy who turned a corner, or drove by, or asked her to dance, or bought her a drink in a bar.
After he died, Perry Edwards was the air. He was everywhere.
“Maybe you should visit his grave,” her therapist had said. “It’ll give you a sense of closure.”
Okay, Karess had thought. I can do that. Okay.
So here she was, pulling off the freeway, driving through the kind of town she didn’t think existed anymore. A church on every corner. Little houses with little porches. There was an actual dog tied to an actual tree in a front yard. Jesus, Toto, I don’t think we’re in LA anymore.
It took two stops at two gas stations to get directions to the cemetery, and then she started to wonder how she’d ever thought she’d find his grave: there were four times as many people buried here than there could possibly be alive in this fucking town.
She parked. She got out.
It was a typical late September day. Karess remembered, vaguely, these kinds of September days from her freshman year in college in this state. The raggedy leaves. The spooky branches of the trees. The sense of things fading and dying, but springing up crazily one last time before they did—blazing, writhing. Look at me!
Shit.
There were rows and rows and rows of Shepards. That must have been one big miserable family, stuck in Bad Axe for generations. And a little circle of Rushes. Mother, Father, Beloved Son. Karess wandered through the old part of the cemetery to the new part. He hadn’t been gone that long, after all. Some Owenses. Some Taylors. A crowd of German names. And then she decided maybe she should follow her gut. She’d close her eyes. She’d turn around. She’d let her instincts guide her.
It didn’t work.
She found herself under a tree. Like all the others, it was losing its leaves. They were falling all around her. Orange and red. She could smell the earth. The grass. That dampness. Moldy, like old clothes. Loamy. Cool.
She would, she decided, sit down. She would close her eyes for a little while and rest, and when she felt more energetic, she would go back to the entrance—those wrought-iron gates she’d passed through—and start over, and she would kneel down if she had to and brush the leaves off every fucking name, look at every single grave, even if it took her all day.
Even if it took her days.
110
There was a sad landmark on every block of that town:
The bench they’d sat on, watching the other students walk by—backpacks, short skirts, iPods. The tree they’d stood under in a downpour, laughing, kissing, chewing cinnamon gum. There was the bookstore where he’d bought the collection of poems by Pablo Neruda for her, and the awful college sports bar where they’d first held hands. It was called something else now, but from outside it looked the same. There were the pretend Greek columns that pretended to hold up the roof of the Llewellyn Roper Library, and Grimoire Gifts, where he’d bought the amber ring for her—set in silver, a globe of ancient sap with a little prehistoric fruit fly trapped in it forever.
And the Starbucks where they went to study night after night and never opened a book.
Craig’s father, beside him, said, “Son, slow down,” and Craig said, “Sorry, Dad.” His father had been blind for years now, and one of his worst fears was getting into an accident he couldn’t see coming.
Craig just wished his father could see it with him. The beauty of it was the strangeness, the familiarity. The girls in their short skirts. The guys with their weird hair.
“You won’t recognize the place,” Debbie had said. She still lived there, worked at the university hospital. She’d become a doctor, and over the years had remained Craig’s best cyber-friend. They emailed every week, although they’d seen each other only a handful of times in the last decade, when they’d met up in various places they happened to be flying through. Her husband was a doctor, too. Back in New Hampshire, Craig had a wife and two kids and a little house that backed up to a little mountain. He’d built his father a small, solid cabin on the property.
“Just stay away, Craig. I mean, I’d love to see you. But you have no idea. It’ll freak you out—not because you’ll remember it, but because you won’t.”
Craig had a family now. He’d written a book, published it. He’d traveled the world promoting the book, and had never come back here.
Now he was back.
And Debbie had been wrong.
He remembered it all. Not a thing had changed. He could have been blind like his father, or closed his eyes, and found his way to Godwin Honors Hall, or to the apartment he’d shared with Perry.
He’d open the door, and there Perry would be, book open on the table beside a sandwich. Perry wouldn’t bother to look up. “Hey, man,” he
’d say. And Craig, older and astonished, would just stand in the doorway and stare, grateful and terrified at the same time to find Perry still there, still alive.
He drove more slowly now, rubbed his eyes, so he could look around. He was looking for Perry, Craig realized, but on every corner, it seemed, a girl was crossing the street with her arm hooked into a boy’s, and the sidewalks were shining and the sky was the same pale nothingness it had always been that time of year, and the old man who had become his father was coughing into a Kleenex, and Craig, forgetting that his father couldn’t see, said, “Look,” as yet another beauty crossed in front of their car, listening to something on her earphones, mouthing the words to herself.
The motor of the car hummed around them, and Craig’s father continued to cough—and there she was, that beauty, flipping her hair over her shoulder, glancing at Craig, making eye contact briefly, and then looking away.
Acknowledgments
For their brilliant editing advice and tireless support, I thank Lisa Bankoff and Katherine Nintzel and Bill Abernethy with all my heart.
For being my best friend in this world or any other, Antonya Nelson.
For the blessing of Lucy Abernethy, my beautiful, smart, strong stepdaughter.
For support above and beyond and over the years: Carrie Wilson, Eileen Pollack, Jill Elder, Nancy Gargano, Holly Abernethy, Andrea Beauchamp, Linda Gregerson, Pastor Doris Sparks, Laura Thomas, Debra Spark, Tony Hoagland, and Keith Taylor.
For trade secrets, fun talks, and being the best student ever, Sara Johnson-Cardona.
Thank you to the University of Michigan’s English Department and Residential College and my colleagues and students for generous support and inspiration of all sorts.
And for the perfect plot advice at the crucial moment, thanks to my extraordinary son and fellow writer, Jack Abernethy.