The Thayer house wasn’t much, but it made the effort. It was a small frame place with a little porch. It needed a coat of paint, all right, but there were pretty gingham curtains in the windows, and the little lawn that had been cleared out of the surrounding forest was cropped and tended.
I first saw it from about two hundred yards away as I crested a winding hill above it. Mrs. Thayer had described it to me over the phone, and I knew it was the right place. The sight of it made my stomach turn over. I felt a cold sweat break out behind my ears. I thought about Michelle.
A straight-A student. Like my daughter was. Fifteen years old. Olivia was too. She’d hanged herself in her backyard woods. That was close enough. Too close. I looked at the Thayer house and my lips felt dry. I glanced to the side, toward the autumn trees falling away below me.
And I saw Death in the woods.
There was some kind of a wall out there. A stone wall, the kind you see in second-growth forests that were farmlands in the old days. For one instant I could have sworn I saw him standing just behind it: a macabre figure, half blending into the gray background, half standing out against the yellow leaves. A man—or something like a man—dressed all in black. But where his head should have been there was nothing but a skull, an eyeless skull with the empty sockets staring straight at me.
I took a sharp jolt as the front right tire of the Artful Dodge grabbed hold of the road’s shoulder. I wrestled with the wheel, fighting to bring the car back onto the pavement. The tire fought back for a few feet, then surrendered. I hit the brake. The car eased to a stop.
I got out. I looked over the Dodge’s roof. Slowly, I scanned the forest before me. My eyes flicked from tree to tree. He was gone.
Now, finally, Lansing’s words returned to me. I heard her voice again: Don’t push yourself too far, John. You’ve got a right to be human.
And I heard that other voice too. That weird, high, light, almost inhuman voice that had come to me out of the fog as if out of my own nightmares.
There’s death in the woods, Mr. Wells. Death in the woods.
14 “You look a little pale, Mr. Wells. Are you all right?”
Janet Thayer stood in the foyer. She was still holding the screen door in her hand. I’d just come in off the porch. I had my hands in my pockets and was glancing around casually, pretending I was fine.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said quickly. I was annoyed with myself. Don’t push yourself too far. Pops. “I just … I just ran my car off the road, shook myself up, that’s all.”
“Oh. Can I get you a glass of water?”
“Thanks.”
She went before me into the kitchen. It was a room run ragged, the yellow floor tiling brown and lumpy, the yellow walls peeling and stained. She ran the faucet into a rusty sink.
“I’m a nurse,” she said. “My friends tell me I’m always on about somebody looking too this or too that. I started on you fast. You hardly had a chance to say hello.”
She handed me a glass of water.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hi.”
She was short and substantial. Not fat, just sturdy. Her hair was dyed blond. It was frizzy and unkempt. Her face was round and well worn, but I pegged her at under forty. Just worn is all. She was dressed in a rumpled pink blouse and jeans. At first glance she didn’t look like a woman in mourning. But that was only at first glance. Then I looked in her eyes—they were pale green eyes with flecks of gold in them. They were hard, steely eyes that had seen a lot of the bad old things in a bad old world. They’d cried plenty, all right, but they weren’t about to do it in front of me.
She had a pack of cigarettes in a teddy bear cookie jar on the counter. She took one and offered one to me. She leaned against the counter’s edge while I lit us up.
“Well,” she said. “You look like a reporter.”
“It’s the overcoat.”
She snorted smoke out through her nose. “This the assignment of your choice?”
“Not exactly.”
She shrugged. “Some of them like it. I watch them on the television. They go out and grab some mother whose three little kids just burned up in a fire, or they interview some cop’s wife after he’s just been blown away. I can see it: it’s how they get their kicks.”
“Not me. I drink.”
“So do I. Now.”
She kept her eyes on me. She had something to say, but she wasn’t sure yet if I was the one she wanted to say it to. All I knew was: she was not the sort of woman to try to fool. I lifted my cigarette, ran my thumb thoughtfully over my lip.
“I used to like it well enough, I guess,” I said. “I used to get a charge out of being on the scene of a fire when the women jumped with their babies in their arms … or watching the cops tell jokes and smoke cigarettes over the body of a murder victim until the M.E. showed. I used to like to tell people I’d seen those things. I talked out of the side of my mouth when I told them. I thought it was just the thing.”
“So now you cover church socials.”
“Mostly I cover the courts. Mostly nowadays I like to watch bad guys get put away. I like to wave at them as they go.”
She smiled. Smoke seeped out from between her teeth. She tossed her cigarette back into the full dishpan. The butt hissed and died. She pushed off the counter.
“Follow me,” she said.
I tossed my cigarette after hers.
We went back through the foyer. Through a small living room with a picture window on the road. I got a glimpse of old stuffed chairs under standing lamps. I got a sense of disorder. Then we were moving up the stairs. They groaned beneath my feet as we rose.
We went down a gray and dusty hall. We passed her bedroom first. I saw a double bed, a lot of old lace, stained and ragged at the edge. There was a photograph on the bed table. I saw it briefly as we passed by. Michelle had had a pretty smile.
There was a door to the right—the bathroom—and one more door on the left down the hall. That door was closed. Janet Thayer took a key from the pocket of her jeans and stuck it in the old-fashioned keyhole under the knob.
“I keep it locked,” she said. “I don’t know why.” She looked up at me. “To keep it all in there, I guess.”
I nodded.
The door opened. She led the way inside.
Everything was different here. There was no dust, no stains, no wear. It was a clean, pink room with a large canopied bed in the middle of it. There was a pink quilt on the bed, and large lacy bolsters. The walls were spotless. They were yellow. The paint was fairly new. There were stuffed animals here and there, and school books and a vanity table with a mirror. There were snapshots tucked up under the mirror. I walked over and took a look.
Michelle had had a tender face, delicate and sweet. She was short like her mother, but her figure was slender and gently curved. I saw her in one photo, standing in a party dress, looking uncomfortable with her hands folded before her. She had shiny brown hair down to her shoulders. She had a round dimpled face with small features. She was looking into the camera with a gaze that seemed at once shy and direct. I was held for a long moment by the expression in her eyes, an expression full of both pity and laughter. It was a woman’s gaze in a girl’s face.
I turned away.
“She was lovely,” Janet Thayer said.
“Yes.”
“But I guess I would think that.”
“No, it’s true.”
Now, for just a moment, I saw the look in her eyes that I was expecting: the agony I’d seen in the Scofields’ eyes, and the Summerses’. But it was deep down under the hard green, and it appeared only for an instant, and sank away again.
“She could draw.” She gestured to a bureau on the opposite wall. There was an artist’s pad on top of it. I went to it, opened it. “She used to draw all kinds of funny pictures of me. Dress me up in different costumes, give me a moustache. It gave her a real kick.”
I leafed through the pad. The light green pages wafted down in fr
ont of me. There were sketches of Mrs. Thayer. Of the woods. Of dogs and cats and flowers. There were sketches of some of the kids from the high school.
I stopped. I had come to a self-portrait. Michelle Thayer in Michelle Thayer’s hand. It was a picture of a girl on the very cusp of womanhood. A girl full of the energy of that moment. Smiling brightly—beaming even—her cheeks high, her eyes bright.
I glanced up at Mrs. Thayer. Suddenly, what I saw in her eyes was neither toughness nor pain. It was something hot and ferocious. Something almost mad. She was nodding at me. She kept nodding and nodding. Her mouth was taut and grim and damp at the corner. This—this self-portrait—was what she had wanted me to see.
“Look at it, Mr. Wells,” she said. It came in a whisper. The kind of whisper you hear in sanitorium halls. “Look at it. She drew that a week before she died. Look at it good.”
Slowly, I turned back to the picture. But all I could see now was the color of the paper: that light green on the roughly textured page. The same color, the same texture, as the corner of paper I had found under the earth in the limestone cave.
“That’s not the face of a girl who killed herself,” Janet Thayer said.
Again I looked up at her.
“My daughter was murdered,” she said.
15 It was Friday night. It was late. I was back in the city room of the Star. An eerily quiet place these days. Once, not too long ago, it was filled with the clatter of wire machines and the bells of typewriters and the shouts of reporters from one desk to another. There were copyboys carrying long sheets of the wire news and laying them beside each writer, murmuring “urgent” or “bulletin” or nothing at all as they went past. There was the sound of editors cursing.
All that was gone. You could see the top of your neighbor’s head over the little walls of the cubbyholes, but no one looked up much. The keys of the computer terminals hardly made any sound at all. The wire machines were built right into the things. You could press a button and call the local wire up onto your monitor, or the A wire or the sports or the weather or business. When something important happened, a polite sort of boop went off, and up in the right-hand corner of your screen, above the copy, a word or two appeared: Urgent, Bulletin, Late Stocks, whatever. Then you pressed the HOT button and the story came up in front of you. All very neat, all very clean. When you finished your story, the editor could call it up on his screen and mangle it without saying a word. And if you wanted to express your opinion, you didn’t even have to shout anymore. You could just send a message from one keyboard to another. Then the editor got the “message” signal on his screen and he pressed a button and the words, “[From Wells] You suck, you illiterate scum!” appeared right before him. Or something very much like. There was no paper, no mess, no muss, no fuss. Even the printers were covered with glass to muffle the noise from them.
So I was tucked neatly into my cubbyhole, hunched before my Olympia, hacking away under the fluorescent lights. An island of sound in the surrounding silence. I was finishing my story on Michelle Thayer.
When it was done, I gathered the pages together. I sat back in my chair and lit up a cigarette. I read the first ’graph over through the smoke.
Lansing came in. I saw her across the top of the page. She strode from the front doors to the city desk. She was wearing a long orange coat. It was open, and the two halves of it fluttered out as she walked. She had a camera strapped around her neck. Her purse was in her hand.
It made me smile to see her like that. It made me think of the first time we’d met, about a year, a year and a half before. She was a stringer then. A bona fide journalism-school graduate, trying to bust on to the staff. She kept a police radio in her car, and every time some store clerk got blown away somewhere, she’d rush over to the scene and try to file it with us.
Then one fine summer’s day a young man who worked in his parents’ upper-east-side funeral home went berserk with a fire axe. Killed his father, his mother, and his sister, then went to work on the corpses being readied for burial. This amused one of my editors, so a photographer named Rich Gruber and I ambled over there. We arrived before the cops had finished cleaning up the place. A detective friend of mine pointed me to a rear entrance and told me to stay out of sight.
Gruber and I snuck inside for some exclusive pictures. We were in a long corridor. Red carpet on the floor, yellow lamps on the ceiling. Eerie. It led down to the room where the cops were trying to figure out which body part went with which. We started toward the room.
We’d taken about three steps when the door behind us cracked open again. In walked this long blonde with two cameras hanging around her neck.
Gruber and I were shaken. We weren’t supposed to be in there and we knew it.
The blonde looked us over. She said, “All right, you two. Get the hell out of here. The police can take their own goddamned pictures.”
Gruber started for the door.
“And you,” she barked at me.
I started to follow Gruber. Then I got a closer look at her eyes. Uncertain eyes. I stopped. I was standing right in front of her. “Nah,” I said. “Almost, sister. But not quite.”
Gruber’s mouth fell open. “What do you mean? You mean she’s one of us?” He was beside himself. “Oh baby. Oh man. Let’s kick her the hell out of here, pal. Even the cops’ll back us.”
“I’ve got as much right to be here as you do,” she said.
“Yeah. None.”
“All right, lady.” I poked my finger at her. “Who’re you with?”
“The Star.” She faltered a little. “Freelance, anyway.”
I laughed. “Oh yeah. You’re the one with the radio. And the dead store clerks. What’s-her-name. Lansing.”
“That’s right. And take your goddamned finger out of my face. Who the hell do you think you are?”
I told her.
She was pretty even when she went pale. “Damn it,” she said.
I thought it over for a minute. I’d seen her stuff. It wasn’t bad. I said, “Come on, Richie. I’ll buy you breakfast.”
Gruber nearly shouted, which would have had the real cops down on us for certain. “Are you joking, man? This is the centerfold tomorrow.”
As it turned out, he was right. It was the centerfold. And a month later Lansing was on staff.
Now she was bent over talking to Mark Parrish, the night city man. I watched her. Telling him what she had, pushing for her angle. He nodded. When she straightened, she caught me looking at her. She smiled and came over.
“You’re back.” She took her coat off, dumped it on a chair. She hiked herself up to sit on my desk. She was wearing a skirt tonight. She swung her legs in front of me. I watched her legs.
“Where you been?” I asked her.
“Gracie. The mayor’s limo hit a cab.”
“Oh jeeze. Is he hurt?”
“Don’t be silly. Only a silver bullet can stop him.”
“I’ll pass that information on to the right people.”
She nodded at my story. “Is that the end of it?”
I tossed the pages onto the Olympia. “Of the profiles, anyway. I’ll do the summary next week for Sunday.” I reached for the ashtray, jabbed out the ’rette. I rubbed my eyes with both hands. I was beat.
“Well?” said Lansing. “Is it good?”
“Read it.”
She gave the story a speculative glance. Then she gave one to me. “Tell it,” she said.
I met her gaze for gaze. “Give it a rest, kid.”
“Go on. Live a little. Tell it, Wells.”
I sighed. I sat silent a while. The effort to tell it seemed like a big one. Finally I said: “All right. Michelle Thayer. She was sweet. She was shy. Gentle. Good-looking. She liked baby-sitting and going out for sodas with her friends.”
“Boys?”
“So-so. A little bit slow with boys, I guess.” I was thinking it over now. Staring across the room where the night people drifted ghostly through the cubicle maze. T
he office, lit by the fluorescents, seemed oddly bright, oddly quiet. You could sense the city darkness hovering at the windows. “Her mother—Janet—married an Army guy,” I said. “He dumped her about two months later. About seven months later Michelle was born. Gave Mrs. Thayer a sort of jaded view of the male sex in general.”
“So she treated her daughter to a lot of lectures about the dangers of men,” Lansing said.
“That’s it.”
“Not so good.”
“I guess.” I pulled another cigarette from the pack. Toyed with it, unlit, between my fingers. “All in all, I got the feeling Mrs. Thayer kept a tight rein on the girl. She told me Michelle didn’t seem to mind it. …”
“You interview Michelle’s friends?”
“Friends. Teachers. The cops. She had a lot of friends. She was the kind of girl the other kids went to for advice. Good listener. Slow to judge. Never told anyone her own problems. Some of her friends said her mother used to confide in her, kind of like their roles were reversed.” I glanced up at Lansing. She was watching me closely. Her expression was serious, intent. “The psychologists tell me you have to look for that with teen suicides. The kid who has to play parent. Has to be perfect. Can’t ever complain.”
“Like Richard Corey in the poem,” Lansing said. “Everyone admires him, looks up to him. One day, he goes off and blows his brains out.”
“Yeah. Well. Yes and no. There were clues in her case. I guess there are always clues.” I closed my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingers. “God, I’m beat. I don’t know why I’m so beat. Long day I guess.”
Lansing studied me. Said nothing.
I went on. “Her friends said she’d started to get secretive. Stopped going out for sodas. Started to disappear after school.”
“She wasn’t going home?”
I shook my head. “She told her mother she was working on a special project with her art teacher. She wasn’t. Mrs. Thayer still won’t believe she was lying. Says there’s some mix-up …”