She spoke. The words came to him, a faint, dry rustle on the wind that lifted and turned the leaves scattered on the greenhouse floor.
“What am I?” she asked. “What happened to me?”
The terror left Trenton at once, replaced by a sadness so cutting and deep he felt like he wanted to cry. It was worse than anything he’d felt in years—worse, so much worse, than the lack of happiness he was used to, a hollow negative space of no feelings at all. This was a dark, black pit of sadness, like staring into a well and seeing a child trapped at its bottom. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that she was scared.
Almost without realizing it, he sat up and extended a hand to her, the way he would have done with a stray animal.
There was a loud crack, then the sound of splintering glass. Trenton ducked, cursing. His first thought was that another lightbulb had exploded, but then he remembered there were no lightbulbs in the greenhouse.
“Shit!” Minna’s voice, muffled through the thick glass walls, came to him; then she was shoving into the greenhouse from the garden, using her shoulder. That door had obviously remained unused for years and was practically rusted shut.
“What the hell?” Trenton was shaking, furious. The girl—the ghost, he thought, and then knew that it was true—was gone. Where she had been was nothing more than a narrow rectangle of light, and dust mites revolving slowly. He felt an unaccountable sense of loss.
“Oh.” Minna had finally managed to get the door open and entered, red-faced, pushing her hat back from her forehead. “Hey. I didn’t get you, did I? That fucking thing fires to the left.”
“Get me?” Only then did Trenton understand what the cracking noise had been, just as he noticed a bullet wedged into the wooden shelf two inches from his left knee. Distantly, he heard his mom calling for them, her voice high-pitched, hysterical.
He was so angry he could hardly speak. “What the hell, Minna?” He was screaming; even he was surprised to hear it. “What the fuck were you thinking? You could have killed me.”
“I said I was sorry,” Minna said, even though she hadn’t. She plunked down a pistol; Trenton recognized it as the one from his father’s desk, and he was even angrier that she had figured out how to load it. “It wasn’t my fault, anyway. I’m telling you, that thing—”
“Pulls to the left. Yeah. You said.” Trenton’s head was pounding. He hadn’t imagined it. He knew he hadn’t. Minna said someone had been murdered in the house. Had he really just seen her?
“I was trying to get that goddamn coyote.” Minna was still wearing the thermal shirt she liked to sleep in.
“What?” When Trenton tried to stand, he realized how stoned he was. He got a rush of black to his head.
Minna wasn’t looking at him, thank God. “It’s the size of a frigging pony. It was sniffing around the house this morning. I was worried Amy would try and pet the damn thing.”
Caroline burst through the door that connected the greenhouse to the pantry, wearing nothing but a thin bathrobe, open, over her nightgown. For one horrifying second, Trenton had a perfect view of his mom’s breasts, each shaped like the flap on an envelope, swinging loosely beneath the thin silk. He looked away quickly. “What happened? I thought I heard a shot.”
“There was a coyote,” Minna started to explain, but Caroline cut her off.
“A coyote? What about the police? Did you call them?”
Trenton looked up sharply. “The what?”
Minna stared. “What are you talking about?”
Caroline had obviously just gotten out of bed. The sheets had left faint creases, small webs, across her chest and cheek. “The police,” she said. “There’s a squad car coming up the drive.”
CAROLINE
“I don’t want them in the house,” Caroline said. “Don’t let them come into the house.” She knew she sounded hysterical but couldn’t help it.
She felt a panic attack coming on. That happened to her sometimes. Her mouth would go dry and she couldn’t breathe and her heart would beat like a dry moth in her throat, and she would know, absolutely know, that she was dying.
There had been streaks of blood in the toilet this morning—her lungs, maybe, or her liver. Ever since the doctor had lectured her about the possibility of cirrhosis, she had imagined her liver like a dying fish, gasping in the middle of a toxic oil spill.
She needed a drink. But she couldn’t drink with the police in the house. She still remembered the cop who had arrested her after she’d rear-ended that stupid woman, the way he’d hauled her roughly to the car, not caring that she was sick, not caring that Trenton was in the backseat. And the cop who’d called to tell her about Trenton’s accident—a woman, that time. He might not make it, she’d said casually, like a grocery store clerk explaining that a coupon was no longer valid.
Minna stared. “Why not?”
“I just don’t. Make them go away.” She heard the sound of car doors closing, and voices, muffled, from outside. “They have no right. We didn’t do anything. They can’t come poking around.”
“What are you afraid of? They’ll turn up a dead body?” Minna said.
Caroline couldn’t tell her daughter that she had a sense that the police were here about the woman—Adrienne, to whom Richard had left all that money. She couldn’t stand to hear the woman’s name spoken out loud again.
Late last night, Caroline had taken Minna’s laptop into her room and spent hours clicking through links and search bars, looking for pictures, articles, anything related to an Adrienne Cadiou in Toronto. The weight of the darkness, the weak blue light—it had made her feel comforted, somehow, like being in a bubble.
And yet at the same time, she was terrified Minna or Trenton would wake up and find her, and every time the house moved or the radiators hissed, she froze, hands hovering over the keyboard. She wondered if this was how Richard had felt reading porn, or watching it, later, on their shared computer. But no. He had not been embarrassed. Sometimes he even left the videos up, so that when she sat down to type an e-mail—painstakingly, with many errors, because she had never been a fast typer—she was surprised by the sudden vision of labias as pink as orchid blooms, or breasts like Minna’s were now, hard as bowls. She suspected he did it deliberately, to punish her.
She found five Adrienne Cadious in Toronto. One was a college student, nineteen, with a mouth full of braces. A second woman, seventy-four, was mentioned in several articles as being one of the first female runners of the Boston Marathon. The third woman was probably Caroline’s age, with red hair too long for someone in her late fifties. Caroline couldn’t figure out whether she was still alive—several articles mentioned she’d been the victim of a recent hit-and-run and showed her with her arms around a girl, presumably a daughter, with the same pattern of freckles and wide-spaced eyes—but it didn’t matter, anyway. Richard hated redheads.
There were two others: a mother of four, a little fat but not as fat as Caroline was now, and with a pretty smile, who ran a cooking blog called TheGoldenSpoon. Caroline had spent nearly an hour scrolling through recipes, reading about techniques for peeling tomatoes and how to make a perfect omelet, searching all the time for a code layered beneath the surface of the words, a message to her, to Richard.
There were dozens of pictures, not just of meals but of Adrienne herself, and, often, her children: fat-faced, grinning, holding up chocolate-covered fingers toward the camera.
Would Richard have done it? She wasn’t sure. But she couldn’t rule it out.
The last Adrienne was forty-two, and there was a single article that appeared about her on the second page of search results. She had spoken at the Ottawa Regional Breast Cancer Benefit; she was a breast cancer survivor, and she worked as a lawyer at the Canadian Immigration Bureau. The photograph was disappointing—head only, and slightly blurry, and moreover taken from an angle that made it difficult to see her features clearly. Whether she was pretty or not, it was hard to say.
Caroline spent anot
her hour searching for more information about this Adrienne, looking for a better picture, but had found nothing. By then it was two a.m., and she was very drunk and she knew she would sleep, finally. Still, it had taken her another half an hour to figure out how to clear the history so that Minna wouldn’t know what she was doing; Caroline knew about clearing the history because Trenton had spoken about it after she went on his computer looking for evidence that he was developing normally and wasn’t reading about assault weapons or how to make a homemade bomb, which had been suggested to her by a magazine she’d read at the dentist’s. He had caught her, and said, in the annoying smirking way he had recently perfected, “Ever hear of deleting history, Mom?” Then, of course, she was left to wonder whether he’d deleted history because he’d been researching bombs.
Caroline heard footsteps coming up the front path; she could see two men, distorted by the glass.
“Go and see what they want,” she told Minna. “Even better, make them leave.”
Minna rolled her eyes. “Fine.” She left through the garden door.
Caroline heard the doorbell ring once, sharply, and then fall silent. She heard Minna’s called greeting and a burst of overlapping voices, then footsteps, crossing back toward the greenhouse.
Minna hadn’t gotten rid of them.
For the first time since entering the greenhouse Caroline saw, suddenly, what it had become: the sad plastic simulacrum, the withered plants crying out for water, the boxes of old Christmas decorations and dirty wooden shelves, still imprinted with watermarks and ghostly rings where flowerpots and planters had once stood. This had been her place, the only spot in the house that had really belonged to her. She could make flowers grow, could coax even the most difficult orchid to life and make thick coils of plumleaf azalea overspill their planters.
Richard had left the greenhouse to die. Now Richard was dead.
There had been blood in the toilet this morning.
ALICE
The new ghost is nervous. Sandra, too. She hates the police, probably because of her many unpleasant run-ins with them. There was, for example, the time she accidentally drove her car onto a neighbor’s property and parked it nose-first against their mailbox; the time she played the Grateful Dead on full volume until four a.m. while consuming an entire bottle of Maker’s Mark; the incident of the stolen goldfish from the restaurant in Dover Plains . . .
“I don’t believe it.” Minna reenters the greenhouse, flushed, excited. “I can’t believe it. My mom won’t, either. You know I still have our prom photo somewhere?”
Two men trail after her, like marine animals riding the wake of a boat. The first is about her height, broad shouldered and balding, with a big smile and a stomach. His uniform is dark blue and looks rumpled, as though he stores it in a corner.
The second man is wearing a bright red windbreaker, dress pants, mud-encrusted leather shoes. He is tall, thin, and unsmiling.
Minna stops when she finds the greenhouse empty. “She was just here,” she says apologetically. “Mom!” she calls out. “Mom!”
The tall man frowns and checks his watch.
“I’m right here.” Caroline emerges from the pantry door, holding a cup so tightly the veins on her hand stand out. She has fastened her bathrobe, at least, although the mottled surface of her chest is still visible. “No need to shout.”
“Mom, look.” Minna gestures to the shorter man; he is still standing there, beaming, while his partner shifts impatiently. “You remember Danny Topornycky, don’t you?”
Caroline frowns. Minna charges on impatiently, “Toadie, Mom. We called him Toadie. My prom date?” Minna nudges Danny’s arm. “My very first boyfriend.”
“Somehow, I doubt that.” Danny laughs. “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Walker.”
“I go by my maiden name now,” Caroline says. “Bell.”
Minna looks happier than I’ve seen her in all the time she is home, except for brief moments with Amy: tickle wars and raspberry kisses, and when they lie entwined, sleeping. “I had no idea you were a cop.”
“Yeah, well, the old man was a cop,” Danny says, shrugging. “You remember he busted Richie for DUI on prom night?”
Caroline says, “Why are you here?”
Minna glares at her, then turns back to Danny. “Do you want coffee or anything?” She starts toward the pantry door. “We can sit down and catch up—”
“No!” Caroline bursts out. Everyone turns to look at her. “I—I’m sorry,” she says. “The house is a mess . . . I’m sorry. It’s embarrassing.”
“That’s all right,” Danny says. He’s stopped smiling, at least, and looks less like an overstuffed teddy bear and more like a cop. “Sorry to barge in on you like this. This is Detective Rogers, from Suffolk County.”
“Suffolk County?” Minna frowns. “In Long Island?”
“Massachusetts.” The taller man speaks for the first time. He has a voice to match his face: worn down, stretched thin.
“You’re a little far from home, aren’t you?” Minna’s eyes keep returning to Danny. But now he’s keeping his eyes on his feet, playing his part.
“I’m investigating a disappearance,” he says, and for just one second, Minna and Caroline, the greenhouse, the whole house—us, me—seem to vanish, and all I feel is that tiny pulsing presence, the new ghost, drumming like a heartbeat. “Vivian Wright. Sixteen.”
Rogers reaches into his back pocket and extracts a photocopied picture of a girl. Long blond hair, dark smears of eye makeup, rings in her lip, ears, nose. The picture quality is terrible: she is half turned away from the camera, grinning at something offscreen, her features charcoal-smudgy.
The new ghost stirs. I can sense her fumbling to see, to learn her way into the air currents, to see with her no-longer-eyes and taste with her no-longer-tongue. She does not know how to be, yet.
“It’s an awful picture,” Minna says. She leans close to Danny to look—so close her breasts nearly end up on his elbow. But he doesn’t seem to notice. She draws back. “Don’t you have anything better?”
“We’re waiting,” he says. “The parents are on their way back from Cape Town now. Apparently they were on safari. No phone, e-mail only once in a while. It was the babysitter who filed the report. Said she showed up for the job and Vivian”—he tapped the photo—“was just gone. Vanished. At first she thought Vivian had just blown out of town for a few days, for a joke. She’d done that kind of thing before. But . . . ”
“But what?” Caroline says.
Detective Rogers blinks. “It’s been over a week,” he said.
“And you think she came all the way up here?” Minna says.
“We’re not sure,” Rogers says. “She used her credit card to buy a ticket—one way, no return—on a Greyhound heading to Buffalo. And a 7-Eleven in Milford has her on surveillance tape, buying chips and some sodas. She’s wearing a baseball hat, but it’s definitely her. The cashier remembers asking about the piercings. We’ve been hitting the towns on the line, asking around.”
“I’m just helping out with the locals,” Danny jumps in. “Disappearances aren’t our typical gig.”
Sandy mutters, “He turned out just as stupid as the rest of them.”
“You think she was alone?” Caroline is slightly calmer now, but she’s still gripping her glass. “When a young girl runs away, there’s usually somebody. Right?”
“We’re not sure she did run away,” Rogers says. He’s good. Noncommittal. “She could have been compelled to leave. Or lured up here by someone. There was no one with her on the tape, but that doesn’t mean she was alone.”
“Do you think she’s . . . ?” Minna trails off.
For a moment, there is silence. The clocks seem to pause; the pulse stops in this ticking, groaning body. Even Sandra doesn’t dare make a sound. The word, unspoken, hangs like a mist. Dead. Do you think she’s dead?
The new ghost trembles.
“We’re investigating every possibility,” Detective R
ogers says, which I know means yes, he does. “She hasn’t used her card again. Hasn’t used her cell phone, either. She used to have Facebook, Twitter, all that, but her parents made her shut it down a few months ago, so no help there. Problems with an ex-boyfriend—that’s what her friends said, anyway.”
“Maybe she’s with her ex-boyfriend,” Minna suggests. She nudges Danny, smiling. “It’s always the ex, isn’t it?”
Danny glows as red as a fire poker. “I don’t know about that,” he says. He pats his shirt down over his stomach.
Rogers doesn’t smile. “It isn’t this time. The kid hasn’t spoken to her in months. He moved to Austin with his family in November.”
“Well, then what did happen to her?” Caroline’s voice is shrill.
There’s another beat of silence. This time Rogers comes out with it. “She might be hiding somewhere. She might have been kidnapped, although there’s been no ransom. And she might be dead. But we hope not.” He takes the photograph, folds it, returns it to his pocket. “Sorry for barging in. Here’s my card, and Danny will leave you his, too.”
Danny’s already working his card over with a pen. “I’m leaving you my cell, too, Min,” he says. “We should catch up while you’re here.”
Rogers looks faintly annoyed. “If you see anything suspicious, please call right away.”
“You expect us to trip over a dead body in our garden?” Minna says. No one laughs, and Caroline says, “Minna, please,” and presses one hand to her head.
“Anything suspicious,” Detective Rogers repeats.
Then they’re gone, and Caroline and Minna are left standing together in the greenhouse, surrounded by dead and rotting things.
I’m expecting Sandra to make an idiotic comment but instead she simply mutters, “Bad business.” I can feel her withdraw, curling into the walls, into the wood shavings, small, hard, and impregnable, as she always does when she’s in a bad mood.
The ghost, the new ghost, is still shaking.