All the Things You Are (25 page)

He took the same route as before, wondering if he could smell Claire's scent – Cristalle by Chanel – in the elevator, praying she was alone, persuading himself there's nothing to worry about. He slowed down as he approached Room 435. Should he knock on the door? He could hear a TV, sounded like an old movie. The hotel walls were like cardboard. The TV was coming from 435, Joan Crawford, it sounded like, one of the old Warner Brothers ones,
Possessed
, or
The Damned Don't Cry
, that's totally what Claire would be watching, they're both addicted to old black-and-white movies. Better living through TMC. Except now, it was as if they were trapped in the middle of one. He was right outside the door, a big blast of Franz Waxman strings shrieking, his hand poised to knock.

But something clicked inside his head, and he didn't knock. He breathed deep, and bit his lip, and turned and walked away. He rode the elevator down to the lobby, crossed the street and ordered a Woodfords in the bar he had spent the evening in. He gazed across the gantry at the range of bottles and taps and drank his whiskey and knew he'd had a narrow escape.

Because what were the alternatives? If she was with somebody, with Casey, what could he have achieved by walking in on them? If she wasn't, what kind of creepy, stalking, controlling motherfucker would he have been? He didn't knock because he wanted to trust his wife. And because all he got to be in charge of were his own actions. If she felt she needed something else, something she'd had before, well maybe that was up to her. Maybe she had a right to cheat. Maybe the marriage had never had a chance in the first place; maybe it was doomed from the day of the fire, doomed because of what he had done. Why couldn't he just tell her the truth? And then it would be over, one way or the other. She could leave him – she
would
leave him, of course she would, or … he's dared hope a hundred, a thousand times, that she could, in time, forgive him, he was just a boy, a child, the same age Barbara is now. But how long would it take to fathom: the depth of it, the scale of it, that her entire family was destroyed, and that it was his fault: months? Years?

Why can't he just confess? God knows at a certain level it would bring him nothing but relief. Because … because he has no right to tell her who her parents were if she doesn't want to know. Is that true? Round and round it goes, has always gone, the spectre at every feast, the four a.m. wake-up call he's lived with every day of their marriage.

‘I
s Halloween second after Christmas of the holidays?' Irene says.

‘I don't know. I sometimes think Halloween is actually
better
than Christmas,' Barbara says.

‘They're totally the top two. And Easter,' Irene says.

‘But you don't have to go to church on Halloween,' Barbara says, making a face at her sister.

‘Oh,' Irene says. ‘Right. I forgot that. Well then. Halloween is
definitely
the best.'

They are sitting on the floor by the fire. Barbara is wearing her vampire costume and writing a story about a werewolf in high school. Irene is wearing her kitty-kat costume and drawing a picture of a spaniel puppy with devil ears taking a ballet lesson. Donna is finishing a quilt with a Halloween pumpkin motif, and trying neither to giggle at nor succumb to the girls' campaign to persuade her to bring them trick-or-treating.

‘Because,' says Barbara, suddenly full of high moral purpose, ‘on Christmas, you can get pretty
greedy
about all the
stuff
you want, and the stuff you get and don't get, and I think it's
wrong
to be so
selfish
in that way. Whereas on Hallo
ween
…'
she says, and then lapses into silence. Presumably, Donna thinks, because the purpose of Hallo
ween
, as far as Barbara is concerned, is accumulating a major haul of
stuff
in the form of candy and then scarfing as much of it as her stomach will allow.

‘On Halloween, we remember the dead,' Irene says solemnly.

Donna makes a noise.

‘Bless you,' Barbara says. Donna is unable to answer.

‘That's true, Irene. On Halloween, we do remember the dead, the … souls of the dead,' Barbara says.

‘Day after,' Donna barks.

‘What's that, Aunt Donna?'

‘Day after. In fact, day after that. All Souls Day. November second.'

‘I know this,' Barbara says, loftily. ‘All Saints Day, November first. I did a project on Halloween last year. The ancient … ways of it. It's like mythology.'

‘Barbara's a Halloween expert, actually,' Irene says.

Donna makes a longer, more complicated noise.

‘Bless you,' Irene says.

‘And as well as All Saints and All Souls, Halloween is about the dead too. Doing battle with evil spirits,' Barbara says.

‘Like the death-eaters,' Irene says.

‘No, not like the death-eaters, stupid,' Barbara says.

‘Is too.'

‘Is not. And how would you know anyway, you've only seen the movies, you gave the books up halfway through
Sorcerer's Stone
. Anyway, you were right before,' Barbara says, modifying her tone from sharpness to sanctimony. ‘At Halloween, and for two days afterwards, we dress up, and light fires, and remember the dead. So that the harvest … to give thanks … for the harvest, and the coming of winter.'

‘Why do we want to give thanks for the coming of winter?' says Irene.

‘We light fires, and give thanks … and in the night,
on
the night, the … the border between the … there are spirits in the air. Spirits
abroad
in the air.'

‘That's good, Barbara,' Donna says. ‘Spirits abroad in the air. I like that.'

‘And the border, the
veil
between the … the living and the dead becomes—'

‘See-through,' Irene says.

‘Transparent. That means—'

‘See-through,' Irene says.

‘Stop inter
rupting
, Irene. That means we feel very close to those who have gone before. And just because we're – even
though
we're –
afraid
, we … we just say, no. That's why we dress up as ghosts and demons and vampires and everything, to …'

‘Confuse them,' Irene says.

‘To conquer our fears. Or something like that.'

‘You got an A-plus, I hope,' Donna says.

‘I got an A-minus. Because the layout wasn't right. And my handwriting—'

‘You should have typed it,' Irene says.

‘I like my handwriting. Anyway, Megan and Susie got A-pluses and their moms typed theirs. Their moms
wrote
theirs. Megan's was on Halloween and it was word for word from the Internet, I know, I read those pages too. And Susie's was on Holyween.'

‘Excuse me?' Donna says.

‘Holyween. Because they're Christians, she said they don't believe in Halloween. So she was allowed do it on Holyween. Which is what Christians have instead. I think.'

‘Is that right?' Donna says.

‘And it isn't fair that if you do all your own work, you get marked down, but if you let your mom do it all, you get an A-plus.'

‘No one said life was gonna be fair,' Donna says.

‘That's what Mom always says. And to be fair to Susie and Megan, I did try and get Mom to do it for me, but she said no, that it was better to do my own work, that's the only way I would learn.'

‘Good for her.'

‘We're Christians too,' Irene says. ‘At least, we are at Christmas and Easter. Aren't we?'

‘There's a difference between being a Christian and being nuts,' Donna says tartly. ‘Holyween. Jesus Christ Almighty.'

‘That's exactly what Mom said,' Barbara says. ‘Those exact words. “Holyween: Jesus Christ Almighty.”'

‘I miss
Mommy
,' Irene says tearfully. ‘Mommy always has the best costumes,
makes
the best costumes, and she brings us to a Halloween House when it's getting dark, and then to one of the local neighborhoods for Trick or Treat—'

‘Last year we went somewhere off Nakoma—'

‘Mandan Crescent, my friend Holly lives there. And then we went to Daddy's office and had burgers and fries and blonde Karen sang “Goldfinger” and threw her shoes in the crowd, which wasn't really about Halloween but Mom and Dad thought it was hysterical.'

‘All right, all right, all right,' Donna says, unable to stand it any longer. ‘There's a subdivision called Ripley Fields, we can walk along the river bank to it, so long as we bring flashlights.'

‘And? What do we do when we get there?' Irene says.

‘We trick or treat, baby, we trick or treat!'

J
eff Torrance's mother was willing to concede that Jeff had gone somewhere, and taken his car, but where he'd gone and who went with him she either didn't know or refused to say, nor would she give Ken Fowler any details of the vehicle's make or registration beyond that it's red, so Fowler is running Torrance's name and address through the DMV to get the make and plates. Meanwhile, Detective Nora Fox is in the library at Monroe High, which is on the fifth floor, and commands spectacular views of Lake Wingra. Having closed the call with Fowler, she looks out the window in the direction of the Brogan house, but all she can see is the wind creasing the oak prairies of the UW Arboretum, the trees flickering in the last of the afternoon light. Maybe it's the proximity to all these books, maybe it's being back in high school after all these years, but she remembers a line from a poem, something about ghosts being driven out like leaves in the wind: ‘Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red.' Nora hasn't retained much poetry by heart – hasn't retained any, truth be told – but that line sometimes comes back to her in the Fall, and each time she wonders if all the adjectives apply to the ‘red,' and thinks that they should: yellow-red, black-red, pale-red, hectic-red. The leaves are like a fire about to expire, she thinks: one last blaze and then they're blown asunder like embers on the wind.

‘Detective Fox?'

Nora turns with a start to Ms Johnson, the librarian (‘call me Doreen, Detective'), aware that her name has been spoken more than once, and a little embarrassed, as if her thoughts could be read. A cop quoting poetry, like some English detective in a book: who does she think she is?

‘I sometimes lose myself in the view, too,' Doreen Johnson says. ‘Here's the 1982 Yearbook you asked for.'

‘Thank you,' Nora says.

They have the library to themselves, apart from four Chinese students poring over complicated math problems. ‘Halloween,' Doreen Johnson had said with a shrug, and Nora had nodded in response: no further explanation necessary. Nora indicates that she's going to sit at a desk and peruse the book; Doreen Johnson looks like she's about to speak, then turns and goes back to her desk by the door.

The first thing Nora establishes is that whoever the dead man is, he wasn't Gene Peterson: the photo Claire Taylor gave her and the photo of Peterson in the yearbook don't resemble each other in the slightest. Peterson at eighteen is fair and square jawed, a jock type. Where does he see himself in five years? ‘Achieving one goal, only to set another: the only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.' She rolls her eyes and sighs. Not only in Wisconsin; the jocks in her high school were big on Vince Lombardi quotes too – or at least the ones their coach drummed into them. There were 479 students in Peterson's graduation class, 243 of them boys, and the only other one she can definitely rule out is Danny Brogan. The photograph she's trying to match is one of the dead man as a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old; he has a mullet and an optimistic smear of moustache. At least, Claire Taylor told her it was the dead man. But if she lied about it being Gene Peterson in the first place … well, here we go with some of that glamorous police work.

She looks up at the sound of Doreen Johnson seeing the Chinese students out. With the tiny, elegant frame of a dancer, she is wearing a blue floral pinafore over a gray long-sleeve t-shirt and gray leggings, and flat-soled black wing tips on her feet; her unruly, undyed, salt and pepper hair is barely contained in a loose ponytail; her skin is tan; her blue eyes radiate curiosity and intelligence; she wears blue gemstones in her ears and at her throat. Doreen checks her watch, takes a bunch of keys from her pinafore pocket and turns one in the library door, then, smiling, crosses the floor towards her. Aging hippies in Madison aren't always this friendly towards the police.

‘Just so you know, Ms Johnson, detaining a police officer in a high-school library in the conduct of her duty is a serious crime.'

‘You'll never take me alive, copper. And it's Doreen, please.'

Doreen Johnson pulls a chair around and sits beside Nora Fox, maybe a little closer than personal-space guidelines would warrant.

‘I just thought it would be better if we weren't disturbed,' she says.

Reflexively, Nora's eyes flicker towards the librarian's ring finger: no metal, but a white line where a ring once was. Back to her face, where her eyes are dancing with cloak-and-dagger excitement.

‘What's on your mind, Ms— Doreen?'

‘I taught those guys in middle school. Before I became librarian here, I used to teach at Jefferson. Junior high, as it was back then.'

‘You did? What do you mean, “those guys?”'

‘They were, not exactly a gang, they weren't tough like that, but they were inseparable. The Four Horsemen. Gene Peterson, Dave Ricks, Danny Brogan and Ralph Cowley. I saw it on the news at lunchtime. It looked like Dave Ricks to me. Is he dead? Did Danny Brogan do it? Of those guys, he'd have been the last one I'd have picked.'