Arrowood (18 page)

Heaney shrugged. “Could have been, a hundred years ago.” He pulled the chain and the room went black. “All right, why don't we go flip the water back on, now that we know nothing's leaking.”

We crossed back over to the shutoff, in the narrow alcove near the stairs, and I reached up for the handle. I froze when I noticed Heaney staring at my arm, the long pink scars snaking over my skin. He chewed his lip and shifted his gaze up to my face, to look me in the eye. I could feel his breath in the tight space, his flannel shirt brushing my shoulder.

“It's nothing,” I said. “I was in an accident.”

“Some accident.”

“It was,” I said. “But I'm fine now.”

He backed out of the alcove and I squeezed past him, taking the stairs up two at a time. After Heaney left, I piled the wet sheets in the laundry sink and got out the house plans. I gingerly lifted the top two layers of the tissue-paper blueprints and pressed down on the layer for the first floor, to see what lay beneath. By my approximation, the hidden basement room was directly below the mammoth antique armoire that sat along the wall in the laundry. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary on the floor around the armoire, and when I attempted to push it aside to see if there was anything under it, I couldn't get it to budge.

When my phone rang Thursday morning and Josh's name popped up on the screen, I hesitated a moment before answering. I wondered if he had news about the case, and whether it was news I'd want to hear.

“Hi.” He sounded surprised when I answered, like he would have preferred to leave a message. “I know this is coming out of left field, but I wondered if you might want to go to a Halloween party with me Saturday night. I mean, if you don't already have plans. It's a costume party my friend's throwing, and I figured it might be a chance for you to meet some people. If you want. I won't be offended if you say no.”

“A costume party?” My instinct was to turn him down, though I had just been thinking about how much I missed celebrating Halloween. I hadn't been to a party of any kind in a long time. I knew it might be awkward to hang out with Josh and his friends as the third wheel, but I wanted to go. “Are you dressing up?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You don't have to, though, if you're not into that.”

“It sounds fun,” I said. “Sure.”

I had an idea for a costume, and I headed out that afternoon to find what I needed. As I drove through town, I noticed that the leaves had begun to turn, the reds and oranges muted and already muddying to brown. It took some time to locate the Goodwill store. It had moved to a crumbling stucco building behind the carwash, though on the inside, nothing had changed. The walls were still lined with old console televisions that no one would ever buy, the shelves cluttered with stained Tupperware, cracked picture frames with pictures still in them, and worn-out shoes molded to the shape of their former owners' feet. In the summers, I had often begged Grammy to take me to Goodwill so I could dig through the bin of cassette tapes and CDs, and she would complain that the place was too depressing for old people. She would browse around and find jewelry and cross-stitch samplers and collections of ceramic pigs that had belonged to recently departed friends, dismayed that their families had thrown out everything the dead had held dear—exactly what my mother had done.

I flipped through racks of dresses until I found a pale satin gown with spaghetti straps, perfect for a 1970s prom. The fabric was stained and discolored with age, but that wouldn't matter. More digging unearthed a pair of white dress shoes, possibly from someone's wedding, and a princess crown studded with plastic rhinestones.

“Got a big day coming up?” the elderly cashier asked, carefully folding the dress before stuffing it into a crinkled grocery sack.

“Just a party,” I said.

“Well, you found a great outfit. You'll be the prettiest girl there.” She smiled as she handed back my change, her hand shaking with some sort of palsy, her eyes magnified behind greasy glasses. I didn't tell her that the dress was for a costume party, that I would be covering it with blood.

By Saturday night, I was jittery, uncertain about my decision to go. I put on my costume, complete with a long blond wig I'd bought at Walmart, and stood in the tub to drench myself with a bottle of fake blood. I poured it over my head, across my chest and bare arms, obscuring my scars. Syrupy red globs rolled down my dress and splatted onto the white porcelain, where they crept in slow motion toward the drain. When I climbed out of the tub and turned on the water to rinse it out, the shriek of pipes was as sharp as an icepick in my eardrum.

When I showed up at Josh's apartment, he knew exactly who I was.

“Bloody prom queen,” he said. “You're Carrie, right? I like it.”

Josh had colored his salt-and-pepper hair dark brown, and it was disorienting. I couldn't stop staring at him. He was dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit instead of his usual cap and windbreaker, which I also thought of as a costume. “I get that you're a convict,” I said. “Are you supposed to be anyone in particular?”

“Are you serious?” he said. “You can't tell? I'll give you a hint. I'm a famous serial killer.” He pointed at his inmate number, 069063.

“Sorry,” I said. “That doesn't really help. Are you…Jeffrey Dahmer?”

He shook his head. “Dahmer had lighter hair. Maybe I was overshooting by going for someone so handsome and charismatic.” He took off his glasses. “Ted Bundy?”

“Oh, yeah, I totally see it now,” I said. “The glasses were throwing me off.”

“Liar.” His mouth curved into a teasing smile and heat rose unexpectedly to my cheeks. I'd never seen this playful side of him. He was always so serious when discussing my sisters' case, and that was what we usually talked about.

“That's okay,” Josh said. “Just don't get used to the hair—it's temporary.” He held up a grocery sack. “You like gin and tonic? We could stop at Hy-Vee and get something else if you want.”

“Gin's fine,” I said. I hated gin, but that didn't matter. I wouldn't be drinking it for the taste.

Josh's friend lived in a brick bungalow on a dead-end street, close enough to the Mississippi that the basement probably flooded every time the river rose. I could see the Ready Mix concrete plant in the distance, sloping piles of gravel glowing in the moonlight. Josh cut the engine and we both looked out at the dark house. There were no other cars around. “Are we early?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “They're not the most punctual people.”

“Where do you know these guys from?” I asked. “Are they friends from school or something?”

“I met them at GameStop,” he said. “Travis works there. We all play
Warcraft
together.”

“Warcraft?”

“It's an online game.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Maybe they're still at the liquor store. Do you mind waiting around?”

“Not at all,” I said. “But maybe we should have a drink while we wait. What do you say, Ted Bundy?”

“Great idea, but I don't have any cups.”

I pulled the Tanqueray out of the bag. “I'm game if you are.”

“What—drink out of the bottle?” He eyed me like he wasn't quite sure if I was serious, if this was something I would do. It was part of the fun of dressing up, I thought, pretending to be someone else. Forgetting the rules we usually lived by.

“Like you've never done it?”

He laughed. “Probably not since I was sixteen.”

“We'll pretend we're in high school, then.”

Josh groaned and grabbed the bottle of tonic water. “Fine. Chaser.”

“Okay, let's do this.” I unscrewed the cap and took a swig of gin. It was warm and bitter and seared my throat. We switched bottles and I chugged the tonic. I watched the line of his jaw as he drank, two quick swallows.

“You may not believe this,” Josh said, “but this is my first time drinking in my van with a prom queen.”

“Pretend prom queen,” I corrected. “I was never voted into high school royalty, not even as part of some sinister plot.”

“Really?” he said. “I wasn't, either. I did submit a lot of embarrassing poems to the school literary journal, though. Luckily they were all rejected.”

I took another turn with the gin and handed the bottle back to him. “Maybe we would have been friends.”

“Maybe so.”

“You really wrote poetry?” I asked. The wig was making my head itch, and I tried to readjust it, pulling loose all the bits of blond hair that the fake blood had glued to my skin.

“Yeah. Doesn't every dorky teenage boy?”

I shrugged. “I had you pegged for school newspaper.”

“You may have greatly overestimated me.” He waved the gin in front of me. “Another?”

I nodded. “Poetry's not dorky.” I had been obsessed, in high school, with confessional poets, envious of their ability to lay themselves bare on the page. I wanted to write my own poetry, but I'd hold the pen and stare at the paper and nothing would happen.

Two cars pulled into the driveway. People spilled out and filed into the house, and lights came on inside. Another car drove past and parked in front of us.

“I guess we can go in now,” I said.

“Or, we could just hang out in here and recite poetry.”

“Only if you go first.”

He screwed the lids back on the bottles, pretending to consider it and then shaking his head. “I guess we'd better go in, then.”

Inside the house, someone had switched on a black light, giving everyone blue skin and glowing teeth. I was relieved to see that nearly everyone was in costume. Josh introduced me to his friends, though Travis was the only name that stuck. He was dressed as Alex from
A Clockwork Orange,
with a black hat and spidery fake eyelashes dangling below one eye. All of Josh's friends looked too young to be drinking, though maybe that was only because the two of us were clearly the oldest people there.

I stood in a corner of the living room next to a dead ficus tree while Josh talked about computer viruses with a guy sporting red contact lenses and devil horns. I tried to pay attention to the conversation, but I couldn't follow it, and then someone turned the music up so loud that I could barely hear them anyhow. I leaned against a brown and gold velour sofa with wooden armrests shaped like wagon wheels. The upholstery was dotted all over with melted black burn marks, as though someone had been chain-smoking and stubbing cigarettes out on the couch for years. Pinned above the couch was a poster I recognized from my freshman dorm, depicting a Malibu beach house at sunset and a garage filled with sports cars.
JUSTIFICATION FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
. The poster should have specified that it didn't apply to anyone with a humanities degree.

The house slowly filled with bodies, and I began to sweat inside my satin dress. I excused myself and made my way through a cluster of girls in eighties costumes (either that, or the eighties had come back in style without my knowledge, which was entirely possible) to reach the tiny kitchen, where the light was normal and the windows were open to the breeze. Travis was there, pumping the keg and smoking a clove cigarette. His pupils were enormous.

“Beer?” He held out a cup for me, and I took it.

“Thanks.” I leaned against the counter. It vibrated with the bass from the throbbing stereo.

“Hey,” Travis said. “Are you having a good time?”

I swallowed a mouthful of beer and wiped foam from my lips. “Yeah.”

He filled a cup for himself. “I've never seen Josh with a date before,” he said. “You must be something special.”

“It's not a date,” I said. “We're friends, I guess.” I wasn't sure quite what to call Josh. We weren't friends, exactly.

“Ah, sorry. How did you two meet? Are you a gamer?”

“No,” I said. “We met through his website.” It was the closest I could come to the truth.

Travis picked at his fake eyelashes, which seemed to be coming unglued. “Wait a minute, did he say your name was Arden? Are you that Arrowood chick?”

I shook my head.

“I never heard of any Ardens around here except for that one.”

“Really?” I murmured. “I know three others.”
In the cemetery.
I dumped the rest of my beer into the sink and plucked a bottle of sour apple schnapps off the counter.

“What did you say?” Travis cupped his hand behind his ear, but I didn't repeat myself. I pushed my way back into the living room, where Josh now stood alone, picking shriveled leaves off the ficus, his teeth glowing in the black light.

“Schnapps!” he said. He had to lean in close to my ear to make himself heard. “This is getting classy.”

I filled the cup halfway and handed it to him, keeping the bottle for myself. The schnapps was thick and went down like cough syrup. I was buzzed, but I wanted to be drunk. Josh took one sip from the cup before abandoning it on an end table.

“Dance with me!” I yelled. I grabbed Josh's arm without waiting for an answer and dragged him into the crowd, tripping on the shag carpeting and nearly pulling him to the floor on top of me. He lifted me to my feet easily, stronger and steadier than I expected him to be. I leaned against his chest and he placed his hands uncertainly at my waist, his arms tensed to grab me again if I should fall. I closed my eyes and swayed, letting the music and the liquor blur my thoughts. I didn't want to think about anything.

At the end of the song, the stereo switched off and one of the eighties girls came in with a jumbo pack of toilet paper. “Time for the mummy contest!” she hollered. “Find a partner, grab a roll of paper!”

I squeezed my way over to the toilet paper and brought a roll back for me and Josh.

“We're doing this?” he asked.