As Simple as Snow (17 page)

 

 

“That’s a little mean-spirited, isn’t it?”

“Not all of it,” she said, and took it away from me. “I’m not changing it. They’re all finished.”

I didn’t know what to say. I looked at the stack of notebooks. “How many are there now?”

“One thousand five hundred and sixteen,” she said. “That’s everybody in town, including everybody in school, even the bus riders, and everybody who works in town but doesn’t live here.”

“So what now?”

“I don’t know. I got it all finished a lot faster than I thought I would. It took me a long time last time, but there were more people, and I didn’t have anybody like you to help.”

“You did this before? What happened the last time you did this?”

“Everybody started dying, exactly the way I had described.”

Her eyes were black and still. I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. I didn’t know whether she wanted me to laugh or not, so I just sat there with her notebook in my lap. I handed it back to her and she started laughing.

“I didn’t make them die,” she said. “People die, that’s what happens. And when they do, you need an obituary.”

 

 

 

I left through the basement door before midnight. She kissed me and said, “With this kiss, I pass the key.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s how some magicians, maybe even Houdini, got the key or pick for the locks in their tricks. Their assistants passed them the key with a last-minute kiss, sliding it over.”

“I didn’t get anything,” I said.

“Maybe next time.”

It had started to snow again. The fine, dry powder blew along the streets and sidewalks like sand, forming small dunes against the wheels of cars. I took my usual route home, cutting through backyards to shorten my time in the biting air, leaving a fresh trail of footprints. If it snowed all night they might fill up. I disposed of the tissue with the condom and its wrapper in Mrs. Owens’s trash. This had become something of a ritual.

 

 

 

I was awakened in the night. I thought my phone was ringing, but when I checked it there was nothing. No one had called. I went downstairs to the kitchen for a glass of water. It was a few minutes past four and I was wide awake. I went back to my room and read until I was tired, and went back to sleep.

 

 

 

My father came in and told me to wake up. I lifted my head off the pillow and looked at the clock. “It isn’t time,” I said. “I’ve got another hour.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Cayne are here,” he said. “They’re worried about Anna.”

I wiped some of the sleep out of my face and saw the three of them standing in my room, my father in front and Mr. and Mrs. Cayne behind him. “What’s going on?” I said.

“Anna wasn’t home this morning,” Mr. Cayne said. “We were wondering if you could tell us what you two did last night.”

Mrs. Cayne pulled my desk chair up by the bed, and my father moved my clothes off the other chair and brought it over beside her. Mr. Cayne sat down and they both looked at me. I know it’s wrong to think about things like this in serious moments, and I probably shouldn’t tell this, as it doesn’t reflect so well on me, but while the two of them sat there in front of me, Mrs. Cayne’s wild hair practically screaming off her head, Mr. Cayne with his completely bald face, I couldn’t help myself: I tried to imagine what Mr. Cayne would look like with his wife’s hair on his head. I had to turn away to keep from laughing. I’m sure they thought I was hiding something, smirking with some secret knowledge about their daughter. I didn’t know what they were talking about.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “We were over at your house last night. I left her at your house.”

“What time was that?” Mr. Cayne said.

“Around ten or so, I guess.”

“She didn’t leave with you, walk you outside or part of the way with you?”

“No,” I said. “I left through the basement and she stayed inside.”

“She didn’t say anything to you about going anywhere?” Mrs. Cayne asked.

“Nothing.”

“You don’t know any reason why she wouldn’t be in her room this morning?”

“No.”

“What did you do last night?”

“Nothing. We just hung out in the basement. Listened to the shortwave, played some pool, drank some soda.”

“You didn’t have a fight, anything to upset her?”

“No,” I said. “We never fight.”

“Something else happened,” Mrs. Cayne said. “What was it?”

“Nothing.” I could feel the redness rising from my stomach, and I tried to take an unnoticeable deep breath to keep the shame of the lie from appearing on my face.

“Did you have sex with Anna?” Mrs. Cayne continued.

“No,” I said. I thought I was going to pass out, fall off the bed and drop to the floor, unconscious. I almost wish that had happened. It might have been better.

I could see that Mrs. Cayne was angry. She had been calm, all things considered—she was nervous and frantic that her daughter was missing, but she wasn’t yelling or babbling or anything like that. But now she was mad.

“What’s this, then?” she said, as Mr. Cayne pulled a torn and empty condom wrapper out of his pocket.

“We found this by the couch in the basement. This morning,” he said.

My brain froze. It hung, like an overloaded computer, the screen frozen. My face must have been a red, frozen screen. I could see that my father and the Caynes could see that I was blushing, but my mind was whipping around in uncontrollable circles. How could they have found a condom wrapper? I had taken it and thrown it away. I made sure. I saw it go into the trash. Part of me wanted to run out of the room and out of the house and go straight back to Mrs. Owens’s and dig in the trashcan and confirm what I knew to be true. But what did that mean? Had they followed me? Had Anna had someone else over after I left? Had she planted the wrapper for her parents to find? Were they just bluffing? Nothing was making sense.

Mr. and Mrs. Cayne sat staring straight at me. My father stood looking down at me. They weren’t happy. I wasn’t happy.

“Well, son?” My father’s voice said, We all know what happened, so now be a man and admit it.

“We were careful,” I said, looking at Mrs. Cayne. She slapped me in the mouth and then started bawling. I knew it was the wrong thing to say, but I didn’t expect to get hit for it. I couldn’t think of any other time I’d been hit. I’m sure my parents spanked me, but not that I remember. I’d never been in a fight in school, and I’d never done anything that provoked somebody to haul off and hit me, especially not a grown woman. And here Mrs. Cayne had slapped me full force in the face and no one was doing anything about it. I sat on the bed and put my cold, sweating hand up to my burning face. My father didn’t say anything. Mr. Cayne didn’t say anything. They looked at me as I sat in my bed, the left side of my face red and shamed.

Finally Mr. Cayne spoke. “Is there anything else you can tell us? Anything else you might know about where Anna might have gone?”

“I don’t know anything,” I said. “I wish I did, but I’m at a loss. She didn’t say anything to me at all.”

“Has she left like this before?” my father asked.

“Never,” Mrs. Cayne replied.

“Her coat’s gone, but it doesn’t seem like anything else. Probably her phone, but she’s not answering it,” Mr. Cayne said.

“Or can’t,” Mrs. Cayne added. “Maybe we should call the police.”

“They’ll probably want you to wait awhile,” my father said. “At least today. To see if she’ll come back.”

“I’d like to call just the same,” Mrs. Cayne told him.

My father took them out of the room, to the phone.

He came back alone. “You don’t know where she is?”

“I told you, I don’t,” I said. “I wish I did.”

“I heard you last night,” he said. “Around four. What were you doing?”

“I got up for a drink of water.”

“Downstairs?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“She wasn’t over here? You’d better tell me what you know right now. This isn’t a joke or a game—this is serious. The police are involved. If you’re covering for her or hiding something, you’d better stop right now.”

“I’m telling you the truth, Dad. I don’t know anything about it.”

He stood in the doorway, glaring at me, trying to figure out if I was telling the truth. “All right, then, get up and get ready for school.” He turned and went downstairs.

I reached for my cell and called her. There was no answer. I checked my log to see if I had missed a call from her. There was nothing.

 

 

 

I had to go to school and sit through every class. Nobody was really paying attention; we were all waiting for the principal to announce something, or for somebody to rush in and say that she’d been found. Part of me thought that she would walk into class any moment and surprise everybody. There was a lot of talk, a lot of speculation, but no one spoke to me, except Carl. He didn’t know anything, but he said that most people thought she had run away from home. Others thought she had been kidnapped. Some said she had been abducted by aliens. Carl said they weren’t joking. There were some people who thought that I was involved and that I shouldn’t be in school. I should be down at the police station, locked up. That hadn’t even occurred to me until Carl mentioned it. “Who’s saying that crap,” I asked, “Melissa?” It wasn’t Melissa. She wasn’t saying anything.

The school day ended and people started going home. There was still no news. I walked to Mr. Devon’s room. He was loading a bunch of cameras with film. I sat and watched him for a while. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. That’s what I liked about Mr. Devon.

Finally I spoke. “What can I do?”

He knew what I meant. He shook his head. “Wait. That’s the hardest thing anyone can do right now.”

“What are the teachers saying?”

“We’re all hoping that everything turns out all right.”

I looked at him, hoping he would give me something more than the official, politically correct crap, but he didn’t.

“It’s all your fault,” I said.

“How is that?”

“I met her in the library.”

We both laughed a little. Then I left. “If you hear anything, would you let me know,” I said when I was at the door. “I feel like I’ll be the last person to know anything.”

“I’ll call you as soon as I hear something,” Mr. Devon said.

 

 

 

It was almost dark outside as I started to walk home. I was a couple of blocks away from school when a car slammed on its brakes and the driver rolled down the window. It was Kevin Hermanson, a senior. “They found your girlfriend down at the river,” he said. “Dead.” He was excited, practically yelling at me from the street. He pulled his head back into the car and drove off. I just stood there, staring at the spot where Kevin Hermanson’s head had been.

I ran back to school. The door I had come out of a few minutes before was locked, so I ran around to the side of the building where Mr. Devon’s classroom was. His light was still on, and I pounded on the window. He came to the window, then motioned toward the front of the building. I ran there and waited for him.

“Kevin Hermanson just told me that they found her dead in the river,” I said.

Mr. Devon grabbed me and hugged me. It was one of those hugs where I didn’t know if he was hugging me or needed the hug himself.

“Let me take you home,” he said.

“Take me down there.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

“I’ll go by myself.”

He didn’t want to go, but he didn’t want me to go by myself either. He slowly put his coat on, trying to think of a way out of it. “Maybe I should take you home first,” he said. I shook my head. “All right,” he said, and then drove us to the river.

 

 

 

There wasn’t anything when we got there. I guess I expected to see ambulances and police cars and a crowd of people watching as Anna’s body was pulled from the water, but there was only the river. It was dark by now, and Mr. Devon drove until he saw a police car parked along the road, just above the water. He parked and told me to stay in his car, then went over and talked to the officer sitting in the squad car. Mr. Devon walked back and said, “Come on.” He kept his headlights on and grabbed a flashlight.

We walked down the shallow bank to the river. Yellow police caution tape stretched between some trees, blocking our way to the edge of the frozen river. Mr. Devon swept the flashlight beam across the surface of the ice and we saw a hole about halfway across. There was snow on the ice, and the tracks and markings made it look as if there had been a lot of activity between us and the hole.

After a few minutes I heard somebody walking behind us. The beam of another flashlight reached toward us and then out across the river. It was another police officer.

“Let’s take you home,” he told me.

I told the police everything. They told me almost nothing. I told them how we had crossed the river once before in the dark. I told them about Anna and me, and the night we spent together before she disappeared. I told them about the condom and Mr. Cayne’s pulling it out of his pocket like some magic trick. We sat in our dining room while my mother made coffee for the police officers. She put dinner aside for later and I told them everything. Almost. I didn’t tell them about our code.

My father had wanted to get a lawyer to make it all official, but I didn’t see the point. I had nothing to hide. “Once you talk to the police, that’s it,” my father said. “That’s the official story. You can’t change it later. You know that part, ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you’? That’s what they’re talking about.” There was only one story, the truth. Why would I change it? I wanted to help. I thought it might help.