Hemlock Grove (16 page)

He took the glass out of her hands and put it on the table, then reached his hand under her skirt and jerked on her panties, which slid down to her shoes. They faced each other. She breathed the smell of scotch into his face.

“Does that help you get it up these days?” she said.

He took her by the shoulders and turned her around and forced her down to her knees doubled over the couch. He knelt and hiked her skirt over her waist and slapped her with force on the buttocks. She breathed out sharply. He slapped her again, and again, and again, and she let out a cry and braced her hands on the cushions to push herself up. He reached with his left hand and gripped her by the neck and held her in place as he struck her with greater abandon, her shoulders racking with low sobs now and her bare flesh imprinted a luminous mottle of sunset red over a glimmering vulva like a heat mirage on the highway, the sight of which gripped his heart like such a vista of natural beauty one desires with every molecule but never can possess. He sank down, encircling her thighs with his arms and running his lips and his tongue over her rear and the small of her back. She pushed back against him and sank to the floor, reaching for his crotch and removing his belt and tossing it to the side. She unclasped his trousers and lay back and he parted her legs, entering her gently and kissing the wetness of tears on her face. She looked him impatiently in the face.

“Like you mean it,” she said.

He thrust.

“Yes,” she said.

He quickly built up a new head of steam. He felt like a rabid little rodent. He felt like a god of carnage. How he felt mattered much less than the fact of feeling so much of it.

Later he stood and took a box of tissues from his desk and handed it to her. She seized his hand.

“Come here,” she said.

He allowed her to pull him down. He lay with his head to her breast and she ran her hand up and down his back. Their first time had been on this floor many years ago. If it had seemed like he couldn’t have felt worse about it then it was because he had been too young a man to know yet that time is cyclical, that there is no upward limit to the number of times you can make the same mistake.

“My poor, poor Norman,” she said.

He would have liked to lie here weeping for a while but was too depleted to cry. It felt like all the world’s kindness was in the flat of her hand.

A Large Bad Thing

The next morning Roman and Peter went to 7 Royal Oaks Drive in Penrose. There was an SUV parked in the driveway with a bumper sticker for the losing Republican ticket of the latest gubernatorial race. On the porch hung a Thanksgiving flag of a cornucopia and lying over the mouth of one garbage can on the sidewalk was a mat with a paw print in place of the
o
in
Welcome.
A pale middle-aged man answered the door. He was wearing glasses with a fingerprint smudge on the edge of one lens and a Steelers T-shirt and sweatpants, his neck and chin pink and red stubbled with razor burn. He had not clipped his toenails recently.

“Can I help you?” he said.

“Mr. Willoughby?” said Roman.

“Yes?” He was medded out and apathetic about their identity or the purpose of their call.

“Is Mrs. Willoughby in?” said Roman.

“No, she isn’t.”

Roman looked him in the eye. “Why don’t you go take a nap.”

Mr. Willoughby went inside to a couch and lay with his back to the room like a cartoon drunk. Peter went to the stairs but Roman lingered over the man. He removed the man’s glasses and breathed on the lens and wiped the smudge with his blazer. Peter looked at Roman and jerked his head in the direction of the stairs. Eyes on the ball. Roman set the glasses on the table and followed him to the second floor, where they began opening doors. Peter found the bathroom and Roman what appeared to be a teenage girl’s room. Peter looked in and said, “This bed has been slept in.”

The next room they tried was Lisa’s. The bed was made and would not be unmade soon. On one wall was a corkboard with pictures of Lisa and her friends tacked to it as well as a hodgepodge of images of popular musicians and exotic travel destinations and a magazine fitness regimen. On her desk was an artist’s dummy in a miniature ballroom gown doing a pirouette on top of a sewing machine. Roman went through her dresser, and Peter her desk. Peter flipped through all her letters and school notebooks and college brochures. He found a doodle she’d apparently done during social studies of a Pilgrim woman being chased delightedly by a Native American with a massive erection tenting his loincloth, and a single sheet of computer paper with a heading on the top:
HOW TO CHANGE
. The rest of the page was blank. He replaced her things in the order he found them.

“Anything?” he asked Roman.

Roman held up a pair of white panties with cotton on the back like a bunny tail. “Hippity hop,” he said.

Peter dug through her closet, Roman pulled a box of childhood photos and mementos from under her bed.

“What if it’s in her car?” said Roman, neatly stacking elementary school class photos and construction paper valentines. “What if it was in her purse?”

“I’ll never understand what a person can do with so many darned shoes,” said Peter, who himself wore only the things as often as custom or climate made necessary.

Roman added a program for an old
Swan Lake
recital to the pile. He held up a picture of eleven- or twelve-year-old Lisa in the costume of a Depression-era hobo with a five o’clock shadow done in charcoal. “Riding the rails,” he said.

“What are you looking for?” said a girl in the doorway.

Roman and Peter turned. She was about fifteen, with the unappealing variation on her sister’s beauty, and overweight. Roman glanced at Peter, who held up his hand. He would field this one.

“We’re looking for a piece of mail that would have come for your sister,” said Peter. “We think someone might have killed her.”

“Someone like you?” she said.

“Touché,” said Roman.

“Roman,” said Peter. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Were you the ones who dug her up?” said the girl.

They were quiet.

“I don’t care,” said the girl. “Like that’s so much worse than what already happens when you die. There are things living inside you right now that will eat you from the inside out. It’s called symbiosis. Mom used to call me ‘the sentimental one.’ She’s out taking Gary to be put down now. She can’t handle a dog being around, and Dad can’t handle the dog Lisa loved so much having new owners. I always thought he was an annoying little fucker, but it still seems like a bit much for a Boston terrier.”

The girl looked at them with eyes as opaque as candle wax.

“I have it,” she said. “What you’re looking for. I’ll get it.” She disappeared.

Roman looked at Peter. “Sorry,” he said.

Peter said nothing.

The girl returned moments later with a blank black envelope.

“I wanted to borrow a pair of socks and I found this,” she said. “I wanted to come along, but she wouldn’t take me. I … had an, I don’t know, a flash. Maybe at the time it wasn’t really a flash of anything, it just feels like it looking back. But you know how it is when you’re mad at someone when they’re leaving and part of you thinks, What if something happens and I never see her again and what I say now is the last thing I ever say? And I looked at her and she was always so fucking pretty and I said I hope she ends up left in a Dumpster.”

She handed the envelope to Peter.

“I showed it to my parents, but they just got pissed,” she said. “They think it was just an animal. They think it was just me trying to get attention.”

Peter opened the envelope and pulled out a card of black construction paper with lettering of glitter and glue and read it. He looked at Roman.

“You’re Roman Godfrey, aren’t you?” said the girl.

“How do you know who I am?” said Roman.

“You’re a Godfrey,” said the girl.

“What is that?” said Roman. “What does that say?”

“I thought you might be here for me too,” said the girl.

Peter handed the card to him. Roman looked at it and was quiet.

“I guess you’re not,” said the girl, morose.

The card was an invitation to a party. The party was INVITATION ONLY and you were not to tell another LIVING SOUL. SHHHHHHH, it said. The party was being held at Castle Godfrey the night of the full moon.

“Do you have any idea who might have sent her that?” said Peter.

“No, I don’t. She didn’t have any friends from Hemlock Grove that I knew of. But someone did steal her wallet out of her purse at a Starbucks there a couple of weeks ago. I figured you guys might have it.”

Roman didn’t respond or seem to be paying that much attention anymore. He held the invitation with his name on it as he would a sacred text.

“Thank you,” said Peter. “This is a lot of help.”

“Why are you looking for him?” said the girl. “The one who did this?”

“Because he’s going to be joining Gary,” said Roman.

*   *   *

Olivia took Shelley on a trip to the library. They branched out to different sections, Shelley physics and Olivia periodicals. Shelley passed the children’s section. A woman in a rocking chair was reading to a semicircle of children on the rug. “Not by the hairs of my chinny-chin-chin,” she said. Then she stopped as Shelley passed and the children turned. Shelley was immobilized—all those little eyes Lilliputian stakes. A little girl slid out and touched one of Shelley’s cubes with an expression of awe. The right side of Shelley’s face curled into a smile. A dark stain formed in the lap of a quivering boy and he began to cry. The storyteller knelt forward and shushed the boy but his tears began to spread from child to child like match heads flaring too quickly for the storyteller to contain. Shelley moved on.

Olivia heard the dim chorus of terror and hummed quietly to herself, selecting a wooden-spooled
Wall Street Journal
. It is commonly expected that wealthy families go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, and JR, being of the fourth and solely responsible for saving the Godfrey fortune from certain ruin, believed this could be forestalled largely by the concerned parties being able to make hide or hair of the financial page without the assistance of flunkies. Early in his education of his wife she had balked—the only figure she could be expected to be overly troubled with was her own—but surprisingly got the hang of it upon realizing its relationship to her own art: once decoded, the market, like the stage or the heart, was simply another arena in which desire went to war. An elderly man of the sort that can be found at libraries with a preference for print periodicals, sitting at a nearby table, said, “At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I’m always damn impressed to see a lady with a nose for business.”

She turned to him, and seeing that the nose in question was connected to Olivia Godfrey, the affability drained from his face and his mouth spread wide in a death grin.

“Why, thank you,” she said, herself old-fashioned enough to receive a man’s compliment in the spirit it was intended.

Olivia and Shelley convened at two armchairs upstairs overlooking the windows. The springs in Shelley’s chair sagged nearly to the floor as she opened her book. Olivia craned her neck, reading aloud over her daughter’s shoulder:

“‘Of course, minute as its impact may be in our physical universe, the
fact
of quantum entanglement is this: If one logically inexplicable thing is known to exist, then this permits the existence of all logically inexplicable things. A thing may be of
deeper
impossibility than another, in the sense that you can be
more deeply
underwater—but whether you are five feet or five fathoms from the surface you are still all wet.’”

Shelley clapped the book shut and folded her arms in a pout. But then her eyes lit (not a turn of phrase) and she rose, waving vigorously. Olivia looked over. The object of her daughter’s enthusiasm was a girl of approximately her own age accompanying an old woman with a stack of trashy detective thrillers, a small girl with a black raven’s nest bramble of hair and one glaring lock of white bang that to Olivia’s authoritative eye was not a dye job. The girl, if she was not mistaken, who had found Lisa Willoughby.

Christina responded to her classmate’s cheer in seeing her out and in good spirits with a smile of her own, but it faltered under the refracting blackness of Olivia’s sunglasses. She hurried on with her grandmother.

Disappointed, Shelley sat, and in so doing the afternoon light glinting off cars in the parking lot caught Olivia’s eye. Olivia tried to look away but could not. Suddenly and irreversibly at its mercy. The light transfixing her, the shadow closing in. The shadow just waiting for her to get distracted by the light shimmering gold like a field of—

Shelley looked up as her mother braced one hand on the arm of the chair and drew the fingertips of the other softly down her own her face and her eyelids fluttered and she said, “The sunflowers…”

And with that crashed to the floor.

*   *   *

“It’s just an empty, out-of-the-way place,” said Peter as he exited the car. “It doesn’t mean anything for all we know.”

Roman looked off to a patch of bare rockface in the hillside where a tree grew outward in the shape of a J.

“Do you know what that’s called?” said Roman. “When the root system is right there in the rock. Do they have a name for that?”

“I don’t know,” said Peter. “A lot of things have names.”

They agreed to convene later in the evening and Peter went inside where Lynda was watching TV and putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a commonly reproduced Monet.

Lynda told Peter Lisa had stopped by.

“‘Lisa’?” said Peter.

*   *   *

From the archives of Norman Godfrey:

NG: I spoke with Dr. Pryce.

FP: …

NG: Do you know who Dr. Pryce is, Francis?

FP: Yeah. I know him.

NG: He says you participated in a medical experiment at the Godfrey Institute. Is that true?

FP: So what?