Hemlock Grove (21 page)

“What, you mean the cops?” said Roman. His tone reflected the boringness and triviality of the incident. “You said get rid of them and I did. Oh, and that was very considerate, dropping my car off with an empty tank, incidentally.”

He waited to see if interjecting levity made the situation any different but it didn’t.

“Okay,” said Roman. “Okay, it was stupid. It was really stupid and I’m an asshole and what is there to say other than that I was being an asshole, but come on. Think about what you’re doing. You can’t walk away over a stupid thing like that. You can’t walk away from … this.”

He pronounced
this
in the phonetically correct fashion, but somehow it still rhymed with
us.

Peter thought about how he might explain things to Roman in a way that wouldn’t upset him further. Explain that they were not alike, that however different from the rest of the world Roman felt, he was still rich and so tolerably different. He did not know what things were like for Peter, he did not fear the cage. The cage was the worst of all possible deaths. But there was no way to make that real for someone like Roman in the same way you could hardly say to a tiger in the jungle, Do you know how free you really are? Because how can he know any other way to be? There was no way to make this a picture in Roman’s brain, so he bounced his heel off the railing for a while and wondered if he could get away with not saying any more than he’d already said.

“Will you fucking say something,” said Roman.

“You should go,” said Peter. “There’s no good for you here. You should get away from this death and this town and your name. Make it all clean. And I don’t know. Figure it out from there.”

Roman regarded his hand. His hand was shaking and wasn’t much use for holding a cigarette, so he flicked it. “I bet you’d like that,” he said. “I bet you’d find that very convenient, you Gypsy piece of shit. You know if you fuck my cousin, I’ll kill you.”

Peter looked at him.

“You’re not better than me,” said Roman, bitter.

Peter kept looking at him.

Roman turned his head. “That’s a faggot fucking ponytail,” he said.

Peter got up and went inside. Roman looked up at the glowering sky. “Fuck,” he said. There was a constriction in his throat.

Then there was a movement in the corner of his vision. Peter coming back out, not leaving it like this. Like before, Peter getting the hard-on thing out of his system but coming back to him. Roman looked pridefully ahead but knew he would let him. That was just his way, Peter was all right for a hard-on. Roman would let him come back again. But the door did not open and Peter did not come, and the movement he had seen was suddenly in the opposite side of his mind’s eye, and it was like dark fingers of black shadow performing sleight of hand to get his attention. Roman’s eyes fluttered. He bent and picked up the brick and the door closed after it and he hurled it over the hill. There was a metallic crunch and a car alarm went off and Roman sat against the locked door and after a moment held up his still-trembling hand palms outward and scurried his fingers in the air, watching the dance of spidery veins.

*   *   *

When school let out Letha appeared by Peter’s side as he approached his bus and he did not question as she boarded alongside him. He walked to his customary seat in the back and gestured for her to sit and she did. She reached into her purse and pulled out an old, wrinkled envelope, which she handed to Peter. It was to her father, no return address. He raised his eyebrows and she nodded, pleased with herself.

“Did you read it?” said Peter.

She was offended. “I would never read someone else’s mail,” she said. “Unless it was about me.”

He put the letter in the front pocket of his backpack, joining the fragment of
Goblin Market
and the shitty picture. He did not know if this would all ultimately come together as something meaningful or if it was like the opposite of those paintings made of dots, the illusion of order a consequence of proximity; if you stood at the other end of the universe seeking resolution you would just end up feeling like an idiot for trying.

When they passed Kilderry Park Letha looked out the window and said, “He’s dead.”

“Who?” said Peter.

“Francis Pullman. The one who saw. He stabbed himself in the brain last night.”

“Oh,” said Peter.

Letha moved her hand as if to take Peter’s but changed the motion into picking at the duct tape patching a rip in the faux leather of their seat. The bus came to a stop at the mouth of Kimmel Lane and she got off with him and started down the hill. Still, neither commented that this was outside the normal run of events.

“Roman seemed weird today,” she said.

“He’s pissed at me,” said Peter.

“Why?”

“Because there’s a big Roman-shaped blind spot in the way Roman sees things.”

“What happened Saturday night?” said Letha. “Were you there when he was arrested?”

“Your mom using the sheriff’s department to give you a time-out isn’t the same thing as being arrested,” he said.

“What are the things you’re leaving out?” she said.

Peter said nothing.

“You don’t need to leave stuff out just because I’m a girl,” she said.

Peter looked at her to see if she really believed that. He said nothing.

“I should sock you,” said Letha.

As they approached the trailer, the rain that had been threatening all day began lightly to fall. They jogged inside. The car was gone and they had the place to themselves. They sat on the couch and listened to the rain.

“Do you believe in angels?” she said.

Peter saw no way out of this conversation and regretted for the second time today that it was only one night of the month that he got to drop his human mouth on the ground.

She clasped her hands on her stomach. “It scares my parents, because they don’t believe me. But I guess I wouldn’t either in their shoes. I know it sounds a little crazy.”

“It actually sounds a lot crazy,” said Peter.

“Do you believe me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you just saying you don’t know because you think I’m crazy?”

“Well, I think you probably are crazy, but I still don’t know.”

She looked at him but he looked away. He felt her still looking at him and wished she would stop, but still tried to make his profile handsomely contemplative. The cat leaped onto the coffee table and sat on the jigsaw puzzle Lynda was still working on and began to groom, not actually disrupting any pieces but proving that it could.

Every cat is a woman, thought Peter.

“Well!” said Letha.

“Well what?” said Peter. He knew but had learned that if there was one advantage to the male sex it was that your obtuseness would never be underestimated; if you pretend you don’t know what the problem is, half the time it just goes away.

“Are you going to try to fuck me?” she said.

Peter sucked in breath. “Well, here we are,” he said.

“What kind of thing is that to say!” she said.

Peter grimaced.

“What is it?” she said.

His grimace tightened and he licked the back of his teeth.

“Roman,” he said.

“What does Roman have to do with the price of rice in China!”

“You know,” he said.

She was quiet.

“Do you like me?” she said.

Peter shrugged. He didn’t
not
like her. Per se.

“Are you sure it’s not—” She moved her hands over her bump.

“No,” he said. “That’s kind of hot.”

“Pervert!” she said, beaming.

“Look,” he said. “If the dynamite’s on the tracks, you think twice about stepping on that train.”

“Smooth talker!”

They were both quiet.

“You’re really saying no?” she said.

*   *   *

Roman stood in his room regarding the coupling link mounted on the wall. While it looked like worthless junk, this was the first item produced by Jacob Godfrey for the Pennsylvania Railroad and its value was beyond measure: an empire had been built on it. Roman picked it up and held it in front of his heart and pulled with both hands as hard as he could, but to no avail even a century after its production: it was Godfrey steel. He put it back on its mount and went to his dresser, where there was a glass of vodka and ice and a small mound of cocaine on a pewter tray. He took out his mint container, where he stored a blade for a box cutter and segments of straw, and divided the cocaine into several lines and snorted them. He took a heavy sip of vodka. He looked at himself in the mirror.

“Godfrey steel,” he said.

He held the blade of the box cutter to the corner of his eye and made a quick vertical slash down his cheek. He closed his eyes and felt the pleasing warmth as blood issued onto his face. He opened his eyes and put a finger to the cut and traced it under both eyes and over his lips in a parody of his mother applying makeup. He batted his eyes for the mirror and puckered his lips.

“Shut up and kiss me,” he said.

The doorbell rang. Startled, Roman hurried to the bathroom and washed his face and applied a Band-Aid to the cut. He grabbed his drink and went to the foyer. The caller was a petite black woman wearing a dark trench coat and holding a badge.

“Are you Roman Godfrey?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

“Close shave,” he said.

“Let me see,” she said.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“Hold still,” she said.

She lifted the bandage, gauging immediately that the cut was superficial and self-inflicted. Further that the boy was high and recently had had his heart broken and that this made him defenseless and dangerous, so conveniently incautious for her purposes. She told him to keep it clean, but he’d live. She introduced herself but it was obviously not news to him.

“You know who I am,” she said.

“You’re the dogcatcher,” he said.

“Might I ask how you know that?”

“Small pond,” he said.

“Is your mother home right now?” she said.

“No.”

“Do you expect her?”

He shrugged.

“Is your sister in?” she said.

“My sister doesn’t go out.”

“Do you think I might talk to her?”

“She doesn’t talk.”

“That’s fine, I’d just like to say hello. If that’s okay.”

“Why do you want to meet Shelley?”

“Maybe I should come back when your mother is around.”

This bluff trumped the boy’s suspicion: he could not in good conscience make a choice that responsible.

Roman led her upstairs and she stopped short in the second-floor hallway.

“Is this your door?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“What’s this?” She pointed to the cross and serpent.

“It’s from a video game. Why do you ask?”

“Just thought it looked familiar.”

They continued to the attic. The door was closed and string music played softly from within. He knocked and said, “Shelley, we have a visitor who’d like to meet you.”

Chasseur noted the softening of his manner. He held some things sacred. There was a pause and then a loud scraping noise followed by several slow creaking steps. The knob turned and the door nosed open and Roman pushed it and entered. Chasseur followed. The music was coming from a computer; on the monitor was the dense text of an academic article on biomimetics. Roman stood off to the side, his sibling awkwardly before her.

Dr. Chasseur was legendary for keeping certain physiological responses in check—her fame within her unit in the Corps dramatically increased one poker night when she won the pot with a royal straight flush with no hint of a tell, and a first husband who would never hear a woman say “I love you” again without flinching. But it took the full exercise of her talents not to gasp out loud seeing the elephant in the room, hands like gloves with hands inside them nervously fussing the folds of her dress, that brute face and eyes so bright and clear and sad.

“This is Dr. Chasseur,” said Roman. “She’s here to take a bite out of the
vargulf
.”

She turned from the girl to the boy. “Excuse me?”

And she saw now his positioning was not accidental: he had strategically placed himself to cover an easel, but the outline was unmistakable. Ouroboros.

She looked back to Shelley with a smile and said, “I don’t mean to be rude, dear, but I think I need to have a word with your brother.”

A sound like a thousand lightly tapping fingers filled the attic: the rain had begun.

Roman and Chasseur went down to the living room and sat and she made her eyes into scalpels and cut him into very small pieces.

“Yes?” he said with badly feigned innocence.

She continued to look at him and he drank, uncomfortable.

“Roman, I’m going to ask you a few questions,” she said. “But before I do, there’s something I want you to do for me. I want you to think about what kind of person you want to be. I’m here because people are getting hurt, and the more honest you are with me the more it will help me do something about it. I want you to take a second and think about that, okay?”

Roman looked down at the glass in his hands. He set it on the coffee table and nodded.

“What is your association with Peter Rumancek?”

“We … hang out.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me about your relationship?”

Roman was quiet.

“Does Peter believe he is a werewolf?”

“No,” said Roman. “People just say that about him.”

“Do you have any idea why they would say those things?”

“They’re afraid of him. You should hear the things they say about us. I guess you have.”

“Do they have a reason to be afraid?”

“No. Peter would never hurt anyone.”

“Why did you go to the first murder site?”

The word hung in the air for a moment like a smoke ring before it dissipates.
Murder.

“I followed Peter.”

“What was Peter doing there?”

“Rubbernecking.”

“Did you dig up Lisa Willoughby?”

“No.”

She reached into her coat and produced her badge and set it facedown on the table.