Promise Not to Tell: A Novel (12 page)

“I went for a quick walk. I was gone only twenty minutes, a half hour at the most.” She shot me an exasperated look and I knew she was right—my mother could do a lot of damage in half an hour.

But would she come back with a knife this time? Dried blood on her bandages?

“Come on, we’ve got to find her. I think she went out to the road.”

I jumped into Raven’s Blazer, self-consciously pulling my long coat closed to cover my pajamas.

“I thought I heard Magpie,” I told her, deciding not to mention the footprints. “Opal wasn’t out in the woods this morning, was she?”

“Jesus, Kate. Of course not. She was up at six and at the bus stop by six forty-five.”

I tried to picture the size of Opal’s feet and the more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself she couldn’t have made those tracks. They would have had to start at the big barn. These tracks seemed to begin and end at the old cabin.

Just some kid Nicky slipped five bucks. Some kid who had a talent for levitation. Maybe she swung her way to the cabin and back on tree limbs, Tarzan-style.

Raven and I wheeled out of the driveway, following what could’ve been my mother’s tracks through the slush. They headed out of New Hope and onto Bullrush Hill Road, where we lost them. Raven continued down the road, both of us desperately scanning the woods on either side.

“Kate, this is exactly why she can’t be on her own. I brought you some numbers. People to call about long-term care. There’s a facility in St. Johnsbury that would be perfect.”

“She doesn’t want to go to a home.”

“I know. I know she doesn’t. But you’re a nurse, for Christ’s sake. You must understand the situation. She’s not going to get any better. There’s this woman who teaches at the college—Meg Hammerstein. She wrote a book on dementia and runs a memory clinic for Alzheimer’s patients. I put her name and number in there for you, too. You should look her up.”

Raven was driving too fast. I strained to look into the brushy landscape rushing by. A snowshoe hare zigzagged across the road and into the woods. White as a ghost. Were ghosts white? Casper was white. White and harmless. Besides, there was no such thing as ghosts. Only desperate men playing elaborate games to make you believe. Damn him.

“It’s got so that your mother’s a danger to herself and others,” Raven continued. “That fire could have been a real disaster. As it was, we just lost the tepee. But what if there had been someone asleep in there? What if Opal or I had been in the tepee? It was the middle of the night. It was only dumb luck that Opal was sleeping at Tori’s and I was at my boyfriend’s.”

“My mother didn’t see anyone on the way to the tepee that night, did she?” I asked.

Raven took her eyes off the road and flashed me a look of disbelief. She glanced from my face to my pajamas and shook her head.

“Kate, it was three in the morning. Gabriel saw the flames from his window. He thought I was in there. He came running over in his underwear and found only your mother. She struggled with him. She bit his arm when he pulled her out—like she didn’t want to go.”

Now it was my turn to shake my head, not in disagreement, but just because something didn’t quite fit.

“She keeps telling me there was someone in there with her.”

“Sure she does. She’s got people with her all the time, Kate—dead people, people she hasn’t seen in ten years, young people who are now old. It’s part of her illness. She can’t differentiate between now and then. She can’t tell who’s there and who isn’t.”

Maybe it’s catching,
I thought, remembering my wild goose chase this morning.

Raven slammed on the brakes when we got to the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. The Blazer skidded in the snow. The Griswolds’ farm was on our left. The
EGGS HAY PIGS POTATOS
sign swayed in the wind by the side of the road. I thought of the pigs, how badly I once feared their razor-sharp teeth.

“Damn it!” Raven pounded the steering wheel with her gloved hand. “Where the hell is she?”

R
AVEN AND
I
LOOKED ALL MORNING
for my mother. My penance for losing her was running all over town in my pajamas, asking everyone we came across if they’d seen her. Raven parked the Blazer and she and I went door to door—you haven’t by any chance noticed an old lady in a nightgown traipsing through your flowerbeds this morning? Gabriel searched the grounds at New Hope. Jim at the general store called the state police for us, and got some volunteer firefighters together to search through the woods between New Hope and town. Raven and I finally returned to my mother’s house to wait for word, only to discover that the phones were down again. The lines on Bullrush Hill seemed to go dead every time the wind blew or a few flakes of snow or ice fell. Sometimes they’d be out for days for no apparent reason at all. It had been this way as long as I could remember.

I put on some clothes while Raven started a pot of soup—she said she had to keep busy or she’d go nuts. I stood on the front steps and opened the pack of cigarettes I’d picked up at Haskie’s, knowing how absurd it was. I haven’t smoked since college. I’m a nurse. I jog many miles a week through the rainy hills of Seattle, only occasionally treat myself to a non-fat frozen yogurt, always choose the baked potato over the fries. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to be calmed down by slicing up a bunch of carrots and rutabagas.

Opal surprised us by coming home from school early.

“What’s wrong?” Raven asked.

“Headache.”

“Again?”

“I’m fine, Mom. I just needed to come home.”

Raven filled her in on my mother’s escape, placing the blame heavily on me, which I willingly accepted. Opal offered to help with the soup and pulled up the sleeves of her sweater before getting started.

“My watch!” I said.

Opal looked puzzled, then touched it, smiled self-consciously, and took it off, handing it to me without explanation—almost as if she hadn’t realized it was there. Like it had suddenly materialized from the ether as soon as she entered the cabin.

“Uh, I think I’m gonna go to the big barn and lie down,” she said, more to Raven than to me. In fact, she was studiously avoiding eye contact with me.

Raven nodded and Opal slunk away, shoulders hunched, eyes on the floor.

“She borrows things,” Raven explained once Opal had gone. “She only does it to people she likes, so count yourself lucky. She would have given the watch back eventually. She doesn’t mean any harm. Most of the time, I don’t even think she’s aware she’s doing it.”

Now it was my turn to nod. Kleptomania with a touch of amnesia thrown in for fun. Add death threats from ghosts to that and some psychiatrist was going to have a field day with this kid.

When had Opal taken my watch? Surely I would have noticed if she’d done it during our visit last night. Did she sneak back into the studio once I was asleep? Was she to blame for my feeling this morning that someone had been in the room, watching me sleep? And had she come to visit before? If so, what, if anything, had she taken?

“I know she’s becoming quite attached to you,” Raven said. “But I have to ask again that you please not encourage these ghost fantasies. I don’t want Del Griswold talked about. Not in any context. Have I made myself clear?”

“As crystal,” I said, buckling my watch on tight.

A
ROUND NOON
, we heard a car pull up in the drive and rushed out to see Nicky Griswold helping my mother out of his truck.

Raven ran to her and gave her a suffocating hug.

“Jean, you gave us such a fright!”

“Had to get some eggs,” my mother said. She looked at me and winked. “I know you,” she said.

Raven put her arm around my mother and led her into the house.

“Where’d you find her?” I asked Nicky.

“She was walking around in the woods out behind our old place.”

“And what were
you
doing there?” Grateful as I was that he’d delivered my mother safely home, I was unable to hide the accusing tone in my voice.

“Just poking around. I had this crazy dream last night that the old cabin burned down. Someone was playing with matches.”

This was too much.

“Yeah, I bet you did.” I couldn’t hold back any longer. “Someone was playing with matches all right. That was a pretty strange idea of a joke, Nicky.”

He looked bewildered.

“Look, I just went out there to see if the cabin was okay, and I came across Jean in her nightie and slippers. I brought her straight back here. I knew you’d be worried sick.”

“Yeah, and what about yesterday? Were you out there yesterday, too? Is that when you did it? Was it before or after you talked to me? And where’d you find the kid who left the tracks this morning?”

He shook his head slowly, held his big hands up in a let’s-all-calm-down gesture. He was going to do his best to make me feel as if I were the one who’d gone off the deep end. I couldn’t believe I’d felt so drawn to him the day before—I was ready to throttle him now.

“Kate, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sounds like you’re the one whose been bit by the Wild Turkey.”

“Find Zack, Deputy!
That’s what I’m talking about. The message you left for me in the cabin. Pretty twisted, Nicky. I don’t like being played with.”

“I didn’t leave any message in the cabin. I haven’t been to the cabin in months. Find Zack? That’s crazy. Zack’s right here in town. He teaches up at the college. We go out for a beer now and then.”

Nicky was a convincing liar and it made me furious. I took a ragged breath.

“I appreciate your bringing my mother home, but I’d like you to leave now.”

He looked like a dog that had been kicked in the belly. I almost regretted being so harsh.

“Look,” he said, chewing on his lip before continuing. “There’s something else. Something I found in the woods before I ran into your mother.”

He walked around to the back of his truck and reached down into the bed to pull out a bundle wrapped in red cloth. I moved in for a closer look, suspicious but curious. Raven opened the door, came down the steps to join us, and reported that my mother was in dry clothes eating lunch.

“What’s that?” Raven asked as she stared at the wadded-up flannel shirt in Nicky’s arms.

He lifted up a corner and we saw a tuft of fur. I reached out and pulled the shirt back the rest of the way, letting out a stifled cry.

“Jesus!”

It was Magpie. Her throat was slit clean through, the white fur on her chest soaked in blood. Her body was soft and limp, the blood still damp. She hadn’t been dead long. I jerked my hand away and rubbed it clean on my jeans.

“Jesus,” I said again.

“Your mother’s, isn’t she?” Nicky asked.

I nodded, glancing at Raven. Her eyes were huge.

“You think it was a fisher? Or a coyote?” Raven asked.

“It wasn’t any animal.” Nicky shook his head slowly. “Not a four-legged one, anyway.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wadded-up red bandanna. He opened it up and took out a Swiss Army knife. I recoiled. It looked an awful lot like
my
knife. But they were common things. Red knives with a large blade and small, bottle opener, screwdriver, corkscrew. And
my
knife was tucked safely in my pocketbook, wasn’t it?

“That cut on her throat is clean and straight, and I found this next to the body. Far as I know, fisher cats don’t need Swiss Army knives.”

Raven shivered. “Where’d you find her?”

“Out in the woods, along the path that runs between our old place and here.”

“Wait a minute,” Raven said, “isn’t that where you went for your walk this morning, Kate?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t see anything. I thought I heard the cat out there, so I went to look.” I sounded unconvincing, even to myself. I knew better than to throw in the minor details of the child-sized footprints and giggles I heard in the cabin.

Raven folded the old shirt back over Magpie and took the cat from Nicky’s arms, carrying the wrapped bundle over to her Blazer, where she laid it down carefully in the backseat.

“I’ll bury her,” she said. “We shouldn’t tell Jean. We can’t let her see this. It would wreck her. And I want that knife, Nicky.”

Nicky handed her the Swiss Army knife, nodded at both of us—his wordless good-bye—got in his truck, and backed out of the driveway. Raven followed, saying she’d be back later to check on my mother.

“Don’t leave her alone again,” she said, her words more a warning than a request.

I stood a minute, listening to the car sounds fade. As I turned to go back into the house, my mother appeared in the doorway, holding a torn piece of bread topped with sliced turkey and an egg-sized glob of mustard.

“Where’d he go?” My mother asked. “I brought him a sandwich. Such a nice man. If you weren’t already married, I’d say you should settle down with him.”

“Nicky’s a turd, Ma.”

“Who?”

“Nicky Griswold. The man who brought you home. The man you made the sandwich for.”

My mother nodded serenely.

“Such a nice man. His sister was killed in the woods. Poor thing. They slit her throat, you know.”

No. Del was strangled. It’s the cat with the slit throat.

She took a bite of the mangled sandwich and wandered back inside.

“Poor little thing,” she mumbled, her mouth full of turkey and bread.

I
T WAS THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL
, June 16, that my great plan backfired, as the plans of unpopular fifth graders desperate to make friends are doomed to backfire. I remember the date clearly, even now, because it was later that evening that Del’s body was found. These two events—my betrayal and her murder—have become so strongly linked in my mind that it is like one could not have existed without the other. Other than her killer, I was the last person to see Del alive. And when I last saw her, she was running from me. Running as fast as her scrawny legs with their scabby kneecaps would carry her.

In those last weeks before both my fifth grade year and Del Griswold’s life ended, things at New Hope were coming to a head. Life in the tepee had been far from peaceful. Lazy Elk, it turned out, was the father of Doe’s baby, Raven. Mimi was the one to tell my mother, who—instead of tearfully, yet with quiet dignity, thanking Mimi for her honesty—immediately accused Mimi of being a meddler and rumormonger who couldn’t stand to see anyone else happy. Mimi stalked out of the tepee, with my mother shouting after her, “You don’t know anything
about
it!” Soon after that unhappy scene, Lazy Elk slunk through the tepee’s flap, sent, no doubt, by Mimi or even Gabriel himself. He admitted that, yes, there had been one, or perhaps three or four, indiscretions with Doe, some time ago, but they had just been having a good time you know, maybe they’d smoked a little, and it didn’t have anything to do with his feelings for his Jeanie-Bird. Jeanie-Bird wasn’t having any of it. She pummeled his chest, sobbing, saying,
Liar!
over and over. Then she told him to get the hell out.

There was a heated community meeting in the big barn that evening that went on past midnight. Doe’s boyfriend, Shawn, was not in attendance—apparently he had hopped into his battered El Dorado and set off for California that morning as soon as he had learned Raven wasn’t his. I was sent out after the first hour, when things began to turn nasty. I listened from time to time outside the door to the raised voices, the pointed accusations. Doe and my mother went at each other—Lazy Elk attempted to intervene, but they both turned on him. Everyone, it seemed, had some choice words for Lazy Elk. The problem, announced Gabriel again and again, was one of deception. No one was judging Lazy Elk for sleeping with Doe—after all, they were consenting adults, and nobody at New Hope bought into the patriarchal trip of obligatory monogamy, of ownership of one person’s body by another. The issue was that he had lied to everyone about it, and had insisted that Doe cooperate in the lie. It was the lying he was on trial for and, in the end, found guilty of. The decision that came near one in the morning was unanimous—Lazy Elk was no longer welcome at New Hope. So the next day, Mark Lubofski packed his clothes, his table, and his jewelry-making supplies into his VW bus and got an apartment in town. No one was sure why he hadn’t gone farther. He wanted to be close to the baby, some speculated. He still loved my mother and hoped she would take him back, was what a few murmured to one another.

I subscribed to the latter theory. In the days following his banishment from the hill, I would ride my bike into town and circle around his apartment building. Once, I caught him watching me from an upstairs window. I signaled for him to come down, and he just gave an awkward wave, then closed the curtain.

Before Lazy Elk moved out of the tepee for good, I stole something from him. It was a necklace he’d made from bits of carved wood, beer can pop tops, and a shotgun shell. I kept it under my pillow, my own talisman for calling him back to us.

Just days after Lazy Elk left, my mother took New Hope’s youngest member (not counting myself and baby Raven)—nineteen-year-old Zack, the college dropout—as her lover. My mother was forty-one, the same age I am now.

It was his heartbreak song that did it. He came by the tepee with his guitar after Lazy Elk had moved out the last of his things and sang my mother a song (an original this time, not one of Dylan’s)—“I wrote it thinkin’ about what happened to you, Jean”—about how being wronged was no reason to close down your heart for good. I stood behind him and made gagging motions, trying to catch my mother’s glance and crossing my eyes. But my mother, with tears in her eyes, hugged him tightly for so long that I thought she might never let go. I couldn’t believe it.

“It’s just a dumb song,” I said as she clutched him.

She flashed me a look over his shoulder, banishing me from the tepee as well. I stomped out. When I came back later, Zack’s guitar was next to the closed curtain that surrounded her bed.

“Just a dumb song,” I mumbled as I got into bed and clung to the necklace.

Zack, unlike Lazy Elk, seemed to have no expectations of me. He did not try to treat me like a daughter or go out of his way to befriend me. He did not take me on walks through the woods or tell me bedtime stories about Trickster Coyote. Zack barely acknowledged me, coming and going from my mother’s bed like a thief with a nervous little smile on his face. If I stared at him long enough, I could make his ears glow red.

But the thing I remember most about their brief affair was how he made my mother laugh. I don’t know what he said or did, but night after night, I would hear my mother’s laughter from behind the curtain enclosing her bed. She would laugh quietly at first, a little embarrassed maybe, then her laughter became louder—uncontrollable, hysterical, almost weeping. And beneath this, I would hear the sound of his whispers, the rustle of sheets.

It was also around this time that my mother began to sew. Needlework was my mother’s first foray into the world of arts and crafts. After this, she would try weaving, pottery, and, finally, painting, which would stick, but in the beginning, my mother sewed.

She set up a little sewing table in the area of the tepee where Lazy Elk had made his jewelry—as if she had to fill that space somehow, make it her own. Her first project was a pillow with cross-stitching:
A Happy Home Is a Home of Love.
It seemed a funny message considering all that had happened in her own home. And a funny picture: a carefully stitched, square white house with neat blue curtains and perfectly symmetrical trees in the yard. I tried to imagine the tiny family you might see if you could open the door or pull back the curtain. I knew they’d be a different family than we were. The kids would have a mother
and
a father. A dog maybe. Hot running water. Steak dinners. The tiny people who lived in that house had nothing to do with our lives, is what I thought back then, at ten years old, watching my mother sew.

Sewing seemed to keep my mother happy, to give her something to help fill her days. And at night, she had Zack. After dinner, he’d play his guitar while she sewed, then they’d give each other a conspiratorial look and rush off to bed.

Desperate, I rode my bike down and left a note in Lazy Elk’s mailbox, telling him about Zack and that he needed to come home and make things right before it was too late. He never came. I guess he figured it was already too late, Zack or no Zack.

When I filled Del in on the saga of Droopy Moose (deciding to leave out the part about Zack) she laughed and said he must not have been so droopy after all. Not the important parts at least. I pretended to get the joke. I also pretended that it didn’t matter that he was gone. No skin off my butt. He was just a dumb hippie with a goofy name anyway.

T
HE DAY BEFORE SCHOOL LET OUT
, I went to the field looking for Del in the afternoon, carrying the necklace I’d taken from Lazy Elk to give to her. No longer believing it held the power to bring him back, I wanted it gone. I was hoping to use it as a sort of conciliatory gesture: Del had not been entirely satisfied with the job I’d done spying on Ellie and Sam.

My double agent scheme had been going as planned for weeks. I simply told both sides what they wanted to hear, sprinkling the made-up stories with bits of truth. To win and keep the friendships of Ellie and Samantha, I reported that yes, it was true that the Potato Girl rode her pony naked—I even told them he was called Spitfire. I told them her bedroom was really the root cellar and that she knew how to shoot a gun.

I told Del that Ellie wore a retainer at night, that Samantha had an older sister who was retarded (both true), and that they were both secretly in love with school bad boy Artie Paris (this, of course, was pure fiction, but Del ate it up).

In the last week of school, both sides were desperate for the ultimate dirt. They seemed unimpressed with whatever tidbits I brought them. I was afraid of losing my hold on Ellie and Sam, who demanded that I bring them something really good. And Del was unmoved when I told her that both Ellie and Sam had had lice, warts, pinworm. I had to pull out the big guns.

So I told Del that Ellie had invited Artie over to her house and they ended up kissing. Del didn’t believe me—she rolled her eyes, shook her head, and said simply,
No way.
I worked hard to convince her, making up details as I went along: they were in Ellie’s basement, Artie forced Ellie into it at first, then she realized it wasn’t so bad and gave in. I even told Del that Ellie, who didn’t know any better, worried that she’d gotten pregnant from the kissing and was always asking her friends if they thought she was starting to show.

“Stuupid!” Del exclaimed, and I wasn’t sure if she meant my story or Ellie thinking she was pregnant.

And to Ellie and Sam, I told a half truth, simply because I’d run out of lies. I told them I knew Del had a tattoo.

“No way!” they squealed. “What of?”

We were standing in our usual meeting place, under the monkey bars. Other kids walked by, and I felt warm all over, proud and glowing to be seen talking with Ellie and Sam day after day. Only when Del watched us did I feel the cool pangs of guilt and regret.

“I’m not sure,” I told them. “I only saw the edge of it when she was changing once.”

“Are you sure?”

“Swear to god. It’s right on her chest.”

“It’s probably a potato!” Sam suggested.

“The part I saw was all black,” I told them.

“A
rotten
potato!” Ellie cackled.

What I didn’t know, what never occurred to me, so secure had I become in my role as informer, was that a boy named Travis Greene, who had a crush on Ellie, would also be told about the tattoo, and that he in turn would tell most of his friends, including Tommy Ducette, the fat kid and number-one henchman of Artie Paris. Nor did I know that on the last day of school, Artie Paris had something planned—his good-bye gift to Number 5 Elementary School and its graduating class of fifth graders.

W
HEN
I
COULD NOT FIND
D
EL
in the fields or root cellar, I decided she must be up at the cabin. I began to make my way from the root cellar to the woods, Lazy Elk’s necklace tucked into my pocket, but was stopped by the excitement in the pigpen. One pig, it seemed, had gone crazy.

It trotted in circles around the pen, squealing—screaming, really. When another got in its way, the crazy pig would lash out, butting against it, biting.

I stood, pressed against the fence, trying to get its attention.

“It’s okay, Pig,” I said. “Come on now, Pig.”

But the pig just ran harder, faster, looking like it would take flight, like it thought if it just could run fast enough, it might be able to escape.

“You get away from them pigs now!”

I jerked away from the fence and turned to see Del’s father standing before me, a man I’d only glimpsed from a distance. Ralph Griswold was a tall man in dirty bib overalls, with large square shoulders and a boxy jaw covered in dark stubble. His black hair peeked out from under his cap and was just long enough to cover his ears. He had Del’s pale gray-blue eyes.

About the only thing on earth that Del was afraid of was her own daddy and there he was, three feet away from me.

“I was…just looking for Del.” As I spoke, I noticed the man’s hands, big as boards. In his right hand, he carried a large pistol.

“Well she ain’t in the pigpen is she? Now get! You’re worrying my pigs!” He waved his hand at me, the one that did not hold the gun. I took off running and when I got to the path, I heard a single shot, but did not dare to turn around.

I was out of breath when I made it to the clearing. My legs felt like rubber bands. I heard voices from inside the cabin and called out as I approached.

“Del? Nicky?”

My shouting was followed by silence, then I watched as a familiar figure hurried through the leaning cabin’s doorway. It was Zack—the boy who made my mother laugh herself to sleep each night. He wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans with holes at the knees. He was barefoot, just like always. Zack had not worn shoes since I met him, except for a pair of red rubber boots he slipped on to go out in snow. I imagined my mother’s sheets must have been filthy from the dirt he carried in on his feet.

“Hey,” he said when he saw me. It was the greeting he always gave, whether he was sitting down opposite me at community dinner in the big barn or crawling out from behind my mother’s curtain first thing in the morning.

“What are
you
doing here?” I asked, truly perplexed. I watched as his ears reddened. I felt unsettled, like my two worlds had somehow slipped together without my knowledge or consent. I would’ve been just as surprised to find Del shoveling a loaf of bread into the oven at New Hope.

“Nothin’.” He shrugged, looked around the clearing as though I bored him. “Just out walking. See ya, Katydid.” And with this, he was headed back down the path with his usual tall man loping gait. First, Zack invaded my life in the tepee, now here he was at Del’s. Who did he think he was?

I stepped inside the cabin and heard rustling from the loft.