Promise Not to Tell: A Novel (21 page)

“Into something more comfortable?” he asked, grinning slyly.

I combed my fingers through his hair and he leaned in, resting his head against my belly. He pulled up my shirt and began kissing me, gently at first, then running his tongue along the top of my jeans until I shivered, pulling away.

“I think you’re a little stoned on pain meds,” I told him. He reached out to pull me to him again, but I danced away, promising to be right back.

I carried a candle into the studio, shutting the door behind me. My mother had draped an old white sheet over the painting on the easel.

I moved closer, holding the candle out in front of me, hands trembling. When I pulled back that sheet, it would be like disrobing a child in her Halloween costume. I worried that it would be Del herself I’d find underneath. I looked at the sheet and swore I saw it move, rippling slightly in some breeze I didn’t feel.

It’s only a painting. Only a painting.

I reached forward, grabbed the sheet, and threw it back.

The flames were almost three-dimensional, hypnotic in shades of red, orange, yellow, blue, and purple. The shadowy figure in the corner was now a fully fleshed-out person who seemed at home in the flames. Like she was born of them. The girl my mother had painted in the corner was the exact likeness of Del.

She wore her yellow cowgirl shirt and blue corduroy pants with a thick leather belt—the outfit she had on the day she was murdered. Her gray-blue eyes stared out at me and she had a half smile on her face as the flames shot out around her, licking at her feet like hungry dogs. The sheriff ’s star was pinned to her chest, just above her hidden letter
M
.
M
for Mike. My own tattoo burned in response. I could almost hear Del saying the name out loud:
Desert Rose
. A pretty name for a pretty color.
Hello, Desert Rose
.

“Hello, Del,” I said to the painting, thinking if I could hear myself speak, the fear would lessen.

The flame of the candle I carried leaped up, illuminating the painting. Del’s face glowed, surrounded by the colorful, lively sea of flames my mother had painted. Then I heard a sound, a quiet laughter. It did not seem to come from the painting exactly, but from all around me—the walls, the windows, under the bed. The candle flame jumped back down, flickered, then was out, leaving me in complete darkness.

I knew I was no longer alone.

O
VER THE YEARS
, I’ve thought a lot about Patsy Marinelli—remembering her words on the night I told her about Del:
The dead can blame
. But mostly, what I’ve thought about is what finally became of the huge woman we all called Tiny.

I wasn’t there when it happened, but I arrived for my shift in time to see them taking her body out. The swing shift nurses told me their version of what had happened, and I filled in the details with what I read later in the log.

After dinner, Patsy went around saying good-bye to people. One of the nurses, humoring her, asked her where she was headed.
My husband’s coming for me
, Tiny said.
I’ll be gone soon
. And then she went into her room, closing the door behind her.

Poor Tiny
, the nurses said to one another.
Now she’s forgotten her husband is dead
.

During bed check at ten, they found Patsy Marinelli, blue-faced, eyes wide open. She’d choked to death on her own tongue.

The dead can blame.

I
FROZE IN THE DARKNESS
, waiting for my eyes to adjust. There was a faint glow coming from the window, but other than that small square, I was surrounded by utter blackness. The giggling got louder, more shrill. I thought of crying out for Nicky, but knew he’d have a difficult time getting to me, if he even heard me at all. Ron Mackenzie’s warning raced through my mind:
One potato, two potato, three potato, four / She’s coming after you now, better lock the door.

I took a step back, then another, and slowly turned toward the door, my arms in front of me, fingers groping out into nothingness. The air in the room was cool and getting cooler. It felt damp. The floor beneath me seemed to give, like I was walking on dirt. Like I was back in the root cellar. Del’s smell was all around me—damp, rotting potatoes and dirt. It filled my nose and throat until I imagined I could feel actual soil packed in there, stopping my breath.

I shuffled quickly to where I thought the door should be, but my hands found only the wall. I felt my way along it, to the left first, five paces, then back to the right. The wall felt like cold cement, not the smooth shiplapped pine I knew should be there. I remembered my first visit to the Griswolds’ root cellar—how when Del closed the door, I was sure she’d locked me in. I felt that same blind panic setting in.

When my hand found the brass doorknob at last, it was so cold it burned my palm. I pulled my shirtsleeve down and managed to turn it. I twisted the knob to the left and pulled, but the door would not open, as if it had been locked from the outside, but I knew the door had no lock.

Was someone holding it shut? My mother getting back at me for locking her in her room each night, or Nicky maybe, in an effort to prove that his sister’s ghost existed? But the laughter…

I pounded on the door while my mind struggled to give a plausible explanation for what was happening, but all I came up were wild excuses.

“Nicky! Mom!” I screamed. “Let me out! Open the door! Jesus Christ, open the door!”

I put my ear against the door, listening for the sound of someone coming to my rescue, but there was only Del’s laugh. It seemed to be coming from everywhere. It was the laugh of a trickster. An
I’m gonna get you
laugh. The laugh I’d heard as Del rolled on the ground the last day of school.

The dead can blame.

I rattled the door handle, collapsed against the wood, sobbing, quietly begging now.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please let me out.”

I wasn’t making excuses or inventing plausible scenarios now. Del had me. She had come back just as Nicky tried to warn me she would. Just as Opal had been insisting all along. I leaned against the jammed door feeling that old familiar feeling that whatever happened next would be up to Del. She was making the rules. There was no use fighting the inevitable. My shoulders sagged.

“Okay Del,” I said. “You’ve got me. What now?”

The laughter stopped abruptly, like a switch had been thrown, but the thick smell of soil and rot intensified.

The door swung inward with great force, sending me toppling to the floor. I slid and hit the legs of the easel, and the painting crashed down on top of me—I shoved it away, a bit desperately, squeamishly. Light spilled into the room. Beside me lay the painting of Del, her eyes on me still. I scrambled away from her, butt sliding across the floor, when I realized I was in the shadow of whoever—or whatever—had opened the door.

It took a lot of willpower to turn my head to face the doorway.

When I looked up, it was not Del’s ghost I saw hovering over me. It was my mother who stood in the doorway, grinning. She had on a calico housedress and rubber galoshes. Her hands wore their gauze bandages, thickly padded, like two bright white boxing gloves. Pinned to her chest was Del’s old sheriff ’s star.

I stood up to face her, but took a step back when I realized the rotten potato smell was now coming from her.

“I know you!” my mother exclaimed in Del’s voice. She rocked back on her heels. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, Deputy. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” She turned, marched to the front door, and swung it open. I stepped through the living room, following her at a safe distance. A flurry of spinning snow let itself in through the open door, her own private storm. She walked out into the dark.

“Ma! Ma, where are you going? Get back in here. You’ll freeze to death!”

“Catch me if you can, Desert Rose. Catch me if you can!”

“Ma! Wait!”

I hurried to the front door and pulled my boots on. I snatched my parka from the coat peg and the flashlight from its hook on the wall.

“What’s going on, Kate?”

Nicky had hobbled in from the kitchen and stood awkwardly balanced on his good foot and the two crutches.

“My mom just took off. Only I don’t think it’s her, exactly. I think she’s Del.”

“Your mom is Del?” Nicky squinted at me—now the great believer wore a look of doubt on his face.

I didn’t have time to explain.

“Nicky, just stay here, okay? And lock the door. If she comes back alone, don’t let her in. Wait for me.”

“Don’t let your mom in?”

“It’s not
her,
Nicky.”

I zipped up my parka and stepped out into the snow, clicking the flashlight on.

“Lock the door behind me.”

The snowflakes stung my face. I swung the beam of light around the cabin and along the tree line but saw no trace of my mother. There were only her footprints, leading exactly the way I knew they would.

I felt for Nicky’s gun in my pocket, praying I wouldn’t have to use it, but feeling reassured by its presence. Would I shoot my own mother if I had to? Did it still count as matricide if I was actually gunning for a little girl ghost? And how could you kill someone who was already dead?

I started off toward the path, and when I got to the boulder at the head of it, I turned right and began my journey down the old trail once more. Surrounded by the forest, the darkness deepened. My feet slipped, and the snowy night just seemed to absorb the flashlight’s beam. I could see about two feet in front of me.

“Ma?” I called out into the dark. But no, that wasn’t who I chasing, was it? “Del? Del, wait up! Wait up, Del!”

My feet shuffled into a slow snow jog, doing more sliding than running. I fell once, then twice. The third time the flashlight flew away from me and I had to crawl on my hands and knees into prickers to get it back. As I rose to my feet the wind kicked up and blew the light powdery snow in gusts. Trees groaned. I kept my eyes on the tracks in front of me, illuminated by the flashlight’s beam.

Was she taking me to my death? Had Del waited all these years, plotting and planning her revenge? Were Opal and Nicky right all along? Was Del Tori Miller’s killer? Del in the form of my vacant, heavily medicated mother? My mother, who just happened to have bloody, leaf-littered bandages and to be wielding a paring knife the morning after the murder.

We were close now. So close. I hurried along through the woods, keeping my light on the footprints in front of me, sure I would lose my way without them. The snow was falling hard and fast, and the wind was blowing it right into my face. I had to keep stopping to wipe the snow out of my eyes. It froze on my lashes, blurring the already dim view I had.

My mother’s tracks turned right at the fork and went in a straight line toward the old leaning cabin. But as I squinted down at the snowy forest floor, I saw that her tracks joined two other sets of footprints that had come from the other direction, from the Griswolds’ field: one smallish set, one very large. They were filling in quickly, and crisscrossed each other, turning here and there from individual prints into dragging streaks.

“Hurry, Desert Rose!” my mother’s voice came floating back out of the darkness, muffled by the snow. “There isn’t much time!”

I looked down at the footprints in the snow and suddenly understood.

Del wasn’t taking me to my death.

She was taking me to save Opal.

I made out the shadow of the cabin just ahead of me. Its lean seemed dangerous. I stopped and ran my flashlight beam along the front of it. There was a soft glow from inside and the windows and open door formed a frightening, crooked face. I saw no movement, but heard voices inside. Then a muffled scream.

I sprinted up to the open doorway—or was it a mouth?—and stepped inside.

My mother was beside the old potbellied stove, looking up at the loft where an old oil lamp swung from a hook on the ceiling. On the floor of the loft, Opal was laid out on her back, her hands bound by thick cord; another length of rope was looped around her pale neck. She had a handkerchief stuffed into her mouth. Her eyes were bulging with terror. And straddling her, holding the two ends of loose cord in his hands, was Zack.

O
H, LOOK
! C
OMPANY
!” Zack said, turning away from Opal to study us, but still gripping the ends of the cord like a Boy Scout ready to show off his knot-tying skills.

“Jean, Jean, Jean. What on
earth
are you doing out in this weather?” He loosened his grip on the rope, giving it more slack. “And Kate, shame on you for letting your mother run around on a night like this in just a nightgown. The poor dear will catch her death.”

But she’s not my mother. She’s Del.

Little by little, I was putting things together, stringing clues like bits of junk on one of Lazy Elk’s old necklaces. Like the one I stole and gave to Del. The only gift I ever gave her.

A friend of Nicky’s gave Del the star. Someone special.

Zack was looking down at us ruefully, shaking his head like a disappointed—but not altogether surprised—mother. Opal seized the opportunity in his moment of inattention—she thrashed her legs fiercely, bucked with her whole body, trying to dislodge him. For an instant I thought she would free herself, roll off the edge of the loft, and fall the eight or ten feet to the floor below.
We forgot the mattresses
, I thought crazily. But Zack barely budged and simply readjusted himself, setting his knee down in the center of her chest to keep her still. She let out a quiet
ooof
on impact.

All that practice flying and falling; the jumps from the hayloft, the way she and her bike were airborne going over the ramps she built. Her obsession with stunts that defied gravity and the wing-walking women who hung from rope ladders and did target practice in the sky. And now there Opal was, pinned flat on her back with no tricks up her sleeve, no one to save her but me.

I touched the gun in my pocket, felt for the safety, and released it. The gun was unyielding cold metal. I closed my palm around it, placed my finger on the trigger. Deputy Desert Rose was back in town.

I’d never had the chance to save Del. Thirty years later, she was giving me the chance to save Opal from the same fate.

“Tell me one thing, Zack,” I said. “Why Opal?”

I thought maybe if I could get him talking, he’d let down his guard and I could make my move, though I wasn’t sure just what that move might be.

Zack gave me a greasy little smile and paused for a minute. Just when I was sure he wasn’t going to answer, he spoke.

“Little Miss Light-fingers here borrowed the wrong thing.”

Ah, it all made sense now. Here was the final missing piece. It had nothing to do with Opal’s being related to Del. It was all about Opal’s borrowing.

“Del’s star,” I guessed.

“Ding, ding, ding! Give that lady a prize,” Zack called down, looking truly gleeful. “Opal found it in my desk drawer the day she was waiting for me with the cookies. Not only did she take it, but she actually pinned it to her mother’s jacket and walked around wearing it! The little bitch was taunting me, playing games. It was just like Del all over again.”

“So you decided to kill her and get the star back before someone recognized it,” I said, filling in the rest of the all-too-familiar story. “But Tori was wearing the jacket and you got her by mistake. But at least you got the star.”

And poor Opal kept going back to the woods to search for it, never realizing it was such a crucial piece of the puzzle. She just wanted to get it back to your drawer before you noticed it was missing.

“They really did look alike, don’t you think?” Zack sighed a bit. “And that dreadful jacket; yes, I admit I was misled by it. But now there’s a little piece of Tori keeping Del’s
M
company. I’ve kept that little piece of Del next to my heart all these years.”

“Inside the Wheel of Life,” I said, sick at the thought of that tiny square of skin held prisoner inside the silver wheel by the God of Death himself.

I remembered the huge-eyed faces with long necks in the lower right quadrant of the Wheel of Life—the hungry ghosts. What could make you hungrier than to have some crucial piece of yourself missing, held hostage by the man who killed you? Then to have that same man threaten the life of your sister, who you’ve been watching over for twelve years. Del was hungry all right. Hungry enough to find a way back.

I looked over at my mother, her white bandages like boxing gloves at her sides, Del’s star gleaming in the lamplight. The talisman that I now understood helped bring her back and keep her here, in my mother’s borrowed body. It was an anchor to her old life, to the physical world.

The increasing amounts of medication we’d been giving my mother had been working all along. My mother
had
been tranquilized. It was just that the deeper she went, the more room she made for Del—the medication left her body flashing a bright red
vacancy
sign.

“How did you get my mother to cover for you?” I asked. “She told the police she was with you the afternoon Del was killed. Surely she didn’t know the truth.”

Zack smiled down at my mother. “I told her I’d been with Nicky. She knew enough about my relationship with him to understand why I would want to lie.”

Just then, as if on cue, Nicky tottered in on his crutches. He took in the scene with a narcotic haze in his eyes and said, “What is this? Zack? Kate? Would somebody please tell me what the hell is going on?”

“Hello, loverboy. We were just talking about you,” Zack called down.

“The professor here was just telling us how he used your relationship with him to convince my mother to give him an alibi,” I said.

“Alibi?” Nicky asked.

“He was also telling us how he’s kept a scrap of Del’s skin inside his Wheel of Life,” I said. “That
M
’s been right there around his neck the whole time. Now he’s got a piece of Tori, too.”

Nicky squinted up at Zack. “You?
You
killed Del? But me and you, we…I thought…
Jesus
…” His voice trailed off into a soft hiss, like the last air out of a deflating balloon.

“Poor Nick. You were just part of the package. The red ribbon on top. Your sister was the box of cherries.”

He tightened his grip on the cord in his hands and looked down at Opal the way he must have looked at Del. Maybe he
was
seeing Del.

“She was too good for you all,” Zack said. “I was going to take her away from her squalid little life: day after day of digging in those godforsaken fields, her fingers always cut open and bruised; listening to those stupid schoolyard Potato Girl rhymes; going to sleep at night only to wake up and find her daddy beside her with his pants down. I was going to save her. But she ruined it.”

“I understand, Zack,” I said. “You loved her. What you had was special—that’s why you gave her the star. But then she got that tattoo….” I shrugged. “You really had no choice. But Zack, that was
Del
. There’s no need to punish Opal. Drop the rope and let her go.”

“Oh, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said. “This little bitch is going to join her sister.”

Opal’s eyes widened as the truth was revealed at last. But she didn’t have much time for processing.

“No!” Nicky screamed and began crutching his way to the ladder as fast as he could.

Zack yanked on the cord, lifting Opal’s head off the floor. She kicked and thrashed as she struggled for air and I finally got a horrifying glimpse at what Del’s final moments were like.

I pulled the gun out of my pocket and lined up my target just as Nicky had taught me to do all those years ago.

I squeezed the trigger easily, naturally. There was not even a second of doubt—I was going to do the one thing I’ve wished for all my life.

At last, I could save the girl.

I
CLIMBED UP INTO THE LOFT
in what felt like slow motion, thinking of all the times I’d gone up as a child, hurrying behind Del and Nicky. I thought I could still smell our cigarette smoke, hear the
thunk
of the knife hitting the target on the wall. The knife Del used to cut into our fingers, mixing our blood, making us bound not just in life, but even in death. Blood sisters.

I stepped around Zack, kneeled down, took the now slack cord from around Opal’s neck, and then untied her hands and feet. She let out several wracking gasps when I pulled the wadded-up handkerchief from her mouth.

“You’re okay,” I told her. “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to get you out of here in just a minute.”

Then I turned to Zack, whose body was curled in the rough shape of a question mark. I didn’t need to check for a pulse to know he was gone, but my fingers felt for the carotid artery just the same and found only cool, damp skin. There was surprisingly little blood and the hole in his chest looked small, reminding me of the dove Del had shot all those years ago and the way she pulled back the feathers, covering the entrance wound with her finger.

This man was my mother’s lover
, I thought. He used to make her laugh. Back in the tepee. Back when we all believed that utopia was something you could create.

I put my hand on the Wheel of Life pendant and coaxed it gently over the dead professor’s head. It was surprisingly light, considering its size and what it held. The God of Death grimaced; the hungry ghosts seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

I helped Opal down the ladder, holding the Wheel of Life in my right hand. I sat the trembling girl down on one of the moth-eaten cots and carried the pendant to my mother, who accepted it with a grin and pressed it to her chest, just over her heart.

There was so much I wanted to ask, so much I wanted to say, but it was Del who spoke.

“I reckon we’re even now,” Del’s voice said. I caught the moldering scent of damp places and rotting potatoes on her breath. “You’re still my deputy.”

“Always,” I promised. “Cross my heart.”

And to prove it, I unbuttoned my blouse and tore the gauze off. There it was: my own secret in black ink, red and puffy at the edges, right above my heart.

My mother smiled then closed her eyes, as Del whispered my name one final time: “Desert Rose.”

The Wheel of Life slipped from my mother’s fingers, hitting the old pine floor with a dull
clunk
.

A familiar look of confusion swept across my mother’s strangely placid face.

“Katydid?” she said, her eyes wide open.

And just like that, Del was gone.