Shadow Season (13 page)

FINN MOVES TO THE WINDOW AS
if he can see out.

“Who?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Vi says. “Some girl. A town girl in the snow.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Just standing there.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes. She’s pretty far away, like she doesn’t know where to go. Whether she should come to the school or not. You know the holler folk still call this place the Hotel? She’s got to be freezing. The storm’s getting worse. And the sun is going down. I can barely see her.” Vi turns and looks into his face. The smell of her toothpaste is strong on the swells and billows of her breath.

He tries to keep expressionless but he thinks it’s Harley Moon out there. Harley’s been wandering around out there for hours, afraid to come near.

“You know her, don’t you,” Vi says. It’s not a question.

“No.”

A stray thought hits him. Is Harley another of Murphy’s young wans? Is that why she was worried and didn’t want Finn calling anybody? Was she protecting him? Is
Murph the one with such ill will? Finn can almost believe it.

He cracks the window. Snow heaves into his face. It feels good, the cold sting against his flushed skin, the grainy blast scouring Vi’s touch away.

“Is she talking to Murphy?” he asks.

“No. I don’t see him. Why would she be talking to him?”

“Does she look hurt?”

“No, I don’t think so. I mean, she’s not staggering or anything like that. Why did you ask? Who hurt her?”

As he leans on the sill, Vi encircles his waist with an arm and gives a little tug, pulling him toward her. There’s jealousy and demand in the action. This has got to stop.

But before Finn can shrug free she lets him go. Her timing is perfect. She dances along the rim of his every boundary. Her knowledge of men exceeds that of most women twice her age. He wonders who there was before the boy in Greece. He wonders exactly what the hell he’s going to have to do to get clear of her.

“Who is she?” Vi asks.

“Just a holler girl.”

“Are you fucking her?”

He stands a little straighter. The hinges of his jaw tighten. He’s glad the resentment is thick in her voice. It makes her almost ugly, and he needs that. Her harsh tone centers him. Heavy snowflakes rise against the back of his neck. His lips cool. She shifts her weight.

Finn moves with the speed of a snake, grips Vi’s wrist, and holds it tightly, just rough enough so that she gasps in shock but not pain.

It’s not lust this time that makes him reach. He sets his mouth and takes off his shades. He glares at her.

“Don’t ever speak that way to me,”
he says, no heat at all, hard and dangerous. This isn’t a teacher’s voice.

She flinches. She’s not taking his handicap for granted anymore. She doesn’t want to mother him now. He’s not the cutie-pie blind guy she can run roughshod over. His eyes have always been intense, and they still are.

He releases her, puts the shades back on, and moves to his coat. “Lead me outside to her.”

“What? Why?”

“It might be important.”

“Why is that important?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure? You can talk to me, you know. You can rely on me. What’s going on?”

It’s a good question, and one he can’t answer. Something about the way Harley Moon spoke, that dramatic cadence of misfortune, it started an engine inside him that won’t turn off. He’s got to know why she’s here, who she was talking about, and how she knew about the metal plate in his skull. Only a few folks know. His pals, his confidants. Roz, Judith, Murph, Duchess, some of the other teachers, and why would any of them be discussing him with a holler gal?

But Vi, like every woman, hates to be ignored, and wants his attention. “Please tell me,” she says.

“Violet, stop asking questions.”

“Well, then answer a few of them.” She sounds like an assistant DA hammering away at him.

“Let’s just go.”

“She’s gone. I don’t see her anymore.”

“Did she head into the Carriage House?”

Vi shrugs demurely, her blouse softly sliding across her breasts and shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“Or the Gate House?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. She was there one second and the next she was gone. How am I supposed to know where she got to? You sound worried, Finn. You sound sick with panic, and that frightens me.”

“There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

“You’re lying. You don’t trust me at all.”

He faces the window once more, breathes against the glass, and hears a drop of condensation slip free. The wind murmurs. The chimes on the three school buildings jangle and clang. He needs to know what Harley Moon meant when she said that she was in the path of misery herself. Another kid has gotten under his skin. The pulse in his throat throbs against his collar.

Of course he’s handled everything wrong, and it’s going to cost. He’s upset Vi. She’s taking harried breaths, arms wrapped around herself, lightly rubbing her elbows. His time here at St. Valarian’s is quickly coming to an end. He slumps into his desk chair and lets the snow keep blowing inside and across him.

“I would never hurt you,” Vi tells him as she shuts the window. With a perfect amount of tenderness she runs a hand through his hair again. “Not like your wife.”

Then she leaves him there alone in the dark.

Finn sits there worrying and wanting to touch her again. He shifts his growing fear from one part of his mind to another while waiting for Roz to return. For an instant he’s consumed with bloody daydreams. A shudder
works through him. Christ, will it ever end? The storm is growing worse inside and out. He reaches over and touches the windowpane. With the wind chill it’s got to be barely above zero outside. His skull is loud with someone shouting. Maybe it’s himself, maybe not.

The words become less distinct but take on a greater meaning. He’s thinking, Roz, where are you? What have I done to you?

THE INTERNET NEVER FORGETS, AND IT’S
not much on forgiving either. When Finn was a kid, if you wanted information, you had to scope microfiche for hours, un-spooling rolls and working them through machines that brought up old newspaper print in reverse negative. Now all you needed to do was type a name into Google—it didn’t even have to be spelled correctly, the Web would fix it for you, offer alternatives—and you had somebody’s life history at your fingertips. You didn’t have to dig because the bodies weren’t buried that deep.

He’d made the newspapers a lot there at the end. First with Ray and Carlyle, then with Dani. Sometimes the hero, often the fool. A lot of mixed messages in black-and-white.

IAD was up his ass nearly as much as Ray’s. The photos generally had him looking stoic and slightly insincere out in front of One Police Plaza or the courthouse building. Ray could work a crowd, always smiling, doing the Nixon double Victory sign.

Later on, a couple of photographers sneaked into the hospital and managed to nab a few pictures of Finn with his head shaved, the Frankenstein scars cross-hatching his noggin. Roz saved the clippings until he
was off the critical list, then read them to him one after the other. After she was done she asked, Do you want me to save these?

History had as tight a hold on her as it did on him, which was probably how they wound up together in the first place.

So Vi had been looking him up on the Net. The events of his life weren’t common knowledge in the sticks. He should have expected it, that one of the girls would eventually care enough to tumble to his story. Still, it felt invasive. Vi working her fingers through his hair, through his life, knowing about Danielle. Christ.

His past wants him more than he wants it.

Finn puts on his coat and feels too warm inside it, takes it off again. He folds it over his arm and carries it, steps out his office door into the corridor. He wonders if Vi is still nearby, down at the other end of the hall, watching him. It’s easy to become paranoid, always feeling eyes on you. He struggles against the sensation but it washes over him.

A snap of his cane on the floor and the echo claps up the corridor. If someone was standing there, the report would be different, like a whitecap breaking over an obstruction. The technical term is “facial vision,” where the blind develop a sensitivity to sound waves in the bones of their faces.

But Finn feels it everywhere. In his shoulders, his hands, playing across his ribs. It’s another topic that makes his shrink feel like she’s earning her pay by saying, Let’s revisit that.

Vi is gone.

For a moment he experiences vertigo and has to
reach out and grab the wall. It’s not dizziness, it’s something like an intense momentary depression. It feels like he’s falling down a sinkhole. It hits him from time to time. It has less to do with anxiety than it does with isolation, an awful sensory deprivation within the darkness. The black is infinite and his very identity sometimes buckles beneath the weight of it.

Finn loses himself for an instant.

He holds on to the wall.

The wall gives his hand shape. The shape of his hand gives his arm substance. The arm helps to delineate the torso. The neck grows from it. He feels the definition of his face and head again. And residing within his skull is his brain, and within that his mind, and within that himself.

Finn breathes deeply, the experience waning and finally passing.

The roof creaks and clacks in the wind as if children are running along it. The occasional howls and whistles form a tune he recognizes but can’t name. He listens, allowing the song to fill his chest. In the city the concrete held the wind back and waited for you to come around the corner before it smashed your face in.

Roz is out in the snow and so is Harley. He imagines them struggling against the storm on a direct course for each other. He wonders, What is the girl saying, explaining, implying? And does it really matter in the end?

He hears a heavy noise down below.

He’s heard that sound many times before.

It’s the sound of a body falling.

“Hello?” he calls.

Someone has collapsed. He takes the stairs almost
casually, left hand on the thick wooden banister, right gripping the cane tightly. The thumping of the storm is in sync with his heartbeat. The history of the building moves into and through him. Thousands of people have walked these corridors. Dozens have died in these rooms. Ghosts heave about no differently than anyone else.

Finn hits the ground floor and stands on the uneven slate. The lingering scent of Duchess’s cookies makes his stomach groan. He hardly touched his dinner.

“Somebody here?” Then more urgently, with a growl, “Answer me.”

Instinct makes him walk at an angle, his left arm up, like he’s stepping across a boxing ring. He drops his chin a little, swings the cane a bit harder than he needs to. The body language is aggressive because it has to be.

He takes a left, heading toward Murphy’s apartment. This wing of the Main House once contained the private quarters of hotel employees. Except for Murph’s apartment, the rooms are now used for storage of extra furniture and custodial equipment. Floor waxers, paint, tools, whatever Murphy and his staff need to keep St. Val’s running. The groundskeeper sheds are outside the west door toward the back of the building. Murph can slip in and out without disturbing any of the classes.

Finn heads to Murphy’s apartment. The door is hardly ever locked, but it is right now. He knocks hard enough that the hinges squeak. There’s no response.

He tries again. “Murph, let me in.”

There’s a body on the floor somewhere. He sees Harley Moon gripping a hatchet, standing over Murph’s twisted body, his chest in pieces. He sees Murph holding
a silk necktie between his hands, standing over the girl’s blackened face, her tongue protruding. He sees Roz in there, cheating on him, lying half on the bed and half on the floor in some weird kama sutra position with Murph on top of her. Finn presses a hand to the door.

All right, he’ll chalk this one up to his imagination. He’s got to do that on occasion. Maybe it was shifting snow on the roof. A tree branch dropping against a shutter.

Finn puts on his coat, makes his way out the back door, and heads toward the dorm, which in the hotel days was called the Gate House. The snow’s coming down much harder now. There’s a not-so-recently-cleared track of walkway that he finds, stumbling as he proceeds. His ankles are covered but the trail is a straight line, and he sweeps the cane, feeling the much higher banks on either side.

In his rookie year, there were days in the city when he’d have to use his nightstick to prod half-frozen homeless out of the alleys and try to get them into shelters or onto heating grates someplace. Sometimes he’d knock a half inch of ice off a corpse’s face, a dead dog stuck like tacky tape to its side. He was never the first one there. The shoes would always be gone, pockets turned out, liquor bottle empty. He’d sweep the park and follow the smell of burning trash to a garbage can under a stone bridge by the skating rink, a family of four huddled around it. A couple of ashen-eyed kids looking at him like he was either Santa Claus or the devil. He’d hand over a few bucks and some healthy munchies that Dani had loaded his pockets with—granola, raisins, sunflower seeds—the parents parceling out handfuls of trail
mix like Christmas dinner. The parents would either be out-of-work assholes or on-the-run drug peddlers or just illegal immigrants who’d come over at a bad time, when even the sweatshops were at max capacity. Finn would either lecture or lend an ear or call INS. He’d get home that night and Dani would ask, How did the battle against evil go today?