Poor Sam, poor Will, she thought. They’d fallen for women with a gift, a talent, a curse, depending on how you looked at it. The second sight, Nanny Temple had called it, crossing herself whenever she mentioned it.
It appeared in Ellen a month after their mother died. Ellen was nine, Frances seven. It was the last day of school, a hot day in June, and it happened in the schoolyard during recess. The kids were wild as crazed dogs, couldn’t seem to settle on one game for long. They’d abandon the jungle bars for the swings, the swings for the teeter-totter, the teeter-totter for the slides, then back to the jungle bars or jump rope.
Later Frances—Franny then—decided it was the atmosphere of wildness that had made Lindsay Muir reckless and cruel enough to say the terrible things she did.
Lindsay was tall and skinny, with a long bony face and narrow eyes. Frances had heard she’d turned into a good-looking woman, but in those days she was gawky and plain and hated pretty, compact Ellen Tilden, with her well-covered bones and wide, dark eyes.
Lindsay had been whispering fiercely to her bosom buddy, whose name Frances had forgotten; they seemed to come to an agreement, nodded slyly to each other, and Lindsay slid off the bench and marched over to Ellen. She looked down at her with slitty eyes that were a little red-rimmed from the heat and schoolyard dust.
Franny knew something was wrong and left her place in the slide line to go to her sister.
Lindsay shuttled her feet, sending up puffs of dust that sparkled in the sunlight. There wasn’t a hint of a breeze, and the girls’ faces gleamed with sweat. Around the yard, in the shrubs and trees, the buzz of insects rose in a sawing wave, then sank, and in the relative quiet that followed, Lindsay Muir said in a ringing voice, “My daddy says your mommy killed herself.”
The girls stopped what they were doing and edged closer to hear the rest (girls and boys had separate play yards in those days).
Lindsay raised her voice to be sure everyone could hear. “My daddy says your mommy locked herself in the garage, turned on the cars and could’ve gassed you all.”
Ellen stood stiller than Franny had ever seen her stand. In fact Ellen Dodd Tilden, who was normally something of a fidget, seemed to have turned to stone.
Lindsay cried, “My daddy says killing yourself’s the worst sin there is. Worse than being a whore and doing it for money. My daddy says...”
“It was an accident,” Ellen said.
Her voice sounded peculiar, reminding Franny of the man at the carnival their papa had taken them to last summer. The man had a dummy with a huge red grin painted on its face and a hinged jaw that opened and closed as it talked. Franny had been amazed and wondered if she could get her own dolls to speak if she hinged their jaws, but their father explained it wasn’t the dummy talking, it was the man, throwing his voice.
Ellen’s voice sounded thrown, like the dummy’s, with a deadly kind of tonelessness that scared Franny. In fact everything suddenly felt weird and scary. Franny’s hair seemed to crackle around her head as it did in the dead of winter and her light cotton skirt clung electrically to her legs.
Then Lindsay chanted, “Soocide, soocide... your mommy’s a soocide,” and Ellen punched her. Not slapped her the way girls sometimes did; punched her like a boxer. The blow drove Lindsay back against the brick wall of the school building, and blood flooded out of her nose. It dripped off her chin and made splotches on her handkerchief-cotton dress that had little blue flowers on it. Frances could still see that dress, could have drawn it, even after almost fifty years.
Lindsay looked at Ellen in shock, then she yowled and wiped her face, smearing it with tears, blood, and snot.
“You turd,” she screamed. “I’ll tell my daddy. He’ll beat you up. He’ll tell everyone about your mother. He says your mother’s worse than a whore, he says your mother’s burning in hell.” Ellen’s hand came out slowly toward Lindsay and Lindsay stopped with a hiccup. Ellen’s face was smooth and expressionless. As she reached out, Lindsay didn’t flinch or try to get away since it was clear Ellen didn’t mean to hit her again. Ellen’s hand came toward her deliberately, fingers out, like a blind person searching. She touched the front of Lindsay’s dress with its polka dots of blood, then wadded the fabric in her hand and said in that strange, ‘thrown’ voice, “It’s your mommy that’s the whore, Linny. Your mommy does it with Mr. Owen while your daddy’s at work.”
Lindsay whimpered and tears flooded down her face, mixing with the blood.
“Yes,” Ellen said, “in the office in the garage, on an old leather sofa with a split cushion. And she yells a lot and he tries to shut her up in case there’s a customer out front waiting for gas.”
“Liar,” Lindsay shrieked, then sobbed helplessly, and Ellen let go of her. The crackle seemed to die out of the air and Franny felt rivers of sweat run down her face and back, along her sides, tickling her ribs. Her nose, which had felt dry as sandpaper a second ago, started to run, her hair was limp and sweaty and felt chilly on her scalp. Poor Lindsay slumped against the wall, crying like a child much younger than her nine years. Lindsay had asked for it, but as their father said a lot, just because you ask for it doesn’t mean you deserve it.
One day, Mrs. Larkin did walk in on Mr. Owen and Mrs. Muir in the messy office of the Standard Oil of New Jersey station (from which Mr. Owen was rumored to sell black market gas you didn’t need stamps for). And before Christmas that year, it was all over town.
For a while, Franny was afraid of her sister because Ellen had known a lot of things she couldn’t know. But Lindsay had known something too. A year or so later, their Uncle Albert Dodd got drunk at a family gathering and told the sisters that their mother, his sister, had stuffed cracks in the garage doors with blankets taken from one of the linen closets and turned on the motor of the prewar Continental.
“Temple found her,” he told the girls slurrily. “She was still alive, but she died an hour or so later. Just as well, since the gas damaged her brain and she’d’ve been a vegetable if she’d lived.”
He’d giggled giddily and shockingly, but there were tears in his eyes. “A sort of eggplant with hair,” he’d said, staring into the dregs of his drink. “It was her visions. You know about the visions.” They had known by then. “And voices too, I guess.” He drained the last of his Manhattan, including the cherry, stem and all, without seeming to chew it up. “My poor sister... poor old Ollie, who’d been the belle of the nineteen thirty Casino Ball, the prettiest girl in Bridgeton, was crazy as a coot by the time she sucked that exhaust pipe, m’dears. Crazy as a fuckin’ bedbug...”
2
“It’s the best pickup joint for a hundred square miles,” the orderly said as the elevator ground its way up. Adam Fuller stared at the button panel, listening, but not looking at the other two men standing against the metal-coated wall.
“Broads’re young,” the orderly went on. He was Tom. Adam didn’t know his last name. The other one was Tony, also no last name.
“And sometimes good-looking,” Tom told Tony. “And they’re looking for it. You’re as likely to get laid as get in a fight. Pretty rare for the boonies.”
“Yeah, only I’m getting too old and stiff in the joints to screw in the back of a car,” Tony said.
“Not necessary,” said Tom. “There’s a motel rents by the hour in Echo Lake, next town over. About twenty-minute drive away. O’ course, you’ll find sand in the sheets—only sand if you’re lucky—but you ain’t there for the housekeeping.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Tony agreed.