She looked around at the dusty wooden cave crowded with objects. She hadn’t even had the relics of a life of her own to add to these… in twenty years. Not since Adam. It seemed impossible. It seemed that burglars had broken into her home and taken everything.
She sank slowly onto a three-legged stool and stared at the leather-bound trunk near the middle of the room. She could vaguely remember lifting the lid that day, dumping his letters helter-skelter, dropping the lid and returning to her room. Then sleeping for almost three days.
She stood and leaned over the trunk. With the corner of her apron she wiped the thick dust from the lid and stared at the initials W.P. It had been her father’s trunk, passed down to her. She slid her fingertips beneath the lip and lifted.
White and yellow wings fluttered out, raising the dust. She reached out to pluck one from the air, and it fell apart in her fingertips. She cried out and tried desperately to gather them all to her before they crumbled, but her efforts only damaged them further.
Letters from Adam like white ash over her apron, like scrapings from a crematorium. She could see the large brown watermark on the underside of the trunk lid, and the narrow tendrils of stain where the water had crept farther, seeking his letters, corrupting them, destroying her memory of him. Had he brown hair, black? She couldn’t even remember his face.
But there were more things under the broken letters, a past the water hadn’t yet reached.
She lifted the items gingerly, one at a time, placing each in its appropriate pile around her knees as she sorted them. A pocket prayer from her grandmother. A book of love poems from her father—who had given the chest to her, joking at the time that it was to be her “hopeless chest.” Once he got sick, and watched her grow old caring for him, he never made that little joke again.
Drama programs from school, pressed flowers, a silly rhyme a little boy wrote her in grade school. A medical textbook. It was an old one her uncle had and she’d begged him for it because she wanted to be a doctor someday. She’d been twelve at the time. She’d completely forgotten she’d ever wanted to be something like that. More than everybody’s nursemaid. More than what she’d finally become. She was suddenly angry, and went through the trunk more rapidly, no longer bothering to arrange the items in her careful piles. Wooden-faced doll. Marbles. The first bottle of perfume she’d ever owned—most of it still there because she’d been so conservative with it, afraid it would run out too soon. Old copies of Argosy and Life magazine. A ticket to the theater in Four Corners, her first—something called Freaks, about all these terribly deformed people. She could hardly stand to watch, and they’d pulled the picture after two days. But she’d never forget that movie.
She was young then, a daydreamer, and afterwards she’d find herself staring at her shadow now and then; seeing the way it distorted at times, wondering whether that’s what she really was if she could only see herself clearly enough.
Her shadow in this attic was distorted too, she realized—she hardly had a distinct shadow at all. It blended in with the other ancient objects. And was eaten by the darkness.
Her album was on the bottom. She lifted it out carefully and rested it on her lap. Pictures of Father, Hector when he was little, an old picture of her in a short dress with boats on it. Pictures of Janie and her together—Janie always the cheerful-looking one, with so many plans for herself. Always so mean when she didn’t get her way.
Inez realized she no longer thought of Janie as dead. It was a strange thing, but Inez knew she believed she could just go out in the woods and talk to her old friend.
At least Janie had become something; that was more than Inez herself could say. She chuckled. She was thinking like a crazy woman!
The morning sun was filling the small circular attic window, the mist outside breaking the light into long strands. It does look like burning hair, Inez thought.
If she hurried she could be halfway up Big Andy by midday, just above where the mist would have burned away, leaving clear sky as far as the eye could see. She’d be able to see most anything from up there: a woman with bright red hair, or even a bear.
Doris had slowed down to a trudge. She wasn’t sure where she was at the moment—somewhere behind the mining operation. No telling how far—she might have been wandering in circles. Her naked flesh was scratched and torn, and she seemed to have more bruises than she could ever remember having at one time, even after Jake beat her, but none of that really seemed to bother her. Or the cold; it could have been summer as far as she could tell. She felt hot, almost feverish.
Maybe Felix had struck her; she couldn’t remember. She shuddered suddenly, feeling all the cold delivered in the one memory. His face, last time she’d seen him: blue lips and pupils vanished into the white of his eyes. Blood lining the ravaged cavities of his head like rainbow-tinted shadows. The face of a dead man.
Rocks and sharp branches jabbed at her tender feet. She grimaced, but continued to walk. The burning woman had given her drive; her hips still ached with it, her breath still ragged and hungry. But Doris was beginning to hate the woman for it. She couldn’t stop the needs that were racking her, and they seemed to be emptying her out.
She couldn’t eat; she couldn’t sit down because of all her recently exposed need. Maybe she could go to the burning woman, get her to let her go.
Beg her. Or force her. This couldn’t go on much longer.
Audra had seen Reed drive by in his uncle’s pickup that morning. She had just awakened, was stretching before the small window near her bed, when he sped past, crouched over the steering wheel as if angry or drunk. She leaned her face into the window and was able to catch a glimpse of the truck as Reed left the town, rear wheels biting into gravel and spitting up dust as he negotiated the bend that led to the Pierce place.
She gritted her teeth. She could hate him, she surely could, if she just knew a little more.
But she didn’t know any more, and it wasn’t likely she ever would staying around the cafe while Reed was up at his daddy’s old place. And until she knew any more, she just had to love him, or pretend she did. For he was the only man who had ever paid any attention to her. He was all she had.
If she could only figure out what he was up to, why he was playing with her like this. He’d terrified her, made her afraid to walk the streets of her own hometown. She wasn’t likely to forgive him for that soon.
She should ignore him, forget all about him. Avoid him. But she couldn’t.
Audra didn’t dress in her uniform that day. She put on slacks and a sweater, and on second thought took her father’s old camping lantern out of the closet. She went out the front door, and, not surprisingly, no one was waiting for her to open. The street was deserted. She left the “Closed” sign out.
Her father’s discolored white Studebaker was parked in the alley at the side of the building. Jake had been tinkering with it so she knew it was running, though pretty roughly. If she pushed it hard, maybe Reed couldn’t keep too far ahead of her. She knew the roads better than he did.
Mr. Crouskey frowned. They’d ordered Emmanuel to come back, and bring some of the workers with him, so where was he? The man wouldn’t get another chance, not if he could help it.
They were no closer to finding the source of the mysterious flooding. They’d at last, after considerable digging, been able to rule out an underground spring or other natural source. But there weren’t any signs of a man-made device, either. It just didn’t make sense. The main office would never let him forget this one if he fouled up, but he didn’t know much more he could do.