“You are a detective.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“When he was dating Sarah?”
“Yes.”
“You were competing for him?”
“Oh, no. I had no interest in Evan. He was a sweet kid, cute and funny, but he was Sarah’s.”
“So you kissed him...”
“To hurt her,” Danielle said. “I wanted to really hurt her, you know? In the worst possible way.”
“Why?”
“Because I was seventeen years old and my father couldn’t keep it in his pants and he was getting married again and Sarah was delighted about it. She was just thrilled. She’d talk about it all the time, she’d write me notes, send these cute little messages all with the same theme: we were going to be sisters. But I didn’t want to be her sister. I wanted to be her friend, and I wanted my father back with my mother. She was so clueless about that, so obtuse, and it drove me crazy. I wanted to punish her. And what’s the best way for one teenage girl to punish another?”
“Through her boyfriend.”
“There you go. I knew it was an awful thing to do, of course. That was the point. I was trying to be awful. Because she needed to be punished, you know, for daring to act as if it were a good thing that my father was marrying her mother. For daring to want to be my sister.”
She wiped at her eyes again. “That was the last weekend I was here. I went back to Louisville two days later, feeling very self-righteous about what I’d done, about teaching that little bitch a lesson. But that’s all it was, understand? A lesson. A temporary thing. I’d see her again in a few weeks, and we’d get over it. Of course we’d get over it, because we were seventeen years old and we’d be family for the rest of our lives, right? The rest of our lives. It would be a footnote by the time we were twenty, something we laughed about by the time we were forty.”
She put the footrest down and got out of the chair, returned to the file cabinet, opened it again, removed a photograph, and handed it to him. There were nine teenagers pictured, four boys in T-shirts and five girls in tank tops that said Trapdoor Caverns. They were standing in front of the entrance to the cave, everybody smiling, the sun on their faces. In the back row, Evan Borders looked relaxed and charming, a kid ready to cruise through the world. Just in front of him, kneeling with their hands on their slim, tan thighs, were Sarah Martin and Danielle MacAlister. Their heads were close together, their smiles wide. Sarah was just a few weeks away from another photo shoot, this one in the county morgue.
“Look at those eyes,” Danielle whispered. “She had eyes that shone. Eyes that belonged to some pop love song. And when Evan came by? Her eyes took on a luminescence when he passed through. She was always smiling too. Immune to the petty and melodramatic things that you’d get between kids. Because she was trying to show her maturity that summer. Trying to act older to impress Evan. To impress me. I can’t lie about that. She looked up to me, and I knew that. How awful then that I was the one who was petty and melodramatic. I was the child to her. My God, her father had died a few years earlier, and I was so dramatic about a divorce that I wanted to punish Sarah? How awful is that?”
She stepped away from Mark and sat back down on the ancient, creaking recliner. The day was young but she looked as if she wanted it to come to an end already. The question Mark asked then wasn’t a detective’s question at all.
“What was the last thing you said to her?”
She looked at him with surprise. “Why does that matter?”
“Don’t you remember? I think most people do when they lose someone. Or if they don’t, they come up with something. They need to remember, whether it’s accurate or not.”
Her chest swelled with a deep breath, and then she said, “I told her that she’d never be my sister, and I hoped she was classy enough not to take my family’s last name for her own.” She managed to say it without looking away from Mark, but it was evident that the statement was a bloodletting.
“You were right,” she said. “People remember. I wish that I didn’t, though. What was the last thing you said to your wife?”
“Told her that I loved her.”
“Do you know what I would give to be able to say that same thing?” Danielle asked, and Mark looked away.
They were quiet for a few moments. Danielle sat in the recliner and gazed around the room as if she didn’t recognize it.
“You asked why we let this place sit,” she said. “Understand now? Trapdoor seemed so pure once, seemed so magical. Right up until my father proposed to Diane Martin. And do you know what? Diane was lovely. She was a lovely woman, and her daughter was the same, and I knew that. Even when I went out of my way to hurt her, I knew that. I just wanted to be allowed to be angry about it. He was my father, and he’d left my mother, and I was entitled to my anger, and Sarah didn’t get it. But my anger wasn’t supposed to last. I understood that even then. The fight would pass, and we’d be fine. We were seventeen. You get another chance then, always.”
She tucked her feet beneath her so she was sitting curled up on the oversize chair, and she cried without making much of a sound. He didn’t say a word, because he understood. She needed to weep for Sarah, for her father, for Evan Borders, for an unspoiled summer that had been swallowed by darkness. To weep not for the way things had once been but for the way things had been supposed to go and did not. People believed that they were haunted by bad memories, but that wasn’t the truth. The most sinister hauntings were from unrealized futures.
Mark watched her and wondered why he hadn’t told her the truth. Because it was none of her damned business, that’s why.
Then why’d you ask her?
What he’d told her wasn’t a lie. He had said the words into the phone, whether they’d been heard or not. Maybe they had been. How could he know?
You know.
Of course he did. Don’t embarrass me with this shit. For so long, he’d known what he’d meant — his wife was willingly pursuing a fraud’s foolishness. He had known that without question, because it was the truth and the truth didn’t require questioning. Then Jeff London provided his addendum, and the old truth remained but another emerged beside it: Lauren had gone to Cassadaga to protect him. To cover for his weaknesses.
She told me you wouldn’t do the interview well because you wouldn’t think the woman had any credibility, Jeff had said. That you’d scorn her, and if there was anything legitimate, you’d overlook it.
Mark went to the wall and removed the tape from the last map Ridley Barnes had drawn, the one from the summer of Sarah Martin’s death.
“Are you going to see Ridley?” Danielle asked.
“Maybe. First I’ve got another stop to make. We’ll see how it goes.”
43
The dog that looked like a fox was back in the yard when he pulled in. It kept its distance but watched him with total focus and a regal stance, like some sort of mythical guardian. He was wary of it as he walked to the porch, but the dog let him pass without a sound. It felt like the animal had made a conscious decision, one that could easily have gone another way.
Julianne Grossman answered the door and said, “You look better. You’ve slept.”
“I’m going to need you to prove yourself to me,” Mark said.