Max made a few calls to get the gist of the previous night’s events from his friend, Randy.
“Greta’s nervous as hell,” Randy told him. “She’s convinced she and the boys should spend the summer at her mom’s place down in Lansing. As if they’re going to be safer with a bunch of gangbangers.”
“I don’t think Lansing is known for its gangbangers,” Randy,” Max told him.
"Well, gangbangers or not, my boys are safer in our woods with a Winchester and a pocket of shells.”
“We’re going, Randy!” Greta shrieked in the background.
Randy lowered his voice. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s like we found out there’s a flesh-eating plague spreading through town. Greta’s friends from a block away are coming over to coordinate travel plans. Good riddance,” he said. “But I’m not getting run out of town by a juiced up alley cat.”
“Did Krista say a big cat attacked her?” Max asked.
“No, no. That’s just the newest theory. I myself figured some nasty kid out there hit her with a stick, or worse, pulled a switchblade on her. But apparently, one of the paramedics spread the rumor it was clearly a bite. As if anyone in this town is an expert on wild animal bites.”
Max managed to wrangle the rest of the story from Randy, though he didn’t know much more than Jake. The kids had been playing capture the flag when Krista had started screaming. The paramedics had carried her from the woods and loaded her in an ambulance. Police had questioned all the children, but no one saw a thing. Max hung up the phone, a vision of Simon Frank thudding against the back of his eyelids.
He found Kim on the back porch.
She’d put on her clothes from the night before and stood drinking coffee and leaning heavily against the rail. The intoxication of the night before, the magic, had disappeared with Jake’s news. It was almost as if his brother had seen it lying there between them, stuffed it in his Jeep, and driven it away with him.
“What happened, Max, with the books?” Kim asked.
He gazed at her, taken off guard by the question. He’d expected her to continue questioning him about the animal. Oddly, he’d forgotten about the books.
“Have you ever been haunted?” he asked, stunned as the words left his lips.
He’d never considered himself a hard man of science, not in the least. He’d loved Shakespeare as a boy, by God. Those works were filled with spectral figures and hauntings, but at the end of the day, it was fiction. He’d never had to ponder the legitimacy of Shakespeare’s characters because they’d never appeared in his home and demanded his attention.
Proof that the paranormal existed, that all the quacks offering to read your palm or chat with your dead grandfather might actually have a toe dipped in the realm of spirits, had only rarely crossed his mind. The closest he’d come to such a contemplation had been his single night in The Crawford House, and he’d managed, rather quickly, to explain that away as a figment of a child’s terrified mind.
Kim studied him, but she didn’t answer.
“I believe one of the missing children, Melanie Dunlop, is…” He paused and weighed the words: haunting, visiting, terrorizing me. “I think she’s contacting me.”
“Contacting? Melanie is the girl who went missing last week?”
Max nodded and waited for Kim’s disbelieving laugh.
Instead, she turned back to the yard. Her profile was delicate, the soft slope of her cheekbone down to her chin. He’d kissed her face the night before, so fragile he’d grown furious for an instant, furious her husband had ever hurt her. She had felt small in his arms. Holding her had been like cupping a butterfly in hands.
“The girl I spoke to last night, out here?” she asked.
“I think so.”
Max walked inside and retrieved a yearbook from the pile of books on his living room floor. He paused, gazed at his copy of Heart of Darkness, and then grabbed that too.
He flipped to the page in the yearbook where Melanie smiled out from a black and white photograph. Each child had their own little square. Though immortalized in the glossy pages, some of them, Simon Frank and likely Melanie too, would never share their grade school pictures with their own children. Look, honey, mommy used to bleach her hair.
He held the book up for Kim, and she looked at the image, the groove between her eyebrows deepening.
She blinked up at him. “Her hair was lighter, the girl last night, but that looks like her.”
“She dyed her hair a lot,” Max explained.
“Maybe she just ran away,” Kim suggested hopefully. “Maybe she’s hiding out in the woods and trying to get your attention.”
Max closed the book and set it on the patio table. “It’s possible,” he agreed, but if Melanie had run away, why did Max hear her voice in the night? Why did his books keep crashing to the floor?
Because she’s obviously a ghost, he thought sarcastically, as if a ghost could ever be an obvious explanation.
“What do you think, Kim? When you really try to dig into that question. Was the girl you spoke to alive?”
Kim set her coffee on the rail and shook her head. “What else could she be?” her voice rose on the last few words. She clutched the rail as if the world might tilt at any moment and spill her into the sky.
Max found he couldn’t speak the words out loud. “This book has been appearing on my living room floor since the day after she vanished.”
Kim took Heart of Darkness and studied it.
“What’s it about?”
“A man who travels up the Congo River into an indigenous area of Africa to meet an ivory trader. He becomes fascinated by an ivory trader who appears to have been accepted by the natives It’s a book I teach nearly every year, a way to begin the conversation about ideas of acceptable cruelty relative to perceived cruelty.”
Kim appeared confused. “I’ve never read classic books. I got my diploma by going to night school, though I always thought it would be interesting to understand why so many people loved the classics. Nicholas said reading Shakespeare was like watching paint dry.”
Max laughed. “That’s pretty typical. I love the classics, but when I was thirteen, I hated reading anything other than H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King,” he confessed.
“What would this book have to do with Melanie?”
“We read it in class first semester. But other than that, I don’t know.”
Kim flipped through the pages. “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness,” she read out loud. “What is the heart of darkness?” she murmured.
“The heart of the Congo, but more likely the heart of men,” Max explained.
Kim’s blue eyes flitted over the pages. She closed the book and set it next to her coffee mug.
“The heart of men,” she whispered, and she clenched her eyes shut as if a spasm of pain had torn through her.
Her cries were silent at first, but then grew louder as she shrank down to the porch.
“I’m sorry, Kim,” he told her, squatting down beside her and putting his arms around her quaking body. She was thinking of Nicholas, of course she was, and if Melanie Dunlop was dead, her Nicholas might be dead too.
Kim shook her head, wiping the tears from her red cheeks. “I’m not strong enough, Max. I can’t…” she started to cry again.
Max held her, feeling again as if Kim were a fragile butterfly.
32
“I’m on house arrest today,” Sid mumbled into the phone. My mom’s been having a hairy canary over what happened at the Shindig. She even went out and bought us oven pizzas and ice cream for lunch. She’s bribing us to stay inside. She keeps looking at me funny, like maybe one of my ears got bit off and she’s just now noticing it.”