Len pulled out a large Ziploc bag. At the bottom corner of the bag my parents could see the glint of gold. Len handed it to my mother, and she held it in front of her, slightly away from her body.
“Don’t you need this, Len?” my father asked.
“We did all the tests on it,” he said. “We’ve documented where it was found and taken the required photographs. The time may come when I would have to ask for it back, but until then, it’s yours to keep.”
“Open it, Abbie,” my father said.
I watched my mother hold open the bag and lean over the bed. “It’s for you, Jack,” she said. “It was a gift from you.”
As my father reached in, his hand shook, and it took him a second to feel the small, sharp edges of the keystone against the flesh of his fingers. The way he drew it out of the bag reminded me of playing the game Operation with Lindsey when we were little. If he touched the sides of the Ziploc bag an alarm would go off and he would have to forfeit.
“How can you be sure he killed these other girls?” my mother asked. She stared at the tiny ember of gold in my father’s palm.
“Nothing is ever certain,” Len said.
And the echo rang in her ears again. Len had a fixed set of phrases. It was this same phrase that my father had borrowed to soothe his family. It was a cruel phrase that preyed on hope.
“I think I want you to leave now,” she said.
“Abigail?” my father queried.
“I can’t hear anymore.”
“I’m very glad to have the charm, Len,” my father said.
Len doffed an imaginary cap to my father before turning to go. He had made a certain kind of love to my mother before she went away. Sex as an act of willful forgetting. It was the kind he made more and more in the rooms above the barbershop.
I headed south toward Ruth and Ray, but I saw Mr. Harvey instead. He was driving an orange patchwork car that had been pieced together from so many different versions of the same make and model that it looked like Frankenstein’s monster on wheels. A bungee cord held the front hood, which fluttered up and down as it caught the oncoming air.
The engine had resisted anything but a shimmer above the speed limit no matter how hard he pressed the gas pedal. He had slept next to an empty grave, and while he’d been sleeping he had dreamed of the 5! 5! 5!, waking near dawn to make the drive to Pennsylvania.
The edges of Mr. Harvey seemed oddly blurred. For years he had kept at bay the memories of the women he killed, but now, one by one, they were coming back.
The first girl he’d hurt was by accident. He got mad and couldn’t stop himself, or that was how he began to weave it into sense. She stopped going to the high school that they were both enrolled in, but this didn’t seem strange to him. By that time he had moved so many times that he assumed that was what the girl had done. He had regretted it, this quiet, muffled rape of a school friend, but he didn’t see it as something that would stay with either one of them. It was as if something outside him had resulted in the collision of their two bodies one afternoon. For a second afterward, she’d stared. It was bottomless. Then she put on her torn underpants, tucking them into her skirt’s waistband to keep them in place. They didn’t speak, and she left. He cut himself with his penknife along the back of his hand. When his father asked about the blood, there would be a plausible explanation. “See,” he could say, and point to the place on his hand. “It was an accident.”
But his father didn’t ask, and no one came around looking for him. No father or brother or policeman.
Then what I saw was what Mr. Harvey felt beside him. This girl, who had died only a few years later when her brother fell asleep smoking a cigarette. She was sitting in the front seat. I wondered how long it would take before he began to remember me.
The only signs of change since the day Mr. Harvey had delivered me up to the Flanagans’ were the orange pylons set around the lot. That and the evidence that the sinkhole had expanded. The house’s southeast corner sloped downward, and the front porch was quietly sinking into the earth.
As a precaution, Ray parked on the other side of Flat Road, under a section of overgrown shrubbery. Even so, the passenger side skimmed the edge of the pavement. “What happened to the Flanagans?” Ray asked as they got out of his car.
“My father said the corporation that bought the property gave them a settlement and they took off.”
“It’s spooky around here, Ruth,” Ray said.
They crossed the empty road. Above them the sky was a light blue, a few smoky clouds dotting the air. From where they stood they could just make out the back of Hal’s bike shop on the other side of the railroad tracks.
“I wonder if Hal Heckler still owns that?” Ruth said. “I had a crush on him when we were growing up.”
Then she turned toward the lot. They were quiet. Ruth moved in ever-diminishing circles, with the hole and its vague edge as their goal. Ray trailed just behind Ruth as she led the way. If you saw it from a distance, the sinkhole seemed innocuous – like an overgrown mud puddle just starting to dry out. There were spots of grass and weeds surrounding it and then, if you looked close enough, it was as if the earth stopped and a light cocoa-colored flesh began. It was soft and convex, and it drew in items placed on top of it.
“How do you know it won’t swallow us?” Ray asked.
“We’re not heavy enough,” Ruth said.
“Stop if you feel yourself sinking.”
Watching them I remembered holding on to Buckley’s hand the day we went to bury the refrigerator. While my father was talking to Mr. Flanagan, Buckley and I walked up to the point where the earth sloped down and softened, and I swore I felt it give ever so slightly beneath my feet. It had been the same sensation as walking in the graveyard of our church and suddenly sinking into the hollow tunnels that the moles had dug among the headstones.
Ultimately it was the memory of those very moles – and the pictures of their blind, nosy, toothsome selves that I sought out in books – that had made me accept more readily being sunk inside the earth in a heavy metal safe. I was mole-proof, anyway.
Ruth tiptoed up to what she took to be the edge, while I thought of the sound of my father’s laughter on that long-ago day. I made up a story for my brother on the way home. How underneath the sinkhole there was a whole village inside the earth that no one knew about and the people who lived there greeted these appliances like gifts from an Earthly heaven. “When our refrigerator reaches them,” I said, “they will praise us, because they are a race of tiny repairmen who love to put things back together again.” My father’s laughter filled the car.
“Ruthie,” Ray said, “that’s close enough.”
Ruth’s toes were on the soft part, her heels were on the hard, and there was a sense as I watched her that she might point her fingers and raise her arms and dive right in to be beside me. But Ray came up behind her.
“Apparently,” he said, “the earth’s throat burps.”
All three of us watched the corner of something metal as it rose.
“The great Maytag of ’sixty-nine,” Ray said.
But it was not a washer or a safe. It was an old red gas stove, moving slow.
“Do you ever think about where Susie Salmon’s body ended up?” asked Ruth.
I wanted to walk out from underneath the overgrown shrubs that half-hid their ice blue car and cross the road and walk down into the hole and back up and tap her gently on the shoulder and say, “It’s me! You’ve done it! Bingo! Score!”