The Damned Page 11

  VIOLET GRIEG MAY HAVE BEEN gone, but according to the internet white pages her sister Sylvie was still with us. I didn’t warn her I was coming to Gloucester to see her, which it occurred to me, as I pulled off the 128 and made my way past the fishermen’s outfitting shops and FRIED CLAMS! stands near the harbor, may not have been the best idea. It’s a long way to have gone just to get a door slammed in my face.

  The door in question belonged to a whitewashed two-story at the corner of Prospect and Main, across from Flannagan Gas Station, the air a rank competition between gas and sea. I parked directly on the street in front and got out, the chain-link gate at the sidewalk’s edge screeching when I swung it open. I was trying not to think about what I’d say, what I came there to learn. There wasn’t time for thinking. Every time I paused, every time I started to wonder if it was over, if Ash was gone—that was when she liked to come. I had to move. Up the cement steps and knocking a fist against the locked screen door.

  When a woman appeared to squint out at me from the other side it took a moment to recall that it was my obligation to speak first.

  “Sylvie Grieg? My name is Danny Orchard.”

  She didn’t say anything to this. She may not have even heard it. When I spoke again I leaned in so close my nose pushed against the screen.

  “I’m not selling anything. I’m just—”

  “First thing, I can hear you. Pretty sure the neighbors a block over don’t need to.”

  “Sorry. It’s—”

  “And second thing, I know who you are.”

  “You do?”

  “Taller than I would’ve guessed. Got a few more gray hairs than the picture in the magazine, but I suppose I do, too, since the last time I read your book.”

  I figured she’d open the door then but she didn’t. Continued to stand there, looking at me like a street accident she’d come to gawk at before heading back to her coffee.

  “May I come in?” I said.

  “Not sure why you would.”

  “I need some help, to be honest with you.”

  “Help? That could mean pretty much anything.”

  “In my case, it’s—”

  She opened the door.

  “You’re still shouting,” she said.

  I TOLD HER ABOUT ASH.

  All the parts that aren’t included in The After. I told her about how my falling in love and having a chance to help raise a boy seemed to have given her a new strength, one sufficient to take hold of the heart in my chest. I told her about Ash trying to lead me to hell but instead I came back and brought her with me. A series of sentences that sounded like the mumblings of a sanatorium patient even to my own ears. But Sylvie didn’t react to any of it one way or another. She seemed as likely to call 911 as wrap her arms around me.

  “Somebody told you about Violet,” she said once I finished. We were in her dark kitchen at the back of her dark house, sitting across from each other. Every once in a while there was the crunch of floorboards from upstairs but nobody came down. “Somebody told you a story.”

  “She reached out to the Afterlifers group in Boston.”

  “Afterlifers group! Sounds like an insurance company. Fat heap of help those tunnel-of-light piss parties are to anyone.”

  She slammed her palm on the table, a single smack, then returned her hand to her lap like it never happened.

  “They didn’t know what to make of your sister’s case,” I said. “And I can’t pretend I do, either. But I believe it. What I heard of it, anyway.”

  “What good is believing it going to do you?”

  She was somewhere in her early eighties but seemed even older, though this could have been an augmentation of the house and its shut-in scents, its smoky curtains and Vick’s VapoRub. A sinewy, ball-knuckled woman who would’ve been good in a fight, all wound-up muscle ready to deliver swift, unpredictable blows.

  “Maybe hearing what you know of what happened might help me,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. To see if there’s a way I can stop my sister from taking my life so that I might have the chance to live a little of it first.”

  She searched the table’s surface for a drink that wasn’t there. Upstairs, someone marched down the hallway and stopped. It was hard to see this woman living with a husband, with anyone, though someone was here with her.

  “He started with me when I made the turn into my teens. But I was a different sort of girl from Violet—not just two years older but different—and he knew it,” she said. “I’d tell. I’d fight. But in the end I ran away the first chance I had and left my sister there with him. You couldn’t imagine the ways I’ve told myself how this was the only thing I could do, how I had no choice. All lies. Because she needed me to protect her. She was alone. And for the years I pretended I was being strong I was only the worst sort of coward, because my life was paid for through hers.”

  Her tears were brief and came with a shake of her head that spilled two lines down her cheeks. But that was it. The next second she was as steady as someone who’d recovered from a sneeze.

  “She tried to kill herself,” she said. “This was years after he died, after she was free of his hands but not what they left on her. Did her best to keep it to herself but I knew the pain she was in. Violet couldn’t recover from it, couldn’t shake him.”

  She wiped her sleeve under her nose and inspected her shirt as if it revealed the long-awaited results of a medical test. When she continued she was still inspecting it, saddened by the news it brought.

  “She tried the easiest way to do it. Took a glass of wine and a straight razor into the bath and made a right mess. But she started too early. Before she had a chance to turn the taps off she was already slipping under and the water was spilling onto the floor and going right through to the couple who lived under her, dripping on their heads as they watched TV. They thought they saved her life, because she was dead for a time in that tub before the paramedics came. And that’s where she met up with dear old Dad. Doctor Good. That’s what they called him in our town. Doctor Goddamned Good.”

  “Who came back with her.”

  “He never let go! That’s what she always said. ‘Sylvie, Daddy will never let me go.’ ”

  Another shuffle of footsteps upstairs, coming through the ceiling directly above us. I involuntarily glanced upward but Sylvie didn’t follow my eyes.

  “Things got worse for her after that. ‘Dad walks with me,’ she’d say. ‘Holds my hand like he’s taking me to school but when he whispers something in my ear it’s the worst of the secrets he made me keep.’ Things you couldn’t live with if you were her. If you were anybody.”

  “So she tried to kill herself again.”

  “Made damned sure of it this time. Put our father’s hunting rifle down her throat and pulled the trigger with her toe. Same way Dad did it. Using the same gun.”

  “My God. I’m sorry.”

  “You know where she got the rifle? He gave it to her in his will! Like it was a joke.”

  “Or a command,” I said before I could stop myself.

  She looked at me like I’d just blown a bubble gum bubble and it popped. “How’s that?”

  “He went out that way, so he was saying she had to follow him. It’d be something my sister would do.”

  “Oh yeah? People think she was a good girl?”

  “They thought she was an angel.”

  The old woman nodded. It seemed to help her come to some internal decision.

  “So what you came here for,” she said. “You want to know if there’s any way to make your sister stop.”

  “You know of any?”

  “The only one who might is Violet, and she’s not here anymore. But I know she tried. Her parish priest, those Afterlifer friends of yours, a New Age minister or whatever you call voodoo in Massachusetts. Knocked on every door she could think of. Didn’t do any good. Just like I expect none of them could do any good for you.”

  “Why are you so sure of that?”

 
“Because your sister is dead. One foot on the far side of the river and the other on your throat. You can’t push her back to where she’s supposed to be, not from here. She can only be pulled.”

  Sylvie reddened. A bloom of heat that came upon her so suddenly she leaned against the back of her chair, puffing for air. I got a glass out of the cupboard and poured her some water. She took a sip and shivered as though she’d swallowed much stronger stuff.

  “I wish you luck, Mr. Orchard,” she managed. “But right now, I think I need to lie down.”

  Sylvie rose on unsteady feet and let me take her arm. Started shuffling toward the front door with me squeezed next to her in the narrow hallway, my shoulder nudging against the framed photos on the wall as we went. One I knocked hard enough that its wire slipped off the hook and I had to catch it with my free hand before it hit the floor. When I put it back I saw it was an image of Sylvie, eleven or twelve years old, standing in a bathing suit at the end of a dock next to a younger girl I took to be Violet. The two of them have just gotten out of the lake, their long hair glued to their necks. A standard setup for a holiday snapshot.

  Yet something about it held me. Something wrong.

  If you looked closer you could see that the girls’ grins betrayed an effort, their closeness to each other an instinct of mutual protection as much as a sharing of warmth after a cold swim. It let me see who held the camera. How the lens and the man who trained it on them captured not only their images but their fragile, shivering selves.

  We carried on to the door and Sylvie removed her arm from mine. Found her balance.

  “Thank you,” I said, and she murmured something I couldn’t make out in reply, though the intent was clear.

  Just go.

  Before I opened the screen door I turned to look up the stairs to the second floor.

  A man stood at the top looking down at me.

  He wore his hair combed, shiny with Brylcreem, his shirt and pants dated but neatly pressed. His smile was the smile of a caregiver, a bedside hand-holder, gentle and knowing and inviting trust. He looked like a country doctor from the sixties. A good man.

  I looked to Sylvie, who glanced up at where I’d been looking but didn’t seem to register anyone there.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, do you live here on your own?”

  “Since my husband passed. Sixteen years now,” she said. “You looking for somewhere to stay?”

  “No, no. Just a question.”

  I stepped out. The day unthinkably bright. My car by the curb, ready to take me away from the salt air and gas station fumes and the house behind me, all of them things I knew I would try to forget but won’t.

  But before I let the screen door slap shut I gave Sylvie a last wave of farewell and in doing so saw that her father still stood at the top of the stairs. His kindly expression hadn’t changed, yet something passed between us. It’s in his eyes. A darkening that left only a red laser point at their center, burning down at me. Eyes that pulled me in, letting me in on something. The sort of awful secret Ash liked to share with me.

  And what his eyes said was that he knows.

  Knows I have the gift of seeing others who are here but shouldn’t be, that I know who he is and all he’s done and that’s just fine with him. It’s all good.

  BY THE TIME I WAS back on the 128 heading south toward Boston the afternoon had grown muggy and windless, though I drove with the windows down instead of hitting the AC just to feel the real air swirl around me. Trying to blow all the voices out of my head.

  It helped. But it didn’t stop Sylvie Grieg’s words from repeating themselves. Words that seemed to either open a door or close it forever.

  You can’t push her back. She can only be pulled.

  Violet’s father wanted to claim her in death just as he had in life. And now he waited for Sylvie to join them, to force her to go with him even if she was meant for another place just as Ash tried to force me into the house on Alfred Street.

  What does Ash want?

  The old question again. Maybe there’s a different answer now than over the years she merely watched over me as a stalking cloud. Maybe she wanted from me what she wanted from Lisa Goodale and Michelle Wynn and Winona Quinlan, the girls she tried to lead on a bike ride downtown.

  She wanted them to see.

  I closed the windows. Pumped the AC up to max. But before the fan drowned it out, I heard my phone vibrating on the passenger seat next to me. Expecting it to be a When will you be home? text from Willa, I tapped the screen to life only to see it wasn’t a text at all but a phone message. A number I didn’t recognize.

  Odds are it was only a telemarketer, or my speaking agent asking if a date looks good for me to fly in to Denver or Biloxi, or Lyle Kirk wanting to know if all went well in my search for Violet Grieg’s sister. But something told me it wasn’t.

  I was going to pull over at the next exit but, seconds later, realized I wouldn’t make it.

  A stab in my chest so sudden my left arm fell off the wheel and I drifted onto the soft shoulder too fast, fishtailing over the gravel, pumping the brakes until I eventually coaxed the car into a diagonal stop.

  There was an excruciating swelling around the base of my neck that sitting forward or sideways didn’t ease. I couldn’t tell if it was a warning flare from the stress of the morning or simply the inevitable reblocking of a valve and this was it, this was where I go, sitting in a Ford Focus somewhere between Manchester-by-the-Sea and Beverly.

  After a time the stabbing reduced to a throb and I was able to lift the cell again. Listen to the voice message on speakerphone.

  “Mr. Daniel Orchard? This is Marion Cross of the Cambridge Police Department,” a voice said. The low register of a bad-news professional. “Could you please call me back as soon as possible? My number—”

  I thumbed the call off. Pressed CALL BACK.

  With every ring the pain returned. It left me to whistle my breath through clenched teeth. Both fists slapping the wheel.

  “Marion Cross,” the voice said when it answered. She seemed to know it was me just as I seemed to know what she was about to say.

  “This is Danny Orchard.”

  “Thank you for returning my call, Mr. Orchard. I wonder if there’s any way you could make your way—”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It might be better—”

  “What happened?”

  There was a quarter second of silence before she spoke. A quarter second of sympathy that proved she was a human being.

  “There’s been an accident.”

  21

  * * *

  The rest of the drive back was a blur of speed and rain. A downpour that hit as soon as I entered the Boston city limits and only came down harder by the time I parked at Mass General and ran, soaked, through the emergency room doors.

  This was where Marion Cross, the voice on the phone, told me I’d find Willa and Eddie.

  She said more than this but I heard only half of it, maybe less. I just tossed the cell into the passenger-side footwell and drove, weaving through everything in front of me. I heard vehicle and they’re doing everything they can and divers. But there was nothing more I needed to know after There’s been an accident and the name of the hospital.

  I was shouting at the sleepy guy sitting behind the glass at the triage desk, asking where they were, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Mr. Orchard?”

  I swung around to find a middle-aged woman in a Cambridge Police uniform. CROSS on her shirt.

  “Are they alive?”

  It’s not the question I meant to ask first, but it was the first one that came out.

  “They’ve been through a lot today, but yes. Both hanging on pretty good, I’d say.”

  “You said divers. On the phone.”

  “Let’s sit over here, Daniel.”

  “Danny. Why divers?”

  “Just come over here with me, Danny. Okay?”

  The guy be
hind the glass smirked as he watched the officer lead me to an unoccupied corner of the waiting room. I was wrong about him. He wasn’t sleepy. He was just a dick who found amusement at the sight of people suffering the worst moments of their lives.

  “We’re still investigating the cause,” Marion Cross was saying, adjusting the gun at her belt so she can sit without it jabbing her in the side. “But there was no other vehicle involved.”

  “What did they hit?”

  She squinted, and it aged her a decade. “Didn’t you hear me on the phone?”

  “Not everything.”

  “Water,” she said. “Your wife drove her car into the Charles River with your son in the passenger seat late this morning.”

  Two things hit me at once, both of equal weight.

  Drove her car into the Charles River was one.

  Your son was the other.

  “But they got out?”

  “Our marine unit was out on patrol, which was fortunate. They were able to reach the scene right away and send a couple divers down to get them out of there.”

  “Are they hurt?”

  “The doctors are still assessing them. But it looks like your wife’s injuries are minor.”

  “And Eddie’s?”

  “He took quite a bump to the head on impact. Regained consciousness by the time he got here, though, which is the good news. But I think he’ll be staying for a while to make sure there’s no long-term damage, that kind of thing.”

  What felt a moment ago like a thousand questions vaporized all at once. Left me with only one.

  “Can I see them?”

  WILLA WAS SITTING UP AND looking reasonably composed when I entered her room. Then she saw it was me. And lost it.

  I held her as best I could and let her scream into my shirt.

  “It was my fault,” Willa said once she was able to. “It was me, Danny. But I don’t know how it happened.”

  “We don’t have to figure all that out right now.”

  “The hell we don’t.”

  “The main thing is to fix the two of you up. You’re both alive. Everything else—it doesn’t matter.”