The Damned Read online

  I should be sleeping. But every time I closed my eyes they demanded to be opened again to confirm I’m actually here.

  Detroit.

  Canadians crossing the border to buy stuff cheap always pronounced it in three syllables (De-troy-it), those of us in the suburbs made the e short (D-troyt), while the people who lived in the city itself stretched the vowel long (Dee-troyt). There wasn’t a single right way to say it, though everyone made fun of how others got it wrong.

  I tried each of these versions aloud as I watched the night pull off the skyline like a sheet. The police cars that lined certain streets and ignored others, the past-their-prime office buildings, the river blackly glinting through the gaps—there was no way to pretend I was anywhere else. Though that’s exactly what I’d spent the last restless hour trying to do. Wishing I were home, or in one of the other Anycities where I gave a talk and had to remind myself where I was.

  Even for an Afterlifers gig, I never said yes to Detroit.

  The bedside phone rang.

  Did I request a wake-up call when I checked in? Being in the middle of a minicoronary at the time, my memory of the exchange was less than crystal clear.

  I was going to let it ring until it stopped, then thought it had to be Willa. Willa, who wanted to be the first to wish me good morning and tell me Eddie’s doing fine—maybe he would even get on the line himself—and they’d tell me they miss me already and be careful, please be careful.

  The receiver was against my ear before I remembered Willa didn’t know where I was staying.

  Wakey-wakey . . .

  I slammed the phone down. Headed straight into the shower. Cranked the hot water as if I might wash Ash’s voice off my skin.

  BREAKFAST AT THE HOTEL BUFFET is all-you-can-eat, an offer taken seriously by the other diners who returned several times for more waffles and nests of bacon, a consolation for what, by the swollen-eyed look of them, was another losing night at the casino.

  I laid my phone on the table and checked to see if the app I downloaded before I left was working. A link to the security system I had installed in the house in Porter Square a couple years ago after a rash of break-ins in the neighborhood. By clicking on the app, I could see what the tiny cameras affixed to the ceiling at the entry points to the house could see: the back door, the main-floor windows, the front door. The idea is that if there’s an intruder or someone who comes in without deactivating the alarm, the phone automatically shows me what’s going on by connecting to the camera where the break-in is happening.

  With a couple clicks, I confirmed it was working. Checked all the cameras, hoping for a glimpse of Willa coming or going to the hospital, but nothing moved.

  When I exited the security app, there was a new message from her waiting for me.

  there ok?

  For five minutes I tried to think of something sweet or flirty or encouraging—some of the talk we found so easy just days earlier—but it all looked false when typed onto a screen. In the end, I decided not to even try.

  Here just fine. Let you know how it goes.

  I waited for an xoxo or luv u, the equivalent of a pecked cheek, but nothing came.

  I GOT INTO THE CAR because I didn’t know what else to do.

  Onto Woodward again, headed away from downtown and this time passing Alfred Street and carrying on by the Medical Center buildings, the Detroit Public Library and Institute of Arts, then into the long, blasted miles of now largely unoccupied residential blocks, the thousands of condemned properties that billboards offered for those looking to START OVER FOR $10,000 . . . OR LESS!!

  Once I was across 8 Mile Road, things started to change. With the Detroit city limits behind me, the stores were no fancier, but at least half of them were open. A couple of car lots offering new models along with the used. Here the churches had unbroken windows and signs advertising the topic for Sunday’s sermon (JESUS OPENS THE DOOR . . . BUT ONLY IF YOU KNOCK).

  When the avenue divided at the base of Main Street I veered right and headed over the train tracks into Royal Oak.

  It hadn’t changed much. Which must be considered a triumph, given that the city has seen nothing but change the past couple decades, almost none of it good. But the Royal appeared to be hanging on, guarding itself against the realities swirling around it. Here’s the Starbucks, there’s the Barnes & Noble. A cookery store with copper pots and wineglasses in the window. People on the street moving with purpose from one place to another, skateboarding students and strollering moms and tie wearers. Contrasted with Woodward south of 8 Mile, it all looked set-decorated, a middle-class checklist.

  Driving alone up Main Street. Not knowing where to go, who to call on, how to get out.

  I felt like a kid again.

  And like the teenager who drifted through town after Ash was gone and, later, the college dropout doing nothing but tweaking a book about being dead, I found myself heading into the Caribou Coffee, ordering a mug of dark roast, and hiding in the corner. Trying to sort things out. Then as now, not even sure what the question was that needed sorting.

  If Ash had been murdered, the one thing that’s known is that it happened on our birthday. And as far as the public record goes, the last people to see her alive were the three girls who biked behind her part of the way down Woodward Avenue before turning back.

  Lisa Goodale.

  Michelle Wynn.

  Winona Quinlan.

  Lisa, cleavaged and sleepy-eyed, came to mind first. She could have any guy at school she wanted, and she did—unless Ash wanted him, too. At one basement party I remember Lisa sitting next to Nathan Pohl. Nathan was two years older, his dad let him drive his BMW coupe, he did some modeling for local ad flyers—as close to a movie star as we had in Royal Oak. And he was taking Lisa by the hand, telling her that maybe they should “go for a drive,” when Ash came down the stairs.

  In less than a second she saw what was happening, how Lisa was brimming with triumph, and met Nathan’s eyes.

  “Can I talk to you?” she said.

  That was it. Nathan let go of Lisa and followed Ash upstairs. It was my sister he ended up taking for a drive, my sister who didn’t care one way or another about Nathan Pohl the moment before she saw how much Lisa wanted him, how happy Lisa was.

  As for Michelle Wynn, it’s a mystery why she was permitted in Ash’s circle at all. Michelle was what you’d call obese today but what we then called fat, given to acne and noisy breathing, undistinguished in intelligence or charm. Invisible when viewed through teenaged glasses. And yet she was with Ash more than most. It may have been because Michelle went to every play Ash was in, taped every issue of the school paper with an Ashleigh Orchard byline to the inside of her locker, snapped hundreds of photos of Ash for a collage she was doing for her Fine Arts project. Even for my sister, such devotion was irresistible.

  Where were they now? Who the hell knows.

  But Ash wanted me to come here. She wanted me to see.

  The Quinlans lived across the street from us. So I set off toward Farnum and Fairgrove. A place I knew how to find.

  Winona Quinlan had thin lips she tried to fatten by drawing outside the lines with lipstick and red hair she cut to look like Molly Ringwald’s. Academically, she was Ash’s equal. Ash pretended not to care on the rare occasions the gold medal for top grade in English or Chemistry went to Winona instead of her, but she did. She knew Winona wouldn’t get the scholarship she needed for college if she fell short of being top of her entire class, and this was enough to inspire Ash to edge her out into second place, denying Winona’s dream of escape.

  She had somewhere specific in mind, too.

  A cousin of Winona’s had graduated from Princeton and given her a sweatshirt with the school’s crest on it when she was in sixth grade. That was all it took. She read the annual Princeton syllabus the way other girls read Tiger Beat. Her American History presentation in ninth grade was about all the presidents who’d gone to Princeton, her Geography project the next year
about the unique landscape features of the campus at Princeton, her public speaking speech (for which she went all the way to the state finals) was titled, rhetorically, “Why Princeton?”

  Winona could tell you why. Princeton meant getting out. To run away from the house she shared with her dope-dealing older brother and her parents, who we could hear screaming promises of divorce from across the street at night but who, by day, returned to their jobs and waved at us as they pulled groceries from their car or mowed the lawn. Winona didn’t have boyfriends. She counted Ash as her best friend, which is to say she didn’t have anyone.

  It was a short walk to the old neighborhood. The streets the same as I remembered them though the trees were taller, a canopy that darkened the faces on the houses. Our house shrouded more than most. The side yard oak towering over half the block, some of the branches pushing against what used to be my bedroom window. In the backyard, over the fence, I could hear a couple of toddlers playing. At the end of the yard the tire swing was still there. The rope spiky and frayed, the branch it was tied to raw from the years of holding up its weight.

  I turned away to take in the Quinlan place. In need of a paint job, car parts and tools littering the floor of the open garage. Still, whoever lived there now might know who the owners of this place were twenty years ago. Where their Ivy League–bound daughter is today.

  It was this long shot that had me walking up to the outer glass door and ringing the bell. From inside, what sounded like two televisions and a radio tuned to a shock jock station, all on loud. I was about to hit the bell again when a woman appeared from the gloom, took me in as her thin, unlipsticked lips disappeared completely into her mouth.

  “Danny?”

  It was Winona. And something about her—everything about her—told me she never made it to Princeton.

  “It’s good to see you, Winona. It must be—I don’t want to even count—”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  She said this with real sharpness, like I’d already done something to anger her. Or like she didn’t want to even be seen standing here talking to me.

  “Can I come in?”

  She looked over my shoulder at her driveway. “I don’t think so.”

  “Just for a minute.”

  “You oughtta go.”

  “She’s come back.”

  “Who?”

  “My sister.”

  Her face blinked. Not just her eyes, but her entire face squeezed together and released.

  “Come around to the back,” she said.

  Winona slammed the inside door closed and left me to slink around the side of the garage and reach over the fence to let myself into the yard.

  Random piles of junk. Tools in open boxes on picnic tables, old power saws left on the lawn, the grass so high you had to watch not to step on them. The backyard of the world’s most careless handyman.

  “Who’re you?”

  I turned around to find a teenaged boy standing on the small deck by the door. Surrounded on all sides by stacked boxes of Miller Genuine Draft empties.

  “My name’s Danny. I’m an old friend of your—of Winona’s.”

  He did the same face blink thing that his mother did. “You’re her friend?”

  “From way back.”

  “Go inside, Henry,” Winona said when she appeared in the doorway behind him. But the boy didn’t move. “I’m serious. Go the fuck in.”

  Eventually he did. Which left just me, Winona, and my idiotic grin.

  “Henry. Classic.”

  “Henry Ford,” she said, her chin sweeping across all the rusted junk in the yard. “This is still Detroit, you know.”

  I waited for her to step down off the deck, or offer me a seat in one of the folding chairs scattered here and there, but she remained standing where she was. The two of us weighing the effects of time on each other in the way of those who, moving into their forties, automatically make damage assessments of people who share their age. I could only guess what she saw in me, but in her there was a whole person who’d been left behind.

  The weight was only part of it, the plumped cheeks and arms that spoke of illness. But that wasn’t what had fundamentally changed in her. It was the feral skittishness, the tension of someone who is alert to potential attack from any angle, at any time. A girl of words, of thoughts, who had grown into a woman of base instinct. Drugs. That’s what all of it said. When she crossed her arms and her sleeves were pulled back, the track marks confirmed it.

  “You’ve lived in the house the whole time?” I asked. “I don’t remember seeing you here when I was across the street, taking care of my dad.”

  “I went away. And then my parents died,” she said with the bluntness with which one would announce a lost pair of shoes.

  “Henry’s your only one?”

  “Three boys.”

  “And their dad?”

  “This a fucking two-person high school reunion we’re having here?”

  “No. I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “About the day Ash died. The bike ride you guys took with her.”

  I was sure Winona would tell me to leave. Instead, she started down the steps. Glanced over the fence at her neighbors’ places, trying to confirm nobody was there to overhear us. Came to stand close enough that she brought her scent of cigarette smoke and unwashed skin with her.

  “I told the police all about it,” she said. “We all did.”

  “I’m just wondering if there’s anything they missed. Because I think Ash wants me to figure out what happened to her. Who started the fire.”

  “She wants that? She’s dead, last I checked.”

  “Yeah. It’s kind of nuts.”

  “Got that right.”

  “But I’m asking you anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you knew Ash. And I’m hoping if I give her the answer, she’ll leave my family alone.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She tried to hurt them. She’ll try it again unless I help her.”

  Winona looked left and right. The regret played over her features like she held her hand over an open flame.

  “They said at the time that whoever killed your sister probably killed Meg, too,” she said.

  “You have any ideas?”

  “Somebody who’d take two girls into an empty house in downtown Detroit? Fucksake, Danny, it’s kind of a long list. Why don’t you start with the phone book?”

  She was bluffing. I’m no expert at these things, but even I could see how her eyes looked around me instead of at me.

  “What if it’s not just some stranger who got away with it?” I said. “What if it was somebody from here, from Royal Oak? Somebody who knew them?”

  She released her lips from where they’d been clenched and they came out with a pop.

  “You know what I think?” she said, reddening. “I think you should leave this shit alone. It’s done.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Because you’ve got people thinking you’re a medium or something? You’re Mr. Heaven, that it?”

  “I’m not a medium. And heaven’s not where Ash went.”

  She seemed to listen to the ongoing noise from inside the house as though trying to discern a particular voice amid the advertising and cartoon sound effects and studio audience laughter.

  “I can’t talk to you,” she said finally. “I’m sorry about whatever is going on with you, but what happened back then—not that I saw anything—I’m not talking about it.”

  She looked pissed off. But this was only where all her feelings ended up, worry and sorrow and love and everything else congealed into confused outrage.

  “Maybe my life isn’t exactly as I was hoping it would go,” she went on. “But here’s the thing—I’m still alive. I need to stay that way. For my boys. And bringing your sister up again—”

  She didn’t finish the thought.

  “What about Michelle or Lisa?�
�� I said. “You know where they live now?”

  “Michelle’s dead. Don’t know about Lisa.”

  “What happened to Michelle?”

  “She tried to talk about your sister, that’s what happened to her. Called me a few times, remembering her, wanting to figure her out, just like you. Then it’s her mother calling to tell me she killed herself. You know what? I wasn’t surprised.”

  “And Lisa?”

  “Last I heard she moved out west. Seattle or Portland or someplace like that. A photographer.”

  Winona did something with her mouth that may have been a smile. Something unpleasant, whatever it was.

  “You should look up her work sometime,” she said. “Bet you’d find it interesting.”

  She started away. Backed up without turning around as if there were some threat of me taking a run at her.

  “Why do you think she wanted to go on that bike ride?” I said. “What did she want you to see?”

  “Good-bye, Danny.”

  “But you have an idea, don’t you? There’s something you know that you didn’t tell the police.”

  “You have to go. Just—”

  “Please!”

  The door banged closed.

  I made my way down the driveway to the sidewalk. Across the street, there was a commotion in the backyard of our old house.

  The toddlers who were playing out there before were screaming now. Not everyday kid screaming, not the theatrics of a scraped knee or protest at a stolen toy. Screams of terror, wordless and pure.

  Their mother rushed out the sliding doors, almost screaming herself.

  “What’s wrong? My God! What’s wrong?”

  I couldn’t see because of the fence but one or both of the kids must have pointed at the far end of the yard, because that’s where their mother’s eyes went to. Where she saw the tire swinging as high as it could go, higher than a kid their size could push it, back and forth without lowering or slowing, stirring the smell of too-sweet perfume and spoiled meat around in the still air.

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