The Damned Read online

* * *

  I hadn’t been to Woodlawn Cemetery since my father’s funeral. Knowing what I know about where we go once we die, I’d never seen the point in leaving flower bouquets next to tombstones or talking to the ground. This was just where the bodies end up, and soon enough the bodies weren’t even that anymore. The soul—or whatever you want to call the part that can’t be buried—doesn’t stick around these places for long. Why would it? There’s nothing here for the dead but the dead.

  Yet, even in this relatively neglected parcel, amid the tilting crypts and gravesites calling out for a weed-whacker, there were the flowers and ribbons and teddy bears and flags left behind. The living showing up for their own reasons, their own loves and duties and confessions.

  Dad’s stone was doing better than the other two. Funny how their monuments stood now as they themselves stood then: Dad firm and tall, Ash a mystery (ASHLEIGH ORCHARD 1973–1989), Mom chipped away, the epitaph a proverb she’d chosen from a book when they’d reserved the plots.

  The acts of this life are the destiny of the next.

  When The After came out, I was asked to come here by TV producers wanting to film me standing at her stone, providing a thoughtful scowl for the camera as the voice-over explained how it was this grave where Mrs. Orchard was buried wearing her father’s watch, the watch that her son was given in the afterlife and still wears today. They would have cut to a close-up of the Omega on my wrist then, Mom’s tombstone soft-focused in the background. “Haunting and moving,” the producers promised me, trying to talk me into it. I refused every time. I didn’t want to be moved, not as a public performance, anyway. And I was already haunted.

  Now, though, alone in the flat field dotted by other stones, I brought the watch to my eyes. What did it say, other than the hour? That there was something that came after our time here. The acts of this life. And that my mother loved me. She loved me and wished she could have shielded me but she didn’t have the strength.

  That’s not how I wanted it to end for me. I wasn’t interested in sending a message from beyond. I wanted to help my family here.

  And to do that, I would have to tell Ash who put her in the ground under my feet.

  I HEADED BACK TO THE hotel and opened my laptop. The first thing I found on Lisa Goodale was her professional website. On the splash page, a self-portrait of Lisa. The kittenish features of her youth had given way to harder lines, a mournful widening of her nose exaggerated by the photo’s stark lighting, so that she seemed to be trying to hide from the camera even as she stared into it.

  Elsewhere, the rest of the site was a slick showcase for her work arranged in various galleries: Weddings, Portrait, Corporate. It’s good. Tasteful and restrained, with a strong leaning toward black-and-white. But it was the pictures I found when I clicked on Fine Art that took my breath away.

  All of the images she’d posted involved a girl as their recurring subject. Always the same model, a blonde in her midteens with blue eyes that appeared to have been enhanced somehow, so that they glowed out from otherwise monochrome exposures, alien and cold. A girl who was illuminated in a kind of aura no matter what setting she was in, though the effect was somehow the opposite of angelic, the light something that would burn if you got too close. Looking directly into the camera from the back of a bus. Sitting on the roof of a car, her legs dangling over the driver side door. Laughing into a set of bathroom mirrors arranged so that a thousand of her faces repeated themselves, bending round into the glass.

  She’d titled the series The After.

  The other results I found were from news sites.

  Missing-person bulletins. Stories reporting on how prominent Portland photographer Lisa Goodale, single and with no children, hadn’t been seen since August 12, 2013. Two days after my heart attack on Cambridge Common.

  They’ll never find her.

  She won’t be taking any pictures that try to bring Ash back to life again, because she was alive.

  And Lisa, officially missing, was already gone.

  WHEN I STOPPED BLINKING AT the laptop’s screen it was night again. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so I walked out the front doors and found a place along Greektown’s single touristy block of restaurants. After I ordered, I pulled out my phone to text Willa and saw there was already one waiting for me.

  how’s it going, sherlock?

  It took the length of a beer to come up with an answer.

  Think I’m on to something here.

  Not a complete lie. Either way, I hoped she wouldn’t ask for more. So I asked what I really wanted to know before she could.

  How are you guys?

  When the answer came I had to stifle a whimper that worked its way out of me just as the waiter returned to take my order.

  Missing you. Both of us.

  Once I finished eating I stepped out and felt the night around me, the air hard and cool. It promised to help me think.

  I started out for a walk but kept to the perimeter of the reclaimed historical buildings that now housed the casino, assuming there was security to keep it safe, though as soon as I turned the corner away from the tourist strip there was nobody on the sidewalk. Two stories above, the People Mover tracks curved toward the office buildings a few blocks away. The trains still passing every couple minutes—almost empty during the day and totally empty now. With every coming and going I looked up to see if anyone sat in one of the fluorescent cars, playing a game with myself where I could only go back inside the hotel if I spotted a passenger.

  In the meantime, I tried to pull something useful out of my conversation with Winona Quinlan.

  Whatever secret she was keeping, Winona felt she was protecting herself and her boys by burying it. And maybe she was right. It couldn’t be denied that she was still here and Michelle and Lisa weren’t.

  Who else was there to ask? I could always try to dig up an old Dondero High yearbook and search the names, firing out e-mails and calling whatever numbers I could find. Yet what would I say if anyone answered? Hi! Danny Orchard here. Ash’s twin who brought a watch back from the pearly gates? Just wanted to ask if you knew how my sister might have been murdered. Oh, and remember . . . GO OAKS! And how could they possibly reply? Oh yes, now that you ask, Danny, I have the name of Meg and Ash’s killer right here. Must have slipped my mind to share it with the police twenty-four years ago!

  Still, I knew something that I didn’t know before coming here. Winona told me, however indirectly. Her nervous face-blinks, her bit lip, her fear at the mention of Ash’s name.

  Even if it wasn’t Winona herself, someone knew at least a piece of what went on in the house on Alfred Street.

  Someone was there.

  Above, like a roll of thunder, the People Mover came again. I looked up to spot a face at the window. A white girl. Alone, lost.

  Chipmunk-cheeked and tiny-nosed, her hair parted in the middle, Midwestern-pretty in the era of leg warmers and roller rinks. Lisa Goodale, the way she appeared at sixteen. Except she was unsmiling now. Her eyes darting around in their sockets.

  Until they found me.

  The train whined into the Greektown platform overhead. It would linger there for a time, doors opened, before carrying on. Enough time to climb the stairs and make it onto Lisa’s car.

  Taking the steps two at a time seemed doable until the chest pain returned.

  Is this where I end up falling? In the empty stairwell of a People Mover station? It was the sort of thing Ash would find funny. Pathetic, she’d call it. Pathetic being the way she liked to judge the world, the way all except her tried and failed, tried and failed.

  And there I was. Trying.

  To follow the bread crumbs left by the dead. To build a wall around Willa and Eddie. It’s what started me up the stairs again, telling myself the pain was only indigestion, a souvlaki dinner gone wrong.

  I made it onto the platform in time to see the doors close. The empty train moaning into motion, its interior lights casting shadows against the walls of the
buildings snugged close to the tracks.

  Neither Lisa nor anyone else in the cars, but there was the outline of hundreds drawn dark onto the brick. The heads of men and women and children, bearded, ball-capped, long-haired, earringed. Invisible passengers staring out at the city, stuck in an infinite commute, around and around. The empty train built for the dead alone.

  27

  * * *

  In the morning, after a call with Willa in which I learned that Eddie was doing fine and that “there hasn’t been any spooky business since you left,” I hung up wondering if it would be best for all concerned if I just stayed in Detroit. And I would do it happily—well, maybe not happily—if it meant Ash leaving Willa and Eddie alone forever.

  But here’s what I didn’t mention on the phone but I suspected Willa knew anyway: she won’t.

  Which meant I had to show her I was getting closer to what she was looking for. Or at least looking like I was.

  There was nowhere to go but back to Winona’s.

  I drove into Royal Oak, crossed the Amtrak line with the familiar a-rum-de-dump of tires over the rails. Years ago, it was a signal of being home. Safety. That was always the fantasy of this place. Harm was something that happened elsewhere. A protective spell cast by middle-class wealth and policemen whose names you knew and sweatshirts that announced which college people went to.

  Perhaps it’s why I was so surprised to see the yellow line of police tape tied across Fairgrove Avenue. An ambulance, police cruisers. Real detectives, so much more convincing than me in their leather jackets and unironic moustaches, speaking with neighbors who wore housecoats and track pants. A crime scene where the Quinlan house appeared to be the center of attention.

  I parked a block south and walked the rest of the way up. Made it to the small group of onlookers as the paramedics brought the gurney out through the front door.

  I was certain it was Winona even though a sheet covered the whole body. It was the look on her son Henry’s face. Standing on the patch of lawn, watching his mother lifted into the back of the ambulance, the boy’s lips moving in a search for words. There was the beginning of anger, too. The grown-up kind that will find no lasting relief, a vine no pruning will hold back until it’s covered everything in its path.

  Once Winona was slid into the back one of the paramedics closed the doors and the other got behind the wheel. All of us, even the detectives who looked, now that I was closer, a little too like detectives—too world-weary, too vainly aware of their grim audience—waited for the ambulance to roll away before we’d let ourselves say another word, pull out cell phones, move. Then, with lights still turning and strobing atop its roof, it bumped off the curb and turned left onto Farnum, the driver looking back at us as if he were considering shouting a distasteful, if irresistible, joke.

  The mom who lived in the house across from the Quinlans’, our house, stood slightly apart from the others. Her toddlers weren’t with her, so that she had nothing to do with her hands except rub them under her eyes. When I approached she looked at me without recognition.

  “Know what happened?” I asked.

  “OD. That’s my bet.”

  “Oh?”

  “A body can only take so much.”

  “She had a history, I’m guessing.”

  “Everybody’s got a history.” She dropped the hands from her eyes. “You a reporter or something?”

  “Just a friend. Of Winona’s.”

  “Friend,” she repeated. “Didn’t know she had any of those.”

  “Actually, I grew up in the house you live in now. Way back.”

  She took two long steps back from me.

  “You’re the brother.”

  “Danny Orchard,” I said, assuming she’d read my book, but it didn’t seem to register with her. And then I realized she didn’t know me by name, but because of what she’d seen in her house. The girl her children knew.

  “You don’t look like her,” she said.

  “We were twins.”

  “Are you . . . like her?”

  “No. I’m not like her at all.”

  She moved her head from side to side the way a pitcher shakes off a catcher’s signal.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  It was clear this gave the opposite of relief. With a swipe of the air that resembled a wave but wasn’t, she turned and started back into her haunted house.

  I’VE NEVER BEEN MUCH OF a midday drinker.

  When you grew up with the kind of mother I did, one who started refreshing herself with white wine spritzers to go with ironing my dad’s shirts in front of Good Morning America, you tend to either grow into an all-day boozer yourself or barely touch the stuff, and never before five. I’m of the latter school.

  Though now, returning to Main Street at a quarter to noon, I felt the overwhelming need for a drink.

  Tom’s Oyster Bar was already busy with the lunchtime rush, but there were still plenty of empty stools and I took one, ordered a large scotch (“You mean a double?”), and let my eyes blur over the laminated menu the bartender left behind. It took a moment—and a full, burning swallow—before I realized someone was trying to talk to me. Two people, in fact.

  “Danny!”

  “Danny Orchard?”

  “That you?”

  “Over here!”

  I spun around to find two men my age at a round table in the middle of the room, waving my way. They wore identical gray summer suits, the same short-cropped haircuts, both dissecting their way through the same plates of peel-your-own shrimps. The Wigg twins.

  The Wiggs were identicals, the only other twins I remembered from growing up. They did the whole mirror-image thing: same sets of clothes worn on the same days, same chess club vice presidencies, same bowl cuts, same beady, superior stares. For class photos, they wore matching sailor suits from kindergarten all the way into their early teens, their faces indifferent to their ridiculousness, year after year. They would often ask to be excused from class at the same time, presumably to sit on side-by-side johns, counting down to launch their identical breakfasts at the same moment. It was said that the only way to tell them apart was by their erections: one with a slight banana hook, the other straight as a ruler. Though how this comparison was ever made—or how one might test its accuracy—I never knew.

  “John? Rudy?”

  The two of them grinned as though I’d successfully identified them, though I could no more tell them apart now than I could in high school.

  “John,” the one on the right confirmed, shaking my hand.

  “Let me guess. Rudy?” I said, indicating the one on the left.

  “Twins know their twins,” Rudy said.

  John pulled out a chair and I dropped into it.

  I considered opening the conversation with the news about Winona Quinlan, but there seemed little point in me being the one to share it with them. “You guys work in town?” I asked.

  “We went into practice together,” John said.

  “Orthodontists,” Rudy said.

  “The efficiencies are phenomenal,” John said.

  Rudy tapped his whitened front teeth. “No business like a family business.”

  “You guys stayed,” I said. “You didn’t want out?”

  “Out of what?” they both asked at the same time.

  “I keep forgetting that not everyone had as fucked-up a time growing up as I did.”

  “Nobody had the sister you had,” Rudy said, glancing down at my scotch.

  I was trying to think of a way to politely leave—being around the Wiggs again, around twins, is pretty close to the last thing I need—when John took a deep breath and, against his better judgment, decided to confess something to me.

  “I asked her out once, you know,” he said, waving Rudy off when he made an are-you-sure-you-want-to-go-there? face. “Probably half the guys in our year asked her out. Seriously, how could you not ask her out? But I thought, seeing as we were both
twins, she and I—maybe I could understand her where other guys didn’t.”

  “But she was—how can I put this?” Rudy said, thinking hard. “Mean. She was mean.”

  “She laughed at me! Right in my face!” John dotted his fingers over his nose and cheeks in a pantomime of spit hitting him. “Then she pretends to change her mind. ‘Maybe a double date! Twins on twins. The four of us! Question is, who gets my brother, and who gets me?’ ”

  “She was something else, no question. A beauty,” Rudy said, closing the subject. “But Danny? Your sister? Gotta say. She had a way of making you feel like shit like nobody else.”

  Rudy sucked a third of his pint glass of cola up his straw, daubed his lips with an index finger, pushed his face across the table at me.

  “So what are you doing here, Danny?”

  “I’m investigating my sister’s death,” I said, like it was the sort of thing anyone might be up to in a bar at noon. “My sister’s murder.”

  The Wiggs scrunched their noses precisely the same way.

  “We’ve always had a theory about that,” Rudy said.

  “The teacher,” John said.

  They seemed to think I ought to know what they were talking about.

  “What teacher?”

  “She didn’t tell you?” Rudy said.

  “Ash and I didn’t exactly share things—” I was about to say the way you two do, but stopped myself. “We weren’t close that way.”

  John nodded in what appeared to be real sympathy, the idea of twins not knowing everything about each other an unthinkable tragedy. “We saw them once,” he said.

  “But we didn’t tell anybody else,” Rudy said. “Guess we always assumed you knew, too.”

  “Which means maybe we’re the only ones who had an idea.”

  An idea about WHAT, you freaks? This is what it took everything I had to prevent myself from screaming into the corners of the room.

  “I’m still in the dark here, guys,” I said.

  “Mr. Malvo,” John said, the two of them starting a back-and-forth between themselves, finishing the other’s thoughts.