Chapter Five
Alan was wearing white pants, the creases like folded paper, and a pale green oxford when I came down to breakfast. He sat alone at the massive mahogany dining-room set, his light shadow glowing in the polished wood. I peeked pointedly at the table legs to see what all the fuss of last night was about. Alan chose not to notice. He was eating milky eggs from a bowl with a teaspoon. When he looked up at me, a rubbery string of yolk swung like spit past his chin.
“Camille. Sit down. What can I have Gayla bring you?” He tinkled the silver bell next to him, and through the swinging kitchen door came Gayla, a former farm girl who ten years ago traded in pigs for daily work cleaning and cooking in my mother’s home. She was my height—tall—but couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. The white starched nursing dress she wore as her uniform swayed loosely on her, like a bell.
My mother walked in past her, kissed Alan on the cheek, sat a pear in front of her place on a white cotton napkin.
“Gayla, you remember Camille.”
“Of course I do, Mrs. Crellin,” she said, pointing her vulpine face at me. Smiled with mismatched teeth and cracked, flaky lips. “Hi Camille. I have eggs, toast, fruit?”
“Just coffee please. Cream and sugar.”
“Camille, we picked up food just for you,” my mother said, nibbling on the plump end of the pear. “Have a banana at least.”
“And a banana.” Gayla headed back into the kitchen with a smirk.
“Camille, I must apologize to you for last night,” Alan started. “Amma is going through one of those stages.”
“She’s very clingy,” my mother said. “Mostly in a sweet way, but sometimes she gets a bit out of hand.”
“Or more than a bit,” I said. “That was a serious tantrum for a thirteen-year-old. It was a little scary.” That was the Chicago me coming back—more assured and definitely more mouthy. I was relieved.
“Yes, well, you weren’t exactly placid yourself at that age.” I didn’t know what my mother meant—my cutting, my crying jags over my lost sister, or the overactive sex life I’d embarked on. I decided just to nod.
“Well, I hope she’s okay,” I said with finality, and stood up to leave.
“Please, Camille, sit back down,” said Alan thinly, wiping the corners of his mouth. “Tell us about the Windy City. Spare us a minute.”
“Windy City’s fine. Job’s still good, been getting good feedback.”
“What comprises good feedback?” Alan leaned toward me, hands folded, as if he thought his question quite charming.
“Well, I’ve been doing some more high-profile stories. I’ve covered three murders just since the beginning of the year.”
“And that’s a good thing, Camille?” My mother stopped nibbling. “I will never understand where your penchant for ugliness comes from. Seems like you have enough of that in your life without deliberately seeking it out.” She laughed: a shrill lilt, like a balloon lifted in a gust.
Gayla returned with my coffee and a banana wedged awkwardly in a bowl. As she exited, Amma entered, like two players in a drawing-room farce. She kissed my mother on the cheek, greeted Alan, and sat across from me. Kicked me once under the table and laughed. Oh, was that you?
“I’m sorry you had to see me that way, Camille,” Amma said. “Especially since we don’t really know each other. I’m just going through a stage.” She flashed an overdone smile. “But now we’re reunited. You’re like poor Cinderella, and I’m the evil stepsister. Half sister.”
“There’s not a speck of evil in you, sweetheart,” Alan said.
“But Camille was the first. First is usually best. Now that she’s back, will you love Camille more than me?” asked Amma. She started the question teasingly, but her cheeks were flushed as she waited for my mother to respond.
“No,” Adora said quietly. Gayla set a plate of ham in front of Amma, who poured honey on it in lacy circles.
“Because you love me,” Amma said, between mouthfuls of ham. The sick smell of meat and sweetness wafted over. “I wish I’d be murdered.”
“Amma, don’t say such a thing,” my mother said, blanching. Her fingers fluttered to her eyelashes, then back determinedly down on the table.
“Then I’d never have to worry again. When you die, you become perfect. I’d be like Princess Diana. Everyone loves her now.”
“You are the most popular girl in your whole school, and at home you are adored, Amma. Don’t be greedy.”
Amma kicked me again under the table and smiled emphatically, as if some important matter had been settled. She swung a corner of the garment she was wearing over her shoulder, and I realized what I’d thought was a housedress was a cleverly wrapped blue sheet. My mother noticed, too.
“What in the world are you wearing, Amma?”
“It’s my maiden cloak. I’m going to the forest to play Joan of Arc. The girls will burn me.”
“You’ll do no such thing, darling,” my mother snapped, grabbing the honey from Amma, who was about to soak her ham further. “Two girls your age are dead, and you think you’re going to the forest to play?”
The children in the woods play wild, secret games. The beginning of a poem I once knew by heart.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.” Amma smiled in a cloying exaggeration.
“You’ll stay here.”
; Amma stabbed at her ham and muttered something nasty. My mother turned to me with her head cocked, the diamond on her wedding finger flashing in my eyes like an SOS.
“Now, Camille, can we at least do something pleasant while you’re here?” she asked. “We could have a picnic in the backyard. Or we could take out the convertible, go for a drive, maybe play some golf over in Woodberry. Gayla, bring me some iced tea, please.”
“That all sounds nice. I just need to figure out how much longer I’m here for.”
“Yes, that’d be nice for us to know also. Not that you’re not welcome to stay as long as you want,” she said. “But it would be nice for us to know, so we could make our own plans.”
“Sure.” I took a bite of the banana, which tasted like pale green nothing.
“Or maybe Alan and I can come up there sometime this year. We’ve never really seen Chicago.” My hospital was ninety minutes south of the city. My mother flew into O’Hare and had a taxi drive her. It cost $128, $140 with tip.
“That’d be good, too. We have some great museums. You’d love the lake.”
“I don’t know that I can enjoy any kind of water anymore.”
“Why not?” I already knew.
“After that little girl, little Ann Nash, was left in the creek to drown.” She paused to take a sip of her iced tea. “I knew her, you know.”
Amma whined and began fidgeting in her seat.
“She wasn’t drowned though,” I said, knowing my correction would annoy her. “She was strangled. She just ended up in the creek.”
“And then the Keene girl. I was fond of both of them. Very fond.” She stared away wistfully, and Alan put his hand over hers. Amma stood up, released a little scream the way an excited puppy might suddenly bark, and ran upstairs.
“Poor thing,” my mother said. “She’s having nearly as hard a time as I am.”
“She actually saw the girls every day, so I’m sure she is,” I said peevishly in spite of myself. “How did you know them?”
“Wind Gap, I need not remind you, is a small town. They were sweet, beautiful little girls. Just beautiful.”
“But you didn’t really know them.”
“I did know them. I knew them well.”
“How?”
“Camille, please try not to do this. I’ve just told you that I am upset and unnerved, and instead of being comforting, you attack me.”
“So. You’ve sworn off all bodies of water in the future, then?”
My mother emitted a quick, creaky sound. “You need to shut up now, Camille.” She folded the napkin around the remains of her pear like a swaddling and left the room. Alan followed her with his manic whistling, like an old-time piano player lending drama to a silent movie.
Every tragedy that happens in the world happens to my mother, and this more than anything about her turns my stomach. She worries over people she’s never met who have a spell of bad chance. She cries over news from across the globe. It’s all too much for her, the cruelty of human beings.
She didn’t come out of her room for a year after Marian died. A gorgeous room: canopy bed the size of a ship, vanity table studded with frosted perfume bottles. A floor so glorious it had been photographed by several decorating magazines: Made from pure ivory, cut into squares, it lit up the room from below. That room and its decadent floor had me awestruck, all the more so because it was forbidden to me. Notables like Truman Winslow, the mayor of Wind Gap, paid weekly visits, brought fresh flowers and classic novels. I could glimpse my mother on occasion when the door opened to admit these people. She’d be in bed always, propped up on a snowdrift of pillows, dressed in a series of thin, flowered robes. I never got to go in.
Curry’s deadline for the feature was only two days away, and I had little to report. Sitting in my room, spread formally on my bed with my hands clasped like a corpse, I summed up what I knew, forced it into structure. No one had witnessed the abduction of Ann Nash last August. She’d simply vanished, her body turning up a few miles away in Falls Creek ten hours later. She’d been strangled about four hours after she was taken. Her bike was never found. If forced to guess, I’d say she knew the person. Grabbing a child and her bike against her will would be a noisy business on those still streets. Was it someone from church, or even the neighborhood? Someone who looked safe.
But with the first murder committed cautiously, why take Natalie in the day, in front of a friend? It didn’t make sense. If James Capisi had been standing at the edge of those woods, instead of guiltily sucking up sunrays, would he be dead now? Or had Natalie Keene been a deliberate target? She was held longer, too: She was more than two days missing before her body appeared, wedged in the twelve inches between the hardware store and a beauty parlor on the very public Main Street.
What did James Capisi see? The boy left me uneasy. I didn’t think he was lying. But children digest terror differently. The boy saw a horror, and that horror became the wicked witch of fairy tales, the cruel snow queen. But what if this person simply looked feminine? A lanky man with long hair, a transvestite, an androgynous boy? Women didn’t kill this way, they just didn’t. You could count the list of female serial killers on one hand, and their victims were almost always male—generally sex business gone bad. But then the girls hadn’t been sexually assaulted, and that also didn’t fit the pattern.
The choice of the two girls also seemed senseless. If not for Natalie Keene, I’d believe they were victims of sheer dumb luck. But if James Capisi wasn’t lying, effort had been made to get that girl at the park, and if it was indeed that particular girl the killer wanted, then Ann was not sheer caprice, either. Neither girl was beautiful in a way that would nurture obsession. Like Bob Nash had said, Ashleigh’s the prettiest. Natalie came from a moneyed family, still fairly new to Wind Gap. Ann was on the low end of middle class, and the Nashes had been in Wind Gap for generations. The girls weren’t friends. Their only connection was a shared viciousness, if Vickery’s stories were to be believed. And then there was the hitchhiker theory. Could that really be what Richard Willis was thinking? We were near a major trucking route to and from Memphis. But nine months is a long time for a stranger to go unnoticed, and the surrounding woods of Wind Gap had yielded nothing so far, not even many animals. They were hunted out years ago.
I could feel my thoughts blowing back on themselves, dirtied with old prejudices and too much insider knowledge. I suddenly felt a desperate need to talk to Richard Willis, a person not from Wind Gap, who saw what was happening as a job, a project to assemble and complete, the last nail in place, tidy and contained. I needed to think like that.