The Dead Place Page 3

  “I guess so. Her Holiness has informed me that I’m not to sneak up on her or listen to her playing the piano.”

  Kate laughed again, but with sympathy. “Oh, poor Ian! And I just jumped all over you again.” She gave him a quick hug, her small arm reaching out to encircle his waist and give it a gentle squeeze, her touch startling and electric. He brought his own arm around hers to try and hold it there, but she slipped away, out of reach.

  “Too much estrogen in this place,” she said, her voice dropping deeper. An old joke between them, something an elderly professor had once said to him in her hearing. She didn’t sound like the cantankerous old man, she didn’t sound like a man at all, but he smiled anyway.

  “I’ve got to take off, unless you need me?”

  Kate’s own smile faded, but she shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  “I was going to take the car.”

  “Okay.”

  “You sure you won’t need it?”

  He was pressing, he knew that even before the crease appeared on her forehead, but he didn’t like the idea of her being without transportation.

  “I don’t know if you can find a cab here,” he said out loud, wincing inwardly at the ridiculous cheeriness in his own voice.

  “Where would I be going, Ian?”

  They both knew she didn’t leave the house, that she could barely be coaxed anywhere these days. It had taken a tremendous effort to get her to go to that party the other night, and he’d had the feeling that he’d be paying for the gift of her presence for months to come.

  “Okay, I’ll take the car then. I’ll call you later.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know. I want to.”

  She accepted the kiss he offered, their lips pressing briefly together like paper, before Kate stepped back. Ian backed out of her space, noticing that her attention turned immediately back to the canvases at her feet. He heard the door close and the key turn in the lock as he walked away.

  His shoes tapped lightly on the old bricks laid out in a herringbone pattern to form a driveway. A few of them looked loose, and he had no idea how they were anchored. Mortar? Years of apartment living hadn’t prepared him well for home ownership, but he would learn. When he reached the Volvo, he looked back at the studio and saw Kate standing at the windows looking out, but when he gave a little wave, she didn’t see him.

  The old car’s engine coughed and spluttered, but finally roared to life, resuscitated once again, but soon they’d have to replace it. Or maybe, since they were going to buy a second car, the Volvo could hobble along for another year. It reminded him that he had to find a new mechanic; there was no way he was driving any car back into the city to get it serviced.

  As he backed out of the driveway, he caught sight of their next-door neighbor coming out the front door of his weathered-looking frame house, the slap of the screen door catching Ian’s ear before the man’s striped shirt caught his eye.

  He was an average-looking white man, middle-aged and balding, wearing a short-sleeved shirt that strained slightly over the fullness of a belly hanging over the belt of his pants.

  Instantly forgettable except that when he saw Ian, the man actually stopped short before reversing and scuttling back up his front steps to hide in his shadowed front porch.

  Ian let his hand drop, the friendly wave forgotten, and concentrated on backing onto the street without hitting the dusty white van parked in front of the neighbor’s door. Guy was obviously shy. A good thing really. The last thing he wanted was some garrulous country neighbor rushing over at every opportunity to share his expertise with the city folk.

  Ian drove down Wickfield’s pretty streets feeling a deep sense of satisfaction. This was a good move, a good place to be. Sure, it would take time to get used to the slower pace, but there were lots of advantages to being out of the city, not least getting Grace away from bad influences.

  He’d wanted to leave the city earlier, and had received overtures from Wickfield over a year before Kate would seriously discuss it. When he’d first been approached by Laurence Beetleman and others from Wickfield to see if he’d consider becoming dean, he’d mentioned it to Kate, but she’d argued against it. He had tenure in the music department at NYU, she was teaching part-time there, too, and more importantly, there was her whole network of artists and galleries. She’d always talked about her studio when they discussed it, mourning in advance the thought of leaving a space that she’d had for so long, which was entirely hers. It predated their relationship by a year, a loft space in an old industrial building on the edge of Williamsburg that she’d found right before that neighborhood skyrocketed.

  She’d extol the light if he suggested that she could find another studio, but he knew that most of her attachment had to do with having been in the space for so long and having so many memories attached to it. She’d taken him there when they were dating, running ahead of him up the dangerously narrow flight of stairs, sliding back the battered metal door with a great flourish, looking for his reaction.

  While he’d noticed the concrete floor flecked with paint and the long, battered worktable crowded with pots and brushes, and the three easels holding canvases in various states of completion, his eyes had been drawn relentlessly back to her. Beautiful in her strange hodgepodge of skirts and peasant blouse, an auburn-haired gypsy with clacking metal bracelets that she tossed on the table so they wouldn’t get in the way of her work.

  She’d insisted on painting him, making him perch on a chair near the window and hold his face just so, tilted toward the light. Asking him questions and scolding him when he automatically moved his head to look at her as he answered.

  “Stop looking at me, I want your profile,” she’d instructed, brow furrowed with concentration. She’d been so fierce in her work, so beautiful.

  “I’d rather look at you.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.” Her laughter came easily, ringing in the room and making him smile and bringing more scolding. “Stop that. No, no—look away from me! I want you in repose, not staring with a fool’s grin like some Sears Portrait.”

  “I can’t help it, you’re making me laugh.”

  Once, after they’d been dating for several months, they’d made love in her studio, moving against each other on an old blanket laid across the stained concrete. He could still recall the sunlight dappling her breasts and the feel of the sable brush they’d taken turns tracing over each other’s body.

  A sudden honk startled Ian, and he realized he’d fallen thoroughly into memory and was sitting at a green light. He stomped on the accelerator and the old car lurched forward. When the lane changed to two, the SUV behind him roared around his left side, the irate driver communicating his displeasure by leaving the Volvo in a cloud of exhaust.

  Annoyed at being lured into unproductive reflection, Ian focused on driving, pulling onto campus in record time. There was a spot assigned for him in the newer parking lot. Just one of the perks of the job and as he parked the car, Ian’s feeling of satisfaction returned, heightened when he made the brisk walk across campus to the beautiful Beaux Arts building that housed the offices for the College of Arts and Sciences.

  His office was on the fifth and top floor in a suite at the end of a long hallway tiled in squares of ocher and black. The brass nameplate on the solid wood door was new, and Ian felt a peculiar mixture of pride and embarrassment, flashing back to his first day as an undergrad, so glad to be there and yet so self-conscious about being the new guy on campus.

  His secretary sat behind a boxy wooden desk that he knew to be a smaller version of the one in the inner office, as if she were in training to be dean.

  Mildred Wooden was small, round almost to the point of being cherubic, and of indeterminate middle age. Ian could have been convinced she was forty-five or sixty-five. Her bob of perfectly smooth ash blond hair was cut too short to flatter her round face, and she favored boxy suits in harsh colors like puce and orange. She moved her small, b
ejeweled hands when she spoke, and reminded Ian of a tropical bird.

  “You have fifteen calls already this morning, Dean Corbin,” she said in greeting, bobbing up from her seat to wave a handful of papers at him.

  Ian took them from her into his office while she flapped along behind him chattering on about a faculty meeting and other commitments. He barely heard her, focused instead on the view out the two large windows that dominated the back wall of the office.

  Here was the University of Wickfield depicted on postcards undergrads sent home to their parents. The rolling green lawns and massive brick and stone buildings, the bell tower where generations of students had carved their names, the avenue of stately elm trees that had been saplings when President McKinley visited Wickfield, and the gentle curve of the river just visible at the farthest edge of campus that Ian could see. He knew that at this very moment more than one pencil-thin scull was slicing cleanly through its silver surface.

  In the far right corner of his window he could see an edge of the field where the new Performing Arts Center would be built. This was why he’d been wooed, and allowed himself to be wooed, away from NYU. The chance to be part of something like this center came once, if it came at all, in a career. The building would be a design masterpiece, something that would stand for generations, and he would be part of the creative process.

  Of course, it was still in the planning stages. They wouldn’t break ground, wouldn’t even be able to name the place, until funding was secure. Finding the money and convincing the rest of the university community to back this project would be his biggest challenges this year, but just the thought of being able to look out this window and see the product of his hard work excited him.

  “Would you like me to call Mrs. Corbin to let her know about the reception?”

  The question doused his sense of satisfaction like a splash of dirty water. Mildred Wooden paused in the doorway waiting for an answer, fidgeting now with the chain of multicolored pebbles supporting her reading glasses.

  Ian turned his bark of startled laughter into a cough just in time. Ask Kate to attend two events in one week? The old Kate, yes, she’d loved socializing, but not the new one.

  Ever since the assault, she couldn’t bear to be around crowds. She also couldn’t bear to be touched. He understood this rationally. It had made complete sense to him after what happened, and he’d been so careful in those first few months not to so much as brush casually against her.

  But that was eight months ago. Eight damn months and he couldn’t even move his hand toward Kate, much less touch her, without that shuttered look coming over her face and her body stiffening in a way that told him without words that he wasn’t wanted.

  It was hard not to take that personally. It was hard not to think that this withdrawal from the world was also a withdrawal from him.

  The secretary he’d inherited from his predecessor was still fidgeting in the doorway. “No,” he said at last to Mildred Wooden. “I’ll call her myself.”

  Chapter Three

  A new semester meant a fresh start. Barbara Terry repeated this like a mantra as she walked along Penton Street, killing time before her class. Last semester was a thing of the past and she couldn’t change it, couldn’t make those C’s into A’s, couldn’t go back in time and choose to study instead of attending those frat parties.

  A new year meant a new beginning. She’d let herself get distracted last year, new to college, new to an independent life. Saturday night parties became Friday and Saturday nights and even Thursdays sometimes. She’d told herself that she’d catch up on studying, that everybody’s grades slipped their first semester, that she had time to make things right.

  Time had crept up on her along with ten extra pounds. It wasn’t “freshman fifteen” no matter what her brothers said. As if it hadn’t been bad enough going back home with crappy grades, she’d had to put up with them making fun of her. “Some guys like a girl with a little extra meat,” Brad said, poking her in the side, and Jim laughed right along with him.

  She tugged self-consciously at the waistband of her jeans, which was digging uncomfortably into her stomach. It was why she was walking through town. Part of her new plan to cram in exercise where she could, which, coupled with ridding her diet of fat, sugar, and anything yummy, would have her shedding pounds so fast that Brad and Jim would just have to eat their words.

  They were just jealous because she’d gotten as far as college, and when she had a degree and a good job they’d still be squeezing cow teats and kicking manure off the soles of their boots.

  She sighed as she passed Corner Bakery. The smell of freshly made muffins and doughnuts didn’t help her resolve. There was already a queue of people in the shop and she hurried past, determined not to indulge. She wouldn’t yield to temptation, not this year.

  A smiling face looked out at her from a faded poster taped to a lamppost. Rain had washed out the word MISSING printed in caps under the picture. Red ink streaked through the plea for information below.

  There were dozens of these posters when Lily Slocum first went missing, but now they had faded or simply vanished, torn from telephone poles or covered up by new signs.

  Still, it wasn’t as if Lily had been forgotten. There were new security warnings on campus about leaving dorm doors unlocked or walking unescorted late at night, even though everybody knew that Lily disappeared in broad daylight.

  It was warm outside, but Barbara shivered anyway just thinking about it. It wasn’t as if she’d known Lily well, not really, but they’d taken Geo Sci 146 together. Sitting in the same row of the lecture hall for an entire semester counted as some sort of bond even if they never said more than hello outside of class.

  Lily had been friendly during Geo Sci, but she was a junior so naturally she didn’t want to hang out with a newbie freshman. That was what Barbara tried to think, but a part of her always suspected that the real reason Lily never suggested getting together outside of class was because she didn’t want to hang out with someone below her standards.

  Lily was one of the beautiful people, those lucky few who beat the genetic crapshoot. She could sit there mainlining M&Ms in class yet never gain a pound, and even when she showed up for class without makeup and with her long blond hair pulled back in a messy knot, guys would still turn to look at her.

  The truth was that Barbara had been sort of jealous of her. She’d felt bad about that after Lily disappeared. It was weird, thinking of someone just vanishing like that, but maybe she’d just taken off with some guy. That’s what a lot of people said.

  Wickfield’s business district wasn’t much, just a lot of stores that appealed mainly to old people—they didn’t even have a Gap—but there was a decent college bookstore and two pizzerias and even one cheap sit-down restaurant that catered to students. Not that she was going to eat out this semester. This semester she was definitely eating in and saving her money.

  Barbara felt a little pang, thinking of all the pizza she’d enjoyed last year, but then she pushed it out of her mind and picked up her pace. Her focus had to be on class work or she was never going to have the grades to get into grad school. Not that she knew what she wanted to do yet, but she knew she wasn’t going back to the dairy farm.

  She walked briskly past Evers Hardware and its display of old-fashioned bamboo rakes, and past First National Bank where a teller about her age was grabbing a smoke. The young woman gave Barbara the disdainful look affected by townspeople who didn’t like college students, and stubbed out the cigarette with the toe of her cheap pump before flouncing through the double glass doors.

  When Barbara reached Thorney Antiques Emporium at the end of the street, she unconsciously slowed down. This was the one old store she really loved, though her friends laughed at her when she insisted on stopping. Two stories crammed with several centuries worth of furniture and bric-a-brac, the shop looked as if it had stood there forever.

  The owner, Mrs. Thorney, was slightly deaf and in so
me indeterminate period of old age between seventy and ninety. She dyed her hair shoe-polish black and wore it in a twisted cone, pinned to her head, so that it looked like a knob of polished ebony. She was fond of 1960s boldly patterned caftans and 1940s Bakelite jewelry and she called everybody “hon,” though her tone of voice could make that either crotchety or a caress.

  She didn’t like the “college kids,” but made an exception for Barbara, who treated her store and its possessions with respect, and Barbara returned her affection.

  There was no sign of Mrs. Thorney through the front window, but she’d obviously been busy over the weekend. There was a new display, Victorian-themed with an emphasis on white. Clusters of lush white flowers and greenery framed the window and curved around silver picture frames and a gilt-edged porcelain tea service on a wide silver tray. There were carved ivory fans and a few sparkling broaches mounted on a velvet pillow, and a wide-brimmed hat with fluffy white feathers curving around its brim.

  Barbara stared at the montage, oohing and aahing over the various elements and able, as was Mrs. Thorney, to ignore the fact that the flowers were silk, the broaches made of rhinestones, the velvet pillow moth-eaten on one corner, and the band of the hat stained yellow with some long-ago wearer’s perspiration.

  Her eyes flitted over everything, but came back to rest on a photograph in one corner. It was fairly small, maybe five by seven, and black and white with a sepia tone. It was in a silver frame that was tarnishing on its edges. This in no way detracted from the beauty of the young woman depicted, lying full-length on a chaise lounge, her body covered by a filmy-looking white dress with a high-neck. Her raised head rested on a pillow and she clasped flowers in hands folded demurely just below her chest.

  Barbara looked, then looked again. She pressed her face so close to the window that it fogged up and she rubbed away the steam with an impatient hand. The young woman’s eyes were closed, but she knew what color they’d be if they were opened. Watery blue. She’d seen them before. She’d seen them in the halls of her dorm and staring out at her from posters all over campus.