The Raising: A Novel Part 33

Sh.e.l.ly touched one of those without taking her eyes off the girl's face.

The multiple enlargements had obscured her features, but even through this veil of haze and distorted pixels, Sh.e.l.ly felt she knew exactly who this was, and where she'd seen her before.

With a trembling hand, she hit the left-hand arrow a few times until she was back at the article attached to the image, and the little box to the left of Josie's pretty feet.

"Craig Clements-Rabbitt has not yet been accused of a crime, inspiring outrage within the grief-stricken Omega Theta Tau community."

Sh.e.l.ly sat back, put a hand to her forehead, and then over her eyes. She had to find him. Why hadn't she done it already? What had she been waiting for? There were things this boy needed to know that only she could tell him. Her hand was still trembling as she typed in the Internet address of the university directory, and realized with some chagrin how incredibly easy he was to find. Like the Grahams, like all of them, he was captured there in the Web-his address and phone number and all the public and personal details of his life. Sh.e.l.ly jotted down the address and grabbed her purse, hurrying out the door.

78.

"Professor Polson's on her way over."

"Our professor is on her way to your apartment?" Karess asked. She was standing by the window with her arms crossed over her chest. Since they'd left the morgue and come back to the apartment, she'd never stopped shaking. She and Perry had walked so quickly they might as well have been running, and he was, himself, sweating in his jacket, but when they got to the front door and he saw how pale she was, and how much she was trembling, he took her in his arms and held her as she muttered, "Oh, G.o.d, Oh, my G.o.d, I remember that guy. Me and my roommate bought weed from him during Orientation. Oh, my G.o.d, Perry, that was his dead body."

Perry had pulled her into the hallway and pressed her up against the mailboxes, trying to warm her, hold her close enough to calm her-or maybe himself-but it hadn't worked at all. Hours and many cups of hot coffee later, Karess was still shaking, standing against the window with her legs pressed to the radiator. She'd barely spoken until now, except to say h.e.l.lo to Craig when Perry introduced them to each other, and to say no when he asked her if she wanted something to eat.

"Does Professor Polson spend a lot of time here?"

"We're working together on-"

"Yeah," Karess said.

"Look," Perry said. "She's never been here before, but this thing, with Lucas-I could tell on the phone, she's really upset."

"f.u.c.k her," Karess said, suddenly completely animated. The jewels and feathers she was wearing started to swing and flutter around her. She stomped the heel of her boot hard enough that Perry felt pretty sure that if anyone had been sleeping in the apartment below them, they weren't anymore. "She was upset? She had us all set up, Perry. Couldn't you tell? That's why she left us all there, and went out in the alley. She knew there was a body in there, that it was a guy our age. I mean, that was her other boyfriend in there, that diener. You didn't notice the big hug and all that? You think he didn't bother to tell her there was a dead college kid in the morgue today? Professor Polson's been trying to scare the s.h.i.t out of us since day one, and I for one plan to file a complaint about it. This cla.s.s has been a freak show from the beginning. My parents are not going to be amused."

"She didn't know," Perry said. "I'm telling you, she had no way of knowing. She was as shocked as the rest of us. I was there when she recognized Lucas. I thought she was going to pa.s.s out."

"Yeah. Right," Karess said, and turned her back to him. He could see her shoulder blades under her sweater and the tank top and sheer blouse she was wearing. It crossed his mind that, undressed, she might be either impossibly beautiful or a skeleton. She was always decorated in so many layers of flowing clothes he could never have begun to guess how much she weighed, but it couldn't have been much.

From the bathroom, he could hear the shower running, and Craig in there b.u.mping around in the tiny shower stall, and then the intercom buzzed through the apartment, and Perry hit the b.u.t.ton to open the apartment house door. Karess snorted out of her nose, and Perry went to stand in the hallway, listening to the sound of what he thought were Professor Polson's black boots on the stairwell (solid, steady steps in sharp heels, as if she were tired or trying to figure out if she was in the right building, heading toward the right apartment), so he was surprised when the woman turned at the top of the stairwell, and she wasn't Professor Polson. At first he thought somehow that she was his aunt Rachel. Same coloring. Reddish-blond hair. Pale skin. Maybe forty years old. Pretty, but not trying to be. This woman was wearing a silk dress and a very large black down parka. "Are you Craig?" she asked.

79.

"Are you Craig?" Sh.e.l.ly asked the boy who stood near the open door in the hallway, although he didn't look like the boy she remembered. He was handsome, in that buzz-cut, face-chiseled-from-marble kind of way-the kind of All-American boy she used to fantasize about when she was a teenager, but whom she never actually met. The closest she'd come was Chip Chase, who'd taken her to her senior prom, and he'd had longer hair than her own, which Sh.e.l.ly had pretended to like-running her fingers through the long, dark brown locks-when, in truth, she'd hated it.

This boy didn't look like the long-haired boy she'd seen at the accident. He looked, instead, like Sh.e.l.ly's brother. He could have been Sh.e.l.ly's brother, had Richie lived to be nineteen. If Richie had been a college student instead of a Marine. Josie's word interchangeable came to mind.

"No," the boy said. "Craig's in the shower."

"Oh. I was hoping to speak to him," Sh.e.l.ly said to this ghost of her brother, and he opened the door to let her in.

80.

When Craig got out of the shower-dried and dressed-he was surprised to find Perry's professor already in the apartment. She was sitting on their couch. And a slender red-haired woman sat on a kitchen chair that Perry had pulled out for her. Perry and Karess stood next to each other at the window.

"I'm Sh.e.l.ly Lockes," the red-haired woman said. "I was at the accident. I was the first one there. I'm the one they said didn't give directions to nine-one-one. I saw you and Nicole the night-"

"The night she died," Craig said, sinking onto the couch beside the professor. It surprised him how easily he was able to say "she died." It had taken Dr. Truby four appointments to get those two words out of him, and that first time he'd said them aloud, when his memory had finally started to come back to him, he'd had to stand up fast, feeling as if his own words had somehow slugged him in the stomach. Then he'd collapsed again and wept into his hands until his session with Dr. Truby was over.

Now he could say the words over and over, as if they weren't the truth.

Sh.e.l.ly Lockes shook her head, as if to contradict him, but she didn't say anything else. It was like she was waiting for permission to speak again.

There was something familiar about her. She was beautiful. She looked the way he thought angels painted on Christmas cards would look if Christmas card makers had more imagination. She was feminine, but without makeup, and although she was pet.i.te and very pretty, she also looked incredibly strong. She looked like the kind of angel who could very easily pick you up from the hundredth story of a burning building and fly you back down to the ground.

He'd seen her before, he realized.

He'd seen her everywhere, he thought.

Again, she shook her head.

Beside him, Professor Polson was shivering. Perry's friend Karess had been shivering all along, as well. Perry looked cold, too. He had his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans. But Craig felt, himself, like he was burning up. Maybe he was sick. He'd slept so solidly (twelve hours?) in the Cookie Girl Deb's bed, and still he felt sure that if he put his head down now for one second, he would fall straight back into that exhausted, dreamless state. If she hadn't woken him up to let him back into the apartment with the key the landlord had dropped off, Craig might still be there in her bed.

He might never have woken up at all.

Sh.e.l.ly Lockes looked flushed, too, he thought. Overwarm. A thin film of perspiration shone on her forehead, although she was wearing only a silky-looking dress, black tights, boots that looked more like fashion stuff than winter stuff. She was staring at him intently, as though either trying to read his mind or willing him to read hers "You were there," he asked, "the night of the accident? You saw Nicole? The night she died?"

The woman looked around as if the question had been asked of someone else in the room, but everyone in the room was looking at her. She cleared her throat and then touched it, and then tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and looked down at her boots.

How many millions of times had Craig seen Nicole tuck a strand of hair like that behind her ears, thinking before she spoke? This woman could have been Nicole, if Nicole had lived long enough to become her. Or Josie. Or any of the other sorority girls Craig had seen or known.

She licked her lips, and then bit them, and then she said, "She wasn't dead."

81.

Sh.e.l.ly had begun to think that perhaps in the months since the accident she had reinvented the boy in her imagination. There'd been only that one night, and it had been dark except for the moon. Afterward, photographs of Nicole Werner had been everywhere, so she'd had an image of the girl to compare to her memory. But Craig Clements-Rabbitt had appeared again only in her dreams.

Now, looking at him sitting across from her on the low, sagging couch-his knees practically pressed against his chest-Sh.e.l.ly realized she would have recognized him anywhere.

The dark, s.h.a.ggy hair. The pained expression she felt certain he'd spent all his adolescence attempting to turn into a rock star sneer. She'd known boys like him in high school, in college, and since. They were the ones who managed to turn into poets, or elementary school art teachers, if someone finally helped them shrug off that persona. If not, they just pa.s.sed through this world with that sneer, drinking far too much, f.u.c.king things up.

The night of the accident, he'd looked at her and understood; she'd never doubted that. He couldn't have heard her, but he'd known what she was saying. He was looking at her that same way now, and Sh.e.l.ly felt sure, again, that something was rising up in him: memory, understanding.

Now, she understood, too: He really didn't remember what had happened. That's why he'd never contacted anyone to set the record straight himself. Amnesia, she thought. Confabulation. Fugue. So many pretty words for forgetting, like names for gray flowers. Still, she felt sure that if she looked at him long enough, as deeply into his eyes as she could, he would see past her, and remember that night. Remember her. Finally, he seemed to, and said, "You were there."

"Yes," she said. "I was there. I was there, and it's not what they said happened."

He nodded. He understood. It was coming back to him, wasn't it? She was coming back to him.

"You were there," he said again. "You know what happened?"

Sh.e.l.ly nodded. "I was the first one there," she said again.

"What happened?" the boy asked.

Sh.e.l.ly felt a small sob start in her throat, and touched it. It was warm in the apartment, though everyone except Craig Clements-Rabbitt looked cold. The girl by the radiator was shivering, and the professor was blowing on her own hands, seeming to be trying to warm them up-but Sh.e.l.ly was either having another one of her hot flashes, or she had a fever, or it was a hundred degrees in here. She was sweating through her silk dress. She could feel that her feet were wet from the snow and slush she'd walked through to get here, but they weren't cold. She was thirsty. As if she'd walked through the desert as well as the snow. But none of that mattered. Finally, finally, she had this little gathered group of listeners to whom she could tell the story, and she was going to tell it. She cleared her throat and began at the beginning: The tail lights on the two-lane road. How she'd been singing along to the radio, watching them up ahead in the distance, and how they'd disappeared.

The couple in the moonlight, and how she'd seen them from the other side of the ditch of cold water. She told Craig that she'd known she had to tell him not to move the girl, but that she was never sure whether or not she'd actually said the words. He'd been so far away, but- "I heard you," he said.

She nodded.

But then he shook his head and said, "But Nicole was in the backseat. It would have been burning."

"No," Sh.e.l.ly said. "That's not what happened. She was thrown from the car. There was no fire. I called nine-one-one. I waded through the ditch, and I was right there. You had your arms around her. There was no blood. She was hurt; she'd been thrown. But you said her name, and she opened her eyes. She was going to be fine. I stayed until the ambulance came, and they told me I needed to get st.i.tches for my hand."

Sh.e.l.ly held it up so he could see the scar. The professor leaned forward, too. She had hair as black and shining as Josie's, and a sharp, serious expression. She looked troubled, and very smart.

"So I left. I went to the university outpatient clinic when the ambulance left with you and Nicole. There was never any blood. There was never any fire. You never left the scene except with them. They don't want us to remember. They want us off this campus. They have something to hide."

"I told you," Craig said, looking over at his roommate. "The postcards. You convinced me, especially after they quit coming, that they weren't from her, that it was a hoax."

"You got postcards from Nicole Werner?" the girl by the window asked. She let her mouth hang open, looking at each of them in the room in turn.

"The Cookie Girl," Craig said. "She told me, too."

No one said anything until the girl near the radiator closed her mouth and then sputtered, as if she'd been listening so long to such a ludicrous story that she couldn't contain herself any longer, "Who's the Cookie Girl?"

"Our neighbor," Craig's roommate said.

Craig said, "She told me that, too. She said, 'They're trying to get rid of you. They don't want you here.' She told me there isn't a ghost."

He went silent then. Sh.e.l.ly waited for him to go on.

"Alice Meyers," he finally said. "I thought there was this girl. This dead girl. She calls. One night, she came here, into the apartment. She stood in the doorway and asked if she could come in."

The girl near the radiator huffed loudly this time, and swept a small, cold-looking hand through her tangled dark hair. "That's a bunch of c.r.a.p," she said. "I live in the dorm. There's these 'Alice Meyers girls.' They're crazies. Cutters. They're obsessed with Nicole. They go around saying they've seen her-"

"Seen Nicole?" Craig asked, looking at the girl as if he hadn't noticed her until then. "They think they've seen Nicole?"

The girl shrugged elaborately, rolled her eyes, and said, "Her or Alice Meyers. Who cares? They're crazy."

Craig's roommate looked at the professor and said, "We have to tell him now."

The professor nodded, and Craig leapt to his feet, stepped toward his roommate and said, "Tell me what?"

"Craig," the professor said, also standing. She took a step toward him and touched his arm. "Other people have seen her, too. Or they think they've seen her."

"Jesus Christ," the girl by the radiator said. "I'm leaving here. This is crazy." She raised a hand as if she might slap the professor, but then put the hand into the pocket of her sweater. "You're crazy, Professor Polson. You're supposed to be teaching us, not f.u.c.king with us. I don't know what you think you're doing, but I'm done with it. I'm dropping your cla.s.s, and I'm-" She shook her head, and then she looked from Sh.e.l.ly to Craig to Craig's roommate, as if trying to find the sane one, and, not finding it, walked quickly to the door, opened it, and slammed it shut behind her.

They all listened to the sound of her heels on the stairs until it was clear she was long gone, and then Sh.e.l.ly said, "I think someone died that night. But I don't think it was Nicole."

She reached into her bag and took out the little snapshot of Denise Graham that Denise's mother had given her earlier that day.

82.

Craig parked the Taurus at the side of the street outside the sorority, but he stayed in the driver's seat for a few minutes, looking out.

The sky was clear, and the snow had melted into a wavering, wet carpet on the sidewalks and the street. From where he'd parked, the Omega Theta Tau House seemed to cast its own extra darkness onto the lawn around it. He couldn't see even a single candle flickering inside. It was as if the house had been abandoned, or never built. Craig shoved Lucas's car keys in his pocket, got out. Nicole was in there, and he had to see Nicole.

He crossed the lawn, purposely walking slowly, deliberately, upright, in full view of the house and anyone who might have been watching him from within it.

Why shouldn't he?

He wasn't a criminal. He was there to see his girlfriend. This was a sorority, not a secret society, not a high-security prison facility. Jesus Christ. He just wanted to see Nicole. Why should he have to crawl on his belly to do it?

Still, it made him nervous. He could feel his heart racing in his chest. Although the house was dark, and Craig heard nothing but silence emanating from it, he had the distinct feeling that he was being watched. He tried to maintain the slow, determined gait, but he was walking faster the closer he got. His hands were sweating, and when he reached the side of the house, he crouched down in the shadows, hiding.