The Raising: A Novel Part 38

95.

"Are you okay, Perry?"

Perry nodded. Again, he had his hands against the fan, blowing its feeble attempt at heat on the dashboard of Jeff's car. They should stop and buy him gloves, Mira thought, before leaving Bad Axe. There was a stillness to the air that made the snow seem even colder and more enveloping than it ordinarily would-and of course there was so little heat coming out of the vents that it seemed pointless to be idling in the funeral home parking lot, letting the car "warm up." The car seemed only to grow colder as they sat in it, engine rumbling around them, interior lit up by the white electric Dientz Funeral Parlor sign, as if that pale light were lowering the temperature of everything it touched.

Still, Mira wasn't ready to drive, and Perry had yet to speak since he'd said good-bye to Mr. Dientz.

When he'd first come back from the Werners', he'd spoken so quickly, been so flushed and breathless, that he reminded Mira of the ranting "preacher" who sometimes stood on a bench on campus and shouted at the students as they pa.s.sed. On every campus she'd ever studied or visited, there had been such a preacher. Always a cheap-looking suit, a good haircut, eyes so pale they seemed to be lacking irises. What this particular ranting man said usually made sense, sentence to sentence, but no sense at all when put together: Lightning was striking cell phone towers. The producers of television shows were trying to read our minds. People in gray coats were hard to see, and could sneak up on you.

Perry had seemed to be trying to hold back that same ranting pa.s.sion, bordering on mania, insanity, when he came back saying he'd seen Nicole.

He'd seen Nicole, he said.

He'd seen her teeth.

But there was also something about a cat, and Mrs. Werner's hair-how it was more beautiful than it used to be-and a Hammond organ and a game of Hide and Seek, and then he just quit talking altogether, and Mira knew she had to get him out of there. She'd said to Mr. Dientz, "It's time for us to leave."

It had been a day full of shock and awe, and Mira regretted the toll it had obviously taken on Perry-beginning with the horror of Lucas at the morgue, and then the discussion with the woman from the Chamber Music Society, and then the photographs on Mr. Dientz's computer.

It was no wonder it had ended with Perry seeing a dead girl in her parents' house.

Mira looked over at him and thought of the cliche "you look like you've seen a ghost"-but didn't say it. She reached over and took one of the hands that was pressed to the heater and brought it to her cheek.

Poor dear, she was thinking, surprised by how cold the hand was to her touch.

96.

"Hey there, Perry. It's me."

"Yeah, Nicole."

"You alone?"

"Well, since you know my roommate's every move, and you know he went to try to score some weed in Ohio with Lucas, I suppose you know I am."

There was a click then, and a hum.

The hum was nothing.

It was the very song of what nothing was, Perry thought, holding the receiver to his ear long enough that he was still holding it when she knocked on his door, and when he opened it, she said, "Can I come in?" and he was breathing into her hair before saying yes, before he'd even taken a breath.

97.

Ellen Graham was wearing the same hot pink bathrobe she'd been wearing earlier that day-although she seemed to have tidied the house a little, perhaps because she'd had some warning this time that Sh.e.l.ly was on her way. The piles of catalogs and envelopes that had been lying on the stairs were now stacked in a few loose piles by the front door. The white cat was lying in a pale patch of porch light that was somehow shining through a crack in the closed curtain. Eerily this cat looked a little like the kind of cat who would have avoided sunlight, anyway, in favor of this reflected winter light. Sh.e.l.ly felt a stab of longing, of grief, for Jeremy, poor Jeremy, who had so loved to bask in a pool of sunlight on the bed or on the kitchen floor.

"Sit down," Ellen said, and motioned Sh.e.l.ly to the couch. "I'm glad you came back. I thought about you all day. I wondered if you'd had any ideas since you left, since our talk. Ideas about my daughter, where-"

"Again," Sh.e.l.ly said, shaking her head a little, "I don't want to mislead you, Ellen. I have no proof of anything. But I have had some more thoughts."

"You look terrible," Ellen said. "Has something happened?"

Not now, Sh.e.l.ly thought. She could not tell anyone, now, about Jeremy. That would have to wait. Instead, she said, "After I left here I went home, got on Google, and then I found the boy, the one who was in the accident with Nicole Werner. I went to his apartment, and we talked. There was a professor there, and another student who also knew Nicole. They're-"

Sh.e.l.ly stopped herself before saying that they had gone to Nicole Werner's hometown to speak to the mortician who'd buried her because of a suspicion that it might not be Nicole in that grave. Sh.e.l.ly knew that if she were Denise Graham's mother, she would have known instantly what that meant. She took a deep breath and said carefully, "I believe you might be the only one who can inst.i.tute any further investigation. I'm not saying that it might even lead us to-"

"Finding Denise." Ellen nodded. Her eyes looked somehow clearer tonight. Her feet were still bare, and that struck Sh.e.l.ly as the saddest thing of all. It was so cold out, and even in the house, where the thermostat must have been turned up to eighty degrees, the floors were cold. She tried to look away from the feet, but she couldn't. She thought of Death of a Salesman. w.i.l.l.y Loman. Attention must be paid.

The toenails were clipped neatly, but the toes looked gnarled, red-the toes of a woman who had, until recently, worn high heels every day of her life. Ellen Graham had been a woman who, proud of her long, slim legs, had probably worn knee-length skirts, too, and silk hose, just to go to the grocery store.

"As I told you," Sh.e.l.ly said, looking from the sad feet to the face, so bright with hope, "I worked at the Chamber Music Society at the university until recently. What I didn't exactly explain earlier today was that my work-study student this year was Josie Reilly-"

Ellen inhaled, as if willing herself not to scream at the sound of that name.

"Yes. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before, but it's complicated by so many things."

Ellen nodded, but her jaw was working on her anger. G.o.d help Josie if she ever crossed this woman's path again, Sh.e.l.ly thought, not without some satisfaction. Eventually, she knew, she would have to tell Ellen the whole, sordid story, but it wouldn't help either of them now, and might end with Sh.e.l.ly thrown out the front door and into the snow, having accomplished nothing at all.

Instead, Sh.e.l.ly started by telling Ellen what Josie had told her about the coffin, about the Spring Event. The hyperventilation. The EMT kept on hand for emergencies.

Ellen listened without seeming to be breathing.

She had, of course, like so many other mothers, a.s.sumed that the Spring Event was a party, a dance, a princess ball. There would be decorations, and hors d'oeuvres, and pretty dresses, and maybe a bit too much champagne, ending in giggling, and dancing around the OTT house in stocking feet.

Even after all that had happened, Ellen had not yet begun to suspect that this image might be entirely wrong.

"Were you ever in a sorority, Ellen?" Sh.e.l.ly asked.

Ellen Graham shook her head. "I didn't go to college," she said. "I married my husband right out of high school, and I worked as a secretary until he finished his MBA. And then I had Denise."

Sh.e.l.ly nodded. "Well, I was," she said. "It was over two decades ago, but some things are the same. Hazing, and-"

"Hazing is illegal," Ellen said. "We would never have allowed Denise to join a sorority if we thought-"

"I know," Sh.e.l.ly said. "But it happens. And being illegal has made it even more dangerous, even more secretive." She went on to tell Ellen Graham, who held a hand to her mouth now as Sh.e.l.ly spoke, what she knew about the Pan-h.e.l.lenic Society and the pressures that could be put to bear by it on a university-a public university, the funding of which was dependent on the goodwill of the taxpayers, which its administrators understood so well.

"I questioned," Sh.e.l.ly said, "how someone like Josie Reilly had come to get one of the work-study positions generally reserved for students who pay their own tuition and who come from fairly disadvantaged backgrounds. As it happens, the music school dean's wife was an Omega Theta Tau sister of Josie's mother. It took only a little bit of research to find out that the two of them are still very involved in the chapter. They would have a vested interest in preventing any scandal related to, say, hazing."

"But what does this have to do with my daughter?" Ellen asked. From the change in her posture, the rigid backbone, Sh.e.l.ly suspected she already knew.

"I was at the scene of the accident," Sh.e.l.ly said. She held her palms open, hands resting on her knees in a gesture she'd been taught to make by her mother when beseeching G.o.d to take care of her brother in Vietnam, and which she'd never made again after he died.

She looked down at her open hands then and said to them, "Nicole Werner wasn't visibly injured. She sustained injury, certainly, since she was thrown from the vehicle. She might have sustained terrible, life-threatening internal injuries, but Nicole Werner was not-"

"Beyond recognition."

Sh.e.l.ly could not look up from her hands until long after she'd nodded and Ellen Graham had already spoken again: "But that boy," she said, "the one who was drunk, why wouldn't he have said something if-?"

"If there was someone else with them?"

Ellen nodded this time, boring her eyes deeply into Sh.e.l.ly's, and Sh.e.l.ly felt an incredible wave of wild energy and bravery emanating from her.

To sit so completely still, with her poor feet pressed together, chapped hands folded sadly in her lap, waiting for Sh.e.l.ly's answer.

"As I said, I spoke to him. Today. Finally. I don't know what took me so long to go looking for him. He doesn't remember anything."

"But of course that's what he'd say. They could have put him in jail for years for what he did."

"Yes," Sh.e.l.ly said. "I'm a suspicious woman, too, Ellen. I feel I have good radar for liars, cheats, cons-but I don't think he's one. He doesn't remember. He truly does not know. Or he only peripherally knows. Something happened to him."

Sh.e.l.ly went on then to tell Ellen Graham what Josie had told her about the ritual. The tequila, the hyperventilation, the coffin, the girl who would be "raised from the dead." Reborn as an OTT sister. They kept a paramedic on hand. They knew what could happen. Wasn't it possible, Sh.e.l.ly asked, that sometimes the girl did not come back, that the ritual might-?

"Kill a girl." Ellen Graham did not nod this time. She closed her eyes.

"Yes," Sh.e.l.ly said, trying to speak quietly. "And you can imagine the scandal for the sorority, the Pan-h.e.l.lenic Society, the university, and the lengths they might go to cover it up. Isn't it possible that an accident might be-?"

"Staged?"

"Staged, or made to happen. Created? Devised?"

Ellen Graham opened her eyes now and looked from Sh.e.l.ly to the ceiling.

"Ellen, I was there," Sh.e.l.ly said. "That boy swerved to avoid something, but only seconds later what he'd swerved to avoid wasn't there. And the girl they say was killed, injured beyond recognition, burned with the car, I saw her. I would recognize her anywhere. She wasn't dead. There was no fire."

"Why are you telling me?" Ellen said, standing up, heading toward a buffet that sprawled in all its shining oaken splendor from one wall of the living room to the other. She yanked open a drawer by a flimsy bra.s.s handle and pulled out a pack of Marlborough lights. Her hand was shaking as she put a cigarette between her lips, but she didn't light it. She turned back to Sh.e.l.ly, eyes blinking and blazing at the same time. "Why did you come here? You know so much. Why haven't you told someone who can do something?"

"I've tried," Sh.e.l.ly said. "I called the papers, I called the police, I waited for the police to call me, but-"

"Now what?" Ellen asked, tossing the cigarette back into the drawer with the pack, and heading back to the couch, but not sitting down. "You think that was my daughter then, don't you, in the backseat of that car? Maybe she was already dead? Maybe they set it on fire? Maybe they buried my baby up there instead of this Nicole Werner girl? I'm sorry. I see what this means, what you're saying about what you saw, except, if it was, if you're right, where in the f.u.c.king h.e.l.l is Nicole Werner now?"

Sh.e.l.ly took a moment before she spoke, before she could even consider speaking.

She tried to think of a way to phrase this thing, which seemed so insane, so that it would not sound insane. Finally, she said, "She's still there. She's at the sorority."

Ellen Graham started to shake her head so quickly, so wildly, that, remembering those earrings Josie had snitched, Sh.e.l.ly imagined Ellen wearing them, her face lacerated by jewels, and Sh.e.l.ly held up a hand to try to stop her from shaking her head so violently. In the calmest voice Sh.e.l.ly could call forth from the depths of her own shaken self, she said, "I can't prove anything, Ellen, but I believe they would have sheltered her, Nicole. I know now that they-the sorority, the Pan-h.e.l.lenic Society, the university-have enough power to drive the only witness to the accident out of town, to involve a dean in doing so, and who knows-"

"How did Josie drive you out of town?"

Now Ellen stopped shaking her head, and Sh.e.l.ly knew she had to tell her. As she spoke the words of the affair with the girl, of the photographs, of the last conversation she'd had with Josie at the Starbucks, Sh.e.l.ly opened her hands again, looking at her palms, and she thought, for no reason she could fathom, of sheep. Sheep with blood on their fleeces, with flies in their eyes. Maggots in their ears, in their a.n.u.ses. She finished the story and stopped speaking, and then she brought the hands to her eyes. When she looked up again, Ellen was watching Sh.e.l.ly with a kindness that would have knocked Sh.e.l.ly to her knees if she hadn't been sitting down. It was not compa.s.sion, or empathy, or pity. Ellen Graham was simply looking at Sh.e.l.ly as if the story hadn't surprised her at all.

As if she'd been hearing such stories all her life.

After the silence, Ellen said, in the voice of the very competent secretary Sh.e.l.ly knew she must once have been, "Okay, Sh.e.l.ly. They got rid of you, if your theory's right. But the boy was a witness, too."

"Yes," Sh.e.l.ly said, trying to regain her composure, to echo the all-business tone of Ellen Graham. "Yes, the boy, too," she said. She nodded. "He doesn't remember anything. But they are doing things to try to drive him away, too. Postcards. Ghosts."

Ellen didn't ask for elaboration. "Just tell me what to do," she said. "Your story-frankly, Sh.e.l.ly, I hate your story. I hate everything it might mean. I think it's crazy. But it's no worse than all the stories I've invented in my mind. And you're the first help we've ever had. We've gone everywhere, spoken to everyone. The state police, the FBI, the-"

"The FBI," Sh.e.l.ly said, an idea forming. "Speak to them again. Tell them you believe there's been a case of mistaken ident.i.ty, and demand that Nicole Werner be exhumed, examined. I can't do anything, Ellen. I have no credibility in this at all. But you're the parent of a girl who disappeared. They might listen to you."

98.

Mira tried to warm up the car before they pulled out of the parking lot. But even as the fan blew hard, nothing but cold air came out. Beside her, Perry was shivering. In the cold electric light from the Dientz sign, Mira could see that he had his eyes squeezed shut. Could he be shivering in his sleep?

Ted had turned off the lights inside the funeral parlor, but his Cadillac was still parked beside them. He was still inside. Mira imagined him scrolling through more photos on his computer-his before and after images of the many disfigured corpses he'd brought back from the dead.

She didn't blame him. If she had such a talent, she would be proud of herself as well.

She pulled out of the parking lot and headed for the freeway without speaking, and after a few minutes, Perry stopped shivering and seemed to have fallen asleep.

The drive back in the blizzard was slow and treacherous, and at every exit Mira thought, We should pull over. We should get off. There were no cars behind them, none ahead of them, none pa.s.sing in the oncoming lanes, as far as she could see, as Jeff Blackhawk's car rattled around them, and Mira became more and more vividly aware in the silence of the sound of the slick road just under their feet. Jeff's car gave one only the slimmest illusion of being anything other than what you were: a soft and vulnerable vessel traveling at great speeds over hard ground.

The car warmed a little, anyway-if from nothing but their body heat and breath-and Mira hoped Perry could stay warm enough to sleep until they got back. It had been wrong, she knew, to bring him here. To encourage or include him in any of this. All of this had gone far beyond what she needed for a book. This had turned into something in which, if she'd really felt she had to take it on (for research purposes? to find Nicole Werner?), she should never have involved a student.

But Perry had been so eager, and he had not seemed to Mira to be what she would have called "troubled" or "impressionable." In her years of teaching, Mira'd had many brilliant, troubled students-their brilliance fueled by brief intensities, always ready and willing to follow someone else's lead. They were the kinds of young people who could easily have been seduced by their professors, or inducted into cults, or recruited to build bombs in townhouses for the revolution. But Perry Edwards had seemed different-although perhaps no less vulnerable for it. He had not reminded her of any of those students. If he reminded her of someone, Mira realized, it was herself.

When Ted Dientz had called up the final photo of the dead girl in all her blazing gigabytes, Mira thought instantly of her mother in the pantry that day, so radiantly alive. That image of her mother was with her always, wasn't it? It was a kind of stubbornness. There was never a day that went by that Mira did not feel that if she could just go back to that childhood house at that moment, she would find her mother still there-shining and crying and studying the cans on the pantry shelf, alphabetizing them as she wrapped her brilliant white wings around her, getting ready to fly away.