In Search of the Rose Notes (21 page)

So I was the bad one. The one who didn’t really care about Rose, when I should care the most. Since it was me who had lost her.

I finally gave in and humored Charlotte again. I sat Indian style on the carpet and let her lay the clip gently into my palms. I fingered it for about fifteen minutes, telling her I was picturing Rose looking in a mirror, doing her hair, examining her work from behind with a compact mirror, frowning, putting the mirror down, taking her hair out of the clip, doing it all over again.

“There’s someone she really wanted to look pretty for,” Charlotte whispered. “Not Aaron, I bet. Someone else. ’Cuz she was looking for a new boyfriend, right? Who was it?”

It had seemed to me Charlotte had wished, before Rose had disappeared, that it was Paul. She never mentioned that anymore.

“Lie down on my bed for a minute,” she said, irritated by my silence. “Maybe it will help you relax and concentrate.”

She gently balanced the clip over my forehead, then grabbed her notebook from her nightstand.

“Who did she want to look pretty for?” Charlotte demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“Now, really concentrate. What else are you seeing?”

“Nothing else,” I said after a few moments of silence.

“Are you
sure
?”

I pulled the clip off my head and sat up. “Nothing else,” I said, and practically threw the clip at Charlotte.

I didn’t want to think about Rose’s hair anymore. Because when I thought of Rose’s hair, I remembered it with a man’s hand on it. The hand was Charlotte’s dad’s. They were sitting together in the garage. His hand had been patting her shoulder just before he’d stood up, and it had gotten tangled, just for a moment, in the dirty-blond ends as it came down from her shoulder. It had been tangled just for a second, before pulling away and disappearing into a pocket to jingle coins. For such a short second, it would’ve been easy not to see it or remember it.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I declared, getting off the bed.

Charlotte tapped her pen against her lips and scrutinized me like I was a lab rat.

“Okay,” she said quietly.

Chapter Thirteen

May 24, 2006

I had about a half hour before dark. As I stood at the end of the Hemsworths’ driveway, I considered my two possible routes. I could go down Fox Hill, where the road met Main Street, where you could cross over to Adams Road. That road would take me by the old junior-high tennis court, where I’d spent much time as a teenager. Somehow, around age fourteen or fifteen, I’d decided I was fat and needed to start running. I was too embarrassed to jog around the neighborhood, so I would walk down there and then run slow, endless laps around the abandoned courts. Sometime in the 1970s, someone had gotten the brilliant idea that the junior high needed a tennis court. But there wasn’t enough room for one right by the old school building. It was built a ten-minute walk from the school, and the result was that no one ever played on it or kept it up. The clay was badly cracked, as if an unlikely earthquake had hit Connecticut. Weeds crept up the cyclone fence. It felt like the end of the world. Its desolation had always made me feel strangely safe—no one would bother me there.

Past the tennis courts, a path went along the back of McMullen Orchards and then out to Adams Pond. It was a little far, but we hung out there sometimes when we were kids—when we were bored enough to walk all that way. We’d never swum in it—it was too muddy and frog-ridden and gross—but all of us neighborhood kids had gone there to ice-skate a couple of times, against our parents’ advice. I remembered the first time, when Charlotte and Toby and I were about eight. Rose ventured out first, imitating an overly theatrical figure skater, making her twirls and hand gestures look deliberately idiotic. And then Paul, not to be outdone by a girl, skated out after her, sliding gingerly on his big blue Adidas. He circled Rose, laughing as she hammed it up. Toby’s older brother, Joe, slid out past them, moonwalking nearly to the middle of the pond, making the three of us little kids—Charlotte, Toby, and me—crack up as we stood and watched from the edge. Only Toby eventually joined the older kids on the ice.

The orchard–to–tennis court route was an altogether more pleasant walk than the one up Fox Hill, past all the familiar houses. But I didn’t wish to get any closer to the place where Rose’s body had been found. Charlotte had told me that part of the pond area was still cordoned off, last she checked.

I headed up Fox Hill instead. I passed Mrs. Shepherd’s—a charming light yellow Cape with about a million bearded irises—then a couple of houses owned by people whose names I’d never known. Then I reached Mrs. Crowe’s.

It was greener but smaller than I remembered it, and it needed a paint job. I squinted upward at the two windows of the room that had once been my bedroom. The glass looked cloudy, as if it hadn’t been washed in a great while. Still the same old heavy, drafty windows, with the rusted locks that always opened and closed with a tiny metal scream. I’d spent years behind those windows. Now it all seemed a blur of math homework, imaginary boyfriends, sad songs played over and over on an ancient pink plastic boom box. I kept walking. How strange it felt to walk right past this boxy green house as the darkness settled and not enter its wood-paneled front hallway, its lukewarm yellow light.

A few more houses as the hill got steeper. I looked only sidelong at Rose’s parents’ house, although its barnyard red made it difficult to ignore.

Past her house, one or two more modest homes before the road twisted up into the trees and houses got farther apart. Then there was the heavily wooded chunk of land that no one seemed to own or build upon and, farther up, the sharp turn where Fox Hill forked. Fox Hill Road continued up the steep incline, Fox Hill Way shot down to the right, toward a few more houses, Toby’s, and then the transfer station.

I decided to go for Fox Hill Way.

Toby’s house looked better kept than I’d expected. Even against the darkening sky, the white paint job looked fairly crisp. I got a whiff of freshly mowed lawn as I approached the property.

The smell of cut grass always made me think of Joe Dean, actually. Mrs. Crowe paid Joe to mow her lawn when we were kids. Once, on a ninety-degree day, he’d asked me to bring him a wet cloth to help him cool off. To my delight, he started mowing with his head tipped back slightly, the cloth covering his face. And he had me yell him directions so he’d turn in the right places and avoid hitting any trees or mowing straight into the road. Mrs. Crowe nearly lost her mind when she came outside and saw what we were doing.

Despite the fresh paint on the Dean house, the little outbuildings were looking pretty dumpy. The shed where Joe had once worked was practically falling over. The always-condemned root cellar didn’t look like much more than a small pile of lumber sinking into the grass.

“Hey, Nora!” someone yelled.

I squinted at the Deans’ stoop. It was Joe Dean, who was sitting on the top step, smoking.

“Hey,” I said. “I was just taking a walk.”

“You looking for Toby?”

“No… but if he’s here, I’ll say hi, I guess…”

Joe led me into the house, through the living room to the kitchen, where Toby was sitting reading the newspaper. He looked startled when we came in.

“You’ve got a visitor,” Joe said.

The kitchen was exactly as I remembered it. It had a reddish brown linoleum floor that was supposed to look like little bricks, and plain white cabinets grubby around the metal handles. On the table there was a loaf pan half full with a crusty dark brown substance and a butter knife sticking out of it.

I was about to ask what it was but thought better of it. I didn’t want to be rude. But Toby caught me looking at it.

“It’s a meat loaf,” he explained. “A failed one.”

“Why isn’t it in the fridge?”

“Joe decided it was inedible. Was gonna clean the pan out, I think. Gave up halfway through scraping it out, looks like.”

“I’ll do it tonight,” Joe said defensively. “Jeez.”

I couldn’t stop staring at it. What Toby described had to have occurred several days ago for the meat loaf to achieve its rocklike quality. It made me want to giggle. You could put this pan in a museum and call it
Bachelorhood.

“We’ve been trying to be a little better about cooking since Dad died,” Toby said, as if to explain.

“That’s good,” I said stupidly.

“Nora, you want a beer or something?” Joe asked. “An ice-cream sandwich? Both?”

“Umm… what’re you having?”

“Sandwich,” Joe said. He seemed much more lucid than he’d been at the bar.

“Okay. I’ll join you, then.”

Joe fished the box of treats out of the frost-encrusted cave of their freezer and handed one to me and one to Toby. We all peeled the thin white papers off our ice-cream sandwiches. I licked ice cream off the edges for a moment, then stopped, thinking it might look a bit uncouth.

“So,” Joe said. “How’re things at the Hemsworth homestead?”

“Yeah,” Toby said. “I noticed your car was gone last night. I thought maybe you’d left town.”

“I went down to Bristol to hang out with my mother for a little while. It was getting kind of weird with Charlotte, actually.”

“Weird how?” Toby asked.

He’d laughed when I’d mentioned the
Looking Glass
at his shop. And it didn’t seem like a hot idea to explain about Charlotte’s dad—or her sudden investigative interest in Aaron Dwyer either.

“Oh, it’s just kind of strange to spend so much time with someone you used to know… a long time ago, when you were a different person… .”

I looked at the softening ice-cream sandwich in my hand, trying to decide if I should continue.

Toby sat back in his chair and considered my words for a moment. “Well,” he said. “If things are getting weird over there, you can always crash here.”

This wasn’t the response I was expecting. In fact, it startled me. Toby looked amused by my reaction. Joe, thankfully, didn’t seem to notice.

“I wanted to ask you about something,” I said to Joe, deliberately changing the subject. “Something you might remember better than Charlotte and I do.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember Brian Pilkington? And his car accident?”

“Of course. Poor guy. But I hear he’s doing fairly well now, considering. He’s a professor or something.”

“But do you remember very much about his accident?”

“Not really. It was out on Route 5. He drove right off the road.”

“I remember that my dad was the one who came in and towed the car,” Toby piped up. “Said his Dodge was so wrecked he couldn’t believe that the kid even made it out of there alive at all.”

“It wasn’t a Dodge,” I said. “It was a Datsun.”

“Oh.” Toby looked at me funny. I’m not the sort of girl who remembers car makes and models, but I wasn’t about to offer that I’d just looked up the accident earlier that afternoon.

“Well,” he said, “either way. I just remember my dad talking about it. I didn’t see it myself.”

Joe turned to Toby. “Did Dad really clean it up?”

“Yeah,” Toby said.

“Huh. I don’t even remember that. I remember they thought Brian must’ve been speeding like a maniac. Wasn’t like him. He was kind of a laid-back dude. And wasn’t he a Jehovah’s Witness? Maybe the Holy Spirit got a hold of him or something?”

Toby sighed, looking embarrassed at Joe’s bad joke.

“Speeding is kind of a secret vice,” Toby said. “It’s not always who you’d expect.”

Joe and I nodded at this vehicular wisdom, since Toby knew about these things.

Joe seemed disinterested in the topic of Brian Pilkington.

“You see the latest article about Rose?” he asked, turning to me suddenly.

“No… but I heard all about the press release from one of Charlotte’s newspaper friends.”

“It’s scary,” he said. “I hope she didn’t suffer, or at least suffer for long. Them finding her like this, it makes me think someone could have been keeping her for a while—alive? Something terrible… something sick like that.”

Toby glanced at me apologetically.

“You need to try not to think like this,” Toby said. I got the feeling he’d already said this to Joe many times. “Whatever happened, at least it’s over now.”

Joe looked to be struggling to keep his face stoic, despite a wobbling chin. I finished the rest of my ice cream and was left with sticky chocolate crumbs on my fingertips. Toby noticed and handed me a napkin.

“Let’s show Nora the lighthouse room,” Joe suggested.

“If it’ll make you feel better,” Toby said.

Toby and I remained at the kitchen table for a moment before following Joe to the stairs.

“Lighthouse room?” I whispered.

“This little room up in the attic. I can’t remember if you ever went up there. We didn’t call it the lighthouse room—Rose did. Do you remember, though, that Charlotte’s been up there? You remember the day she came over and went up there to record for ghosts?”

“A little bit,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I’m sure Joe will tell you the lighthouse story. We were just talking about it this morning.”

Toby and I climbed the stairs together. Toby’s room was the first one on the left when you came up the stairs. I remembered that much. I glanced into it before he led me farther down the hall. Still poorly lit. Still covered in gentle floral wallpaper that didn’t suit him, now without the Nirvana and Pearl Jam posters that had once masked it.

“You still sleep up here?”

“Nah. Downstairs, usually.”

“In your dad’s old room?” I asked, proud of myself for remembering the sleeping arrangements.

“No. On the couch, usually. Especially in the summer. It’s a lot hotter up here.”

“And this is Joe’s room, right?” I said as he led me into another bedroom.

“Yup.”

Toby led me through Joe’s room. More cream-and-lilac floral walls, totally unsuitable for its occupant. Toby turned the knob of what I thought was a closet door. But it opened to a narrow staircase.

“That’s weird,” I said.

“I know, isn’t it? These old farmhouses have some quirks.”

The creaky wooden stairs led up to a single room with a small window and pink-rosebud wallpaper. It was crammed with boxes, piles of old magazines, board games in fatigued boxes. Joe was already upstairs when we got there, standing by the room’s single small, square window.

“My grandmother said they’d used it as an attic bedroom at one time,” Toby explained, “although I can’t imagine sleeping up here. It must have gotten really hot and really cold. We’ve always used it to store crap, mostly. Dad filled almost all the space with his train magazines and fly-fishing equipment. I still don’t know what to do with the stuff. I should sell it, I guess.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Not if you want to keep it around.”

“Look,” Joe said, motioning for me to move closer to the window.

I did. The small, square window gave a decent view of Fox Hill. To the east you could see only trees, where the road twisted off to the transfer station. But to the west was the overgrown grass on that side of the Dean property, and Joe’s shed. Beyond that you could see down across a couple of backyards and, below that, Rose’s family’s house, which was set farther back from the road than the houses before it.

“I didn’t realize,” I said, “how much you could see from here.”

“That’s what Rose got such a kick out of. When we were kids and I told her this room was haunted, naturally she wanted to see it. But once she saw it, and the way you can see her house, she didn’t care about ghosts. See those two windows on the side of Rose’s house? That’s the Bankses’ living room.

“She and I were about ten, and she’d seen this movie where these kids who were neighbors would communicate at night from their bedrooms with their flashlights. Of course, in this movie the kids had actual stuff to communicate about on a regular basis, and they had the convenience of their bedrooms facing each other. But Rose wanted to try it. We tried it a couple of nights. She set a time after her parents would be asleep. Didn’t even bother to use a flashlight, actually. Just blinked the living-room light on and off. In Morse code. I remember we sat here waiting a couple of hours for her to do it.”

“It was kind of scary,” Toby added. “Because we never came up here at night.”