Patch looked at the house for the first time up close. Looked for cracks that seeped blood, strained his ears for the echo of their screams. “I can’t see any of it. And I know how that sounds…but I just—”
“Have you seen Misty since you got back?” she said.
“We’re going out tonight.”
The week before his release Saint had sat in the salon as the woman lightened her hair. She had been to the nail salon, bought new makeup and perfume and even some new dresses. She was fit, her body lean, her face clung to youth. She drew looks from men, comments from assholes.
“I look out for her when I’m in town. Maybe she doesn’t walk into Main Street anymore. They’ve got the department store in Palmer Valley now, fancy dresses and all that.”
“Sammy told me what Jimmy’s mother did.”
“I’m the first woman to divorce in Monta Clare.”
“Norma must be proud.”
Saint thought of her grandmother. Of how she had stopped asking her to attend church each Sunday. A move that hurt more than that fateful day. Saint thought of the summer after, how she had not returned to Monta Clare, refusing to let her grandmother see the bruises, the way her jaw clicked when she ate, the way her body had emptied. How she had taken a six-month sabbatical, only left her apartment to take a stroll each morning. She had read, watched television, and cooked. Spoke to Norma on the telephone and told her she was too busy to come back. The hardest summer of her life. And there was much competition.
“We’re still young,” he said.
She plucked the head from a black-eyed Susan and wondered just how it had survived.
“You know that this is the first flower to grow after a fire or natural disaster,” she said.
He took it from her and admired the rays. “We’re tough, right.”
“Buy a boat, Patch. Go sail the Indian Ocean.”
“Why can’t I feel her…here. Why can’t I feel anything at all?”
“Circadian desynchrony. A failure of light information. The blind don’t have heightened senses.”
“I was blind down there.”
“Grace wasn’t. She saw what she saw. He let her out and put her back and she carried that with her. And what she saw…people say unimaginable horror, but we can all imagine it. You suffered. You survived.”
“In part.”
He picked moss from the rock with the blunt of his nail.
“I’ve known you, what, more than twenty years,” she said. On a tree beside were holes forged with a heavy hatchet, the sap dried like fingers of varnish. The catkins of black alder circled the base like peppercorns at a giant’s table.
“You ever see Jimmy?” he asked.
“He left town. His mother told my grandmother he couldn’t bear the shame.”
“Do you think of the baby?” he said. No one had asked her that before.
She could not speak, so nodded.
He kissed the top of her head.
For a long time they let the wind blow over them.
He moved toward the store before she could stop him. Before she could call him back, tell him it was not worth it, it could never be worth going through it again.
She slipped in the mud, cursed the rain, and climbed down the steps behind him.
He stood silent in the center.
Beneath his feet was the concrete he might have once lain upon.
Saint knew it then.
He would die once they knew how Grace lived.
“Shut the door,” he said.
She shook her head.
“Please, Saint.”
She heaved the heavy hatch door closed and held her breath.
And she stood beside him.
And she saw the look, for a moment confusion, and then something clearer. She saw it because the room was not dark at all, because light splintered from a thousand gaps in the surround, slicing through everything they thought they knew.
For a long time he walked around the area, tracing the walls with his fingers. He paced it out, her eyes on him as he counted aloud.
“It’s so much bigger,” he said.
He knelt and touched the ground, stared around like he could see what he had not been able to see.
He stood and turned to her. “You think Tooms took me and gave me to Aaron.”
“I never said that.”
“So tell me what you think.”
“I don’t know what to think. Nothing is clear. Could be that Aaron took you right to his farmhouse. Maybe it was just Callie Montrose that was held here. Or maybe we’ll find DNA that puts the other girls here. There’s still questions we might not be able—”
“But Tooms was there that morning I was taken. Those same woods. Not a hundred yards from where it happened.”
“Searching for a dog,” she said. And even then, to her it did not sound right.
“Grace wasn’t here either,” he said.
She looked at him and was about to reason but knew that it would do no good at all.
“I can’t feel anything, Saint. I’ve never been here before.”