Blue Diary

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, THE FIELDS IN this part of Maryland were yellow, burned and discolored by a season of unusual heat, but now, in the first week of August, they are sweet and green, rich with corn and soybeans and millet. Out here on the Eastern Shore, two hours from Baltimore and half an hour past the Bay Bridge, the old roads buckle in the summertime. Late in the afternoon, when the air becomes cooler, a person can smell the tide upon approaching the marshes past Blackwater. When Jorie stops for gas, she stands beside the rented car in the fading light and tries to get her bearings. The landscape is one she’s not accustomed to, with bits of extreme beauty peeking out from between asphalt and billboards. Beyond the gas station, for instance, lies a stretch of wild rice, golden and blooming riotously in the damp, brackish soil.

I could move to this place right now and nobody would know who I was and what I was leaving behind, Jorie thinks to herself as she pays the attendant and gets a Pepsi from the soda machine. She holds the ice-cold can to her forehead and blinks in the sharp light. I could tell people anything I wanted to, and whatever I told them, that would be the truth as far as they were concerned. Whoever I said I was, well then, that’s who I ’d be.

Jorie gets directions and heads out. It’s been a long while since she’s been anywhere on her own, and she has a nervous, prickly sensation up and down her spine. What would happen if she never returned? Anne is the only one who knows where she is, a necessity in case of an emergency. But Anne is disorganized and may already have lost the sheet of paper with the vitals written down- - time of departure, time of arrival, the name of the town that is Jorie’s destination. With no husband and no child to accompany her, Jorie feels oddly light, as if she could float away through the open car windows; the breeze catches her pale hair so that it flies everywhere and is quickly tangled into knots. She thinks warmly of the vacations she and Charlotte used to take when they were young, always staying at third-rate motels, whether on the shore in Rhode Island or up in Maine, weeks when they ate fast food, and stayed up all night, and had a ridiculously wonderful time. It astonishes Jorie to think of how young they were, how hopeful and free. Amazing where your life can deposit you before you know it. One, two, three, and you’re on a completely different road than the one you’d always expected to be on at this point in your life. There is no compass when such things happen, no rules and no maps to guide you, and no one who cares if the sun is glaring or if the asphalt is melting beneath your tires.

As Jorie drives on, loblolly pines edge the road and cast shadows across the thickening air. She turns on the radio for company, but the southern twang of the voices and the chords of a sorrowful country song only serve to sharpen her loneliness. At the turnoff to Holden there’s a stretch of cordgrass that is nearly eight feet tall, and Jorie can hear the call of birds from within the reeds. As she gets closer to town, she can’t help but wonder if Ethan had driven down this very same road fifteen years ago, and if, as he’d passed by the marshes, he’d noticed the wild cherry and sweet gum trees.

Although she’s exhausted from traveling, Jorie finds the Black Horse Hotel easily enough: it’s the only hotel in town, far less busy than the Econo Lodge she passed before she stopped for gas. The building is framed by tall white pillars and there is a set of gray stone steps, swept clean every morning. Inside, the lobby is cool without benefit of air-conditioning. There’s a restaurant that looks decent, and a bar called the Horseshoe. The woman behind the desk is pretty and lively, the sort of woman Ethan might have dated if he’d stayed in this town instead of traveling north to New England, instead of running as fast as he could.

Jorie feels a little guilty about using Anne’s credit card, but with Ethan no longer working and so many bills to pay, she is frighteningly low on funds. With unexpected generosity, Anne had shoved the MasterCard into Jorie’s hands. Go on and enjoy it, Anne had told her as she left for the airport. Trent will be the one paying the bill, so honey, live large. They’d laughed as they’d imagined Trent’s distress upon seeing the charges, but as Jorie signs her sister’s name on the register, she wonders if she isn’t committing some punishable offense. Perhaps this simple act would be considered forgery or grand larceny; still, it’s the only way she can pay the bill, so from now on she is Anne Lyle. In truth, she’s more comfortable under the cloak of her sister’s identity. It’s as though she has discarded herself somewhere between Baltimore and the Bay Bridge, and has become the sort of woman who uses falsified ID and spends nights alone in a hotel, the sort of woman whose husband is sitting in a jail cell hundreds of miles away with no idea of where she is and when she’ll be home.

Her room is nice and clean, with a down quilt on the bed and a hand-hooked rug ringed with flowers, which covers most of the wide, pine floorboards. Sheer curtains frame a view of town hall across the street, a brick building fronted by glossy magnolias. There’s air-conditioning up here, but Jorie doesn’t bother with it. She opens the window and breathes deeply: she wants to know what it feels like to be in Holden in the summertime. The damp scent of evening falling, the heavy August air, the song of the red-winged blackbirds, alighting in the fields around town by the thousands, to feed on wild rice and fight for their territory.

After she’s settled in, Jorie orders room service, choosing a house salad with vinaigrette dressing along with a steak sandwich and fries. Once the food arrives, she finds she’s ravenous. And she’s equally tired; soon after she’s caten, she falls asleep on the bed in her clothes, shoes still on, desperate for rest, even though the sky is still light in the farthest corners and the hour isn’t much later than nine. On this night, Jorie dreams that Ethan is with her, beside her in the hotel bed, his face close to hers. He is so handsome that she is blinded, and for an instant she’s unable to make out her own husband’s features. He leans closer, and although she cannot really see him, she can feel his warm breath, as well as the catch in her stomach as her desire for him rises, the way it always does when he’s near.

He gets out of bed and walks to the window. He moves the filmy curtains aside, then turns back to smile at her. She wants him so completely she’s tied up in knots, yet when she tries to speak, she finds she cannot say one word, nor can she leave her bed and go to him. She can only watch as he steps beyond the curtains and casts himself out the window, like a bird who has longed to be free, disappearing from view so quickly that when Jorie finally struggles from the tangled bedsheets to look for him, there is nothing to see in the hot, pallid air. Anything a man might leave behind, footprints and fingerprints alike, have vanished, and the clothes he wore have unraveled into a pile of white cotton thread.

Jorie awakens the following morning with a terrible headache. Her feet hurt from sleeping in her shoes, her mouth is parched, and she rises from bed with her dream still around her, a foggy halo that nags at her. She showers and dresses, then phones her mother’s house, as she’d told Anne she would, to check in on Collie. Collie’s fine. or so Anne says, and Jorie will just have to take her sister’s word for it, since Collie himself won’t come to the phone. He’s too tired, he’s still half asleep, he has nothing to say. No matter how Anne tries, he cannot be convinced or cajoled into speaking to his mother, and this isn’t like Collie.

“So is every twelve-year-old boy.” Anne tells her. “At least yours has a right to be angry. Stop worrying about Collie. Gigi’s going to take him and that strange little girlfriend of his down to the lake. They can cool off and eat the picnic lunch I’m sending along with them- -peanut butter, pickles, and pink lemonade. Remember? We used to think it was a sure cure for just about everything.”

Jorie does indeed recall that she and Anne used to fix that exact picnic nearly every day after their father left them. It was the only summer when they spent any amount of time together, and now it comes back to her, how they used to walk to Lantern Lake, the long way around, past the old orchards that grew spicy russets and buttery Keepsake apples, along with Mclntoshes and Macouns. It was the only time they had ever felt close to each other, gorging on that wretched menu no one else would have cared to eat, wanting only what was salty and sour to ease their pain.

Jorie knows Anne is taking good care of Collie, yet for what is perhaps the thousandth time, she wonders if she’s done the wrong thing in leaving her boy. She cannot imagine he will understand that this trip was hardly a matter of choice for her. How could she ever be sure this place existed if she hadn’t flown to Baltimore, and rented a midsize car, and followed her map of the Eastern Shore? She needed to do these things, just as she needed to sleep in this hotel bed and dream her terrible dream, and wake on this sunny morning in Holden, Maryland.

Most people look inside to know what they feel, but Jorie has nothing left inside anymore. The truths by which she has lived her life have evaporated, leaving her empty of everything except the faint blue static of her own skepticism. She has never been a person to question herself; now she questions everything. Yes, she is looking out the window at town hall as she sips the coffee room service has brought her, but mightn’t that vista—the knobby gray stone building, the lustrous trees and wrought-iron benches—just as casily be a moonscape? Magnolias don’t grow on the moon and red-winged blackbirds don’t fly there, or so she has always been told. Yet how does she know that for sure? Where are the documents, the photographs, the hard and fast proof? In a matter of weeks, Jorie has become a disbeliever in just about everything, including herself She, who took people at their word and always trusted her own instincts, is now a woman who wants only facts, black ink on paper, eyewitness accounts.

As soon as the clock on the night table is at nine on the dot, Jorie leaves the hotel to go across the street. It’s another hot day, and she’s already overheated by the time she finds her way to the department of records. The woman behind the desk, busy with some mail and muttering to herself, ignores Jorie, until Jorie asks to see a death certificate. The clerk, a local woman named Nancy Kerr, who’s never lived anyplace but Holden and has never wanted to, is suddenly interested. Nancy is a few years younger than Jorie. with dark curly hair and a no-nonsense demeanor. She’s the person folks in Holden come to when they want to complain about something, and after a few years at the job, most of the soft edges she once had have been eradicated.

“Whose death in particular?” When Nancy hears the name Rachel Morris, she shakes her head. “Poor thing.” For an instant, Nancy almost seems like the girl she once was, vulnerable and casily wounded, long before she got divorced and took on this job in order to raise her daughter. But that reverie doesn’t last. Nancy gives Jorie the once-over, and as she does, her face takes on a clouded cast. “You’re not a reporter, are you?”

“You sound like you’re from Massachusetts, so I’m guessing it’s pretty damned personal.” Nancy is smart and she’s not afraid to speak her mind, but she’s had a rough week, with her daughter in bed with a stomach \ irus. All the same, she finds herself being won over by the fact that Jorie’s eyes are glassy, the sure sign of a woman who’s a stranger to a good night’s sleep, much as Nancy is herself. Perhaps this is the reason Nancy Kerr goes to a file cabinet and comes back with a folder. “Well, now I know I’m crazy. I just hope I’m not going to regret this as much as I do everything else in my life,” she says as she hands over the information.

When Jorie opens the file and sees the death certificate, she feels dazed, almost as though she’s been blinded somehow. She has to sit down, quickly folding herself into one of the hard plastic chairs, each of which has a desktop conveniently attached. Here are the papers, right in front of her. Here is a photograph that doesn’t even seem like a human form. Well, this is what she wanted, isn’t it? She had to know the official cause of death, had to see it in black and white, and now she has the coroner’s report in her hands. She forces herself to go over how the internal bleeding was caused by trauma, how the skull was cracked, leaving fragments of bone lodged in the brain. What she finds hardest to read are the simplest of facts: the color of the deceased’s eyes, green, and of her hair, red as roses, and the grievous information offered by a crude sketch of the birthmark at the base of the girl’s spine, a plum-colored blemish in the shape of a butterfly

When Nancy Kerr sees how pale Jorie is, her skin turning to ice on this summer day, she comes over and pulls up a chair. Nancy hadn’t planned to be helpful, but the mention of Rachel Morris’s name has opened her heart. Up close, she notices that Jorie has written down the address of the Morris farm.

“He?” Luckily, Jorie has her trusty map in the car, for the address is a rural route east of town, out past a series of inlets and ponds. She thinks of butterflies and birthmarks, and of a sorrow so deep a person would have to dig with a shovel and a spade all night long just to reach its outermost edges.

“Rachel’s brother, James. You can forget about it. He won’t see you if you go out to the house. There were a lot of reporters hanging around when it happened, and some awful people with their own agendas, psychics who didn’t have a clue and such. Everybody was looking to get their names in the papers. It wasn’t more than a few years before Joe and Irene, Rachel’s parents, both died, one after the other, the way people do when they don’t want to live anymore. After that, James stopped talking to people. Especially reporters and lawyers. Now they’re back, like flies. And even if that’s not what you are, there’s no way he’s going to see you. Unless you give me one good reason to try and talk him into it.”

Some people say Nancy Kerr is too soft-hearted for her own good once you get past her tough exterior. Certainly, it’s not easy for her to turn down someone in trouble. Nancy takes a hard look at Jorie, then heads over to the phone and dials; she speaks in a hushed tone for a few moments, then signals to Jorie.

There is deep silence on the other end of the line. Jorie can almost feel how conflicted James Morris is and how close he is to hanging up on her. Why shouldn’t he greet this call with mistrust? Who in this town, or any other, can assure him that people are worthy of a moment of his time? It’s the hour when the town offices are growing busier. The motor vehicle department is at the end of the hall and already a line of customers has gathered. Several people call out a greeting to Nancy as they walk past the office of records.

Silence again, and then after what seems like forever, a man speaks. “Are you referring to the murderer?” James Morris has a raspy voice, and he speaks so softly Jorie has to jam her ear up to the receiver in order to hear. “You think I should talk to you because you know my sister’s murderer? Let me guess—you want to tell me what a good man he is. You want to tell me I should forgive what I don’t understand. But the way I see it, if I listen to you, I’ll have everyone who ever knew him in Massachusetts knocking on my door to plead his case. So, no, I don’t think so.”

There, she has said it, the nightmare sentence she’s been dreading so, and with these words released she is melting, like green ice in the shallows of a pond, like crystals evaporating into flame. Before long, little blisters will rise on her tongue, the price, perhaps, for speaking the truth; she’ll have to stop at the water fountain in the hallway for a long, cold drink.

Nancy Kerr pretends to be busy with some files, but Jorie can tell she’s listening in to Jorie’s part of the conversation. How could a woman who’s been raised in this town not be interested in this turn of events? When a second phone line rings, Nancy doesn’t bother to answer. Instead, she lets the machine pick up.

She has actually broken into a sweat talking to this man, James Morris, and it doesn’t help that town hall isn’t air-conditioned. She’s close to begging for something she’s not even certain she wants. All the same, she knows if she misses this opportunity to go out to the Morris farm, she’ll never be sure of what she feels. If she doesn’t walk along the same roads, breathe the same air, how can she ever understand what happened that night?

She has come hundreds of miles not to look for a way to pardon Ethan or to condone what he’s done, but to see if she can find a way to live with what’s happened. That’s what James Morris doesn’t understand; it’s not so much his forgiveness she’s searching for, it’s her own.

James Morris surprises her when he responds. “Sure, you can come out here.” Maybe he wants to get a good look at her: the woman who’s spent all these years with the man who killed his sister. He must be standing near a window or out on a porch as he speaks to her, for Jorie can hear the chirrup of birdsong through the receiver. It’s a mesmerizing sound, a chorus from heaven, sweetness from the skies up above. “But just so you know, you’re not going to like what you find.”

Jorie heads out to her parked rental car, left in the sunshine and hot as blazes, the steering wheel burning her fingertips as soon as it’s touched. She opens the windows, then follows James Morris’s directions, west on Main Street until the turnoff at Greenway Road and then left on Route 12. On her way out of town, she passes a block of stores and then a more residential section of the village, lanes of pretty brick homes surrounded by hedges of azaleas. As she drives along, Joric is thinking about Rachel Morris and the birthmark at the base of her spine. Rachel must have taken this same road a thousand times or more; she must have ridden her bike through the leafy shadows cast by the sweet gum trees and stopped to grab handfuls of fruit from the stands of wild cherries that grow here in such abundance. Surely, she bought her shampoo in the pharmacy on Main Street and ordered vanilla Cokes and French fries with vinegar at Duke’s Diner on Greenway Road, where the crullers are fresh every morning and the menu hasn’t changed for the past fifteen years.

Once again, Jorie has the feeling of having dropped off the face of the earth as she’s known it. only to surface in another time, as if this deserted road is a tunnel leading back through the years. She is engulfed in the heat, dizzy with it. She has always thought herself to be a compassionate person, as sure of right and wrong as she is of herself, but now she’s not so certain. The person she’s always assumed she was would not be driving on this road in Maryland all alone, passing huge osprey nests balanced on telephone poles, heading farther into the countryside as scores of fish crows soar through the sky. After she passes a wrecking shop and a market and a tiny post office, she spies the turnoff James Morris has told her about—a swampy stretch ofpickerelweed and brackish water that was once a swimming hole with exceedingly warm temperatures. Now, the shallows are clogged with water parsnip and mallow; some mallow roses are blooming, pink and sweet as they manage to grow through the wool grass. No one goes swimming here anymore, and they haven’t for years; these days, people worry about bacteria and leeches, they take into account factors no one used to even consider when diving into the murky depths of a natural pool that was so hot steam rose from the surface of the water and clouds formed only inches above the ground.

Jorie takes the turnoff and rides along until she finds the dirt road leading to the farm. The strain of her engine startles a covey of woodcocks in the thickets of dogwood and sweet pepper bush when she passes by. As the birds flap into the sky, prattling, Jorie feels a chill go through her, even though the temperature is hovering above ninety. Her heart is like one of those birds, easily startled, too quick for her own blood. She can see the white house, unpainted for the past several years, the black shutters sagging at odd angles. All she wants is the tiniest shred of information that will allow her to believe in her husband. At first, she'd been convinced that Ethan’s confession was intended to cover up someone else’s crime. Surely he must have a brother on a chain gang, or a cousin gone wrong, perhaps a best friend he’d vowed to protect on that August night so long ago.

Now that he’s given testimony and recounted facts no one save the guilty party could know, she’s still convinced there’s an answer. There must be an explanation for what happened, some strange set of circumstances that led him astray Drugs, perhaps, or alcohol: a dire phase of the moon, the drought-scarred season, the rising temperatures, any of these factors might have been at play. Or perhaps it was the girl who was at fault; she may have egged him on, tricked him, teased him until he had no other choice but to respond. This girl may have possessed a violent nature. She may have spat in his face, tried to scratch his eyes out, left him no choice. Such things happened, didn’t they? Good men were trapped when they least expected it. they were ambushed and set upon, with end results they never could have imagined.

There is a reason for what has happened, there must at least be that, and that is why Jorie has come here and why she brings the rental car to a stop in this red dirt driveway, hundreds of miles from home. James Morris is waiting for her on the porch. He doesn’t get up when she parks and steps out, not even when his dog, a lanky cross between a bulldog and a shepherd, comes racing up, barking and showing its teeth. For a minute Jorie truly thinks she might faint. It’s the heat, the sunlight, the growling dog; it’s the look on James Morris’s face and the last several weeks of her life, rewinding in her head like a movie she’s been forced to watch too many times. Jorie places one hand on the burning hood of the car to steady herself. The air out here is thick, salt-laced from the marshes that surround the farm.

James Morris whistles, and the dog goes trotting to him. Morris stands then; he pats his dog as he watches Jorie approach. He is younger than Jorie had expected him to be, and Jorie is surprised when she understands: he was Rachel’s younger brother, not much more than ten when it happened. Not so very far from Collie’s age.

“I appreciate you taking the time to see me.” Jorie holds one hand over her eyes. Although she can’t quite make out his expression, she can see he’s a good-looking man in his twenties, blond and tall, with a narrow thoughtful face. He wears old jeans and a gray tee-shirt stained with sweat. I led been working outside when the phone rang, cutting down some of the foxtail grass that always encroaches upon his fields. Jorie suddenly understands why she’d heard birdsong through the telephone wires when she’d called earlier from town hall. Though they are usually territorial, there are hundreds of red-winged blackbirds perched in the cypress trees, and hundreds more swoop across the cornfield beyond the house. James Morris had been working with a scythe earlier, and when clouds of mosquitoes rose from the shorn grass, huge flocks of birds had come to dine upon them. Even now, the sky is aflutter with black wings; the birds are unsettled and feeding wildly, as if they might never again be offered a meal such as the one set before them in the white-hot air of the morning.

“This probably isn’t very smart of you.” James Morris is looking at Jorie closely He has pale eyes, like Collie’s, and like Collie he’s not easily read. “What if I wanted the man who killed Rachel to know what it felt like to lose somebody? What if I shot you right now?”

Morris comes down the porch steps. He might have a gun with him at this very moment, but Jorie doesn’t turn and run. She looks right back at him. He’s a big man. Close up, he’s even taller than Jorie would have guessed when she first got out of her rental car, maybe six two, but on the night when it happened, he probably wouldn’t have come up to Jorie’s shoulder. Perhaps she should be afraid of him, but she’s afraid of something else entirely. She’s afraid of the way it might be possible for her to feel inside if she doesn’t find the answers she needs.

They stare at each other across the heat waves that separate them. James Morris hasn’t trusted anyone since the time he was ten, but Jorie is new to this, and there’s an innocence about her that makes Morris want to shake her and wake her up. Come on, girl, he wants to say. What does it mean to you that you trust a complete stranger more than you do the man you’re married to?

Jorie nods. She has been prepared for James Morris to tell her to get off his property, to turn tail and run back to Massachusetts as fast as she can. Instead, he’s opening up to her and Jorie has already decided she will agree to see anything he offers to show her, no matter where it might lead. She follows James through the cornfield with the dog racing ahead, cutting a path through the green husks. She could be anywhere on this earth, lost to everyone who’s ever known her, so far from home she might never again find her way back. It so hot out beyond the shadows of the sweet gum trees that a person could easily confuse what is real and what’s imagined, thrown off by the floating scrim of heat waves and the sea of green. For an instant, Jorie isn’t sure of what’s in front of her eyes—a black angel, a man tied to a tree—but as they grow closer she realizes it’s only an old pole once used for a scarecrow The pole has a metal whirligig attached, set out to scare away grackles and swamp sparrows and crows. James stops and the shadow of the pole slides across his face in a single dark bar. His dog leans against his leg and looks up at its master, anxious to walk on.

Jorie shakes her head. She doesn’t want to look at him, but she forces herself to meet his eyes. He’s an extremely handsome man, she sees that now, one who hasn’t had any life to speak of. He lived here with his parents until theyd died, and after that he never for a moment thought of going anywhere else.

James Morris’s life might have taken him anywhere, to a place where the well water didn’t taste like salt, a town where no one even knew what a blackbird looked like. The women in Holden have given up on him, and they shake their heads when they think of what might have been. They used to bring him suppers of baked ham and beans, they’d stop in on Saturday nights with homemade pies or six-packs of beer, but even though James Morris was always polite, he clearly had no interest in any of them. Something had stopped for him a long time ago. Their lives had gone forward, but his had come to a halt, in shades of gray, as if he were living in a snapshot, frozen in place. He didn’t even notice the blackbirds swooping above them; they ate crumbs from his hands, they rode on his shoulders, pecking at bits of grain caught in the seams of his clothes, and still he pays them no mind.

James Morris has spent years trying not to think, and that’s the way he’s managed to rise from his bed every day. He’s a man who stays clear of town, unless he needs provisions; he goes to the bank and the post office once a month, more than enough as far as he’s concerned. A few summers ago he sold a parcel of land to a neighbor, so he has some money in reserve, and he does well enough with his cornfields to pay the taxes and the utility bills. When it comes right down to it, there wasn’t much he wanted. Unless you count going backward in time. Oh, if only he could wake up and be ten years old all over again on a splendid summer morning. If only the most unusual thing that was about to happen was that he’d finally manage to dive into Hell’s Pond from the highest branch of the big sweet gum tree that grew on the shore until lightning struck a few years back, cleaving the giant trunk in two.

“There was another reason folks around here said the scarecrow had done it. Its clothes were gone. Of course, someone had stolen them and left his own bloody clothes behind, but no one could convince anyone around here of that. Not for quite a while. It got so most people who grew up in this county wouldn’t go out at night, especially the ones living on farms. A week or so after the funeral, my father burned the scarecrow. He doused it with so much gasoline, he nearly set fire to all our fields, but he didn’t care.”

After that, James confides, there wasn’t a farm anywhere near Holden where scarecrows were set out in the fields, and that true today. Fifteen years after it happened, some people still swear that scarecrows can walk on hot summer nights, they can slip into houses while people are sleeping, they wait by the roadside in order to trap children and turn them into blackbirds. Maybe that’s the reason this area seems overrun by birds; there, in the distance, Jorie watches as clouds of blackbirds form a dark horizon, whirling back and forth across the white heat.

“They’ve still got those bloody clothes down at the district attorney’s office,” James Morris says, “and something tells me when they finish running the tests they’re doing now, the DNA is not going to belong to any scarecrow. But when I was a kid, I really belicved it. I couldn’t sleep until my father burnt the damned thing, and even then I kept dreaming about it. Every night it was walking through the fields, coming for Rachel.” He turns to Jorie, his face wary, as it has been for all these years. “Is that what you came here to hear? You want to see firsthand how our lives were ruined? You want to hear how he raped her and killed her and left the clothes on the ground for any ten-year-old boy to find?”

Jorie can feel how dry her throat is, like paper or parchment, aflame with grief and guilt. James Morris is being cruel, he wants to hurt her, but so what? He has a right to do so. He had been the first one up that next morning; he’d gone into the field with his old dog Cobalt, who been dead twelve years now. He didn’t know what the pile of clothes was covered with until he’d already stopped to pick up the shirt. and by then it was too late. He had blood on his hands, and it burned him, it stained him right through his fingertips, through his flesh, and he knew that no matter what he did, it would never wash away.

He should have called for his father. He should have screamed until the neighbors on the other side of Route 12 could hear him. Instead, he ran in the opposite direction, and he sat in the woods crying, until Cobalt found him. By then, Rachel had been taken away. In a matter of hours, on a perfect summer day, the house where they lived had become completely empty, even though there were still three people living inside.

He laughs at the notion. It’s not so much that he doesn’t believe her, it’s that he knows what she wants is impossible. All the same, he leads her down to the place where Hell’s Pond used to be, the mucky inlet Jorie spied on her drive in. This is where the truck had been found when the water was drained as a way to stop the spread of mosquitoes.

Jorie crouches down. The shallows are thick with smarnveed and needle rush. King rails nest here, along with mallards and those swamp sparrows that always sound like women crying when they call to each other, It’s cool in the shadows at the edge of the water and everything smells like earth and salt. The air is tinged green, and little fish swim through the few pools that are left, each one drying up in the heat of the day, evaporating by the second.

“Those were her favorite flowers.” James Morris nods to a ring of rose mallow, luminous and pink in the brackish water. “She used to put on my father’s high boots and tromp through the mud and get a whole basket of them, and our house would be full of them. I told her there were rice rats out there, but that didn’t stop her. She was the kind of girl who was always better at everything than everyone else was. Dancing, climbing trees, even using my father’s shotgun. She had twenty-twenty vision. She could see things nobody else could.”

When they turn back, they don’t speak as they follow the path their footprints have made. Joric is thinking of baskets of mallows. She is thinking of a girl pulling on her father’s old green boots. The more she imagines this, the more her head hurts, until it is pounding. At the turnoff, they leave the path through the woods and head back through the field. As they make their way through the tall grass, the dog flushes some woodcocks out from the reeds and runs off barking. James whistles through his teeth. “Hey, Fergus,” he calls, and the dog comes racing back, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. James Morris reaches down and pats the dog’s head, and in that moment Jorie sees the man in all his loneliness. Right then she knows that she is walking beside a shattered individual who has never gotten beyond that terrible day. James Morris might as well still be ten years old for all the good being a man will do him. For an instant, as they traversc the cornfield, Jorie feels likc holding his hand.

The heat is crackly, a sure sign of rain later in the evening. But for now the sky is still ablaze with light, azure above them. “It used to be like other people’s, but that was before you knew what he was. Now it sounds like you had nothing.” It’s taken years for such a sweet boy to turn ill-tempered, but he’s managed it, almost. “Isn’t that right?”

The red dust that had risen as they tramped through the fields has begun to settle on Jorie’s skin so that she looks slightly sunburned. “All this time I’ve loved him, and now what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to walk away? just like that? Chalk every day we had together up to one big lie?”

It’s a threat, and James’s voice breaks, but allowing her into the house is also a gift of sorts, Jorie understands that. As he opens the screen door, it’s an invitation into his pain. It’s not often that a closed-up man like James Morris makes an offer such as this, so Jorie nods. She looks back at him, straight into his beautiful face with its lines of sorrow and hard work.

He takes her inside, where the rooms are dusty and cool. There are photographs on the mantel- James Morris’s parents in happier days, aunts and uncles from Annapolis and Virginia that he hasn’t seen for more than a decade, the old dog Cobalt, and the next dog as well, a swcct-tempered Doberman, mistakenly taken for a deer and shot a few years back. In the center of the mantel are the photographs of Rachel. Jorie approaches for a closer look, though she feels even dizzier inside this darkened house than she did out in the hot fields.

“May I?” Jorie says. and when James Morris shrugs, she picks up a photo of Rachel at five, front teeth missing, red hair cut in bangs. The silver frame is shockingly cool in Jorie’s hands, like stones in a river or hail from above. She replaces that photograph and turns to the next, Rachel on horseback, her smile gorgeous, and then the next, Rachel in a party dress, her hair carefully curled, and then one that James tells her was taken two weeks before she died, Rachel and her mother at the shore, arms around each other, mouths wide with laughter.

Rachel was beautiful, Jorie can see that even in the half-light of the living room. She was a real live girl with hopes and dreams who loved the beach at Ocean City and collected stray cats, dozens of which she kept in the barn. She was a girl who walked into the swamp searching for rose mallows. and who had once raced her horse. Sugar, all the way to the pharmacy in the center of town, where she yodeled at the top of her lungs, then galloped her way home through the woods, all for a dollar bet made with her brother.

When James signals, Jorie follows him down the hall, past the kitchen, past his own bedroom, to a closed door. Jorie can feel her head pounding again. Her legs feel heavy; if they hadn’t turned to lead, surely she would have run, back into the burnished light of the field, the red light of the road, the blue-black light of her hotel room.

James opens the door into a fifteen-year-old-girl’s bedroom where everything has remained the same- there are her stuffed animals, the white curtains and the pink wallpaper patterned with flowers, a design that’s nearly unrecognizable, faded from the constant stream of sunlight. There is the dressing table on which there are barrettes, and bracelets, and bottles of cologne that have evaporated within their glass stoppers. Her books are piled upon her desk, and across one wall are ribbons from the horse shows she’d entered, along with awards from dancing school.

Jorie goes to the dressing table and picks up the hairbrush. Three strands of red hair are still caught there, twisted like gold. It’s colder in this room than it was in the rest of the house; it’s icy, as a matter of fact, and the air, trapped for so many years, is difficult to breathe. Jorie forces herself to look at the single bed, up against the wall.

James opens the closet and all at once the room smells sweet. Sachet, Jorie thinks, lily, of the valley, the same scent she herself had loved as a girl. Rachel’s dresses are still there, fifteen years out of date, but still pretty. There are her blouses and her shoes, her winter boots with the laces threadbare. There are her mittens, her winter parka, her Easter coat with its gold buttons. There are her blue jeans, neatly folded over hangers. On the shelf along one wall are piles of sweaters and of underwear ; as she peers through the dim light, Jorie notices that the socks are a far smaller size than the ones Collie wears.

Jorie walks the perimeter of the room. She wants to remember how the sunlight falls in through the gauzy curtains, how wide the pine floorboards are, how the silver barrettes on the dressing table are placed in a pink glass dish. She stops in front of the night table. There is a diary, pale blue leatherette trimmed in gold.

“We found this, but the key was missing. My mother thought it was disrespectful to read the private thoughts of the dead, but the investigators insisted. They broke it open, but I had them lock it again before they gave it back to us. I figured somebody should respect the person that she was.”

Jorie goes into the hallway, where she hides her face in her hands. She has no right to cry, but she does so anyway. She can’t stop herself James stays in his sister’s room a while longer. He knows when women cry, they’ll eventually stop, or at least that was true for his mother. He waits, and sure enough when he comes out and closes Rachel’s door, Jorie has gotten herself back under control.

He shows her to the bathroom, which is uncommonly clean for a man living alone, where Jorie washes her face. The scent of the water is nasty, rusty and filled with salt, but it’s cold, and Jorie’s burning eyes are refreshed. Afterward, she finds her way to the kitchen, and while James Morris fixes coffee, she stands by the back door. It’s so peaceful here, watching the blackbirds swoop across the open sky It’s easier to breathe if she thinks about blackbirds.

“I don’t have milk or sugar.” James Morris has not had anyone in his kitchen since last Christmas, and even then it was only his nearest neighbors, the ones he sold his land to, good people who insist on bringing him platters of turkey and mashed potatoes and sausage stuffing on the holidays, though he’s told them they needn’t bother. But even his neighbors didn’t come in much past the back door, and he has never offered them anything in return, not even a glass of cloudy water.

“Black is fine,” Jorie assures him. She looks down the driveway as a truck passes by on the road. It’s the kindhearted neighbor, off to the post office, a trip he makes every morning at this time. It’s somebody with an ordinary life of the sort Jorie once had, only weeks ago. “My husband says he wants to take responsibility now. He says he’s a different man.”

“It was a horrible accident, that’s what he’s said. He knows he should have called the authorities, but his mind shut down. It was a terrible mistake, but he swears he’s not that person anymore.” Jorie hasn’t touched her coffee. In fact, she’s nauseated. It’s all she can do to keep down the breakfast she ordered earlier from room service, just some tea, along with toast and jam. “I wouldn’t have married that person,” she says.

Jorie is not sure why she is defending her husband instead of watching the blackbirds in the trees. She’s seen the room where it happened, she’s seen the girl’s diary, and the brush, and the window he climbed through on that rainy night when the air was sweet and the future was right there before him, his for the taking. She’s seen it all and she’s standing here making excuses. “You can see who I am. I wouldn’t marry the kind of person who killed your sister.”

“But you did.” James Morris slams his coffee cup down on the counter. It’s good china, and the force of hitting it against the counter causes a chip that will, before long, crack the cup in two. “I know why you really came here. You want me to tell you it’s all right, but I’m not going to do that. Because it’s not all right and it never will be. Your husband came here and he killed my sister and she never had the chance to be a different woman the way he’s had the opportunity to be a different man. So what do you say to that? She never got to be a woman at all. She was fifteen, and that’s what she’ll always be. There are no second chances for her.”

If there was a time for Jorie to be frightened of this man, it would be now. It’s been years since James has spoken to anyone about this subject, and the words come pouring out; they’re savage and painful, and if they ever could have been forgiving, the years spent unspoken have turned every syllable into burning ash.

“I see what you’re telling yourself.” James gives a broken laugh. “He’s different. He’s not the same. Well, he’s made up of the same flesh and blood as the thing that crawled in here. I feel about him the same way my mother would have felt. She was a woman who wouldn’t even tolerate anyone shooting a squirrel. She said every creature had a soul, but she changed her mind after what happened. She told me straight out how wrong she’d been. Not every creature has a soul. That’s what she said. Not whoever did this.”

He’s going on in the manner of a man who’s lost control, and even Fergus, loyal as can be, is shivering out on the porch, the way the dog always does before a storm. Jorie should be frightened, she should be wondering if she’ll get out of this in one piece, but all she can think about is that she’s watching a grown man cry. He doesn’t even seem to notice, he just goes on shouting at her, but she can see who he is, the boy who raced into the field one fine morning, thinking the whole wide world was his home, sweet as new corn, sweet as summer can be.

“Now your husband wants to say it was just a big mistake? Well, nobody forced him to come onto our property. Nobody made him sneak into our house. He did it on his own. When they do bring him down here for trial, I’m going to sit in that courtroom every day, and when they convict him, I’ll be thinking about my mother and how pleased she would have been that at last he had to pay the price.”

The dog is pawing at the screen door, whining low down in its throat. Jorie thinks of Collie, sleeping on the couch with her mother’s dog, Mister. She thinks about how it would be to spend her life without him, to have him snatched by moonlight, wrung out and left like a husk on her doorstep, to find him in her garden on a summer’s day between the rows of sweet peas and strawberries.

Jorie sets her coffee cup on the counter. She hasn’t taken a sip, all the same, she can tell it’s far too strong, undrinkable at best. She has come here with a puzzle that cannot be solved, she sees that now For if Ethan is the man who murdered Rachel Morris, then who is she? If he is that, what is the life they’ve been living?

Gazing out the back door, wondering herself why she cares so much about what James Morris thinks, Jorie notices that the tallest cypress outside is filled with red-winged blackbirds. Why, they’re everywhere; if you looked quickly you might think there were black flowers growing on that tree, each one streaked with crimson, as though cut and bleeding still.

“The blackbirds came when Rachel died.” James is looking outside, too. “At first my father thought it was because he burned the scarecrow. He thought the birds would take over the cornfields, but they haven’t. My father’s been gone for eleven years, and my mother for almost that long, but it’s Rachel who seems like she was here yesterday.”

James walks past Jorie and goes out to the porch, where his dog is waiting. He sits in one of the old wooden chairs on the porch, then pets Fergus, who quivers with delight just to be noticed, clearly grateful that the quiet man the dog is accustomed to, that kind and generous master, has returned. Jorie follows James and stands with her back against the same door Rachel walked through every day of her life, off to school and back again, off to work at the general store, off on that last morning of her life. James’s sorrow is there in the set of his shoulders, in the way he looks out at the bald cypress trees, as if there were answers in those dark leaves, to be found somewhere between the blackbirds and the branches. Jorie has the urge to put her hand on his shoulder, but she doesn’t.

“Well, then, there you go. You have something.” James Morris lets go of her hand. “I understand you didn’t know. But that doesn’t change what happened. He’s the same man who came here that night. I know that for a fact.” James nods in the direction he once ran from, far from here, into the woods. “He’s the one.”

Jorie drives back the way she’s come, past the fields, past the pond where the shallow water used to be so warm it turned to steam, out onto the two-lane road that will lead her to Main Street. Blackbirds follow her into town, swooping and chattering above her, casting shadows on the asphalt. After she parks at the hotel, Jorie walks back to Duke’s Diner. Although the lunch hour has come and gone, she sits at the counter and orders a chicken salad sandwich on whole wheat toast and an iced tea. She’s starving , but when the sandwich arrives, she can’t eat. She keeps thinking about the brush left on the bureau, the diary without a key She sips at her iced tea, and as she does she notices Nancy, the clerk from town hall, picking up a Greek salad to go.

“Well, that’s a surprise.” Nancy lights a cigarette and pulls over the plastic ashtray on the counter. “I didn’t think he’d say more than two words to you.” Some people truly love to talk, and Nancy is clearly one of them. “What a waste of a man. I could personally name five women who would have jumped at the chance of settling down with James Morris, myself included, but he wasn’t interested. It’s like it happened yesterday as far as he’s concerned. and you can understand why.” Nancy’s face seems crumpled as she speaks about the past. “I was at school with Rachel, you know.”

“He said that?” Nancy looks pleased. “A lot of the girls in town weren’t very nice to me back then, but Rachel wasn’t like that. She didn’t care how much money you had or what you wore.” At last Nancy pauses. “I happened to overhear you talking about your husband when you were on the phone with him.” She glances around Duke’s, not particularly crowded, except for two police officers bolting down a late lunch, and a table of elderly women ordering decaf coffee and peach pie. “You might want to keep his involvement to yourself,” Nancy advises. “People around here still have strong feelings about what happened back then.”

“Well, I can show you exactly what happened.” Nancy’s boss, Arnold Darby, will probably dock her for the extra time she’s about to take, but Nancy isn’t too concerned about getting back to work. She never takes a proper lunch hour; she’s entitled to this one. “Come on.”

It’s hot as they walk up the hill leading to the oldest section of town. The cemetery has been in this part of the village since 1790 and is ringed with hedges of sweet pepperbush and dogwoods that bloom pink and white in the spring. Rachel Morris is buried between her parents on the far side of the second hill. It’s a shady spot, one that is damp enough for the rose mallows someone has planted to thrive.

“This is what happened. Somebody died.” Nancy’s mouth is set. She has her salad-to-go under her arm, wilted long before this trek, and the paper bag rustles. Just standing here causes a catch in her throat. She was one of those girls who would have waited for James Morris forever, if he’d even looked at her twice. She could have made him forget some of his pain, if only he’d let her, if only he’d tried, but some things aren’t destined to be, no matter how you might want them, and so she gave up and married Lonnie Kerr, who, even though they’re divorced, is a good father and a good man, despite the fact that he’s not James Morris.

There are red-winged blackbirds here, too, and because they defend their territory by song, the sky is filled with a riotous band of trilling. Jorie goes to the stone, then bends to run her fingers over the carvings. Beneath Rachel’s name, a message from her parents has been engraved: You are with us every day.

“One weekend she was sleeping over at my house, and by the next week she was dead. and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it or any story they could tell themselves to make it all right.” Nancy doesn’t seem like a stranger. She seems like the kind of woman who would be a good friend. “Sometimes I think no one in this town ever felt safe again, not the way we used to.”

They stand at the gravesite for a while longer, then walk back along the cemetery path to the main road beneath the azure-colored sky. This was the same sky Rachel had seen every day. These blackbirds had woken her each morning with song. What happened then feels so real here, whether it was yesterday or fifteen years ago or this morning. Jorie’s history is fading under the weight of the Morrises’ sorrow, disintegrating strand by strand, year by year.

“I hear the heating system is terrible,” Nancy Kerr informs Jorie. “The last tenant nearly froze to death last winter. He packed up and drove south to North Carolina with icicles in his beard.” She peeks into the bag to see if Duke remembered to put in a roll with her salad order, which, of course, he never does. “Some things look a whole lot better from a distance, and this town is probably one of them.”

They shake hands when they reach the Black Horse Hotel. Under different circumstances they might have become friends, or perhaps they would have passed each other by entirely; now they will always have this walk they’ve shared, under the blue sky, up to the second hill, where Rachel Morris is buried. When Jorie goes to her room in the hotel, she takes off her clothes and lies on the bed, between the clean sheets. At last, she can cry in peace. The room is glassy with heat, and by the time Jorie is done weeping, her face is splotchy, her eyes red. She used to cry over foolish things, movies and books, stubbed toes, stories of children rescued by their mothers, suddenly strong beyond human limitations in the face of danger. Now she cries for herself, and she’s shocked by how much salt water there is contained within her. She could collect buckets of it, wash her clothes in it, boil a sour teary tea that could bring grief to the drinker with a single sip. She goes into the bathroom, naked, then steps into the shower and runs cold water over herself, streams of it hitting her hot, dusty skin, grateful that the racket of the faucet stops her from thinking, at least for now.

Some things, however, are true no matter how hard you might try to block them out, and a lie is always a lie, no matter how prettily told. Jorie thinks about Rachel Morris’s bedroom; some doors, once they’re opened, can never be closed again, just as some trust, once it’s been lost, can never be won back. The past thirteen years feel less real to Jorie than do the last twenty-four hours. She sleeps with dreams of blackbirds and rose mallows, and when she wakes, she notices that her pillow is faintly red, as though she’s been crying blood and not tears. It’s the dust that collected on her skin, granules that remain even though she’s washed carefully.

Jorie has slept so deeply she hadn’t heard anyone outside her room in the hallway of the Black Horse Hotel. She doesn’t find the package James Morris leaves for her until she’s about to go down for breakfast before driving back to the airport in Baltimore. By then, Jorie has nearly made up her mind; she has the bellman carry her bag downstairs, then goes back to sit on the edge of the bed. She opens the envelope neatly tied with brown string and brings forth Rachel’s diary. It’s still locked; Rachel’s privacy has been preserved since the summer when she died. She would have been a junior in high school that next year if Bryon Bell had never come to town, if he’d just kept driving north, if he hadn’t been so damn thirsty and the heat hadn’t been so brutal, if he hadn’t seen her red hair through the window of the market.

James placed the package so gently against the door, Jorie hadn’t heard a thing. On this, her last morning in Maryland, she feels the tenderness of his message, as well as the strength. People pity James Morris, but Jorie finds she respects him. He is one man who knows exactly what’s inside his heart, and he refuses to pretend otherwise. What he told her was true. He will never move forward, and he’ll never forgive. He’s honest, simple as that, and this has become the trait that Jorie finds most admirable.

When she leaves the hotel, Jorie stands out in the parking lot to take a last look at Holden. Although it’s not yet nine, the heat is already rising off the blacktop in transparent waves. Jorie can feel the sun on her back as she packs Rachel’s diary into her suitcase before driving back to the airport. She has the suitcase right under her seat as the plane taxis out across the runway, for as it turns out, the flight to Massachusetts isn’t the least bit crowded. Jorie leans against the headrest and closes her eyes during takeoff As they hurtle into the milky blue air, awash with cloud and sun, she can no longer tell the difference between east and west. But there’s one direction of which she has no doubt, and one thing she knows for certain: she is not about to forget.