THE TWO WOMEN stared at it for a frozen moment, then Gina said, “That door was bolted on the inside. I’ve never used it. Elaine was hiding out in here after all, damn it!”
She pushed the heavy door open and went out onto a veranda that surrounded the house on three sides. The house stood on a slight rise, man-made when it was built, to keep it above flood level when the Kaw and Wakarusa rivers spread their waters through the valley. From the top of the rise, Rachel saw a trail of bent and broken stems through the waist-high grass, showing where the intruder had fled.
The yard was filled with trees—firs, sycamore, walnut, a dozen varieties that Una Fremantle had brought with her as seedlings from Massachusetts; these had grown so huge over the centuries that they shielded the road from sight.
Rachel went down the porch stairs and made her way through the bent stalks and past the trees, but the wild prairie grasses in the drainage ditch still blocked her view of the road. She slithered into the ditch. When she made it up to the road, she couldn’t see anyone in either direction.
The wind kept the high grasses in constant motion, but as she stared across the road into the twilit fields a different kind of movement caught her eye. Something like the wake a boat would make in a turbulent ocean was splitting the corn in the field to the north. She squinted, concentrating on the motion until it was lost from sight. Whoever was going through those fields was heading northwest toward the Grellier house.
Rachel limped back up the road to the Fremantle drive and slowly returned to Gina. Scrambling through ditches and grasses in her school shoes had raised blisters on her heels and toes. When she got back to the house, Gina demanded to know where Elaine was.
“It wasn’t Elaine.” Rachel sat on the veranda steps and took off her shoes. Blood was oozing through the stocking on her left foot. “She can’t move fast. Whoever this was could run.”
Gina’s shoulders sagged. “Anyone could get in here who felt like it—the place has five doors. I have keys, but you can see what a sieve it is. My God, I wonder if it was Arnie Schapen or that dreadful mother of his, trying to plant some kind of evidence here so he can prance around in his deputy’s uniform and arrest me.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine Mr. Schapen giving up his dignity by squatting down here in the hallway for half an hour or sprinting to the road with me after him—he’d be more likely to shoot me and claim self-defense.” Rachel peeled off her socks and stared mournfully at her bleeding feet. “I don’t know Mr. Schapen’s mother, but this was someone who could move fast on foot. Unless she really is a witch, I doubt an old woman could have gotten away by the time we came out the front door.”
“People have the wrong idea about witches,” Gina said. “We don’t do magic, we can’t influence the outcome of events or violate the laws of physics any more than Christians can. However much the Schapens photograph our rituals, they won’t find any sign that we fly or kill babies for their blood or any of the other crap they accuse us of.”
“If Junior Schapen were still living at home, I might suspect him,” Rachel said, “but the football coach, or Arnie, persuaded a local Bible school to let him play football for them, despite his abysmal grades, so he’s over in Tonganoxie.”
“They do have another son. I’ve never met him, but he passes here sometimes on his way to the Wakarusa. Hard to believe, but people eat fish out of that muddy creek.” Gina flushed. “I’m as bad as everyone else out here, aren’t I, keeping track of who’s doing what?”
Rachel smiled, but shook her head. “That must be Robbie. He’s in my sophomore English class this fall, but, Schapen though he is, he seems so engaged by poetry that I can’t imagine him doing something so—so sordid.”
“Eddie Burton!” Gina exclaimed. “I would have thought of him at once if Elaine hadn’t been hanging around.”
When Rachel said she didn’t know him, Gina gave a harsh bark of a laugh. “That’s because he’s mentally deficient, or whatever the jargon is—couldn’t even learn the alphabet, according to Lara Grellier, so it’s not likely you’d have seen him in your high school. He climbed a tree outside the second-floor bathroom, spying on me the week I moved in last winter, and I know I saw him lurking around the place on Midsummer Eve, when Arnie Schapen called out the fire department against us. But Jim spoke to Eddie’s father, and I haven’t seen him since the last fire. I’d forgotten about him until now.”
“Where does he live?”
“Down near K-10.” Gina pointed south toward the highway, away from the Grelliers’. “That ramshackle place with the cars up on cement blocks.”
Rachel shook her head again. “I saw movement through the field to the north. Who lives that way besides the Grelliers?”
Gina shrugged. “I don’t know. A million people, all minding my business, but I don’t know their names. Lara and Etienne Grellier used to come into this house when it was empty—Jim says they treated it like a kind of clubhouse. Maybe it was Lara—she slipped into the bedroom one morning right after I moved in, looking for some damned thing.”
“Lara?” Rachel tensed. “I can’t believe it.”
“The country is a murky place. All these houses, with people doing dreadful things in them, any of them might think it was a funny idea to break in here. I can believe it of Lara or the young Schapen or Eddie or—or anyone else, if I knew their names.”
“Why Lara?” Rachel demanded sharply.
“No special reason,” Gina said, “except that she’s one more teenager in a place where everyone seems to lead disturbed or disturbing lives.”
The trouble was, Rachel realized, she, too, feared it had been Lara. The new, downward-spiraling Lara might try almost anything to get some attention from Susan. If Lara was deciding to add vandalism or housebreaking to her new hostile persona, she was heading for more serious trouble than Rachel could help with. She couldn’t bear to think of the pain it would cause Jim. She made one of those meaningless prayers: Please don’t let it be Lara. Let it be someone else’s child, someone else’s problem. Protect Jim from more harm.
Gina ran her hands through her hair, leaving a trail of dust across her temples. “Will you go through the house with me? I don’t want to spend the night jumping up every time a board creaks—and every board in this house creaks, believe me. I can fix you up some Band-Aids for your feet,” she added, seeing Rachel’s pained look at her bloody socks.
Rachel rubbed the tight spot behind her eyes where her head was throbbing. She wanted to hobble to her car, bypass the Grelliers’, forget life east of town, and sleep for a year or two, but then she imagined what it would feel like when she had left, when the light was gone, and Gina was alone.
With surprising patience, Gina cleaned Rachel’s blisters and wrapped them in layers of bandages. She even gave Rachel a clean pair of socks. When Rachel was duly wrapped up and able to walk again, Gina took a heavy-duty flashlight from a kitchen drawer. With Rachel at her elbow, she went through each of the downstairs rooms in turn, then went up the formal front staircase to the second floor. The clutter in the bedrooms Gina wasn’t using was so dense it was impossible to tell if anything had been added—or, indeed, taken away—but the black dust covering the surfaces didn’t seem to have been disturbed.
It wasn’t until they got to the little corner room Gina was using as a study that they found anything out of the ordinary. Gina checked her laptop, to make sure it was still there, to make sure her work files were intact, but Rachel was looking at the portrait of the dark-haired woman.
“There’s a cigarette stub in her mouth,” she said.
Gina glanced up from her machine, then sprang to her feet, furious. “It’s a roach. How dare they? Come in here, spy, and then deface my picture!”
“A roach?” Rachel moved closer to the picture. “But it looks like a cigarette.”
“You are damned naive for a high school teacher. Marijuana. The butts are called roaches, okay?” Gina blazed with anger but worked carefully on the tape holding the end of the joint to the woman’s lips to make sure she didn’t pull any of the paper away. “They did this so Arnie Schapen could march in, wearing his deputy sheriff’s uniform, looking for drugs, and get me locked up! And then his repellent mother could write a screed about dykes who practice witchcraft and use drugs.”
Rachel looked at the roach meekly, feeling there was, in fact, something amiss with her for not knowing what it was. Her roommate in college had smoked dope, but Rachel had never wanted to try it, and her adult milieu had never included drug users. Over the years, her students had used the language of the drug world in the hopes of shocking her, but she couldn’t remember whether she’d ever seen roach in a student paper. Maybe this joint end meant it really had been one of the Schapens. If Arnie or Junior Schapen were breaking in, Rachel wouldn’t want to be alone in this big house.
“Who is the woman in the picture?” she ventured, as Gina searched the room for any more drugs.
“She’s someone—I treated very badly.” Gina’s face twisted in pain. She led Rachel abruptly from the room. On her way downstairs, she said, “I’m not up to going into that basement, are you?”
“No,” Rachel agreed thankfully, “but I’d nail the door to it in the kitchen shut if I were you. That way, if someone tried to break in through the cellar they wouldn’t be able to get into the house. I need to stop at the Grelliers’ on my way home. Do you want me to ask Blitz Fosse to come over and do that for you?”
“Is he the big guy with the dark beard? He looks at me so disapprovingly whenever I’ve gone over there, I can’t imagine he’d help me out.”
“Don’t jump to any more conclusions today, okay?” Rachel said, thinking of Blitz’s encouragement to her on her way over. “You’re so—so elegant, you make all the rest of us feel awkward. Most people are nervous and uncomfortable around strangers, after all, but they do want to find common ground, not look for the nearest rock to pick up and throw.”
It was a talk she gave to at least one student at least once a term, but Gina said, “Actually, I don’t believe that. If it was true, we wouldn’t have so many wars.”
“But you’re part of that peace group. If you want peace, then why not try practicing peaceful behavior? It’s that old saying of Gandhi’s, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’” Rachel stopped, embarrassed to find herself preaching. “Is there someone you could stay with or someone in your group who could come out to be with you tonight?”
“Call me from the Grelliers’,” Gina said. “If Blitz or Jim can come over to nail things shut, I think I’ll be okay. Maybe I should let Elaine Logan move in here, after all—she could sleep in the living room, where anyone coming in through the front would trip over her.”
Rachel smiled, but said seriously, “At least you wouldn’t be alone in the house.”