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PROLOGUE
ONE Emmie E mmie and Deacon sit together on one of the long antique benches lined up neatly inside the old Kingston Station, daughter and father waiting impatiently with all the other people headed south to New Haven or New York or wherever it is they’re all bound at half past eleven on a cold Saturday morning in February. Old Kingston Station instead of Providence Station because Deacon says he likes the long drive, and, besides, he has a friend in West Kingston he hasn’t seen for a while. He’s sipping at a can of Diet Pepsi from a vending machine near one of the windows, and Emmie is silently wishing that the train would hurry up. She loves taking the train to see Sadie, even when she has to ride alone, even when her father is too busy with his shop to go with her. She pretends she’s Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, or she pretends that all the sights rushing by outside the windows of the Amtrak are places that she’s never seen before, exotic, far-off places from the books she’
TWO Soldier “I ’m asking you nicely—you need to stop staring at that damned watch of yours,” Odd Willie Lothrop grumbles, plucking an unlit Winston from his thin lips. “You’re making me jumpy.” “She’s late,” Soldier says for the seventh or eighth time since Saben failed to show for their two-o’clock. That was almost thirty-five minutes ago now, and the Bailiff’s already called twice to see what the hell’s going on, why the three of them aren’t on their way from Cranston to Woonsocket. She’s made Odd Willie take both the calls because she doesn’t like talking to the Bailiff when he’s pissed off—nobody does—but Soldier knows the next one will be for her, for her personally and no one else, and she’ll have to come up with some sort of halfway credible excuse to cover Saben White’s ass—again. This will make twice in one month, and Soldier doesn’t know why the bitch hasn’t already been handed her walking papers, why someone hasn’t put a couple in her skull and left her floating facedown in
THREE New York A fter the cab ride from the train station, after dinner and half an hour’s worth of old Tom and Jerry cartoons on Sadie’s little television, Emmie sits on the sofa and watches while her stepmother checks all the locks on the front door of her apartment again. “Just in case,” Sadie would say, or, “It never hurts to be careful,” if Emmie were to ask her, but she doesn’t ask because she knows better. She knows that Sadie paid extra to have all those locks installed on the door, because Deacon said so. He also told Emmie that it wasn’t polite to ask questions about Sadie and her weird thing with the locks, but she’d already suspected as much. “Something very bad happened,” Deacon told her, “a long time ago. That’s how her arm got hurt. I’ve told you that, Emmie. Now she needs to feel safe, that’s all.” “Does she have OCD?” Emmie asked him. “What?” her father asked back, furrowing his brow and scowling at her. “Where the hell did you learn about OCD?” “From an abnormal-psych
FOUR Woonsocket “I t wasn’t like that,” Odd Willie mumbles indignantly, and lights another cigarette off the butt of the one before, crumpling the empty Winston pack and tossing it out the car window. “That sour old cunt, she needed a lesson in the finer fucking points of minding her own business, you know.” “Yeah, well, be that as it may,” Soldier says, “don’t think you’re gonna make a habit out of shit like that.” She squints through her sunglasses and the windshield of the Dodge at the cloudy afternoon, the sky still threatening snow. The Bailiff told her to keep driving the old Intrepid for now, even after what Odd Willie pulled at the Dunkin’ Donuts and then the scene out at Rocky Point, and that was only one of the dozen or so unwelcome surprises in the last twenty-four hours that have Soldier wondering if maybe she’s finally running out of luck, or if maybe the Bailiff’s just running out of patience. “You’re wound way too tight, Odd Willie,” she says. “You’re like the center of
FIVE Angell Street E mmie is sitting on the floor in her bedroom, her bedroom in Providence, home again after the three-hour train ride from Manhattan. They took the Acela Express, because it was so much faster, but the trip still seemed to take at least twice as long as usual. Sadie hardly spoke the whole way, and Emmie stared out the window at the countryside and the towns and the train stations rushing past. Somewhere in Connecticut, the sky turned stormy and dark; the clouds were like mountains piling up to crush the world. When they finally reached the Providence station, Deacon was there waiting for them. He looked worried and annoyed, but he hugged her tight, kissed her cheek and told her he’d missed her and was glad she was back so soon. Home again, home again, jiggety-jog. On Emmie’s CD player, Doris Day is singing “Secret Love,” and the volume’s turned up loud, but she can still hear Sadie and Deacon arguing. They’re downstairs in the kitchen, but their voices rise like warm
SIX Shadow and Flame “F ucking dead,” Odd Willie moans, somewhere nearby, somewhere in the river-scented darkness and the acrid stench of the mill-befouled Blackstone, and Soldier grits her teeth and shuts her eyes again. No sense staring into that black void until her eyes burn and she begins to imagine taunting, swirling colors that aren’t there to see. No light left down here. No light at all. Only pain and the darkness and Odd Willie moaning about being dead. Both of them dangling headdown like fat hogs strung up for the slaughterhouse knife, her wrists tied behind her back, her ankles bound. Soldier’s head and spine and shoulders are white fire, but at least she can’t feel her hands or feet because she’s been hanging here so long, and, besides, the nylon cord and electrical tape have cut off the circulation. “Fuckers,” mumbles Odd Willie. They may have been hanging here only an hour, but it might have been much longer. She remembers the car and the cemetery, the glamour, the butt
SEVEN Star I t’s a little warmer inside the old tunnel, if only because Emmie’s finally out of the storm, out of the wind and snow. But the subterranean air is stale and stinks of neglect and the tiny, long-stemmed mushrooms growing from the old railroad ties. Their caps are neither red nor white, but not exactly pink, either, and Emmie figures she’d probably die if she were to eat one of them. The tunnel is flooded on either side of the tracks, but the brown girl has assured her the water isn’t deep. The smooth cement walls rise up around them, converging overhead in a wide arch encrusted with icicles and stained with the soot of forgotten trains. Emmie can see because the brown girl is carrying some sort of fist-sized flashlight or lantern, something she pulled from a pocket of her dress shortly after they entered the darkness. Emmie thinks it looks more like a snow globe with a lightbulb sealed up inside than any sort of flashlight, but when she asked the girl what it was, she would
EIGHT Intersections A nd from the starry place, all things are possible, and, perhaps, all things are also probable. Possibility is infinite here, and possibility collides, in spiraling space-time fusillades, with probability at every turn. The unlikely and the never-was become, for fleeting instants, the actual and the inevitable and the black facts of a trillion competing histories, each entirely ignorant of all the others, each confident that it’s the only true history. Emmie is wearing her gloves and down coat again, her alpaca muffler and her mittens, and she clutches the glass orb as she slips between everything that was and is and never quite shall be. Sometimes she shuts her eyes, because there are things she cannot comprehend and would rather not see, and sometimes she opens them wide and wishes that she could see more clearly and more fully understand what she’s seeing. The stars, and the almost empty spaces between the stars. Light and darkness and things that are not exactl
Intersections
NINE The Bailiff T he clouds have gone, and the sky above the highway is a bright shade of blue, a cold and perfect cloudless blue spread out above the sagging power lines and bare tree branches glistening with ice. The snow is piled high along the sides of the road, and Emmie thinks it’ll start melting soon, if it hasn’t started already. Odd Willie’s driving, and Soldier’s riding up front with him, so Emmie has the backseat all to herself. The stolen Chevy sedan glides over brown slush—ice and salt and sand—and the black streaks of asphalt showing through. There’s a Beatles song playing on the radio, “Hey Jude,” and Odd Willie is humming along to it. Every now and then he smiles at Emmie from the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry,” Soldier says again. “She was my mother,” Emmie replies, but no matter how many times she says the words, it doesn’t feel any less unreal. “She was my mother, and she’d come to find me, and you killed her.” Soldier lights another cigarette and rolls her window dow
TEN The Yellow House S oldier can’t remember the first time she saw the yellow house on Benefit Street, not the first time that she saw it from the outside. It seems she might have been a grown woman before she ever looked at it the way that other people do, those unsuspecting people of the sunlight who have not been raised in the deep and rotten places of the world, who have never walked the silent halls of the house or climbed the narrow stairs leading into and out of its vast basement. If Soldier had ever paused to consider this juxtaposition—that she knew the terrible heart of the yellow house before she ever glimpsed its concealing face—she might have thought it odd. There has never been a less haunted house, nor a house more filled with bad memories and restless spirits. It has a reputation, of course, but then many old houses in this city suffer from unpleasant reputations; too many houses that have stood far too long to escape insanity and murder, suicide and all the less munda
EPILOGUE
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