Her laughter was a quality he prized in her above all others—the deep, chaotic music of it and the way she gave herself over to it completely. It stirred him, drew him out of himself. It was just after seven by the clock on the microwave. He would step back into the living room and join the two of them for a few minutes of easy, pointless talk, and then he would get Georgia’s attention and shoot a meaningful look at the door. The road was waiting.
He had made up his mind and was turning from the kitchen counter when a sound caught his attention, a lilting, off-key voice, singing: byebye, bay-bee. He turned on his heel, glanced back into the yard behind the house.
The rear corner of the yard was lit by a street lamp in the alley. It cast a bluish light across the picket fence and the big leafy oak with the rope hanging from one branch. A little girl crouched in the grass beneath the tree, a child of perhaps six or seven, in a simple red-and-white-checkered dress and with her dark hair tied in a ponytail. She sang to herself, that old one by Dean Martin about how it was time to hit the road to dreamland, digya in the land of nod. She picked a dandelion, caught her breath, and blew. The seed parachutes came apart, a hundred drifting white umbrellas that soared out into the gloom. It should’ve been impossible to see them, except that they were faintly luminescent, drifting about like improbable white sparks. Her head was raised, so she seemed almost to be staring directly at Jude through the window. It was hard to be sure, though. Her eyes were obscured by the black marks that jittered before them.
It was Ruth. Her name was Ruth. She was Bammy’s twin sister, the one who had disappeared in the 1950s. Their parents had called them in for lunch. Bammy had come running, but Ruth lingered behind, and that was the last anyone ever saw of her…alive.
Jude opened his mouth—to say what, he didn’t know—but found himself unable to speak. The breath caught in his chest and stayed there.
Ruth stopped singing, and the night went still, no sound even of insects now. The little girl turned her head, to glance into the alley behind the house. She smiled, and a hand flapped up in a small wave, as if she’d just noticed someone standing there, someone she knew, a friendly neighborhood acquaintance. Only there wasn’t anyone in the alley. There were old pages from a newspaper stuck to the ground, some broken glass, weeds growing between the bricks. Ruth rose from her crouch and walked slowly to the fence, her lips moving—talking soundlessly to a person who wasn’t there. When had Jude become unable to hear her voice? When she gave up singing.
As Ruth approached the fence, Jude felt a rising alarm, as if he were watching a child about to stray onto a busy highway. He wanted to call to her but could not, couldn’t even inhale.
He remembered then what Georgia had told him about her. That people who saw little Ruth always wanted to call to her, to warn her that she was in danger, to tell her to run, but that no one could manage it. They were too stricken by the sight of her to speak. A thought formed, the sudden, nonsensical thought that this was every girl Jude had ever known who he hadn’t been able to help; it was Anna and Georgia both. If he could just speak her name, get her attention, signal to her that she was in trouble, anything was possible. He and Georgia might beat the dead man yet, survive the impossible fix they had got themselves in.
And still Jude could not find his voice. It was maddening to stand there and watch and not be able to speak. He slammed his bandaged, injured hand against the counter, felt a shock of pain travel through the wound in his palm—and still could not force any sound up through the tight passage of his throat.
Angus was at his side, and he jumped when Jude pounded the counter. He lifted his head and lapped nervously at Jude’s wrist. The rough, hot stroke of Angus’s tongue on his bare skin startled him. It was immediate and real and it yanked him out of his paralysis as swiftly and abruptly as Georgia’s laughter had pulled him out of his feeling of despair only a few moments before. His lungs grabbed some air, and he called through the window.
“Ruth!” he shouted—and she turned her head. She heard him. She heard him. “Get away, Ruth! Run for the house! Right now!”
Ruth glanced again at the darkened, empty alley, and then she took an off-balance, lunging step back toward the house. Before she could go any farther, her slender white arm came up, as if there were an invisible line around her left wrist and someone was pulling on it.
Only it wasn’t an invisible line. It was an invisible hand. And in the next instant, she came right off the ground, hauled into the air by someone who wasn’t there. Her long, skinny legs kicked helplessly, and one of her sandals flew off and disappeared into the dark. She wrestled and fought, suspended two feet in the air, and was pulled steadily backward. Her face turned toward Jude’s, helpless and beseeching, the marks over her eyes blotting out her desperate stare, as she was carried by unseen forces over the picket fence.
“Ruth!” he called again, his voice as commanding as it had ever been onstage, when he was shouting to his legions.
She began to fade away as she was hauled off down the alley. Now her dress was gray-and-white checks. Now her hair was the color of moonsilver. The other sandal fell off, splashed in a puddle, and disappeared, although ripples continued to move across the shallow muddy water—as if it had fallen, impossibly, right out of the past and into the present. Ruth’s mouth was open, but she couldn’t scream, and Jude didn’t know why. Maybe the unseen thing that was tugging her away had a hand over her mouth. She passed under the bright blue glare of the street lamp and was gone. The breeze caught a newspaper, and it flapped down the empty alley with a dry, rattling sound.
Angus whined again and gave him another lick. Jude stared. A bad taste in his mouth. A feeling of pressure in his eardrums.
“Jude,” Georgia whispered from behind him.
He looked at her reflection in the window over the sink. Black squiggles danced in front of her eyes. They were over his eyes, too. They were both dead. They just hadn’t stopped moving yet.
“What happened, Jude?”
“I couldn’t save her,” he said. “The girl. Ruth. I saw her taken away.” He could not tell Georgia that somehow his hope that they could save themselves had been taken with her. “I called her name. I called her name, but I couldn’t change what happened.”
“Course you couldn’t, dear,” said Bammy.
33
Jude pivoted toward Georgia and Bammy. Georgia stood across the kitchen from him, in the doorway. Her eyes were just her eyes, no death marks over them. Bammy touched her granddaughter on the hip to nudge her aside, then eased into the kitchen around her and approached Jude.
“You know Ruth’s story? Did M.B. tell you?”
“She told me your sister got taken when you were little. She said sometimes people see her out in the yard, getting grabbed all over again. It isn’t the same as seeing it yourself. I heard her sing. I saw her taken away.”
Bammy put her hand on his wrist. “Do you want to set?”
He shook his head.
“You know why she keeps coming back? Why people see her? The worst moments of Ruth’s life happened out in that yard, while we all sat in here eating our lunch. She was alone and scared, and no one saw when she was taken away. No one heard when she stopped singing. It must’ve been the most awful thing. I’ve always thought that when something really bad happens to a person, other people just have to know about it. You can’t be a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear you crash. Can I at least get you something else to drink?”
He nodded. She got the pitcher of lemonade, almost drained now, and sloshed the last of it into his glass.
While she poured, Bammy said, “I always thought if someone could speak to her, it might take a weight off her. I always thought if someone could make her feel not so alone in those last minutes, it might set her free.” Bammy tipped her head to the side—a curious, interrogatory gesture Jude had seen Georgia perform a million times. “You might’ve done her some good and not even know it. Just by saying her name.”
“Wha
t did I do? She still got taken.” Downing the glass in a swallow and then setting it in the sink.
“I never thought for a moment anyone could change what happened to her. That’s done. The past is gone. Stay the night, Jude.”
Her last statement was so completely unrelated to the one that had preceded it, Jude needed a moment to understand she had just made a request of him.
“Can’t,” Jude said.
“Why?”
Because anyone who offered them aid would be infected with the death on them, and who knew how much they had risked Bammy’s life just by stopping a few hours? Because he and Georgia were dead already, and the dead drag the living down. “Because it isn’t safe,” he said at last. That was honest, at least.
Bammy’s brow knotted, screwing up in thought. He saw her struggling for the right words to crack him open, to force him to talk about the situation they were in.
While she was still thinking, Georgia crept into the room, almost tiptoeing, as if afraid to make any sound. Bon was at her heels, gazing up with a look of idiot anxiety.
Georgia said, “Not every ghost is like your sister, Bammy. There’s some that are real bad. We’re having all kinds of trouble with dead people. Don’t ask either one of us to explain. It would just sound crazy.”
“Try me anyway. Let me help.”
“Mrs. Fordham,” Jude said, “you were good to have us. Thank you for dinner.”
Georgia reached Bammy’s side and tugged on her shirtsleeve, and when her grandmother turned toward her, Georgia put her pale and skinny arms around her and clasped her tight. “You are a good woman, and I love you.”
Bammy still had her head turned to look at Jude. “If I can do something…”
“But you can’t,” Jude said. “It’s like with your sister there in the backyard. You can shout all you want, but it won’t change how things play out.”
“I don’t believe that. My sister is dead. No one paid any attention when she quit singing, and someone took her away and killed her. But you are not dead. You and my granddaughter are alive and here with me in my house. Don’t give up on yourself. The dead win when you quit singing and let them take you on down the road with them.”
Something about this last gave Jude a nervous jolt, as if he’d touched metal and caught a sudden stinging zap of static electricity. Something about giving up on yourself. Something about singing. There was an idea there, but not one he could make sense of yet. The knowledge that he and Georgia had about played out their string—the feeling that they were both as dead as the girl he’d just seen in the backyard—was an obstacle no other thought could get around.
Georgia kissed Bammy’s face, once, and again: kissing tears. And at last Bammy turned to look at her. She put her hands on her granddaughter’s cheeks.
“Stay,” Bammy said. “Make him stay. And if he won’t, then let him go on without you.”
“I can’t do that,” Georgia said. “And he’s right. We can’t bring you into this any more than we already have. One man who was a friend to us is dead because he didn’t get clear of us fast enough.”
Bammy pressed her forehead to Georgia’s breast. Her breath hitched and caught. Her hands rose and went into Georgia’s hair, and for a moment both women swayed together, as if they were dancing very slowly.
When her composure returned—it wasn’t long—Bammy looked up into Georgia’s face again. Bammy was red and damp-cheeked, and her chin was trembling, but she seemed to be done with her crying.
“I will pray, Marybeth. I will pray for you.”
“Thank you,” Georgia said.
“I am countin’ on you coming back. I am countin’ on seeing you again, when you’ve figured out how to make things right. And I know you will. Because you’re clever and you’re good and you’re my girl.” Bammy inhaled sharply, gave Jude a watery, sidelong look. “I hope he’s worth it.”
Georgia laughed, a soft, convulsive sound almost like a sob, and squeezed Bammy once more.
“Go, then,” Bammy said. “Go if you got to.”
“We’re already gone,” Georgia said.
34
He drove. His palms were hot and slick on the wheel, his stomach churning. He wanted to slam his fist into something. He wanted to drive too fast, and he did, shooting yellow lights just as they turned red. And when he didn’t make a light in time and had to sit in traffic, he pumped the pedal, revving the engine impatiently. What he had felt in the house, watching the little dead girl get dragged away, that sensation of helplessness, had thickened and curdled into rage and a sour-milk taste in his mouth.
Georgia watched him for a few miles, then put a hand on his forearm. He twitched, startled by the clammy, chilled feel of her skin on his. He wanted to take a deep breath and recover his composure, not so much for himself as for her. If one of them was going to be this way, it seemed to him it ought to be Georgia, that she had more right to rage than he did, after what Anna had shown her in the mirror. After she had seen herself dead. He did not understand her quiet, her steadiness, her concern for him, and he could not find it in him to take deep breaths. When a truck in front of him was slow to get moving after the light turned green, he laid on the horn.
“Head out of your ass!” Jude yelled through the open window as he tore by, crossing the double yellow line to go past.
Georgia removed her hand from his arm, set it in her lap. She turned her head to stare out the passenger-side window. They drove a block, stopped at another intersection.
When she spoke again, it was in a low, amused mumble. She didn’t mean for him to hear, was talking to herself, and maybe not even completely aware she’d spoken aloud.
“Oh, look. My least favorite used-car lot in the whole wide world. Where’s a hand grenade when you need one?”
“What?” he asked, but as he said it, he already knew and was yanking at the steering wheel, pulling the car to the curb, and jamming on the brake.
To the right of the Mustang was the vast sprawl of a car lot, brightly illuminated by sodium-vapor lights on thirty-foot-tall steel posts. They towered over the asphalt, like ranks of alien tripods, a silent invading army from another world. Lines had been strung between them, and a thousand blue and red pennants snapped in the wind, adding a carnival touch to the place. It was after 8 P.M., but they were still doing business. Couples moved among the cars, leaning toward windows to peer at price stickers pasted against the glass.
Georgia’s brow furrowed, and her mouth opened in a way that suggested she was about to ask him what in the hell he thought he was doing.
“Is this his place?” Jude asked.
“What place?”
“Don’t act stupid. The guy who molested you and treated you like a hooker.”
“He didn’t…It wasn’t…I wouldn’t exactly say he—”
“I would. Is this it?”
She looked at his hands clenched on the wheel, his white knuckles.
“He’s probably not even here,” she said.
Jude flung open the car door and heaved himself out. Cars blasted past, and the hot, exhaust-smelling slipstream snatched at his clothes. Georgia scrambled out on the other side and stared across the hood of the Mustang at him.
“Where are you goin’?”
“To look for the guy. What’s his name again?”
“Get in the car.”
“Who am I looking for? Don’t make me go around slugging used-car salesmen at random.”
“You’re not goin’ in there alone to beat the shit out of some guy you don’t even know.”
“No. I wouldn’t go alone. I’d take Angus.” He glanced into the Mustang. Angus’s head was already sticking into the gap between the two front seats, and he was staring out at Jude expectantly. “C’mon, Angus.”
The giant black dog leaped onto the driver’s seat and then into the road. Jude slammed the door, started around the front of the car, the dense, sleek weight of Angus’s torso pressed against his side.
“I??
?m not gonna tell you who,” she said.
“All right. I’ll ask around.”
She grabbed his arm. “What do you mean, you’ll ask around? What are you going to do? Start askin’ salesmen if they used to fuck thirteen-year-olds?”
Then it came back to him, popped into his head without any forewarning. He was thinking he’d like to stick a gun in the son of a bitch’s face, and he remembered. “Ruger. His name was Ruger. Like the gun.”
“You’re going to get arrested. You’re not goin’ in there.”
“This is why guys like him get away with it. Because people like you go on protecting them, even when they ought to know better.”
“I’m not protectin’ him, you asshole. I’m protectin’ you.”
He yanked his arm out of her grip and started to turn back, ready to give up and already seething about it—and that was when he noticed Angus was gone.
He cast a swift look around and spotted him an instant later, deep in the used-car lot, trotting between a row of pickups and then turning and disappearing behind one of them.
“Angus!” he shouted, but an eighteen-wheeler boomed past, and Jude’s voice was lost in the diesel roar.
Jude went after him. He glanced back and saw Georgia right behind him, her own face white, eyes wide with alarm. They were on a major highway, in a busy lot, and it would be a bad place to lose one of the dogs.
He reached the row of pickups where he’d last seen Angus and turned, and there he was—ten feet away, sitting on his haunches, allowing a skinny, bald man in a blue blazer to scratch him behind the ears. The bald man was one of the dealers. The tag on his breast pocket said RUGER. Ruger stood with a rotund family in promotional T-shirts, their ample bellies doing double duty as billboards. The father’s gut was selling Coors Silver Bullet; the mother’s breast made an unpersuasive pitch for Curves fitness; the son, about ten, had on a Hooters shirt, and probably could’ve fit into a C cup himself. Standing next to them, Ruger seemed almost elflike, an impression enhanced by his delicate, arched eyebrows and pointy ears with their fuzzy earlobes. His loafers had tassels on them. Jude despised loafers with tassels.