The Dead Place. Rebecca Drake

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СКАЧАТЬ of her right hand.

      A cell phone will also be mentioned. This one small detail will make it all the more remarkable. She had a cell phone. She was talking on a cell phone. So how did she disappear somewhere between Bates and McPherson, the street with the rundown student apartments where her boyfriend waited to celebrate an end-of-year lunch?

      He called her as she traipsed along and she had to pause to dig the cell phone out of her bag. “Hey,” she said. “I’m on my way. You got lunch ready?” She walked a little more slowly as she talked and if she felt something at her back, she didn’t mention it. They were living together and their parents didn’t know.

      He will rerun their conversation many times in his head. He will be forced to replay it for their parents and the police. He will repeat her last words to hundreds of strangers watching on TV, the camera zooming in so they can see tears overwhelming him: “See you in a minute, babe.”

      He will describe her as a sweet, friendly girl. Her parents will add kind. Lily was so kind. When the car pulled up to the curb, Lily smiled at the man who asked for her help. “Sure,” she said, stepping closer to the car, shielding her eyes so she could see the map he was holding.

      The weather will be talked about. It was a hot day. Unseasonably warm for May, the town overflowing with people because graduation was only a few days away. Lily had told her roommate she wished she were graduating now instead of a year from now. She wanted to be free of this small town. She didn’t know that the man smiling up at her from the car lived to grant her wish.

      People don’t just vanish. They aren’t there one minute, walking along a sidewalk in the sunshine, whole and sentient, only to disappear the next. Only sometimes they do. Ask Lily.

August

      Chapter One

      The irony was that the people at the party probably thought the Corbins were the perfect family. Kate Corbin turned her attention from the speech being made by the head of the music department and glanced surreptitiously around the room, watching the large crowd gathered to welcome the new dean and his family to Wickfield.

      A sea full of smiling faces in the wide, comfortable living room of Laurence Beetleman’s house. They were university folk mainly, but a few local business owners had been invited as well. “I guess I passed muster,” a bluff man with white hair and a booming voice had said to her earlier. A banker or lawyer, she couldn’t remember which, just that he wasn’t a professor. “Town and gown, you know,” he’d said with a hearty laugh. “Always that division between town and gown.”

      Only she didn’t know. She didn’t know at all. They were Manhattan transplants and that division didn’t exist at New York University.

      Laurence Beetleman rambled on about the lovely town of Wickfield and how the university community was like a family to him and would now welcome the Corbins into the family.

      “We’re so happy we finally snared you,” he’d said to Ian when he opened the door to them, including Kate with his broad smile, shaking even fourteen-year-old Grace’s hand before ushering them inside his gracious, porticoed home, his plump and pretty wife standing radiant at his side.

      Helpmeet, Kate thought. Wasn’t that what they called such a woman in Victorian novels? Was she the one responsible for the gleaming hardwood floors and well-dusted bookcases? There was a faint scent of furniture polish in the rooms, and Kate pictured Clara Beetleman lovingly rubbing the oval surface of the dark oak table and running her cloth up the curving feet of upholstered armchairs.

      She thought of their own home—old home—in the East Village and how every surface carried a thin sheen of dust like the faintest sprinkling of powdered sugar, except when they gave the loft a hasty wipe-down before parties.

      She glanced through the open door left of the crowded living room, and noticed with some satisfaction that a catering firm hovered in the Beetlemans’ kitchen, and then felt ashamed for feeling any animosity toward the older professor’s wife. Clara Beetleman seemed perfectly happy tending to her husband, and Kate had a sudden vision of her watering and pruning him just as she must the numerous glossy-leafed plants lining the windowsills, and had to stifle a giggle.

      Ian glanced at her, a question in his blue-gray eyes, and she gave an imperceptible shake of her head. Behave, Kate. Now was not the time or place. Maybe they’d laugh about it later. At one point she would have been sure of their shared humor, but that was before. Things were different now.

      “It’s been eight months!” he’d yelled at her that last night in their home. “Eight long months, Kate!”

      And because she had no good answer to that, no way to pretend that she hadn’t recoiled when he’d reached for her, she’d resorted to the role of mother, saying, “Ssh, Grace will hear.”

      As if Grace, a hallway away, cared about anything but how her life was being ruined by this move. Kate knew if they’d checked on her they would have found her hunched in a corner of her bed, her long, dark hair, so like her father’s, hanging like a curtain to block her sullen face from view, and plugged into her iPod so she could unplug from her parents.

      If Grace slept that last night, Kate didn’t know. She only knew that she herself couldn’t sleep, watching Ian instead, his long lean body turned away from her. She’d wanted to touch him, but not in the way that he desired. She’d studied his back with its familiar constellation of moles, a smattering of dark spots scattered across the pale skin, grateful for the reassuring solidness in that long, lean muscled frame.

      Yet when he breathed deeply, she spied the faintest outline of his rib cage and felt the immense fragility of the bones within that skin, knowing they could shatter, that the organs sheltered by them could rupture, that the machinelike working of his body could stall or stop.

      This sense of his vulnerability was another frightening result of what had happened to her. Strange that something that had taken place so quickly—she’d been shocked to see on the police report that the span was at most a half hour—could completely alter her life. Their lives. It might have happened just to her, but it had affected all of them.

      Hearing her own name pulled her out of her reverie. Dr. Beetleman was directing his smile at her now, saying, “—Kate will be sure to paint some lovely portraits of the good citizens of Wickfield.”

      A ripple of polite laughter, followed by an undercurrent of conversation. People focusing those expectant looks on her now, not Ian, and some of them asking others what Dr. Beetleman was saying about the new dean’s wife? The Kate Corbin? Yes, of course, they thought the name sounded familiar, but they hadn’t realized the connection. She was the painter. Portraitist. Artist. Oh, but hadn’t they heard that she’d been attacked? Yes, but maybe it was just a rumor. She certainly looked fine.

      Kate met their gaze, smiled wide enough to bare her teeth, catching the anxious glance that Ian threw her way. “Don’t worry, I’ll be the perfect wife,” she’d said with some bitterness when he’d asked for the fifth time if she was sure she’d be all right at the party.

      “I can go by myself,” he’d suggested. “Or take Grace.”

      “And wouldn’t people wonder where I was? What would you say?”

      “I could tell them that you were painting.”

      “But we both know that would be a lie.”

      It was the same thing he’d said to her six months earlier, СКАЧАТЬ