The Vanishing Season Page 6

  Liam laughed. “I just want you to have what you want.”

  “Well, you’re not going anywhere,” Pauline said teasingly.

  He sat leaning his back against the couch and expertly searing the edges of his marshmallow, meticulously, perfectly even.

  “I don’t mind living up here. I like the cold. I like being near my dad. I could live in the north all my life.” He snapped a graham cracker and laid the marshmallow on top. “There’s stuff I’d like to see though.”

  “Like what?” Maggie asked.

  Liam thought. “Well, up in Michigan there’s this spring that’s really deep, but it’s crystal clear, forty feet to the bottom, like glass. It stays the exact same temperature all year, and you can see the springwater bubbling in through the sand on the bottom; the sand . . . rolls. My dad said it looks like the top of a volcano down there. And there are these big, silver trout that have lived in that tiny pond their entire lives. You’re not allowed to go swimming there, but I’d like to.”

  “That’s what you really want to see?” Pauline teased. “In this whole gigantic world? A trout pond a couple of hours away?”

  Liam leaned back against the couch, unfazed. “I never said I was ambitious, Pauline.” He raised his eyebrows at Maggie.

  “What about you?” Pauline said. “Please tell me you have something more interesting planned than a trout stream.”

  Maggie shrugged. “Yeah, I have a lot planned. Northwestern. Then get a job in finance, most likely in downtown Chicago. I get nervous if I don’t map things out ahead of time.”

  “Wow, you’re such an adult,” Pauline said wonderingly, then squinted as she studied Maggie.

  “I get that a lot.” Maggie was always the one her friends back home turned to for practical advice or Band-Aids or a nail file or hand sanitizer. (She kept supplies in her purse and backups in her backpack.) Jacie sometimes called her Grandma Mags.

  “I actually can’t picture that you were ever a kid,” Pauline mused, resting her chin in her hands. Maggie was holding her half-eaten s’more unconsciously in one hand but paused as the comment hit home. It hurt a little. Quick as a fish, Liam darted his face to her hand and stole a bite. Then grinned at her. Maggie felt herself blushing.

  “Let’s go down to the Roadrunner and get pizza,” Pauline said, suddenly standing and stretching, tall and skinny above them. “I’m starving.” Maggie marveled at Pauline’s appetite—she’d already had three double s’mores.

  “Took the words out of my mouth.” Liam stood, pulled his coat on off the couch, then picked up Pauline by her waist and moved her out of the doorway, pretending to need to get to the pizza first. Then he turned back and held the door open for them, suddenly gallant.

  They piled into Pauline’s car.

  “Are you sure we can get through the snow?”

  “Snow tires.” She pinched Maggie’s cheek and smirked. “City girl.” The car started and stopped. “Sorry,” Pauline said, leaning over the dash. “She’s temperamental. Sometimes she goes. Sometimes she doesn’t. My mom keeps trying to buy me a new car, but this one owns my heart.”

  She put the Subaru key on the dashboard, and Liam leaned forward from the passenger side and loosened the ignition by hitting it with the palm of his hand. He pulled it off, looking like a seasoned mechanic, fiddled a bit, then put the cover back on. This time, when Pauline tried the key, the car came to life.

  “It’s called finesse,” Liam said. He fiddled with the knob, turned the heat on full blast, and kept fiddling with the vent so it would blow on her. Maggie heard something snap.

  “Ugh.” Pauline threw a look at Maggie in the rearview mirror as they backed down the driveway. “He breaks everything.”

  As they ate—standing outside the shop, staring out at the bridge that crossed over the strait into mainland Wisconsin—Maggie thought how much she missed real Chicago pizza while Pauline held out her car key to Maggie, showing her that it was scorched and melted on one side.

  “I threw it in our fireplace once, when I was really annoyed with the car.” She tucked it into the pocket of her jeans, then looked up and over Maggie’s shoulder. “Hey,” she said, pointing through the glass wall of the pizza shop. “Look.” Inside the store everyone—every single person inside—was staring up at the TV. “Let’s go inside to hear better.” They trickled in, rubbing their cheeks to warm them up, and listened and watched.

  A third girl had been found in White Stone. She hadn’t come home from school the day before, and they’d found her that morning in the water, about fifty yards offshore. The newscasters had started to use the word serial. An 8:00 p.m. curfew had been issued for the entire county for anyone under twenty-one. And the bridge between Gill Creek and the mainland would be put up tonight, in case the perpetrator was still on the peninsula and could be caught.

  “Looks like you moved here just in time,” Pauline said, “for the whole county to start shutting down around us.”

  Maggie didn’t know what to say. TV always made the lives of teenage girls look easy, with lots of texting and shopping, and lots of squealing that no one Maggie knew actually did.

  But in Door County, they were dying.

  That night, because Mrs. Boden was out at a town meeting, they watched movies on Pauline’s giant TV. Pauline looked to be half asleep when she seemed to remember something and went into the kitchen, then came out again and handed Maggie a piece of paper.

  “Here,” she said.

  Maggie stared at it. It was covered in pictures of Grumpy Cat, an angry blue-eyed cat from the internet.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Just a Grumpy Cat collage. I made it for you during study hall. I tried to capture all of his best expressions,” she said sleepily, laying her head on the arm of the couch and stretching her legs onto Liam.

  “Um, thanks?”

  Pauline conked out halfway through the first movie.

  “Does she always fall asleep so fast?” Maggie asked.

  Liam nodded. “She falls asleep at the movie theater.”

  They turned back to the movie, then Liam went on, his voice low. “People think she’s kind of this wild girl. But she’s really just like a kid. She gets excited about everything, and then she crashes.”

  “Do you think we should leave?” Maggie whispered.

  Liam rubbed his finger along his lip, studying Pauline as if trying to decide. Then he stood up. Without a word he crouched and lifted Pauline off the couch and put her over his shoulder. Maggie stood and watched him walk up the first couple of stairs, staying where she was, until Liam looked over his shoulder at her.

  “Come on up.”

  Maggie followed him up the rest of the stairs and down the hall to Pauline’s room. In the dim light from the hall, Liam walked over to the bed and laid Pauline down in it, first pulling back the covers and then bending to drape her on the bed. He pulled the blankets all the way back up to her chin, and Pauline’s eyes fluttered for a moment and then closed again. She looked peaceful and, like Liam had said, kidlike. Liam touched his hand to her hair and kissed her on the forehead, and Maggie felt her heart beat faster, as if she were seeing something she shouldn’t. Finally she turned away and stared into the dark hall. There were pictures on the wall of Pauline and her mom and dad through the years. Her mom looked a lot less polished, in T-shirts and jeans, and a lot happier in the eyes. Her dad, apparently, was where Pauline had inherited her coloring and her high cheekbones.

  Maggie felt Liam approaching her, and he put his arm on the door over her head.

  “She likes to wake up in her bed. She says it makes her feel cozy. For all I know, she’s pretending she’s asleep just so I’d carry her,” he said.

  He hovered there with his arm over her, and Maggie took a couple of steps backward. Stiffly she turned and led the way downstairs.

  That night she pulled out her pencils again to have another go at the mural idea, but she couldn’t think of anything to sketch. She pulled out a book
on rocks that she’d gotten for her geology lessons instead. She loved the book, because it had shown her you could crack dull, ordinary rocks open and find colors inside. She considered retrieving a hammer from her dad’s toolbox in the basement and taking it outside in the moonlight to rock hunt.

  Despite being tired, her body was wide awake. She found herself thinking about Liam Witte, who was not her type. She thought about the habit he had of rubbing his lip with his thumb.

  Jacie used to say that Maggie was waiting until everything lined up just so before she really decided to live her life. But nothing about life on the peninsula was just so. Maggie wondered if this was how the real part of life started, with everything going slightly tilted and making you feel like things were rising in you, the thought of Liam Witte’s thumb moving in and out of your mind like ripples and waves.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  7

  GILL CREEK REACTED TO THE DANGER IN ITS MIDST WITH FEAR BUT ALSO a slight bit of pride. The county had never been at the center of things before. Father Stone at Maggie’s church—which her parents had started making her attend every Sunday afternoon after work—had more fire in his step and more passion at the pulpit. More people came to church, maybe because there was safety in numbers. Reporters rolled into town, and cops patrolled in the evenings—which came earlier as the days got colder—to scan the streets for suspicious individuals. Maggie’s dad installed a home alarm, even though she reminded him that it wasn’t like the guy was sneaking into people’s houses and taking them out of their beds.

  The tourists were completely gone by now, and in downtown Gill Creek, the seasonal restaurants and shops—the kite store, the Scandinavian dessert shop where the waitresses dressed up as milkmaids—had shut their doors, their windows dark and gloomy as Maggie passed them on her way to work. But the quiet also gave the town a certain warmth—in the year-round cafés, people gathered for eggs and fifty-cent coffee and huddled against the world outside, and others caught up on the mostly empty Main Street and talked in low voices about their theories on the killer.

  At the Emporium business slowed, but no one seemed to mind. Elsa hadn’t gone into the antiques business, Maggie realized, to make money but to socialize, catch up with the people who came and went, and have something to do. She could have retired, she revealed one day, because she’d inherited some money that made her retirement comfortable. Maggie, it seemed, was the only one who desperately needed the job. And luckily Elsa kept the Emporium open rain or shine.

  One weekend after the next, Maggie rang up one dusty thing and then another and another: a chamber pot, a Victorian hairbrush set, a yellowed copy of Huck Finn: proof—she figured—that Gill Creek’s long-dead residents had once pooped, combed their hair, and read books just like people today. She watched for Gerald, who came in only sporadically, and who Elsa said had denied everything, pointing out that he sold at least one gramophone every two weeks and that anyone could have bought one and left it on Maggie’s porch. Maggie knew he must keep a detailed inventory beyond the store’s price ledger, and she still planned to confront him herself, but she was waiting for a moment that felt right, likely when there were no customers around.

  Meanwhile she got Elsa’s life story and all the local gossip: She learned all of Elsa’s sister’s annoying habits, she learned that the woman who lived in the white house at the end of Banks Street was a hoarder, that Ed who owned the fish boil was cheating on his wife, and that fishing in the northern tip of the lake was bad this year and everyone was drinking more than usual. She also heard, once or twice, about Liam and Pauline. She heard Pauline liked to sunbathe naked and that Liam and his dad sometimes sacrificed animals. Elsa talked about all of them the way she talked about celebrities. Maggie sometimes had to just tune her out.

  At times like this, she missed Chicago, its largeness and anonymity. On a dare at a sleepover when they were younger, Jacie had once made her walk through Andersonville Park in a gold leotard and sling-on fairy wings, and no one had even stared. Maggie had been mortified, but Jacie had always been like that—loving and funny in a biting way. She wasn’t the kind of friend Maggie had seen in movies, who she felt like she could open up to about her deepest secrets. Jacie was the kind of friend who made you walk through Andersonville Park in a gold leotard and said she was trying to get you to lighten up, and who sometimes got jealous when you got more attention from guys than she did. But Maggie still missed her like crazy.

  One afternoon as Gerald walked in, he came right past the desk without looking at her. Maggie watched him out of the corner of her eye as he passed. Studying him intently for the first time, she noticed that he limped just slightly.

  “Elsa, is there something wrong with Gerald’s legs?” she asked, after he’d disappeared down the aisle.

  “Well, leg. He’s only got one,” Elsa said matter-of-factly.

  Maggie turned and looked at her, leaning on her hands. “Elsa, you said you thought he was the killer.”

  “Well, he could be.”

  “Don’t you think it’d be kind of hard to capture and drown girls when you’re that age and you only have one leg?”

  Elsa shrugged. “I dunno how psychopaths do what they do.” She proceeded to pick up a true-crime novel she was reading. As if anyone was more of an expert on psychopaths than Elsa.

  Maggie tried to picture Gerald lugging the gramophone onto her porch. It didn’t seem so sinister now. At worst, he was a harmless old guy with a crush, that was all.

  The first week of November, summer ducked its head back in for a few last, rare days. Almost every day that week, Maggie could see Pauline and Liam out the window playing baseball in the damp, brown field in the evenings, Pauline winding up like a spider in water, Liam sizing her up in his serious, observant way before throwing his pitch. Sometimes she went to watch, and sometimes she stayed inside and worked on her schoolwork: comparative world lit, European history, advanced calculus, and French III.

  “Sweets, can you pot all the geraniums and move them into the cellar?” her mom said on her way out one morning. “I want to bring them in for the winter. I wasn’t expecting that early snow, but I’m hoping they’re okay.” She crossed her fingers in the air. Maggie wondered why her mom had planted them when they were just going to have to bring them back in, but she guessed she’d just gotten carried away with having a yard for the first time and wanting to make it nice.

  She walked out to the garden that afternoon and surveyed the property. All in all, they’d made some good progress. Her father had painted two sides of the house so far. The field was tamed, and the bushes had been neatly trimmed so that they no longer looked like they were swallowing the house. The porch had been sanded, with boards replaced in some places, and her mom had hung some yellow wind chimes. The mailbox was painted, and they had cleared a pleasant little pathway between some semi-well-shaped shrubs from the back door to the driveway. The house no longer looked derelict or unlived in. She would have upgraded it to “shabby but charming.”

  Her mom had laid out all the planters. Maggie began to fill them—pulling out the geraniums from under the roots and tucking them into the potting soil—then hauling them toward the cellar door.

  She turned at the sound of footsteps on the grass and found Liam standing there with a shovel.

  “Pauline thought you guys might need some help. She saw your mom putting out the planters this morning.”

  “Oh.” Maggie wiped the hair out of her eyes. “Thanks. I’m okay actually.”

  She didn’t want to be alone with him. It made her feel prickly.

  “Okay,” he said, and hoisted the next planter—the same size as the ones she’d been wrestling for an hour—into his arms like it was a feather. He lifted a second planter in his left arm and walked in the direction of the cellar. Maggie sighed and lugged one behind him.

&
nbsp; They worked for about half an hour, digging, filling, hauling, until sweat covered their bodies and dirt covered their arms, legs, calves, faces. Gnats kept hovering around their sweat. Finally Liam laid the last planter near the cellar door and sank down on the grass. Maggie knelt a couple of feet away.

  “So what’s in the cellar?” he said.

  “Besides the washing machine and dryer, I actually don’t know.”

  “You’re not curious?”

  Maggie shrugged.

  He opened the cellar door, and the smell wafted out to them, the cool air on their faces.

  “Smells like the old days,” Liam said with a grin. He climbed in and then helped her down, and her feet landed with a thud on the cold concrete. The room was low and tight—the ceiling just over their heads.

  He’d been joking, but it did smell like the past—like dust and things that people didn’t use anymore: old oils, old metal, old leather, and air, Maggie imagined, that people had last breathed in the fifties, or the twenties, or the late 1800s. It was the kind of place where people used to store vegetables and jars and things like that. She could barely see more than a few feet in front of her—only the space illuminated by the open cellar door and then black beyond that.

  They began loading the planters in, having to pile them farther and farther back. Suddenly, inexplicably, Liam closed the door and they were in darkness. There was only the tiniest crack of dim light coming from a small window on the wall to her right, covered in cardboard.

  She could hear Liam breathing beside her, quiet as usual. “I just wanted to see what it feels like,” he finally said. “Do you mind?” Maggie didn’t tell him to open the door or say she was scared. Liam seemed comfortable with the silence, but it began to make her antsy.

  “Isn’t it weird how you see colors when the lights first go out?” she said, to break the silence. “Right now I can see green dots following each other. Green-dot parade.”

  “I just see red lines,” Liam said. “Pretty standard.”