The Girl in Blackwood

The Girl in Blackwood

Why did Kessler produce the name Ethan the second he heard about a boy called B and a yellow Parcheesi piece?

I got into the car, rolled the window up, and put my head down on the steering wheel.

I dragged both hands down my face and made myself take the next breath slowly.

Halfway through it I stopped and held it.

A smell had come in with the air, faint and exact.

It was the one that had been at the edge of my nose for the whole hour in that warm office, the one I hadn't been able to name.

Musty herbs and cold mint.

It hadn't come off my car seats, and it hadn't come out of the tea.

It was on my wrist and on the cuff of my shirt, where Kessler's thin hand had closed when he asked me to leave Ethan alone.

It was the oil Emily blended herself, a family formula she had never sold to anybody.

For it to be on his hand, the two of them had been inside arm's reach of each other, and not long before I walked in.

Then the hour in that office was staged.

That would make all of it choreography: the sympathy, the tea going gold in the cup, the old professor asking me to trust him one time. She walks it through with him and leaves, and I come up the path 20 minutes behind her.

Against that, Kessler had said it out loud in that room. He had told me he and Emily had been keeping me safe, and a man running a script does not hand you the connection for free. The oil put the two of them in a room together. It told me nothing about what was said in it.

I sat with the engine off until the windshield fogged from the bottom up and the gray brick building across the lot went soft behind it.

I made two columns in my head. In the first one: an hour and five minutes in that office, 3:10 to 4:15 by the clock in the dash; a cup of tea poured in front of me and drunk to the bottom; a white card that had been in his hand before it was on my passenger seat. Last, the smell on the cuff of my right sleeve, in the two inches where the thin hand had closed.

In the second column: that Emily had been in the building, that she had come and gone ahead of me, that the two of them had been close enough for it to transfer. Nothing in that column carried a time on it or a person who would say so. I kept the two lists apart the way you keep ink apart from pencil, and I let nothing cross over.

If the hour was staged, the point of it was to leave me believing my parents had been the monsters. Grateful, quiet, and still inside the same glass box I had been in for 31 years.

Either way, two things had come loose in that room.

Kessler, working to get me calm, had let the name Ethan out.

And the oil on my wrist had put Emily in the building.

I lifted my head and looked at the plain white card on the passenger seat.

I got the cheap phone out of my jacket and pushed Michael's number into the keypad.

It rang once.

"Michael, run a name for me..."

I kept my voice level:

"Ethan. Every medical record, patient list, or adoption file tied to the 1998 project with the name Ethan on it."

"James, what's wrong? Your voice..."

"Do it now."

I cut him off, looking out at the dark past the windshield:

"Whatever they're running... it's over."

* * *

The countdown on the phone screen blinked its red digits.

Three weeks left before the final chapter GhostInk had set was due.

I opened the hidden folder on the laptop again and went down the lines GhostInk had typed into my book.

This time I went at it the way you go at a map. Street names, paint colors, anything a person could stand in front of.

The scenery ran more specific than invented scenery runs: a two-story house with a finished attic, a front walk of moss-green brick, a wood fence gone bare of paint beside an old transmitter tower, and the name Mia Calloway.

I closed the laptop and started the car.

The drive took about 90 minutes, north out of Milton on Route 9W.

The houses thinned out and then the trees did, and after that it was gray asphalt with the Hudson showing through the gaps on my left.

I stopped at a gas station with nobody in the lot and bought black coffee hot enough to take the skin off my mouth and a sugar donut gone dry, from a counter that smelled like recycled fryer oil.

Two pumps, one of them bagged. Regular was $3.09 and the last digit on the sign hung crooked. The man at the register took my $4 without looking up from a portable TV with the sound off and handed the change back in three quarters and a dime. The restroom key was wired to a hubcap on a nail beside the door.

Route 9W came down to one lane at a bridge over a creek running low and rust-colored with leaves. Past it the shoulder was stacked with leaf bags, two and three deep at every mailbox, and a board outside a firehouse advertised a chicken supper for Saturday, $8 a plate. The river came back at the bottom of the hill, flat and the color of a nickel.

Blackwood came up on the right. Nothing hung over the rusted tin roofs, and none of the atmosphere I put in my own books was anywhere in it. People lived there and got old there.

Main Street ran four blocks. A pharmacy, a laundromat, a storefront with a realtor's name in gold leaf half scraped off, a Methodist church with 1874 cut into the stone over the door. I turned onto River Street and took it slow, reading the numbers off the porch posts. They went 4, 6, 8, then 12, 14, 16, and the houses stood in an unbroken row with no ground between them where a 10 would have gone.

Then I found the house.

It sat at the end of a gravel lane, the way the manuscript had it. The manuscript was wrong in three places.

First, it had her at nine. The girl in the front yard was 11, tall for it, thin through the legs.

Second, it had her living with her mother. The woman hanging laundry on the porch was her aunt, and the mother had died of cancer two years earlier.

Third, it spent a whole line on a blue plastic butterfly barrette, always clipped carefully in her hair.

She wasn't wearing it.

Her hair came to her shoulders, loose, dried out from the sun. Her left hand stayed down in the pocket of a gray jacket, working at something with a hard edge on it.

It was the barrette. The last thing her mother left her, and she had never once put it in her hair.

I stopped at the gate and stood where the woman on the porch could see me.

I kept my hands out of my pockets. The car stayed up the lane with the doors shut, and the gate was a loop of baling wire dropped over a post that I left alone. From the gate to the porch was about 30 feet, and I let all 30 of them stay there.

How was I supposed to put it? You don't look at an 11-year-old and say, "I dreamed about you, and a man I've never met is writing you into my next book."

"Ma'am."

I said it from the far side of the fence, in a voice gone rough from the drive and from not sleeping.

"My name's James Miller, I write novels, and I think somebody has been putting your address and your niece's name into a manuscript. I want to know whether anyone's been out here asking about her."

Out loud it sounded exactly as bad as it was.

The girl stopped raking.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were wide and clear and had nothing in them that belonged to 11. She didn't believe a word of it.

She didn't cry and she didn't back away. A man she had never seen was standing at her fence in a slept-in shirt in the middle of the afternoon, and it didn't move her.

She stood still with her hand shut around the barrette in her pocket, hard enough that the plastic corner would have been printing itself into her palm. She had learned that somewhere.

The aunt came down off the porch with the basket still on her hip. She looked at me the way people in small towns look at a car they don't know.

She came as far as the end of the walk and stopped. The basket stayed up on her hip, between us, and her free hand went out sideways and held open at the level of the girl's shoulder. She looked past me once, up the lane at my car, and I watched her go along the plate and then come back to my face.

"Who are you? We don't talk to writers and we don't talk to anybody collecting anything. You need to go."

She put a hand on Mia's shoulder and turned her toward the house, and she didn't leave me room to say anything else.

I turned around and walked back up the lane. That was the whole of it. Ninety minutes each way.

I was six or seven steps onto the gravel when Mia's voice came from behind me:

"You're the second person to ask me that."

I stopped.

I turned around. Mia had come back to the gate with the rake still in her hand. Her aunt stood two steps behind her on the walk, the basket down at her feet now, and she wasn't calling the girl in.

"What did you say?"

I came back up to the fence and stopped on my side of it. The aunt watched me do it and stayed where she was.

"The second one? What did he look like?"

Mia tipped her head and thought about it, then described him at her own pace, in a voice with no weather in it:

"Real thin. His skin's pale, like somebody who doesn't go outside. He talks nice, though. He looks at you longer than people usually do..."

She blinked and went on:

"He brought a can of white paint. He said he saw my aunt's fence was rotting, so he'd fix it for free. He's been here three times."

The bottom third of the fence under my hand was new pickets, and the paint on them was whiter than the rest.

I counted the new ones. Nine in a run under my hand, then a stretch of old gray, then four more at the corner post. The old paint had gone on lengthwise, with the grain, worn thin enough in places to show the wood. The new paint had gone on up and down, and along the bottom edge of every new picket it had run and set into a bead.

Behind the forsythia at the corner post there was a one-gallon can with the lid pressed back on and a flat stone set on top of it. The ground there was soft where the downspout let out. It held two boot prints, both of them turned in toward the fence, and the heel of one had filled with water.

GhostInk. He hadn't stayed on a screen. He had stood on this gravel and put his hands on this fence. He had gotten here before I did.

"The last time... when was the last time he came?"

I got the words out one at a time, with both hands on the top rail.

Mia looked at me and answered in the same level voice she had used for all of it:

"Day before yesterday."

She stopped for a beat, then said the rest of it:

"He said a man with tired eyes was going to come find me. He said I should trust him."