Part 35 (2/2)

The delicate ear behind which her hair was tucked.

Those were the same.

He'd have recognized them anywhere.

She was wearing a leather skirt. And tights with a silver sheen, and high-heeled boots. More eye makeup than she'd ever worn in-in what? In life?-and dark red lipstick. Her skin was pale in the moonlight, but her cheeks were bright, either with cosmetics or the cold, or maybe she'd been drinking. She seemed to stagger a little. She held a hand to her mouth to laugh at something else Josie had said, but Josie's voice shouted over the sound of Nicole's laughter, and Craig was grateful for that, because if he'd heard her voice, her actual voice, he might not have been able to stand it.

”Nicole,” he said again, and then he was walking straight toward her, saying her name over and over, shouting it, and he was sliding on the slick cement toward them, and then they saw him, and there was no denying it: Nicole.

She saw him, too. Her eyes filled with alarm. She turned and ran with what seemed like incredible speed back from where she'd come, back up the hill to the OTT house. Craig ran after her, slipping on the sidewalk, stumbling like a drunken man but managing somehow to stay upright, to continue the chase.

But she was so much faster than he was. She did not slip at all. How was that possible? In those high-heeled boots? In his life, Craig had only ever seen a deer run that gracefully, that quickly, that wildly and swiftly and without a backward glance, across the freeway, into the woods, without a sound. He was, himself, a much clumsier, heavier animal, slipping after her, panting, not with exertion but with panic, excitement, ecstasy.

She was ahead of him, but he was closer to her than he'd ever really believed he'd be again. She wasn't within reach, but she might have been. She might be, eventually. If he could only- But then Josie Reilly had slammed her body fearlessly into his, knocked him to the ground, and then she was on top of him, pummeling him with her fists, straddling his hips with her legs spread, slamming her small, white, balled-up hands against his face, his head, his eyes. She tore off her soft gloves so she could claw at him. ”You motherf.u.c.ker. You a.s.shole. You murderer. Get out of here. Get out of our lives. Get off this campus you f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d.” He tasted blood, and though he heard the sound of a bone snap somewhere in his face, and although it seemed to Craig that the whole thing lasted for decades, he felt no pain-and suddenly, just as he was getting used to it, he opened his eyes, and she was gone, and he was alone on the sidewalk, staring up at the moon as it seemed to toss cold white flakes down on his throbbing face.

”Holy s.h.i.+t,” a guy in a Red Sox cap said, looking down at him. ”You okay, dude? I hope whatever you did to p.i.s.s her off was worth it.”

87.

”Oh, goodness. That certainly wasn't the image I intended to show you,” Mr. Dientz said. ”I'm sorry.” He sounded as if he were apologizing, belatedly, for having absentmindedly forgotten to offer someone sugar for his tea.

Perry had come back from the men's room and was standing with his head against the window, looking out onto the Dientz Funeral Parlor parking lot, which was shadowed by the casket-shaped rectangle of the Dientz Funeral Parlor sign.

Both of these things-the parking lot and the sign-he'd pa.s.sed in cars and on his bike maybe ten thousand times in his life, and yet there was something so unfamiliar, so unreal, about them in that moment that he knew that, if he were asked to, he'd be utterly unable to read the sign, to name the function of a parking lot, to place these things or himself on the surface of the earth. Back in the men's room, he'd rinsed his mouth out, but he could still taste the bile. Professor Polson came up behind him and touched his arm. ”Perry.” She said it firmly, pulling him back from the window.

”Well, that must have been a shocker for you!”

There was no escaping the amus.e.m.e.nt in Mr. Dientz's voice, and Perry remembered now Mr. Dientz standing over a table of Cub Scouts in the Bad Axe Elementary School cafeteria chuckling as the Scouts tried to pound nails into boards. What had they been building? Birdhouses? Toolboxes? The pine boards had been thick and incredibly hard, and the Scouts were all under the age of ten, and with every smack of the hammer, a nail would bend over dramatically instead of being driven into the wood. ”Hah, hah. We aren't too good at boys' work, are we, girls?” Mr. Dientz had teased, and Perry remembered the screwed-up expression on his son Paul's face, the watery glare he kept trained on the nail as he prepared to smack it again with a hammer, and the way, when the nail bent over a fourth or fifth time and his father began to laugh, he didn't throw the hammer down or even drop it, but very carefully placed it next to the boards and walked away as his father watched and continued to laugh.

”This,” Mr. Dientz said, ”is the image I meant to show you, the post-reconstruction photo. Very good photo, and nice work, if I do say so myself.”

”First, let me see,” Professor Polson said, letting go of Perry's arm, and leaving him in the corner of the office.

”You can see, Professor,” Mr. Dientz said, ”how much work went into this, I hope. There's really no resemblance between the first face and this one, is there?”

Professor Polson said nothing. She was looking intently into Mr. Dientz's computer screen. Perry could see that there was a small line of sweat at her spine, gently soaked through the red silk of her s.h.i.+rt. The blouse wasn't tight, but the material clung to her back, and Perry could have counted the vertebrae from where he stood. The electric glow from the computer illuminated the hair around her face, causing it to look both black and blindingly bright. ”Perry?” she said gently, turning toward him. ”Do you think you can you look?”

Perry swallowed. He crossed the mauve carpeting again, took the seat beside her, rubbed his eyes, which were watery and blurred from vomiting, and then he leaned toward the computer screen.

”You can see,” Mr. Dientz said, ”that it's truly like sculpting, the kind of work that has to be done on a face in the kind of condition in which this particular decedent was delivered to me. Luckily, the skull was mostly intact, and provided in its entirety, so that the fragmented sections could be glued back to their original places.” Mr. Dientz inhaled, as if reexperiencing the exhausting task in his memory. ”I was then able to use something we call mortician's putty to cover the bone, and then of course, because of the burning and discoloration, I needed to use mortuary wax as a kind of masking. But after that, with some cosmetic work, she was really almost finished. The hair needed only some styling and a synthetic addition or two. That was lucky, considering the damage from the fire to her skin. In total, maybe five hours work? Sadly, until the two of you, no one except me has ever seen her.”

Perry leaned in closer.

The face of the girl in the digital photograph was like no human face he had ever seen.

She radiated something so purely radiant that he wanted to close his eyes and lean forward at the same time, to disappear inside it. He had the feeling that, if he put his hand to the computer screen and touched her, she might wake up. She would be startled, confused, perhaps, but she would be more alive than anyone else in this room.

She had her eyes closed, this dead girl in the photo, but Perry didn't have the sense that she couldn't see. He had the sense that she no longer needed to have her eyes open to be able to see. She was seeing everything. She was everything. He had to lean back in the plush velvet chair and close his own eyes, and then open them again, and then he looked from Professor Polson to Mr. Dientz, and back to the girl.

”Perry?” Professor Polson asked.

”It isn't her,” he said, shaking his head. ”That's not Nicole.”

88.

She took only the things she'd need for a night in a motel-she couldn't stay at Rosemary's, not with her children there, not in the state she was in-but when Sh.e.l.ly closed the door behind her, she felt an intense moment of grief for the things inside the house: the teacups and the comforter and the prints on the walls and her shelf of CDs, things she felt she might possibly never see again. No one ever knew, did they?

She didn't bother to lock the front door. It was such a safe neighborhood, she'd never bothered-a fact she'd shared with Josie.

Her hands were still cramped and shaking from the shovel, the hard early winter ground. As she buried Jeremy (with a blanket, because it was unbearable to think of him in the cold, in the dirt) and wept, she thought about whether she should call the police, and decided that, if she ever did, it could not be now.

The darkness was pale on the lawn.

The moon was full.

The snow was falling fast, and it made a webby froth on the gra.s.s.

There was what seemed to be an unusually large number of students out, walking in small groups or in pairs, girls in ridiculously high heels leaning against one another, slipping around, making their way to bars, she supposed, and parties, where exciting and terrible things would happen to them. There would be kisses, and accidents, and endearments, and bitter words exchanged. Someone would fall in love. Someone would dance all night. Someone would get drunk, get raped, get hurt.

Sh.e.l.ly had to wait for a couple kissing in the middle of her street to break apart (two beautiful blondes, the girl on tiptoes to reach the mouth of the boy) before she could pull out of her driveway. They noticed her taillights eventually, and laughed, and moved with their arms still around each other, to the sidewalk. When Sh.e.l.ly backed up and pa.s.sed a few feet from them, separated by the rivulets of melting snow on the gla.s.s of her pa.s.senger window, the girl (whose scarlet lips were parted over her white teeth) gave Sh.e.l.ly the finger, and then the couple let go of each other, doubling over with laughter, slipping around on the sidewalk, headed away, lit up in the moonlight-two incredibly beautiful, pointless human beings with no idea what awaited them-and Sh.e.l.ly had no choice but to drive past them again, trying not to stare, willing herself not even to glance at them in her rearview mirror, but watching them anyway.

They had nothing to do with her.

She knew that.

She could stand out in the snow all night and lecture those two about the fleetingness of youth, the dangers of this world, the acc.u.mulating importance of every act in this life, the thin thread, so easily snapped, between death and life, or simply the importance of being respectful of one's elders, and they would never hear a word.

89.

”Go,” Professor Polson said, and handed Perry the keys to Professor Blackhawk's car. ”I'm going to stay and talk to Ted Dientz here about possibilities. Identification. That sort of thing. He seems willing to work with us. He seems intrigued.”

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