The Back Door of Midnight (25 page)

When Zack entered the house, he still didn’t understand what was happening. While aware that his stepmother visited Iris occasionally, he had not known the nature of their relationship and had no idea why Marcy would hurt Iris or Will. But when he heard her counting in her strange game of hide-and-seek, he knew Marcy was dangerous. He feared it was his own text messages that had been accessed, that it was Marcy who had used Erika’s game as a convenient cover for Uncle Will’s murder.

That was as much as we could get through that night—or that morning, I should say. The sheriff told us all to get some sleep. He planned to get his own shut-eye in his car, which he had parked across the top of Aunt Iris’s driveway, protecting us from curious intruders. Zack needed to get home to Dave. On his way out, he stopped for just a moment, his fingers brushing the tips of mine.

I went to check on Aunt Iris. Her room was dark, but she was up, sitting on the edge of her bed. “I can’t sleep.”

I turned on a soft lamp and sat on a chair close to her bed.

“They made me promise I wouldn’t tell her,” Aunt Iris said. Her eyes were wide open, but when I looked in them, I didn’t think she was seeing the present.

“You mean the Fairfaxes.”

“They broke their promise, the one they made to me when
I gave them Marcy. So I broke mine. After they had the boy—after they decided Marcy didn’t matter anymore—I told her she was mine.”

I could imagine how it had happened. Whether Marcy was emotionally abandoned by her parents or whether she was simply a spoiled child with a bad case of sibling jealousy, all Iris could see was her own child suffering.

And what had Uncle Will seen? The outcome that he had feared all along, knowing Iris’s unstable mind and a mother’s strong feelings for her child.

“William argued with me when I was pregnant, said the Fairfaxes lived too close.”

I wondered silently why the Fairfaxes weren’t wary of the O’Neill reputation; perhaps the gossip was a more recent phenomenon, or perhaps the Fairfaxes didn’t mix enough with the locals to hear it.

“I thought he meant it would be too painful for me. I didn’t know it would hurt other people.”

I said nothing, unable to respond in a way that would comfort her. I didn’t remember Joanna or the pain her death had caused me as a toddler. The only mother that I remembered loved me still, and I loved her. But Uncle Will’s death cut deep.

“I didn’t tell Marcy who her father was, not while he was alive.”

“Did Audrey know?”

She shook her head no. “Marcy was born here at the house. Since Mick wouldn’t admit she was his child, he couldn’t tell me what to do with her, couldn’t tell the Fairfaxes not to take her. Marcy and Mick never got along. He was hard on her.”

“Maybe he was afraid for her.”

“
Of
her,” Aunt Iris corrected. “He was afraid of her the way he was afraid of me.”

More afraid,
I thought, seeing a selfishness and greed in Marcy that wasn’t in Aunt Iris. I wondered at what point Uncle Will had bought the book
Psychosis and the Criminal Mind.
I suspected that it was to understand Marcy rather than Iris.

“When Mick died, a part of me knew that Marcy had done it. Joanna didn’t suspect at first—didn’t know my relationship to Marcy or Mick—she simply wanted to help Audrey. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t listen to me. So I told Marcy that Joanna was reading Mick’s psychic signs and she should get out of Wisteria for a while. I never expected she’d kill Joanna. I couldn’t allow myself to think that Marcy would kill someone as sweet and loving as Joanna.”

I swallowed hard.

Iris sat on the edge of her bed, rocking back and forth, hands clasped tightly in her lap. “What could I do? What could I do? I couldn’t bear to lose my daughter, too. And reporting Marcy
wasn’t going to bring back Joanna. ‘She won’t do it again,’ I thought. ‘There’s no reason for her to.’”

“But there was,” I interjected. “She’d kill as long as she needed to, to save her own skin.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Aunt Iris said.

I couldn’t say,
That’s okay. I forgive you.
I couldn’t say that yet.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated plaintively.

“I know you are. Try to get some rest.”

IN THE DAYS
that followed, Zack and I had our hands full. His father had lost more than his wife and their future together: With the information that surfaced about Marcy, Dave’s memories of the person he had loved were destroyed. My aunt lost the daughter she had spent thirty-seven years protecting. As for Audrey, as much as I disliked her self-righteousness, I felt sorry for her. She lost her “project” in life, the little girl she had helped to raise and the woman she cared for in later years. She also lost her belief that she had known everything about her husband. Zack and I spent every waking moment trying to support the people who had lost so much as well as working with authorities.

The sheriff also had his hands full. With additional police support, traces of Uncle Will’s blood were found in the gazebo. They fingerprinted the smooth, painted rocks that had been placed on my bed in imitation of Audrey’s work and found Marcy’s prints. I would never know whether Marcy was trying
to scare me away or had started on a plan to murder me.

Erika was charged with second-degree arson and malicious destruction of property, and Carl and his two friends—the guys who had attacked me—with assault. Although I didn’t like Erika, it was the three guys I found scary. Their excuse for inflicting pain and threatening serious harm was simply that they were “looking out for their own.” Carl’s two companions were in the process of copping deals, offering information that proved Carl responsible for the earlier harassment of Uncle Will. I guess in their and Marcy’s world, it was every man for himself.

By law, the kids who attended the fire and made no effort to stop Erika were also accountable. The sheriff thought they’d end up with probation—a close monitoring of their school and home life—as well as community service. Mom kept reminding me that it was for the best; they needed their parents to pay more attention to what they were into.

Yes, Mom came. And here’s the really weird thing: She arrived in Wisteria the day after the fire. The night of the fire she awoke with a bad feeling, and for a reason she couldn’t really explain, she started packing suitcases. At seven a.m. she tried to call me, but I had turned off my cell. She tried Aunt Iris’s landline next, but by the time I awoke to answer it, she had given up. Not waiting any longer, Mom put the kids and the dog in the car and started for Maryland. Maybe psychic
stuff can bypass genetics; maybe it can work heart to heart.

With the arrival of my Baltimore family, Aunt Iris’s silent house sprang to life. The girls and I took the room that had been Joanna’s and mine, the one with the blue-flowered wallpaper. Jack begged for my corner of the attic. Mom took Uncle Will’s room. Rosy slept in the upstairs hall at night, and when she needed some peace, hung out in Uncle Will’s den—she liked the brick floor.

To Grace, Claire, and Jack, it seemed as if we had just won the lottery. Suddenly, they had a large house to run through; a backyard as big as a park, which had its own “lake,” as they called the creek; and “a castle” next door, the Flemings’ home.

Aunt Iris informed me that Uncle Will had departed shortly after she and I had talked in her bedroom, which was just as well, for with my family, there would be no resting in peace in his own home. Surprisingly, Aunt Iris seemed to like the noise; maybe it drowned out some of the noise that was inside her head. Or maybe, with Marcy gone, she was truly more at peace. Rosy liked the new doggy friend she found in Clyde, and Clyde introduced her to the joy of ducks. Aunt Iris’s cats could handle both dogs, but they were wary of the kids at first, spending a lot of time on the hood of Uncle Will’s pickup.

Dave and Zack often followed Clyde through the gate in the hedge. Dave was selling the house—its memories were too
painful—but he seemed to be able to bear up better when he was around us.

As for Zack, he found out what it was like to be adored by little kids. I envied the freedom Claire and Grace felt with him—tackling him in the grass, climbing on his shoulders in the creek, getting him to draw pictures that they could color in. I would have liked to feel his big hand wrap around mine the way it wrapped around theirs. When he was gentle with them, I felt a strange ache inside me.

I even felt a little left out. In Baltimore I had been Jack’s pitcher when he batted, his quarterback when he received, and his receiver when he quarterbacked. Now it was always Zack and Jack, and when Jack couldn’t pull Zack away from the twins, he trailed behind Dave.

But that wasn’t the real problem. With all the people that Zack and I were paying attention to, there didn’t seem to be the time or space alone to figure out our own connection. There was a bridge between us, formed by the people we loved, but I didn’t know how to cross it. Maybe I didn’t have the nerve to.

About two weeks after Marcy’s death, when a semblance of normal life had returned, thanks to Mom, I was in the kitchen, sipping a glass of Dr Pepper, taking a break from the book I had been reading on psychic phenomena. I thought I had the gift, and I had been raised to believe we are supposed to
use God’s gifts, but I wasn’t yet confident enough to let go and see what I was capable of.
In time,
as Aunt Iris said.

Mom was putting the kids to bed. I could hear their scampering feet above me. Aunt Iris had gone off in her gold sedan to who knows where, and the cats had wandered away into the trees. I walked down to the dock, stepped over the life vests the kids and I had left there, and sat at the end, swinging my feet over the dark water.

I don’t know how long I’d been there when Zack called from the other dock, “Can I come over?”

Before I could reply, he dove into the water, breaking the moonlight into silver pieces. I watched him swim the distance and climb the ladder onto our dock. He sat next to me, his arm dripping on me.

“Anna,” he said, “we’re good friends, right?”

“Right.”

“And good friends are honest with each other, right?”

“Right. . . . Well, most of the time,” I said.

He glanced sideways at me and laughed. “I need honest advice.”

I waited for him to continue. I wondered how I was ever going to get over him.

“I’ve got girlfriend problems.”

Oh, great, just what I wanted to advise him on. “You
know, Zack, I’m not really good at that kind of stuff.”

“But I know you understand, because we talked about it before. You know how some girls are attracted to artist types, while other girls think that’s the last thing they need and are interested in jocks?”

I swung my legs. “Yeah.”

“I have two girls really interested in me.”

I felt like saying,
Just two?

“I mean
really
interested,” he went on. “One of them wants to marry me.”

“What?!”

“How do I tell them I’m in love with their sister?”

I turned to him.

“Anna,” he said softly, “I am in way over my head with a girl who has chestnut-colored hair. I have been from the beginning. But maybe before I tell the others, I should find out if their sister would give me half a chance. What do you think?”

“I think the others are too young for you,” I said. “But the girl with the red hair, she might be just right.”

“I know she is.”

Our first kiss was shy. The second was longer and sweeter. The third—well, to be honest, on the third kiss I fell off the dock and took him with me. And the dark water wasn’t scary at all.