It was not oval, not really; it was too rough-hewn and lopsided for that. Cassie reached under the brambles, feeling the branches tangle around her wrists like bracelets. It was rose quartz, and she had brought it with her all the way from the East Coast. Chiseled crudely on its flattest side were the lettersCCMand the year1976.
She could not remember why she had hidden it under the boxwood in the middle of Alex’s maze. She could not remember if she’d ever told Alex it was there. But she realized it was the first piece of evidence she truly believed; the first thing she’d seen since losing her memory that convinced her she had once belonged here.
Cassie rolled onto her back and held the rock on her chest. She stared into the sun until this beautiful world Alex had offered her went black, and then she whispered Connor’s name.
ON NOVEMBER 1, 1976, A LITTLE AFTER SEVEN IN THE MORNING, Connor’s father walked into the kitchen where he and his mother were eating cream of wheat and killed them both with a 12-gauge shotgun.
Between the time it took Cassie to call the police about the shots and to run through the path in the woods to Connor’s house, Mr. Murtaugh had managed to turn the gun on himself.
Connor’s father had blown himself clear into the living room, but Mrs. Murtaugh lay on the floor. The back of her head was gone. Connor had fallen nearly on top of her, and there was a tremendous hole where his chest had been.
With a calm born of shock, Cassie sat down beside Connor and pulled him into her lap. She touched her fingers to his lips, still warm. She thought about kissing him, like she had the night before at the graveyard, but could not bring herself to do it. The police and the paramedics dragged Cassie away from Connor’s body. She sat in a corner of the kitchen with a rough wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders, answering the same questions over and over. No, she had not been present at the scene of the crime. No, she hadn’t seen Mr. Murtaugh this morning. No, no, no.
Everyone knew how close Cassie and Connor had been, and she was excused from school until after the funeral, but that didn’t keep her from hearing the whispers.They said he pulled the trigger on himself with his own toe. Couldn’t get himself a job, and turned to the bottle. Killed an innocent boy like that, in the prime of his life. At least the problems in her own house she could see coming. Connor’s family had been rotting beneath its candy surface, festering where no one could see.
The day of the funeral it snowed. Connor didn’t have a will, so his body was disposed of the way his parents’ bodies had been; he was cremated. The ashes were blown over Moosehead Lake. Cassie watched as the urn holding Mrs. Murtaugh was opened, then the one holding her husband. When they spread Connor’s ashes, Cassie started to scream.
No one could stop her; not even when her father clamped a gloved hand over her mouth did the sound diminish in intensity. It wasn’t right that for the rest of forever Connor and his father would be mixed together. She wanted them to do it over. She wanted them to give Connor to her.
She felt snow freeze her eyes wide open when what was left of Connor was given to the wind. A breath of gray, insubstantial and shifting like smoke, screened the sky and disappeared just as quickly. It was as if Connor had been a figment of Cassie’s imagination. As if he had never existed at all.
She slipped away from the other people paying their respects and,
still wearing her good dress and her snow boots, started to run around Moosehead Lake. It was tremendous, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to get very far, but by the time she sank to her knees in the snow, gasping, she was a mile away from the site of the funeral. She let the snow melt through the thin fabric of her skirt, cold enough to paralyze.
She dug with her fingers into the frozen ground until her nails were cracked and bleeding.
She realized that although she had tried for years to ease her mother’s pain, she would never be able to ease Connor’s. So she would do the next best thing: she would hurt for him. She carried the piece of rose quartz home with her and sat in the garage near her father’s tool chest, using a hammer and an awl to make the headstone Connor hadn’t been given. She worked until her hands cramped. Then she curled her arms around her knees and rocked herself back and forth, wondering why, since both their hearts had been ripped out, she wasn’t dying too.
FRIDAY EVENING, WILL FLYING HORSE WAS SITTING ON HIS NEW green couch watching a game show and eating a partially cooked TV dinner when the electricity went out. “Shit,” he said, watching the blinking clock on hisVCRfade into nothing. He set his plate beside him on the couch and tried to remember where the fuse box was.
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been; it was dinnertime, so there was enough light outside to see his way into the basement. The strange thing was that none of the breakers had been tripped. He walked back upstairs and stepped onto the front porch of his house. In the windows next door and across the street he could see a kitchen light burning steady; a mute dog jogging across a TV. It was just him.
He called the electric company, but could only record his address and problem on a voice-mail system. God only knew how long it would take for workers to get the message. So he started pulling candles out of his kitchen cabinets, ugly red egg-shaped ones that a former girlfriend had bought him one year for his birthday. He carried four of them into the living room and lit them with a book of matches he had in his pocket.
As the sun went down, a shadow crept across him. The fringes of the medicine bundle above his head stirred, restless in the quiet. Will listened to the rhythm of his own pulse. There was nothing to do but wait.
ELIZABETH, THE MAID, CARRIED INTO THE BEDROOM A SUITCASE THAT was bigger than she was. “Will you need a hanging bag, too?”
Cassie didn’t know. “I guess I will,” she said, and the maid immediately turned to leave. “Wait,” she called. She furrowed her brow. “I can’t find the closets.”
Elizabeth smiled. She walked through the suite and the bedroom into the short hallway that led to the green marble bathroom. When she leaned her shoulder against the wall, Cassie was amazed to see the wallpaper spring open to reveal a hidden closet. “Yours,” Elizabeth said, and then she did the same thing on the other side. “Mr. Rivers’s.”
She walked out of the room, leaving Cassie to stare at the rows of sweaters and blouses and furs that belonged to her. The closet was bigger than the housekeeper’s quarters at the apartment. Cassie had never seen so many clothes in one place.
She began to pull things she thought she should pack from the drawers—comfortable turtlenecks and cotton cardigans, underwear and extra bras and a small quilted bag for her makeup. She wanted to take a pair of loafers from the bottom of the stack of shoe boxes, but she thought she might be able to get to them without removing the boxes on top. She slid the box out halfway, trying to wedge the loafers under the lid, but the support gave out and the contents of her closet came tumbling down.
Surrounded by a mess of lingerie and high heels and bush jackets, she almost missed finding the tiny compartment. She’d pushed against it and its latch sprang free. It was another hidey-hole that worked on the same principle as her closet. It was tiny, no bigger than a breadbox.
Cassie wondered if that was where she kept her jewelry.
Inside was a stack of paperback romances, the glitzy kind that showed a half-dressed woman bent under a pirate on the front cover, the kind an anthropologist would never be caught dead reading. Cassie laughed out loud. Was this her big secret? What did Alex keep in his compartment?Hustler?
She picked up a handful and leafed through the titles.Save Me Again. The Fire and the Flower. Love’s Burning Flames. Maybe Alex made her hide them. It wouldn’t do for the public to find out that the wife of America’s leading man read these things in her spare time.
A box was trapped in the corner behind the stack of books. Cassie identified it by sight, its pink cover open, one of its two foil-wrapped tests still cradled inside. First Response. For use the first day of your missed period.
She glanced outside the closet, into the stunning green bathroom.
