Into the Sound, page 7
Every hour brought them nearer to the point where Holly knew from working the beat that a missing person was usually presumed dead if they hadn’t been found. It had been nearly twenty-one hours since Vivian’s panicked call.
Holly sat in her van for a moment, debating about trying to go inside. But she needed to talk to Clay, and he wasn’t returning her messages. She couldn’t see much from across the street, so she exited her vehicle and tried to blend in on the sidewalk with the other curious neighbors.
“Lawyer’s wife. Missing.”
Holly heard the mumbles and came to the horrible realization that her sister’s life had become a source of gossip, the kind people talked about in the grocery store, the sort their parents had detested.
Holly was the uncouth member of the family with her pedestrian talk and revealing questions, the one who preferred math over English but had nevertheless gone into the lowbrow profession of crime journalism. One thing she did have in common with her parents even then—she hated gossip, especially gossip about one of her family members.
“I heard she was involved with the neighbor.”
Holly turned her head to see the source of that preposterous rumor and locked eyes with a little old lady in a bathrobe. There was no way Vivian was having an affair with Peter Carrington. She’d said he was so vanilla, he made Clay look downright kinetic. Holly had to smile for a moment at the memory of her sister’s choice of words.
As she did, she caught sight of an older man who was in complete contrast to the elderly lady: well-dressed in slacks and a brown sweater, plaid scarf draped around his neck, walking a dog—a German shepherd mix, perhaps. It made Holly wonder what breed TomKat’s Bodie was, and she was mad at herself for taking an interest in Vivian’s possible abductor.
Holly was startled to realize she actually knew the older man, though. It was his distinctive mop of wavy hair and swagger as he walked that sparked her memory. That and the plaid scarf. He had been a professor at the same university where her parents had taught.
Holly couldn’t remember his name, but she recognized his face, and she knew that he’d at one time been a trusted member of the faculty who partook in the campus happy hours their parents sometimes attended. He’d been in their house once or twice for a nightcap in the nineties, when Holly was a child.
And now it was all coming back to her—more gossip, ironically. He’d pulled some sort of wild stunt and abandoned his whole family and career with no warning. Now, that was a town rumor even her parents spoke of. Eventually, he was discovered holed up on an island in the Caribbean. He’d lost his position at the university, his family, his reputation. Holly couldn’t recall the exact details, but she had faint memories of her mother being worried when he was missing and their father not caring one bit. Holly was surprised the professor had come back and still resided in this town . . . and likely somewhere nearby, if he was out for a walk.
A cop car pulled up next, lights whirring red and blue. The LEDs sliced through Holly’s temple.
“Disperse. We’re going to need everyone off the sidewalk. Please return to your homes.”
The cops were kicking everyone out. Another cop car pulled up beside Clay’s driveway, and Holly immediately recognized who it was—Nadia. Holly was fearful they’d found out about her secret printouts.
She held her hand over her head, still swimming in pain. “Ugh.” She placed her fingers over her eyes like a blindfold. It was time to get home and lock herself in a dark room.
“Excuse me?” a gruff voice said.
Holly peeked through her fingers to find the old professor there. What does he want?
“Yes. I’m sorry; I’m having a bad headache,” she said.
“I noticed.” He held something out for her. It was a small amber bottle with a white lid. The professor had a leather messenger bag strung around his body where he must’ve pulled the pills from.
Is he giving me drugs? Her mind spiraled to Mrs. Burgess and her closed casket. Holly still had an aversion to pills because of that day. She knew logically that there were good pills and bad pills, ones that were necessary to cure certain infections and ease pain, but she avoided them whenever possible. “Oh . . . no thank you.”
“It’s ginger,” he said with a strong Long Island accent, the r getting lost on his tongue. Their parents had taught them to enunciate perfectly, which meant they didn’t sound like true New Yorkers. Mother had been from a cow town upstate, Father a Long Island lifer, but he’d converted his dialect for her.
“Ginger?” she asked.
“Cures headaches. Trust me. Just take one tab.” He took her hand and closed her fist around the bottle.
The professor’s dog rubbed against her leg, and she was surprised how friendly he was for looking so fierce. Holly had a strange feeling the old man was much the same. She normally wouldn’t do such a thing, take pills from a man off the street, but this was a person her mother had trusted at one time, a friend of the family. Not that he likely recognized her. Holly didn’t think he’d try to harm her, though.
Plus, she was desperate to make the pain go away. She examined the tiny white label on the bottle, and all it said was: Ginger, pure extract, 750 mg.
The police made their announcement again. Half the street had cleared out, but the news cameramen and the lady in the bathrobe were holding strong.
“Better get going before they bring out the dogs.” The old man looked at his pup. “Come on, Harley.”
“Thanks again.”
He winked at her and trotted away. Holly opened her car door and collapsed in the seat, her temples throbbing. Sometimes her headaches were related to alcohol, and other times they were brought on by stress. She wasn’t sure which had caused this one, but she was betting it was a stress migraine, and those were the worst.
She glanced at her phone—five more texts and two more calls from Mark.
She couldn’t call him for help.
If she was ill, contacting Mark would make for less of a fight later about how long she’d been away from home, but she didn’t want to make excuses for taking the time to look for her missing sister. She needed to take a stand for Vivian and herself.
But . . . the pain. She’d waited too long to drive home.
Holly texted her brother-in-law again. Maybe Clay would open his front door to her so they could actually talk about Vivian. His car was in the driveway, but she didn’t know if she had the strength to bypass the police and face him uninvited.
Holly: Clay, I’m nearby. I want to talk to you about Vivian. Can I stop?
She practiced rhythmic breathing to quiet the zinging in her temporal lobe.
Desperate, Holly cracked open the mysterious bottle. It reminded her of something she might find in an old-school apothecary. The capsules looked more like rabbit pellets than pills.
She sniffed the contents. The odor singed her nostrils. Whoa. If that wasn’t ginger, she didn’t know what was. On the beat, she’d reported on men slipping drugs into women’s drinks, but this man had a prescription with his name printed on the bottle—Archibald Steiner. That’s right; Holly remembered the name from the university now—Professor Steiner. The substance inside appeared to be exactly what he said it was.
Holly took another whiff. It smelled like the sliced ginger that appeared on the side of her favorite Japanese dish at Koi Sushi. Her reporter brain told her these pills had to in fact be ginger.
Holly took a pill and swallowed it down with the remains of a bottle of water in her car. The cop lights continued to flash, but no one approached her van and asked her to move it.
She checked her phone, but she knew Clay hadn’t responded. Why was he avoiding her?
Holly closed her eyes, and the most miraculous thing started to happen. Little by little, the pain that had invaded her T-zone started to dissipate, like tiny fingers slipping over her head in ease. The ginger was doing the trick—and fast.
Freaking miracle.
Thirty-five years of life and no one had told her ginger worked for migraines.
With the windows rolled down, Holly heard another thing from the nosy neighbors on the street before she pulled away.
“It’s always the quiet ones. Librarian. Who would’ve thought she would’ve gotten mixed up with the neighbor?”
Holly wanted to shout at the woman from her car window to knock off the ludicrous talk, but she stopped herself. It would only make her mother do a double roll in her grave. Mother hated gossip, but she hated public displays over gossip even more.
“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”
They were words Professor Cynthia Forester uttered every chance she got.
Had Vivian talked to anyone else about Peter Carrington, though? The rumor of an affair between them had to have come from somewhere.
Another of Mother’s favorite lines by the philosopher and poet Kahlil Gibran came to mind. “If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.”
Mother often talked in quotes and theories. Vivian had adopted that idiosyncrasy, whereas Holly hated it, preferring a much more direct approach to communication. She wished she could say she was more like her father, but he used quotes and proverbs, too, just more sparingly.
It made Holly question whether the insinuations about Vivian and Peter could possibly be true. Was Peter’s screen name TomKat? There was all that talk in Tom’s Hangouts feed about living alone by the water. It didn’t jibe. But if Vivian did have something going on with the neighbor and Clay found out about it, that was troublesome. Clay was a man of power, but was he violent?
Every time Holly tried to forget about the Carringtons, they kept sneaking back into the conversation. If Vivian had been seeing Peter in secrecy, it wouldn’t be her first offense doing something she shouldn’t have with the opposite sex—but it had been a long time since she’d tried. The problems Vivian had now reminded Holly of the ones they’d covered up when they were younger. Vivian liked to play games with people, like the time she’d taken off at the mall and when she’d run off with the boy to see the meteor shower.
Vivian had thought she was clever, dreaming up ways to circumvent their mother’s scrutinizing lens. But her bouts of rebellion had come back to bite them both—Holly and Vivian—during the summer Holly considered the worst of their childhood. There were peculiar things about Vivian’s most recent behavior—particularly how sneaky and flirtatious she sounded in the Hangouts sessions—that had the same feel as that summer.
And the consequences then had changed them both forever.
7
1997
“Why is she making us journal about this?” Holly asked.
Vivian was dressed in cutoff shorts and a paisley bodysuit, perched at the tongue-and-groove picnic table at the back of their wraparound porch. The table was the kind found at Robert Moses Park, fire-truck red and dinged from use, sturdy, with heavy planks and bench seating.
Their back porch was made for summertime picnics with its large swinging chair and striped maroon-and-white canopy overtop. It hung in the corner where Father liked to read. When Mother would bother him to do things around the house, he’d sometimes escape out there or to the little roped-off garden in the backyard by the shed if he couldn’t hide from her on the porch.
“Just answer Mom’s questions so we can get to the beach,” Vivian said, never one to challenge their parents’ journaling questions, even though they’d been doing these mind-bending activities since they could pick up a pencil. Holly had assumed they would eventually stop once they became teens, but no such luck.
“But these questions are—”
“Don’t be repressive. Just answer them, Holly.” Vivian rolled her eyes, pebble gray and stormy just like their mother’s. She even sounded like her, using large psych words like repressive. Their father had light eyes, too, but Holly had been stuck with mud brown. She always got the short end of the genetic stick, and her capability for writing these stinking entries was no exception.
Holly watched as her older sister’s mechanical pencil flowed swiftly over the lined paper, no shortage of inspiration from the impressive vat in her pretty head. Her mother often told them “don’t get creative; just state the facts” in regard to the psychoanalytical questions she posed, but Holly was convinced Vivian had an easier time answering the hard ones because she was older, smarter, more like her parents.
Vivian looked up at Holly, annoyed. “Just make something up if you don’t have a real answer. It’s like you’ve never done this before.” She sighed.
“Easy for you to say,” Holly muttered. Everything was frozen—her hands, her brain—it happened when she was nervous. She was also distracted because she knew her sister’s offer was on borrowed time.
It was supposed to be hot today, and Vivian had agreed to drive her to the beach. Holly wanted to get there early so she could find a good spot to set down her towel with the other soon-to-be ninth graders, one near the ice-cream stand, where all the other kids from her school hung out. They just had to finish their assignment first. Their mother couldn’t let their brains go soft with an entire three months devoid of learning—not using the best muscle God gave them.
Whenever they complained about journaling, their mother would go on about how lucky they were that they didn’t have to be stuck in summer camps like the other children of working parents.
Holly envied the hell out of those kids.
What was the point of having a summer break if they were still assigned homework? The questions today weren’t even reasonable, let alone appropriate for parents to ask their teenage daughters.
Holly shouldn’t have been all that surprised. Their mother had gone off the rails that past Christmas when she’d begun a study dealing with the Freudian consequences of sexuality and parenting. She was working on an article for a new clinical journal, and when Mother had scholarly papers to write, she became obsessed with the research. Holly despised being viewed as her mother’s patient, clinically assessed in her own home.
After Christmas dinner and way too many glasses of eggnog, which Holly could only assume was spiked with the clear liquid hidden in the empty cookie tin, Mother had somehow made the analysis that their fireplace was a sexual symbol resembling the female birthing canal. Santa, of course, was the phallic element squeezing himself through the chimney, chubby and red-faced. Why their mother had shared these thoughts with them, Holly would never understand.
Needless to say, Christmas had been forever ruined. Holly had long been over the actual idea of Santa Claus, but to sexualize him destroyed the entire holiday. Even Vivian had regarded her mother’s comments with wrinkled-nose disgust, though she was mostly just happy Father let her sip his glass of wine while she listened. Mother never cared if they drank. She claimed they’d experiment less on their own if alcohol wasn’t forbidden at home. Father disagreed, although not as strenuously as he should have.
Holly’s hairline was growing sweaty, anxiety percolating out of her pores, acting as tiny springboards for her curls. The lined paper was still nearly blank.
“Who did you put?” she whispered to Vivian.
Vivian sighed, already on her last question. “If you don’t hurry up, I’m not taking you.”
“Well?” she asked.
“You know we can’t share answers,” Vivian whispered back. She looked past Holly, no doubt through the kitchen window. They couldn’t see their mother watching them, but they knew she was there.
Holly peered over her shoulder just to make sure. “Come on. Just this once. Who did you put for the guy you . . .” She could barely read the question aloud: “Are most likely to have sexual fantasies about, in real life or on television, and why?”
Ew. Holly knew her childhood wasn’t normal. Their parents were respected local college professors. But Holly understood enough about other families to realize hers was far from average.
Vivian stared at her as if she were incompetent, although Holly realized Vivian was scared too. Mother’s rules were not to be broken, especially when it came to her research.
“Please?” Holly begged. She didn’t want to admit it to Vivian or her mother, but she hadn’t had any sexual fantasies. These were the moments in her life when her mother’s profession made her wonder if she were the one who wasn’t normal. Mother had written the question on the paper clear as day, as if it were assumed that both girls had fantasies of this sort. But Holly hadn’t. For the life of her, she couldn’t think of any movie stars she’d like to kiss . . . let alone . . .
Gag.
Maybe she was repressed. These questions made Holly want to move far, far away and never return. She looked at her sister pleadingly.
Vivian looked back pitifully. “Okay. Rico.”
Holly smiled. Rico was the tall, dark, and superhot lifeguard. His station was Field 5 beach, and his abs were so defined they reminded Holly of the bottom of a serrated egg carton. A six-pack.
“Good one.” And just like that, Holly’s fingers started to write. She’d buy her sister a snow cone or something at the beach for helping her out.
Holly was getting through the assignment, but then she came to a full stop again. “Oh God. What about question number five?”
Vivian rolled her eyes again. “Just write something. If she catches us, she’s going to flip. You know she’s probably using this for her article.” Vivian looked at the kitchen window again.
The assignment was making Holly hotter. Her curly mane, pulled up into a bun on the top of her head, was becoming more unraveled by the moment. The sounds of cars rolling by in every direction made her itch even more to get on the road. But if question two was a showstopper, number five was downright immobilizing.
If you were in a romantic setting with the subject in question two and there were no consequences to be had, emotional or physical, would you engage in sexual activity or abstain?
Holly didn’t care that she was cheating.
