He should have worn his jacket. It was that kind of late winter cold that was damp, not solid anymore. Back in Fredonia, you'd be able to feel the thaw in things. But this was a long way from thaw. This was going to be cold like soiled sheets or something. Like sleeping in your own wet laundry.

Suddenly, crouching in the dark at the side of the OTT house, he felt sadder than he'd ever felt in his life. On his knees. In the dirt. He found himself remembering, stupidly, his mother of all people: Her ankles.

Traveling toward those ankles at high speed on his hands and knees because he couldn't walk. Because every time he tried to walk he fell on his f.u.c.king a.s.s. Because he was a baby. Why wouldn't she pick him up? He was her baby.

He shook his head. How idiotic was that? Thinking about his mother? Right now?

("I've f.u.c.ked Nicole," Perry had said. "Half of f.u.c.king G.o.dwin Hall has f.u.c.ked your virgin girlfriend, you stupid, stupid, deaf, blind, f.u.c.king idiot.") He was behind familiar shrubbery, he realized-right where he'd been that other night, when he'd gotten tossed out of OTT. He put his face to the little window and looked down (blinking, blinking) at the whole tableau of the bas.e.m.e.nt again.

This time, he hadn't really expected to see anyone.

There was no music. No strobe light. He'd convinced himself that he was right, that the whole house was either an illusion, or empty. There was no way a whole house full of girls all dressed up for their Spring Event could be so still, and silent.

It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the darkness well enough to make out the scene: They were standing so motionless they'd blended into the atoms around them, it seemed. They were as gray as the air.

Sorority girls made of air, made of shadows. They were all in black, with their heads bowed, and the only bright thing Craig could see at all was the glinting silver handles on the coffin they were standing around. In the darkness.

But then he pressed his face closer to the window, and he could see that, in the coffin, there was girl. She must have been wearing white, because she was brighter than anything around her, but the darkness was so complete that she seemed to absorb it. She must have been the one they were raising from the dead. (Ridiculous. Pathetic.) He was about to stand up, just leave, when he heard what sounded like vague, dull, stupidly girlish chanting under him.

Girlish monks.

He snorted, hearing that.

Stupid game. Stupid hazing. Stupid him for being here, for caring so much, for crouching down behind a bush trying to catch a glimpse of his girlfriend, who was standing around a coffin in a bas.e.m.e.nt pretending to raise some sorority sister from the dead.

And then, there that guy was: The omnipresent EMT.

He was standing in a corner, in the shadows, the way he always was.

Craig remembered Nicole saying, "What's EMT stand for?" Denying she'd ever even seen the guy before. He heard Perry say it again: "You f.u.c.king idiot. You blind a.s.shole."

He wanted to walk away, but it was mesmerizing, too-the sound of their voices. It was like music bubbling out of the ground. It was the coldness seeping through his jeans. It sounded ancient, and completely new. He could see it very clearly now, the whole thing in the bas.e.m.e.nt. This was no game. The girl in that coffin was dead. The silky inner lining of the casket they'd placed her in was the same color as her blue-gray, blue-white skin. Yes, she was wearing white, but the white had turned to a deathly nothingness, a bluish absence. Craig stared, and stared, and held his breath. s.h.i.t. Had they killed her? Did they know she was dead? Was he the only one who could see clearly from where he looked down at her through the bas.e.m.e.nt window that the girl was actually dead?

Did they have their eyes closed? Why was the f.u.c.king EMT just sitting there in the corner? Were they so caught up in their chanting that they couldn't see the girl was dead?

Before he even knew what he was doing, Craig was slamming his fists against the flimsy gla.s.s until he'd broken it, and was falling into it, and the girls were all screaming and running and shrieking, just like the time before when he'd run down the bas.e.m.e.nt steps, except this time the screaming had nothing to do with him.

Part Five.

83.

"Something happened to him," Perry said, "after the accident. I know Craig. He can be an a.s.shole, but he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. He remembers everything. He can tell you all the presidents in order, their terms of office. He won't admit it, but he can. He's not going to forget what happened on that night."

Jeff Blackhawk's car rattled around them disconcertingly, but Mira felt oddly comforted by the rattling, and the smell of it: the Krispy Kreme doughnuts and old French fries. When they'd left her apartment Jeff was watching Sesame Street with the twins, a show Clark insisted was the opiate of the ma.s.ses. ("This s.h.i.t's supposed to turn parents into as.e.xual zombies," he'd said when Mira suggested that a minimal amount of PBS might help the boys with some language acquisition.) "Look!" Jeff was shouting at the television, pointing. "It's Elmo!"

"Elmo!" the twins shouted back, as if it were a name they'd known all their lives and had only been waiting until this moment to call out.

Jeff wouldn't even let Mira thank him-not for lending her his car, not for watching her children. "Just get some great material for your book," he'd said, "and thank me in the acknowledgments. It'll be my claim to fame."

Now Perry Edwards was sitting beside her, directing her to the lanes she needed to be in to get to the exits they needed to take to get to Bad Axe to find the mortician who'd accepted the mangled remains of Nicole Werner, and who had slid them into the white coffin Perry had helped to carry down the aisle of the Bad Axe Trinity Lutheran Church on the day of her funeral.

Mira said, "Of course, there are head injuries that will cause selective amnesia-"

"But there were no head injuries," Perry said. "They did a CT scan. They did ten CT scans."

Mira stared out Jeff's cracked windshield. It was a small crack on the left side, making its way across the gla.s.s slowly but perceptibly enough that she could gauge the progress it had made since the last time she'd been in the car. Two inches. In four weeks, at this rate, it would traverse the windshield.

She tried to think.

Mira had seen skulls.

Plenty of them. Skulls in Romania. Skulls in morgues. Skulls in long, chaotic piles and heaps in the Paris catacombs: Walking through that underground full of bones, Mira had been amazed. So many dead. She'd let her hand drift over the hundreds and thousands of skulls, breathing in the smell she knew was theirs (must, dust) while the dank ceiling dripped ancient water onto her head, and she'd let it sink in how truly flimsy that helmet that protected everything was. That fragile container of dreams and memories and longings and desire. Of everything. One well-placed blow with a tree branch could shatter it all.

The impression had never left her. When she was seven months pregnant with the twins, she'd told Clark (who'd rolled his eyes), "I want them to wear helmets when they're old enough to ride bikes. And they won't ever be playing soccer."

But, if there'd been no head injury?

There was nothing, Mira knew, that a CT scan couldn't show. If there was no head injury, no brain damage, how was it that Craig Clements-Rabbitt remembered nothing of the accident that had killed Nicole?

"Well," Mira finally said, "there are substances. Drugs. Injectables. There's something called the 'zombie drug.' Scopolamine. At high doses it kills you, but at lower doses it induces amnesia. Prost.i.tutes have been known to use it to drug and rob their customers. In some countries they claim it's used to drug mothers and take their babies, traffic them to adoption agencies. They say it makes people so docile they'll help you burglarize their own houses-and long after the drug is out of their systems, they still have no recollection of the events at all."

Perry was running his hand over his head. Mira had noticed the buzz cut was growing out. It was as dark as she'd thought it would be.

"They used to give Scopolamine to women during childbirth," she went on. "Probably your grandmother was given it-just woke up, and they told her she'd had a baby. It completely blocks the formation of memory. You can't even hypnotize the person to help them remember what happened, the way you can with date rape drugs, because the memory is simply never recorded.

"They think it's been used for voodoo for centuries in Haiti. It's given to victims who are then buried alive and then dug up and told they've died and been exhumed as zombies-and they believe it. They're willing to live the rest of their lives as slaves or prost.i.tutes or servants because they're convinced they died and were brought back to life."

Perry had stopped rubbing his head. Now he was drumming his fingertips on his knee. The jeans he was wearing were creased so nicely Mira thought maybe he'd never worn them before. It was hard to imagine a boy his age ironing his own jeans, but if any boy would, Perry Edwards would be the boy. He said, "Before he left that night, in Lucas's car, we had an argument. No," he interrupted himself, "we had an actual fight. A fight that ended up with him with a b.l.o.o.d.y nose and us on the floor. He never said a word about it again, either like it never happened or, like after everything else that happened, it didn't matter. I've never known if he just doesn't remember. How do you know about this drug?"

The good students, they always questioned you in the end. They would accept your word for it only so far.

"Well," Mira said. She went on to tell Perry how, while working on her master's thesis, she'd traveled to Haiti with the help of a small summer grant that she and another graduate student had received together for a proposal they'd made to meet with a woman the Haitian newspapers had tried unsuccessfully to debunk as the "Zombie of Port au Prince."

The woman's family had claimed she'd been kidnapped by neighbors who tried to extort money from them, and that when they were unable to produce the money, the kidnappers strangled the young woman and left her dead body at the side of a road. Pa.s.sersby put the body in the trunk of their car and drove it to the police station. When the trunk was opened, the young woman's eyes were open, so she was returned to her family. But her family refused to take her back. When they saw her they said it was clear that she was missing her soul.

When word got out that this zombie was being moved from her hometown, where they'd have nothing to do with her, to an inst.i.tution in Port au Prince, the inst.i.tution employees resigned, and mayhem ensued among the other patients. By the time Mira and her fellow student learned about her and applied for the grant, the zombie was living in foster care-the fourth foster care she'd been placed in. It didn't help matters that she herself had insisted that she was a zombie.

It seemed like such a promising research opportunity, and Mira's advisors had been excited and supportive, but Mira and her research partner, Alexandra Durer, got only as far as the airport in Port au Prince, where they were refused entry into Haiti because riots had broken out. Americans had been killed. Armed rebels were said to have taken over the capital. Mira and Alex were boarded right back onto the plane they'd arrived on-and, after a lot of fruitless imploring and phone calls, they just gave up and got drunk on a bottle of duty-free rum they bought at the airport.

That winter, the Zombie of Port au Prince died of pneumonia.

Before they left for Haiti, Alex and Mira had done extensive research on the zombie drug, and their loose hypothesis had been that the woman had been drugged by her kidnappers, and that her 'rescuers' had mistaken her drugged state for death, and that the reaction to her return from the dead had been so influenced by the Haitian zombie culture that the victim herself, having no recollection of what had actually happened to her, had been willing to believe that she was a zombie.

"It's not unheard of," Mira said, "to find Scopolamine on college campuses-date rape, of course, but other uses, too. Hazing?" She shrugged. She'd never heard of this, but it seemed far from outside the realm of possibility. "Nicole might have known Greeks with access to the drug. Were she and Craig experimenters?"

Perry shook his head. "He smoked dope. A lot of dope. Probably other stuff, back in New Hampshire. I don't know about her. I always thought she was against all that, but there were other things I thought about her that turned out to be wrong."

He seemed disinclined to go on. He turned his face to the slushy scenery outside the pa.s.senger window, and put a hand against the dashboard, the heat vent. It couldn't have been more than forty degrees in Jeff Blackhawk's car, and Perry's fingers were very white, the fingernails tinged with blue. Mira would have offered him the gloves she was wearing, but she was afraid that without them she'd be unable to drive.

"Zombie drugs," Perry said after a long pause. He tucked his hands between his knees, paused again, and finally said, "All Craig can remember about the accident is what they told him, and what was in the reports: that Nicole was so badly injured and burned they could identify her only by the things she'd been wearing, and that he'd left the scene of the accident without bothering to try to help. That's our exit." He pointed to a green-and-white sign up ahead that read, BAD AXE.

84.

Sh.e.l.ly's answering machine was blinking so rapidly and chaotically that she didn't bother to count the number of messages it must have recorded. She hit Play, and then she pulled a kitchen chair up next to the phone table, sat down, and began to unlace her boots.

"We know about you," the first message said, followed by a beep. A young feminine voice. Not familiar, but not a total stranger's, either. Sh.e.l.ly stopped unlacing the boot and put both feet next to each other on the floor.

"We know about you. You don't know about us. We're smarter than you think we are. You can't trace these calls."

An amused-sounding laugh, followed by a beep, and then: "We've got a surprise for you. A whole bunch of surprises."

Beep.

"Sh.e.l.ly? This is Rosemary. Are you okay there, honey? I felt so worried after our last talk. Things will get back to normal, I promise you, but how about, until things settle down, you come stay with us for a while? I told the kids I was inviting you, and they're excited. Please?"

Beep.

"Surprise!"

But it was a different female voice this time. Lower. s.e.xier. Quieter.

Beep.

"Maybe you should have a look around your house. There's a present for you. It's in the bedroom. We know that's where you like to get your presents."

Sh.e.l.ly stood up.

Beep.

"That's right. Go on. Go see for yourself."

Beep.

"Hey, Sh.e.l.ly. Keep going." Josie. Sh.e.l.ly couldn't have proved it-too few words-but something about the cadence, the consonants p.r.o.nounced at the very tip of the tongue against the teeth, seemed nauseatingly familiar.

Beep.

"Mee-owwww." And then there was laughter, hysterical laughter, but Sh.e.l.ly was heading into the bedroom now, hurrying, that laughter pouring down on her like gla.s.sy rain.

Beep.

"Here kitty-kitty-kitty."

Beep.

"You're next, you b.i.t.c.h, if you don't look out. I'd say it's time you got out of town. And don't think you can trace these calls, because the cops won't be able to figure it out, and there's no-"

But Sh.e.l.ly was screaming now, yanking on the rope that was strung from the light fixture over her bed and wrapped around her cat's neck, pulling his limp body down, cradling him in her arms, screaming his stupid, silly name into his blank face with his black lolling tongue and his gla.s.s eyes staring intently at nothing at all.

85.

Mr. Dientz remembered Perry from Cub Scouts. His own son was many years older than Perry, so they'd overlapped for only a year, but he gave Perry a hearty handshake and said, "Lord. What did your parents feed you, boy?"

Perry asked after Paul Dientz, who was in mortuary school in North Carolina, and then introduced Professor Polson. Mr. Dientz was obviously surprised, and not necessarily pleasantly so (a quick raising and lowering and raising of his very bushy gray eyebrows) to find that the professor was a woman. A young woman.

On the phone, he'd said, "Perry, since I know you, and since you say you're doing this 'research' "-the word had come out of his mouth like something from a foreign language-"I'm willing to indulge you and your professor, of course, and have I mentioned how impressed I am that you're attending our state's finest inst.i.tution?"

Perry had a.s.sured him that he had.

"But it's a part of my job I don't relish. The reopening of old wounds, so to speak. Perry, it would amaze you to learn how many family members and friends in the weeks, months, years after a funeral-especially in the case of cremations and closed coffins-become convinced that there has been some case of mistaken ident.i.ty. They think they've glimpsed a deceased brother or son or daughter on the street, or in a magazine, or they've gotten a hang-up call in the middle of the night-and, if they weren't at the scene of the accident or the one to identify the body or if there were issues of identification, because many untimely deaths, Perry, let me be frank, leave behind corpses that do not resemble the living person-well, they can become fixated.

"Again, in the interest of 'science,' I am willing to meet with you and your professor and go over the record, but I must admit I can't recall all the details, except of course the terrible tragedy of it, and, as I recall, the Werners did not take our recommendation to view the body. In the case of their lovely daughter, it would certainly have been horrific, but there's really nothing better for a sense of finality, if you know what I mean, than to see the deceased with your own eyes."

"Well, welcome," Mr. Dientz said, sweeping his arm toward two plush red velvet armchairs across from his desk. "I've gone through my files, and as soon as you're settled, I'd be happy to show you the reconstructive photographs."

Perry had no idea what reconstructive photographs would be, but he did know, because Mr. Dientz had told him on the phone, that the funeral home kept a digital library of photos and information about their 'clients.' He would be showing them photographs of Nicole? Now? Perry looked toward the door, wondering if he could excuse himself for a moment, but Mr. Dientz wasted no time booting up his Mac, and turning the screen toward Perry and Professor Polson, so they could see.

"You may well ask yourself," Mr. Dientz said, his voice shifting into the tone of a man on a radio commercial, clearly getting ready to say something he'd said a million times before but that still held meaning for him, "why it is we would spend the many hours we spend here at Dientz Funeral Parlor reconstructing the likenesses of decedents who have been disfigured by accidents or illness when, in fact, most funerals at Dientz Funeral Parlor are now closed-casket, and, in especially the most extreme cases, even family members will not be viewing the bodies?"

He looked at Perry and Professor Polson with rehea.r.s.ed animation, as if gauging to what degree they had each been asking themselves this question.

"Well, I answer you with an anecdote from my earliest years as a mortician," Mr. Dientz went on. "A young man had been killed in a motorcycle accident. I won't go into the details, but like your friend Nicole, identification was difficult. Injuries, burns, even dismemberment. Everyone in the family insisted, as so many so often do, that they only wished to remember their loved one 'as he had been.' Of course, someone had identified him at the morgue, but it was a distant relative, and the identification was done mostly from clothing and a ring. The family insisted that they didn't want any kind of reconstruction, no embalming. They didn't even care what the deceased would be wearing in his coffin.

"Still, this was a very traditional family, and after ascertaining that they would not object to reconstruction and embalming, I went ahead with my usual practice of preparing a body for viewing-although, I will tell you, I did not charge the family for these services, or even inform them that I was going ahead with them.