When she did slow down, she found herself nearly letting out a little cry, thinking, looking out at him, Richie, her brother, he was- No, G.o.d.

Of course not. What was wrong with her?

Of course not.

It was that boy who reminded her of her brother, the roommate.

The buzz cut. The nicely pressed white shirt. What was his name?

Sh.e.l.ly braked. She pulled over as far as she could near the bank of snow that was now the shoulder of the road. Like the first time, the last time, like the accident, she unrolled her window, called out, knowing he would never be able to hear her in the great white s.p.a.ce between them-the snow and the white annihilating everything, especially the sound of her voice.

Still, he must have heard her pull over, because he turned around. He looked at her. She opened her mouth as he began to shake his head-a slow back-and-forth no, no that made Sh.e.l.ly close her mouth, and put her hand to it. She didn't need for him to say a word to know what he was telling her: No.

There was nothing she could do for him.

He was telling her to go.

Sh.e.l.ly lifted a hand before she rolled her window up again, and watched him walk away until she could no longer see him at all in his white shirt in the snow.

107.

Ellen had aged. There was no denying it.

But, of course, so had she. How old must Sh.e.l.ly have looked to Ellen? It had been fourteen years since theyd last seen each other. Still, they managed to recognize one another instantly and simultaneously, and rushed toward one another there in the Las Vegas airport between the escalators and the baggage carousel, with no hesitation.

Ellen tossed down the black leather bag that was slung over her shoulder and threw her arms around Sh.e.l.ly, and said, "I told you so," into Sh.e.l.ly's gray hair. They both began to weep-no sobbing, just quiet tears dampening their cheeks.

Sh.e.l.ly nodded at Ellen. It was true. Ellen had always promised she'd come to visit Sh.e.l.ly in Vegas before either of them managed to die. She'd say it at the end of every phone conversation, jot it at the bottom of every email-and there'd been a million of those phone calls, emails, postcards, notes over the years. Time had seemed to create itself out of those exchanges across s.p.a.ce.

It was a short drive from the airport to Sh.e.l.ly's apartment. They were only awkward in the moments of silence, so they kept talking. They talked about Ellen's flight-four hours beside a woman who stopped blabbing only when she was chewing the cuticles of her fingernails. ("I got up to go to the bathroom three or four times, hoping she'd bother the guy on the other side of her, but she was just waiting for me when I got back.") They talked about Las Vegas. Ellen had never been, and Sh.e.l.ly had lived there so long by then that she didn't even notice how strange it might seem to someone who'd never been out of the Midwest except to go to Manhattan, or France.

It was like moving to Mars, Sh.e.l.ly had told Rosemary on the phone when she first moved. When the plane had landed on the tarmac in Vegas, Sh.e.l.ly had looked through the little plastic window at the desert, and said to herself, I have moved to Mars.

"Good," Rosemary had said. "In Las Vegas, everyone's in hiding. And you have to consider yourself in hiding, Sh.e.l.ly. Don't do anything stupid, like start a Facebook page, okay?"

After that first phone call from her new life, Sh.e.l.ly had hung up, crossed the floor of her fourth-floor apartment, and looked out: Forever, she'd thought. As in the song, she could see it from the window of her apartment. Forever reached as far as the red-dirt mound of Sunrise Mountain before it abruptly disappeared from view.

And, in all the years, Sh.e.l.ly had never considered moving. Not from Las Vegas (which had become the home she'd never known she hadn't had-sometimes shabby, consistently inconsistent, but full of a beauty that was that much more lovely because you had to go looking for it) and not from the apartment.

She loved the view from her apartment. At night, the moon hovered over Sunrise Mountain as if it were completely empty up there in the sky, shining light down on light, not seeming to be reflecting anything, but holding its own spot tenaciously up there-a gleaming checkpoint, long ago abandoned.

Directly below Sh.e.l.ly's balcony, a p.r.i.c.kly pear cactus spread its flowering menace between her view and the parking lot.

Once, years before, some member of the maintenance crew had tried to chop it down, swearing as the cactus ripped its barbs through his flimsy windbreaker. Sh.e.l.ly had hurried and called the landlord, who'd agreed to stop the worker, and no one had touched that cactus since.

Now every spring it bloomed as if it were some sort of simple-minded florist's offering to G.o.d. The rest of the year it didn't try to fool anyone. You knew, if you got close, it was going to rip you to pieces.

In Las Vegas, they said, you never saw the same person twice. And it was true, in its way. Not at the library, not at the gym, not the shopping mall. Even the people Sh.e.l.ly worked with at the hospital kept moving and rotating, coming and going, always keeping their distances so well that it felt, even if it wasn't strictly true, that she was surrounded by strangers, new strangers every day. And the people in the apartments around hers never lasted more than a few seasons, were easily replaced by brand-new people completely foreign to her, who also left. Every summer, the heat scoured the streets clean of the past.

Only once in all those years did Sh.e.l.ly gasp and turn around, feeling she'd recognized someone. She'd been walking a sand trail through Death Valley in the shadow of the Funeral Mountains, and five girls were walking toward her, coming from the opposite direction. They were swinging their empty water bottles, and stupidly wearing flip-flops through the tough desert terrain, and little spaghetti strap tops under the blasting sun, Greek letters stenciled against the pastel cloth, bare shoulders turning red. It was ninety-five degrees out. ("But it's a dry heat," everyone in Las Vegas always joked, "like an oven").

They will die out here, Sh.e.l.ly thought. Just by being silly, they will die.

She considered saying something, but as those girls pa.s.sed, they didn't even acknowledge her-except for one with shining black hair who flipped it over her shoulder and looked at Sh.e.l.ly without smiling.

That girl, in truth, looked nothing like Josie Reilly, except that she was a type. Still, it took all the restraint Sh.e.l.ly had to keep walking, not to stop and say something to this girl, to the whole group of them: Something about the stupidity of thinking you were bigger than death. That you could walk in the valley of it without even bothering to bring enough water or wear hiking shoes.

But these girls would just turn around and walk right out, Sh.e.l.ly knew. They would survive it. They could, and they knew it, and, after all, that girl was not Josie. Like so many others who had pa.s.sed through her life over the many years (she was, after all, sixty-three years old), Sh.e.l.ly would be haunted by Josie Reilly forever, and would never see her again.

Sh.e.l.ly had made up the couch in her apartment living room for herself so Ellen could have the bed, but of course Ellen would have none of the bed. "You slept on my couch," she said. "And you put the fight back in me, Sh.e.l.ly."

"I gave you a dead end to follow for the rest of your life," Sh.e.l.ly said. It was something they'd talked about hundreds of times over the years-how much and how little difference Sh.e.l.ly's bits of information had given Ellen. Had they been worth the trouble in the end, since they'd never brought her daughter back?

"No," Ellen said. "It was the only thing anyone gave me. The only thing better would have been if you'd given me Denise."

They talked about Denise, of course, as they so often did. Marveling that she'd have been thirty-five years old now, if she were alive.

"I don't see her anymore," Ellen said. "I still look for her, but I can't imagine her now. She can't be twenty years old to me anymore, but I don't know who she would be if she were thirty-five."

"She'd be like you," Sh.e.l.ly said. "She'd be a mother by now. And a friend. A good one. The best."

108.

It didn't matter how many times she wrote it on the board (lie, lay, laid), they always got it wrong.

The students at South Plains College thought Mira was a crazy lady anyway, or just plain misinformed, herself, on the basics of good grammar. She sometimes considered going all the way-writing letters to newspapers and politicians insisting that it was simply time to change the verb tenses. (I laid down last night. Tomorrow, since it's Sat.u.r.day, I plan to just be laying around all day. I lied on the couch until noon drinking Budweiser.) It would be so much easier to change the grammar than to continue trying to teach these kids to get it right.

She erased the board, and closed the cla.s.sroom door behind her, headed for the parking lot, got in her car, and drove back to her trailer.

It was September, and the sky was blue and uncluttered by clouds, or anything else. In West Texas you really could see forever. You could have rolled a coin on the ground, and there would be nothing to stop the rolling for a thousand miles.

Mira tossed her bag on the couch, grabbed a Diet c.o.ke from the refrigerator, sat down, and booted up the computer. As she'd hoped, there was an email message from Matty, and one just under it from Andy.

The usual sweet things: Cla.s.ses were great. They needed money. Matty was in love with a girl, and Andy was just breaking up with one, and that night they were having pizza in the cafeteria, not to worry. They'd be home in a couple of weekends.

She smiled as she opened the photo that Matty had emailed of himself with his arm around the new love object. He was wearing sungla.s.ses and a UT-AUSTIN T-shirt. He was taller, thinner, but there was no way to overlook his resemblance to his father. Somewhere, Mira suspected, she still had a picture like this one of her ex-husband in a T-shirt and sungla.s.ses: Clark with s.h.a.ggy dark hair, needing a shave, smiling crookedly, an arm tossed over Mira's shoulder the way Matty had his arm tossed over the shoulder of this girl.

The girl was blond. A little chubby. Familiar-looking in the way of so many girls that age.

Or everyone, of every age, Mira thought.

That afternoon, as always, she'd strolled across the quiet campus from her office and to the library, raising a hand to Tom Trammer, who looked to her so much like Jeff Blackhawk (especially in the mornings, before her eyes were clearer and before he looked more haggard than he did later in the day, and older) that she almost called him by Jeff's name as he pa.s.sed.

And then she said h.e.l.lo to the dean, Ed Friedlander, a nice enough man, doing what he could at a low-budget community college to keep the faculty-a few with serious drinking problems, and the others with a variety of personality disorders-teaching their cla.s.ses, and the students from killing one another. His resemblance to Dean Fleming was all in the age and the suit, she thought, but the sight of him never failed to unnerve Mira, start up the heart, fight or flight, although she always managed to conceal it, and to smile.

Clark was everywhere, too-although he was always the young husband and father who'd smiled so sadly at her in divorce court, and then, later, nodding solemnly on porch steps as he picked up or dropped off their sons. A depressed man, growing older, seeming to have been expecting something to come, now knowing it wasn't going to.

He'd gotten married again. And that also hadn't worked out. Last Mira had heard, he was in Dallas working in some kind of sports equipment shop. They had no reason to keep in touch now that the twins were old enough to drive themselves from one parent to the other.

And the students, of course.

There was Brent Stone, a nice boy from Muleshoe who wanted to be a gym teacher, and Mary Bright, whose name, unfortunately, did not in any way describe her. These could have been any of Mira's students, in other cla.s.ses, at other places, and she supposed she could have been anyone to them in return. They looked at her and thought, she supposed, Aunt Molly, Ms. Emerson, my mom.

Types. Ideals. Reproductions. Representations. Nearly exact copies of one another.

Perry Edwards, of course, was everywhere, but Mira was used to that after all these years. Really, she took comfort in it now when Perry pa.s.sed her on the highway in his pickup, or said, "h.e.l.lo, ma'am," to her from behind the counter at the grocery store. By now, Perry Edwards would have been the age she'd been herself when she met him-but, instead, he was always the age he'd been the night she said good-bye to him in the snowstorm in Jeff Blackhawk's car.

Sometimes she saw him at a movie, maybe a row or two ahead of her, his arm around the shoulder of some girl who looked like Nicole Werner or Denise Graham, or any of those girls, his hand in the popcorn bag between them. She tried never to think of him laid out at Dientz's funeral parlor. The nice suit. The lovely job Ted Dientz would have done to make him look as if he hadn't been shot a few days earlier by a panicked sorority sister with a gun (given to her by a father who firmly believed every pretty girl on an American college campus needed to have one), who had been up late that night reading a book about Ted Bundy when she heard footsteps in the hallway and came out of her room in the dark to find a stranger on the stairwell of the Omega Theta Tau house.

Mira would have gone to the funeral, to see Perry for herself, but Ted had told her that the family had politely requested that she not come-and she'd also received a letter from the university lawyers saying she was not to speak to the media, the students, or the families of the students about anything that had happened. And she was never to write about it.

Mira's own lawyer had said, "No one has a right to establish these restrictions. Last time I checked, this was a pretty free country. If you want to write a book about it, write the book and we'll stick it to them then."

But as it turned out, Mira had no interest in writing about death, ever again.

Over the years, until he died one Christmas morning, Mira had kept in close touch with Ted Dientz. He'd become obsessed, as she'd known he would. (She'd thought they were alike that way, but as it turned out he was much more pa.s.sionate than Mira had ever been.) The DNA test had proved ("Incontrovertibly!" he'd shouted over the phone) that the body he'd buried in Nicole Werner's coffin, the one from which he'd taken the sample for his bloodstain card, was in no way related to anyone whose hair strands had been found in the brush Perry Edwards had taken from the Werners' house.

"Unless Nicole Werner was adopted, or that hairbrush was used by someone other than Werner women, there is no way the girl I buried in that coffin was a daughter or a sibling of any female in that family."

By then, Mira didn't care about Nicole-where she might have been, who might have been buried under her headstone instead of her. Perry was dead, her husband had left her, and she'd lost her job in an explosion of accusations and suspicion and hatred.

Still, she told Ted to call her after the exhumation. There would be, she knew, no talking him out of this. He was determined to dig her up. When Nicole's parents couldn't be located, permission had to be granted by Etta Werner, Nicole's grandmother, to exhume the grave. (Etta was a feisty old woman who'd attended nearly every funeral in Bad Axe for the past eighty years, and the idea of digging up a grave didn't seem to bother her at all. She never even asked for an explanation.) And, afterward, when Ted called Mira with the news, she had to sit down to keep herself from pa.s.sing out when he told her that there was no one, nothing, in that coffin at all.

"Empty," he'd said, sounding empty himself. "And no one anywhere to explain that fact to me, or with the vaguest interest, it seems, in investigating it-except for me."

And although Ted Dientz devoted all the last years of his life to solving that mystery, he never managed to uncover the truth about anything. He closed down his funeral home, wrote letters to newspapers, called authorities and experts everywhere in the world. He became possessed by the empty grave, by Nicole Werner's DNA, by other missing sorority girls all over the state. And then all over the country.

It was amazing how many there were!

They could have formed their own private sorority house somewhere: some large old mansion hidden behind a shadowy hedge, where they built floats out of tissue paper flowers and styled one another's hair and sang songs and took secret oaths for all of eternity.

Ted believed that someone from the university, or from the sorority, or both, had been trying to hide a hazing death and had come in the night and spirited away the remains of the dead girl so that her ident.i.ty could never be determined. They were professionals. They'd done it with surgical precision. The gra.s.s over "Nicole's" grave, the crucifix, the stuffed animals-all appeared to the naked eye never to have been disturbed.

But, later, when none of the hundreds of relatives of the Werners' in Bad Axe were able, or willing, to reveal the whereabouts of Nicole's parents so that they might be told the news that their daughter's grave was empty, Ted came to suspect not only Nicole's parents but the entire Werner clan. (Even Etta: Hadn't there been something almost gleeful in the way she'd given her permission to exhume her granddaughter's corpse?) He thought most of them knew exactly where Nicole was, and that she hadn't been the girl in that grave.

But there were other possibilities Ted Dientz was willing to consider, especially as the years pa.s.sed. He had worked with the dead long enough, he told Mira, to know that strange things happened. This world was more than a material thing. Was it impossible that he had buried Nicole Werner on her funeral day, and that, somehow, she had escaped from her grave?

What could Mira say?

Ted Dientz died without answers, and Mira had no idea what his wife and children might have done with the bloodstain cards he'd kept all those years in the bas.e.m.e.nt. All those souls he'd wanted to bring back, that army of his dead he'd been waiting to raise-he was with them now, she supposed. There were so few answers in this life, and what few there were often scattered with winds. And only now and then little bits of belated justice.

It took a decade, but eventually some sharp soph.o.m.ore who wrote for the university newspaper dug up the story of Denise Graham, of Nicole Werner. The student managed to pa.s.s herself off as an Omega Theta Tau pledge for six months, and then to expose the rituals for what they were.

The sorority sisters were not, as it happened, drinking tequila and hyperventilating and pa.s.sing out before their raisings in the coffin. They were being injected by an EMT from the local ambulance service with Scopolamine, the zombie drug.

At the right dosage, the soph.o.m.ore reported, as Mira already knew, the drug causes you to sleep and then awake feeling born again. At higher dosages, it makes it impossible to form memories of anything that has happened in the hours before and after the injection. At the wrong dosage, it kills you.

Mira followed the story on the Internet from Texas. She would have been lying if she hadn't admitted that she wanted to see some administrators fired, but they never were. She'd hoped at least that the Omega Theta Tau chapter would be shut down. But it wasn't-receiving, instead, a hefty fine, and its members, counseling.

Mira hoped they might be able to prove that Craig Clements-Rabbitt had been injected, himself, with Scopolamine, and that's why he remembered nothing of the accident. She was herself convinced that the car he'd been driving with Nicole in it had been chased off the road by someone trying to cover up for the sorority, someone who knew that Nicole and Craig had the dead, or dying, Denise Graham in the backseat. Someone who knew that they were trying to get her to a hospital and who was trying to keep them from getting her there.

Craig and Nicole were run off the road, and the car was burned later by those trying to cover up the hazing, the overdose.

Nicole's death was faked. Denise had been her stand-in. Being a good sorority girl, Nicole went along with it.

Craig Clements-Rabbitt was blamed, and he'd taken the blame. He'd been drugged, and he'd been in love, which is its own zombie drug, especially when mixed with guilt and grief.

You could still Google Nicole Werner, and still find bloggers who claimed to see her ghost at G.o.dwin Hall.

And there was evidence to be found on the Internet, too, that students had never managed to squelch the fascination with Alice Meyers, either. Every year, there were the cutters. Every year there were fewer and fewer applicants to G.o.dwin Honors College-a fact that would have been officially blamed on the laziness of today's students, Mira knew, but which she suspected was because parents didn't want their kids, especially their daughters, living in G.o.dwin Hall.

But there was always one such hall on every campus, wasn't there? It used to be Fairwell Hall they shunned, as Mira recalled.

Here at South Plains College there was an Alice Meyers, too-a girl who haunted the auditorium where, it was said, she'd hanged herself from the rafters.

And there was also a Nicole Werner: Here her name was Sara Bain. One day she'd been holding on to her boyfriend's back on his motorcycle, and they'd hit-who knows? A squirrel? A rabbit? A rock in the road? The details didn't matter. Sara Bain was thrown from the back of the motorcycle. She landed in the median, where her boyfriend, dazed and b.l.o.o.d.y, had rushed to her side.

A small mound of stones ringed a cherry tree in the South Plains College courtyard. Every spring, a group of girls was rumored to huddle around the cherry tree on the night of a full moon to cut themselves, and sing songs, read their poetry aloud. In the morning some horrified faculty member would find blood splashed on the stones. There would be talk of chopping down the tree, of carting away the stones, but no one ever did.

109.

Karess got lost somewhere south of Bad Axe, and by the time she found her way off the freeway she was exasperated and wondering why the h.e.l.l she'd thought this was a good idea, and what it was she'd been hoping to find or lose by coming back to this G.o.dforsaken state after all these years away in search of a boy she'd barely known.

But somewhere inside herself she also knew, even as she threw her ruined map (coffee spilled on it, and wrinkled to s.h.i.t) behind her into the backseat of her rental car, why: Somewhere inside her Perry Edwards was still alive.