I kept moving faster and faster, digging in deep. I had my headphones on, so I could pretend that I didn’t hear her, that she wasn’t behind me.
I walked along the path that led away from campus. It brought you up to the edge of The Hollows Wood, where the school had created and maintained paths through some of the state-owned acreage. There was a two-mile, four-mile, and eight-mile loop that wound through the woods or down along the banks of the Black River, or up to the highest elevation in The Hollows, a scenic lookout over a steep drop into the river below called Bird’s Eye Rock.
Up there, you could see the whole town of The Hollows and into the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. I had watched brilliant sunsets and soaring eagles, a fire that raged through a warehouse on the edge of town. I had smoked dope up there with Beck. But usually I went up there alone when the world was pressing in and the weight of all my secrets was crushing me.
It was the one place in the whole world where I could just be myself, with no eyes watching. And that’s where I was headed, even though it was dark and cold. It was where I wanted-no, needed-to be. Beck would never follow me there, I thought. But she did.
After the detective left, and Lynne and Frank returned to their hotel, I was more than a little grateful for the distraction of Luke’s poem. Otherwise, I’d have just lain there staring out the window at the moon and ruminating on all the dread possibilities. The doctor had warned me about too much down time, where that catastrophic thinking of mine had room to grow, expand, wrap around me like a strangling vine.
So I took the card and key from my jacket pocket and reread the poem, held the old key in my hand. I was surprised to find myself hoping for a challenge, something to occupy my busy brain, but it didn’t take me very long to figure out Luke’s poem. After all, mad genius or not, he was still an eleven-year-old boy who would sit in his room and play video games all day if he could. How creative could he really be?
I opened my laptop and started searching: “Hollows, New York, Suicide.” The first listing on the search engine was for The Hollows Historical Society Web site.
I already knew that there were lots of supposedly haunted places in The Hollows. So many that the historical society offered a “haunted tour” in the weeks leading up to Halloween as a fund-raiser for preserving some of the town’s oldest buildings. And people came from all over to creep themselves out.
For weeks, there were small white buses carting people around the town. There were walking tours, Segway tours (oh my God, really?), and kiddie tours that ended with hot cider and pumpkin muffins at the Old Mill. There was even a stop on our campus. (Naturally, the fraternity boys lived for this tour.) Once upon a time, our college used to be a convent, and our dorms were the cloisters where the nuns had lived.
In the early 1900s, one of the young novices managed to get pregnant. She was apparently able to hide it for the duration, and then died trying to give birth by herself. The baby was given away for adoption. Residents of the Marianna dormitory had, for decades, claimed to see her wandering the halls, looking for her lost child. It’s the last stop on the tour. As the guide dutifully tells the sad tale, the Delta Phi boys inevitably turn up draped in sheets and smelling of beer, and walk by, moaning. It’s usually good for a big laugh from the tour group, who are apparently quite aware of the silly nature of the whole thing but enjoy it anyway.
I scrolled through The Hollows Historical Society Web site, scanning their list of haunted sites-complete with an album of photos, creepy music, and a well-written history of each location. It took me about five minutes of reading to find the place on which Luke had based his lousy poem.
Within its walls,
For a hundred years,
People have learned and prayed and died.
Now, some believe, a tortured soul is trapped inside.
I read about a small, dilapidated building, erected in 1901, that sat sad and abandoned in the old cemetery down by the high school. It had lived several lives, first as one of the original schoolhouses in The Hollows, later as an Episcopal church, then finally as the office of the cemetery caretaker and a storage facility for the equipment needed to keep the grounds.
During the 1918 influenza pandemic, it had been used as a makeshift hospital, and five people died there. There was a colorful description of each of the five ghosts-a man, a woman, and three children. They wandered about at night: the children who happily play among the tilting headstones, the woman who is searching for something, forever looking behind trees, and the man who stands stock-still always beside the same grave.
But there was only one brief sentence about the caretaker who in 1995, as Luke so eloquently put it, drank a bottle of whiskey and ate the barrel of his gun. Another caretaker had never been found, and now it was the people of the historical society who through volunteer efforts maintained the graveyard.
Of course, the Web site had an agenda to run, to make things sound scary enough to attract but not frightening enough to repel. So the mention of the relatively recent suicide was brief and underplayed. It was as if only old ghosts were permitted to wander The Hollows, harmless shades who passed hundreds of years ago. The spirits wandering around The Hollows were just harmless tricks of light, and the wind through the trees, and the idea that maybe, maybe there might have been something moving in the dark. Certainly nothing real or terrifying, nothing horrible enough to keep people away, only enough to draw the curiosity seekers in. A suicide, the ghost of the man who in terrible psychic pain committed suicide, is not among the featured, harmless Hollows shades.
Why did he do it?
What secret did he hide?
But, of course, there are no secrets anymore. Not in the electronic age, where we lay everything bare or it is laid bare for us. Every ugly thing on earth is just a few keystrokes away. That’s why you must be so careful.
As I continued to move through the listings on the search page, I found a news item about the man who committed suicide in the graveyard shack, Harvey Greenwald.
He was a wretched man, a crooked golem with a deeply lined face, and wet, wide blue eyes lashed thick like a girl’s. It would be easy to say he was a convicted pedophile, a porn addict, facing yet another accusation, because according to the newspaper article I found online, he was all of those things.
But he was also a husband, a father of two young girls. I know, from bitter personal experience, that there is always so much more to people than what is written about them in police reports and newspaper articles. They never get it quite right, as if the retelling of a life makes it less than what it is-or was. He was a good man, his wife was quoted as saying. What they say about him, it isn’t true. It can’t be. He left a note with a brief single sentence: I’m sorry.
In the articles about the investigation, a familiar name kept popping up: Detective Jones Cooper. He was Dr. Cooper’s husband, and he’d also been the lead investigator on Elizabeth’s disappearance. It was odd to see his name. I remembered him; he’d made me nervous. He’d asked a lot of questions of me, seemed to think I was hiding something. Of course I had been.
Ainsley had taken an Ambien, turned on her whale sounds, and donned her lavender-scented eye mask in a hale effort to get some sleep. It had been hours since Lynne and Frank had left, both of them looking dazed and worried. I didn’t see any of the vitriol between them that Beck had so often described. They seemed to share a sad and tender connection. He kept a hand on the small of her back as they left the room. I’d seen him take a strand of her silken blond hair, she touch his tattooed arm. Beck’s name was tattooed around one of Frank’s wrists, in linked letters that looked more like a tribal pattern than anything else; Lynne on the other. They didn’t seem like people about to get divorced. I could see why Beck found them so confusing. We hate our parents for having their own lives, don’t we, for making decisions for themselves that don’t seem to take us into account. They’re not people, not really. They’re parents; how dare they live and love and die without us?