Fields and fields of fingernails, sticking up out of the ground.
“Marco Roemer. Maddy’s boy. David’s nephew. He was maybe eight, then? Apparently, David had showed up out of nowhere, picked up the kid from soccer practice, and brought him here. I mean, to the university. ‘Just stopped off to grab the rest of my files,’ he said. ‘Say goodbye, Marco.’
“And that was it. Off they went. Leaving us all. ”
“. just sitting there,” Frazee says, so sadly that Jalena takes her eyes off the prairie long enough to check on her. Frazee is crying silently, watching the grass. “Doing fuck-all, as always.”
“Paying him homage,” says Parrott.
“Instead of getting up and helping.”
“Actually,” says Rogan, “after he showed up, we didn’t know what to do except sit around and stare at each other, as usual. And wonder why we all seemed to feel so compelled to retell this story, about some fucked-up fucker even more fucked up than the rest of us.”
“Someone actually capable of living his life, you mean,” Parrott says. “Someone capable of real love.”
“Ah. Right. The digging-up-graves real love. The lit professor’s ideal. The made-up, fucked-up kind.”
This time, Frazee doesn’t take Rogan’s hand or even turn around. And that’s why Rogan is so angry, Jalena understands abruptly. She’s hurt, and she’s scared, because Frazee is so far away from her.
Then she thinks, I am actually seeing. I see.
“We were all still in our places,” says Parrott, “when Maddy Roemer burst through the door. ‘He’s got Marco,’ she said.”
“ ‘He’s going to kill Marco,’ ” murmurs Frazee.
Dazed by the lights on the prairie, the silver grass, the stars blooming in the blackness like thousands of parachutes opening all at once, an invading army gliding earthward, Jalena thinks she has misheard. “What?”
“ ‘He’s got my son,’ ” says Parrott, with a waver clearly meant to replicate Maddy Roemer’s. “ ‘He’s gone all the way batshit. He says he’s found them. The Carnival. He says they’re all dead.’ ”
Jalena stirs, alarmed. “What? Who? I don’t—”
“ ‘Murdered. All of them. Or something. They’re here, they’re back, and he thinks he’s gone to find Kate. And to do that — to find them — I think he’s going to kill Marco. Oh my God, he’s going to kill my son.’ ”
“To lure the Carnival — the murdered dead — to him,” Frazee explains. As though that explained anything. “Or get himself invited. Something like that.”
“ ‘He’s going to kill Marco,’ ” Parrott says again. In Maddy Roemer’s voice. “ ‘You’re his friends, aren’t you? Help me.’ ”
“We were all on our feet by that point,” says Frazee, flat toned. She still has tears in her eyes, and her hair whips out from under the scarves as the truck plunges forward and still more stars blossom all around them. She is speaking through her scarf, her coat collar, her chattering teeth. “Because the thing is, Jalena. we didn’t understand what she was saying, exactly. We still don’t, to be honest. But we knew she was right.”
“Right? Right? About what? That. that this Carnival was full of dead people?”
“That he was going to kill Marco. Kill his nephew. We all. you could just see it in him.”
“So there we all were,” Parrott says. “Galvanized at last. Ready to help. Because we all, well, we loved David.”
“Or we loved what happened to him,” says Frazee.
Across the truck, Rogan nods furiously, and for once, she’s the one who reaches out, grabs Frazee’s hand. “That’s the truth. That’s exactly right. We loved talking about David.”
“This part was almost funny,” says Parrott, though she doesn’t sound as though she thinks it was funny. “We realized that not a single one of us had any idea what to do next. Maddy didn’t know where he’d gone, understand, just that he’d taken the boy. All that scholarship in the room, and not a single one of us could figure out how to research a moment we were actually in.”
“How to engage life as it flies by,” Frazee says.
Parrott drones on. “I can’t remember whose idea it finally was—”
“Mine,” Rogan snaps. “It was mine.”
For the first time since the lights appeared in the grass, Frazee looks up and meets her partner’s glare. A smile — the ghost of one — flickers on her face, under the scarf. “It was yours.”
“Facebook,” Rogan says. “All the kids were doing it. So many that even we’d heard about it.”
“Once we were there, on the site, it didn’t take long,” Parrott says. “We. not Googled. There wasn’t Google, was there? What was the verb?”
“Who cares? How about ‘searched’?”
“Okay, yes, Dr. Rogan, fine. Just trying to be precise. We searched. We tried ‘carnival.’ We tried ‘dead people.’ And then we just typed in its name. ‘Mr. Dark’s Carnival.’ And there it was.”
“A single mention,” Frazee says. “On one user page.”
“Mr. Judgeandjury. Born 1881. Two friends, neither of whom any of us knew. One post, zero likes.”
“What was the post?”
“Numbers. Just numbers. N E 27 07 M 12. Or something very close to that.”
“None of us had any idea what those were, obviously. But Maddy Roemer was smart as hell. Even smarter than her brother, I think.”
“GPS coordinates?” Jalena says, and Rogan takes her eyes off Frazee long enough to look right at her, for once.
“Impressive,” she says.
It’s the surprise in Rogan’s voice that rankles Jalena, and also reminds her, again, that all this is for her: a performance, unless it really is a hazing, which it really might be. The words spill from her mouth before she can catch them.
“Africanist smart. Smart African, kemosabe.”
Instead of flaring up, spitting back, or blushing in embarrassment, Rogan levels her stare and holds Jalena’s eyes until Jalena’s slide sideways.
“I was simply marveling that you recognized the notation. None of us other kinda-smart people did. Of course, it was a while ago, now, and those devices weren’t so common.”
“We got down a road atlas,” Parrott says, “then doubled back to the Facebook page to make sure we’d gotten the numbers right. But the post was gone. There was nothing there at all.
“So we just took the numbers we had and went where they led.”
“That drive,” Frazee says suddenly, and not in storytelling rhythm but her everyday cadence. “My God, Darlene. Do you remember that drive?”
The truck, Jalena realizes, has started to slow. It isn’t stopping. But it’s crawling, now. And Green has his face pressed against the passenger-side window like a little boy pulling up to his grandparents’ house on a holiday, with his puffy, weirdly manicured hands poised on the door handle.
“I remember,” says Parrott, though she, too, has turned to stare into the night, over the prairie.
“All that orange light,” says Frazee.
“Was that that year?” Parrott grips the side of the truck, nodding. “It was. You’re right.”
“They—somebody—had slid orange plastic bags over every single streetlight in Clarkston. Also, it had just snowed, remember? The first snow, I think. And the way the wind made those bags flap, so that the light flickered? It was like we were all swimming in jack-o’-lantern light. Like the whole town was a jack-o’-lantern we were floating in.”