And there’s Bemis, who seems to pop up on the flat plain, somehow behind Frazee, and gazes wildly around himself, as though he’s surprised. As if the wind has lifted him up and dropped him there. The rifle in his hands seems to jerk as he lifts it. As though it is what’s lifting, not his arms.
No. As though the air itself is tugging his arms. As though he’s a marionette.
And just as it happens — right as the wind rises again, Jalena can see it this time, a huge, black, screaming thing, boring down on Bemis like a steam train — she begins to understand. Realizes what her brilliant colleagues have somehow missed, all these years. Whatever is out here — whatever spirited off David Roemer’s lover, or some flickering essence of her, and lured him after it, again and again, until it was finished playing with him, whatever has drawn them all out here tonight — it isn’t kind. Mr. Dark and his Carnival, whatever they are: they are not kind. They are not offering opportunities to commune with loved ones, or invitations to join them, or comfort in grief. They are playing. Toying. Casting the living in roles they cannot help but enact. Assigning them parts in a pantomime all its own.
She watches the wind smack into Bemis, all but lift him off his feet as it yanks his arms up, levels the rifle. Frazee shrieks, “David,” one last time before the gun goes off and the bullet blasts through her brain.
Then the wind engulfs Jalena, too, driving her to the earth, which is giving way as she knew it would, opening as she teeters, falls, the ground shockingly soft on her bruised back, the sky whirling and full of faces. So many faces.
“Dad?” she hears herself say. Then her vision clears, and the stars are on her.
She awakens in the bed of the truck, laid out flat with her head in Parrott’s lap. When she opens her eyes, the stars are still wheeling. She tries to lunge upright but her spine seizes, and she cries out.
“Sssh,” Parrott says, stroking her hair. “Sssh.”
The stars slow, like a switched-off ceiling fan. Slow. Go still. Stay put. Then they start to fade.
Which means it’s morning?
“How long?” she finally manages.
Parrott never looks down, answers automatically, as though she’s one of those fairground fortune-teller automatons. Climb on the scale, tell me your birthday, I’ll show you your future.
“A while,” she says. “You better have that head checked when we get back. Although I don’t think anything actually hit you.”
Red and blue lights skitter over the back of the truck cab, and again Jalena tries to rise. Again, she fails, but realizes what those lights are. She sucks in a long, deep breath, and a new feeling fills her. It should be panic. But it hurts too much.
“Frazee?” she whispers, although she already remembers.
Parrott just goes on stroking.
“Bemis?”
With a nod, Parrott directs Jalena’s gaze to the right. The bed of the truck is open. Bemis sits in the back of the nearest of three police cars, his head down, his handcuffed hands in his hair.
“Rogan?”
“She went with Alexa, of course. With Alexa’s body. They’ve already taken that.”
“Green?”
Parrott goes silent again, and Jalena thinks of his bottom desk drawer, full of photographs he has never let anyone see. Of a life, she is now certain, he had long since lost.
“Green’s gone, too?”
The sky continues to lighten. The stars slip back into their caves, one by one. Jalena imagines them up there behind the blue; she will sense them up there every second of the rest of her life. Hanging upside down, ringing the earth in their unfathomable trillions. A Hughes poem pops into her head, a rare one she’d studied for her dissertation, written during the Spanish Civil War and forgotten, about creeping dream shadows, a mother rocking her baby to sleep amid tanks and sirens. About wind grabbing and tossing men like straw.
“It’ll all come out now,” Parrott says eventually. “It probably should.”
But time passes, and policemen come and go, and no one asks them anything. The police car with Bemis in it returns to town. No one seems to have any idea where Green has gone; he’s just gone. Not until the sun has risen clear of the grass and fixed itself on the horizon does Parrott tell Jalena the rest, while they just sit together, alone again, with the sparkling in every direction, all around them. Winking with light.
“It happened so fast,” Parrott says, still stroking Jalena’s hair as though petting a cat or comforting a child. “It took nine years playing out, but the end came so incredibly fast.
“We got out here, where those coordinates had sent us. We poured out of this very truck in this very place and looked all around and saw lots of grass and nothing else. Then we heard the kid screaming, and we just raced onto the grass. All of us. Team Lit and Comp, Halloween Lifeguards, to the rescue. Ridiculous, really. Who did any of us think we were kidding?”
A shiver seems to spread across the prairie, from one end of the horizon to the other. Like a laugh, Jalena thinks, and shudders.
“Frazee saw him first. She called out, and I looked, and I saw what she saw. There was the kid, Marco, stretched out on some rock. And there was David Roemer over him, with. I don’t even know what it was. In my memory, it was a knife, but it might have been another rock. They were just frozen that way. It really was biblical. Some crazy Abraham and Isaac thing.
“But this is what’s important, Jalena. This is what you need to understand. It’s what we’ve always comforted ourselves with. And I still think it’s true. I really do.
“We were, I don’t know, fifty yards away? Maybe more? So David had plenty of time. He could have done whatever he wanted with that kid. And he just held there. I think he’d been poised like that for a long while. Do you see? He was never going to kill that kid. Not ever. The whole charade was for us. He just wanted to create that image. That moment.”
“So that one of you would kill him,” Jalena finishes. Because she does understand. He was going with his lover, or so he believed, which meant he’d be joining the Dark Carnival of the murdered dead. Which meant he had to be one of them.
“The rest of us — well, the men — just froze when they saw him. Rogan, she was new, she didn’t really understand what was happening. And I was doing something really helpful like waving my arms and shouting a lot. So that left Alexa. And Alexa. she was always the bravest. She just barreled toward him. Straight into him. She drove him right over that cliff. For a second, we thought they’d both gone over, but she’d just fallen in the grass. David landed on his head. We could all hear it splat even from where we were standing.
“And there it is. Now you know.”
Pushing gently but firmly in the small of Jalena’s back, Parrott eases her, finally, to a sitting position. With careful fingers, Jalena probes at the bruised spots on her spine, pressing until tears pour into her eyes.
“One of you,” Jalena whispers, in Frazee’s chanting cadence.
Parrott gazes at her. Her expression could almost be a smile. A lost and rueful one. “One of us. Think we can get you in the truck?”
They manage that, eventually. For one long moment, after she gets the engine started, Parrott sits, watching the prairie. Jalena, though, can’t bring herself to look at the grass. She watches Parrott, instead. And Parrott looks. not peaceful, exactly. But also not scared.
And that’s when Jalena knows she has it wrong. That all of them do. They always have. Because whatever it was that was holding that boy on that rock, that lured David Roemer out there and then stayed his hand, it wasn’t David Roemer. Any more than Frazee’s murderer was Bill Bemis.