“I do not,” she said, still grinning, though her ears were hot now, and her neck.
“You resemble someone I used to know. It’s uncanny. The ears and chin.”
“Why, thank you,” Zee said, and leaned back so she could get around his finger without it grazing her breast.
“A man, mind you!” he called after her. “It was a man!”
22
Doug had been much more confident about the soccer chapters in the previous book — he’d played varsity in high school, three lifetimes ago — than about the theater business here. He was flummoxed by the parts of Frieda’s outline where the Populars and the Friends shared a dressing room. In the back of an old notebook, he’d begun listing things he needed to research:
Would have bra?
Purse? Backpack?
Stage makeup?
Undress in front of each other or hide in stalls?
Chairs backstage? Benches?
They read like a pedophilic stalker’s notes, and he wanted them scratched out as soon as possible. He could maybe use the Internet for the theater parts, but he shuddered to think where an AltaVista search for “twelve-year-old, brassiere” would lead.
He started down to look for Miriam, but she was on the landing of the stairs, cross-legged, sorting through an ice cube tray of colored beads. She said “Oh!” and some of the glassy blue ones splashed out and rolled down the steps. Doug bounded down, picked them up with the sweat of his fingertips, then shook them into Miriam’s outstretched palm.
“I’ll tell you why I’m here,” she said, as Doug sat on the step above her. He regretted his choice of seat immediately. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he could see too far down her green tank top. He leaned back and looked instead at the ceiling. Miriam said, “I wasn’t sleeping well, so I thought I’d spend time in the ghostliest part of the coach house. Just to dare something to happen. If it does, I’ll know. And if it doesn’t, I’ll sleep better.”
“Why is this the ghostliest part?” He hoped she didn’t have a good answer.
“Oh, you know. Doorways, staircases, attics, windows. You never see a ghost in the middle of the room.”
“I’ve never seen a ghost at all.”
“Well, yes. That.”
“But Doug,” she said. “I found out. How she died.”
“What, Violet?” He sat back up despite himself.
“I went to the library and they got me set with microfiche. There was an obituary with no information at all — But did you know she was born in England? I love it! English ghosts are scarier, right? — so I was about to give up. But then there was this weird article a few days later that was like, ‘Husbands, pray for your wives!’ You know, very 1906. And then it talks about ‘to perish by starvation, in this land of plenty.’ And it was clearly about her. Starvation.”
“Seriously. Wow. Wait, I thought she killed herself.”
“Exactly. Something doesn’t add up.”
“Was anorexia a thing back then?”
Miriam tilted her head. “That’s the boring version. I think Augustus killed her. I think he starved her.”
Doug let out a low, slow whistle and laughed. “So I need your help on something less serious,” he said. “Since you’re already in on my secret.” He decided not to ask the bra question, in light of current circumstances. “Do twelve-year-olds carry purses?”
She put the bead tray down. “Oh, fun! Well, the Populars would have chic purses. The Friends should have backpacks. Cece probably has an army surplus bag, something cool that she stenciled on.” Doug scribbled in the notebook as she talked, and twenty minutes later most of his problems were solved.
She said, “Just pay me back when you find that original Demuth painting.”
And then, before he could fathom why he was doing it, he told her about the plan with Leland, who had conceded to go undercover next week. Maybe it was for the same reason he hadn’t shared the news with Zee: One secret, whether shared or kept, begot more.
“I want to help!” she said. “I won’t get in the way. It’s just that nothing exciting has happened to me for such a long time.”
“You’d be handy for identifying art,” he said. “Not that my hopes are up. I’m skeptical. But just a list of who stayed here and when, if Parfitt were on the list — it would be huge. You know, who was with him, that kind of thing.”
Miriam rubbed her bare arms. “See, don’t you feel the ghosts around you when you say things like that? All those people, all that creative energy — it had to go somewhere. And Parfitt was another suicide. People like that are the most probable ghosts.”
He stretched his legs, which had fallen asleep.
“Oh!” Miriam said. “You have scars!” She was eye level with his knees and the thick white scars below each kneecap, and to Doug’s surprise she reached out her finger and traced down the length of the left one, as if it concerned her greatly.
Doug knew he ought to run for his life, but he did the next best thing. He said, pointedly, “How did you and Case meet?”
“Oh, he bought one of my pieces. And I thought he was so old, because he was twenty-eight! Can you believe that? I was still in college.”
“He’s had a rough go here.” He laughed in what he hoped was a friendly way.
She said, “I wonder about this house. This whole place. Gracie said it’s lucky and it’s unlucky. It’s been lucky for me. I’ve never done so much good work in my life.”
“Don’t take philosophical advice from Gracie.”
Miriam picked a red bead out of the container. “I’ve seen an astrologer do a birth chart for a house, just like a person.” She saw the look on his face. “I know, stars, but it’s no weirder than genetics or pheromones telling us what to do, right? It’s just the genome of a place.”
“But you like it here.”
“It’s like — did you ever play with magnets as a kid? You know how if you have them turned to the wrong pole it pushes away, but you flip the same magnet around and it clicks together? I feel like Case is the wrong pole, the one that gets pushed. And I’m the right one.”
It wasn’t till he was back in his room, silently mouthing her words just to feel their strangeness on his lips, that he felt they almost made a kind of sense.
One Twix and two beers later, he was on fire. He found the bra information in the FFL Bible. He was stupid not to have looked there first. Candy got a bra in book 60, apparently, then Molly, but not Melissa. He spun his chair to celebrate, and got back to work. With Violet’s unexplained starvation fresh on his mind, he decided (why the hell not? The books could use some edge) to give one of the Populars an eating disorder. He showed Amelia Wynn, the sixth-grade dictator, eating a glass of salted ice. He showed her counting her ribs in the dressing-room mirror. Her arms were as thin as tapers.
23
(I wrap my ankles around chair rungs
So I don’t spring out and bite your shoulder.
Your thumb and finger
On the edges of a CD
Your tongue
Makes its way between your teeth
In time with music
I want to be
That music
The hair just below
Your navel
Curls to the left.