As Simple as Snow Page 13

  It wasn’t anything more than a big, thick clump of woods. I had seen it a million times and had never thought anything about it. No one had mentioned it before Anna, and she was a newcomer to town. An old hiking trail led into the woods, but across it hung a chain with a “No Trespassing” sign.

  “Do they think that’s going to stop anybody?” I said.

  “Shouldn’t it say ‘Enter at Your Own Risk’?”

  “Well, it doesn’t look like anyone’s been here lately.” I didn’t see any footprints in the snow. There weren’t any animal tracks either.

  We trudged through the woods until we came on an old chimney sticking out of the snow. It was crumbling at the top, but otherwise was in good shape. Anna scooped away the snow from the base of the chimney and found the stone hearth. She brushed it off and pulled a blanket out of her picnic basket, spread it out on the hearth, and sat down. “This is a good-enough spot,” she said.

  “Isn’t it cold?”

  “Sure, but what are you going to do?”

  “I could start a fire,” I said.

  “Somebody would see the smoke and think the whole forest was on fire,” she said. “Besides, this will warm you up.” She took a drink of brandy and handed me the bottle.

  I sat down beside her, and we took sips of the brandy and ate the food she had brought. She peeled an orange and handed me one of the segments. It was a brilliant curve of color against the white of the snow. Everything was sharp, the smell of the brandy, the crisp air. I could have stayed there forever.

  It started to get dark. The sky was a deep blue, and stars were visible. There was going to be a full moon. “Let’s wait for the ghosts,” she said, and moved against me. We sat huddled in the freezing darkness and waited.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked her.

  “I would like to believe,” she said. “I would like to think that there’s something beyond this life, something that connects us. It would make the world more interesting.”

  “So you think this place is haunted and all that stuff we read about Mumler is true?”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “That’s the problem, too many people have junked it up with legends and hoaxes and schemes.”

  She told me about Houdini.

  “One of the tricks he designed, and even patented, but never performed was to be frozen in a block of ice, or at least a theatrical representation of one, and escape, walk out of it, without disturbing it at all.

  “The Water Cell Torture was like a phone booth filled with two hundred fifty gallons of water. Houdini was locked inside, upside down, and then a curtain was placed between him and the audience. His attendants would be visible, at least one holding an axe, to break the glass booth just in case. Houdini would ask the audience to hold their breath with him. The audience waited and waited. You could hear people gasping as they couldn’t hold it any longer. Still, nothing happened. They say that some people in the audience would become frantic, start screaming for the attendants to free Houdini, save him from drowning, and then, just when the audience couldn’t take any more, when no one could possibly be holding their breath, Houdini would emerge from behind the curtain.”

  “That’s some trick,” I said.

  “It was a trick,” she said. “Houdini could get out of the Cell whenever he wanted. Some people claim that he would sit behind the curtain reading a paper, waiting for the right moment to come out. What’s most amazing is that it’s a performance where nothing happens—the audience is just looking at a curtain and a couple of guys standing around. It’s what they think is happening that gets them agitated and excited, anxious and nervous, and finally relieved and amazed. The trick wasn’t so much in getting out of the Cell—he had figured that part out long before he ever took it onstage—but in manipulating the crowd. He knew how to play the crowd so well that he knew fake mediums and spiritualists were doing the same thing.

  “His friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the biggest sucker, he fell for the cheapest tricks. Doyle had lost a son in World War One and wanted desperately to believe in séances and mediums,” Anna went on. “Houdini thought that this type of desperation was dangerous and allowed people to exploit Doyle’s grief and desire. So Houdini tried to convince Doyle that the mediums were really nothing more than skillful magicians. He wrote Doyle letter after letter denouncing mediums Doyle believed, and he described exactly how they had managed their tricks. Doyle refused to believe and told Houdini that the problem was that Houdini didn’t approach the mediums with an open mind. The friendship turned into a feud, and Houdini changed his act to include the exposure of the tricks used by mediums.

  “The funny thing,” Anna said, “is that both men wanted to believe. Doyle wanted to believe so much that he was willing to accept any medium as genuine in order to hear from his son, and Houdini wanted to communicate with his dead mother so badly that he refused to accept the frauds and the fakes.”

  “That’s why he used the code?”

  “Exactly. He had tried to contact his mother through a medium, and one told him that she had made contact. Houdini wanted to know what his mother’s message was. ‘I’m through. At last, I’m through,’ the medium told him. Houdini’s mother couldn’t speak English, so he knew it wasn’t true, and that’s why he created a code for himself and his wife.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, giving the woods an opportunity to live up to their reputation. Nothing happened. It only got darker. There was no moon, and I couldn’t see farther than ten feet. The closest trees were like enormous columns, and everything behind them was a solid black wall.

  “Do you want to wait for the moon?” Anna asked.

  “Not really.” I was colder than I wanted to be. She handed me the flashlight. “Do you think we need it?” I said, and took a few steps away from her. She almost disappeared in the darkness, only her blond hair visible, dimly shining. She came over and took my hand. “Listen,” she whispered, and gripped my hand. We stood for a few seconds in the cold silence. “What?” I finally whispered back.

  “You can almost hear that Cure song I put on that first CD for you, can’t you?” she said out loud, and started singing the first verse, before breaking into laughter. I turned on the flashlight and we slowly made our way out of Mumler.

  “Now we’re cursed,” she said when we left the trees and the darkness and the Cure behind us.

  “I’m ready for it,” I said. “I feel like I’ve already been cursed.”

  “That’s not a nice thing to say.” She came up to me quickly and kissed me, then ran down the road. I chased after, keeping the beam of the flashlight on her back, the light bending around her black clothes. She ran off the road and through the snow, down to the river. “Let’s walk across,” she said.

  “I don’t think we should. I mean so soon after we’ve been cursed.”

  “You think we should wait a half-hour?”

  “Like swimming after you eat?” I groaned.

  “You’re the one who wants to wait.” She took a step out onto the frozen river.

  “Let’s at least do this during the day,” I said.

  “Everybody does that.” She took a few more steps. I took a step onto the ice and shined the flashlight across the surface. There was a layer of brittle snow. I couldn’t see any water or fishing holes or other breaks, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, waiting under a thin patch of ice. Anna was about twenty feet out. She turned back into the beam of light and looked at me, her black-mittened hand in front of her face, shielding her eyes. “Come on,” she said, seeing I was still at the shore. “Come on.”

  I took the picnic basket and swung it back behind me and then tossed it forward onto the ice. I thought that I could slide it to her and test the ice between us, even though the basket weighed a fraction of what I did. Instead, the basket skidded to a stop a few feet away from me, slowed by the snow.

  “You’re definitely cursed,” she said. She waited for me, but I told her to go ahead, we
didn’t need to double the weight on a small space of ice. I knew this river; I had skated on it and walked across it hundreds of times in my life, but always in daylight. Anna acted as if she owned it, walking confidently across the surface, as if she did this every night, while I treaded more cautiously, examining every inch of ice between us and the other shore. My heart was thumping in my chest as I imagined us both breaking through the ice into the swift current just beneath our feet.

  Finally we reached the opposite bank and I scrambled off the ice and collapsed. Even though I had been moving slowly and carefully, I felt as if I had just run the hundred-yard dash. I was out of breath and sweating. I turned the flashlight toward Anna, kneeling beside me; she was beaming, her face reflecting the light with the stars thrown out across the dark sky behind her. “How fun was that?” She was right; even though I’d been half scared to death, it was the most fun I’d had in a long time.

  7 february

  “I’ve finished my obituaries,” she said.

  “The whole town?”

  “Everybody. Do you want to see the last one?” She grabbed her notebooks and flipped through the pages, then handed me one. “I know you like him and everything, that’s what took me so long with his.”

  It was Mr. Devon’s obituary:

  William Devon, former art teacher and high school athletic coach, was found dead in his home after a fire that started sometime around 4:00 a.m. Mr. Devon’s girlfriend, and former student, Jana Chapman, escaped the blaze through a second-story bedroom window, but firefighters could not rescue Mr. Devon, who was asleep on a couch downstairs, where the fire started. It is still unclear how it began, and Hilliker police are actively investigating the scene at 32 Eddowes Street. “There are some inconsistencies with an accidental fire,” George Godley, Hilliker detective, said, “and we will continue to work with the fire department and investigate the scene until we can come to a determination for the cause.”

  William Devon was born on June 3, 1969, in Tacoma, Washington. His father was an itinerant carpenter, and the family moved frequently, living in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Arkansas, and Florida before William was in high school. He lettered in football, track, and baseball at Fort Kelly High School, excelling particularly in football, where he was named to the all-state team his junior and senior years as running back. His 1,283 yards rushing set school records in season rushing yardage and total offense in 1983. He scored 130 points that season, and had 307 yards rushing in a single game against Stride. In the first quarter of that game, Devon lost four teeth on a play in which he also lost his helmet at the yard of scrimmage but continued to run for nearly fifteen yards before being tackled, and was struck in the mouth by a Stride helmet. Despite the injury, Devon played the rest of the game.

  After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1992, he spent two years traveling and studying in Europe, before returning to the United States, where he began his teaching career in 1996.

  Mr. Devon was forced to leave the teaching profession after a series of scandals in his classroom and the athletic department became too troublesome for the school board. He had spent a few months traveling before returning to town and beginning his residence with Ms. Chapman on Eddowes Street.

  “That’s a little mean-spirited, isn’t it?”

  “Not all of it,” she said, and took it away from me. “I’m not changing it. They’re all finished.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I looked at the stack of notebooks. “How many are there now?”

  “One thousand five hundred and sixteen,” she said. “That’s everybody in town, including everybody in school, even the bus riders, and everybody who works in town but doesn’t live here.”

  “So what now?”

  “I don’t know. I got it all finished a lot faster than I thought I would. It took me a long time last time, but there were more people, and I didn’t have anybody like you to help.”

  “You did this before? What happened the last time you did this?”

  “Everybody started dying, exactly the way I had described.”

  Her eyes were black and still. I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. I didn’t know whether she wanted me to laugh or not, so I just sat there with her notebook in my lap. I handed it back to her and she started laughing.

  “I didn’t make them die,” she said. “People die, that’s what happens. And when they do, you need an obituary.”

  I left through the basement door before midnight. She kissed me and said, “With this kiss, I pass the key.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s how some magicians, maybe even Houdini, got the key or pick for the locks in their tricks. Their assistants passed them the key with a last-minute kiss, sliding it over.”

  “I didn’t get anything,” I said.

  “Maybe next time.”

  It had started to snow again. The fine, dry powder blew along the streets and sidewalks like sand, forming small dunes against the wheels of cars. I took my usual route home, cutting through backyards to shorten my time in the biting air, leaving a fresh trail of footprints. If it snowed all night they might fill up. I disposed of the tissue with the condom and its wrapper in Mrs. Owens’s trash. This had become something of a ritual.

  I was awakened in the night. I thought my phone was ringing, but when I checked it there was nothing. No one had called. I went downstairs to the kitchen for a glass of water. It was a few minutes past four and I was wide awake. I went back to my room and read until I was tired, and went back to sleep.

  My father came in and told me to wake up. I lifted my head off the pillow and looked at the clock. “It isn’t time,” I said. “I’ve got another hour.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Cayne are here,” he said. “They’re worried about Anna.”

  I wiped some of the sleep out of my face and saw the three of them standing in my room, my father in front and Mr. and Mrs. Cayne behind him. “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Anna wasn’t home this morning,” Mr. Cayne said. “We were wondering if you could tell us what you two did last night.”

  Mrs. Cayne pulled my desk chair up by the bed, and my father moved my clothes off the other chair and brought it over beside her. Mr. Cayne sat down and they both looked at me. I know it’s wrong to think about things like this in serious moments, and I probably shouldn’t tell this, as it doesn’t reflect so well on me, but while the two of them sat there in front of me, Mrs. Cayne’s wild hair practically screaming off her head, Mr. Cayne with his completely bald face, I couldn’t help myself: I tried to imagine what Mr. Cayne would look like with his wife’s hair on his head. I had to turn away to keep from laughing. I’m sure they thought I was hiding something, smirking with some secret knowledge about their daughter. I didn’t know what they were talking about.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “We were over at your house last night. I left her at your house.”

  “What time was that?” Mr. Cayne said.

  “Around ten or so, I guess.”

  “She didn’t leave with you, walk you outside or part of the way with you?”

  “No,” I said. “I left through the basement and she stayed inside.”

  “She didn’t say anything to you about going anywhere?” Mrs. Cayne asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t know any reason why she wouldn’t be in her room this morning?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do last night?”

  “Nothing. We just hung out in the basement. Listened to the shortwave, played some pool, drank some soda.”

  “You didn’t have a fight, anything to upset her?”

  “No,” I said. “We never fight.”

  “Something else happened,” Mrs. Cayne said. “What was it?”

  “Nothing.” I could feel the redness rising from my stomach, and I tried to take an unnoticeable deep breath to keep the shame of the lie from appearing on my face.

  “Did you have sex
with Anna?” Mrs. Cayne continued.

  “No,” I said. I thought I was going to pass out, fall off the bed and drop to the floor, unconscious. I almost wish that had happened. It might have been better.

  I could see that Mrs. Cayne was angry. She had been calm, all things considered—she was nervous and frantic that her daughter was missing, but she wasn’t yelling or babbling or anything like that. But now she was mad.

  “What’s this, then?” she said, as Mr. Cayne pulled a torn and empty condom wrapper out of his pocket.

  “We found this by the couch in the basement. This morning,” he said.

  My brain froze. It hung, like an overloaded computer, the screen frozen. My face must have been a red, frozen screen. I could see that my father and the Caynes could see that I was blushing, but my mind was whipping around in uncontrollable circles. How could they have found a condom wrapper? I had taken it and thrown it away. I made sure. I saw it go into the trash. Part of me wanted to run out of the room and out of the house and go straight back to Mrs. Owens’s and dig in the trashcan and confirm what I knew to be true. But what did that mean? Had they followed me? Had Anna had someone else over after I left? Had she planted the wrapper for her parents to find? Were they just bluffing? Nothing was making sense.

  Mr. and Mrs. Cayne sat staring straight at me. My father stood looking down at me. They weren’t happy. I wasn’t happy.