"Like a medical procedure," Ruth said. "Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet."
"I think holes in the earth draw on some pretty primal fears." "I'll say," Ruth said. "They have throats, for God's sake! Hey, let's check this out."
A mile or so down the road there were signs of new construction. Ray took a left and drove into the circles of freshly paved roads where the trees had been cleared and small red and yellow flags waved at intervals from the tops of waist-high wire markers. Just as they had lulled themselves into thinking that they were alone, exploring the roads laid out for a territory as yet uninhabited, they saw Joe Ellis walking up ahead.
Ruth didn't wave and neither did Ray, nor did Joe make a move to acknowledge them.
"My mom says he still lives at home and can't get a job." "What does he do all day?" Ray asked. "Look creepy, I guess."
"He never got over it,w Ray said, and Ruth stared out into the rows and rows of vacant lots until Ray connected with the main road again and they crossed back over the railroad tracks moving toward Route 30, which would take them in the direction of the sinkhole.
Ruth floated her arm out the window to feel the moist air of the morning after rain. Although Ray had been accused of being involved in my disappearance, he had understood why, knew that the police were doing their job. But Joe Ellis had never recovered from being accused of killing the cats and dogs Mr. Harvey had
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killed He wandered around, keeping a good distance from his neighbors an^ wanting so much to take solace in the love of cats and does- For me tne saddest thing was that these animals smelled tt*e brokenness in him梩he human defect梐nd kept
away.
Down Route 30 near Eels Rod Pike, at a spot that Ray and Ruth were aboi* to Pass> Isaw Len coming out of an apartment over Toe's barr?ersn癙- He carried a lightly stuffed student knapsack out to hi* car. The knapsack had been the gift of the young woman w^0 ownec^ tne apartment. She had asked him out for coffee oitf day after they met down at the station as part of a criminology c0urse at West Chester College. Inside the knapsack he had a cort1^"33^011 of things梥ome of which he would show my father an^ some that no child's parent needed to see. The latter includedtne photos of the graves of the recovered bodies梑oth
elbows there to each case-
When ke na^ called tne hospital, the nurse had told him Mr. Salmon v'as w^t^1 n*s w^e an<^ fam% Now his guilt thickened as he pulled n^s car mto ^ hospital parking lot and sat for a moment wit)1 t^ie not sun commg through the windshield, baking in
the heat.
I coulJsee Len working on how to state what he had to say. He could wo^ with only one assumption in his head梐fter almost seven ye^s ofever more dwindling contact since late 1975, what my parer>ts would hope for most was a body or the news that Mr. Harvey b10* ^een found. What he had to give them was a charm.
He probed n*s knapsack and locked up the car, passing by the girl outsi^e with her replenished buckets of daffodils. He knew the num^r 癪 m?father's room, so he did not bother announcing hims^ to t^le fifth-floor nurses' station but merely tapped lightly oJ>my Other's open door before walking in.
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My mother was standing with her back toward him. When she turned, I could see the force of her presence hit him. She was holding my father's hand. I suddenly felt terribly lonely.
My mother wobbled a bit when she met Len's eyes, and then she led with what came easiest.
"Is it ever wonderful to see you?" she tried to joke.
"Len," my father managed. "Abbie, will you tilt me up?"
"How are you feeling, Mr. Salmon?" Len asked as my mother pressed the up arrow button on the bed.
"Jack, please," my father insisted.
"Before you get your hopes up," Len said, "we haven't caught him."
My father visibly deflated.
My mother readjusted the foam pillows behind my father's back and neck. "Then why are you here?" she asked.
"We found an item of Susie's," Len said.
He had used almost the same sentence when he'd come to the house with the jingle-bell hat. It was a distant echo in her head.
The night before, as first my mother watched my father sleeping and then my father woke to see her head beside his on his pillow, they had both been staving off the memory of that first night of snow and hail and rain and how they had clung to each other, neither of them voicing aloud their greatest hope. Last night it had been my father who'd finally said it: "She's never coming home." A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.
"It's a charm off her bracelet," Len said. "A Pennsylvania keystone with her initials on it."
"I bought that for her," my father said. "At Thirtieth Street Station when I went into the city one day. They had a booth, and a man wearing safety glasses etched in initials for free. I brought Lindsey one too. Remember, Abigail?"
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"I remember," my mother said,
"We found it near a grave in Connecticut."
My parents were suddenly still for a moment條ike animals trapped in ice梩heir eyes frozen open and beseeching whoever walked above them to release them now, please.
"It wasn't Susie," Len said, rushing to fill the space. "What it means is that Harvey has been linked to other murders in Delaware and Connecticut. It was at the grave site outside Hartford where we found Susie's charm."
My father and mother watched as Len fumbled to open the slightly jammed zipper of his knapsack. My mother smoothed my father's hair back and tried to catch his eye. But my father was focused on the prospect Len presented梞y murder case reopening. And my mother, just when she was beginning to feel on more solid ground, had to hide the fact that she'd never wanted it to begin again. The name George Harvey silenced her. She had never known what to say about him. For my mother, connecting her life to his capture and punishment spoke more about choosing to live with the enemy than about having to learn to live in the world without me.
Len pulled out a large Ziploc bag. At the bottom corner of the bag my parents could see the glint of gold. Len handed it to my mother, and she held it in front of her, slightly away from her
body.
"Don't you need this, Len?" my father asked.
"We did all the tests on it>" he said. "We've documented where it was found and taken the required photographs. The time may come when I would have to ask for it back, but until then, it's yours to keep."
"Open it, Abbie," my father said.
I watched my mother hold open the bag and lean over the bed. "It's for you, Jack," she said. "It was a gift from you."
As my father reached in, his hand shook, and it took him a
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second to feel the small, sharp edges of the keystone against the flesh of his fingers. The way he drew it out of the bag reminded me of playing the game Operation with Lindsey when we were little. If he touched the sides of the Ziploc bag an alarm would go off and he would have to forfeit.
"How can you be sure he killed these other girls?" my mother asked. She stared at the tiny ember of gold in my father's palm.
"Nothing is ever certain," Len said.
And the echo rang in her ears again. Len had a fixed set of phrases. It was this same phrase that my father had borrowed to soothe his family. It was a cruel phrase that preyed on hope.
"I think I want you to leave now," she said.
"Abigail?" my father queried.
"I can't hear any more."
"I'm very glad to have the charm, Len," my father said.
Len doffed an imaginary cap to my father before turning to go. He had made a certain kind of love to my mother before she went away. Sex as an act of willful forgetting. It was the kind he made more and more in the rooms above the barbershop.
I headed south toward Ruth and Ray, but I saw Mr, Harvey instead. He was driving an orange patchwork car that had been pieced together from so many different versions of the same make and model that it looked like Frankenstein's monster on wheels. A bungee cord held the front hood, which fluttered up and down as it caught the oncoming air.
The engine had resisted anything but a shimmer above the speed limit no matter how hard he pressed the gas pedal. He had slept next to an empty grave, and while he'd been sleeping he had dreamed of the 5! 5! 5!, waking near dawn to make the drive to Pennsylvania.
The edges of Mr. Harvey seemed oddly blurred. For years he
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had kept at bay the memories of the women he killed, but now, one by one, they were coming back.
The first girl he'd hurt was by accident. He got mad and couldn't stop himself, or that was how he began to weave it into sense. She stopped going to the high school that they were both enrolled in, but this didn't seem strange to him. By that time he had moved so many times that he assumed that was what the girl had done. He had regretted it, this quiet, muffled rape of a school friend, but he didn't see it as something that would stay with either one of them. It was as if something outside him had resulted in the collision of their two bodies one afternoon. For a second afterward, she'd stared. It was bottomless. Then she put on her torn underpants, tucking them into her skirt's waistband to keep them in place. They didn't speak, and she left. He cut himself with his penknife along the back of his hand. When his father asked about the blood, there would be a plausible explanation. "See," he could say, and point to the place on his hand. "It was an accident."
But his father didn't ask, and no one came around looking for him. No father or brother or policeman.
Then what I saw was what Mr. Harvey felt beside him. This girl, who had died only a few years later when her brother fell asleep smoking a cigarette. She was sitting in the front seat. I wondered how long it would take before he began to remember me.
The only signs of change since the day Mr. Harvey had delivered me up to the Flanagans' were the orange pylons set around the lot. That and the evidence that the sinkhole had expanded. The house's southeast corner sloped downward, and the front porch was quietly sinking into the earth.
As a precaution, Ray parked on the other side of Flat Road,
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under a section of overgrown shrubbery. Even so, the passenger side skimmed the edge of the pavement. "What happened to the Flanagans?" Ray asked as they got out of his car.
"My father said the corporation that bought the property gave them a settlement and they took off."
"It's spooky around here, Ruth," Ray said. They crossed the empty road. Above them the sky was a light blue, a few smoky clouds dotting the air. From where they stood they could just make out the back of Hal's bike shop on the other side of the railroad tracks.
"I wonder if Hal Heckler still owns that?" Ruth said. "I had a crush on him when we were growing up."
Then she turned toward the lot. They were quiet. Ruth moved in ever-diminishing circles, with the hole and its vague edge as their goal. Ray trailed just behind Ruth as she led the way. If you saw it from a distance, the sinkhole seemed innocuous條ike an overgrown mud puddle just starting to dry out. There were spots of grass and weeds surrounding it and then, if you looked close enough, it was as if the earth stopped and a light cocoa-colored flesh began. It was soft and convex, and it drew in items placed on top of it.
"How do you know it won't swallow us?" Ray asked. "We're not heavy enough," Ruth said. "Stop if you feel yourself sinking."
Watching them I remembered holding on to Buckley s hand the day we went to bury the refrigerator. While my father was talking to Mr. Flanagan, Buckley and I walked up to the point where the earth sloped down and softened, and I swore I felt it give ever so slighdy beneath my feet. It had been the same sensation as walking in the graveyard of our church and suddenly sinking into the hollow tunnels that the moles had dug among the headstones.
Ultimately it was the memory of those very moles梐nd the
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pictures of their blind, nosy, toothsome selves that I sought out in books ?that had made me accept more readily being sunk inside the earth in a heavy metal safe. I was mole-proof, anyway.
Ruth tiptoed up to what she took to be the edge, while I thought of the sound of my father's laughter on that long-ago day. I made up a story for my brother on the way home. How underneath the sinkhole there was a whole village inside the earth that no one knew about and the people who lived there greeted these appliances like gifts from an Earthly heaven. "When our refrigerator reaches them," I said, "they will praise us, because they are a race of tiny repairmen who love to put things back together again." My father's laughter filled the car.
"Ruthie," Ray said, "that's close enough."
Ruth's toes were on the soft part, her heels were on the hard, and there was a sense as I watched her that she might point her fingers and raise her arms and dive right in to be beside me. But Ray came up behind her.
"Apparently," he said, "the earth's throat burps."
All three of us watched the corner of something metal as it
rose.
"The great Maytag of 'sixty-nine," Ray said. But it was not a washer or a safe. It was an old red gas stove, moving slow.
"Do you ever think about where Susie Salmon's body ended
up?" asked Ruth.
I wanted to walk out from underneath the overgrown shrubs that half -hid their ice blue car and cross the road and walk down into the hole and back up and tap her gently on the shoulder and say, "It's me! You've done it! Bingo! Score!"
"No," Ray said. "I leave that to you."
"Everything is changing here now. Every time I come back something is gone that made it not just every other place in the country," she said.
