The Frenzy Page 4

  He said, “Next time maybe we’ll go out of town to the drive-in and I’ll ask that guy Michael and we’ll have us a double date.”

  I wondered, then, as I had wondered before, if I should tone down my affection for Pace around Corey since I couldn’t publicly express my feelings for my boyfriend at all. I hated how we couldn’t be who we really were in our town.

  But then I forgot about it; everything seemed fine between the three of us.

  Bad Business

  Before Gramp’s ninetieth birthday party my mom wanted me to get my body waxed. I didn’t feel like fighting anymore; in spite of how much it hurt, it worked better and lasted a lot longer than shaving and the weather was so hot I’d have to have my legs and arms exposed to all the eyes of my parents’ friends. So I went.

  The beauty parlor was downtown near Joe Ranger’s shop. My mom hurried by there as she always did.

  “Why do you always run past there?” I asked as she opened the door of the beauty parlor and shooed me inside. I knew she wouldn’t answer, though. She didn’t like to talk about why she’d blacklisted Joe.

  We were blasted by air-conditioning and the fumes of nail polish and bleach. Melanie’s House of Beauty was a tiny place with a row of sinks and hair dryers, a couple of nail spas and a back room where, as Pace said, advanced “in-hairoggation” techniques were applied. There were fake pink flowers in a vase and a case full of candy-colored nail polishes and jewel-studded flip-flop sandals.

  “Mom?” I said again.

  “I don’t like that man. I’ve told you before. I don’t like you talking to him.”

  “But why?” It was one of the conversations we had repeatedly but we never got anywhere with it.

  She ignored me and spoke to the woman behind the glass case. “Mel? Hi, we’re early for our noon appointment.”

  The woman stood up wearily. “Hi, Mrs. Mayor.”

  My mom grinned; I knew she liked that title.

  Melanie gestured for me to join her behind the door of the torture chamber. She was a big woman with a deep voice, a beehive hairdo, muscular arms and long fake nails studded with rhinestones. I could have sworn she was really a man.

  I lay down on the table and let Melanie baste me with warm pink wax, then apply the strips and rip the hair from my skin. I flinched with each yank. Tears sprang to my eyes.

  “What about your bikini line?” Melanie asked. “It’s summer!”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You have that cute boyfriend. He’d probably like to see you looking nice in a bikini.”

  She was talking about Pace. I tried to smile at her. “It’s okay.”

  “Boys don’t like to be reminded that their girl is a mammal,” she said as she tore a long strip of wax off my calf, leaving a smattering of red bumps and hot pain.

  On the way to the car I watched my mom closely. I wanted to see if her expression changed near Joe Ranger’s shop. She headed for the other side of the street when he came out.

  “Hi, Liv. Mrs. Thorne.”

  She stopped in her tracks and turned slowly to look at him. Her eyes were bright and alert for danger.

  “Hey, Joey,” I said.

  “Hot one, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. My mom still stood, frozen. I remembered, suddenly, this happening before, when I was very little. The same trapped-animal look on my mom’s face and Joe just watching her like that, like they knew something I didn’t. Then it was me who wanted to leave.

  I took my mother’s hand and we walked across the cobblestone street to the truck.

  “Bye, ladies.”

  Neither of us answered him.

  During Gramp’s party I wore the yellow sundress my mom had ordered for me. I felt like a complete ass in that dress, let me tell you, even with my waxed arms and legs. My mom and I had argued for days about me wearing it and she had won by sheer force of will.

  “I’m just trying to help you look pretty, Liv! It’s like you think I’m torturing you.”

  I slumped in my chair and wouldn’t look at her. “No, you hire Melanie to do that.”

  She leaned forward and spoke more softly. “Okay, it hurts to be beautiful. I know, believe me. But I only want to help, can’t you see that?”

  I thought about all the important things in my life she wouldn’t approve of—Corey, my desire to go away with him, my desire for the woods, my friendship with Joey Ranger. Those were the things I’d have to have strength to fight for if it came to that. I couldn’t waste my battles on dresses. So I wore the sundress. But I refused to put on the white sandals she got me; I wore my new Chuck Taylors instead.

  My mother had invited almost everyone in town, everyone “important” according to her, that is. Gramp had owned the steel mill until it closed, so many of the townies had been his employees. My mom set out platters of cold cuts and cheeses and pastries. There was even her specialty, the dish she made at every holiday—cold shrimp salad with whipped cream. I wasn’t hungry.

  My mother ran around making sure everyone had a drink. My father was on what looked like his third or fourth scotch. I stood in a corner with Pace, shaking hands and accepting wet kisses on my cheeks from ladies with too much perfume and drunken men who tried to peek down the front of my dress. I muttered thank-yous and nice-to-see-yous. The smell of these people made me feel claustrophobic, like I wanted to go outside, away from the fumes that clung to their hair and clothes.

  Dale Tamblin’s mother, Nancy, was there. After her husband, Dan, had been killed while he was out hunting in the woods three years ago, she’d stopped going out much, but I guess my mom had persuaded her to come. She’d never forgotten how I’d scratched her son and she gave me a nasty look. I couldn’t really blame her, especially after what had happened to her husband.

  “Liv!” my mom called from the kitchen. “Bring Gramp his cocktail.”

  I got the Bloody Mary and carried it over to my grandfather. He wasn’t really supposed to drink but my mom said it was a special occasion. I felt weird giving him alcohol, though. This was his second glass. He sat holding court in a high-backed armchair. Gramp looked great for his age, everyone thought so. You could tell that he’d played football as a kid—his shoulders were still broad for a man his age and his hands were huge and gnarled with arthritis.

  “Olivia, is that my drink?” he asked.

  “Yes, Gramp. Are you sure you want another one?” I liked my grandfather. I wanted him to be around for as long as possible.

  He winked at me. “Of course. How often do you turn ninety years old?”

  “Good point.” I handed it to him hesitantly.

  “Thank you, Olivia.”

  “You’re welcome, Gramp.”

  “Would you like a candy?” He reached into his pocket and took out one of the ancient peppermints he carried around with him. They were left over from when my grandmother died fourteen years ago. He had moved in with us after that. Gram always had glass decanters filled with candy all over their house, my mom said. I guess it reminded him of her. My mom complained about her but Gramp called her his angel.

  I took the candy to be polite. They were so stale you couldn’t crack them with your teeth. Gramp took a large sip of his drink. I wanted to tell him to slow down; I noticed his hand was shaking.

  “I miss Ellie,” he said.

  He talked about my grandmother a lot, especially at times likes this when we were doing something he would have wanted her to share.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I didn’t deserve her.” His face was sad and I wanted to comfort him. My grandfather didn’t really know who I was, not in a deep way, but he was always kind and seemed to have some special, protective feeling toward me.

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “No.” He scrutinized me. “You take after her, you know.”

  “That’s a nice compliment.” He’d given it to me before. I didn’t look much like Grandmother Ellie, though, and from what I’d heard, our personalities were different, too.
But she was quieter than my mom and loved animals, so we shared those things.

  “She was a very caring person. She didn’t like me drinking, either.”

  I smiled at him.

  “Got me into lots of trouble.”

  I winked. “Heard it’ll do that.”

  His eyes looked glazed, suddenly. “And she didn’t like the hunting. She warned us not to go out that day. But your mother, now she had different ideas about things. Wasn’t like her mama at all.”

  “What’s that, Gramp?” I knelt beside his chair and gently pried the drink from his hand. The group of people that had surrounded him had dispersed. I was relieved; I didn’t want them to see him like this.

  “She shouldn’t have killed it,” he said. “Your mother. That was some dangerous business. I shouldn’t have taken her up in that helicopter. She got the big daddy. She got the leader. That girl came to me after and warned me all about it. But what could I do then? That’s some bad, bad business.”

  I felt weak and steadied myself against the fluffy flowered couch. I felt an arm around my shoulder. It was Pace.

  He pointed out through the glass to the garden that sloped down the hillside, getting wilder as it went until it became a gulley leading to the woods. Among the tall oak trees and the ferns I saw a figure standing. It reminded me of the deer that ate my mother’s flowers and broke the flowerpots. Whenever I could I chased the deer away before she could get her gun.

  This wasn’t a deer, though.

  It was Corey.

  When I looked at him he didn’t run away, just stood there, staring at me with his big green-brown, leaf-colored eyes. I always teased Corey about his eyelashes, saying it looked like he curled them. He hated when I said that. He looked back and forth between me and Pace and I reflexively moved away from the shelter of Pace’s broad shoulder. I knew what Corey was thinking—I knew him pretty well. He wasn’t jealous of Pace for real; he just was getting sick of being left out of parts of my life. I didn’t want Corey to feel bad but I also felt upset that there wasn’t anything I could do about it; I couldn’t invite him in. My mother would have had a fit.

  Corey turned away and I caught my breath and felt my blood warm in my veins.

  Maybe it was because of the confusing things Gramp had said, or because of the realization that I couldn’t let Corey in, but seeing him out there like that made anger toward my mother well up in me. Suddenly my senses sharpened and I could smell the slices of fresh ham, chicken and salami on the serving trays. My heart pounded in my chest. It was like the moment when I found out that my mom had killed the wolf, the moment I had been running from for all these years. But I wasn’t going to let the feeling overtake me; I couldn’t. I reached into the pocket of my dress for the enamel pillbox with the Xanax in it.

  My grandfather’s voice startled me out of the trance. “That’s why I gave her that cross there. They don’t like silver when they’re on the attack.” The silver cross my mother always wore?

  “Gramp! What are you talking about? Who is ‘they’?”

  He looked back at me and this time his light blue eyes were clear. He smiled sweetly. He had one of those faces wrinkled more by smiles than worry or anger. That made what he had said even stranger. But maybe it was the alcohol.

  “Did you take my drink, Olivia?”

  “Yes. I think maybe you had enough?”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll just have some cookies instead. Would you mind?”

  “Of course not.” I got him his sugar cookies and myself a glass of water to swallow my pill with. When I came back and looked into the garden, Corey was gone.

  “Want to go outside?” Pace asked.

  I nodded. Maybe Corey was just hiding in the trees a little farther off.

  The heat and humidity hit us like a wall after the air-conditioned house. It felt good, though, purifying and real. I took some deep breaths with my mouth closed, whispering the air through my nose and deep in my throat to calm down. I’d had to learn ways to calm myself when I was scared or angry. After what happened when I was thirteen I sensed that knowing how to do this wasn’t just important—it might be lifesaving. I felt my pulse; it had slowed. I smelled wet earth and not flesh. Corey really was gone.

  “What was that shit about?” Pace asked me.

  “He shouldn’t drink. I don’t know why she lets him drink.”

  “It is his ninetieth birthday. What’s the point in not?”

  I ran my hand along the bark of the tree where we’d seen Corey. I pressed my face against the trunk, imagining it was him.

  “Dude,” Pace said. “What was he talking about, though? It freaked me out.”

  “He used to take my mom hunting from a helicopter in Alaska when they went on vacation there. She killed this big wolf. She likes to talk about it but he never has before.”

  Gramp would take my mother out in a helicopter in the winter when the animals were easier to spot, running across the snow, and she would shoot them from the sky. I wonder what it must have been like for them, running free and suddenly this whiz of killing pain from above just grounds them. Usually the animals don’t die right away. They get hit again and again. Blood stains the snow. Sometimes I imagine what would happen if my mother didn’t have a gun or a helicopter. If she was just on the ground with her fingernails and her bicuspids facing a huge, snarling wolf. She’d never survive.

  Pace shuddered. “It was weird. Can’t we leave yet? You need to go after your boyfriend and I want to see if I can find Michael.”

  His eyes twinkled when he said the name and I remembered how excited he’d been about the guy he’d met but I hadn’t heard much about it since. “Michael, huh? What’s up with that?” I socked his arm.

  “What?” Pace batted his eyelashes in an uncharacteristically girly way. “He’s cute, that’s all.” I knew Pace; I could tell there was more to it than that but I let it go.

  “You’re cute.” I kissed his cheek. He smelled like soap.

  “So are you. Let’s get out of here. It makes us less cute.”

  “I can’t,” I told him. “I promised I’d stay to the end of this thing.” Then I added, “Corey looked pissed.”

  “No,” Pace said. “He’s just sad. He misses you.”

  “Maybe you and I should cool it a little when he’s around. He’s gotten more sensitive about it.”

  “Sure. I’m going to go see if Michael is there. Is that okay? Will you be all right without me, Skirt?”

  “Yeah, you go, Beard,” I told him, breaking off a piece of bark in my hands and holding it up against my cheek. The rough texture of tree skin comforted me.

  I could hear my grandfather’s voice in my mind. Bad, bad business.

  Haunted

  Pace left and the party wound down by evening so I helped my mother clean up and then I texted Corey but he didn’t answer so I went to find him.

  I went toward the campus, where the streets were quiet, everyone inside hiding from the heat or gone for the summer. The large wood-frame houses with their slightly dilapidated porches and hand-lettered Greek signs all looked deserted. It was true that some of the townies and almost all of the college kids from the frat and sorority houses took off for cooler places in the summer but this much quiet was uncanny. The sun was still as bright as day although it was past six o’clock. I rode my bike down the middle of the street, daring a car to come around the corner, but none did. Then I cut through the campus, along paths that ran among brick buildings and leafy trees, to the other side.

  Corey lived in one of the bigger old farmhouses at the edge of town. There were bicycles in the yard and a small, neat vegetable garden with rows of carrots and corn and pea vines clambering up a low metal fence. Corey’s brothers, Mitch and Jordy, were playing basketball against the tool shed. They glanced up at me blankly. I smiled at them like usual but they didn’t smile back. I always wondered if it was a racial thing or if they just thought I was weird like most people did.

  “Corey around?”
I asked.

  They both shrugged. They were much bigger and lighter-skinned than Corey. He had told me that they didn’t dislike me the way I thought; they just didn’t care.

  I parked my bike and went up to the door. Corey’s mother answered, wearing her nurse’s uniform. She looked at me suspiciously. “It’s not a skin color thing,” Corey had reassured me, but you never know; my parents wouldn’t have put it that way either.

  “He’s out,” she said. Her face was cold. I wanted her to like me so much. Corey had her hazel eyes.

  “Would you tell him I stopped by?”

  She hummed a yes as I hurried away.

  “Oh, and Olivia?” I stopped and looked at her. “You two be careful running around like you do.”

  I nodded, glad she had spoken to me but not sure what her tone meant. Was she being protective, or warning me to keep my distance from her son? I couldn’t tell.

  I went to the woods, to our special place, but Corey wasn’t there either. I wished I’d run outside to him right away when I saw him in the garden. I looked around at the dark, towering trees and started to feel a panicky sensation in my chest. Then I had to talk myself down. We’d always been safe in the woods before, right?

  I didn’t want to let myself think about murders that had occurred annually in those woods over the last four years. One of them was Sadie Nelson’s dad, Loudon. After it happened she and her mother moved away and no one heard from them again. There was one more besides Loudon Nelson; Carl Olaf’s dad, Reed; and Dale Tamblin’s dad, Dan—Bob Lee, the father of Sherry, the girl who had tied my hair to the chair in seventh grade. The bodies of the hunters were so torn up it looked like a wild animal had done it but the precision of the killings—always in the woods, always local hunters of about the same age—made my dad and his men think it was human. They hadn’t solved the crimes, though. Maybe that’s what Corey’s mom was referring to but she’d never said anything like it before. Maybe she was finally seeing how serious things were between me and her son.