“Kind of.”
“All I’m saying, I would have run off too. At the first available opportunity.”
Luc gives me a pointed look. Luckily, he’s smart enough not to say what undoubtedly popped into his head. But still, the retort passes between us, unspoken. And you did exactly that, didn’t you?
A silence lingers, turning into something awkward. Luc eases the photo off the wall and puts it in his backpack.
“You’re just—”
“You said so yourself, nobody wants these things anymore.”
The silence resumes. Luc zips up the backpack and shrugs it back on.
“Hey, there’s something I wanted to tell you,” he says. He’s avoiding my gaze. “About Cath—”
The last thing I want right now is to hear about Cath. “How about we go upstairs?” I ask quickly. “I want to take some photos of Michelle’s room.”
Luc gets the message loud and clear. There’s something guilty about his posture as he holds up the flashlight and turns to lead the way.
“The place doesn’t look all that damaged,” I say as I follow him up the stairs to the second floor. The stairs are solid, barely even creaking under our weight. The smell of humidity and sewage also seems to diminish.
“Because it wasn’t flooded, strictly speaking. The water reached the foundation but not higher. It was the sewers backing up that flooded the basement. And without anyone to strip off all the damaged materials, the place is now scrap.”
“It’s a shame,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say and I want to fill the silence.
“It’s a shame for the rest of the town too,” Luc says. “There’s talk of not rebuilding. That the floods are going to become a regular thing, with global warming and all. To rebuild is just another disaster waiting to happen.”
I ponder this. The pang of sorrow I feel takes me by surprise. I don’t picture Marly without its main street, its own little claim to history.
“You know, my family used to have this cabin,” Luc is saying. “There used to be this spot in the woods by the river where a lot of people had cabins. To go fishing and stuff. I saw pictures of my dad as a kid in that cabin, and when I asked about it, he said no one went there anymore. Hadn’t gone there in decades, because one time it flooded and then it just started to flood, first every few years, then every year. And apparently no one figured this was a sign of things to come.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I was so curious, though, I had to go and find the place.”
“Did you?”
“I did. I can take you there if you want to see it. It’ll make some nice creepy pictures for your book.”
“It’s not a book, it’s a podcast,” I correct.
“Yeah, whatever. I can take you there tomorrow if you want. The weather’s going to be nice, and the water already receded.”
“Sounds good,” I say, even though it doesn’t exactly sound good.
“It’s a date.”
And it sure as hell isn’t a date. I follow Luc down the upstairs hall. Naturally, there’s already a couple of teenagers necking in what I think is the master bedroom. They hardly pay any attention to us as we pass by.
Michelle’s room is at the end of the hall. I’d seen it in one single crime scene photo, and I thought I had a general idea of it until I walked in. Not only does it look bigger in the picture, seeing it live finally makes me realize why the photo seemed so off.
Even now, despite the passage of time—or perhaps because of it—it doesn’t look lived in. There’s a canopy bed, shelves of books and toys, a toy chest, but it all looks a little too young, a little too undisturbed. There are too many musty, decaying stuffed animals and faded dolls, the kind of dolls a toddler might play with. I’d chalked it up to different times—I only had a vague idea what kids in the seventies liked to play with—but now that I’m seeing it in person, this becomes painfully clear. I snap a picture, then another.
“It’s eerie,” Luc says. “Let’s get out of here.”
He’s echoing my thoughts with surprising exactitude. But before we hightail it out of here, I take a step over to the window and look out.
The view is incredible. The bonfire in the yard below looks like a lit match, and the starry sky stretches out endlessly. I come closer and peer down, my forehead nearly touching the glass.
It’s quite a drop. And there’s nothing, just a smooth wall all the way to the deck below. Even the windows don’t have edges to grab on to. The yard below the window is all paved over. I can still see the intricate mosaic despite the debris and missing pieces.
Michelle didn’t climb out of this window. She would have fallen to her death or at least would have been injured. And this would have been obvious to anyone who stood in this same spot looking down.
“Let’s go,” Luc urges.
I’m all too happy to obey. We make our way back down. I don’t pause to look into any other rooms, aware of the partiers who are making their way up here to make out and then some. The musty smell of cheap pot hangs in the air.
We pass through the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, and go back outside. Luc follows me as I circle the house to stop in front of it.
“Steph?”
I hold up my hand and take a few steps closer to the façade.
Here it is, the thing that’s been bothering me from the start: The front-facing windows of the first floor have bars on them.
NINETEEN
1979
