Laura Kasischke - The Raising

She looked down at her open hands then and said to them, “Nicole Werner wasn’t visibly injured. She sustained injury, certainly, since she was thrown from the vehicle. She might have sustained terrible, life-threatening internal injuries, but Nicole Werner was not—”

“Beyond recognition.”

Shelly could not look up from her hands until long after she’d nodded and Ellen Graham had already spoken again:

“But that boy,” she said, “the one who was drunk, why wouldn’t he have said something if—?”

“If there was someone else with them?”

Ellen nodded this time, boring her eyes deeply into Shelly’s, and Shelly felt an incredible wave of wild energy and bravery emanating from her.

To sit so completely still, with her poor feet pressed together, chapped hands folded sadly in her lap, waiting for Shelly’s answer.

“As I said, I spoke to him. Today. Finally. I don’t know what took me so long to go looking for him. He doesn’t remember anything.”

“But of course that’s what he’d say. They could have put him in jail for years for what he did.”

“Yes,” Shelly said. “I’m a suspicious woman, too, Ellen. I feel I have good radar for liars, cheats, cons—but I don’t think he’s one. He doesn’t remember. He truly does not know. Or he only peripherally knows. Something happened to him.”

Shelly went on then to tell Ellen Graham what Josie had told her about the ritual. The tequila, the hyperventilation, the coffin, the girl who would be “raised from the dead.” Reborn as an OTT sister. They kept a paramedic on hand. They knew what could happen. Wasn’t it possible, Shelly asked, that sometimes the girl did not come back, that the ritual might—?

“Kill a girl.” Ellen Graham did not nod this time. She closed her eyes.

“Yes,” Shelly said, trying to speak quietly. “And you can imagine the scandal for the sorority, the Pan-Hellenic Society, the university, and the lengths they might go to cover it up. Isn’t it possible that an accident might be—?”

“Staged?”

“Staged, or made to happen. Created? Devised ?”

Ellen Graham opened her eyes now and looked from Shelly to the ceiling.

“Ellen, I was there,” Shelly said. “That boy swerved to avoid something, but only seconds later what he’d swerved to avoid wasn’t there. And the girl they say was killed, injured beyond recognition, burned with the car, I saw her. I would recognize her anywhere. She wasn’t dead. There was no fire.”

“Why are you telling me ?” Ellen said, standing up, heading toward a buffet that sprawled in all its shining oaken splendor from one wall of the living room to the other. She yanked open a drawer by a flimsy brass handle and pulled out a pack of Marlborough lights. Her hand was shaking as she put a cigarette between her lips, but she didn’t light it. She turned back to Shelly, eyes blinking and blazing at the same time. “Why did you come here? You know so much. Why haven’t you told someone who can do something?”

“I’ve tried,” Shelly said. “I called the papers, I called the police, I waited for the police to call me, but—”

“Now what?” Ellen asked, tossing the cigarette back into the drawer with the pack, and heading back to the couch, but not sitting down. “You think that was my daughter then, don’t you, in the backseat of that car? Maybe she was already dead? Maybe they set it on fire? Maybe they buried my baby up there instead of this Nicole Werner girl? I’m sorry. I see what this means, what you’re saying about what you saw, except, if it was, if you’re right, where in the fucking hell is Nicole Werner now?”

Shelly took a moment before she spoke, before she could even consider speaking.

She tried to think of a way to phrase this thing, which seemed so insane, so that it would not sound insane. Finally, she said, “She’s still there. She’s at the sorority.”

Ellen Graham started to shake her head so quickly, so wildly, that, remembering those earrings Josie had snitched, Shelly imagined Ellen wearing them, her face lacerated by jewels, and Shelly held up a hand to try to stop her from shaking her head so violently. In the calmest voice Shelly could call forth from the depths of her own shaken self, she said, “I can’t prove anything, Ellen, but I believe they would have sheltered her, Nicole. I know now that they—the sorority, the Pan-Hellenic Society, the university—have enough power to drive the only witness to the accident out of town, to involve a dean in doing so, and who knows—”

“How did Josie drive you out of town?”

Now Ellen stopped shaking her head, and Shelly knew she had to tell her. As she spoke the words of the affair with the girl, of the photographs, of the last conversation she’d had with Josie at the Starbucks, Shelly opened her hands again, looking at her palms, and she thought, for no reason she could fathom, of sheep. Sheep with blood on their fleeces, with flies in their eyes. Maggots in their ears, in their anuses. She finished the story and stopped speaking, and then she brought the hands to her eyes. When she looked up again, Ellen was watching Shelly with a kindness that would have knocked Shelly to her knees if she hadn’t been sitting down. It was not compassion, or empathy, or pity. Ellen Graham was simply looking at Shelly as if the story hadn’t surprised her at all.

As if she’d been hearing such stories all her life.

After the silence, Ellen said, in the voice of the very competent secretary Shelly knew she must once have been, “Okay, Shelly. They got rid of you, if your theory’s right. But the boy was a witness, too.”

“Yes,” Shelly said, trying to regain her composure, to echo the all-business tone of Ellen Graham. “Yes, the boy, too,” she said. She nodded. “He doesn’t remember anything. But they are doing things to try to drive him away, too. Postcards. Ghosts.”

Ellen didn’t ask for elaboration. “Just tell me what to do,” she said. “Your story—frankly, Shelly, I hate your story. I hate everything it might mean. I think it’s crazy. But it’s no worse than all the stories I’ve invented in my mind. And you’re the first help we’ve ever had. We’ve gone everywhere, spoken to everyone. The state police, the FBI, the—”

“The FBI,” Shelly said, an idea forming. “Speak to them again. Tell them you believe there’s been a case of mistaken identity, and demand that Nicole Werner be exhumed, examined. I can’t do anything, Ellen. I have no credibility in this at all. But you’re the parent of a girl who disappeared. They might listen to you.”

Mira tried to warm up the car before they pulled out of the parking lot. But even as the fan blew hard, nothing but cold air came out. Beside her, Perry was shivering. In the cold electric light from the Dientz sign, Mira could see that he had his eyes squeezed shut. Could he be shivering in his sleep?

Ted had turned off the lights inside the funeral parlor, but his Cadillac was still parked beside them. He was still inside. Mira imagined him scrolling through more photos on his computer—his before and after images of the many disfigured corpses he’d brought back from the dead.

She didn’t blame him. If she had such a talent, she would be proud of herself as well.

She pulled out of the parking lot and headed for the freeway without speaking, and after a few minutes, Perry stopped shivering and seemed to have fallen asleep.

The drive back in the blizzard was slow and treacherous, and at every exit Mira thought, We should pull over. We should get off. There were no cars behind them, none ahead of them, none passing in the oncoming lanes, as far as she could see, as Jeff Blackhawk’s car rattled around them, and Mira became more and more vividly aware in the silence of the sound of the slick road just under their feet. Jeff’s car gave one only the slimmest illusion of being anything other than what you were: a soft and vulnerable vessel traveling at great speeds over hard ground.