could speak to Jillian about anything. She was his closest friend.
But not that day.
He had given her his costume, including the hat. Though it was obvious that they would have to pay for the damage, Jillian said nothing more about it.
His mind was filled with images of the night before, of shattered fragments of memory, of sights and sounds and even smells. Michael could not remember everything. The details were muddled, as though the previous evening had been a fresh deck of cards and someone had shuffled them, removing a random few. He had trouble putting them in order, and he could not tell what was missing. But he had enough to construct a basic mental sketch of those bizarre events.
The little girl in the road. That house. What the hell had possessed him to go inside in the first place? Yes, he'd been concerned for the girl. He remembered that much. But to go wandering around inside . . . it would have taken a lot more than a few Guinnesses to get him that inebriated.
Late on Sunday afternoon he was raking leaves as the last of the sunlight slipped away, the indigo sky bleeding into black. He wore a battered leather jacket and thin gloves, but when the wind blew the chill cut into him. It was too early in the autumn for the nights to be this cold. Or, at least, that was what he told himself. Obviously he was wrong. The proof was in the air, and the way his cheeks stung. His eyes watered. There were bags of leaves all over the lawn. The wind had forced him to collect them as he went, or he'd have been raking until the snow fell.
The second story was dark, but a warm golden glow radiated from the windows of the living room and the kitchen. Jillian had muttered something to him, noncommittally and without meeting his gaze, about making some sort of pasta dish tonight. His stomach rumbled as he paused, leaning on the rake, leaves rustling. Several blew away from the pile in front of him, drawing his attention.
Michael caught the scent of a wood-burning stove. A smile touched the edges of his mouth . . . the first one in hours. The Greenways, two doors down, had one of those stoves and used it all fall and winter. It was a wonderful smell, one that reminded him of autumns back home in Sudbury. Several people in the neighborhood had had such stoves. For just a moment, there in the gathering darkness, he closed his eyes and remembered.
And flinched.
That had been one of the smells in the girl's house. If it even
was
the girl's house. Several times during that day he had tried to open up to Jillian about it. But what would he say? How would he explain what he thought had really happened?
The one thing that was growing clearer in his mind was the progression of his drunkenness. His memory was murky now, but it seemed to him that he had felt only a little buzzed when he and Jilly had left the party. But that wasn't right, was it? Once he had gotten behind the wheel he had realized that he was drunker than he had thought. He might have had four bottles of Guinness instead of three. Maybe—and this was an enormous maybe—but maybe even five.
Still, though, that did not explain what happened afterward. It did not explain the blacked-out portions of his memory, or the way in which his judgment and perception had been impaired. The images of the house were practically hallucinatory. When he thought about it, he felt dread seize him. He was—
Terrified . . . you were terrified . . .
His eyes snapped open. Michael stood in his backyard, an eddy of chill wind spinning autumn leaves away from the pile he had made. It gusted, and he swayed, staring at the leaves as more and more slipped away. This was useless. He blinked away the encroaching darkness and then glanced upward. The night was deepening and the moon had emerged, frosted with a white corona, a kind of ghostly doppelgänger.
He
had
been terrified.
The small cuts and the bruise on his face were obvious, but he had done his best to hide the gash on his right