State of Grace Read online

  My grandfather’s belligerence scared me—as did his hatred of anyone different. Polacks . . . spics . . . niggers—my grandfather hated them all. That’s why when Natalie mentioned the vandalism to Mr. Holmes’ truck, I immediately thought of the conversation between my grandfather and his cronies the weekend before. I had been down at the station with my father.

  “Goddamned stink,” my grandfather had announced as he stepped inside the dirty garage. “Can’t even take a breath of fresh air.”

  My father, who was head and shoulders deep in the engine of an old Chevrolet pickup, looked up warily.

  “Somebody oughta go up there and teach that sumbitch a lesson.”

  This comment came from Randy Jenkins, one of the men who worked in the station. He was lying on his back, his legs sticking out from under the front of the pickup. As he spoke, he pushed himself out from under the truck. The caster wheels on the rolling creeper squeaked in protest. His face was dark from the dirt and grease of the old engine. With a huff, he sat up and looked meaningfully at my grandfather, who pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and stuck it between his lips.

  “He better be careful somebody don’t go put him in his place,” he finally agreed. Despite the oil, grease, and gasoline cans, he flicked open the tarnished lighter and held the flame to the tip of the cigarette. He inhaled deeply, held the smoke in his lungs for several seconds, and then blew it out both nostrils. No one spoke and finally, my grandfather pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, hawked up a wad of phlegm and spit.

  “—you know?”

  Natalie’s question brought me sharply back to the present.

  “Know what?” I asked.

  Natalie sighed in exaggerated exasperation. “You weren’t listening.”

  “I was,” I insisted. “Really.”

  “I said that my dad told my mom that he got to Mr. Holmes’ place and Mr. Holmes had his shotgun out. He said he was fed up with the way people treated him and his family. He said it wasn’t his fault that people were losing their farms or that his pigs smelled. He even threatened Dad.”

  We were all silent for several moments, no one knowing what to say. Finally, Grace spoke up. “I’m glad my dad isn’t a cop. It sounds too dangerous.”

  Grace’s father was a dentist and, like most of the fathers in town, traveled to Winston to work—or, at least, he had until the year before when he announced to Grace’s mother one night at dinner that he’d fallen in love with one of his hygienists. He moved out the next day, and after that Grace visited him every other weekend in his sparsely furnished bachelor’s apartment.

  “It’s not so bad,” Natalie said almost matter-of-factly. “Besides, I get to hear all about stuff that’s going on. And I know stuff most people don’t.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, both curious and slightly frightened.

  Natalie thought for a moment and I imagined her trying to determine what information would elicit the biggest reaction from us. She had an excellent sense of timing when it came to storytelling. Her dream, she had confessed to me one afternoon when it was just the two of us, was to write murder mysteries.

  “Well . . . I know about how to solve mysteries. I’ve seen all sorts of crime photos and I know about fingerprints and blood and stuff. I could probably solve murders if I wanted to.”

  We believed her—or at least I did. And I could guess from the expression on Grace’s face, she did too. We were silent and in that silence everything suddenly seemed too small—too intense. The morning sounds of locusts and birds seemed somehow ominous rather than pleasant. I was uncomfortable.

  “Hey, let’s ride up to the store and get some watermelon sticks,” I said to break the spell.

  “Yeah,” Natalie said. “And then we can ride over to the old Montgomery place and see if we can get in.”

  Sneaking outside of the boundaries of town and exploring the boarded-up house that used to belong to the Montgomery family was something we had been planning to do most of the summer, but had thus far been unable to accomplish. The boarded-up house, which had been abandoned for at least a decade, was a never-ending source of fascination for our group—and particularly for Natalie. Not only was it supposed to be haunted by the ghost of William Montgomery, the man who built the house in the early 1900s and hung himself during the height of the Great Depression, but it was also rumored to have been abandoned in such haste by later occupants that the plates were still on the dinner table.

  “I don’t know, you guys.” Grace shook her head slowly back and forth. “What if we get caught? We’re not supposed to be in there.”

  “Exactly.” Natalie grinned and raised one eyebrow dramatically. “Which is why, my dear Watson, we need to do it. Just think how cool it will be. Nobody’s been in there for years. And we’ve got everything we need to do it without getting caught.”

  When I had first suggested sneaking into the house, Natalie had jumped into action, making a list of everything she thought we’d need for a successful break-in. Per her instructions, we had each brought flashlights, gloves, ski masks, and rope. Now, Natalie turned her attention to the collection of things that lay piled in the corner of the Nest.

  “We will definitely need the flashlights and we don’t want to leave fingerprints so we’ll need the gloves, too. But . . .” She pursed her lips in thought. “I don’t think we need the ski masks. It’s too hot.”

  “I don’t know, Nat.” Grace said again. She looked first at me and then at Natalie.

  “So, don’t come,” Natalie gave a nonchalant shrug. “Me and Birdie will go, right?” She looked at me for affirmation.

  “Yeah,” I said with forced fearlessness. Grace looked back and forth between us. I leaned forward and touched her knee. “You should come, though. It won’t be the same without you. And we won’t go to jail.”

  Grace stared into my eyes for what seemed like forever before she gave a deep sigh. “Okay. I mean, why not?”

  “Excellent!” Natalie said with satisfaction.

  And that’s how the decision was made to break into the Montgomery house. We were just curious girls who wanted adventure. We had no idea that we would set in motion a chain reaction that would change everything.

  Chapter 3

  What I remember most about breaking into the abandoned Montgomery house was that it was like entering another world. Outside, the air was hot, muggy and the sunlight almost too bright. But inside the house, it was musty and dark; the air, though cooler, was thick with dust and an unnatural silence. We entered through a window in the back. Natalie’s gloves came in handy for more than preventing fingerprints. In an attempt to keep people out, the windows and doors had been boarded up with splintery planks of varying lengths which we had to pry away. The gloves had protected our hands from the jagged shards of glass that survived a long-ago thrown rock.

  One by one, we climbed through the lower portion of the window and then stood, clustered together, in the unnatural silence of what appeared to at have been, at one time, a dining room. Despite the stories of a house frozen in time, most of the furniture had been removed. All that remained was a rickety-looking wooden chair with a broken leg, a stained blanket, a pile of rotting boards, and various brands of crushed beer cans. The wallpaper had been peeled away from one of the walls and in its place someone had spray-painted the words, “Kill the PIGS!!” and “Satan worships here.”

  I turned to look at Grace. We hadn’t turned on our flashlights, and in the gloom her eyes were wide and very white in her tanned face. Next to her, Natalie stood very still. Her already pale skin looked almost translucent in the half-light. She turned her head to look at us and seemed to realize we were waiting for her to tell us what to do next. She swallowed and then gestured to a doorway that led toward the front of the house. “Let’s see what’s out there.” She turned and started for the doorway. Grace and I followed.

  We walked silently into the main area of the house. The walls were gray a
nd, in some places where the sheetrock hadn’t ripped off, dark mold stained the surface. I stepped carefully over the warped and rotting floor and around a pile of old magazines, a discarded pair of boy’s underpants, and a Jim Beam bottle.

  The smell of cool, dank decay tickled my nose and I sneezed.

  “Bless you,” Grace whispered. She was walking in the direction of the hallway. Buckled and peeling wallpaper drooped from the wall to her right. The floor groaned under her slight weight. Ahead of her, Natalie turned toward what must have been a front bedroom, shone her light into the room, and froze.

  “Uh oh.”

  Grace, too, halted and we both picked our way carefully to stand next to Natalie, who swung the beam of her light from a sleeping bag, to a milk crate, to a flashlight, to a book and notebook stacked neatly on top of the sleeping bag. Next to it was a familiar army camouflage jacket with the name “SULLIVAN” on a cloth badge.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Don Wan’s army jacket,” Natalie said.

  I looked at Grace who swallowed nervously.

  Everyone in Edenbridge knew Don—all the way back to the days when he had been Lenny Sullivan, the youngest of seven and the son of Red Sullivan, who had a reputation for abusing both whiskey and his family—generally in that order. It was after one particularly violent encounter with his father that Lenny, who still went by that name in those days, ran away and joined the army. Eventually, he was sent to Vietnam where, by his account, his army buddies christened him Don Juan because of his romantic prowess. It was only years after his discharge and subsequent name change that he realized he had misspelled Juan on the name change application. Because he always had heard it pronounced, he just assumed it was spelled like it sounded. He was wrong.

  After two tours in Vietnam and an honorable discharge, the newly minted Don Wan moved to the West Coast, where he spent the better part of two years feeding his addiction to opiates. He let his crew cut grow into a shaggy mess and purchased a motorcycle, painting fantastical dragons on the gas tank. His days consisted of getting high, working on his motorcycle, and expanding his collection of hand-drawn tattoos.

  No one in Edenbridge knew why Lenny/Don returned home. Some people said it was the death of his father. Some said he couldn’t make it in California. Others said it had to do with a scrape with the law. All we knew was that one day he came roaring back into town on a motorcycle covered with flames. A clearly pregnant girl with stringy blond hair sat behind him, her arms barely able to span the distance created by her belly and his chest. And he wasn’t Lenny, he told everyone; he was Don.

  Within weeks, the girl, whose name we came to know was Tammy, left to return to wherever she came from, and the house, which was mortgaged to the teeth, was repossessed. Homeless, jobless, and with only his motorcycle to his name, Don slept wherever he could find a bed. When that didn’t work out, he slept in the woods near the creek, under one of the county bridges, or in one of the many abandoned barns or farmhouses. Apparently, this included the Montgomery house. To make money, he worked odd jobs around town.

  “Do you think he’s here?” Grace whispered. We stood in silence and listened for any creaks or sounds to indicate he was upstairs or in an unexplored part of the house. The soft rustle of what were probably mice was the only sound.

  Natalie shook her head. “We would have seen his motorcycle outside if he was around, right?” She raised her eyebrows and looked at each of us for confirmation.

  We nodded.

  “Okay, so . . .” She looked down at Don’s things. A battered and grubby notebook lay on top of the army-issue sleeping bag. Natalie reached down and picked it up.

  “Nat, what are you doing?” I could hear the anxiety in my own voice and tried to remain calm. “That’s Don’s. You can’t look at it.”

  “This isn’t his house,” she said. “That means it’s fair game. Besides, don’t you want to know what Crazy McCrazerson writes about?”

  I shook my head. “I’m going to see what’s upstairs.”

  “Suit yourself,” Natalie said and opened the notebook. She flipped through a couple of pages before gasping. “Guys, come here.” Her tone was urgent. “You’ve got to see this.”

  Both Grace and I moved quickly to stand on either side of her and looked down at the notebook. Sketches of full-breasted women lounging in various poses jumped off the page. In some of the drawings, the women wore bits of clothing, in some, just hats or panties. But in most of the sketches, the women were nude. Some were touching themselves with long, graceful fingers. In others, they were reaching forward for something or someone outside the picture.

  “Gross.” Grace said. “Are they all like that?”

  Natalie began to slowly turn the pages. Not all of the drawings were of nude women. Some were just faces—faces of women or girls or boys. One, I thought, looked remarkably like one of the boys in our class. Another, I saw to my shock, looked like me. Grace saw it, too.

  “Birdie . . .” she said softly, “This looks like you. He drew you.”

  I felt sick. My arms and neck and legs began to tingle.

  Natalie turned on her flashlight, shone it onto the page, and then looked from the page to my face and back again. She could see I was upset.

  “It looks a little like her,” she said finally. “But not really. Birdie’s skinnier and her eyes look different. And her hair is longer. It’s not her.”

  Grace looked again at the picture and then again at me. I could see she didn’t agree, but she said nothing.

  “Let’s go, you guys,” Grace said finally. “I don’t like it here.”

  I shivered, praying that Natalie would decide that Grace was right. For once, she did.

  “Okay,” Natalie said, still looking at me. The shadows masked her eyes, but I could tell she was thinking. She closed the notebook. As she leaned down to put it back on top of the sleeping bag, several loose sheets of unlined paper fell to the floor. She bent to pick them up and as she did so, looked down at the images. She gasped softly before quickly slipping them into the back of the book.

  “What is it?” I asked. Grace, who had walked to the doorway, turned.

  “Nothing,” Natalie said, too quickly. “Just more of the same stuff.” She carefully placed the notebook back on the sleeping bag where she had found it and then stood. She walked quickly to the door and shouldered past Grace. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I met Grace’s gaze, shrugged, and then followed Natalie out of the room. I could tell from the way she walked that she was upset about something. What, I wondered, had she seen that she wasn’t telling us?

  Chapter 4

  Climbing out of the gloom of the Montgomery house and into the heat of the late morning sunshine was a relief—or, at least, it was for me. The three of us blinked uncomfortably in the bright light and then started to walk, our heads down, to the cluster of trees near the old well where we had hidden our bikes. Natalie was quiet and I glanced at her several times, tempted to ask her what she had seen.

  “So, what are we going to do now?” Grace asked as we hauled our bikes out of the bushes and pushed them out to the blacktopped road that would take us back into town.

  “I should probably go home,” Natalie said.

  I turned to look at her, surprised at her answer. She never wanted to go home.

  “We probably all should,” she said and looked pointedly at me. I narrowed my eyes like I had seen my mother do when she was suspicious of something I had said, but Natalie ignored me.

  “I think I’ll go back to the Nest,” Grace said.

  As she spoke, we climbed on our bikes and began to slowly pedal back toward town. Within ten minutes we had reached the Lempkins’ house. I grinned to see Andy mowing the grass, his T-shirt tucked in the waistband of his jeans, his skinny chest and stringy arms reddened from the sun. He smiled and raised his hand in greeting. My flushed face turned even redder as I tried to be casual and wave back.

  Part of my nervousness
was because I was in love with Andy. But equally significant was that everyone in town was slightly intimidated by the Lempkins. For lack of a better analogy, they were the Kennedys of Edenbridge. Or, if not the Kennedys, then the Osmonds. In addition to Ted and Alice, the family consisted of three boys and two girls who happened to be twins. Like their parents, they were all attractive with naturally wavy hair, perfect teeth, and a natural grace that made everything each of them did seem effortless. They possessed a celebrity quality that made the rest of us jealous. But you couldn’t dislike them for it because they were also genuinely nice.

  Often on Sunday afternoons in the fall, all seven of them could be seen in their front yard, tossing a football around or playing three-on-three while Alice sat on the front steps and watched the game with a steaming cup of what we all imagined to be cocoa. The other thing about the Lempkins was that they genuinely liked each other. You could tell—not only by all the family activities, but also by the way they subtly attended to each other at school or at town events.

  Natalie glanced in my direction as we passed and snickered. My crush on Andy was common knowledge and she enjoyed teasing me about it. “Birdie’s got a boyfriend,” she sang. “Kissy kissy.”

  “Shut up,” I said and pedaled faster. We were almost to the Mercantile and if we were all going home for the afternoon, I wanted to get some jawbreakers and bubble gum. “Last one to the store is a rotten egg.”

  We raced, then, as fast as possible to the store and only hit our brakes at the end so we could skid to a dramatic stop.

  “I won,” Natalie announced and climbed off her bike. “And I had the longest skid mark.” She pointed at the ground.

  “You’re so full of it,” I said. “I—”

  My words were interrupted by yelling from across the street at my grandfather’s service station. Parked in front of the pumps was Mr. Holmes’ battered Ford pickup. Large, scoured circles that looked like gray rain clouds spotted the passenger side and the hood—as if someone had taken an SOS pad and tried to scrub off the paint. I remembered what Natalie had said about the words someone had painted on his truck.