Jane Was Here Read online

  Sarah Kernochan’s Previous Work:

  Dry Hustle

  JANE WAS HERE

  JANE WAS

  HERE

  Sarah Kernochan

  JANE WAS HERE. Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Kernochan. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information and restoral system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume any responsibility for, third party websites or their content.

  Grey Swan Press

  www.greyswanpress.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are prod-ucts of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, or locals or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  100% acid-free paper

  __________________

  Printed in the United States

  Cover designed by Norman Moore

  Cover photograph by Phoebe Lapine

  100% acid-free paper

  Printed in the United States

  __________________

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Kernochan, Sarah.

  Jane was here/Sarah Kernochan-1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Mystery-Fiction. 2. Reincarnation-Fiction. 3. Title.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010941987

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-615-49061-8

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  eBook published by Page of Wands Press, Inc.

  To my parents,

  Jack and Adelaide Kernochan

  I’ll be seeing you.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter-Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  Colophon:

  The night is pale, humid, with a few begrimed clouds. The moon has hung around so long it’s ignored, unremarkable as a thumb-tack. On this July night, the girl soon to be known as Jane enters the village of Graynier.

  It has grown since she was here last, though that was too long ago for her to remember. Back then there were only a few hundred people in Graynier.

  It had never been one of those quaint New England hamlets, with neat white clapboard houses, town hall and Presbyterian church presiding over a cozy green, a registry spanning back to the Puritans.

  Graynier came into being because of the glass factory. Built in 1828 at the foot of Putman Hill, it harnessed the gush of Ponusuck Creek for its great wheel. Workers arrived; their houses sprang up on haphazard dirt lanes. The factory owner’s mansion went up. His progeny built a cluster of modest Victorians to face the wooded hills, turning their backs on the working-class neighborhoods, repudiating community. The workers’ progeny established shops and took up the better professions, valiantly trying to confer an air of prosperity on the village…But Graynier was built on glass, and everyone felt that impermanence underfoot.

  The factory no longer exists.

  She remembers so very little, she cannot comment to herself how this and that have changed since the old days. Yet it was her home, this much she knows. That certainty produces in her a wild joy, thrashing like a bird against the curtain of fatigue sweeping over her body.

  She wants to know everything, all, and at once.

  Better that she does not: too soon for her to know the appalling events of the past. And the future she is rushing toward, sweeping the town’s inhabitants along with her in a frightful flood of justice, is also obscured—as it should be.

  Some of the people who were present for what happened all those years ago still live here. The one who pushed her from the womb. The one who carried her on his shoulders. The one who taught her arithmetic. The one who kissed her first. The one who fell in love with her. The one she loved instead.

  And the one who killed her.

  That one is somewhere here: a small life that shimmers and pulses in the night—or so Heaven must see it, for, in spite of that terrible deed, all life is sacred. But her killer would have no more idea of that than a mole snuffling about its starless underworld.

  And Heaven would have her be ignorant as well, as she walks into the village of Graynier, in the valley between two hills, under a vapid moon.

  CHAPTER ONE

  At 3 a.m. Hoyt Eddy wakes up in his truck. The Shicker Shack’s neon sign is shut off; his pickup is the only vehicle left in the bar’s parking lot.

  Mosquitoes bob and weave inside the cab as he scratches the bites on his arms. Maybe they took one too many hits off his over-bourboned blood. He twists to peer through the rear window into the truck bed. Sure enough, his dog Pete is gone, bored with waiting for him to sleep off the night’s booze-a-thon.

  Hoyt whistles. Pete catapults out of a dumpster, shaking off pizza crusts and wet coffee filters from ruptured garbage bags. He jumps into the pickup bed while Hoyt starts the engine.

  Might as well stay up the rest of the night, Hoyt decides, pulling onto Route 404: have a glass of that Malbec he stole from Jack Meltzer’s wine cellar, read the 1893 pocket edition of Byron’s poems he bought for twenty-five cents at the First Methodist Book Fair. He likes the tiny print and age-dappled pages of the worthless volumes that sometimes turn up at church sales, especially oddities like nineteenth century treatises on angling, or housework. He has an entire wall he has read of books like these, and another wall he intends to read.

  Jack and Audrey Meltzer are arriving in two weeks to enjoy their dream house. As their caretaker (Hoyt Eddy Property Management, LLC), Hoyt is responsible for making sure everything is as it should be. That means he will have to rescue the place from ten months of neglect. He has to start work early in the morning.

  He will spend the week preparing the estate: cleaning gutters, poisoning ants, roaches and the mice that have gnawed through the home theater cables. He will bomb wasp nests he’s left untended to grow as big as basketballs; he’ll repair cracked windows and punctured screens; bring in migrant workers from the motel (paying them a meager wage from the outrageous amount he charges the Meltzers for lawn care, using the name of a fictitious high-end nursery) to mow, trim, and weed. He will skim snakes from the pool; tie rags around burst pipes; dump copper sulfate into the lake to destroy the carpet of green algae which has vividly claimed it, and in the process kill whatever fish haven’t mutated since the last time he threw chemicals their way. All must appear shipshape.

  The illusion has to last through September. After Labor Day, Hoyt can le
t the elements and the pests have their go once again at Maple Manor. Once more vines will crawl under the roof, leaves blow into the garage, mice strafe turds on the kitchen counters and make their homes under the bedclothes. Snow and ice will wall off the driveway.

  Hoyt does have a plow attachment for his truck, and he does bill the Meltzers for snow removal, but winter is mainly his time for uninterrupted reading and drinking. Once or twice during the season he will snowshoe into the property from the road, leaving aimless loops of tracks around the house as he notes damage he will address, in an eleventh-hour dash, next July.

  Rehearsing this calendar of chores in his head, Hoyt’s attention is elsewhere when he reaches the curve in the road.

  A woman comes into view, walking in the middle of his lane, her back to his headlights. Hoyt’s reflexes are slow: dreamily he records the thin hair wafting with each of her strides, her clam-digger pants, the duffel bag in her hand. Then, sucking air, he wrenches the wheel left to avoid hitting her.

  At the same moment, in the opposite lane, a pair of low-slung headlights swings around the curve. Car and truck collide with a thick crunch.

  MARLY HAD ALSO BEEN at the Shicker Shack earlier, though she left before Hoyt arrived. She hadn’t wanted to go. But Chuck Mosher kept shooting looks over his wife’s shoulder, his eyes jerking back and forth: Marly…door… Marly…door. Clearly he was nervous about having both ladies in the same room: the woman who bore his children and his name, and the one he fucked on bowling nights when he was expected home late.

  Taking the hint, Marly had left. But it was a shame: there were at least six other guys at the Shack who were glad to see her. Gil Reynard, with his cute grin and maxedout credit cards (she always has to buy drinks). Oly Gustaffson, back from Iraq with his amazing finger prosthesis; Oly’s boss, who sells carpeting, and whom she mixes up with Harold Bourjois the mortician because they both smell of formaldehyde; Brink Banner, manager of a cold-storage warehouse near the freeway (a place nowhere near as cold as his wife, he once told Marly).

  Actually, the entire town of Graynier is filled with men who exploit Marly’s good nature. A cheerful person, Marlene Walczak always tells herself that if times are tough, they could be tougher. Her daughter Pearl may be overweight and illegitimate, but she could be morbidly obese and an orphan. Men might ram away at Marly like a plunger in a toilet, but at least they’re not mean and disrespectful; they’re fond of her. She loves seeing that little lamp switch on in their eyes when she swings into the bar after work. You can’t fake that appreciation; it’s almost as genuine as love.

  “There are worse things,” she always says, spinning her skimpy straw into gold. “Be thankful for what you have.”

  After leaving the Shicker Shack, Marly went to The Hut, where she bumped into Van Farkle, who was all a-twitch for some pussy. Turning down his generous offer of the reclining seats in his Camry, she managed to wangle an invitation to his house.

  In the past Van had enjoyed having her over; he would record their goings-on with the mini-cam he had mounted on the ceiling. By now, though, he had more than enough tapes of them scrambling around the waterbed; they were all pretty repetitive after a while. It took some effort to convince him that coitus in the home was way preferable to coitus in the Camry, something she’d learned empirically from slamming against the gear shift and cup-holders only the week before.

  It was a good thing Van had woken her at 3:00 a.m. and told her to get the hell out. Otherwise her daughter Pearl would have discovered her mom’s empty bed in the morning, and they would have both been late to work. Giving Van’s meaty shoulder a kiss, Marly had gotten dressed quickly and jumped in her car.

  Halfway home to the trailer park, she swung her Cavalier around a corner, and saw a young woman walking in the opposite lane.

  For a split second Marly registered the girl’s slight silhouette, rimmed by a big bright halo of light.

  Then the halo turned into the headlights of a truck, which swerved suddenly, plowing into Marly’s car.

  HOYT GETS OUT of his truck, his hand on the back of his neck. In the collision, his head snapped forward and back; now bolts of pain are flashing through his cervical spine.

  The first thought he has is about liability. Though his pickup looks fine (except for a little paint damage), the other car, a cheap compact, has taken the brunt, its fender flattened, its hood buckled, one light gouged out. The driver will be angry—or worse, injured. Hoyt braces for accusations, police reports, blood alcohol tests, defendant’s hospital bills, insurance claims.

  His second thought is defensive. It wasn’t his fault. There was someone—a girl—smack in the middle of road.

  Where is she?

  He peers around quickly. It hurts to turn his head. There’s no one on the road now; maybe she continued walking and passed beyond the streetlamp’s pool of light.

  The other driver gets out of the car. Hoyt tenses.

  Then he sees it’s only Marly.

  Dazed, she’s holding her neck, too. “Hi, Hoyt.” She musters a meek smile. “Was—was that my fault?”

  Hoyt relaxes. Why not let her embrace the blame, as long as she’s willing? “You took the curve too wide. I couldn’t avoid you.” It’s always fun to fuck with Marly Walczak’s head.

  Marly is looking about in confusion. “There was a girl standing in the road. Did you see her?”

  “I saw someone. Nobody there now.”

  “Oh my God! You don’t think I hit her?”

  “You would’ve heard it.”

  While Marly checks along the roadsides for a huddled little body in clamdiggers, Hoyt searches under the vehicles. They both find nothing.

  “Hoyt…” Moonlight plays on Marly’s anxiously creased forehead and the sooty mascara whorls around her eyes. “Please let’s not report this. My insurance was canceled last week ‘cause the payment was late. I was going to put a check in the mail Friday when I get paid.”

  “Suits me. You got the worst of it, anyhow.”

  Her engine starts right up. As she inches it onto the road alongside Hoyt, the fender drags noisily, its headlight looking like Quasimodo.

  “You’re good to go,” Hoyt says heartlessly.

  “You know, my neck doesn’t feel too good.” She catches herself complaining. “Still, it could have been a lot worse!”

  On the drive home, Hoyt keeps an eye out for the girl they both saw. But she seems to have vanished.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Around 3 a.m. Brett finishes the Little Rompers Nursery School website design, inserting his secret signature: a tiny pumpkin in place of the ‘c’ in the copyright notice circle. If anyone accidentally clicks on it, guitars explode and the Smashing Pumpkins holler, “Despite all my rage/ I’m still a rat in a cage…” So far his employer hasn’t caught him at it.

  He emails the link to his boss, rubs the sweat off his glasses with the hem of his T-shirt, and scratches a mosquito bite, pink on the pallor of his arm. It was probably a mistake to set up his workspace in the top-floor garret. The summer heat rises and clots under the rafters; when he gets up from the rickety ladder-back chair, unbending his long frame so his head grazes the eaves, he is momentarily dizzy. But he’d wanted to be within earshot of his son’s bedroom, in case the boy has a nightmare or something and calls for him.

  Not that Collin would.

  Their first summer together, begun only a week ago, is already a disaster. Maybe Veronda wanted it that way. When he went to pick Collin up in Norwalk, she stood in the driveway with her fierce acrylic nails crossed over the boy’s chest like a mother bear’s. Gold eyes like a bear, too. Parting her claws, she handed Collin over to Brett. Her parents were on hand, for good measure, their baleful stares reminding him that he’d cut short their daughter’s college career by impregnating her, thus forcing her return home to Connecticut.

  Brett took his son’s hand. It hung limply in his grasp as he led the boy to the rented van. “Bye, sugar bunny,” called Veronda’s mother
. Brett knew there would be cold carnage if he returned their grandson dinged, dented, or white-ified at summer’s end. The sinister whine of weed whackers on a Saturday reminded him of the hell he would descend unto at the hour of judgment for having boned a good black girl. This despite the fact that Veronda had been the one to straddle him, to cover his meager mouth with her lush pillowy lips, and later to shock him with her nasty laughter when he said he loved her.

  He’d paid monthly support, sent Christmas presents, telephoned on Collin’s birthday, but the message from Norwalk was always the same: pay and pay but stay away. We’ll let him come to the phone and that’s it.

  The boy’s conversation was all grunt. Brett gave up calling.

  This past year, though, the recriminations changed: Brett learned that he was selfish, he had no interest in knowing his own son, he never asked to visit, he had a good job and unfettered freedom as if he’d done nothing wrong, as if Collin didn’t exist! Brett took the blows and awaited fresh instruction. It came in June: he would take the kid for eight weeks of father-son bonding while Veronda went to Ghana to understand her roots.

  Now, his hands sliding over crumbled wallpaper, Brett gropes his way down the staircase to the second floor. The dingy floorboards yelp under his bare feet as he pads cautiously down the corridor to look in on Collin, as a father would.

  As it happens, Brett can’t look in on his child because he can’t see him. The boy’s bed is swathed in mosquito netting hung from four posters. The kid is veiled from view— and that’s the problem.

  From the moment he got into Brett’s van, Collin had vanished into silence, turning his face away as if telephone poles, freeway shoulders, blurred woods were of intense interest. Brett kept glancing at his son, admiring his amber skin and fluffy brown curls, the pretty eyes that were always averted. The only motion came from the boy’s hands, continually pulling on his fingers, as if trying (in vain) to make his knuckles crack.