If there was something in the room that would tell me more about Laura, I was going to find it.
I was going to search.
I didn’t want to.
Everything inside me said it was wrong.
It was wrong.
I guess I just didn’t care.
I went to one of the bureaus resting against a wall. It had a framed mirror on top on a kind of pivot, and some pretty enamel boxes in front of the mirror, painted in a sort of Asian fashion.
I opened them.
Makeup.
Some jewelry.
I closed them one by one.
I opened the first bureau drawer.
Clothes. Tops.
I fingered through them.
Nothing.
I opened the next few drawers.
Clothes, clothes, clothes.
I crouched down and opened the bottom drawer. The second I had it open I wanted to close it. I mean that.
But I couldn’t.
I guess all girls have this sort of stuff. Suzie Perkins did. She didn’t pack it away so nicely, though, but usually just threw it all over the floor.
The bras were on the left side and the panties on the right.
I swear, I didn’t touch them.
Some were cotton; some were fancy lace.
I’d opened the drawer. Why close it?
I knew it didn’t matter.
There was no going back on it. I was sorry, but it was done.
Still, it wasn’t enough.
You see, I just kept having these thoughts.
I mean these really weird thoughts just kept sort of occurring to me, like they had out in the hall when I sat against the wall and downstairs and even last night in the basement, and they were thoughts I felt I’d had on my mind all along but was only now letting myself become aware of.
I didn’t know how much time I had. I admit I felt pretty scared, because I could still hear the maid downstairs, but not so clearly because the house was insulated pretty well, and I could hear these little thumps. I realized it would be smart to sort of hurry up and get it over with—searching, I mean—so I could find a way out before the maid maybe came upstairs or somebody else arrived.
But I kept having these weird thoughts—and one thought in particular—maybe just to convince myself to stay there and not be so nervous, because to tell you the truth, I sort of really did want to leave, but I couldn’t help thinking this weird thought that there was something dangerous in the room, and I really wanted to know what it was.
Of course, maybe it was me.
Maybe the danger was me.
Maybe I was losing it.
I stood. I looked around. Her computer was on the desk. Check her files, her emails? I might be able to ferret out her passwords somewhere in one file or another, or scribbled in one of the notebooks she had stacked on an open shelf in the desk.
But I didn’t think it would help.
I knew I wouldn’t find what I was searching for—whatever it might be—in her computer.
I stepped lightly to a closet and slid it open.
Dresses on hangers, most of them in protective vinyl slips.
I looked all over. In boxes on upper shelves. In these neat storage containers down below.
Nothing.
I went into every cabinet. The worst I found were the same drugs her mother took.
Mood stabilizers.
She’d never told me.
Suzie Perkins would have told me. She probably would have offered me one. Suzie hid nothing. Had I been searching her room, I’d have learned everything about her in a minute, from what was strewn on the floor.
But here I learned nothing.
Laura’s was a good girl’s room.
A perfect girl’s room.
Well behaved and well brought-up. It really did look like a room display in a department store catalog.
I was about to give up.
There was nothing.
Then I found what was under the bed.
When I first felt it I knew I had to be careful. It was heavy. I couldn’t get it out without pulling it across the floor. I pulled it slowly and steadily, so the maid wouldn’t hear.
It was an open wooden box, about three feet wide and two feet long, the drawer from some old chest.
The first thing I saw were some paintings.
Laura had told me a little about them. I mean she’d mentioned a couple times that she loved painting, when she told me how she wanted to go to art school, which she told me that day we were kissing on my bed. I don’t mean she talked too much about it, but just sort of mentioned it, because she always said she wasn’t good enough. You could kind of see she felt that way. The paintings I found weren’t signed on the front or anything, and only when I turned them over did I see her initials on the backs of them, in the corners, small and hidden.
I looked at one. It was a little hard to see because of a reason I’ll tell you about in just a second, but I thought the painting was all right.
No, it was better than all right.
It was a picture she must have painted from life, or from a photo, I guess, because it looked pretty realistic. It showed a field in the country with a white fence, one of those fences you always see along the side of the road whenever you drive out far enough, and behind the fence there were three horses, two brown and a gray one, with their heads pressed together over the fence, and in the background there were trees.
Everything was really well painted and proportionate, but that wasn’t what made it good. What made it good was the way she did the light, because there was, like, a bar or a stripe of light across the horses’ heads, and more light fell onto the field behind them, making certain areas of the grass bright with sunshine, while the rest of the grass was in shadow. And then very far in the background I saw another horse running,
