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I shook my head. He looked skeptical.
"Are you telling me you didn't know what had happened today?"
"I forgot," I said.
"Wow. Interesting. Well, it is the date anyway. C'mon up. We'll be like historical detectives or something."
I continued up the stairs slowly, stairs my mother had climbed many times, my legs feeling heavier. It was as if l were dragging my grandmother behind me because she had seized me at the waist and was trying to prevent me from going any farther. I knew she would be upset to know I was in this house.
"Everything's changed up here as well." Craig explained when I reached the landing. "My mother put in all new lighting, including those chandeliers," he said, pointing to the two in the upstairs hallway. "She redid the flooring, covered the walls with this wallpaper, had doors replaced and redid the fixtures in the bathrooms as well. My room was changed from top to bottom, including the fixtures and the closet. She ripped out part of a wall to expand it. Then, she had the wall on the opposite side torn out and had a bathroom put in for me. That was a very big job. My father complained that it was costing as much to redo the house as it was to have bought it.
"But, being we could get all the materials wholesale and great deals on the labor, he didn't stand a chance." He leaned toward me to whisper, as if there were others in the house. "The truth was my mother wouldn't have moved in here if he didn't go along with all her changes. A dead body in your house is a dead body. For most people
it would give them the creeps, but this was too good a house to pass up, especially for the price."
"I understand," I said. "Your parents were smart to buy it, I'm sure."
He nodded.
"My dad's a good businessman. It's supposed to run in the family, so there's high hopes for me."
He went to his right and opened his bedroom door.
Then he spread out his arms and cried, "Ta-da. Here it is. The scene of the crime."
He stepped back. I hesitated. How many times had I imagined myself here, dreamed of looking into the room and envisioning Harry Pearson's body on this floor, my mother standing over him? It was the meat to fatten the bones of my worst nightmare.
"Harry Pearson's body was sprawled on the floor just inside the door. He was lying facedown, both arms out above his head." Craig looked down as if the body was really there. It gave me a surge of ice along my spine, and I actually shuddered. He turned to me. "You know how she did it, right?"
I nodded even though I really didn't know any of the gruesome details. I felt as if I had a heavy stone on my tongue.
"She stabbed him in the throat," he told me.
I didn't need to hear it. I didn't want to hear those details, and yet I did. I was caught in the web of that horrible contradiction. I was like a moth drawn to a flame. Get too close and you set yourself on fire. Craig smiled.
"I know the whole story, of course. I couldn't help but be curious about something like that, happening in the house we had bought and were going to live in and especially the bedroom I would sleep in," he added, as if he had to provide me with an excuse.
I nodded, but I couldn't get my gaze off the floor where Harry Pearson's body supposedly had been found.
"He wasn't half in and half out. He was fully in the room."
I looked up at him.
"So?"
"There were no pictures of your mother in the papers," he continued, ignoring my question. "She was still considered a juvenile, but I found her picture in one of the old yearbooks in the school library. You ever go in there to look at those?"
"No"
Since my father had graduated from a high school in Yonkers, New York, looking at his yearbook wouldn't have provided my mother's picture, and Aunt Zipporah had never shown me my mother's picture in a yearbook.
"There's just pictures of her with her class, and her face is so small you need a magnifying glass. She was very pretty," he told me. "Now that I see you out of a shell, you're very pretty yourself, and you do bear a strong resemblance."
"I wasn't in any shell."
"You weren't?" He smiled.
"I wasn't."
