Spire in the Woods/4

I didn’t have any classes with Fletch and rarely saw him in the halls, but I had two classes with Drew DeLuca and he had lunch the same period as Fletch, so I had him pass along that I wouldn’t need a ride. When 6th period let out, I made my way over to the parking lot where Alina was waiting for me next to her blue ‘98 Beetle.

We got in and blasted the heat. Unlike Fletch’s ancient Civic, Alina’s Beetle actually warmed up pretty quick. Everything but the silence was comfortable.

“Do you...do you wanna get right into it?”

Alina looked at me out of the corner of her eyes. They were so blue. She shook her head. “Not while I’m driving.”

We rode in silence until we pulled up in front of a good-sized colonial house.

“Is this ok?” she asked.

“Oh yeah, yeah. Sure.”

“I just...I don’t want to talk about it in public.”

“It’s totally fine.”

Alina looked relieved as she hit the garage door opener. It was like she thought bringing me over her house was really putting me out. Getting out of the car, I noticed the garage was otherwise empty. We were alone.

Abbey, an aging golden retriever that the Aminevs apparently didn’t kennel, greeted us with her tail wagging and her leash in her mouth.

“I have to take her out. Make yourself at home.”

Just being inside Alina’s house felt so intimate. Identity is everything to a teenager, and to bring someone else into your home was to expose a part of you that was beyond your control. It was laying bare the environment that had produced you.

When I had first entered Fletch’s house, his discomfort was evident. His house was just a place he passed through to get to his room. For Scary Kerry, her house was a source of shame. Mrs. Peterson’s small, ill-kept home was a constant reminder to Kerry, not just of her parents’ failed marriage, but of her mother’s lack of achievement. Lack of education. They were both stuck there, in a house that smelled of deli meats and the water that feta cheese is packed in. A smell that started in Mrs. Peterson’s work clothes but now infused everything they owned.

I entered Alina’s house with the same reverence I would a church. It had a feeling to it that put you in the mood to sip hot chocolate and watch the snow fall. There were candles and tealights on the tables and holiday-themed knickknacks on the walls. The piney scent of a Christmas tree filled the air, and as I collapsed onto their overstuffed couch, it occurred to me that for the first time all day, I felt relaxed.

After she returned, Alina lead me downstairs into the ‘game room,’ a finished basement dominated by a full-sized pool table. She offered me a soda from the mini fridge behind the wet bar and then we sat down on a loveseat in front of the big-screen TV.

Alina stared at me while I spoke. I stared back. It was impossible to look anywhere else. I recounted the story Fletch had told me, as faithfully as I could. All the while I was very conscious of where her legs were in relation to mine. They tugged at me as if they had gravity.

She’d seemed fine the whole time I talked, but the moment I was done she began gasping for air, like she’d been holding her breath. Then the sobbing started. I was quick to close the gap between us. I held her for several minutes while her slender frame shook and quivered. When she regained her composure, she slowly withdrew to her end of the love seat.

“Oh, God. I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

“Don’t be.”

“I’m such a mess. I feel ashamed when I’m happy and like a victim when I’m ashamed. It takes everything I’ve got just to keep it together. It’s exhausting.”

“Have you talked to anyone? Seen a...you know?”

“Yeah, but she won’t give me anything.”

“That’s not a bad thing.”

“So you don’t believe any of it?” Her right leg began bouncing up and down on the ball of her foot. “I thought you were Mr. Ghost Hunter.”

I scoffed. The corner of her mouth twitched as if she were about to smile and for a fleeting second, I felt connected to her. To the old Alina.

I didn’t run around telling everyone I met why I cared so much about ghost stories. I didn’t wear anything that personal on my sleeve, but I told Alina. She listened and nodded and understood me.

“Can I ask you something?”

She nodded.

“Why does it matter to you if the Widower’s Clock is real?”

“I need them to be wrong about me. The people who stare at me in the halls. Blame me. Like Fletch and John Murphy.”

“Fletch’s just hurting. He doesn’t blame you. Not really.”

“Yes he does. Everybody does. All they get are these little snippets about how much Rob loved me. I’ve heard them talk about it. They say I thought I was better than him because I live in a big house, or because he wasn’t a jock, or because he was nerdy. He loved me, and I was a bitch for rejecting him.”

Alina pulled her legs up to chest and hugged her knees. I remember being struck by how much she looked like a little girl. It seemed strange at the time, but in hindsight, at scarcely seventeen Alina practically was a little girl. A kid realizing for the first time that her classmates felt entitled to opinions about what she did with her body and affections.

I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t true. That no one really believed she was a snob about money or shallow or a bitch. I wanted to, but I’d also heard the whispers.

“The truth is,” she said. “The only thing I really knew about him is that he made me uncomfortable.”

I moved beside her and put my arm around her shoulder. I could feel how tense she was as she stared straight ahead.

“It’s not your fault.” Her haired smelled like vanilla. “Alina, look at me.” She looked so full of uncertainty. Scared. I put my other hand on her wrist. “I’m gonna go down there, to the Quabbin...”

She grabbed me by the shoulder and held me like I might fall.

“It’s OK.” I couldn’t help smiling at her concern. “I won’t go in. I’m just going to listen for the bells.”

She studied my face. We were only inches apart. My heart was racing. “Besides,” I said as I leaned in, “I want to.” And I kissed her.

Her lips were slow to respond. Doubts raced through me. Was she surprised? Was this a rejection? Had I crossed a line? I felt like Scary Kerry must have back in Greenfield. But Alina didn’t withdraw.

Maybe it had nothing to do with me. Maybe it was just survivor’s guilt.

After a very long couple of seconds, Alina kissed me back. My brain went fuzzy. I almost had to stop. It’s tough to kiss with a grin. I was kissing Alina Aminev. I slipped my fingers through her wild hair. Alina who ran track. I could feel my leg pressed against hers. Alina who smelled like vanilla and smirked when she used to smile. I tried to press my leg between hers, but she kept her legs closed. And that I was fine, I was happy just to be kissing her.

We spent the next few minutes on that loveseat. It wasn’t the sort of first kiss you imagine, I was nervous, and she was still. At the time, I remember thinking it was more intimate than passionate, but that made sense to me. She wasn’t in a real good place. Being with her was going to be like building a house of cards. It’d take a slow hand and the slightest misstep could bring her crumbling down.

She wanted to drive me home before her parents returned from work. As we were getting our coats on, I said, “Let’s see a movie.”

She didn’t answer immediately. I thought for a second she hadn’t heard me. “I can’t. I can’t.”

I kissed her and asked again, but it didn’t help.

“What if someone sees us?”

I wanted people to see us. I didn’t care what people thought about her. I didn’t even give a rat’s ass what Fletch thought about her.

“Please don’t tell him. Don’t tell anybody. I can’t handle how they’d look at me.”

She broke down. I held her.

As I lay in bed that night I found myself fantasizing about Alina. It wasn’t sexual, hell, it wasn’t even about the kiss. It was about the most mundane things. Spooning her while we watched TV. Holding her hand while we walked down the hallways at school. Having little arguments over who’d sit at whose lunch table.

That’s when I resolved that I had to find the Spire in the Woods. Right in the middle of fantasy-Alina apologizing for not wanting to sit with my friends and telling fantasy-me that I was the most important thing in the world to her. I had to find it for Alina. To get her out from under some of the guilt she held on her shoulders.

And was it really so crazy to think there might be some truth to it? Even if I was skeptical of the connection to the Widower’s Clock, couldn’t Robert Edward Kennan have followed the sound of bells? Couldn’t he have discovered a spire sticking out of the ground?

Maybe he even found a body. Hadn’t Fletch mentioned someone had gone missing from that trailer park? If he had found her corpse, that could have certainly pushed him over the edge.

The thought sent a shiver up my spine.

The last couple of weeks before Christmas vacation were always filled with midterms and projects, and that year was no exception. It was the last thing in the world either of us wanted to do, but with a group project due Monday, I had to meet Scary Kerry at the library.

We were bullshitting while I busted my rear end looking for sources for our presentation on Robespierre (I had practically carried Kerry through the first half of European History), when I told her that I had changed my mind. I wanted to visit the Quabbin.

Kerry was thrilled. “When do you wanna go?”

“I dunno. Sometime over break, I guess.”

“We should try to figure out everything about them.”

“Who?”

“The clockmaker and his wife.”

Only one of my haunted New England books told the story of the Widower’s Clock, and maybe it was because I’d initially been skeptical that the story was grounded in any sort of reality, but it honestly never occurred to me that there was anything more to know. But if there was a clockmaker, he had to have made clocks, and if there’d been a murder, there must be an obituary.

Kerry disappeared into the basement where the library kept their microfiche. With her gone, I was able to finish researching our paper in short order and by the time I wandered downstairs, she’d found out quite a bit.

The clockmaker was a German immigrant named Adolf Riefler, born in 1857. He was hired sometime between 1905 and 1907 to construct the clock for the Custom House Tower in Boston by an architect named Robert Swain Peabody. The clock was a failure. In an effort to show up his two brothers, who were also master clockmakers, Riefler attempted to miniaturize several of the motor’s components. While the clock ran, it failed to keep accurate time. The clock was referred to by some as Adolf’s Folly until the mid-1930s, when Hitler’s infamy outstripped Riefler’s.

The bride was Robert Swain Peabody’s niece, Amy Lowell Putnam, born 1892. She was just 16 when she married Riefler, who was, by that time, 51 years old. I suppose the age difference wasn’t that unusual in those times, but back in 1999, when Alina was 17, the idea of her with a man in his 50s made my skin crawl.

It also made me regard Amy Lowell Putnam with more sympathy. Imagine being married off at 16 to a man more than three times your age. Imagine twenty years of marriage to that man, waking up to find yourself in your mid-thirties, still in the heart of your sexual prime, with a husband in his seventies. Of course she was attracted to other men.

We couldn’t find an obituary for Amy Lowell Putnam, nor for Amy Lowell Riefler, nor for Amy Putnam Riefler. Scary Kerry took it as a sign that the Putnams, Lowells or Peabodys, all powerful families, had covered up the scandalous manner in which Amy Lowell had died. I, on the other hand, chalked it up to the microfiche being a bitch to work with.

What we did find of interest, though, was a picture of Enfield in 1938. It depicted a large hill with most of its trees cut down, a tractor pushing aside some debris and a lone man standing with his back to a large colonial building. The large colonial was the only one still standing. And it had a little tower. We couldn’t tell whether or not it had a clock— the old microfiche view screens didn’t exactly have great resolution— but based on its proximity to the hill, it was easy to see how the loose soil could have enveloped it (or another building very much like it) when the flood waters came pouring through, leaving just a spire peaking out above the earth.

We only found one more reference to Adolf Riefler: an obituary published by The Boston Globe in 1941 (I wish I could remember the date). It mentioned that he was wanted for questioning in regard to a ‘disappearance,’ but that was all. Riefler had died in Munich. The cause of death was omitted, but at 84, it was probably just old age. Riefler must have fled the country sometime in the mid-1930s, at a time when the Germany he returned to must have been very different from the Germany he had originally left.

I don’t know why, but somehow knowing these historical details made the story of the Widower’s Clock so much more plausible. It was no longer a story of a man with an unfaithful wife, the characters defined by nothing more than their relationship to one another. It started to become the story of two people. Amy Lowell Putnam, restless and starved for marital attention, shackled to an old man incapable of giving her what she needed; and proud Adolf Riefler, obsessed with proving himself after his failure designing the clock for Customs House Tower, too busy and too old to see what his young wife was up to.

Since her mom had the car that day, when we got hungry Kerry and I had to choose between waiting for my mom to pick us up or hoofing it down to the (hometown omitted) House of Pizza to grab a bite. Despite the cold, we opted for the latter.

Settling into a booth, a hot slice in front of both of us, things between Kerry and me felt right again for the first time since our trip to Greenfield. We quickly fell into discussing the plans for our trip.

“We should head out early,” she said. “The first time Rob heard the bells, it was just after sundown.”

“Yeah, but the later it is, the less likely we are to bump into some park ranger.”

“Mmm. You think there are gates or fences?”

“The roads in and out might be gated, but fences? Nah. The Quabbin’s too big.”

Just as the words left my mouth, Fletch plopped down right next to me, his friend Murph lingering behind him. “Hey, I didn’t see you guys come in,” He said. “How long you been here?”

I don’t know what I felt exactly. Embarrassment? Shame? But even though there was nothing in Fletch’s face to indicate that he’d heard me, I got that feeling you get when your parents tell you, “We’re not mad, we’re just disappointed.” I’d been so wrapped up in the fun of going on a ghost hunt and clicking with Scary Kerry again, that I’d lost sight of the fact that Rob Kennan had killed himself. I’d forgotten that the only reason I knew about the Spire in the Woods was because of his suicide notes, and had actually been happy about the whole thing, while two guys who had lost a good friend, quite possibly because of the Spire, were sitting right behind me.

“I dunno. A bit,” I mumbled.

“You wanna ride home? I can take both of you.”

I really didn’t.

“Sure,” Kerry said.

Murph had just found out that he’d been accepted, via early admission, to UMass Amherst, a topic Scary Kerry found intriguing. Like many unhappy high school students, Kerry hung a lot of her hope on the idea that her life would get better in college. She knew she didn’t have the grades to get into a top-tier school. Hell, she knew that UMass Amherst was a real reach, but she had hoped to get into UMass Lowell and transfer after a year or two.

Of course, Murph hadn’t thought he’d be accepted either.

“Definitely apply early,” he said. “Shows them you’re serious. And see if you can get a reference from someone who went there. They list where all the teachers went to in the yearbook each year. Like half of them went to UMass.”

Kerry was hanging off Murph’s every word, but I wasn’t paying much attention to what he was saying. I was too busy hoping against hope that after we dropped Kerry off, Fletch would announce he wanted to hang out with Murph some more and, as such, would have to drop me off next.

That didn’t happen and we were soon alone together in the car. The second the door closed behind Murph, Fletch dropped his mask, and I knew that he’d heard me.

“You’re going to the Quabbin? After what I told you, you’re going to the Quabbin?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you fucking retarded?” Fletch was a pretty big guy. That, coupled with the hurt and anger in his voice, intimidated me into silence. We drove on, listening to nothing but the heater struggling in vain to dispel the cold.

After a few miles, I found myself resenting Fletch. Who was he to speak to me like that? And why the fuck should I feel guilty for his sake? He’d lost a friend and he had my sympathy, but that didn’t entitle him to treat me like garbage.

“What’d you tell me for?”

Fletch didn’t answer my question. He just kept driving.

“Huh? Why’d you tell me about it if you don’t want me to look into it?”

Fletch tightened his grip on the steering wheel and ground his teeth together as if he were literally chewing over the question.

We were in our neighborhood before he finally answered. “Who else could I tell? Did you know the school’s been contacting the parents of everyone who goes to the special counselling sessions? They’re reporting any ‘early warning signs’ they see in the sessions. You think I want my parents making me see somebody or sticking me on meds? I can’t go in there with a fucking ghost story.”

Fletch’s anger had left him. By the time we pulled into my driveway he looked deflated. “I thought you’d believe me. Or could disprove it. Or, shit, I don’t know.”

It seemed like both Fletch and Alina were looking to me to absolve their sins. Alina wanted me to prove that Rob had found a spire sticking up from the ground in the middle of the woods, and it was the reason he’d taken his own life. Fletch wanted me to tell him it was just a ghost story. I honestly couldn’t say what I believed, but I had to know.

“I haven’t even told Murph,” he said. “I just couldn’t handle it if he blamed me for letting Rob go on his own.”

“What would you have done if you’d been with him?”

“I don’t know.” Fletch wouldn’t look me in the eyes. “But at least he wouldn’t have been alone.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about us. We just wanna try to hear the bells. It’s not like we’re gonna swim out there or anything.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m not gonna let ya.”

I had no idea how Fletch intended to stop us. It’s not like we needed his permission to visit a public park and I told him his as much.

Fletch looked at me like I was an idiot.

“If you’re going, so am I,” he said.

I didn’t argue. If he felt guilty for letting Rob go looking for the Spire in the Woods alone, maybe being there with Kerry and me would help him get over it.

As Fletch backed out of the driveway, I realized there was another reason I didn’t protest. Scary Kerry. Yes, things that day had felt normal again between us, but I was still gun-shy about spending that much time alone with her. Especially on the shore of a moonlit lake. And as an added bonus, now we didn’t have to worry about getting Ecto-1 for the night.

Alina kept her distance at school, especially after I attempted to steal a kiss from her the Wednesday before winter break. I had left class to use the bathroom and bumped into her on my way back. There were these moments, a few minutes here and there, where she seemed like nothing was wrong, where her smile and her laughter would come easily, and walking her back to class that day was one of those moments.

The corridor was nearly deserted. Just before we reached the door to her classroom, I stopped her. I slid one hand around her slender waist, and slipped the other through her hair towards her neck. I leaned in to kiss her and she withdrew from me, from my touch, as if I was on fire.

And just like that, the old Alina was gone and the broken one was left in her place. We stood there apologizing to each other— her reassuring me that I had nothing to apologize for, me doing the same— before she finally backed into her classroom and shut the door.

I was thankful Thursday was our last day. Winter break couldn’t arrive soon enough.

I saw Alina twice over the break. Once before Kerry, Fletch, and I went to the Quabbin, and once after. Alina’s parents had a cabin at the foot of Shawnee Peak in Maine where they usually spent New Year’s Eve, but that year they decided to go up on the 27th and come back down on the 30th so Alina wouldn’t miss her weekly therapy session.

The day after Christmas, she came over to our house for dinner. My parents were wonderful. I had warned them about how nervous and anxious she was likely to be. I didn’t say a word about the suicide notes or the Spire in the Woods, but I had told them that Rob had had a crush on her and that Alina wasn’t coping well with his death. They couldn’t have been more understanding.

Ordinarily my dad would have delighted in teasing anyone I brought home for the first time, but he refrained. Instead, whenever there was a lull in the conversation, he teased my younger brother, who had gotten for Christmas that year, among other things, a Furby, and insisted on bringing it to the dinner table.

“Don’t let me catch you feeding that thing after midnight.”

My brother was too young to catch the reference and looked up, confused. “It’s only 6:30.”

“Well, it’s always after midnight somewhere.”

My mom, for her part, also resisted her natural instincts. Usually, whenever someone came over to my house for the first time she’d practically interrogate them, stopping just shy of shining a spotlight in their face. This habit of hers had been particularly rough on Scary Kerry, whom my mom was briefly convinced was on drugs.

After dinner, my dad suggested that I show Alina the TV that I had gotten for Christmas the day before. The TV that was in my room. He really was a great dad.

“I really like your family,” Alina said once the door shut behind us.

I scoffed. “Believe me, they were on their best behavior.”

Drew DeLuca was a firm advocate of the idea that a romantic movie was not the best movie to watch with a girl you wanted to get romantic with. For starters, most of them were, in his view, very crappy movies and the good ones ran the danger of actually holding a girl’s interest. What you wanted was a movie that was pleasant and charming, but light enough that you could miss a good chunk of it without feeling lost and needing to rewind. The sort of movie you’d stumble across while watching TV on a Sunday afternoon, and finish even though it was already mid-way through.

I threw in Maverick.

Alina sat on the floor and I followed suit, but not before grabbing a couple of pillows off my bed. Her movements were stiff as she settled down on the pillow. I tried not to appear too eager as I got down behind her and draped my arm over her waist.

As the movie started, I kept thinking about those fantasies I’d had the night after our first kiss, about how pleasant it’d be just to lie next to Alina watching TV. Just being near her and nothing more. I was right. But actually being beside her, my hand resting lightly against her flat stomach, I found other ideas even more enticing.

I pulled myself closer to her, savoring the fragrance that her vanilla-scented shampoo left in her wild hair. My fingers crept slowly, almost imperceptibly, up her toned body.

Alina stopped my hand. “Do your parents ever come up here?” she whispered.

“No. We’re alone.”

“Actually, would you mind if we just watched this? I haven’t seen it before.”

“Oh, no, that’s...that’s cool,” I said, mentally cursing the day DeLuca had been born.

I spent the next hour knowing the agony of a man without any fresh water, stuck on a life raft adrift at sea.

After the movie, my luck didn’t improve much. The credits began to roll and I had it in my head that Alina might feel more comfortable expressing her affection for me if she felt like she was in control. I kissed her neck where it met her jaw and pulled her lithe little body on top of mine.

The pressure of her weight pressing down on me was an excruciating pleasure. My eyes rolled back in my head. Conscious thought melted away.

My fingers found their way to the bare skin of her lower back. I could feel the slight bumps of her vertebrae raising up her skin. It was oddly intoxicating. When had I become attracted to spines?

I brushed my cheek against hers, and angled my face so our mouths aligned. Her lips parted tentatively. I listened for the subtle changes in her breathing that would tell me when it’d be safe to make the next move.

Her breathing deepened. I slid my hands up, up, up her back, all the way to her satiny bra strap. I had never touched a bra before in my life and had only a vague idea of how to guide the hooks from the eyes.

I nibbled her ear as my fingers fumbling beneath Alina’s shirt. And that’s when I felt that she was crying.

“Hey. Hey. It’s OK. Look,” I whispered while pulling my hands out of her shirt. “See?”

She sniffled and turned her head away from me. I was so scared. I knew I couldn’t be too eager with her. I knew I couldn’t press her too hard. She was in a fragile state and there I was, thinking with anything but my head.

My only defense was that I’d just wanted to make her feel good. I’d thought, since she liked me, she’d like my touch as much as I craved hers.

But I’d thought wrong. On many levels.

I gently pushed her chin up to look her in the eyes. “I didn’t mean to push you too fast. You OK?”

She nodded and I held her until she pushed herself up off of me.

Alina paced around my room doing a breathing exercise her therapist had taught her. I went downstairs to grab us a couple glasses of water. It was less than the least I could do. While I was in the kitchen, my dad gave me a questioning look and a thumbs up behind my mother’s back. I shook my head no and felt like a failure.

Once she was calm enough to sit down, we sat on my bed, far apart from one another, sipping the water and talking.

“It’s not you,” she said.

“Yeah. Yeah. Don’t worry about it. I know you like me.”

Alina gave a little nod as she stared down at her water.

“This will pass,” I said. “People at school will move on to something else and leave you alone. And you can get back to normal.”

Alina got up and started pacing again. “My parents don’t even think I can skip a session for New Year’s. How’s that for normal? I hate that we’re not going to be up at Shawnee for New Year’s.” She put the glass down on my desk, her hands as fidgety as her legs. “Every year we go skiing in the morning, then drive into North Conway to have dinner and watch the fireworks until my mom gets too cold and wants to head back. That’s all I want. And I can’t even handle that.”

“What if I found something down at the Quabbin?” Alina stopped, practically mid-step, and stared at me. I hadn’t noticed until just then, but she had bags under her eyes. “Would that help?”

“When are you going?”

“Tomorrow.”

Alina stared at me. The energy in the room had changed. I could practically smell her desperation as easily as her vanilla-scented shampoo. She needed me to find the Spire in the Woods and prove that it was the Widower’s Clock. Prove that Rob hadn’t killed himself because she broke his heart, but because he’d been haunted by the ghost of Amy Lowell Putnam.

And if Alina Aminev needed it, so did I. To hell with Fletch. To hell with just hearing the bells. I was going to find the Spire.