Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) (4 page)

"I'm glad you wore it. I love it."

"So do I. When I wear it I feel very safe and warm."

"That's the way it makes me feel too."

"Are you sure you want to sleep alone? Wouldn't you rather sleep in my bed?"

"No. I like this room." She snuggled down into the fur collar and whispered,
"Tu es si belle, Maman."

Annette kissed her soft cheek, and the child's eyelids closed, and within a few breaths she was asleep.

* * *

Annette took a shower and washed her hair, and with her head under the water she broke down and cried, where no one could hear her. When she finally came out, her father was sitting at the kitchen table, counting out his weekly dosage of vitamins and medication into a pillbox. More than once he dropped a pill into the wrong slot, and then, with trembling fingers, would clumsily try to retrieve it. She noticed how his hands had aged since she'd last seen him. As she pulled up a chair to sit down with him, she accidentally jostled the table and two red pills rolled onto the floor. The lines around Charlie's mouth tightened.

"I'm sorry," muttered Annette as she leaned down, but Charlie impatiently pushed her arm aside and picked up the pills, meticulously dusting off each one with a napkin.

"Floor's dirty," he mumbled.

"Let me help you."

"Are your hands clean?"

"Yes, Dad, my hands are clean."

He told her how many to put in each slot, how many blue ones and white ones and green ones.

"Your mother always got the coffee ready before she went to bed. It's on a timer," he said when they had finished.

Annette prepared the coffee and kissed him good night on his whiskered cheek.

"I love you, Dad," she whispered.

"That doesn't change anything," he said harshly.

She thought she knew what he meant: that loving didn't help the pain. It certainly didn't defeat death.

* * *

For a long time she sat on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, listening to the strange sounds the wind made and hoping it wouldn't wake Eliana. After a while she got up and went down the hall to check on her. Charlie had referred dismissively to this small, cramped room as her mother's sewing room, although the sewing machine had been shunted into a corner and looked as though it hadn't been touched in a long time. Now, it was her mother's upright piano that held pride of place; the keyboard was open and music had been left on the stand as though she might walk in and sit down to play at any moment. Beneath a curtained window was the ruffle-skirted daybed where Eliana now slept. Annette suspected her father never came in here. He must surely have disliked it. It spoke too eloquently of all the things he had tried to crush in his wife, interests and hobbies that had stolen her attention away from him, things he had assumed were gone and dead but that somehow, in later years, had re-emerged with sudden vigor.

The walls and surfaces were covered with photographs of Annette and Eliana, framed press clippings from Annette's performances as solo violinist, photographs of her shaking hands with the Queen of England and the Israeli prime minister. There were postcards Annette had sent from cities around the world, which her mother had proudly framed. There was an old movie poster of Rita Hayworth in
Affair in Trinidad
that Annette had found in London and mailed to her, although at the time she wondered where her mother would be able to hang it without a prolonged battle with her father, and another she had found in Munich, an equally obscure film of Humphrey Bogart's, entitled
Sirocco.
Then there were photographs of her mother's idols, the divas Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland and Kiri Te Kanawa, whose voice sounded so much like her mother's had once.

Annette sat on the piano bench in the dark, listening to the wind and thinking of her mother's sweetly scented body lying alone in the cold ground in those lonely hills. Suddenly she was seized with anxiety, and in a flight of morbid fancy she imagined her mother's spirit trapped here.
It's this damnable place,
she thought. She'd heard stories of earthbound souls, and believed there were many things in the realm of the spirits that we could not know. So she went to her daughter's bed, knelt and hastily crossed herself, then, in a muffled voice, half-aloud, she offered up a single prayer: that her mother's spirit would not be bound to this land; that it would come away with her, away from this place, and be free. She crawled into bed under the blankets and the sable-collared coat and curled up next to Eliana. She found her daughter's hand, soft and warm, and held it in her own.

Annette lay quietly listening to the Kansas wind. When she was a little girl it had terrified her, screeching and moaning around the house at night like a devil from hell, a faceless, deadly wind that could level the land. The white people who settled here had never given it a name: the naming of winds had disappeared with the Indians. She remembered a story she had once read about an aboriginal people shooting at the wind with their guns and beating at it with their brooms, and she thought their behavior wasn't so strange after all.

She tried to sleep but every time she closed her eyes she saw her mother's grave. She wanted to see her alive, coming toward her with her arms open wide, freed from her father's control, free to turn her love elsewhere. Once again came the sad realization that this would never happen. Outdoors the wind rose to a piercing whistle, and she turned her head to look at her daughter, hoping the child wouldn't be awakened.
Must get you away from here, precious. Away from these banshee winds.
Nothing frightened Annette so much as the thought of being trapped and dying here.

After a while she imagined she was hearing music. It sounded faintly like a Schubert Lieder, one of her mother's favorites. She lifted her head from the pillow and listened carefully, thinking perhaps her father had turned on the radio in his room, but she couldn't locate the source.

The music soothed her and for a moment her grief was lightened. From time to time the wind would halt to catch its breath, and the music in her head would fill the silence. As she drifted off she imagined a presence in the room protecting her and her child from the world beyond, and at last she fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.

Outside the wind dropped, quite suddenly, and the night was cold and still.

Chapter 5

Jerry Meeker could pound in a fence stake with a few blows and bring a stubborn horse under control with a single jerk on the lead, but he was having serious trouble getting a wide leather club chair up the narrow stairs of the Salmon P. Chase House to Ethan's office. Ethan was at the top and Jer was holding up the bottom, straining so hard his face had gone red and his bright blue eyes were swimming in tears.

"Set the damn thing down," gasped Ethan.

"Can't," whispered Jer through clenched teeth.

"Just set it down."

"Keep goin'," grunted Jer.

Ethan took another step, and then another, and finally his heel touched the flat landing at the top of the stairs.

"Okay, buddy, we're here."

"Damn, this's heavy," said Jer as he wrangled his end up to the landing and then collapsed into the chair. "Nice, though." He fingered the brass studs. The leather was very smooth. "Why didn't Tom want it?"

"Didn't have room for it." Ethan wiped his brow with his sleeve. "Come on, let's get it in my office."

"I ain't movin' yet, pal," said Jer.

"You're gonna have to. I'm expectin' that French lady any minute now."

"You mean Emma's daughter?"

"That's right."

Jer rested his head on the chair back and his eyes fell on the plaque that hung next to Ethan's door. Nothing identified the place as a law office; there was only one word—
Wordsworth
—and below that, a framed quotation by the poet that read:

Where are your books?—that light bequeathed

To Beings else forlorn and blind!

Up! Up! and drink the spirit breathed

From dead men to their kind.

Jer didn't read much, just an occasional magazine, and he had always found Ethan's office a little strange for an attorney. Inside the spacious attic office were walls of books, many of them having nothing to do with law. It was Ethan's sacred domain, and although Jer didn't understand it, he honored it and held his tongue.

Jer looked down at his stomach. There was a dark blue patch in the middle of his shirt where his sweat had soaked through the denim.

"Well, I guess the sight of me sweatin' like a hog won't make much of an impression on her, will it," he said, slowly getting up. "So I'll move. Just for her sake. Not yours."

"So, I'm supposed to be makin' an impression on Madame, am I?"

"Why didn't you go to the funeral?"

"Actually, I did make an appearance. Sort of."

"What d'ya mean?"

"I'll bore you with it some other time, pal. Come on, we gotta move this thing. You ready?"

"Yeah." Jer squatted and positioned his hands underneath the chair. "She's a mighty pretty lady. You'd like her."

"I doubt it," Ethan said as they lifted the chair together. "She probably has one of those little yappy poodles with bows in its hair."

The office door, which was never locked, swung open as Ethan backed into it. "You doin' okay with your end?" he asked.

"Yeah. Just take it easy," answered Jer.

"Beats me how any relation of Emma Ferguson's can have anything in common with a bunch of little Nazis with no balls," said Ethan as they slowly inched the chair through the doorway. He rambled on, "You remember the time they tried to put French crepes on the menu down at Hannah's? It was on a Saturday night. Old Burt walked in, all spruced up in his good overalls, all clean and pressed, and then he sat down and picked up the menu. He took one look at the Saturday Nite Special and said, 'That goddamn cook's full of crap.' And then he slapped down the menu and walked out. Burt's never been back to Hannah's since."

It was perhaps the physical exertion, or just Ethan's remembrance of the look on Burt's face, but mirth got the better of him, and his voice rose in a boisterous laugh that came straight from the heart. He laughed so hard his breath came in little snorts and tears streamed down his face. It was not a mean laugh, for there was not a mean bone in Ethan Brown's body, but he was a Kansan and his prejudices were deeply rooted in a proud and stubborn conservatism.

"Better put this down before I drop it," said Ethan, his shoulders heaving in the throes of laughter. He swept his hat from his head and wiped the tears from his cheeks. When he looked up he saw Jer, who had turned suddenly quiet, was gaping at something over Ethan's shoulder. Ethan swung around.

In his office stood a slender dark-haired woman. She wore black gloves and a black fur-trimmed coat and black high heels. Her soft brown eyes mirrored utter disbelief. She had been reading a book,
The Collected Poems of
W. B. Yeats,
which Ethan had left lying on his coffee table.

"Excuse me," she said quietly. "I'm looking for Mr. Brown. The attorney."

"I'm Ethan Brown."

The look in her eyes cooled. "I'm Annette Zeldin. Emma Ferguson's daughter. We have an appointment this morning."

"Yes, of course," boomed Ethan. With a nervous gesture he patted down his hair and put his hat back on. Then he remembered his manners and took it off again and slung it onto the coat rack.

"I'll see ya around, Ethan. Good day, ma'am," Jer said, and disappeared out the door.

"Yeah, thanks, Jer," Ethan called after him. He turned back to Annette Zeldin and stepped forward, extending his broad hand to her, mustering an amiable smile. "Ethan Brown, attorney at law." It was the greeting of an easygoing, confident man—a style he used with folks out here, and they loved it. Annette wasn't the least bit softened; she hesitated, then kept him waiting a moment longer while she laid down the book and removed her glove, and only then did she shake his hand.

"Sorry to keep you waiting. I didn't see a car outside."

"I walked."

"You walked? Well, ma'am, if you're going to be doing any walking around here you'd better get yourself some comfortable shoes."