Flight of the Stone Angel (13 page)

But, according to Cass Shelley, Ira could play complex scores of music, note-perfect. He could follow the slow evolution of clouds with patience beyond a Buddhist master, and he was on intimate terms with the constellations, calling every star by name. The sheriff had said that Ira could sing with the angels. Cass Shelley’s journal said he
was
one, ‘with wings unseen by the vast majority of beings, who had only the one temporal, solid context for life on earth.’

The concert ended, and Charles found the silence unbearably sad, the loss of the music, the loss of heaven.

The two men watched as Ira folded his body inward and sank to the grass at the foot of the statue. He curled up like an exhausted kitten, pulling his broken hands into the protective circle of his body. After a time, they walked away and left him sleeping in the perfect peace of a winged shadow.

Roused from sleep, the dog opened his eyes to the bright light of day. One shaggy ear rose to attention. Was it an animal he sensed? It came toward him so stealthy, he could barely detect its movement – even with his muzzle pressed to the earth and sensitive to every vibration. Suspicious now, his weary head lifted, and he caught the scent.

Not an animal.

The elderly sentry rose to a stand, his fur coated with the dry smell of dirt. With some regret, he left his patch of shade and padded slowly across the yard and down to the narrow path leading away from the house, his paws kicking up small swirls of dust. His eyes were dry and sore, slow to focus on the figure in the road. He turned his head, the better to see with his good eye.

The stranger whistled to him, an old familiar ripple of music – one long high note and two short bursts – his secret name. It was not a stranger in the road, and neither was this the stuff of his dreams.

She had come home.

As she came closer, his heart beat faster. He moved a few steps into the road, his jaws hanging open in the dog’s way of a smile. Enormous waves of emotion pounded his heart, banging out blood to crash through the wreckage of ancient veins, and his mind was lost between shores of disbelief and joy. His steps were slow, but he believed he was running, bounding toward her.

At last, he stood before her, making low loving noises in his throat. He licked her hand, and then his legs betrayed him. He was falling, rolling into the dirt at her feet.

She knelt down to stroke his pelt, and then to hold him in her arms, pressing him close to her body. Her face was wet as she cradled him. One soft and gentle hand was probing that place where his heart was caged by ribs, and together they followed the weakening beats. His gaze was fixed on her face, backlit by the brilliant aureole of the midday sun.

He was shivering now, so very cold.

And then his eyes rolled back; his day was done; the darkness was absolute.

Charles Butler walked on water. Or perhaps this was only the top of the natural water table. His shoes squished with each step across wet grass. The soaked earth was yet another piece of evidence in favor of Augusta’s invisible hill, for the land closer to the house had been dry.

“Augusta!” he shouted to the distant figure in the faded cotton dress. She stopped at the edge of the woods and turned to wave.

As he moved toward her, the water level was rising, his shoes were sinking and probably ruined. When he joined her by the trees, he noticed that she was barefoot – an elegant solution to the footwear problem.

She grinned. “Charles, you and I must have a talk about your wardrobe.”

He supposed it was ridiculous. The tailored suit and handmade shoes had been of no help blending in with the locals. Blue jeans abounded here. He had not owned a pair since the summer spent with Cousin Max. At home, his parents had always dressed him as a miniature adult on his way to a dress-code office job.

“I came to return the keys to the Shelley house.” He looked down at the small plastic bag in her hand. It was half filled with chicken wings. “Planning a picnic in the swamp?”

“No, but you take off your shoes, roll up those pantlegs, and I’ll show you a sight to remember.”

“You’re on.” When he was properly attired in naked feet and showing a bit of leg that had not seen the sun in years, he splashed after her into deeper water which now covered his toes.

“Stay close to me and don’t wander off the path.” She spoke to him over one shoulder, stern in her warning. “If you go into the bayou, you won’t find any purchase. Bottom’s real slippery.”

They had cleared the semisolid ground and passed into a watery, primeval forest of widely spaced cypress trees and small grassy islands. He could not immediately detect the path she mentioned. Then he saw the chunks of rock, more like man-made mortar, colored green with slime and moss. She was using them as stepping stones.

“These chunks came from the foundation of the original house.”

Augusta’s feet grasped the rocks like a second pair of hands. He fared less well, but with practice, his toes got the hang of it. Both his arms shot out as balancing beams until he stepped onto soggy but more solid ground, a small rise jutting over a sea of water hyacinth. A pondlike area had been cleared of the choking plant life covering the rest of the water. This must be the narrow tributary which ran alongside the road to Cass Shelley’s house.

“This is the tip of Finger Bayou.” Augusta’s lips curled inward as she sucked in air to make a sound like a child’s fingers rubbing the skin of a balloon. She pointed to a log floating toward them, though the dark glass surface of the bayou showed no trace of a current. Augusta made the strange sound again, and he realized that she was summoning the log.

And now Charles could see that it had large reptilian eyes. The beast hung in the water only four feet from his toes, and there was time to remember that this was not a zoo with bars to keep the wild things in their place. This thing went wherever it wanted. In this primordial habitat, Charles had slipped to a humbler notch on the food chain. “Don’t you worry about having a flesh eater in the neighborhood?”

“You’ve been listening to Betty Hale,” said Augusta. “Alligators prefer dead humans to live ones. But even if you were three days dead and real tasty, this one wouldn’t touch you. It’s his hibernation period. He only surfaces every two days. He knows when I’m coming with the chicken. Won’t eat but a few pieces, and sometimes nothing at all, but he’s gotten used to me over the years, and we never disappoint one another ”

“Could Cass’s body have been eaten by an alligator?”

“No, there were no gators in those days. They were wiped out before Cass died. You can trust me to know the exact count of every living thine that crawls in the swamp and swims in the bayou. I put this alligator in myself when he was small. That was after I cut off the herbicide to give him shelter from those poaching Laurie brothers.”

“Then what could have happened to her body?”

“You won’t get the solution to every mystery, Charles. Just let it go.”

“But I’m not made that way. I need that solution.”

Augusta stepped onto a small man-made platform of rock chunks, some with corners, a wharf of sorts, and she threw the small bits of chicken to the alligator. Its massive jaws opened to expose the sharp teeth, hundreds of them. The jaws clamped down and the water exploded in sudden violence. A tail appeared and Charles could see the enormous size of the monster. The leviathan’s tail splashed down, hitting the water with the force of a hammer, raining frothy particles far and wide. The water bubbled and boiled, and when the foam subsided, the alligator had vanished. Large waves slapped the side of the bayou, and the water hyacinth bobbed and rocked in the wake of waves.

As Augusta had promised – a sight to remember.

“Magnificent, isn’t he? If that fool Ray Laurie or his brother Fred knew the gator was here, he’d be dead by this time tomorrow. I trust you to keep my secrets, Charles, and I will keep yours.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t have any secrets if you hadn’t told Lilith that I didn’t know Mallory. I always meant to ask why you did that.”

“Mallory – I can’t get used to that name. I always think of her as little Kathy Shelley.”

“Perhaps it was her father’s name?”

“Can’t help you there. Cass never mentioned Kathy’s father. I couldn’t even say if there was a marriage. Never thought to pry. Cass was pregnant with Kathy and carrying her maiden name when she came back here to practice medicine.”

As he followed her out of the swamp, he well understood the need for a guide. He had no sense of direction in this alien world. Things slithered here, and the plant life reached out to him, pointing accusing fronds at his eyes. He swatted the back of his neck where a tiny winged thing had bitten him, and now there was a spot of red on his palm. Bloodsucking insects were so unfair in the month of November.

When the house was in sight, he walked abreast of her to the place he had left his shoes and socks. “Do you think the father might have had something to do with Cass Shelley’s death? A love affair gone wrong?”

“No, that doesn’t work for me,” said Augusta, looking down at his wet socks and ruined leather. “The man who fathered Cass’s baby would be a stranger here. Not likely he could bring thirty friends along without someone taking notice. And how would a stranger get thirty locals to go through with a thing like that?”

“The father couldn’t have been a Dayborn man?”

Augusta shook her head. “Cass left town when she was eighteen and didn’t come back till she was twenty-eight. Most everyone else who went off to school never came back. Tom did, but he was home four or five years before Cass.”

“Could there be a connection between Cass’s murder and Babe’s?”

“Doubt it. Cass had no enemies. Now
her
death was a genuine mystery. But Babe was such a mean-spirited bastard, no one was too surprised when he turned up dead.” She waved her hand with impatience to rid herself of this topic, which obviously bored her. “So where are you off to now, Charles?”

He hesitated for a moment. Well, he supposed he could hold her alligator as a hostage against a secret of his own.

“I’m checking out of the bed and breakfast. Henry invited me to stay with him, but I don’t think he wants that generally known.”

Augusta only nodded, with no curiosity in her face. “Well, that can wait, can’t it? I’m just gonna put the horse in his stall, and then I’d be pleased if you’d join me for a meal. It’s all cooked – I just have to turn a light under it.”

“Thank you.”

“And then I’m gonna send you over to Earl’s Dry Goods. I know he’s got a pair of jeans that would fit you, and maybe some sturdy boots.”

They walked together over the sodden ground, which became more solid, less watery with each step toward the mansion. The only approach to Trebec House was the path from the cemetery. Every patch of surrounding ground would be rough going for a car unaccustomed to lakes in the grass and no traction to speak of. And there was only one road into Cass Shelley’s house. Beyond that it was swamp and bayou. “I suppose the killer took Cass’s body away in a vehicle.”

“Well, he didn’t dump it here in the swamp. If you put a body into this ground, eventually it will bob up to say, ‘Hello again.’
”

“Is it possible, just possible, that Cass could have survived?”

“No, it isn’t.” Augusta was firm in this. “There was so much blood, Tom Jessop even gave up little Kathy for dead. Cass could not be alive.” And there was a trace of menace when she said, “Don’t you even suggest that to her child.”

Cassandra Shelley’s child turned to the north, where Trebec House crouched behind the oak trees, hidden but for the attic window. Reflected clouds created the illusion of movement and life in that round pane of glass.

Mallory carried the dog’s body into the dense foliage at the far side of her mother’s house to block any view from the mansion’s dark window, so like an eye. In early childhood, she had believed that eye had followed her about. She remembered it well, and somewhere between heightened instinct and imagination, she believed the window-eye also remembered her.

She sat down beside her dog and ran one hand over the scarred pelt, still warm to the touch. It was a comfort, this tactile deception of life. She did not look at his eyes, for with the passage of only a little time, they had lost their roundness and could not fool her anymore. She continued to pet him.

Good dog
.

She was alert to every sound, every movement in the trees and the grass. The air was alive with winging insects and birdcalls. The pure blue sky was slowly deepening into the darker shade of nightfall. She could hear the gurgle of the narrow stream tumbling by the house, splashing over rocks and lapping at a floating branch, plucking at twigs like prongs in a music box.

Ripples of phantom music poured through the window at her back, sweet simple notes of a child’s piano lesson. When she turned around, remembrance filled the glass pane with a woman she had seen in mirrors. Their countenances did differ, for Mallory’s smile was always forced, and the mother at the window of her mind was laughing in absolute delight. Her eyes lit up like green stars as she beheld her child – young Kathy, six years old, almost seven.

Mallory raised her hand to the window, and the woman waved to her. But it was too hard to sustain the illusion, and she turned away from her own reflection. She was alone again.

The stronger memory of terror and violence stayed with Mallory longer. There was the vision of her mother, hair streaming with blood, inching toward her across the floor, gathering Kathy into her arms, pulling a laundry marker from the pocket of her bloody dress and writing a telephone number on the back of the little girl’s hand.
“Run,”
Cass Shelley had said to her child. Young Kathy had held on to her mother, terrified, screaming.
“Run!”
yelled her mother. And then she had slapped the child hard to make her go. The first touch that was not gentle.

Mallory turned her face up to the sky. There were lights overhead, tiny lamps turning on one by one. She retrieved an old sheet of canvas from the garden shed and used it as a shroud to wrap the animal’s body, which had grown cold. An hour later, when the sky was dark blue and banged with stars, she lifted the dog in her arms and carried him into the woods.

Charles walked out the front door of the Dayborn Bed and Breakfast with his suitcase in hand. The other guests had deserted the porch following the evening bat races. Only Darlene Wooley remained. She was slumped in one of the wicker chairs lining the rail. The porch light was being unkind to her. Harsh shadows deepened all the lines of worry and stress common to the caregiver of a special child. Even Darlene’s hair seemed strained and tired, falling to her shoulders in halfhearted attempts at curls.

“Hello again.” He had spoken softly, but even so, she was startled into better posture. Her back was stiff and straight when she smiled a wan greeting.

He set his suitcase down beside her chair. “I ran into Ira in the cemetery today. I tried to speak to him, but I’m afraid I may have upset him. I
am
sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She made an effort to sustain her smile, but it slipped away as she looked down at her folded hands. “I’m so pleased that you
did
stop to speak to him. Some people in this town don’t believe Ira
can
talk anymore, let alone
think.”

“Well, I can tell them different.” Betty pushed open the porch door. Neatly balanced on the flat of one hand was a tray laden with a china coffee service. “Ira used to talk a blue streak when he was a little boy.”

Betty’s white hair had taken on a yellow cast from the porch light. The same lamp which had aged Darlene made the innkeeper seem younger than her sixty-five years. The flesh of her arms jiggled beneath the flower-print sleeves of her dress as she waved off Charles’s attempt to help her with the tray. She placed it on a small side table between an empty wicker chair and her own wooden rocker. “I brought an extra cup for you, Mr. Butler.” Betty settled into the rocking chair and filled it to overflowing. “No need to run off this minute. Sit yourself down for a bit.”

“Thank you, I will.” He settled into the chair beside Darlene and addressed the usual problem of what to do with his long legs. He elected to leave them sprawling on the floorboards between the two women. “I understand Cass Shelley was Ira’s doctor.”