Flight of the Stone Angel (37 page)

Her wedding ring fell off and lay on the table. He wondered how much weight she had lost. He longed to open the wrapper for her, to feed her.

“Had to have happened that way,” she said, twisting the package in her hand, mashing the cake. “Ira’s clean now. So, at least my husband had the grace to get the boy treated before he wrapped his car around that telephone pole.”

“So now you believe you killed the wrong man?”

“I heard Ira tell you his father threw the first rock. Well, that’s proof, isn’t it? Cass was going to tell, so my husband – ” Her hands were resting on the table, covering the cellophane package, too tired to fight with it anymore.

“Your husband didn’t hurt Ira,” said Charles, covering one of her hands with his own. “But I believe he was
told
that Cass had accused him. Something similar was done to Deputy Travis. Malcolm read him Cass’s letter, and Travis thought she was accusing him of raping a boy in custody – Jimmy, I suppose. When Travis was dying, he said Cass was going to ruin him with science. He was innocent of course, but just the accusation meant ruin. The rock was put into his hand – the idea was put into his mind.”

Look at the damage Darlene had done with a rock and a single maddening idea. But Travis had only stoned the dog. “Actually, there was a letter on file from the hospital lab. It was a negative report on your husband’s blood test.”

“That was the letter Malcolm read from?”

“I believe so. The date matches up with the stoning. Mallory found a copy of it in the hospital files. There was another letter on file, addressed to your husband – the same negative report on his tests. But by the time it was mailed out to him, Cass was dead.”

“That’s why he killed himself.”

Suicide never made sense. But Darlene wanted the world to be orderly for a few minutes. She was coming undone, and this was a small thing to ask.

“Yes,” he said, “Your husband and Cass probably argued when she asked him for a blood sample. He would have been outraged. He was innocent, but she needed to eliminate him as a suspect. So Cass had the results in her hand when she went after the real child molester that day, and she was angry.”

“Then it
was
Babe. Mal was shielding his brother with that letter.”

“There’s no way to know for sure.”

“Who else
could
it have been!” Her eyes were suddenly wide and startled, disbelieving that shrill scream could have come from her own mouth. The people at the nearest table left it, upsetting a chair in their haste to be gone. The abandoned chair rocked and teetered on its hind legs and then crashed to the floor.

“Babe had the disease before the others did!” Her voice was louder now and carrying across the cafeteria. Her hands splayed out in the air as if to call the words back and hush them down. All around them, conversations ceased, and the newspapers of solitary patrons went flat on the tables.

Her lips pressed together. She was in control again, but just barely. “I know Babe was the nineteen-year-old in that file. His was the oldest stage of syphilis. The nurse told me so.”

And so it must be true. A man had died because of her faith in hard science.

“That chronology, by itself, proves nothing about who gave it to whom.”

The cellophane package lay by her hand. The wrapping showed no signs of wear, but the cake was badly smashed. She renewed her struggles with it for a moment, and then gave up. “If only Ira could have told me.”

“Children are the best of conspirators,” said Charles. “They’re so easily frightened, they rarely tell. Jimmy never told, and neither did Babe when it was his turn to be abused.”

“Babe?”

“He had a very late stage of syphilis according to the autopsy. But there was no way for a pathologist to pin the date of infection with only a dead body to work with. The coroner didn’t have the history of convulsions, the weakness in the legs, fits of temper, delusions of grandeur – it was all there.”

Malcolm had supplied some of the symptoms in his impersonation of Babe on the stage. “The unsteady gait made everyone think that Babe was stoned on drugs. And I’m sure he was on some kind of painkiller. He would have been in a lot of pain near the end of his life. Those symptoms don’t usually appear until a man is nearly fifty.” And with all the wear on Babe, mind and body, that might have been his true age when he died at the calendar’s measure of thirty-six years. “So Babe must have been a child himself when he contracted the disease.”

“How could that happen? Somebody would have known.” And then she froze. For she had not known about Ira, had she? Did Jimmy Simms’s parents know what had been done to
their
child?

“I’m sure Malcolm knew,” said Charles. “Babe would have run the gamut of symptoms. But Malcolm was hardly going to have a small child, his own ward, treated for venereal disease. There would have been an investigation.”

“But Cass was treating Babe when he was – ”

“When he was a teenager and it could be passed off for whoring around. Tom Jessop told me Cass dragged Babe right off the street to treat him. Lesions would have been evident by then. She didn’t wait for the test results to tell her what she already knew. When Cass did get the tests back, when she realized the extent and the duration of the disease, she made the link to Jimmy Simms. His hepatitis led her to Ira. And suddenly she had a lot of questions for Malcolm.”

The cellophane had burst open; the cake was in Darlene’s hands at last, and it was mashed to bits. “So it was Mal she went to see at the meeting that day?”

“He raised Babe from the age of five. He had the opportunity.”

Her hand closed. Golden crumbs leaked through her fingers. “Then Babe just did what was done to him. Well, that makes a bit of sense.”

Charles could see she was desperate for something to make sense, but he shook his head. “Only attorneys make the case that their child-molesting clients were themselves abused. All the stats on that are tainted. Malcolm was always the more natural seducer. The time frame works. He probably went after his nephew Jimmy when Babe was no longer a child. And then he could’ve easily taken Ira at the faith healing.”

That had been the most likely window of opportunity, and it would account for the setback in Ira’s therapy. The child would have been terrified when Babe did the healing act, the laying on of hands. He would have been screaming. Malcolm would have played the role of the calming influence. He would have taken the child away to some quiet place. If Ira had screamed again, if anyone had overheard, who would have guessed the real reason for it? No one – not even his own father seated in the audience that night, perhaps only steps away from his small son during the abuse.

If Darlene had followed this much, she was willing the image away, slowly shaking her head. The dry cake crumbs, crushed to a finer dust, fell from her hand to spread over the tray, the table, and some trickled to the floor.

“It must have been hard for Babe to watch Cass Shelley die,” said Charles. “Cass was his doctor once. Probably the only one who had ever cared what happened to him. Then Mallory appeared – the image of her mother. And Ira began to play those notes over and over on the piano. Those same notes were playing on a scratched record all the while Cass was being stoned by the mob. Babe went wild. He might have yelled at Ira to stop. But you know Ira would have blocked that out and kept on playing. At this stage of Babe’s disease, he couldn’t have handled any frustration. So he slammed the piano lid on Ira’s hands to make the music stop. When the music did stop, the assault was over.”

“But Babe was lying in wait for Mallory.” Louder now, insistent, “He was going to
ambush
her!”

Her coffee cup crashed to the floor.

The room quieted for a moment. Then the other patrons resumed their conversations, but everywhere about the room, eyes were trained on the dark stain spreading across the floor and the woman who might be dangerously crazy.

“I rather doubt that Babe meant to harm Mallory,” said Charles. “Perhaps he dimly saw her as Cass, an old source of comfort, an easer of pain. Or maybe he was lucid and wanted to talk to Mallory about the day her mother died. That might explain why the brothers fought in the square and again at the gas station. But we’ll never know. It’s always a tricky thing – second-guessing the dead.”

It began with quiet tears, and then she was trembling. Stutters of breath were choked up in her throat, emerging now as racking sobs. The people seated around them had finally redirected their eyes to their own affairs. Tears were the norm in this place, and Darlene’s seemed to comfort all of them, saying there was nothing dangerous here – only death and pain.

Charles patiently waited out the crying, occasionally handing her napkins. When she was composed again, he fetched another piece of cake and opened the wrapper for her.

She tried to give him a smile for the cake, and she failed. “No one gave a damn who killed Babe Laurie. Only you.”

“Oh, that’s not true,” said Charles. “They were liars, every one of them who said Babe’s death didn’t matter. They all thought someone they cared about had done it.”

Well, Mallory
might
have believed the sheriff had killed Babe Laurie. When pressed, she had pointed him in Jessop’s direction, hadn’t she? But Charles remained uncertain. It was always so hard to tell when Mallory was lying. She might have reasoned that Tom Jessop could easily fend off a false accusation; but if Darlene had gone to prison, who would’ve looked after Mallory’s old playmate? It would be just like her to choose the expedient –

“Charles, what do you think the court will do with me?” Darlene’s words were listless. She was calm now, and seemed only mildly curious about her future.

“Tom Jessop is a very decent man. He’ll have a strong influence on what happens to you.” Jessop would certainly support a plea of temporary insanity for the crime of mother passion. “I suppose your best outcome would be probation.”

“And if you were on my jury?”

“Would I ask for a pound of flesh? No.”

Babe’s life would have been absolute hell if he’d been allowed to live it out. The best medical treatment in the world might have eased the suffering, but not reversed the insidious damage. “However, I do regret Babe’s murder – particularly the
way
he died.”

“All alone and scared,” she said, nodding. “Left to bleed to death like a dog in the road.”

She was in accord with him now, sharing his regret, her face set with real grief. And pity? Yes, that too. So, the death of Babe Laurie had mattered a great deal. And now the dead man was assured of one mourner, his own murderer, a woman who would certainly visit his grave to bring him the odd bouquet of guilty flowers.

The night was mild, and so she was without her black duster. The pale blue jeans and white shirt had made it easy to follow her in the gathering darkness. Though Charles had trailed Mallory here, he made no move toward her, but kept to the darkest shadows in the ring of trees, silent as a parishioner in church.

She stood on a small patch of open ground at the center of the cemetery, where two gravel roads met in the form of a cross. Just behind her was the movement of something small and alive racing through the grass in a line of bowing fronds. A bird of prey crossed the sky in a glide and then descended in a lazy circle, settling to earth. In the grass at the owl’s feet, a tiny animal screamed, and the night bird rushed up to the stars.

Mallory’s head tilted back, and at first, Charles thought she was only following the flight of the owl. But no, something else was going on here, and it was suspiciously close to a religious act. She was looking up at the sky, not in admiration for the holy handiwork in the firmament, nor with the aspect of worship, but it definitely was a communion of sorts.

Were there obscenities in her eyes?

Whatever did Heaven read in that angry face of hers? For now, in a sudden rush of wind, it began to cover its own vast face with clouds, and the conversation was ended, debate lost by default.

Disrespecting borders, she stalked across gravel and onto the grass, moving between the carved monuments and tombs. She paused by the stone that meant the most to her, and then Mallory moved on.

Now he only followed her with his eyes until she disappeared into Henry’s woods. She re-emerged, climbing the levee in long graceful strides. When she reached the top, she stood still for a moment, looking down on the cemetery. He pulled back into the circle of trees.

Though there would be days on the road before they separated, in a way, he was saying goodbye to her. Their actual parting would be more mundane; she would slip off into the canyons of New York skyscrapers and forget him. And for his part, he would cease to debase himself by following after her, doglike, growing smaller in her eyes until he altogether vanished.

The clouds were dispersing in a network of lace to expose the constellations. And now he had a small insight on the poetry of Ira’s vision, freed of conceptions of space and time, mass and the radiant energy of distant lights. Low-hanging stars winked in and out with her passage across the levee road. There was no hard line of demarcation between the heavens and the high earthen barrier. In his fractured perception, she was walking across the sky.

Goodbye, Kathy Mallory.

He said her name again, aloud this time, and now another connection was taking place, almost against his will. He climbed into Mallory’s point of view, an uncomfortable and cramped place to be, for she was only six years old, going on seven. The child in the closet had heard no sound from her mother, only the one voice speaking to the silent mob. The words may not have been clear, but the voice would have been recognized. Thoughts of the child were linking to Malcolm, whom those of long acquaintance called Mal.

Mal Laurie –
Mallory
.

The child had taken the name of her mother’s killer. She had been plotting, even then, to come back for him one day when she had her size, when her hands were large enough to hold a lethal weapon. Each day of her life, she had been called by that hated name – so she would not,
could not,
forget the worst pain a small child could suffer and yet remain alive.

Charles stood there for a time, collecting his emotions. And then, forgetting his resolution of goodbye, he struck out across the starry night, following after Mallory. He was planning to hold her very close, to inflict comfort on her, and consolation for all her pain and loss.

He realized she might not care for that. Actually, he knew she would hate that. She would probably try to wave him off, as though he might be an annoying two-hundred-pound housefly.

Well, too bad, Mallory.

He needed to hold her; that need was very strong. And now he was forming another intention to annoy her even more: Until the end of his life or hers, whenever she turned around, there he would be.