Flight of the Stone Angel (4 page)

Throughout the long and involved explanation of events, Henry Roth had been extremely attentive and patient. Now the man smiled broadly, and his hands said,
“I’m not deaf
–
only mute.”
And then he laughed in silence as though this were a great joke, and Charles supposed it was.

“Sorry.” Charles spoke aloud this time. “I shouldn’t have assumed – ”

“Everyone does,”
signed the mute.
“People in town have been assuming that for sixty-five years.”
He went on to explain that he didn’t mind, because people would say the most amazing things when they believed he couldn’t hear them. “
I live in an eavesdropper’s paradise.”

When the conversation came back to Mallory, Charles said, “I don’t want to alarm her by barging in with no warning. She might be afraid I’d given something away to the sheriff.”

Actually, she would just
assume
he had done that. Mallory knew she had wasted her time tutoring him in the sister arts of lies and poker. Despite his freakish IQ, she regarded him as learning disabled.

“So, would you prepare her for my visit? You could tell her Augusta will back up the story that I’m working for the estate. Will you help me?”

The sculptor used both hands, upturned and open, alternately moving them up and down, weighing one thing against another to say,
“Maybe.”
He went on to say he
might
speak with Mallory,
perhaps
tomorrow – but only if it could be done without the sheriff asking questions, and that was unlikely. He did not enjoy the idea of lying to a man he had known for so many years, and Charles should not count on his help. Then his hands dropped back to his sides and hung there with nothing more to say.

Charles’s hands rose, as though to speak, but instead, they splayed wide in helpless frustration. He lowered his eyes and nodded. “I understand.” Of course he did. This man had no reason to trust him, to help him or lie for him.

Henry Roth shrugged to say that he could offer nothing more solid. And then his hands explained that he had work to do, and he must get on with it.

Charles followed the sculptor to the door and watched him unfold a metal ramp, extending it over the stone stairs to the back end of the truck. Now Roth unhinged two metal legs to level the ramp. He moved a rolling pallet in place near the open truck gate, and began to work the large canvas-covered shape from the flat bed, patiently rocking the massive stone and pulling it toward him.

Charles guessed, by metallic sounds, the pads beneath the stone must ride on ball bearings. Still, it was a tremendous weight, and this would be slow work for a man not much over five feet tall. Now he grasped the sculptor’s problem of weight, balance and leverage. In a moment, he had doffed his suitcoat and rolled up his sleeves. “Allow me, please.”

Henry Roth stood aside, and Charles pulled on the block until half of it jutted out from the bed of the truck. He eased it into an incline, and the bottom edge of the stone was sliding down toward the rolling pallet. As it touched the edge of the pallet, quickly, with one foot, he moved the rolling platform underneath it. Braced against the truck bed, the block was leveraged into an upright position. Next, he put his shoulder to the stone and pushed it along the ramp until it was housed inside the sculptor’s studio.

The man smiled his thanks, then signed,
“It takes me an hour to unload a block that size.”

Roth locked the doors, and the two men walked away from the chapel and back toward the house. Now the sculptor made a firm date to meet at the town square in the morning, for he had thought of a way to avoid the sheriff and his questions.

Charles was still smiling as his Mercedes pulled out of the driveway. He traveled back along the dirt road, circling around the cemetery. Near the bridge was a signpost topped by a board in the shape of an arrow and weathered to blank, gray wood. All that remained of its lettering was an ironic
y
at the edge of the board. The mystery arrow pointed down a side road, a dark and narrow tunnel through dense woods of low-hanging branches. A notice posted on a near tree warned him not to enter the swamp by Finger Bayou, a narrow waterway running alongside the nameless road.

The sign for Upland Bayou was freshly painted and fixed to the metal girders of the bridge. This wider body of slow moving water was black in the evening hour and edged with a lace of pale green algae. Along the banks, the tree limbs were draped with gray beards of Spanish moss. On the far shore, wooden houses perched on feet of brick, and small flat-bottom boats were moored to gray wharves standing over the water on stilts.

At the other end of the bayou bridge, he was offered a choice of paved roads. To his right was the turnoff for the main highway and green fields of sugarcane extending out to the horizon line. He turned hard left toward the town. On both sides of Dayborn Avenue, the houses sat on conventional foundations, children played in the front yards, and windows lighted, one by one, as people returned home from work. Except for the warm weather and the occasional banana tree, he might be anywhere in America at the close of an autumn day.

When he rolled into the town square, his vista widened and perception altered radically. He was back in time. It was everything the brochure from the Dayborn Bed and Breakfast had promised – a collage of architectural history. The formal Georgian structure at the far end of the square must be the municipal building. Its walls were painted Federal green, and the white rooftop cupola mimicked a capitol dome.

The square was flanked by Italianate row houses of brick and mortar in hues of purple, pink, blue and yellow. Graceful galleries of ornate iron lace supported flowerpots in a smaller riot of colors above the ground-level storefronts.

He pulled his car to the curb in front of the hotel. There were private homes of Gothic Revival on either side, but this massive Colonial before him was the oldest building of all. The slanted roof of the bed and breakfast sported five gables and a chimney at either end, and its dark shingles sloped down to the support posts of the front porch.

He carried his suitcases up the stairs and met his hostess, Betty Hale, a white-haired woman of generous size and a more than generous smile. After the formality of checking in and depositing the bags in his room, she led him back out to the front porch and gently pressured him to sit down alongside the other guests, whose chairs were lined up by the rail like spectators at a sporting event. They were all facing north and holding field glasses to their eyes.

Betty unstrapped her own binoculars and put them in his hand. “Mr. Butler, I’m so sorry you missed the evening bat races. But if you look real quick, you can still see some of the losers.”

He followed the point of her finger to the triangular peak of Augusta Trebec’s house above the distant trees. He focussed the twin lenses on the tiny silhouettes of three bats flying upward from the roof. They were backlit by clouds which had lost all their color after sundown.

“Now look across the square, above the sheriff’s office,” said Betty, speaking to the larger audience and directing them to the south side of the municipal building. All heads turned in unison. “You see that light that just came on? See the bars on the window? That’s where they keep the woman who murdered Babe Laurie, though that’s not her window. Hers faces the alley between the sheriff’s office and the fire department.” She tapped Charles on the shoulder, speaking only to him. “You can see a real good likeness of her in the cemetery tomorrow morning – if you want to take the tour with the other guests. It’s included in the cost of your room.”

Charles was so startled, he only caught the odd word in Betty Hale’s ongoing monologue of breakfast and checkout times. This was even more inconceivable than the murder charge – Mallory had become a tourist attraction.

He slumped low in his chair, and stared at the window above the sheriff’s office.

So
there you are
. So close.

He remained on the porch long after the other guests had retired to their rooms, or gone off in search of evening meals with Betty’s advice on local cuisine. Long after nightfall, when the house lights had gone out, he was still sitting in the same chair, fixated on the light in the window across the square, until that too flickered out.

Good night, Mallory.

The hour was late, but Lilith Beaudare remained with her elder cousin until they were caught up on family stories to fill in all the years since the last visit.

The old woman’s face glowed in the flame of a match. She lit a cheroot and exhaled blue smoke into the night air.

“You know,” said Lilith, in the lecture mode, “you shouldn’t smoke. You want to be wheezing with emphysema in the golden years of your life?”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Augusta. “I would quit this minute if I had any sense.” Smoke swirled around her as she spoke. “I should practice discipline and self-denial.”

Lilith nodded.

Augusta continued. “Then, when I’m ninety years old and blind with cataracts, when I’m crippled with arthritis and my breasts have been hacked off for tumors – I’ll be able to say, well thank God I don’t have
emphysema.”
Augusta threw back her head and laughed. Her bubbling voice had a wicked young character.

All the wrinkles, the deep lines, every detail of Augusta’s age was lost in the dark. Here was the lean, unbowed body and long, flowing hair of the famed beauty who, shot for shot, had drunk many a young man under the table – the better to take advantage of them in the love affair and the equally bloody war of a business transaction.

Augusta had also been a legendary horsewoman. As a small child, Lilith had been enthralled by the sight of her elder cousin riding bare-back along the top of the levee. And best of all was that moment when Augusta had turned her horse down the steep slope of the dike, riding home to earth. The horse’s massive body had obscured the action of its legs and the animal appeared to fly down from the road in the sky. Whenever Lilith thought back on that day, she remembered the horse with wings.

Now Augusta’s laughter subsided.

“I saw the angel when I passed through the cemetery,” said the younger woman, casually, as though this might be idle conversation. It was not.

“There are
sixteen
angels in that cemetery.” Augusta tipped back the last of her coffee and reached for the pot on the small wicker table by her chair.

Lilith repressed an urge to caution her cousin on the dangers of caffeine. “I mean
the
angel. I forgot how beautiful Cass Shelley was. So the prisoner is really Kathy?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need Mr. Butler’s help, would I?” Augusta was betraying a trace of temper, and Lilith knew she was onto something. “But you’ve heard talk in town. You think it – ”

“Don’t insult me,” said Augusta, and the subtext of her sarcasm was clear – Idle conversation my ass.

“I’m just curious is all,” Lilith lied.

“Fine.
We’ll just pretend I
am
the addled old woman you take me for.” Augusta settled back in her chair, but the tension between them was strung tight. “Let’s say the prisoner
is
Kathy. Remember, she was born in Louisiana, and I do believe the strategy of a woman comes with the mother’s milk. But I’m told she talks like a northerner. Must have been up there all this time. So now the southern woman and the northern woman meet in one brain and one body.” She turned to Lilith and smiled with no intention of kindness. “Now there’s a hellish piece of work. Does that scare you, Lilith? It should.”

The younger woman pressed her lips together in a hard line to stifle the remark that would put her on Augusta’s bad side.

The old woman went on. “Oh, I know what you’re up to. But if I had to bet on the outcome, I wouldn’t give even money for your chances.”

Lilith began to hum a tune as she pushed off with her feet to rock on the back legs of her chair, working off the angry energy. She watched her cousin out of the corner of one eye, and then she smiled to see Augusta looking back in the same way. She sought out safer ground for conversation. “You still ride your horse along the top of the levee?”

“No, I never ride anymore.” Augusta said this with the rare tone of defeat. “I had a bad fall one year. Broke my leg, and it took forever to mend. I don’t have time to be laid up with another injury. Time is precious.”

The sudden howl of an animal made Lilith tuck in a breath and sit up a little straighter. “That was the wolf.”

“Oh,
stop,
Lilith.” The red coal of the cheroot made an impatient streak in the dark as Augusta waved her hand. “You’re too old for that game.”

“I know that howl.” Indeed, this was the strongest memory of her early childhood in Dayborn. “That was Daddy’s wolf.”

“It was nothing of the kind – only an old dog.” There was a tired smile in Augusta’s voice. “Your father was pulling your leg when he told you that story. You
know
that.”

Yes, she did. In one pragmatic room of Lilith’s mind, she knew her father had created the wolf for her. But there was another room where she kept her father’s gifts: his poetic blind faith in things unseen, and the power of that faith.

“There has never been a wolf in these parts – not ever,” said Augusta.

And Lilith knew this was fact. But in that room, her father’s gentle voice was saying,
“Lil, if you can only catch that wolf, he will infinitely increase your life.”

As though Augusta were arguing against this inner voice, she said, “He only told you that tall tale when he had it in mind to raise him a little track star.”

“When you catch him, when that moment comes, your life will be changed.”

“Oh Lord, how you did run to see that wolf.”

“Hear him howl, Lil? Isn’t he magnificent?”

“But all the time, it was only Kathy’s dog,” said Augusta. “And that’s him wailing now.”

And it did sound more like a wail for the dead, tapering off to mournful crooning, ending with a whimper. The animal was crying.

“But he can’t be alive. No way. He’d be more than
twenty
years old.”

Lilith had kept faith with a winged horse and a wolf she had yet to see, but she could not believe that a common dog had lived well past the century mark in the canine’s translation to human years.

“It
is
an indecent age for a dog.” Augusta exhaled a perfect smoke ring. “Every time I leased out Cass’s house, I always told the old story of the murder and how the dog missed little Kathy. All the renters were good sports. They even fed him. And I might’ve kept that house occupied. But after a while, the renters began to realize that the dog was insane.”

Lilith turned away, preferring her father’s wolf to the half-dead dog haunting the yard of the old Shelley house.

Augusta’s voice droned on in the background of her thoughts.

“In any case, you never want to chase down a wolf, Lilith. Ever think of what you’d do when you caught up with it?”

The old black dog’s hind leg was working as he ran through his dream, pacing himself to the towheaded child with green eyes. It was toward the violent end of the dream that he moaned and rolled over in the dirt to expose all his old scars to the moon, every wound that was not concealed by his pelt. The pain of old injuries woke him again, and he felt the real and solid world all around him.

He was alone.

His head dropped low as he did the dog’s version of bitter tears. Then came a fresh spate of howling. It was one of those rare phases of weather when the wind carried his night music everywhere, even into Owltown.

At the edge of Dayborn was its unacknowledged spawn, a crescent cluster of shacks and mobile homes on blocks, a main street of neon lights that glowed all night, and drunks who did not fall down until the first light of dawn. Though it was a legal partition of Dayborn, the older residents pretended it was not. When they had occasion to refer to the sprawling blight on the lower bayou, they called it Owltown.

Alma Furgueson, who lived in this place, rose in her bed and listened to the dog’s voice. She wished someone would put that demented creature out of his misery and hers. She would do it herself, but she could not bear to go back to the Shelley house again.

She gripped the edge of her blanket and drew it up over her face. Though she was past fifty, she reacted to her fears with the solutions of a child. She left her bed and went to the closet, hiding herself away at the back and pulling the door shut.

Alma sat very still, but her body was hard at work, a damned factory of emotions, slopping great dollops of tears through her eyes, pouring acid into her stomach and churning up the bile. A scream was rising in her throat, and a heavy weight of guilt was resting on her breast, like a lump of something cancerous, inciting fear and daring her to look at it. And so, though she sat in the blackness of a closet, she shut her eyes.

But fear would not be deterred, and it flooded her brain with ugly pictures. There was no place to hide.

In the town square of Dayborn, in the house next to the bed and breakfast, Darlene Wooley listened to her son screaming in the next room. It was not the pain in his broken hands; he had taken pills for that.

Kathy’s dog ceased to wail, and Ira’s screaming stopped. Her son had moved on to a hiding place in some other dream.

That was a small mercy, for whenever she had to wake him from a nightmare, to put her hands on him and shake him out of the dream, the fear in his eyes destroyed her. He would always push her away, batting at her hands, repulsed by every demonstration of mother love. And that was the worst of it, because she loved him so.

She stood by her bedroom window, sending silent prayers to the dog, asking him not to howl anymore, please, not tonight.

Let him be. Let my child alone.

There was no way to comfort Ira without knowing what had happened to him all those years ago. He could never tell her. From the age of six, her child’s communication had been mostly musical – ripples of piano keys and snatches of sung songs. But she was not a musical woman, and all of Ira’s conversations remained one-sided.

So many questions had gone unanswered, and they continued to nag at her. Sometimes Darlene half expected the vanished Cass Shelley to come back, to knock on her door, to sit down with her over a cup of coffee and explain away each dark shadow on Darlene’s life and the content of Ira’s dreams.

Her son screamed again. She could hear the thrashing in the next room. Oh, he was awake now and beating his head against the bedstead.

Darlene ran into Ira’s room. As she came toward him, he stopped his frantic motions and stared at her with big eyes, the child’s unconscious signal to be held and hugged out of his fears. This was perversity that drove her crazy, for if she tried to hold him, he would scream again, as though she had stabbed him.

He was full-grown now, but his body was small and slender. His face was thin, making his eyes seem larger, more vulnerable in their plea for comfort. She longed to cradle him in her arms, but instead, she clasped her hands behind her back to reassure him that she would not. She only stood by his bed until he felt safe again, until he drifted back to sleep and escaped from Kathy’s dog.

Long after Darlene had returned to her own bed, she lay awake.

The other woman, on the floor of the closet in Owltown, was also awake. Her fists were grinding into her eye sockets, madly at work erasing the pictures in her mind. Alma Furgueson only wanted to forget. She had been there; she had seen it all from beginning to end; but she had understood it no better than Darlene Wooley, who had seen nothing at all.

Lilith Beaudare said good night and left Augusta to her chronic insomnia.

Running down the covered lane of oaks and into the woods, her feet pounded on the hard dirt until she entered the cemetery. She sprinted across the sacred ground, keeping to the soft grass, crunching gravel when she crossed a path. She was running on packed dirt again as she sped along the road by Henry Roth’s cottage and climbed up to the top of the levee. Her long legs were flowing across the high road as she looked down at Dayborn. The glowing streetlamps mapped out the town beyond the trees.

Running was her passion, always chasing the wolf – not an old, half-blind dog, but something sleek and powerful. She had evolved a personal mythology around this animal: He was the metaphor for a moment just ahead of her in time, ‘the powerful, the uncommon’ – Rilke’s ‘awakening of stones.’

Tonight, Augusta had voiced Lilith’s greatest fear. When she did catch up to the wolf, what then? If she failed to recognize the moment, it would be just another tick of the clock, and she would be condemned to an ordinary life.

In successive scenarios, she plotted out her strategy:
The wolf is slowly turning round. What now?

Lilith was deep in the euphoria of the runner’s high, and in the bizarre contradiction of a devout atheist, she believed she could reach out and touch the face of God and His gleaming white fangs. While in this state of grace, the strain and effort fell away from her body. She lost the awareness of feet lighting to ground; the earth itself fell away, and she was flying down the side of the levee.

The dog cried out again, and Lilith’s epiphany was shattered.

Her feet touched down on the hard-packed dirt of level ground. She looked into the blackness of the trees ahead and shivered when a breeze slipped up behind her in the dark to lick the sweat off her skin.

The prisoner lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Golden rectangles floated there, a play of shadows and the yellow light of a streetlamp bouncing off an alley wall to shine on the window bars.