Lost Girls (13 page)

When she finishes the audience applauds dutifully but without the usual whistles or howls, which I assume is out of either boozy distraction or respect for her tender age. She bends down and picks the gauzy white slip up off the floor, lets it fall over her shoulders. On her way to the bar I wave to her to join me and she brings me another drink as well as one for herself.

''Like the show?'' she asks when she sits, places the fresh drink she's brought for me down beside its two empty friends. Her skin egg-yolk yellow inside the thin fabric.

''I did indeed, thank you. I feel much better now.''

She makes a hollow sound at the back of her throat in place of laughter. Even up close I can gain no better view of her face, and she keeps herself a little turned from me to make sure of it. But her body leans into the table, a leg sliding forward to make contact with mine.

''You want me to dance?''

''In a minute maybe. How about we talk a little first. You live in town?''

''Not exactly. But I know
you
don't.''

She moves her head so that it's now at a different indirect angle from before, but as she does she exposes a flash of teeth from behind the veil of hair.

''Oh, so you must know me pretty well, do you? Let's see, then. What's my name?''

She laughs, once.

''No? It's Barth.''

I extend my hand to her but she doesn't take it. Instead she pulls her feet up beneath her on the chair and rocks back and forth distractedly to the music, which has now changed to a heavy metal ballad from the seventies that I can't quite place. And then over the girl's shoulder I see the older blonde take the stage and immediately begin to squeeze her pendent breasts together and glower at the four lumber jackets, who respond with a couple beery hoots.

''Don't you have a name?'' I try again.

''Call me whatever you want.''

She leans forward, close enough that her hair brushes against my cheek, and I notice that it has no smell. That she herself gives off no powder or perfume or sweat.

''But I know you,'' she whispers.

Something in her voice moves me back against the wall. Maybe it's only that she doesn't speak like all the other dancers with their little-girl or smoky-madam routines. She's so new at this she's still using her own voice.

''So it's
that
obvious that I'm from out of town?''

She nods, and her hair shifts like poured honey.

''Is it the clothes? Or wait a second. You saw the story on me in the local paper. There must have been a picture too. That's it, isn't it?''

She says nothing to this but rises, bending down at the waist when she's on her feet. Once more she moves her head in a way that briefly exposes a smile, a narrow row of too-small upper teeth.

''Going already? You haven't even danced for me yet.''

She laughs again, this time cracking out so loudly I expect the whole room to have noticed, but when I glance behind her all eyes remain on the stage. The girl places her hand briefly on top of mine and sends a dull shock up my arm that holds me there, waiting for her to let me go. And when she does she leaves the idea of her touch over my skin--dry as paper, bird bones and muscle strings within --long after she withdraws. Moves to the bar, her spine a slippery semicolon under the cheap lingerie. Says something to the barman and leaves by way of the door marked LADIES' ENTRANCE.

I finish the drink she brought in a swift gulp, pretend to watch the finale of the other blonde's routine. The lumber jackets hollering, then transfixed and silent for the moment of lowered panties, hollering again. Her body a blue-lit phantom, a photograph come to dollish life. The men watch her. Fixed to their seats, eyes held open to the small miracle of remembered desire.

Except for me. Eyes moving between my drink, the glowing bottles behind the bar, the closed door of the LADIES' ENTRANCE. Trying to recall when I'd last been with a woman. Years. Not since university, and God knows even then only rarely and without success. It's hard to discern with any precision when impotence turns from a lack of desire to incapacity. Having consulted neither shrink nor urologist in my own case, I can only guess. For me there was never repugnance, only a flat indifference. Women could still charm and allure, but the third requisite response--the stirring mechanics deep down where it counts--was never forthcoming.

I haven't been with a woman in years because I know that I cannot. Cannot because there would be no rewards for her and I'm too old for new shames. But tonight with this girl there was something. A pooling of warmth in the lower back, neck loose, toes curling up within the leather privacy of shoes. The need to reach out to another met by the discipline to sit still, everything left in an almost painful balance. For the time she sat near me I wanted only to diminish the air between us, pull her hair aside and stroke my knuckles over her face. I wanted only this, but at the same time wanted only for her to leave me and these feelings alone. For with this there came also an apprehension. Not of her exactly, but of seeing and touching more than I could bear.

Early the next morning, inspired by six hours of semiadequate sleep and a larger than usual nasal breakfast, I decide to drive back up to Lake St. Christopher for another look around before taking on the day's more pressing tasks. Outside, the rain comes down in silver curtains. Cold enough to draw the blood away from fingers, toes, and face within a minute of stepping out the door. If it gets this bad up here at the end of September, what cruelties will December bring? I make a mental note to check out the army surplus store down the street and stock up on thermal long underwear.

Then I'm in the car, head buzzing, heat cranked, crunching onto the white-frosted stones of Fireweed Road. Rain syrups down the windshield, thinks about turning to ice before the defroster's warm breath decides the matter for it. Bringing the Lincoln to a stop in the squishing mud that has blurred the pattern of boot prints and car treads clearly visible just days ago.

But I'm not here to take the same route down to the water as before. Instead, there's a path that begins where the road ends and heads around the far side of the lake. Rain turns to mist as it bounces off the cover of pine needles and black ash boughs above. The air is quiet, and the turning leaves around me--yellow and red and an almost unbelievable gold--are uninterrupted for long stretches by any building, signpost, or litter. In fact I have to walk a full twenty minutes around the far end before spotting the first cottage, a shabby clapboard box that wouldn't pass for a garden shed in certain Toronto backyards. Look in its windows expecting abandonment but instead finding definite signs of life: a loaf of bread beside a knife on the tiny kitchen's cutting board, the embers of a fire in the brick hearth, an unfinished mug of coffee holding down the sun-yellowed page of a crossword-puzzle magazine. Beyond this I can see straight through and out the window at the front, which takes in a view of the water and the few road-accessible cottages on the far shore.

''You make a habit of putting your nose up against other people's glass?''

An old woman's voice behind me. Not a day under eighty, judging from the wrinkled erosions mapped into her skin, shoulders collapsed at her sides. There, standing at the top of the slope next to a woodpile I hadn't noticed on the way in. Her tone is disapproving, pitched up through the grinding sand in her chest. But she takes me in with a squint that softens her a little, adds a scornful humor to her face, blotched and fuzzy as a bruised peach. The accent is the same as the others up here--clipped and tight--but beneath it there is also the slight rise at the end that I've heard before in those who've grown up in Scotland, the north of Ireland, or one of those damp, peaty places.

''I'm not a snoop by vocation,'' I answer. ''But I do apologize for--''

''Names first. I'm Helen Arthurs. Widow of Duncan James Arthurs.''

I wonder for a second if I'm supposed to recognize the dead husband's name, but seeing as I don't, I make no mention of it.

''I'm Bartholomew Crane. Just to explain, Mrs. Arthurs, I was walking along this side of the lake for the purposes of an investigation of sorts--''

''Bartholomew Crane, you say?''

''Call me Barth.''

Shifts a little inside her bundled layers of knit sweater, windbreaker, and scarf. Then she slowly pulls the folds of her neck out of the encasement of her clothes, a turtle's head emerging from its shell.

''But tell me now, Mr. Crane, what are you
really
doing up here at a quarter to eight on a rainy bugger of a morning?''

''You know something? I'm not quite sure myself.''

I smile up at her as charmingly as I can, hoping she'll simply stand aside and let me go. But she does nothing of the sort.

''I'm here on business.''

Nothing.

''I've been hired as Thomas Tripp's defense attorney, if you'd like to know the truth.''

''Oh, I
always
like to know the truth, Mr. Crane.'' She laughs now, though her stance is unchanging. ''Now, speaking of the truth, there are some things about that whole business you may not know.''

''Oh, yes?''

The squint returns. Puts one hand on a tree trunk next to her and the other on her hip, gives me a good looking-over, lingering on the mud-caked dress shoes and loosened silk tie of black and emerald stripes.

''I'm
sure
of it,'' she says. ''But if you ask around here you won't get much help. They all think the teacher's the one. If you ask me, though, I'd say it isn't exactly so.''

''That's encouraging. But you know, I really should be heading back.''

Neither of us moves. Odds are the old lady's clueless, her brain softened by too many years spent alone in the empty woods, or maybe just by too many years, period. But you can never be sure. There's always the possibility that she had her bird-watching binoculars on the day in question and saw something that may be of help to old Thom Tripp. Nothing for me to do but try to grease her wheels by stepping forward to rest my foot on a protruding root halfway up the incline.

''Mrs. Arthurs, it's been informative, truly, but I must--''

''Don't you want to hear?''

''Hear what?''

''What I think happened to your missing girls.''

''They're not
mine
. In fact--''

''I think they're in that lake there.''

She sticks the hand on her hip out in the direction of the water, but her fingers are too crooked with arthritis to indicate any point in particular and their wayward pointings take in everything before her at once.

''Well, that
would
seem the most likely suggestion,'' I say, now a little closer to her than I would like. ''But the police have conducted extensive searches--scuba divers, underwater sensors, and the rest. And nothing, I'm afraid.''

''I didn't say they're ever going to find them.''

She holds up her chin in a gesture of triumph and the loose folds of skin that enwrap her neck are drawn tight enough to show the bulging pipe of her throat.

''You beg the question, Mrs. Arthurs, so I'll ask it. How do you know that's where they are?''

''Because it weren't your man that took those young girls away, although God knows he may have had some hand in the business somehow.'' She flicks her hand dismissively through the air before her. ''No, it weren't him, if you ask me. It was the Lady.''

''The Lady?''

''That weren't her real name, of course. It's only because nobody had a bloody clue what to call the wretched thing that we all got to speaking of her as the Lady, or the Lady in the Lake, though there's not many alive today who'd remember her as she was then.''

She's setting me up. Without even an invitation inside for a cup of coffee and lump of bread she's going to go ahead with this tale of hers no matter what evasions I might attempt. And the tough old bird has got me stuck here, nodding at her to continue.

''She was barren, you see,'' she says now, voice lowered as though there was a risk of being overheard. ''At least they
made
her barren, so she couldn't have no more.''

''I'm sorry?''

''Gave her a hysterectomy, is what they did. But that was only salt in the wound, because they did that
after
they made her childless. Had her little ones taken from her, on account of a mental hospital not being a fit place for a mother to bring up children. So the doctors or the government or whatever--they took her kids away, and were never seen by their blood mother again. At the time there were some who said it was the taking the kids away that made her go strange. Some others say it was the operation they went ahead and did on her. But I say she was damn crazy to
begin
with.''

''So where is she now?''

''Oh, she's of no use to you, Mr. Crane. She's been good and dead for fifty years now.''

The old lady juts her chin out at the lake and I involuntarily turn, as though she's got something right there in her sights before her. But there's only the gray surface of the water, pocked by rain.

''Nobody knew what her real name was, you see, because back then all the crazy people were just put away and nobody much cared about why or where they came from. It was 1945, the war not long over and all the boys back home, and she just showed up in town one day, a bag o' bones with her hungry kids holding her hands, like they'd just come back from the war themselves. Christ knows, they probably had.''