The Fall of the Year (22 page)

Next he announced that after a short intermission he'd perform his pièce de resistance: the solving of a murder mystery. “I'll leave the building with the gal and we'll slope down the street for a breath of fresh air. Whilst we're gone, you kind folks invent the murder. Choose a victim, a perpetrator, and a weapon. Hide the weapon here in the hall. I'll come back and have a trusted member of the audience blindfold me and take aholt of my wrist, see to it I don't go to bumping into things. If my luck holds I'll identify the victim and the dastardly killer. Then, by the Great Sam Houston, I'll uncover the murder weapon. All within fifteen minutes.”

Mr. Mentality blinked out at the audience for a second or two, started to shuffle offstage, then turned back to say, “I ask only that during the solving of the murder you sit in the same seats you're in now.”

He stepped off into the wings, then reappeared instantly. “Oh,” he said. “If, in the allotted quarter of an hour, I should fail to identify the victim or the murderer or the weapon, I'll donate my entire share of tonight's take to the sponsoring churches.”

 

When the roaring finally died down, someone in the audience nominated Father George to moderate the selection of victim and murderer. At first he demurred, but the unorthodox priest had never been good at saying no to anyone so, shaking his head and laughing, he climbed slowly up onto the stage and asked for a volunteer victim.

Instantly Louvia was on her feet. “The whole village has wanted to murder me a dozen times over. I'll be the victim.”

“That's too obvious,” Roy Quinn said. “You've called so much attention to yourself already, he'd guess it in a minute. What we want is a chance at those ticket receipts.”

“Fine, then I'll be the murderer,” Louvia declared. “Pick a victim. Pick the least likely victim. Someone the opposite of me. Pick the most popular person in town.”

“That would be Father George, hands down,” Julia Fiefner, the town busybody, called out. “We'd never want to kill Father G. Even you wouldn't, Louvia.”

Again the hall erupted into laughter.

“I don't much feel like being murdered tonight,” Father George said. “Who else has a nomination?”

But Julia was not to be deterred. “All in favor of selecting Father as the victim say aye,” she said, to a huge chorus of ayes.

The choice had been made. It remained only to select a weapon.

“Sheriff White's revolver,” someone yelled.

“Winnie Blake's cane.”

“No, no, I've got it,” Louvia said. “My Daughter.”

The fortuneteller had her gazing stone out and was waving it over her head. “It's the perfect choice. We'll hide it in the sheriff's uniform jacket. I brained old Lecoeur with it. The charlatan won't ever guess.”

“I can't be involved in such antics,” Sheriff White said. But everyone urged him on. Finally he agreed to hide the pink quartz rock in his pocket. Even my ailing father seemed to be getting into the mood of the evening. When Julia suggested that he remain on stage to time Mr. Mentality as a means of further throwing the mind reader off the scent, Father George laughed and got out his gold pocket watch. Rarely, except in cases of a natural catastrophe, had there been such unanimity in the village.

Reverend Johnstone hurried out of the hall to fetch back Mr. Mentality; a few minutes later the house lights flickered off and on, and the mind reader and the Petrograd Princess reappeared. This time she was holding a long dark scarf. “Mr. Mentality will need someone from the audience to blindfold him and serve as his medium,” she said. “He'd like to invite Frank Bennett to come up onto the stage.”

I couldn't believe my ears. From my earliest school days, I'd hated to be the center of attention. But Father George, standing off to the side of Mr. Mentality with his watch in his hand, beckoned to me as though to say that if he could be part of the fun tonight, so could I. To all kinds of laughter and mock applause, I forced myself to go up and wrap the dark scarf several times around the mind reader's head.

The Princess guided Mr. Mentality's left hand to my right wrist. His grip was loose, his hand cold as a corpse's. Looking like nothing so much as a hooded condemned man, the reader stood beside me as if in a trance.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Princess announced. “Mr. Moriarity Mentality will now solve the murder. Father Lecoeur will time him. If by some chance Mr. Mentality fails within the agreed-upon fifteen minutes to identify the victim or the killer or fails to discover the murder weapon, he will, as promised, forfeit his share of tonight's receipts. First the victim.”

Father George opened his watch and grinned at me. “How did you and I get roped into this?” he whispered.

Just at that moment Mr. Mentality bore down on my wrist with the grip of a barroom arm wrestler, did an abrupt about-face, marched straight away from the audience to the rear of the stage, and cracked into the painted backdrop of the village.

“Wrong way,” I whispered frantically. “Mr. Mentality. You're going the wrong way.”

Paying no attention, the mind reader began to reel up and down in front of the painted flat, pulling me along beside him. Up close, the village on the backdrop didn't resemble a village at all, just dizzying splotches of color. From the audience came peals of laughter.

Finally I got the blindfolded reader turned around and headed upstage. As we started down the steps toward the audience, Father George announced, “Fourteen minutes.” Already we had blundered away sixty precious seconds.

Linked hand to wrist, Moriarity Mentality and I moved up the sloping center aisle. At first there seemed to be no method at all in his short, erratic lurches from one side of the aisle to the other. Twice he barked his shins on chair legs. As Father George ticked off the minutes, sheer panic seemed to govern Mr. Mentality's progress. At the ten-minute mark he put on a sudden burst of speed, veered sharply, and fell into the lap of Julia Hefner, dragging me off my feet after him.

Then he wasted another entire minute standing still and turning his swathed head from side to side like a baffled hunting dog trying to pick up a scent.

“Nine minutes,” Father George announced.

Only then did Mr. Mentality begin to edge back down the aisle. Now creeping, now gliding, he was making straight for Louvia, stalking the fortuneteller with his head jutting out and swaying from side to side like a snake slithering toward its prey.

“Mr. Moriarity Mentality is about to reveal the murder victim,” the Princess announced. But if the reader misidentified Louvia as the victim rather than the murderer, he would forfeit his entire share of the night's receipts! A breathless silence fell over the audience. Mr. Mentality reached out toward Louvia with his free hand. At the last possible moment he drew back from her as if he'd stepped on a bare electrical wire, staggered the few steps to the foot of the stage stairs, pointed his finger, and announced in a highly agitated voice, “The victim is Father George Lecoeur, the unorthodox priest of Kingdom County.”

The Princess looked at Father George, who looked at her, astonished. “Time?” she asked.

“Eight minutes and twelve seconds remaining.”

The Princess nodded. “Mr. Moriarity Mentality has successfully discovered the victim. He will now proceed with his investigation and identify the murderer.”

Once again the mind reader began to lunge up and down the aisle like a powerful leashed animal struggling to free itself. When he bumped into me, as he did repeatedly, his body was as taut as a bent bow. His hand bore down on my wrist like a pipe wrench. His strength seemed to have doubled as he tacked up and down the aisles in a series of false starts, dead-end sprints, jolting about-faces. Twice he passed Louvia without slowing down. As much as I wanted him to succeed, I was determined not to give away the identity of the murderer.

“Seven minutes,” Father George announced.

Mr. Mentality charged back up the center aisle, ascended the stairs to the balcony, staggered toward Farlow Blake, who was operating the spotlight, wheeled, and started down toward the railing. I was afraid he'd pitch over into the crowd below. Or what if he had a heart attack? Such an outcome seemed far from impossible. He was dragging me along behind him like a puppet, all but yanking me off my feet.

Once again the reader stopped in his tracks, a foot or so from the balcony rail. Below in the hall, every head was turned upward. Backlit by the spotlight, his head inclined forward, he began to sway from side to side in that serpentine rhythm. Pointing out at the crowd below, he roared, “J'accuse! The murderess, Louvia DeBanville.”

This time, after a brief stunned silence, the crowd cheered loudly, no doubt partly in appreciation of the mind reader's histrionic timing. But immediately Father George called out, “Three minutes,” and again the reader and I embarked on our strange linked peregrination, back down the balcony steps and up and down the aisles of the hall. Now we proceeded to rhythmic clapping from the audience. Sweat ran down the sides of the reader's face, and he seemed to give off a faint metallic scent, something like the sulfurous scent of the paper mill at Memphremagog when the wind was out of the north. I wanted desperately for him to find Louvia's rose quartz gazing stone in Sheriff White's jacket pocket, but I was more determined than ever not to divulge any clues.

“Sixty seconds,” Father George said just as we stopped in front of Sheriff White at the rear of the hall. I could see the bulge in the sheriff's pocket. The mind reader began to make a high-pitched noise. His hand glided toward the sheriff's pocket. His keening intensified. The clapping and stomping reached a thunderous peak. The reader's hand stole closer.

“Thirty seconds.”

Mr. Mentality jerked back his empty hand and started down the aisle, dragging me behind him in a grip of iron.

“Fifteen seconds . . . ten, nine, eight . . .”

Now the hall was counting with Father George. “Seven, six, five . . .”

In front of the stage the reader whirled again to face the audience. He dropped my wrist and whipped off the blindfold.

“Three, two, one . . . ,” chanted the crowd, now on its feet.

“Behold!” croaked Mr. Mentality, shooting his right hand high above his head. “The weapon of destruction.”

Sparkling in the spotlight like the Star of India was the fortuneteller's Daughter, which Mr. Mentality immediately dropped into Louvia's lap.

To the prolonged applause of the standing crowd, the exhausted reader mounted the steps of the stage, bowed once, and half collapsed into the arms of the Princess, who helped him into the wings. The show was over.

 

Father George and I found Mr. Mentality backstage, peering into the envelope that Roy Quinn had just handed to him. He shut it up, then looked in again. He frowned.

“Divvy-up agreement was sixty-forty my way or a flat one hundred dollars, whichever was the greater,” Mr. Mentality said.

“Yes, but the turnout was disappointing,” Roy said. “So, frankly, were parts of the show.”

“Parts of the show,” the mind reader repeated in an inflectionless voice.

“That's right. You'll have to admit you got off to a pretty shaky start. Even so, we're willing to pay you fifty dollars. I'd call that handsome compensation for an hour and a half's worth of work.”

“Out in West Texas, where I hail from, a man's word is—”

“This isn't West Texas,” said Zack Barrows, the former local prosecutor and also a deacon in the United Church. “Take it or leave it.”

“See here, goddamn it,” Father George said, his face getting red. “This is disgraceful. This man earned his money and, by God, I intend to see to it that he gets it.”

But Mr. Mentality shook his head at Father George. He got out his round dollar watch, which had stopped at 6:23. For a while he stared at it as if he had never learned how to tell time. Then he shook it half-heartedly, the way a person might shake a pair of dice he had every good reason to believe had been loaded against him. As he did so, the hour hand fell off. And for the first time that evening, the mind reader smiled.

“Well, folks,” he told the church committee, putting the watch in his pocket and handing the envelope with the fifty dollars in it back to Roy Quinn, “in this old world, a fella has to know when to fold up his hand.”

“Wait a minute,” Father George said, reaching for his wallet. “What about your money? I'll make up the difference myself.”

“Put it toward the hall rental,” Mr. Mentality said.

“The hall rental?”

“For when I come back again,” Mr. Mentality said.

“You'd actually come back here?” Father George said, astonished. “When?”

“Soon,” Mr. Mentality said, and headed out the stage door with the Princess.

 

TONIGHT ONLY
Town Hall
at 7:30
Mr. Moriarity Mentality Will Reveal the
INTIMATE SECRETS OF KINGDOM COMMON
$10 per Head
No One Under Eighteen Admitted

 

Nobody knew how the posters had been printed up and distributed. The following morning they were simply there, on the elm trees on the common, on the hotel and courthouse doors, on the sides of the commission-sales barn and the railway station, plastered to telephone poles along the county road and Route 5. The day had dawned gray and chilly, and there was something unsettling about the garish posters under the overcast sky, though no one thought Mr. Mentality would have much of a crowd at ten dollars a head.

By seven o'clock that evening the hurricane had blown in. The wind howled through the elms, and rain was pelting against the tall windows of the town hall, which, contrary to expectations and despite the weather, was filling up fast. I noticed that some of the men buying tickets had pulled their hats down over their faces, and some of the commission-sales crowd and barbershop gang had sacks and parcels under their arms. A few reeked of liquor. A number of the women wore shawls, which they left up over their heads inside the hall, as if attending a funeral. Father George was played out from the night before and had elected to stay home tonight. Once again I sat beside Louvia.