The Swan Gondola (41 page)

“Like what else?” I said.

“Like a key,” she said. “That might open a door.”

•   •   •

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the night, a few whiskeys in, the plot had seemed foolproof. In the light of day I was certain of doom. I wanted nothing more than to wrestle myself from another of Mrs. Margaret's death grips. But it was actually Doxie's grip that held me, and I'd been in it ever since she'd first wrapped her fingers around my thumb.

All the gears of the scheme were clicking along by afternoon. The only actress in the city of Omaha who I knew I could trust was Phoebe St. James, from the burlesque at the Empress Opera House. It'd been nearly a year since I'd seen her. I thought she'd left town, just before the Fair, to act in an open-air theater that had been hacked into a patch of forest. She went there, somewhere east, every summer to play actresses in Russian plays. “All the best plays are about actresses,” she would say. The theater consisted only of a stage built from the trees they'd felled. The audience sat on rows of stumps.

“I didn't go this summer,” Phoebe said, when I tracked her down. It had been easy—she had a telephone, and her name was in the directory. “You didn't notice I wasn't gone, I guess.”

She had a little cottage of her own, and it looked like you could lick it. Some of its bricks were pink, others were white. The shingles were yellow and rippled like waves of ribbon candy. The wallpaper was striped like peppermint. I sat in her parlor with my hat on my knee.

“I'm sorry I fell out of touch, Phoebe,” I said. “I had a very . . . a very
complicated
summer. How'd you get such a fine house?”

“I met a soldier off to war,” she said. She picked up sugar cubes with tiny ivory tongs, and she seemed to drop about ten of them into a teacup. “He fell in love with me after only one day. We woke a judge in the middle of the night to marry us. And my soldier left in the morning. His family was wealthy. They were furious. I can't say I blame them. I wouldn't want
my
son to marry an actress.” She poured tea into the cup of sugar, and brought the sickening brew to me. I set the saucer on the knee that didn't have a hat on it.

“So I made do,” she continued, “taking whatever work there was. I was paid by a horse thief to play the part of a reverend's wife one afternoon. He had me take a Bible, with saws hidden in the pages, to his partner in crime who was cooling his heels in jail. I was so convincing, no one even suspected me when he cut his way out. Oh, and maybe you heard of Dizzy Daisy, who thieved on the midway?
Watch out for Dizzy Daisy?
No? I would pretend to faint from the heat, and the gentlemen who caught me would be relieved of their wallets and watches.”

“You must've done a swift business,” I said, studying the pretty swoop of the gold handle of the teacup.

“Not really,” she said. She cut through a coconut cake with a silver-handled knife. “I got my money from yellow fever. My soldier died from it.”

“Oh, Phoebe,” I said.

“And the family paid me well to go away,” she said. She picked up a flake of coconut and put it on her tongue. “They paid me to not have his name anymore. They paid me not to wear black and not to grieve. They paid me not to be a widow. And so I don't grieve, and I'm not a widow.” She held out to me my slice of cake, and when I went to take the plate, my hat tumbled from my knee. I sat there, holding the saucer on my one knee with my one hand, and the cake plate on my other knee with my other hand. But I wasn't hungry for cake or thirsty for tea, so it didn't much matter that I couldn't lift a finger.

As a cuckoo clock clucked the hour, its little doors snapping open and shut, Phoebe said, “So I guess my summer was
complicated
too.”

I told Phoebe of my own loss, and I think she took some comfort in it, in knowing that love and death had touched us both. The polite state of shock she'd seemed to be in as she'd served the cake and tea began to lift, and it was just us again, like always before, Ferret and Feeb, backstage at the Empress. We moved to the music room and sat slouched on the sofa, her arms wrapped around mine, her cheek on my shoulder.

“I'll be Madam Seymour,” she said, thrilling to my scheme. “Madam Seymour sees more.”

•   •   •

T
HE
W
AKEFIELD HOUSE,
even though so far up the hill, had a telephone now. I called the house from Rosie's den. I spoke to Pearl about Madam Seymour.

“I've been to every parlor in the city,” I said. “Madam Seymour's the finest.”

“I'll see what Billy says,” Pearl said. “I'll ask him this evening over brandy.”

“No,” I said. “
Tonight
must be the séance. Madam Seymour is impatient. She says Cecily needs us there. All of us. She needs all her friends with her.” Pearl said nothing. I listened for her voice in the crackling of noise on the line.
I knew this wouldn't work
, I thought. My heart sped, my stomach turned. We'd failed.
Just help us
, I wanted to plead. Instead, I said, “Pearl? Don't you believe in Cecily's ghost? Has this all been a fraud? Pearl? Tell me. Has this all been a fraud?”

Pearl said, “I'll ring back in an hour.”

And in an hour she called with an invitation to summon ghosts in the parlor. But Wakefield was not happy, she said, and he'd have no part in it. “I had to beg him, Ferret,” she said. “I broke down in tears.”

By evening, we had rented a coach and driver, and had gathered our friends. August ran a stick of charcoal around Phoebe's eyes, painting exotic sweeps. He plummed her lips purple with some kind of rouge and he got her lashes to sparkle with silvery dust. She wore a lace shawl over her head. The six of us crammed ourselves into the coach, with August, Phoebe, and me sharing one bench. Across from us, Rosie and Mrs. Margaret took up all of a seat, so Josephine sat on Rosie's lap.

The weather worsened, growing as wet and cold as it had on the day of Cecily's funeral. The sky was just as stark-white. Maybe
we
were the ones who weren't real, caught up in a dead woman's dream.

Mrs. Margaret had given me the key to the secret room, and I held it tight in my fist. I was going to the house to open a door. It kept me anchored, this piece of iron.

•   •   •

W
HEN WE ARRIVED,
Pearl ushered us into the parlor, the same parlor where Cecily had laid in her open-lidded coffin on the day of her memorial. Servants rushed in and out, not only with extra chairs to bring to the table but with decanters of wine and cut glass bowls of candied fruit. They brought in cakes and pies and plates of marrow on toast. They brought us mutton puffs, boiled sweetbreads, and oysters wrapped in bacon. “This was the best we could do on short notice,” said the head cook, a stout woman they called Lady, as she stood in the parlor and worried.

“You shouldn't have brought out anything at all,” Pearl said, scratching at the back of her head. “This isn't a party.”

Rosie popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and insisted the servants sit with us. “Cecily needs her people,” he said. The evening was like Christmas, with its snow at the window and the servants carrying in suet pudding and macaroon custard. With some coaxing the maids and the butlers, and even old Morearty, consented to a splash of the wine. Pearl stood at the doorway, gnawing a thumbnail, refusing all drink.

Phoebe, as Madam Seymour, moved around the room with her eyes shut, wiggling her fingers in the air in front of her face like she was feeling for cobwebs in her path. “There is a room that is locked,” she said, in an accent thick with fraud.
“Zere eees a vroom zat eees lok-ka-da.”

Pearl stepped forward. “Yes,” she said, tilting her head. “At the top of the stairs. There's a room.” I felt a pang of guilt seeing Pearl so curious. I nearly stepped forward to confess, to hold the key out to her. Pearl's deception—her possession, her letters—seemed somehow less dishonest than mine. This burlesque of ours, this séance, seemed a crooked act. Poor, gentle Pearl had only wanted connection. In my foolishness, I started to speak, to apologize for all of us, for drinking and dancing on Cecily's grave. But Mrs. Margaret elbowed me in the ribs and nodded her head, happy to see Pearl so easily fooled.

“Doxie's birthday's in April,” Mrs. Margaret whispered in my ear. “I didn't think I'd get to spend it with her.” She began to weep a little and held her handkerchief to her eye.

“Don't eat the calf in the cow's belly,” I said. “You're getting ahead of yourself.”

Madam Seymour opened and closed her hands. “Someone has the key in their fist,” she said.
Some-vun az ze key in zere vist.

Everyone held their hands out, palms up, even all the servants. They all looked around, looking for the hand with the key. “Ferret,” Pearl said.

Pearl snatched the key from my hand and walked quickly to the stairs. We all followed, and we surrounded her in the narrow hall. The key fit through the keyhole, but it would only jiggle around in the lock, and the knob wouldn't turn. She tried and tried, until finally Morearty stepped forward to take the key from her. “The locks in the house can be fussy,” he said. He put the key in and looked up and off, as if divining his way through the lock's twists and turns. We stilled our breaths and waited.

When it became clear that the old man could not unlock the door either, Rosie took him gently by the shoulders and led him out of the way. We all suspected what Rosie was up to as he pressed his palms against the door, testing for give. We stepped back, to allow him room. He rammed into the door, leading with his shoulder, shaking the whole house, it seemed. A picture fell off the wall. A hall lamp flickered and went out. But the door didn't open. Rosie struck again, this time harder, knocking all breath from his lungs with a loud oomph. He slammed into the door a few more times, until he was clearly in great pain, and Josephine came forward to beg him to stop.

“Is the door bricked up, for God's sake?” Rosie said.

I slipped away from the others and into Doxie's room. The room was dark, and her crib was empty. I walked to the window and looked out into the backyard, and the gardens, where the cyclone had spun Cecily up from the ground and into the rosebushes. At the edge of the yard was a child's house I hadn't noticed before, a playhouse painted bright blue, like a box of sky against the bone-gray of winter. A light was on inside.

•   •   •

W
HEN WE'D GIVEN UP
on the door, we all returned to the parlor where Madam Seymour suddenly doubled over, clutching at her womb. “The child,” she said. “Where's the child?”

“She's playing with the maid's little girl downstairs,” Pearl said.

“Fetch her,” the psychic said. “Cecily wants her among us.”

Pearl began gnawing at her thumbnail again. “I don't think that . . .”

Madam Seymour bellowed as if gutshot, bending over even more. “
Pleeeeeease
,” she said, with a low growl. Pearl rushed to the back stairs that led to the servants' quarters.

While she was gone, I walked down the hall to the conservatory that led out into the garden. I stepped through the French doors and followed a snow-dusted lane of stone. When I reached the playhouse, I ducked my head around the gingerbread woodwork of the doorway's eaves to let myself in. Wakefield, in a fur coat, sat hunched over a carpentry bench, the top of it scattered with the wheels and mechanisms of windup toys and trains. The room had a small hearth, and the little bit of heat from its fire struggled against the bitter cold. I closed the door behind me, and Wakefield looked up slowly, unsurprised by the noise.

“Ferret,” he said in dull voice.

The carpentry bench took up much of the room, having been shoved in among the furnishings of a child's pretend life. I kept bumping my head against the low ceiling, so I took a seat on a wooden chair painted blue. Wakefield returned his attention to his bench, and a penny cart with a wooden horse. He picked up the horse of willow to whittle at its flank with a knife. “How goes the ghosting?” he said.

I shrugged. “Have you ever been to a séance?” I said.

He nodded. “Many séances,” he said. “Many, many, many. But all my ghosts are punishing. They won't speak to me.”

“Cecily seems to have some things to say,” I said.

“I'm skeptical,” he said.

“There's a locked room,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“I'd like to unlock it.”

“No.”

“I just think that Cecily—”

“No!”
Wakefield said. He stabbed the point of the knife into the wood of the bench, and left the knife to stand there. He covered his face with his hand, then pushed his hand back through his hair. He took a deep breath and said, “That room is something between Cecily and me only.”

A gust of wind knocked against the house and blew so harshly, so firmly, it seemed it'd blow the walls over. A draft worked in from somewhere, playing with the fire and rattling the paintbrushes in the jar on the bench. And just at my back, I heard the familiar tapping of shoes against the wall. I turned to see a puppet much like Oscar hanging from his collar by a hook. But I knew it wasn't him. This dummy's face was unmarred by dents or chips. His suit looked new and he wasn't missing a single finger.

I reached up to touch the dummy's hand. “Could this be Oscar?” I said.

Wakefield turned. “No,” he said. He then reached for a box on his bench—a splintered crate with oranges painted on. He pulled it down on its side, and my dummy spilled out, grotesque, stripped naked, plucked apart, dead. The door to his chest had been ripped off its hinges, and he'd been hollowed out, robbed of all his tricks and gimmicks.