Walking the Labyrinth (28 page)

Callan laughed, and after a moment she joined him.

She took out her letter to John after dinner the next day. “Ironic, isn’t it, that your girlfriend Gwen thought I knew so much about people, about relationships. I know nothing at all about people. All this time Peter was using me to write his damn book, and I had no idea. I’d managed to convince myself he liked me, maybe even loved me.”

The alligator door-knocker banged against the door downstairs. “Molly!” Alex yelled. “You have visitors.”

Peter?
she thought. No, not Peter. That turning of the labyrinth was behind her. She went downstairs.

Three people stood outside, the trees behind them, the last three people in the world Molly would have expected to see: Fentrice, Lila, and Andrew Dodd.

“We know it’s customary to call first,” Andrew said. He was grinning at Fentrice, as if they shared a secret. What was going on here?

“We were worried about you, Molly,” Fentrice said.

“Aunt Fentrice,” Molly said weakly. “It’s good to see you.”

“Fentrice,” someone said. Molly turned around quickly; Callan had come up quietly behind her. “After all these years. Come, let’s go inside.” He opened the door and motioned them into the crowded living room. “Sit down, please. Can I get you anything? Tea and biscuits?”

“This isn’t a social call, Callan,” Fentrice said, spreading her skirts and settling in one of the carved chairs.

“No, I don’t suppose it is. What does bring you here after so long? Though it wasn’t that long really, was it?”

“What do you mean?” Fentrice asked.

“That was you, wasn’t it, prowling through my house a few weeks ago? Looking among my books and things?”

“I told you, that wasn’t my aunt,” Molly said. “It was—” She turned to the housekeeper. For a moment she had forgotten Lila was there, she was so unobtrusive. “It was you, Lila, wasn’t it?”

Lila looked from one to the other impassively, first Molly, then Callan, and finally Fentrice. “Yes, that was me,” she said.

“Why? “Molly asked. “What did you want with Emily’s journal?”

“You know what I wanted,” Lila said. “You wanted it too, or you wouldn’t have gone to England to get it. I wanted Emily’s secret.”

“Emily’s secret?” Molly said.

“Oh, don’t play innocent with me,” Lila said impatiently. “You’re an Allalie, you know very well what I’m talking about. Emily knew how to enchant people to make them do her bidding. That was how she got rid of Harrison’s wife Lydia.”

“What?” Molly said.

“Don’t tell me you hadn’t guessed,” Lila said. “You weren’t nearly this dull as a child. How else could a laundress have taken Lydia’s place as the head of the household? She enchanted Lydia, put her into a sort of trance. Lydia did anything Emily wanted her to. She backed away from Harrison, let Emily take over.”

“No,” Molly said. “No, she wasn’t like that—”

“How do you know she wasn’t?”

“I read her journal, for one thing.” Suddenly Molly remembered the final words of the journal:
“And I did the one last, necessary thing I told you of …”
Could Emily’s last act in England have been to loose the enchantment, to restore Lydia to her normal life?

“Ah, but you never knew her, did you?” Lila said.

“No, did you? You did, didn’t you? You’re Thorne, aren’t you? Emily was—what? Your grandmother?”

Lila gave her strange choking laugh. “No, of course not. I’m no Allalie, I’m a housekeeper your aunt hired. I learned a few things from Fentrice over the years, things she let slip.”

“Is that what happened?” Molly asked Fentrice. “You told her about the family, and she wanted Emily’s power?”

“I suppose so,” Fentrice said. She looked drawn, tired. “After you left there was only Lila for company. I may have mentioned something.”

Callan moved his hands suddenly, and spoke a few words. Lila looked unchanged, was still the sullen, taciturn housekeeper, but Molly understood that Callan had put her under the same enchantment that had silenced Lydia. She would not say anything more as long as she remained in his house.

He can do it too,
Molly thought.
He’d said so in his diary, when he made that jerk in the audience shut up, though the enchantment would last only while the man remained in sight. Can I? How much can I do?

“Well,” Callan said. “Here we are. You and me, Fentrice, and Andrew Dodd, a reunion of sorts of that day at the Paramount. The only one missing is Thorne. And I wonder whether, if we put our minds to it, we can’t figure out what happened to her.”

“I’d say you owe me an apology first,” Fentrice said. “Did you truly think I would come here, push my way in, disrupt your house like that? What on earth would I want with Grandma’s journal?”

“There’s the small matter of your disappearance in England, when we toured there in 1935. You went up to Tantilly to see if you could find the journal, didn’t you?”

“Nonsense. And if I found the journal then, why would I want it now? Be sensible, Callan. That was always your trouble, wasn’t it? All those wild, fanciful ideas you had. It got so you couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what was illusion.”

But illusion is important, a way to the truth,
Molly thought.
Isn’t that what I learned? Or is Fentrice right?

“I thought you came here because you wanted to know whether I had the journal,” Callan said. “Whether Molly had brought it to me. That would have been a terrible blow, wouldn’t it, if Molly had given it to me instead of to you? And if I had it, I’d know what you did with Thorne.”

“That wasn’t me who came here. You heard her—it was Lila. I didn’t do anything to Thorne, and I resent your insinuation that I did. She left with that trumpet player, that Tom.”

“Did she? I’ve always wondered. And who wrote me those letters?”

“What letters?”

“I’ve still got them, up in the attic. Threatening me, accusing me of usurping someone’s place. Did Thorne write them or did you, Fentrice?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Why would I write to you? I wanted nothing more to do with the family.”

“Didn’t you? Why are you here?”

Fentrice stood. “I won’t stay here and listen to this. Molly, dear, I came because I wanted to be sure you were all right. I’ll find a motel room in town, and you can come visit me. I won’t stay under this roof another minute.”

“Wait,” Callan said. He gestured with his hands again.

Fentrice said a few words in reply. Callan stood, spoke over her loudly. Their voices clashed like thunder.

Molly stood. “Stop it, stop it!” she said. “What are you doing?”

Another loud clap of thunder drove her back into her chair. “Listen to me, both of you!” she said again. “Callan! Fentrice has the right to leave your house if she wants to. Stop it!”

The thunder rumbled, subsided. Callan and Fentrice stood facing each other. Fentrice had gone very white, the tip of her nose pink.

Callan laughed. “Now I’m the one who owes you an apology, Fentrice,” he said. “I’m truly sorry—I didn’t mean to get so angry. Of course you’re free to go if you want to. But I had hoped you’d stay here as my guest. We could work out the mystery of Thorne’s disappearance together. And we have so much to catch up on.”

Fentrice said nothing for a moment. “I’m glad I didn’t grow up in your family,” Andrew Dodd said, breaking the silence. “Were all your arguments like this?”

“No, of course not,” Fentrice said. “We had Verey and Lanty to keep us in line.”

“So what do you think?” Callan asked. “Will you stay?”

“I don’t know,” Fentrice said. “I don’t trust you, Callan, you know that.”

“Please stay,” Molly said. “It’s been so long since you’ve seen one another, and there were so many misunderstandings—we could be a family again.”

“Oh, very well,” Fentrice said. “But I warn you—if I hear one more reckless accusation I’ll leave.”

“Great!” Molly said.

“Is it?” Callan asked softly.

THIRTEEN

Disillusion

M
olly and Alex sat outside Callan’s house the next day, watching the sun rise through the fog. “What on earth was all that about yesterday?” Alex asked. “I heard shouting, and then what sounded like thunder …”

She told him a little about Fentrice and Lila and Andrew Dodd. “So Lila was the woman in blue, just like I thought,” she finished. “She even admitted it.”

“Where’s Thorne then? Do you think Fentrice knows?”

“No, why should she? She hasn’t had anything to do with Thorne for years. Why is everyone here so quick to assume my aunt is guilty? Did Callan turn you against her when you were growing up?”

“No, of course not. He barely mentioned her.”

“Do you know what it must have taken for Fentrice to come here? She was the one who made the first move, she had to humble herself to Callan after all these years of not speaking to him. What if he had turned her away? And she did it for me, to make sure I was all right.”

“Callan was certainly right about one thing,” Alex said. “Things are definitely happening here. No wonder he asked us to stay behind.”

“Do you know what’s going to happen next?”

Alex shook his head. “I’m not as good at that as Callan is,” he said. “What about you?”

“No. I keep trying to see it but there’s something blocking me, something in the way. I don’t know what it is.”

A rose appeared in Alex’s hand. “This is what I do in the act,” he said. He gave her the rose. “Listen, Molly, I want to—oh, it’s ridiculous! I want to ask you out on a date, but I can’t, can I? I mean, we already live together, don’t we?”

She looked at him in surprise. “I always thought you were laughing at me,” she said. “It’s that mustache.”

“Do you want me to shave it off?”

“No, it’s—Is this why Callan asked you to stay here? Did he know this would happen?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Molly shook her head. “I just don’t trust that man. I can’t go out with you if he’s behind it, if he’s planned our every move.”

“Maybe after all this is over. Maybe when we find out what happened to Thorne.”

“Do you think we will?”

“Oh, yes,” Alex said.

“A lot has happened since I last wrote you,” Molly wrote to John. “Aunt Fentrice and Andrew Dodd have come to visit. Something’s happened between them—they keep grinning at each other as if they share a secret. Well, she can be very charming when she wants to be—no one knows that better than I do.

“And Lila’s here too, though I haven’t seen much of her. Either she’s under Callan’s enchantment or she’s off sulking about something. She seems to know an awful lot about the Allalies, but she learned it all from Fentrice. She’s not Thorne in disguise, which is something I thought before she came here.

“Lila says Emily enchanted Lydia do her bidding, and that she explained how she did it in the book she wrote for Lady Dorothy. If she’s right this would certainly answer a lot of questions—why all those people were looking for the journal, Joseph Ottig and that awful man with the sharp face who followed us in England.

“It would also explain what happened to Lydia. But would Emily do something like that, would she essentially take away someone’s life? Because that’s what enchanting Lydia would have amounted to. It’s almost like murder.

“I wonder if this is what Callan meant. I said it was great to have my aunt visiting, and he said, ‘Is it?’ He was wearing what I’ve come to think of as his wise-old-man look, that exasperating expression of his that says, You’ll see that I know more about this than you do. Everyone wants to learn more about their ancestors, but what happens if you find out something really unpleasant about them? Was he suggesting that I’m going to discover something like that about Emily, or even Fentrice? Or was he trying to direct my suspicions somewhere else, away from him?

“And meanwhile there’s what I learned about Peter. I can see now why people are so eager to get their hands on Emily’s journal—there are days when I fantasize about enchanting Peter. It would be great if I could make him stay here with me instead of gallivanting all over the country, if he could be persuaded to stop doing harm to my family. If he saw how much I loved him, and finally came to love me in return.

“But I don’t think I could murder Peter like that, no matter how much I’m tempted. What I have to do is try to forget him, realize that he’s used me, that he’s every bit as bad for me as Robin Ann said he was.

“It’s very difficult. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think about him for what seems like hours. I remember the excitement I felt being with him, the way he seemed to know everyone and be connected to everything. That’s something I wanted all my life, a connection, a place in the world. Was it my family I was looking for all this time?”

She reread what she had written. There was something important in it, some clue that she had missed. The man with the sharp face. No, before that. Joseph Ottig. Joe. “This is the third tour Joe’s missed,” Jake Polanski had said at the Paramount.

Could Joe be Joseph Ottig? Could he have missed the tour because he was dead? Ottig might have made the connection between Emily Wethers and Neesa Allalie, might have gone on to read Andrew Dodd’s article. And if he had he would have known that Callan considered the Paramount Theatre the most beautiful place in the world. Maybe he thought that Callan had hidden something away there, maybe he had gotten a job there as a tour guide so he could have access to every corner and cranny. Maybe he had mailed the missing pages from Emily’s journal from England to himself at the Paramount. He hadn’t mailed them to his house; John had said he had checked Ottig’s last known address.

It was very far-fetched. She reached for an answer, trying to feel her way toward it as Emily had done with the audiences at her seances. Something was in the way, some unopened door or unturned corner. She was afraid of what she might find.

Well, but if she stayed here she would only get more enigmatic questions from Callan, more shrugs from Corrig. She got her purse and went out to her car.

As she drove along the ocean on Highway 1 she found herself thinking not of Joseph but of Alex. Did she want to go out with him? She barely knew him, had never thought of dating him. But there was no denying that his question had sparked an answering interest in her. She thought of his burnished-brass hair, his stomach as concave as a greyhound’s, his lean thighs. His kind, courtly manners, the way he had conjured up the rose.