Walking the Labyrinth (30 page)

Corrig reached into one of his pockets and retrieved the gun. He shrugged and handed it back to the sharp-featured man.

“Corrig, for God’s sake!” Molly said.

“All right,” the man said. “Give me the book or I shoot you.”

Corrig shrugged again. Molly watched, horrified, as the man took aim at him and pulled the trigger. A bouquet of flowers shot from the barrel.

The man looked at the gun, stupefied. Molly reached for it. Something moved through her mind, picking its way across her memories, her jobs, her loves, her life.

Suddenly she was overcome by an urge to take the four pages out of her purse and give them to Peter.
No,
she thought.
No, I won’t let him win, I’ve come so far
.…

She was holding the gun now, though she didn’t know how she had come to take it. Everyone was watching her, waiting to see what she would do next.

She reached out for Peter’s mind. She saw his greed, his self-importance, the feelings of insecurity that made him strive for success with his dreadful books. Her hand began to move toward her purse; she watched it impassively, as if it belonged to someone else. Soon she would give him the pages and he would go write his book, would turn her family history into something sleazy and cheap.

Wait,
she thought.
There’s something wrong here. What is it? Peter. Peter can’t be doing this, he isn’t part of the family. Someone wants me to give Peter the pages because it’ll be easier to take them from him than from me. Who? Who is it? Who can be calling to me like this?

She looked around the room. The rest of the family were finally coming down the stairs. Fentrice, Callan, Alex, Matt: Emily’s descendants. Behind them came Lila, and behind her, walking slowly and clutching the banister, Andrew Dodd.

She reached out into their minds, cautiously.

Peter and the other two were silent. Someone—Callan? Corrig?—had frozen them into immobility so they could not do any more mischief.

Corrig’s mind was a riot of color and sensation, of the laughter he saw underlying everything. He could easily stop the compulsion calling to Molly, but he didn’t see that it was important. Very little mattered to Corrig.

Callan’s thoughts were more complex, mysteries and their answers, tragedy as well as comedy. His life had been hard: his daughter and son-in-law had been killed, he had thought his granddaughter lost to him forever. Yet he had come to a hard-won equilibrium, and, yes, to wisdom.

Alex, to her great surprise, saw her as a rose, beautiful and self-contained. And Fentrice—

Fentrice was a stone. Something kept Molly from her great-aunt’s mind, pushing her away.

She turned to Lila, went into her mind. She saw her as a young woman, her parents impoverished and unable to provide for her, saw her come to the offices of Professional Housekeepers looking for a job. She saw her meeting Fentrice, saw their friendship blossoming slowly over forty years, saw Fentrice begin to confide in her. And she saw which member of the family had sent Lila to Callan’s house.

She didn’t have to go on. She could stop now, could move away from Lila’s mind and never tell anyone what she had found there. No one would ever need to know the truth.

But she had wanted answers. She was traversing the labyrinth blindly, her hands outstretched, moving without a plan toward the center. She turned to Fentrice. “You sent Lila here, didn’t you?” she asked.

Fentrice stood up straighter but said nothing. The pressure to surrender the pages grew stronger.

“You’d found Emily’s journal in 1935,” Molly said. “Callan said you left the family for a few days while they were touring in England—you must have gone up to Tantilly and read the journal, found out how to enchant people. You enchanted Thorne, you made her leave the act so that you would be in charge.

“And then I started asking questions about your past. I even went to England, started poking around at Tantilly. You were afraid I’d found the journal, that I’d guessed what you’d done and that I’d come to Callan because I was disillusioned with you. You knew all along that I was here at Callan’s house—look how quickly you found me when you wanted to. You always knew more about me than I wanted you to.

“But you didn’t know how I felt about you. You sent Lila here to see what was going on, you worked your magic through her. You told me she was angry with you so I’d suspect her, think that she wanted power and hadn’t gotten it. You wanted to draw my suspicions away from you.”

No one spoke. Molly reached again toward Fentrice’s mind, was stopped again. It wasn’t only Fentrice stopping her, Molly realized. It was herself, the fear she had felt ever since she had begun her quest. The fear of what she might find out.

She took a deep breath, pushed outward past her terror. Suddenly she was in Fentrice’s mind, she saw all the complex mix of envy and hatred and scorn and love that Fentrice had felt toward her sister. “What did you do with Thorne?” she asked. “Where is she?”

Fentrice stood stiff and straight, a woman made of onyx. Molly went farther into the labyrinth of Fentrice’s mind, saw a bridge game, a garden of flowers, purple stars and cigarette smoke and a cork shooting off a bottle of champagne. Laughing Sal roared at Play land.

“You enchanted her,” Molly said. “You lured her into the labyrinth somehow and turned her into someone you could control. You enchanted her, took her life away. You murdered her. The kids at school were right—you are a witch. You and all those weird friends of yours, that bridge club.”

The pressure on her mind grew stronger. Fentrice was trying to silence her as she had silenced Thorne. Molly pushed back, terrified. And then suddenly the pressure eased, and Molly saw something she had missed earlier. Fentrice loved her, cared about her as she had never cared about anyone. She was Fentrice’s daughter, they were bound together by their shared history. No matter how badly Fentrice had treated the rest of the family, she still wanted to justify herself to Molly. She was ready to confess.

“It wasn’t … it wasn’t murder, Molly,” Fentrice said. “I went up to Tantilly to look at Emily’s journal, but I swear to you I was just curious. I wanted to know why everyone was so afraid of the Westingates, and so worried about the Order … I didn’t even think about what I read until later, when Thorne took Tom away from me and left the act. I was so angry with her. I invited her to come to England with me, showed her the labyrinth. I just reached out the way Emily had, and … and she didn’t expect it.”

“You took her life away,” Molly said again. She went farther into Fentrice’s mind, feeling her way toward the answers. “That’s why you left the act,” she said. “Corrig knew what you were planning. He told you so, he asked you not to harm Thorne.” She turned to Corrig, who nodded. “You became terrified whenever you had to do that scene with the golden statues. You never knew whether Corrig would bring you back to life or leave you frozen forever. But finally your hatred of Thorne got the better of you and you took her to England. Corrig wouldn’t stop you—he didn’t care enough. He knew what you’d planned to do, though, so you could never return home after you enchanted Thorne. But you always felt that your rightful place was at the head of the family, and you kept sending Callan threatening letters.” She looked straight at her aunt. “You’ll have to release her now,” she said.

“No,” Fentrice said. “Molly, no.”

“Yes, you will. You have to give her back whatever life remains to her.”

“No. She’ll be so angry.”

“You have to. Where is she?”

Molly pushed toward the answer. Something blocked her way. Fentrice was guarding her last secret.

“It’s wrong, don’t you see that?” Molly said. “It’s as if you murdered her. You have to make amends.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I haven’t felt remorse every day of my life for what I did? I thought of releasing her—every day I thought it. But it was too late, always too late …”

“It’s only too late when she dies. Where is she?”

“No, I won’t—I can’t—” A tear fell down her cheek, coursing through her soft pink face powder. “Molly, please, can you ever forgive me?”

“It’s not up to me to forgive,” Molly said. “It’s up to her.”

Fentrice squeezed her eyes shut. “All right,” she said softly. “All right, I’ll do it. But I need your forgiveness too, Molly. Molly, please …”

Molly said nothing. Could she forgive her aunt? Murder was the worst crime, she had always thought; a murderer took away something that could never be replaced. Thorne had lost sixty years of her life.

“Where is she?” Molly asked. “What happened to her?”

Fentrice shook her head.

“All right,” Molly said. “We’ll have to—” To what? How could she make sure her aunt kept her promise? “We’ll have to meet in England, in Applebury. Bring Thorne. We’re going to walk the labyrinth together, and I’ll see that you release her.”

“Very well.”

Molly looked at Callan. Callan nodded, and Molly relaxed. Callan thought that it was safe to let Fentrice go.

Fentrice walked down the stairs. “Good-bye, my brother,” she said to Callan. “You were right all along. I would have been a poor choice as the head of the family.”

“Thank you, my sister,” Callan said. “I hope you’ll come back.”

“Perhaps I will,” Fentrice said. “Come along, Lila.”

Everyone watched as the two old women made their way to the door, walking past Peter and the men from the Order. The men were still frozen, Molly saw. Blood had started to flow down the pale man’s shoulder and then stopped.

“We’ll have to call the police,” Callan said.

“What on earth are we going to tell them?” Molly said.

“We won’t have to tell them much,” Callan said. “This one”—he pointed to the sharp-faced man—“still has powder burns on his hand from shooting the gun, the same gun that killed a man in England. And this other one is wounded with a bullet from that gun. They came in here, tried to rob us, started quarreling among themselves. They’ll probably keep arguing all the way to the police station.”

He turned to Alex. “Would you get some rope and bind them, please? And Corrig, would you take off that man’s bird mask? Molly, you can call the police. As for me—I think I’ll go make dinner.”

FOURTEEN

Journey’s End

C
allan gave Molly the money for another trip to England, and a few days later she was back in London. She caught the train to Canterbury and spent the trip thinking about her aunt.

Fentrice had asked for forgiveness, and Molly had said that it wasn’t up to her to forgive. But even if it was, she thought, she didn’t know if she could. Fentrice had lied to her all these years, lied not just about the rest of the family but about her terrible crime. Some things were too dreadful to forgive.

She took a cab to Applebury, rang the brass doorbell at Tantilly. Kathy Westingate answered the door.

“Hello,” she said, leading Molly into the chilly entryway. “That other woman—is she your aunt? She’s already here.”

Molly looked into the drawing room. “Where is she?”

“Oh, she’s already gone down to the labyrinth. I have to say I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to do—”

“The labyrinth?” Molly said. “She was supposed to wait for me.”

“I don’t—” Kathy looked flustered.

“Never mind. Down the hall, right?” Molly hurried through the drawing room to the unmarked door that led to the labyrinth. Kathy followed. “Did she bring someone with her?”

“Yes, she did. Strange-looking woman—”

Molly barely heard her. She pushed open the door and went down the stairs. Someone had already turned on the light. Fentrice, probably.

She ran through the cluttered anteroom and into the labyrinth. The lights were on here as well. “Fentrice!” she called. The name echoed off the walls.

She turned right at the first door, remembering the Victorian man sitting at his desk. But the room had changed since she had last seen it. She was in the deli she had gone to with John Stow, the place where all her adventures had begun. Mannequins stood behind the counter, serving other mannequins lined up for sandwiches.

She left that room and entered another. Now she was in Andrew Dodd’s apartment, looking at his wooden office chair, his battered desk, his gold-and-red patterned couch. An aluminum walker stood in the corner.

“Fentrice!” she shouted again. “Fentrice, where are you?”

She moved faster down the halls and rooms. She passed Fentrice’s kitchen, the scrapbook open on the round oak table, passed Tangled Tales Bookstore, passed the Great Hall at Tantilly with its stained glass windows sparkling blue and yellow and red in a nonexistent sun.

The next room was the empty storefront in Camden Town, the dead man, Joseph Ottig, slumped where she had found him months ago. She had been half expecting him, but still the sight of him against the wall made her gasp and put her fist to her mouth.

Then she was in the great lobby of the Paramount Theatre, its amber light coming up through the yellow fountain, shining gold on the frieze of women along the walls. And here was Callan’s confused, jumbled living room, all the cartoon animals changed into chairs and tables and lamps.

She was nearing the end now. “Fentrice!” she called. She thought she could hear footsteps and voices, around the next bend, maybe, or the next. She turned a corner, another. The voices drew closer.

Two women stood at the end of a hallway, shadowy in the dim light. “Fentrice!” she said again.

One of them turned. And then the other, and as Molly came closer she thought the second woman looked familiar. Heavy black glasses, heavy jewelry, a gray dress like a sack.

“Estelle!” Molly said. “Estelle is … is Thorne?”

Estelle said nothing.
Of course,
Molly thought. The glasses she had seen in some of the old pictures, the teeth so even they had to be dentures, replacing the gapped teeth of the family. The woman’s docility, her slowness. “Estelle?” Molly said again.

“She can’t say anything,” Fentrice said. “She’s deep in enchantment now. Come—I have to take her to the center.”

Molly followed Fentrice as she negotiated the turnings of the labyrinth. Sometimes she caught glimpses of rooms off the corridors, flashing pieces of Fentrice’s life: the deck of an ocean liner, Laughing Sal at Playland, a garden shaded by a peach tree. “Do you know how to get there?” Molly asked.