Wonder Show (6 page)

“No,” Portia pleaded, “no, no! Come back!”

This time Mister did not stop her. She pushed at Caroline’s chest where she thought the heart might be, hit it with her fist, shook Caroline’s body with all her strength.

But it was not enough.

“I suppose I knew this would happen,” Mister said. “She wasn’t ready to leave her family, and they weren’t ready to take her back. For my part, I wasn’t ready to give up their money. Our marriage might have been just the thing for everyone.” He turned and, feigning sadness, said, “Alas, our Caroline took matters into her own hands.”

Then he grinned and said, “Ah, well. A funeral’s just as good as a wedding.”

Portia’s skin felt like fire. She wanted to kill this man, to see him suffer, burn, bleed to death, anything. He was the one who should have died. Not Caroline.

It’s all your fault,
the voices said.
You gave her the poison.

Portia’s thoughts fired back.
I told her how to use it. To make Mister sick. To protect herself, not to
kill
herself!

You should have known she would do this. You put it in her hand. You killed her.

No!
Portia’s mind was reeling, spinning in weakened circles like a top spun by a child. She wanted to cry out, to make the voices go quiet. But she held her tongue. And the voices kept on.

Murderer,
they whispered.

Murderer.

The Funeral

It was dusk, when the processions met.

A train of battered trucks, patched with rust and the wrong colors of paint, limped up the road like a company of wounded soldiers. They were evenly spaced. Some of them towed silver trailers; others hauled only themselves and the people inside, most of whom were concealed by hats or veils or the falling shadows of the trees.

A herd of girls in matching gray dresses, silently marching down the road, followed a single car that had carried Caroline’s body to the graveyard. They walked together behind the empty car, each one wondering,
Would I have done the same thing? What if that was me in the box?
For some of them, the thought was not totally unpleasant.

The carnival and the wayward girls eyed one another with naked curiosity. They recognized themselves as compatriots in some foreign country, a country made of many islands, each one so tiny that it held only one person at a time. The carnies and the girls on the road knew exactly what separated them from other people. They knew, at that moment, precisely how much distance was between them.

The last truck in the line looked newer than the rest. It was red. Portia watched as it passed. She couldn’t quite see inside because the setting sun cast such a glare on the glass, but there was a thin opening at the top of the passenger-side window, and something flew out of it. It landed in the truck’s dusty wake and lay there like a calling card. Portia felt almost too weary to move, but her curiosity gave her just enough energy to bend down and pick the thing up.

It was a thin piece of cardboard with a list of names and numbers printed on it. At the top it said
MILLER BROS. CIRCUS.

A memory flashed in her mind, of Max and butter-scented air. Portia slipped the card into her pocket and straightened her shoulders. She watched the red truck as it slid out of sight, stood in the hot, sallow breeze and wished to be a speck in the cloud of dust that followed that slow parade. But she was earthbound. She had never felt so much like stone.

It was only a sharp bark from Mister that compelled her to move. One foot, the other, and so on, until she reached the unwelcoming maw of the house.

Mister gave them the afternoon off. Not all of the girls, of course—the apple trees needed pruning and would not wait for mourning. But Portia and Delilah were granted a respite from their duties, which sent Delilah outdoors in search of skipping rocks and gave Portia a chance to further explore the secret file room. After assuring herself that Mister was properly occupied in his office (aided in his work by a fresh pot of tea and an entire plate of dry biscuits), she made her way upstairs, avoiding the third and seventh steps, which creaked. She looked hard at the floor as she passed Caroline’s bedroom. She did not want to remember that now.

Three steps down the back stairs was the door, which had become so familiar to her that Portia knew every nick and imperfection in its face. She opened it carefully, to keep its voice from sounding. She reached to her right, where she had stacked some of the boxes she had already explored, and her fingers caught hold of the small box of matches and the stub of a candle she’d jammed into a discarded beer bottle (collected from the side of the road on her way back from town—Mister indulged in no such habits). She lit the candle and, wetting her finger against her tongue, squeezed the tip of the extinguished match to make sure it was well and truly out. The tiny sting of its hot head between her fingers woke her to her task.

It seemed that no matter how many boxes she looked through, there were more and more beyond, as if the room did not end but stretched itself beyond the edges of the house. In order to keep track of which boxes were done and which had yet to be opened, she had helped herself to one of Mister’s green-lined ledgers, in which he recorded his financial gains and losses and other tallies that made less sense to Portia, who was, of course, not their intended audience. In her own stolen pages, she recorded the years and alphabetical designations for each box, as well as certain names that caught her storyteller’s heart.

Annika Merrithew

Daisy Sinclair Creamer

Ruby Ledwith

Alice MacEvoy

Evelyn Rose Rossiter

Hazel Danforth

Josephine Ibbotson Tolley

Aside from the constant nagging fear of being discovered, Portia found the work almost soothing. The rhythm of pulling a file from a box, flipping its dusty pages, letting her eyes roam the melee of words typed and scrawled and scratched into paper, letting her mind wander and imagine where these dozens of girls had gone on to.

But there was that urgency, that anxious wondering, that buzzed at the back of her brain all the time. The fear of being caught, and more than that, the fear of not finding her own name on any one of the thousands of pieces of paper hidden in the darkness.

Scraps

The day after the funeral, Portia was ordered to sort through Caroline’s belongings.

“She was your friend, after all,” Mister said, his voice oily and thick. “You knew her better than anyone.”

There was a condemnation wrapped inside the words, a reprimand. Again Portia heard them:
You should have known she would do this. You should have stopped her. Saved her.

Mister leaned in. “If you find anything . . . that might further grieve her family . . . bring it to me.”

Portia didn’t imagine she’d find anything that could be worse for Caroline’s family than the fact that the girl had poisoned herself—and if she did, she would never turn it over to Mister. But she nodded and went upstairs.

The room still smelled like Caroline, like the rose-scented soap she used, the only comfort her mother had ever sent aside from her letters (which weren’t, in the end, very comforting at all). Portia closed her eyes and imagined that when she opened them again, Caroline would be there, in her bed, pale and alive.

Portia,
she would say,
I’m feeling better now. Let’s go for a walk in the orchard.
And they would put on their sweaters because the orchard was chilly at night, and they would link their arms together, and Portia would let Caroline talk about the parties at home, listen as she described her dresses in excruciating detail, and never call her silly.

But even as she opened her eyes, she knew it would not be true. There was only the empty bed, which Delilah had made up with fresh sheets as soon as the body had been taken, and the empty room, and the silence. A few plain cotton dresses in the closet, a nightgown and some underthings in the dresser, a yellow sweater, a cream one—Portia folded everything neatly and put it in Caroline’s blue suitcase. Her mother might send for it.

There was a small stack of books on the nightstand, wholesome stories that had been donated to The Home by local church ladies. Stories of redemption for the inspiration of wayward girls. Portia preferred the books in Mister’s library, wholly inappropriate for young ladies, but Caroline hadn’t been willing to risk getting caught where she didn’t belong and so she’d settled for the church ladies’ choices.

Portia put the books in the suitcase as well, just in case it was requested by Caroline’s family.
At least her mother will see she was trying to be good,
she thought.
Might help, somehow.
Though, if she was being honest, she didn’t feel much like Caroline’s mother deserved to feel better.

Not if Portia had to feel so bad.

She looked around the room again, totally empty now, and was about to shut the suitcase when her eyes settled on the nightstand drawer. Almost as if someone else were lifting her arm, her hand went to the handle and pulled it open.

It was filled with torn paper.

Torn paper like strips of birch bark, with black writing on every piece.

The letters.

Caroline had shredded them, every one from her mother, laid them in the drawer like a bird’s nest. Her last act of defiance.

Good girl,
Portia thought. And then she gathered the paper scraps into her arms, sat down on the bed, and wept hot, bitter tears.

When she was finished—for she allowed herself only a few minutes of such behavior at a time—she gathered the shreds of the letters and laid them gently in the suitcase, spread them across Caroline’s clothes, tucked them into each corner. Then her eyes caught sight of her own name, written by this stranger’s hand, and she had the sudden urge to seize it. As she folded the lone piece of soft white paper into her pocket, her fingers touched something stiff. She pulled it out.

It was the slip of cardboard from the red truck.

She looked more closely now. Down the left-hand side of the card, there was a list of names. Towns, she realized. Not Brewster Falls, of course, but others that were not far away. Next to the towns there were numbers—dates and distances.

It was the circus’s schedule for the summer, the map of their route. They had come from Jacksonville and were headed for Winchester, which was only a few miles away.

The first line said
MAY 14—BURLINGTON—20 MILES— U.S. 61
.

My birthday,
she thought. Just over a week ago. She hadn’t even known it
was
her birthday until she’d accidentally seen the date on Mister’s newspaper, folded neatly on his desk. Portia wondered if there was a girl in Burlington who had turned fourteen that day, if she had gone to the circus to celebrate.

Something began to move in Portia’s memory, reluctant as a rusted wheel—the old story she had made for herself, in which Max had run off with the circus. How many circuses were there? Fewer, Portia knew, than there had been before. Movie theaters and dancehalls cropped up like pretty weeds, common and alluring, and without the strange elements that came with traveling shows. Mister had frequently lectured her on the topic of such distasteful forms of entertainment.

But Max loved a good time. And a circus was certainly that. Even if he wasn’t still with
this
circus, someone might have seen him, known him, heard about his beloved daughter.

Only a few miles away,
Portia thought.

Even by bicycle.

One Last Chance

Once the idea of Max and the circus solidified in her head, Portia allowed herself to spend a small part of each day speculating about her future—when she would leave and how, where she would go, what she might find there—but she was careful not to overindulge. Mister had a kind of radar for these things, and she could not afford to have him sniff her out. She went on teaching Delilah how to cook, despite Delilah’s objections that she “didn’t need to know none of this kind of thing,” as she was going to be an actress someday and would never ever cook for herself or anyone else.

“But what if,” Portia said, “you need to play the part of a cook on stage?”

Delilah considered this and grudgingly agreed that it might be useful to know a few things, just for appearances.

“Nothing fancy, though,” she insisted. “I don’t want no one mistaking me for a servant.”

Portia refrained from pointing out that unless Delilah started speaking like a lady, she would surely never be mistaken for that instead. “Of course not,” she said. “We’ll stick to the basics. Get the eggs.”

Tempting as it was to request another girl to help with the housework (since Delilah was generally preoccupied with observing herself in any and all reflective surfaces), Portia resisted for two reasons: she loathed the idea of asking Mister for any kind of favor, and she did not want to have to account for the whereabouts of another person in the house every time she crept into the secret room to search for her file. Between the cooking, the cleaning, the trips into town, and these covert missions, Portia was utterly exhausted by the end of the day and frequently slept so deeply that she could not muster any kind of dream onto the blank screen behind her eyelids.

But every night, just for a moment, she made herself remember when she was five, the air carrying stories from the garden, Max’s good-night kisses, the tail of his truck fading in the dust. She made sure that this room she had been given would never feel like home. She wouldn’t let it.

The list of names in her notebook grew longer, and the number of boxes she had yet to search through steadily waned. Still, she found no mention of Max, her family, anyone she knew, anyone who might care to find her or be found. She wondered if Sophia felt guilty for leaving her behind, then pushed the thought roughly away. She bowed her head, continued reading, writing down the names, recording the history of the man who she vowed would not keep her much longer.