Banshee

Chapter Two

The police came and went, came again and left again, throughout the summer. And toward the end of fall the funeral was held.

The small coffin was covered with camellias and white heather and here and there a bunch of cornflowers because they were the color of the princess’s eyes. The church was filled to capacity. Relatives and close friends sat in the front pews on the left, and on the right neighbors and Howard Hyatt’s business associates, and at the back on both sides were the well-wishers and the curiosity seekers and people who’d followed the long search in the newspapers. Also near the back were some who wanted to make sure they could get out quickly if necessary — Mrs. Cunningham with her son, Peter, on her right, and Ben York on her left. He had designed the Hyatts’ house as well as the princess’s palace and should have sat up front as a close friend. But he was afraid he’d break down in public as he had so often in private.

Peter Cunningham’s reason was different. He had allowed his mother only two double martinis before leaving their house and he thought that would hold her. But more and more people kept filing into the church and the music kept playing on and on and finally Mrs. Cunningham began to fidget. Her fingers wriggled in her lap like fat pink worms trying to escape their jeweled collars.

“Peter dear, do you suppose I could just slip out for a minute and—”

“No. It was your idea to come in the first place.”

“The music’s depressing me. I need a couple of Valium.”

“No.”

“Not even one?”

“No. And the music is fine. Debussy. Pavane for a Dead Princess.”

“What’s a pavane?”

“A dance.”

“A dance? What an odd choice.”

“Not if you feel like dancing.”

“That’s a naughty remark, Peter.”

“Ugly,” Peter said. “Evil. In poor taste and gross. But naughty? No, I think not. Try and avoid using that word in connection with anything I do, will you, old girl? It bears connotations of cuteness and I never do anything cute.”

“Sometimes you do.”

“Never. Comprennez?”

“Of course I comprennez.” She glanced at him reproachfully, then turned her attention back to the music. “One expects Bach or Mozart. Pavane for a dead princess, indeed. She was a little snoop. Do you remember the time—?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t suppose there were other times, that she ever saw anything? Do you?”

“No.”

“I really do need a Valium, Peter dear. Please?”

“No.”

“Someday you will regret this, Peter. Someday it will be my funeral and you’ll be sorry.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I am in great despair and pain,” Mrs. Cunningham said. “And I’m beginning to hyperventilate.”

Benjamin, on the other side of her, could see her bosom heaving under layers of maroon silk. The little gold curls dangling from her maroon satin hat like Christmas ornaments had started to quiver and the silver bracelets on her arms clinked like the chains of a prisoner.

Prisoner, Benjamin thought.

There was no prisoner. No one had been arrested or even detained for very long though hundreds had been questioned, everyone who lived in the neighborhood or worked there or had reason to come to deliver mail or newspapers, to read meters or to service water softeners, to sell cosmetics or religion; migrant fruit pickers, registered sex offenders living in or passing through town, even a self-styled holy man who claimed to live only in the past and in the future. After sampling the food and accommodations at the county jail he conceded he knew nothing of the future, remembered only a few fragments of the past and preferred to spend the present on the outside rather than the inside. He went back to banging his tambourine and panhandling along the beach-front, and the death of the little princess remained a mystery.

Her parents, Kay and Howard Hyatt, sat in the front pew with Howard’s father. It was the old man who insisted on a formal funeral. So Kay, who understood the depth of his grief, allowed the small bones to be wrapped in the blue down-filled comforter from the child’s bed and placed inside the coffin.

The bones weighed seven and a half pounds. Benjamin was with Kay when she heard this news and it was the last time he saw her cry.

She sobbed against his shoulder. “Oh dear God, that’s what she weighed when she was born.”

Ben had cried too. Seven and a half pounds at birth, seven and a half at burial. It was a crazy coincidence but there was a certain rightness about it also, like the closing of a circle.

The captive worms in Mrs. Cunningham’s lap still struggled to escape.

“I’ve started to fibrillate, Peter,” she said. “Feel my pulse if you don’t believe me. Fibrillation can be very dangerous.”

“So stop doing it.”

“I’m not doing it deliberately. I can’t help it. I’ve always had this tendency—”

“I know all about your tendencies,” Peter said.

“Why are you so cruel to me, Peter? I’m hyperventilating and I’m fibrillating and you won’t even let me have a Valium. I could be cruel myself if I wanted to.”

“Try it.”

“There are some things you think I don’t know about. But I do. And I could tell people if I wanted to. I could tell a great deal.”

“Go ahead.”

“Of course I won’t. I’m not capable of cruelty. I just don’t have it in me.”

“What you have in you,” Peter said, “is enough booze to float an oil tanker and enough pills to choke a herd of whales.”

“You shouldn’t speak like that to your mother. No son should speak like that to his mother.”

“Maybe I’ll start a trend.”

“You made me leave the house with only one tiny drink.”

“Two.”

“Both seemed very weak.”

“They were doubles.”

“You contradict me all the time.”

“No,” Peter said. “Only when you lie.”

Benjamin turned and said, “Sssh,” not loudly, but directly into Mrs. Cunningham’s left ear.

Shrinking away from him as if he’d blown poison gas at her she clasped her son’s arm. “Peter, that man told me to ssssh.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“I consider it very rude for a stranger to address me in such a manner, especially when I’m fibrillating.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know you’re fibrillating. Let him feel your pulse. He’s not, by the way, a stranger.”

“I’ve never seen him before. He must be one of your friends.”

Peter raised one carefully trimmed eyebrow. “No. No, I think not.”

Benjamin had met the Cunninghams casually at a number of social functions. Mother and son always arrived together, both elegantly and rather formally attired, Peter in dark vested suits or dinner jackets, Mrs. Cunningham in silks and brocades and velvets, jeweled and perfumed and elaborately coiffed. Their arrival usually created a stir. Peter at fifty was a handsome man, with his silver wig and deep bronze tan, and Mrs. Cunningham still showed traces of beauty. Throughout any social affair Peter remained the same but Mrs. Cunningham seemed to be struck by a series of inner earthquakes and aftershocks that loosened her coiffure, dislodged hairpins and left little gold curls dangling helplessly by their gray roots. She staggered and clutched at people to retain her balance. (“Oh, I’m so sorry. This frightful migraine has made me quite dizzy.”) She bumped into furniture, dropped glasses and spilled food down the front of her dress. (“How clumsy of me. I seem to have lost my contact lenses.”) And she departed early, leaning heavily on the arm of her son. Peter never appeared embarrassed or angry, merely rather amused as though he’d been playing a walk-on role in some dreadfully amateur drama.

“If he’s not one of your friends,” Mrs. Cunningham said, “and he’s not one of mine, who is he?”

“An architect.”

“We don’t need an architect, do we?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t have to pay any attention to him when he tells me to ssssssh, do I?”

“No. So I’ll tell you. Shut up.”

The music stopped and the Reverend Michael Dunlop began to speak. His training and years of experience seemed to be forgotten. His voice was not the one he used in Sunday sermons to teach, exhort, inspire or downright terrify. This voice was uncertain and so soft it was barely audible in the back rows. He had officiated at hundreds of burials but the deceased had been old or ill or had died in accidents or by their own hands. Annamay Rebecca Hyatt was eight years old and she had, in the words of the coroner’s jury, died at the hands of another.

He was angry, baffled. He questioned his faith and the wisdom of God, the competence of the police and the motives and veracity of his audience. He paused between sentences, almost as if he expected someone might stand up and confess to the crime or at least to the suppression of evidence.

“And we entrust to Your loving care the soul of this beautiful child who eight years ago was christened at this very altar, Annamay Rebecca Hyatt.”

He paused again. There were coughs, sobs, sniffles, but no confession. He wanted to accuse, to threaten someone with the wrath of God, the fires of hell and eternal damnation. But he didn’t believe in hell, and he had no power or right to threaten anyone, no reason to believe there was a murderer in the audience, or a murderer’s friend. But he had an almost overpowering feeling that there was: One of you did something, knows something, and by God, I’d like to force it out of you—

His wife, Lorna, sitting in her usual place on the aisle in the middle row, was sending him her special Look which indicated he was making mistakes, saying things he should have omitted and omitting things he shouldn’t have. Lorna was a good Christian and an even better critic. She was paying careful attention so she could tell him afterward what mistakes he had made in delivery, content and demeanor. Lorna was always eager to help people improve, especially him.

He would hear about it all later, probably just before dinner which was his lowest point in the day and, maybe not coincidentally, Lorna’s highest. “What’s the use of speaking, Michael, if you cannot be heard by everyone in the church?”… “Goodness me, you sounded emotional. You can’t afford to have feelings, you’re a minister.”… “And those long pauses when you seemed to be trying to establish eye contact with somebody. It says in the book you’re never to do that. Why did you?”

Why? he thought. Why indeed?

Lorna wouldn’t understand that he was looking for a murderer or a murderer’s friend. She would consult her book and find that it was against the rules.

Lorna had a valuable book which was unknown and inaccessible to anyone else. She consulted this book frequently and, like a good friend, it offered words of wisdom which exactly matched her own opinions. Many people were puzzled by her references to the book, thinking she meant the Bible. And in a sense she did. It was her bible, anyway.

He was certain that Lorna’s book would have murderers listed in the index:

By now he must have broken every rule in Lorna’s book but he no longer cared. He paused between sentences, his voice trembled with emotion and he established eye contact with Annamay’s father, Howard Hyatt. They were the same age, thirty-seven, and had attended the same college. Even then they moved in different social circles. Howard was president of the students’ council and a business major who after graduating had joined an investment firm owned by his father and took over the management of the firm when his father retired. Howard was, in brief, a success.

Success was a big item in Lorna’s book.

The references would stretch as far as Lorna’s memory and imagination. Meanwhile, success notwithstanding, he and Howard remained friends. Howard came to church a dozen or so times a year, sent his daughter, Annamay, to Sunday School and contributed generously to the building fund. And it was to Michael that Howard came after Annamay disappeared, not seeking comfort, which was impossible, but seeking an explanation of how God could let such a thing happen. Michael didn’t know. He pulled out a few old saws like God writing straight with crooked lines, but he was unconvincing and unconvinced. There was no explanation.

Four months later Annamay’s bones were found a mile or so up the creek under a pile of forest litter covered by a tangle of poison oak. The poison oak was red with autumn by that time and very pretty.

“I’ve failed you, Howard,” Michael said. “I’m sorry. If I had enough faith I could give you—”

“No, you couldn’t give, I’m not taking. The time for praying and pleading and groveling, all that’s over. What I want now is action. And let’s leave God out of it, for Christ’s sake.”

“The police have done their best.”

“Their best isn’t necessarily my best.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Start over.”

“Maybe I can help.”

“Maybe you can.”

The eyes of the two men met and agreed: It was time to begin. Except for a few small bones missing from the left hand and probably carried away by some animal or bird, the bones were intact and offered no evidence of how the child had died. Various theories were advanced, some reasonable, some bizarre, all of them shot down:

She had tripped, hit her head on a boulder, become unconscious and unable to call for help. This was negated by the absence of fractures or indentations on the skull.

She had stumbled headfirst into the creek and drowned. But the creek was running very low by that time and at least twenty feet from where she was found, a distance not easily covered by a drowning victim.

She had been struck by a bolt of lightning. Electrical storms, however, were rare in the area at any time of the year, especially summer. None had been reported within a thousand miles on the day she disappeared.

She had wandered into a patch of poison oak and because she was highly susceptible to it she had died there on the spot. Chizzy shot down this last theory: “Why, she’d never go near the stuff. She knew how dangerous it was, and I’d taught her and her cousin Dru how to tell it from the wild blackberry vines. I composed a poem for the girls to memorize and made them say it over and over: Of shiny leaves in three, you must careful be.”

She hadn’t drowned, broken a leg, been overcome by poison oak or struck by lightning. She had, in the words of the coroner’s jury, died at the hands of another, a person or persons unknown.

Person or persons unknown. Michael’s eyes searched up and down the aisles, back and forth along the pews like feeble twin lights trying to probe too dark a forest.

Person or persons, you are unknown but you are here. I feel your presence. I’m going to find you.

He saw his wife, Lorna, waving a handkerchief in front of her face. Observers might think she was merely fanning herself because she was too warm but Michael recognized it as one of her more meaningful signals indicating that he was, according to the book, making a fool of himself.

He thought that she might be right and how little difference it would make one way or another. There had been a time for Lorna. Now there would be a time for Annamay.

Behind Annamay’s parents and grandfather and Chizzy, her cousin Dru sat with her mother, Vicki, and her current father, John Campbell. Dru was almost as big as her mother and a good deal more sensible.

Dru wanted to go home. She didn’t bother asking her mother who could never make a decision on the first try. She put it straight to John. He was a large informal man several years younger than his wife, and Dru treated him more like a brother.

She pulled at his sleeve. “I want to go home, John.”

“Me too.”

“Why can’t we?”

“Because your mother’s a little squirrelly. She thinks the experience will help you mature.”

“I wish she wasn’t into Experience,” Dru said wistfully. “It was more fun when she was into Pollution and we marched in protests and carried signs and things.”

“I missed that period, fortunately. I’m no good at carrying signs.”

“I could pretend to have a fainting spell,” Dru said, “and you could help me get outside.”

“Wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Face it, kid. She knows all the tricks. She probably invented most of them.”

“Vicki says we’re supposed to feel Annamay’s soul. I don’t. Do you?”

“Not keenly.”

“How are people supposed to feel a soul?”

“Beats me,” John said and chewed the moustache he’d grown to make him look older. The upper part of his moustache was blond and the bottom, where it was wet, was brown. It made him look, in Dru’s opinion, uneven.

“If I chewed myself like that,” Dru said, “I’d get holy hell.”

“What makes you think I don’t?”

“I scratch my head a lot, though.”

“Why?”

“It itches.”

“Good reason.”

“Do you think I could feel Annamay’s soul?” Dru said anxiously. “I don’t know where to start. It would help if I knew what souls did. Do you suppose they just sort of flutter around like birds, only invisible? Maybe if I listened real hard I could feel her soul fluttering its little wings.”

“Maybe. Why don’t you try?”

“I’m scared. I guess I don’t really want to hear it fluttering.”

“Neither do I particularly,” John said. “But let’s give it a chance. You listen hard, I’ll listen hard.”

Dru closed her eyes tightly and listened very hard. But all she could hear was the minister talking and Vicki sniffling into a piece of tissue and Annamay’s grandfather, sitting directly in front of her, whispering. Whispering and whispering, as if he were telling himself secrets.

Howard Hyatt reached out and touched his father’s clenched hands. “Are you all right, Dad?”

The old man didn’t answer. His eyes remained fixed on the small coffin, as fixed as the glass eye of Annamay’s doll Luella Lu which he had glued in for her himself.

“Dad?”

“Why wasn’t it me? I’m old, living is a burden. It should have been me. It was my turn. Why did He take Annamay when it was my turn?”

“Stop that now. You’ll make it harder for Kay.”

“But it was my turn, Howard, you know that. There has been a serious miscalculation. When I was running my business a gross error like that could not have occurred, and if it had, would have been severely punished. No one seems to be in charge anymore. Oh, I realize you think I’m irrational at times, Howard, but not now, not about this. It was my turn.”

“Don’t, Dad.”

“The whole operation has been poorly run. Seniority was ignored and people were taken out of turn. Those are the key words, Howard. Seniority and turn. I am an old man and it was my turn.”

“We’ll discuss it later, Dad.”

“There wouldn’t be any point in a discussion. The whole thing has been fraudulently mismanaged from the beginning. When your mother died it was bad enough. But this, this—”

“Later, Dad,” Howard said. “Please.”

The old man had been going downhill for a couple of years and Annamay’s death had accelerated his decline. He confused God and the President, the Twelve Apostles, the Supreme Court and the members of the cabinet and the board of directors of Bethlehem Steel.

He made grandiose plans to go to Moscow and Peking, London and Berlin, to straighten out misunderstandings which would never have happened if a good businessman had been in charge in the first place. Lesser plans, like dental appointments and visits to the doctor, were often abandoned as trivial, or simply forgotten.

He wrote notes to himself on bits of paper and backs of envelopes which Kay and Chizzy were always coming across in odd places throughout the house.

Howard was very patient with his father. Kay was occasionally sharp. She thought his lapses of memory could be controlled if he really tried. And so he tried. But the more he tried the more he failed, and the more he failed the more impatient Kay became.

Chizzy and Annamay were his chief allies. Chizzy knew he couldn’t help forgetting; Annamay didn’t care. What he forgot wasn’t as important as what he remembered, what he did. He tied excellent knots in things, he repaired doll furniture, cleaned dogs’ ears and removed foxtails from their paws. He played Grand Duke at royal parties in the palace and listened to Annamay’s dreadful renditions of Minuet in G and Dance of the Hours on the piano. He would clap his hands and say, “Splendid, splendid.” Since Annamay had no talent at all for music and consequently no idea how many wrong notes she struck, she was only slightly surprised at her grandfather’s appraisal.

“I must have improved,” she said. “The teacher told my mother last week that I had a tin ear.”

“What nonsense. Neither of your ears looks the least bit like tin to me.”

“Don’t you think the Dance of the Hours sounded a little funny in spots?”

“In a few spots, perhaps. But by and large it was a fine performance.”

During the weeks following Annamay’s disappearance, Mr. Hyatt fell into a routine. He left the house early in the morning with the two dogs at his heels, and spent the day wandering around the property, usually within sight of the palace. The palace itself had been sealed by order of the Sheriff’s Department and no one could get inside. But the old man and the dogs waited patiently, as if they expected the princess to return at any moment with stories of her royal adventure. When the bones were finally found and identified, Mr. Hyatt had to explain to Newf and Shep that the princess would not be coming home again.

“She would if she could, of course. You both know that. It is the result of shoddy management at the top level. Fair and honorable business practices have been cast aside. Annamay was taken instead of me.”

Newf wagged his great plumed tail as he always did at the sound of a human voice no matter what the words, and Shep licked the tears from the old man’s face the way he used to lick Annamay’s scraped knees and elbows.

At sunset the three of them trudged slowly back to the house. The dogs were hungry by this time but the old man had to be coaxed by Chizzy into eating even a small bowl of cereal or half a piece of toast.

“You’ll waste away,” Chizzy said. “Why, already you’re hardly more than skin and—”

She bit her tongue but it was too late. The old man began to cry again. He pushed the bowl of cereal away and went up to his room to lie on the bed with his face to the wall. Of all the tears shed, his were the bitterest. They offered him no relief; they blistered his eyelids and puckered his skin like brine. He told Howard he’d been turned into a pillar of salt, and explained how this happened:

“It should have been Lot’s wife who was turned into the pillar of salt as in the Book of Genesis. But the head of the salt-mining company made a gross error. He must be replaced, Howard.”

“I’ll see to it,” Howard said.

“You’re a good boy, Howard.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“And Kay is a good girl too. She forgets things but then once in a while I do myself… Does Kay know I love her?”

“I think so.”

“I’m glad to hear that. It’s a mistake to keep love a secret. I used to tell Annamay I loved her and she would tell me she loved me back twice as much. And then I would say I… well, it was like a little game, Howard.”

“Keep your father quiet,” Kay told Howard in a voice that was becoming more steely every week. “It’s for his sake we’re going through this charade.”

The months of waiting had aged her. Nights of violent dreams, days of horrible imaginings had dulled her lively blue eyes and stooped her shoulders and dissolved the flesh from her frame as though she were biologically degrading like the body of her only child. Her pretty blond hair looked stiff as straw. Even when she forced herself to smile the corners of her mouth wouldn’t turn upward. She appealed to no one for help or counsel. In bed at night she turned away from Howard and lay as lifeless as Marietta and Luella Lu in their bunk in the palace.

“You must come to me, Kay. You must let me comfort you, love you.”

“There isn’t anything left in me to love.”

“You’re my wife. I’m cold and lonely, I need to have you lying close to me.”

“I’m lying close to you.”

“I want to love you, Kay. Have I lost my wife as well as my child?”

“I don’t know.”

The person who tried hardest to bring the two together was Ben York. He’d expected them to cling to each other in such a crisis. When they didn’t, he begged Kay to be more loving and advised Howard to continue waiting with compassion and understanding. He appealed to Kay’s older sister, Vicki, who said Kay was terribly spoiled, always had been, and needed a course in deprivation like est. Old Mr. Hyatt’s explanation for the rift varied, but the same theme was repeated: One of the top executives had pressed the wrong button.

When Ben tried to talk to Kay and Howard together they regarded him like a stranger caught in the act of robbing their house, a bungling pathetic amateur.

“You’ve never been married, have you, Ben?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then butt out.”

Ben had known the Hyatts for a long time. Howard had given him his first job while he was in college, and arranged his most important assignment after he graduated from architectural school. His reputation was solidly established after he designed the Hyatts’ own house and the princess’s palace. He was considerably younger than they were but sometimes he felt like their older brother and sometimes like their son. He even had occasional dreams of living in the palace himself, and he would wake up contented and refreshed as if he’d been on holiday at a happier place and time.

From his seat in the back row he had glimpses of Howard at the front sitting with his father on one side and Kay on the other, and beside Kay, Chizzy. This was his family, his only family, and he very much wanted to be sitting with them as they’d asked him to do. But he didn’t trust his own emotions, so he sat near the rear exit, mute, suffering, smothering in the fumes of Mrs. Cunningham’s perfume.

“Do you know,” Mrs. Cunningham said, “what fibrillation is?”

When she repeated the question, Ben realized that she was addressing him and not her son. He responded with a shake of his head. “No, I don’t.”

“It means a very, very rapid beating of the heart. It can be extremely dangerous, often fatal. I am fibrillating right this minute.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“You don’t happen to have a Librium or something on that order, do you?”

“No. Sorry.”

“People don’t go around prepared the way they used to. In my day I never went anywhere without smelling salts, for instance. They had an odor like lavender but they contained something like ammonia that could knock you for a loop.”

“I see.”

“Now whenever I go out my son searches through my handbag to make sure I’m not carrying anything of that nature, not even a wee drop of booze for use in an emergency like this. A very small amount of bourbon or scotch would tide me over if you—”

“I don’t have any.”

She frowned at him through the little maroon veil that reached to her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. “I don’t understand why people go about unprepared.”

“Maybe because they don’t know what to be prepared for.”

“They must be prepared for the worst because that’s what happens.”

“Amen,” said the Reverend Michael Dunlop, and went over to the coffin and placed both his hands on the lid and bowed his head. People thought he was praying because what else would a minister be doing beside a coffin with his eyes closed, his mouth moving? But he was not praying; the words his lips formed were not part of any liturgy.

“Good-bye, dear child. Your murderer will be found, will never be forgiven or forgotten, will never spend a single day without torment. I swear this to you, Annamay Rebecca Hyatt.”

Without opening his eyes he was aware that Lorna was standing beside him. He could hear her angry rapid breathing and then her voice, whisper-soft but still managing to sound urgent:

“What on earth are you doing, Michael? This isn’t what’s supposed to come next.”

“What’s supposed to come next?”

“You say a prayer aloud asking for the salvation of her soul and pleading for mercy for the perpetrator of the deed.”

He opened his eyes and gave her a look of such intense hatred she stepped back, holding her purse across her chest like a shield. “That’s what you did when Mrs. Vallancourt was hit by a truck and the driver was never found. Then after the plea for mercy you led the procession of mourners past the body. Why aren’t you doing that now?”

“There is no body. There is a pile of bones.”

“Stop repeating that. I want to remember her as she was, whole and pretty and—”

“Seven and a half pounds of bones,” he said.