Stone Angel

CHAPTER 10

There were no curtains on any of the windows, yet Charles Butler wondered if he had been misinformed. Cass Shelley’s house should be vacant, but wasn’t the dog a sign of residency?

The black Labrador had come loping from behind the house, favoring one hind leg with a limp. Some of his front teeth were broken and others were missing. Hanging from his graying muzzle and his ears were tags of flesh on strings of skin grown awry in the aging process. The Lab didn’t look directly at Charles, but turned his head to the side to study his visitor with the eye that was not clouded by cataract.

Perhaps this was only a stray, or maybe it was Augusta Trebec’s idea of a guard dog.

Though Charles knew it was the conceit of humans to see their own emotions in other creatures, he perceived a great disappointment in the dog’s aspect and his one good eye. Had this poor beast been expecting someone else?

The animal lowered his large dark head, limped back to the house and disappeared in the bushes at the rear of the yard.

Henry Roth was nowhere in sight. Charles looked at his watch. It was still a quarter to the hour when the artist had agreed to meet him with the keys.

He stood back to admire the elaborate woodwork on the porch of the old Victorian building. The turret rooms on either side had rare barrel glass in the windows. Augusta might be slack with her own house, but she had spared no expense in keeping this one in good order, even to replacing the red shingles and applying a fresh coat of blue-gray paint to the walls.

Charles walked up the short flight of stairs to the front door and tried the knob. The house was unlocked. Henry Roth must have come early and left it open for him. He stepped into a foyer of hardwood floors calling out, “Hello? Mr. Roth?”

No answer.

He stood at the foot of the staircase and glanced at a set of doors which should open to a wide drawing room. If he correctly recalled the architecture of this period, he would find a narrower servant staircase at the other end of the hall, and that one would lead from the kitchen to the attic. He opened the last door off the hallway and entered an enclosed, airless space. A window at the second-floor landing provided a generous amount of light, and he climbed past it, heading toward the attic, hoping that door would also be unlocked.

More light came flooding down the steps from a top-floor window. As he neared the final landing, he could see the attic door standing open to a darkened room. When his eyes had fully adapted to this space he could see that all but one of the dormer windows were obscured by trunks and furniture. A film of dust had been allowed to settle on every surface. He turned around to see that he had left footprints on the dark wood floor. Nothing had been disturbed in a very long time, but someone had taken care that Cass Shelley’s personal papers should be preserved. Clear plastic boxes were stacked up against one wall. Each bore a carefully printed label. At the base of the stack was a doctor’s Gladstone bag.

He wiped the dust from a box marked ‘Business Correspondence,’ and through the plastic he could see a packet of letters with surprisingly little yellowing. He opened the box and held the first letter to the light of the only clear window. It was addressed to Cass Shelley, the town doctor and parish health officer. And now he found the label for her journals on a lower box. Twenty minutes later, he was deep into her personal notes on Ira Wooley, the boy’s progress reports from the age of two years to five. She had also written lengthy impressions of his talents. It was nearly poetry, and in every line there was deep respect for the small child who had been her patient from birth.

Dr. Shelley’s appointment book had not been packed in one of the boxes, but rested in a plastic bag bearing an evidence tag from the sheriff’s office. Inside the cover of the book, he found a faded carbon of the receipt signed by the executrix, Augusta Trebec. He turned to the last entry, seventeen years in the past, and found Ira’s name. But the six-year-old was expected for a piano lesson, and not a medical appointment. So Cass Shelley was the one who had taught him to play. The entry was dated to the last day of her life.

Suppose Ira had witnessed the murder?

That would explain the block in his progress, the withdrawal and lack of articulation. With seventeen years of ongoing therapy his speech skills should have improved, not declined. Even after the traumatic loss of his primary mentor – there should have been improvement. But if he had seen her murdered, what then?

He held the sheriff’s receipt in his hand. The same thought must have occurred to Jessop. Had he interrogated the boy? Depending on how such an interview was carried out, that might have done even more damage.

He was so preoccupied with his thoughts, he never heard a sound until the footsteps were almost on top of him. He was turning to say hello to Henry Roth, but he found himself staring into a barrel of blue-black metal a few inches from his face. He never moved and scarcely breathed for all the time it took the sheriff’s eyes to adjust to the dim light.

The weapon was returned to its holster. “Afternoon, Mr. Butler.”

“I do have a letter of permission from Augusta Trebec.” Charles was reaching to the inside pocket of his suit.

“No need for that. Sorry if I frightened you.”

The sheriff did seem genuinely regretful – and relieved. He was working on a smile when his eye fell on the appointment book in Charles’s hand. Now his lips were set in a tight line, and he stood a little straighter as though he were bracing for a blow.

“I was expecting Henry Roth,” said Charles. “He was supposed to meet me here.”

“Henry’s probably out in the yard feeding the dog. He does that every day.” The sheriff was staring at the stacks of cartons, perhaps looking for other worries in the printed labels.

Charles stood up, dusting off his pants with his free hand. “So you took me for a burglar?”

“Light’s so bad in here. At first, all I saw was a shadow bending over the boxes.” Now the sheriff was pointing at the book in Charles’s hand. “Find anything interesting?”

“I know Ira had an appointment for a piano lesson the day Cass Shelley died. I assume the lessons were part of Ira’s behavior therapy.”

“You don’t need to mention Ira’s appointment to anyone else.”

“Does his mother know?”

“I never ran that past Darlene. Her husband was alive then. I asked him about it. He said he’d canceled the piano lesson. He had a falling-out with Cass. Said he was planning to change doctors.”

“But Cass Shelley didn’t mark it as a cancelation. She’s done that with other entries, but not this one. So you never asked Darlene if – ”

“I don’t think we need to mention this to Darlene,” said the sheriff, as though explaining something to a child for the tenth time and getting damn sick of it.

“Why the secrecy? The mother has a right to know. If the boy was here when – ”

“Well, maybe the boy was here.” The sheriff’s voice was on the rise. “So what?” Jessop pressed his lips together tight, damming up his words for a ten count. His tone was lighter, lower, when he said, “Mr. Butler, you’ve met Darlene. She wouldn’t like it much if she were to find out – at this late date. She’d be back in my office shooting off her mouth, and then everyone would know.”

“If Ira saw his doctor die, that would explain the problems with his – ”

“He’ll have more problems if you tell Darlene. No one in Dayborn would ever hurt Ira. Most of those people have known him since he was a baby. But I got all that trash in Owltown to consider. Ignorant fools might take it into their heads that Ira could be dangerous. You know how Cass died?”

“Yes, but Ira was only a little boy when – ”

“Ira’s a mimic, echoes everything you say. Maybe they’ll see Babe’s murder as another kind of echo because he was done in with a rock – just like Cass.”

Charles thought that was a bit of a stretch.

“All right, you got me.” Obviously, the sheriff was adept at reading incredulity. “Let’s say Ira’s a witness to an unsolved murder. Suppose one of the killers goes after him? Maybe more than one. Remember, it was a mob that stoned Cass to death.”

“I understand.” Charles paled at any possibility, however remote, that Ira might be harmed. “Augusta tells me you never established a motive for the crime.”

“Well, it wasn’t a crime of passion.” The sheriff picked up a box and stared at the label. “It was a quiet kill – more like an execution.”

How was that possible? “A mob killing – with no passion?”

Jessop tilted his head to one side and looked at Charles as though he might be a bit slow. “That’s what I said.” Disinclined to elaborate, he turned his back and perused the rest of the box labels.

Charles thumbed through the previous entries in the appointment book. He found another familiar name. “Babe Laurie was one of her patients?”

The sheriff seemed almost bored now. “Yeah, but Cass had to drag him in off the street to treat him.” Jessop stood beside Charles and glanced down at the page. Then he sat down in an armchair, suddenly appearing very tired. A cloud of dust rose all around him. “That was the day she discovered Babe’s syphilis lesions. I told you about the clap party that went on for three days. Babe was just nineteen, and I swear he had no idea what venereal disease was. He was an ignorant little bastard – never went to school a day in his life. I remember once, when he was maybe fifteen, Cass dragged him in to stitch up a head wound – flap of skin hanging loose from a fight. Nobody in that useless family of his ever thought to get him to a doctor.”

The sheriff’s hand grazed the Gladstone bag, and he smiled at some more pleasant memory. Back in the present and more serious, he said, “There were times when I actually felt sorry for Babe. I suppose Cass did, too. She was the only one ever showed him any kindness and didn’t have some more practical use for him.”

“So he’s not a likely suspect in her murder investigation?”

“I didn’t say that.” He eased himself out of the chair and walked to the stairs. “I don’t know that Babe was all that grateful. She had to chase him down to treat him, and he didn’t appreciate that much. Swore at her, as I recall.”

Charles walked down the stairs behind the sheriff. They had emerged in the hallway at the back of the first floor before Charles thought to ask, “And what brought you out here, Sheriff?”

“The prisoner broke jail this morning.” Jessop walked down the hall, heading toward the front door.

Charles kept his silence, reasoning that if he did grab the sheriff by the lapels of his blazer, if he demanded to know if Mallory had been hurt, it might indicate something more than a passing interest in the erstwhile prisoner. “You were looking for her here?”

The sheriff seemed almost sheepish when he turned around to face Charles. “Maybe you saw that old black Lab outside?”

Charles nodded.

“That was Kathy’s dog. I had this silly-ass idea that she might come back for him.” He shrugged and smiled. “Well, I’m that kind of a fool.”

Charles suspected the sheriff was many things, but not that. However, he had never suspected Mallory of harboring any sentimental feelings for dogs. She was compulsively neat, and dogs left hair on the furniture, didn’t they? But now he toyed with the ludicrous idea that the dog had also been expecting Mallory to come back.

“She’s armed and dangerous, Mr. Butler. So I’d rather you stayed out of her way if she does show up. And the jailbreak is one more thing I wish you’d keep to yourself. I don’t need these woods full of vigilante Lauries and guns. Wouldn’t be so bad, but half of ‘em can’t shoot straight, and they might wipe out an innocent tree.”

“Why can’t you just let her go? You really had no right to hold her.”

“Like I said before, she’s a material witness to her mother’s murder. It’s all legal.”

“So it was the mother’s murder, not Babe’s. I rather doubt that she could have been here when her mother died. Why would the mob let her go if she was a witness to the stoning?”

“I know she was here that day. She was supposed to be on a riverboat trip with every other kid in her school. But they crossed her off the boarding list as a no-show. Her teacher said she’d had the sniffles on Friday. So Cass probably kept her home with a cold.”

“Mallory could have been truant and elsewhere. You can’t know that she was in the house when the murder occurred.”

“Oh, yes I can. You need a guided tour, Mr. Butler. You can’t really appreciate what happened here, not looking at the house the way it is now.”

The sheriff opened the double doors to the drawing room and pointed to the side window. “The stoning happened outside the house on that side of the yard. That’s where the bastards left her for dead. But she wasn’t dead – not yet.”

He opened the front door and pointed down at the floorboards. “Seventeen years ago, Cass’s blood was all over those front stairs and the porch.” The sheriff looked down at the floor of the foyer now. “Where the old carpet used to be, there was a blood trail. You could make out her handprints as she dragged her body into the house.”

The sheriff moved over to the banister. “The blood trail led up the stairs – handprints and smears. She was mortally wounded, but she managed a flight of stairs. And do you know why? She was trying to get to her little girl.”

He climbed the stairs, and Charles followed him. “I followed the blood up to Kathy’s bedroom.” Jessop turned into the second door off the hallway. He walked to the center of the room and looked down at the floor. “And this is where the trail just disappeared in a lake of blood. This is where Cass died. So this is the way I see it. When she came into the room, Kathy was locked behind that closet door over there. But Cass just couldn’t make it that far.”

The sheriff moved over to the closet and opened the door. A shaft of sun streamed down from a high window, a common light source in the closets of old houses predating electricity. “Well, you should have seen the job that little kid did on this door, fighting her way out to get to her mother. Kathy demolished that bottom panel, and it was real solid construction. I figure she had to throw her body into the wood a hundred times to break it. And she cut up her hands pulling the wood out so she could crawl through. That was the worst of it for me, finding those tiny bloody prints inside the closet, and the track of Kathy’s own blood to the place where her mother fell. Can you picture that?”

Charles shook his head. “If she was locked in there, she couldn’t have seen the stoning or identified the killers.” He pointed to the square of light near the top of the closet’s rear wall. “That window is too high for a full-grown adult to see anything but blue sky.”

“Maybe so. But she knows something. She might know who took Cass’s body away. Or maybe her mother was able to tell her something before she died.”

“So you’re going to hunt Mallory down like an animal. She’s the victim, the innocent.”

“It’s my call. The mob that killed her mother is still out there. And who do you suppose they’d most like to see dead? Unless you give Ira away, the only witness is your good friend, Mallory.”

The two men stared at one another in an uneasy silence.

“This is very personal to you, isn’t it, Sheriff?”

“You got that one right, Mr. Butler. It’s just real damn personal. Let me tell you the other little detail that keeps me awake at night. Cass locked Kathy in the closet and probably told her to keep quiet. Maybe she made a game of it. I figure Cass saw them coming from the bedroom window, and there was just time to save Kathy. The mob figured on Cass being alone in the house. Damn near every kid in town was supposed to be on that riverboat. Now if Kathy had heard her mother screaming, you think she would have kept quiet? Not that kid. So it’s a safe bet she didn’t hear anything at all.”

“What about the noise from the mob?”

“I told you it was a quiet kill. They never made any noise – no yelling – nothing like what you’d expect. Maybe there was some conversation. She might have overheard that. And later there might have been words between Kathy and her mother – I’m hoping for words, but Kathy never heard screams. I figure Cass kept quiet all the time those bastards were taking turns at her with rocks. She didn’t want them to know the kid was in the house. Can you picture it? I can. I see it every damn day of my life. I see a woman standing up to a mob, terrified, in pain, and never letting out a sound. I couldn’t have done that. Could you?”

The sheriff stepped into the hall. “One of them came back for the body.” He pointed toward the back stairs. “She must have been carried out that way. By the time I got here, those steps had been wiped clean, and the hall carpet was damp between this room and the back stairs, like somebody’d scrubbed it. Odd thing, isn’t it? One staircase full of blood, and the other one tidied up.”

In silence, they walked down the main staircase and left the house. The sheriff was standing by the open door of his car when the dog came back to the front yard.

“I couldn’t stop what was done to the mother, but no one will get to the kid. I guarantee that. I’ll get her back and she’ll stay in jail until she talks to me. And remember, Mr. Butler, word about the jailbreak will be out soon enough. Don’t speed it up, all right?”

The dog came slow and growling. His teeth were bared, and they seemed longer. He looked larger, too, as he headed for the sheriff, eyes glowing red in a trick of the light. He snarled and snapped at the air, biting a path to the man. The old dog was possessed by a completely different animal, younger, with purpose and teeth. There was a deadly occupation in the stalking stride.

Jessop never moved. He showed no fear of the dog, as though he and the animal had been through this before. The sheriff only waited patiently until the growling subsided.

The dog stopped ten feet from the man. He raised his muzzle and sniffed at the air. Then the old Lab lost his footing in a sorry confusion of missteps and nearly fell. In that moment, he was made old again, gray and slow. He turned and walked away, moving with a pitiful drag of the hind leg.

Charles watched the sheriff’s car drive off, soiling the air with clouds of fine brown dust.

A dark figure stood in the shadows at the far side of the house. The man walked slowly into the light, which dappled his golden skin. Henry Roth’s smile was dazzling today. Absent was the suspicion of yesterday morning, which had probably been reinforced when Mallory told him to send Charles away.

Something had changed.

Charles walked up to the man and shook his hand. In the clearing behind Henry, the black Lab had settled down near a pan of water and a half-finished bowl of food. The animal was sleeping now, and caught up in some chase of an old dog’s dreams, one hind leg stirring into movement as he slept.

The sculptor’s hands moved into language. He pointed at the sleeping Lab. “He was near death when Augusta found him. That was the morning after Cass’s murder.”

“They stoned the dog?”

Henry nodded. “Augusta did what she could, but he was so badly broken, she had to call in a vet. The doctor offered to put him down for free. The sheriff would not allow it. He paid a staggering amount of money to keep the dog alive. It was months before the animal could even walk.”

“The dog doesn’t seem to like the sheriff.”

“The car confused him. He hates the sight of it. Tom usually parks it down the road.”

The dog rolled in the dirt and moaned. This animal should have died long ago. What kept him alive?

Charles rejected the idea that the dog was waiting for Mallory. Still, the thought kept creeping back to him.

“Why wouldn’t the sheriff let the animal die?”

Henry shrugged. More specific with his hands, he said, “I don’t think there was any one reason. It was Kathy’s dog, and Tom loved Kathy. But later, he realized the dog was a way to add to his list.”

“List?”

“A list of people who were in the mob – like Travis.”

“Travis? The deputy who had the heart attack?”

“The same. The sheriff suspected Travis the first time the dog attacked him. Tom only kept the man on the job so he could torture him. It was Travis’s job to take the dog to the vet. The dog lost one of its teeth smashing into the glass window of the car door. In his younger days, he nearly took a leg off the deputy. Travis screamed like a woman until I pulled the dog off him.”

“Is it possible that the dog caused the deputy’s heart attack?”

“No. Travis wouldn’t go near the dog unless I was with him. I was late the day he had his heart attack. He probably just turned around and drove back to town. I always helped him load the dog into the car, and then I’d ride along to the vet’s, so I could walk the dog home. The vet says he needs the exercise. Over seventeen years of walking the dog, I’ve added a few people to my own list.”

In answer to Charles’s silent query, he added, “We never speak of lists, but Tom and I both keep them.”

“So the sheriff figured the dog recognized Travis.”

Henry nodded. “Tom also used the dog to torture Alma Furgueson. She was the purple-haired woman you saw running through the square yesterday. Alma was a creature of habit. Every Saturday when she did her grocery shopping at the Levee Market, the sheriff and the dog would be there waiting for her.”

“The dog recognized her?”

“No. Alma recognized the dog, and she was afraid. Tom and the dog would stare at her for a while and then walk away. Finally, she went to pieces. She was always a little crazy, but then she got worse. Talks to herself now – cries all the time. The sheriff did that to her. Don’t make an enemy of that man.”

“You think he’s dangerous?”

“One day, he caught Fred Laurie shooting at the dog. The fool missed the dog three times. The sheriff beat the living hell out of that man.”

“And you added Fred Laurie to the list.”

“That day, two of the Laurie brothers made my list. They were tight – Fred and Ray. And violent. Maybe that’s why Malcolm never gave them any money – easier to keep them reined in. But anyone could have bought the pair of them for fifty dollars, and it would not be the first time they did rough work for money.”

“And what about Babe?”

“I suppose I never gave much thought to Babe on any account.”

Henry picked up the sack of dog food and carried it in his arms.

Charles followed him to the back of the house, where he stored the sack in a garden shed. When his hands were free again, Henry asked, “Have you seen enough of the house?”

Charles nodded. Henry was so much more talkative today, more forthcoming. The radical change in the man’s attitude nagged at him.

“Mallory wants you to go. I think that might be a good idea. This place seems tranquil, but now you understand it can be very dangerous.”

“I won’t go.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“You’ve seen Mallory today, haven’t you?”

Henry ignored the question, as they walked by the side of the house. “It’s important that you know what you’re dealing with.” He stopped to look down at the ground. “This is where Cass was stoned. By the tracks in the wet ground, the sheriff figured around thirty people turned out for this murder.”

Charles was thinking of the six-year-old child, locked in a closet while a mob killed her mother.

“When 1 arrived that next morning, I could hear the music inside the house. It was an old record player. The needle was stuck. It played the same five notes over and over.”

“The sheriff believes the stoning was done in silence.”

“Yes, it was very strange.”

“Henry, there’s a problem with the logic. The sheriff said it was a silent kill. He reasoned that if Kathy had heard screams or shouting, she would have called out to her mother. They would have found the child and killed her, too.”

Henry was nodding in agreement with this.

“But why didn’t the sheriff jump to the conclusion that the noise of the mob muffled the sound of a screaming child? He made such a point of the silent kill. As though he knew it for a fact, but how?”

“He was out of town when Cass died, but he probably knows more details than the people who were here that day.”

“But the silence? This was a violent murder – the act of a mob.”

Henry pointed to the circular beds of flowers ringed by stones. “Those flowers were not trampled. The people actually walked around them. No branches were broken on the shrubs. No twigs were snapped on the lower branches of the trees. There were no running prints on the ground. The only signs of violence were the rocks and the blood. They didn’t rush her in anger – they assembled here for a killing. And when they were done with Cass and the dog, they quietly walked away. Tom figured that out by the stride of the prints.”

And perhaps Mallory had backed that up. “You know where she is, don’t you?”

Henry Roth only looked down at his silent hands, and walked around to the front of the house.

“I know Mallory broke out of jail this morning. Won’t you – ”

“She’s fine. Don’t worry about her. She’s more concerned about finding a safe place for you. I suggest you check out of Betty’s tonight, and we’ll put your car in my shed. You can stay with me.”

Charles followed him out to the road. “Thank you, but I was planning on going to the tent show tonight, the memorial service for Babe Laurie. Malcolm offered me a front-row seat.”

“It would be best to go through Owltown on foot. Many people will be coming for the service. The road will be bumper-to-bumper traffic from the highway. So much easier to walk. And you don’t want anyone to follow your car back to my place.”

Now they left the wider road to take a path into the cemetery, which lay between this house and Henry’s.

“Augusta says Owltown is dangerous at night, and the sheriff doesn’t think it’s safe to go walking there in the daylight.”

“Tonight, all the really dangerous people will be in church.”

They were approaching the cemetery when Charles stopped on the path. He was listening to the unaccompanied lyrics of a Puccini aria. The disembodied voice was so beautiful, so delicate in its perfect phrasing, glass-fragile in the highest notes. They rounded the trees and beheld Ira singing to the statue that so resembled Cass Shelley and her daughter.

The young man was all the sheriff had said he was, talented beyond reason. Carved cherubs poised over neighboring graves, wing and body frozen in flight, as though straining to catch each sweet note flowing by on the air as Ira sang to his audience of marble and granite, sandstone and common rock.

Charles well understood the isolation of the wildly gifted child. He had some personal sense of what Ira’s early years had been like. And he had sad professional knowledge of what lay in the future. Dr. Shelley’s notes had concurred: Ira would never develop subtle social skills, and so he would never understand the flirtations of a girl, for he would be unable to read any expression of tenderness or willingness. That sweet phase would pass him by.

But, according to Cass Shelley, Ira could play complex scores of music, note-perfect. He could follow the slow evolution of clouds with patience beyond a Buddhist master, and he was on intimate terms with the constellations, calling every star by name. The sheriff had said that Ira could sing with the angels. Cass Shelley’s journal said he was one, ‘with wings unseen by the vast majority of beings, who had only the one temporal, solid context for life on earth.’

The concert ended, and Charles found the silence unbearably sad, the loss of the music, the loss of heaven.

The two men watched as Ira folded his body inward and sank to the grass at the foot of the statue. He curled up like an exhausted kitten, pulling his broken hands into the protective circle of his body. After a time, they walked away and left him sleeping in the perfect peace of a winged shadow.

Roused from sleep, the dog opened his eyes to the bright light of day. One shaggy ear rose to attention. Was it an animal he sensed? It came toward him so stealthy, he could barely detect its movement – even with his muzzle pressed to the earth and sensitive to every vibration. Suspicious now, his weary head lifted, and he caught the scent.

Not an animal.

The elderly sentry rose to a stand, his fur coated with the dry smell of dirt. With some regret, he left his patch of shade and padded slowly across the yard and down to the narrow path leading away from the house, his paws kicking up small swirls of dust. His eyes were dry and sore, slow to focus on the figure in the road. He turned his head, the better to see with his good eye.

The stranger whistled to him, an old familiar ripple of music – one long high note and two short bursts – his secret name. It was not a stranger in the road, and neither was this the stuff of his dreams.

She had come home.

As she came closer, his heart beat faster. He moved a few steps into the road, his jaws hanging open in the dog’s way of a smile. Enormous waves of emotion pounded his heart, banging out blood to crash through the wreckage of ancient veins, and his mind was lost between shores of disbelief and joy. His steps were slow, but he believed he was running, bounding toward her.

At last, he stood before her, making low loving noises in his throat. He licked her hand, and then his legs betrayed him. He was falling, rolling into the dirt at her feet.

She knelt down to stroke his pelt, and then to hold him in her arms, pressing him close to her body. Her face was wet as she cradled him. One soft and gentle hand was probing that place where his heart was caged by ribs, and together they followed the weakening beats. His gaze was fixed on her face, backlit by the brilliant aureole of the midday sun.

He was shivering now, so very cold.

And then his eyes rolled back; his day was done; the darkness was absolute.