Stone Angel

CHAPTER 11

Charles Butler walked on water. Or perhaps this was only the top of the natural water table. His shoes squished with each step across wet grass. The soaked earth was yet another piece of evidence in favor of Augusta’s invisible hill, for the land closer to the house had been dry.

“Augusta!” he shouted to the distant figure in the faded cotton dress. She stopped at the edge of the woods and turned to wave.

As he moved toward her, the water level was rising, his shoes were sinking and probably ruined. When he joined her by the trees, he noticed that she was barefoot – an elegant solution to the footwear problem.

She grinned. “Charles, you and I must have a talk about your wardrobe.”

He supposed it was ridiculous. The tailored suit and handmade shoes had been of no help blending in with the locals. Blue jeans abounded here. He had not owned a pair since the summer spent with Cousin Max. At home, his parents had always dressed him as a miniature adult on his way to a dress-code office job.

“I came to return the keys to the Shelley house.” He looked down at the small plastic bag in her hand. It was half filled with chicken wings. “Planning a picnic in the swamp?”

“No, but you take off your shoes, roll up those pantlegs, and I’ll show you a sight to remember.”

“You’re on.” When he was properly attired in naked feet and showing a bit of leg that had not seen the sun in years, he splashed after her into deeper water which now covered his toes.

“Stay close to me and don’t wander off the path.” She spoke to him over one shoulder, stern in her warning. “If you go into the bayou, you won’t find any purchase. Bottom’s real slippery.”

They had cleared the semisolid ground and passed into a watery, primeval forest of widely spaced cypress trees and small grassy islands. He could not immediately detect the path she mentioned. Then he saw the chunks of rock, more like man-made mortar, colored green with slime and moss. She was using them as stepping stones.

“These chunks came from the foundation of the original house.”

Augusta’s feet grasped the rocks like a second pair of hands. He fared less well, but with practice, his toes got the hang of it. Both his arms shot out as balancing beams until he stepped onto soggy but more solid ground, a small rise jutting over a sea of water hyacinth. A pondlike area had been cleared of the choking plant life covering the rest of the water. This must be the narrow tributary which ran alongside the road to Cass Shelley’s house.

“This is the tip of Finger Bayou.” Augusta’s lips curled inward as she sucked in air to make a sound like a child’s fingers rubbing the skin of a balloon. She pointed to a log floating toward them, though the dark glass surface of the bayou showed no trace of a current. Augusta made the strange sound again, and he realized that she was summoning the log.

And now Charles could see that it had large reptilian eyes. The beast hung in the water only four feet from his toes, and there was time to remember that this was not a zoo with bars to keep the wild things in their place. This thing went wherever it wanted. In this primordial habitat, Charles had slipped to a humbler notch on the food chain. “Don’t you worry about having a flesh eater in the neighborhood?”

“You’ve been listening to Betty Hale,” said Augusta. “Alligators prefer dead humans to live ones. But even if you were three days dead and real tasty, this one wouldn’t touch you. It’s his hibernation period. He only surfaces every two days. He knows when I’m coming with the chicken. Won’t eat but a few pieces, and sometimes nothing at all, but he’s gotten used to me over the years, and we never disappoint one another ”

“Could Cass’s body have been eaten by an alligator?”

“No, there were no gators in those days. They were wiped out before Cass died. You can trust me to know the exact count of every living thine that crawls in the swamp and swims in the bayou. I put this alligator in myself when he was small. That was after I cut off the herbicide to give him shelter from those poaching Laurie brothers.”

“Then what could have happened to her body?”

“You won’t get the solution to every mystery, Charles. Just let it go.”

“But I’m not made that way. I need that solution.”

Augusta stepped onto a small man-made platform of rock chunks, some with corners, a wharf of sorts, and she threw the small bits of chicken to the alligator. Its massive jaws opened to expose the sharp teeth, hundreds of them. The jaws clamped down and the water exploded in sudden violence. A tail appeared and Charles could see the enormous size of the monster. The leviathan’s tail splashed down, hitting the water with the force of a hammer, raining frothy particles far and wide. The water bubbled and boiled, and when the foam subsided, the alligator had vanished. Large waves slapped the side of the bayou, and the water hyacinth bobbed and rocked in the wake of waves.

As Augusta had promised – a sight to remember.

“Magnificent, isn’t he? If that fool Ray Laurie or his brother Fred knew the gator was here, he’d be dead by this time tomorrow. I trust you to keep my secrets, Charles, and I will keep yours.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t have any secrets if you hadn’t told Lilith that I didn’t know Mallory. I always meant to ask why you did that.”

“Mallory – I can’t get used to that name. I always think of her as little Kathy Shelley.”

“Perhaps it was her father’s name?”

“Can’t help you there. Cass never mentioned Kathy’s father. I couldn’t even say if there was a marriage. Never thought to pry. Cass was pregnant with Kathy and carrying her maiden name when she came back here to practice medicine.”

As he followed her out of the swamp, he well understood the need for a guide. He had no sense of direction in this alien world. Things slithered here, and the plant life reached out to him, pointing accusing fronds at his eyes. He swatted the back of his neck where a tiny winged thing had bitten him, and now there was a spot of red on his palm. Bloodsucking insects were so unfair in the month of November.

When the house was in sight, he walked abreast of her to the place he had left his shoes and socks. “Do you think the father might have had something to do with Cass Shelley’s death? A love affair gone wrong?”

“No, that doesn’t work for me,” said Augusta, looking down at his wet socks and ruined leather. “The man who fathered Cass’s baby would be a stranger here. Not likely he could bring thirty friends along without someone taking notice. And how would a stranger get thirty locals to go through with a thing like that?”

“The father couldn’t have been a Dayborn man?”

Augusta shook her head. “Cass left town when she was eighteen and didn’t come back till she was twenty-eight. Most everyone else who went off to school never came back. Tom did, but he was home four or five years before Cass.”

“Could there be a connection between Cass’s murder and Babe’s?”

“Doubt it. Cass had no enemies. Now her death was a genuine mystery. But Babe was such a mean-spirited bastard, no one was too surprised when he turned up dead.” She waved her hand with impatience to rid herself of this topic, which obviously bored her. “So where are you off to now, Charles?”

He hesitated for a moment. Well, he supposed he could hold her alligator as a hostage against a secret of his own.

“I’m checking out of the bed and breakfast. Henry invited me to stay with him, but I don’t think he wants that generally known.”

Augusta only nodded, with no curiosity in her face. “Well, that can wait, can’t it? I’m just gonna put the horse in his stall, and then I’d be pleased if you’d join me for a meal. It’s all cooked – I just have to turn a light under it.”

“Thank you.”

“And then I’m gonna send you over to Earl’s Dry Goods. I know he’s got a pair of jeans that would fit you, and maybe some sturdy boots.”

They walked together over the sodden ground, which became more solid, less watery with each step toward the mansion. The only approach to Trebec House was the path from the cemetery. Every patch of surrounding ground would be rough going for a car unaccustomed to lakes in the grass and no traction to speak of. And there was only one road into Cass Shelley’s house. Beyond that it was swamp and bayou. “I suppose the killer took Cass’s body away in a vehicle.”

“Well, he didn’t dump it here in the swamp. If you put a body into this ground, eventually it will bob up to say, ‘Hello again.’ ”

“Is it possible, just possible, that Cass could have survived?”

“No, it isn’t.” Augusta was firm in this. “There was so much blood, Tom Jessop even gave up little Kathy for dead. Cass could not be alive.” And there was a trace of menace when she said, “Don’t you even suggest that to her child.”

Cassandra Shelley’s child turned to the north, where Trebec House crouched behind the oak trees, hidden but for the attic window. Reflected clouds created the illusion of movement and life in that round pane of glass.

Mallory carried the dog’s body into the dense foliage at the far side of her mother’s house to block any view from the mansion’s dark window, so like an eye. In early childhood, she had believed that eye had followed her about. She remembered it well, and somewhere between heightened instinct and imagination, she believed the window-eye also remembered her.

She sat down beside her dog and ran one hand over the scarred pelt, still warm to the touch. It was a comfort, this tactile deception of life. She did not look at his eyes, for with the passage of only a little time, they had lost their roundness and could not fool her anymore. She continued to pet him.

Good dog.

She was alert to every sound, every movement in the trees and the grass. The air was alive with winging insects and birdcalls. The pure blue sky was slowly deepening into the darker shade of nightfall. She could hear the gurgle of the narrow stream tumbling by the house, splashing over rocks and lapping at a floating branch, plucking at twigs like prongs in a music box.

Ripples of phantom music poured through the window at her back, sweet simple notes of a child’s piano lesson. When she turned around, remembrance filled the glass pane with a woman she had seen in mirrors. Their countenances did differ, for Mallory’s smile was always forced, and the mother at the window of her mind was laughing in absolute delight. Her eyes lit up like green stars as she beheld her child – young Kathy, six years old, almost seven.

Mallory raised her hand to the window, and the woman waved to her. But it was too hard to sustain the illusion, and she turned away from her own reflection. She was alone again.

The stronger memory of terror and violence stayed with Mallory longer. There was the vision of her mother, hair streaming with blood, inching toward her across the floor, gathering Kathy into her arms, pulling a laundry marker from the pocket of her bloody dress and writing a telephone number on the back of the little girl’s hand. “Run,” Cass Shelley had said to her child. Young Kathy had held on to her mother, terrified, screaming. “Run!” yelled her mother. And then she had slapped the child hard to make her go. The first touch that was not gentle.

Mallory turned her face up to the sky. There were lights overhead, tiny lamps turning on one by one. She retrieved an old sheet of canvas from the garden shed and used it as a shroud to wrap the animal’s body, which had grown cold. An hour later, when the sky was dark blue and banged with stars, she lifted the dog in her arms and carried him into the woods.

Charles walked out the front door of the Dayborn Bed and Breakfast with his suitcase in hand. The other guests had deserted the porch following the evening bat races. Only Darlene Wooley remained. She was slumped in one of the wicker chairs lining the rail. The porch light was being unkind to her. Harsh shadows deepened all the lines of worry and stress common to the caregiver of a special child. Even Darlene’s hair seemed strained and tired, falling to her shoulders in halfhearted attempts at curls.

“Hello again.” He had spoken softly, but even so, she was startled into better posture. Her back was stiff and straight when she smiled a wan greeting.

He set his suitcase down beside her chair. “I ran into Ira in the cemetery today. I tried to speak to him, but I’m afraid I may have upset him. I am sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She made an effort to sustain her smile, but it slipped away as she looked down at her folded hands. “I’m so pleased that you did stop to speak to him. Some people in this town don’t believe Ira can talk anymore, let alone think.”

“Well, I can tell them different.” Betty pushed open the porch door. Neatly balanced on the flat of one hand was a tray laden with a china coffee service. “Ira used to talk a blue streak when he was a little boy.”

Betty’s white hair had taken on a yellow cast from the porch light. The same lamp which had aged Darlene made the innkeeper seem younger than her sixty-five years. The flesh of her arms jiggled beneath the flower-print sleeves of her dress as she waved off Charles’s attempt to help her with the tray. She placed it on a small side table between an empty wicker chair and her own wooden rocker. “I brought an extra cup for you, Mr. Butler.” Betty settled into the rocking chair and filled it to overflowing. “No need to run off this minute. Sit yourself down for a bit.”

“Thank you, I will.” He settled into the chair beside Darlene and addressed the usual problem of what to do with his long legs. He elected to leave them sprawling on the floorboards between the two women. “I understand Cass Shelley was Ira’s doctor.”

Darlene nodded. “Cass started his therapy when he was two. He could read when he was only five years old.”

This was a tribute to a dedicated doctor. And it spoke well of Ira. He must have been highly motivated to participate in the world. “That’s amazing progress.”

“I thought so. But his behavior wasn’t improving quick enough to suit his father. One night, my husband took Ira to a faith-healing service. Have you ever seen one of those sideshows?”

“Yes, a faith healer’s tent show.” This had been a professional courtesy – the evangelist had been to Cousin Max’s tent the night before.

The religious showman had put on an extraordinary performance – gospel music and howls of damnation, elements of carnival and magic, voodoo and Christ.

Charles tried to imagine the terror of an autistic child standing up in front of a thousand screaming people, going through the faith healer’s laying on of hands. In such a setting, the forced contact alone would have driven the boy wild. “I imagine that experience set Ira back a bit in his therapy.”

“More than a bit,” said Darlene, with a faint reserve of anger. “If I hadn’t been working late that night, I could’ve stopped it. Ira was never the same after that. And then, after Cass Shelley died, he got worse – never talked at all for the longest time. My husband took him to another doctor in the next parish. That one tried a new therapy – gave him shots for allergies.”

“Well, allergies can create additional problems for the autistic. They – ”

“That may be,” Betty interrupted him as she finished pouring out the coffee. “But the shots didn’t help one bit. He never did improve until his father died, and Darlene got Ira into a state school program.” She spooned cream and sugar into a cup and handed it to Darlene. “I remember the days when Ira would talk your ear off. That child was talking since he was how old, Darlene?”

“Eighteen months. But he would talk at you more than to you,” said Darlene, almost as an apology.

“But he did have a lot to say,” said Betty, more magnanimously. “Mostly, he would go on about his lists, and his stars. I believe you take your coffee black, Mr. Butler – and three sugars? Oh, yes, Ira was always counting things and memorizing things.”

“One time,” said Darlene, more animated now, “he memorized all the stars he could see from the window of his bedroom. He made himself a star map that even showed the window frame and the curtains.”

“And the things Ira knew about stars,” said Betty. “To this day, I can’t get some of Ira’s facts out of my head. Do you know about the old stars, the cold stars? Just a bit of one in the palm of your hand could weigh as much as a ton.” She leaned toward Darlene. “Remember the night the sheriff took down Ira’s missing-star report?”

“That was a time, wasn’t it?” Darlene’s gaze was focussed on the sheriff’s office across the square. One yellow light burned late tonight. “I should go over there and apologize to Tom for blowing up at him. The day he took up Ira’s side – ”

“Let me tell it, Darlene.” Betty began to lightly rock her chair. “Ira was just a little thing back then. Was he five years old?”

Darlene nodded, and Betty went on. “We were sitting out here, like we always do after supper. Old Milton Hamlin was here, too. He was a steady boarder in those days. Dead now and good riddance. I never liked that fool. Milton was one of those people who have to advertise their superior education every damn minute of the day. You know the type, Mr. Butler?”

Charles nodded.

“So little Ira was sitting on the steps right there with his star map,” said Betty. “Suddenly, he looks up at his mother and says one of his stars is missing – winked out in the dark. And he couldn’t have been more upset if it was a lost puppy. So then Milton Hamlin commenced with a lecture. He said stars didn’t just wink out – they went up in a ball of fire, don’t you know – and Ira couldn’t have seen any such thing.”

“Milton was a retired librarian,” said Darlene. “I guess he figured sheer proximity to all those books made him about the smartest man in the world.”

“Turned out later, he didn’t know the first thing about astronomy.” Betty sighed, as though her aggravation with the deceased Milton Hamlin might be ongoing.

“I thought maybe Ira might’ve miscounted his stars. But Darlene had never known him to miscount anything, so she took the boy’s side, and then so did I. Well, Milton was livid. He went on and on about how Ira was just an ignorant little boy, and he had certainly not seen a star go nova. The old fool embarrassed that child no end.”

Betty was warming to her story now, leaning forward to touch his arm and alert him that this was the good part coming up. “Well, the very next evening, Tom Jessop shows up on the porch after dark, with his clipboard and all these official-looking papers. Bless him – he wrote down Ira’s account of that missing star. Tom was dead serious. Asked Ira if he could borrow the star map.”

Betty smiled at Darlene. “Tom was a handsome man in those days, wasn’t he?” She turned back to Charles. “But I’m digressing.”

She rocked a little faster as she picked up the pace of her story. “Milton came out on the porch just as Ira was showing Tom the place where he had last seen his lost star, and the sheriff was writing down every word. Well, Milton laughed at the pair of them, and it hurt Ira all over again – poor little thing. So the sheriff says, ‘You’re right, Ira. Any fool can see that star is gone.’ Now he said that to the boy, but he was staring straight at Milton Hamlin, and it was a look to freeze blood. Milton didn’t say another word – not that night anyway.”

She was rocking faster now. “The following evening, just after supper while it was still light, the sheriff stopped by to tell Ira that his star was coming back. ‘Tonight,’ says Tom, ‘And that’s a promise.’ ‘’

Betty slapped her hand down on the arm of her rocker. “Well, Milton nearly bust a gut laughing over that one. The sheriff stared him down, and you would have thought Tom had pulled his gun on Milton – the old fool shut his face that fast.”

Betty ceased her rocking and pointed to the edge of the porch. “Ira sat right there on those steps. Sat there for hours, watching that empty place in the sky. And Cass Shelley’s little girl, Kathy – she was only six then – she was right beside him. Ira believed in Tom Jessop, and so did Kathy. The kids were waiting – you see?”

Charles did see. He was staring at the porch steps. Even if he lived to be a very old man, he knew he would never lose the image of two small children sitting there, side by side in absolute faith, waiting for a star to come home.

“That very night,” said Betty, “damned if that star didn’t come back – just like Tom Jessop said it would! There it was, and right in the place Ira said it should be. So then Tom, Kathy and Ira were all huddled together on the steps, real quiet, just admiring that star for the longest time.”

He smiled, knowing that Malcolm Laurie would have thought the sheriff a fool to give away this miracle for free. Charles understood what Tom Jessop had done, and how, and why. He was only having difficulty squaring the man who loved children with the man who had used an insane dog to torture Deputy Travis and Alma Furgueson.

“So it was a variable star, an eclipsing binary.” Charles said it softly, in the manner of thinking aloud.

“Why, yes.” Betty smiled with pleased surprise. “That’s exactly what it was.”

Darlene was also smiling. “Tom called the observatory. He was thinking Ira might’ve seen a satellite or a comet. But they told him a dark star had moved across the face of a bright one and hid its light.”

Charles nodded. The eclipse would have been only hours long, but atmospheric conditions could have obscured the star for several days. So the sheriff had used that knowledge to put on an elaborate magic show for Ira and Kathy.

“It was called Algos,” said Darlene.

“But we call it Ira’s star.” Betty wagged one finger to end her story with a flourish. “And that old fool Milton Hamlin was dead within the year,” she said, as if this might be a fitting penalty for humiliating a small child.