Stone Angel

CHAPTER 1

The rain had finally ended, and the sky was a noisy circus of life on the wing, birds getting off to a late start on the day. Every fish hawk was screaming after its supper, and the woman wondered if the fish could hear them coming.

One osprey flopped its catch onto the grass. The fish struggled under the bird’s talons; its silver scales were striped with watery blood. The fish hawk was so intent on tearing flesh from bone, he paid the woman no mind as she drew closer, smiling benignly on the creature and his bloody, living meal, nodding her approval of a good catch.

If reincarnated, Augusta knew she could depend on coming back to the earth with feathers, for she had the ruthless makings of a fine bird, and God was not one to waste talent.

A breeze off the river whipped the faded green cotton dress around her bare legs, and long waves of hair streamed back over her shoulders. The finer detail of cornflower-blue eyes would be lost from the distance of the town below, but any citizen of Dayborn would have recognized her tall and slender silhouette striding along the top of the levee, that great sloping barrier which was the high ground for the lands along the mighty Mississippi.

A sudden cloud break made her tresses into a brilliant flowing shock of white, wildly upstaging the few remaining strands of black hair. She winced at a twinge of bursitis in her left shoulder and shifted the weight of her grocery bag onto one hip as she moved down the steep incline of dirt and spotty clumps of Bermuda grass.

When she stepped onto level ground, she walked slowly toward her house perched behind distant trees. One dark window, round like an eye, could see and be seen through the choke of foliage. It watched her progress from the base of the levee to a narrow dirt road.

The mansion of forty-seven rooms had been standing for nearly a hundred and fifty years. She wished it would finally crumble back into the earth. Toward that end, she had made no repairs on the place in the half century since her father’s death. She had done nothing to abet her incarceration, nor anything to free herself. For the majority of her seventy years, she had been known by the titles of Miss Augusta Trebec, spinster of Dayborn and professional prisoner.

She paused in front of Henry Roth’s cottage, a small one-story affair of red brick walls and a fine slate roof. The garden was ablaze with exotic flowers growing in wavy bands of brilliant primary colors. She had always coveted this house for its simplicity of form and manageable space. If it had been hers, she would have let the garden go to a more natural state of untended wildflowers. But Henry was an artist who could not help but improve upon nature. Every day of his life, he improved blocks of stone with his chisel to create beautiful and most unnatural things.

A stranger was standing at Henry’s door, and a silver car was parked in the driveway. Augusta did not know the style of one car from another, but she could recognize a Mercedes hood ornament when she saw one. The license plate was obscured by shrubs and could not tell her where the man and his vehicle had come from.

Henry’s visitor was a tall one, well over six foot, and a good figure of a man by the back of him. As he turned away from the door, she was struck with admiration for his profile. That nose was a thing to behold, right formidable, nearly a weapon in its size and length.

The man turned around to face her. His eyes were large and heavy-lidded, with small blue irises. They put her in mind of a fairy-tale frog who had not quite completed the transition to a prince by way of a kiss from a beautiful maiden. Perhaps he had not been properly kissed, or maybe the maiden was flawed.

Augusta walked up the flagstone path to Henry’s door. The visitor nodded to her in the modern version of a gentleman’s bow.

Respectful – she liked that.

He was not a very young man, but there was no gray in the longish brown hair to help her fix his place in time. He might be in that awkward phase before the onset of middle age. She was near enough to note the fabric of his three-piece suit, and by that heavy material she made him a northerner from a colder state of autumn.

“Hello,” he said, with a smile that was at once loony and beguiling.

Augusta smiled back before she realized what she was doing. Now she pressed her lips together in a more dignified and noncommittal line. “Henry’s not expected back from New Orleans till early evening.”

“Thank you, I’ll come back later.” He handed her a white business card.

She was charmed by this small gesture. It reminded her of the gentleman’s calling card, a custom from her father’s generation.

He pointed to her grocery bag. “May I help you with that? It looks rather heavy.”

Apparently, he was from good family, or at least his mother had raised him right. By his accent, she narrowed his compass points to the northeastern corner of the country.

Augusta placed her brown paper sack in the crook of his arm, slyly reveling in his look of surprise as he realized how heavy the bag really was. She had carried greater weights. Beneath the light cotton dress was a well-toned body, kept in good order by spurning any form of transportation but her own good legs, and by carrying all her own burdens.

She scrutinized his business card. “Charles Butler, consultant.” A line of academic credentials trailed after his name, like boxcars on a train.

Could any man be that overeducated?

And now she learned that Mr. Butler had carelessly misplaced a very good friend. “Perhaps you’ve seen her.” With his free hand, he pulled the folded page of a newspaper from his inside pocket and handed it to her.

Augusta opened the sheet and looked down at a large, grainy photograph of a stone angel. She recognized the page from last Sunday’s edition of the Louisiana Herald, which had featured famous plantation gardens along the River Road. The caption gave a credit line to the sculptor, Dayborn’s own Henry Roth.

“That statue was commissioned five months ago,” he said. “It looks so much like my friend, I think she must have posed for it.” Now he produced a wallet photograph of a young woman with blond hair and green eyes. Both the carved angel and the glossy portrait of a living woman were good likenesses of an unforgettable face.

“She was here. I knew her.” Augusta refolded the sheet of newspaper and handed it back to him. “She’s gone now. It was a sudden death.”

During the long silence, she watched questions welling behind the man’s eyes, crowding up against his lips, mad to find an exit. But she had just wounded him, deliberately and severely; he was incapable of speech. His head tilted to one side, as though to empty out her words and cure himself this way.

Well, obviously, he was not good at death.

“You can leave your car here.” She turned back to the road and motioned him to come along with her. “My house is only a short walk through the cemetery.”

He was slow to follow her, moving mechanically as he carried her groceries along the path leading into a broad circle of trees and a city of small whitewashed houses, each one home to a corpse. The roofs of the tombs were topped by crosses of stone and crucifixes of wrought iron. Less impressive graves were slabs made of concrete to prevent the dead from rising in the buoyancy of sodden ground.

Many a grave was spotted with the colors of dying blooms. The wilted bouquets were remnants of All Saints’ Day, when the local people had left flowers for dead relations – the very day the young stranger had arrived, and Babe Laurie had violently departed from the world, leaving a nasty red stain by the side of the road.

The crunch of shoes on the gravel path was masked by the incessant music of birds as Augusta’s tall companion walked beside her, still speechless. And all the while, she was measuring his state of shock as a sign of good character. Evidently, he had been telling the truth. He was merely a man in search of a friend, and that friend was certainly beloved. Ah, but one could never be too sure of anything, she cautioned herself as she guided him toward a statue with the same face as the one in his newspaper clipping. But this one held a different pose, and she didn’t carry a sword.

“Now this is her monument,” said Augusta as they approached the back of an angel poised for flight, stone wings spread on the air. “There isn’t a corpse, though.”

The sheriff had never found her body.

The young woman had not gone into sacred ground, but certainly to her death. Her lost blood had grown to the dimensions of a river in the talk of townspeople. And a child had also vanished, gone to that famed place of Only God Knew Where.

As they rounded the monument, Augusta pointed to the angel’s face. “Now that’s a real good likeness of her. Is that your friend?”

She looked up at the stranger beside her. His face was a waffling confusion of anguish and relief as he read the date of death, seventeen years in the past.

Yet it was undeniably Mallory’s face.

Charles Butler stared up at the delicately sculpted features, the long slants of her eyes, the high cheekbones and full lips. The wings were unfurled in the disturbing and masterful illusion of levitating stone. In her arms, the angel carried a smaller version of herself, a child.

He felt a tug at his sleeve and looked down into the old woman’s dispassionate blue eyes. “Is that your missing friend?”

“No. My friend would have been a little girl when this woman died.”

The old woman pointed to the stone child in the angel’s arms. “Well now, that’s Cass’s daughter. The girl ran away, or was carried off – we don’t know which.”

The carved child was perhaps six or seven years old. The age was right. Yes, the child was Mallory; he was certain of it now. So, after all the months of searching for her, he had stumbled onto the beginning of the road and not the end of it. “You have no idea what happened to the little girl?”

“No,” she said. “Those seventeen years between the day the child disappeared and the day she came back to town – well, that’s a total mystery to everyone.”

“She came back?”

“Three days ago.”

“And she’s alive?”

“Oh, yes. By all accounts, she’s very healthy.”

He looked into the old woman’s cunning eyes, only now realizing what a cruel joke she had spun out for him. He glared at her in silent accusation, and her foxy smile offered no denial whatever.

The agony she had put him through, knowing all the while that Mallory was alive.

“Perhaps that was a nasty trick,” she said. “But I’m old. I have to get my fun where I can.” Her smile slowly spread into a glorious grin.

She was at least thirty years his senior, but he was not entirely immune to what beauty survived in her. His mind’s eye worked backward in time, undoing her wrinkles and restoring the dark glory of her waist-long gray hair. In his imagined reconstruction, she astonished him.

The woman pointed to the roof and round window of a house, all that was visible over the trees beyond the rim of the cemetery. “That’s my place, up there on the hill.”

“What hill?” In his travels along the west bank of the Mississippi River, he had yet to see a hillock or even a bump on the Louisiana landscape.

“According to the surveyor’s report, my house sits ten feet above sea level.” Her tone bordered on combative. “In these parts, that qualifies as a damn mountain.”

She threaded her arm into his, and they walked along the path leading out of the graveyard and toward the imperceptible hill, which he was taking purely on faith. “Where can I find my friend? Do you know where she’s staying?”

“Oh, yes. The whole town knows where she’s staying. I hear she’s called Mallory, but I don’t recall if that’s her last name or her first.”

“Her first name is Kathy, but Mallory is the only name she answers to.” He glanced back to the angel and her child. So Mallory had finally found her way home.

“That cinches it,” said the old woman in the spirit of eureka. “Kathy is the name of Cass Shelley’s daughter. But Sheriff Jessop only knows your friend as Mallory. He found that name inside an old pocket watch she was carrying. When you see the sheriff, don’t you tell him any different.”

“Why not?” And what did a sheriff have to do with -

“Don’t help him. He’s no friend of hers. So, don’t give him anything useful. Oh, perhaps I should have mentioned that a local man was found murdered, and your friend was put in jail shortly thereafter.”

Charles stopped dead on the path, and his eyes rolled up to the sky. What next? What new torture might this woman be fashioning for him? He looked down at her and caught the smile that was just stealing off.

“All right, let’s have it – all of it.” It was a fight to keep civility in his voice. “I assume the murder and her jailing are connected, but I don’t want to take anything for granted – not with you. What happened?”

She drew out the silence, eyes squinting at that middle ground of focus, as though reading the small print of a contract. Charles popped off the balls of his feet and settled down again, inclining his head to prompt her.

“What happened?” she echoed him, and held a pause for a few more maddening seconds. “Well, I guess a number of odd things happened the day Kathy came back. The deputy nearly died of a heart attack. And then they found Babe Laurie’s body, his head all stove in with a rock. Oh, but wait – I’m misremembering the day. First, the idiot got his hands broken, but that was done with a piano.”

“A piano. Right. And Mallory is supposed to have accomplished all this in one day?” Not likely. Though she was capable of frightening a man into a heart attack, she was fanatically neat, hardly the most likely suspect for a messy homicide by rock. And as for the idiot’s broken hands, though Mallory was a highly original creature, if she were merely assaulting someone, she would probably not use a piano.

With light pressure on his arm, the woman moved him forward again. “Well, we’re pretty sure she had something to do with the deputy’s heart attack. He had a dickey pump. It wouldn’t have taken much of a fright. Your friend startled a whole lot of people, showing up the way she did.”

Well, that fit. Startling people was Mallory’s forte. She had an unparalleled talent for it. “After we drop off your groceries, perhaps you could give me directions to the jail?”

The woman’s face was stark-naked incredulity. Oh, you rube, said her eyes. “So you’re gonna go strutting in there and demand to see her, is that it?”

“That’s my plan, yes.” It was a nice straightforward plan, no flaws, no holes in it.

“The sheriff’s bound to ask what you know about her. If she’d wanted him to know anything at all, I guess she would’ve told him.”

But, according to this woman, who now introduced herself as Augusta Trebec, Mallory had refused to say anything at all. Miss Trebec had this on the word of the cafe proprietress who delivered the prisoner’s meals. For three days, Mallory had sat on the edge of her bed, staring at the jail cell wall and driving Sheriff Jessop wild. She never moved, never said a word. Except once or twice, Jane, of Jane’s Cafe, had seen Mallory smile while the sheriff was pitching a fit. “Jane says the girl is making him a little crazier every day. So if you go in there all – ”

“I see the problem.” It might create complications for Mallory, and it would certainly ruin her fun.

When they cleared the cemetery, the path changed from gravel to hard-packed dirt. As they drew closer to the house, he was told that jail visits were limited to the morning hours. Charles also learned that Mallory had not been blamed for breaking the idiot’s hands. The murdered man had done that particular piece of damage.

Well, that was encouraging.

He paused at the foot of a wide lane flanked by stands of ancient trees. Their dark twisty limbs reached out across space to form a green canopy high above them. The ground was dappled with bright patches of late afternoon sun streaming through the leaves.

“These are live oaks – Quercus virginiana,” said Miss Trebec, in the manner of a tour guide. “And the house at the end of the lane was built in 1850.”

He had seen centurion oaks before, but never one approaching the enormous girth of these giants. Surely the trees were older by -

“The trees are three hundred years old,” said Miss Trebec. “Give or take a few decades.”

Charles shook off the idea that she was reading his thoughts. She could no more do that than could the men who regularly beat him at poker. It was his face that spoke to everyone. Even his most private thoughts were on display in every change of expression. She must have noted his confusion and followed the swing of his eyes from manse to tree trunks.

“So the oak alley was planted for another house?”

She nodded. “And it was built by a real tree-planting fool. There’s fourteen varieties of trees back there.” She gestured back over her shoulder. He turned to scan the woods extending out from the cemetery, east and west of the oaken lane.

“Now that first house was destroyed in a flood, and my house sits on top of its remains.”

He smiled. “Hence the ten-foot hill?”

“Right you are, Mr. Butler. My place, however, has never shown any structural weakness. It’s harder to destroy.” By her tone, she seemed to take this as a challenge.

Looking westward through the spaces between the massive tree trunks, he could see an open field of green grass stretching out to the levee. He watched the slow flight of a bird in a glide, a free ride on the wind. There were birds everywhere – singing, and some were screaming. Everything was in motion. Drapes of Spanish moss swayed in the boughs of the oaks, and shade-loving ferns waved in the breeze. There were nods from blooming shrubs and deep bows from independent flowers.

When they had come to the end of the covered lane, he had his first unobstructed view of Trebec House. The basement level was a gray brick wall with deep-set windows and a small door. Rising above this foundation was a massive structure very like a Grecian temple. He counted eight white fluted columns soaring up past two flights of windows. The breakneck flow of their lines was not disrupted by the ornate railing on the gallery, which served as a roof to the wide veranda. The scrolled capitals supported the massive triangle of a pitched roof with a round attic window.

Thick foliage surrounded the foundation wall and climbed the brick to wind strong green tendrils around one column, threatening to pull the shaft from pedestal and lintel, and thus to bring down the house. But this was only illusion. The structure was elegant, yet bold enough in its design to withstand every assault of nature.

Two graceful staircases curved upward from the grass, and inward to embrace on the main level above the brick foundation. A massive carved door was set well back on the veranda.

“Those are courting staircases,” said Augusta. “In my grandfather’s day, a young lady never preceded a gentleman on the stairs. That was for the gentleman’s protection. One sight of a woman’s ankle and he was as good as engaged. So they each took a separate staircase and met up there at the front door.”

The house was so beautiful, even in its ruination – like the woman who walked beside him. The exterior had once been white and smooth, but now was weathered by the elements and extreme age.

He had to bow slightly to follow her through the small wooden door set into the foundation between the staircases. They passed down a dimly lit hall, which suddenly broadened into a wide, bright room.

“This kitchen only dates back to 1883,” she said. “The original was in a separate building out there where the paddock is now.” She gestured to a tall window which framed a white horse at the center of a fenced enclosure. The entire wall was a bank of such windows.

Charles loved kitchens, and this one was a sunlit marvel. Absent was the neglect of the exterior. The room was in perfect order and contained all the creature comforts of a twentieth-century Hobbit – microwave and dishwasher, coffee machine and bean grinder. Polished copper-bottom pots and pans hung from the mantel of a stone hearth large enough to accommodate a roasting ox on a spit.

A broad table was laid with a red-and-white checked cloth. At its center was a sketchbook, which lay open to a rather good drawing of a white owl. Beside this book was a set of galleys with the red marks of a proofreader’s pencil.

Augusta caught his eye. “I write monographs on local birds.”

As he set the grocery bag down on a slab of butcher block, a hiss called his attention to the top of the refrigerator and the narrowed eyes of a large yellow cat.

“You just sit yourself down.” Miss Trebec gave Charles a gentle push in the direction of the table.

The cat on the refrigerator followed his every move. He stared at the animal as he spoke to the woman. “This man Mallory’s accused of murdering – ”

“Babe Laurie?” She put the cans of orange juice in the freezer compartment, brushing the cat’s tail aside to open and close the refrigerator door.

“Babe?” He raised his voice to be heard above the noise, for she had quickly moved on to the chore of grinding coffee beans by touching one finger to a state-of-the-art machine.

“He used to be called Baby Laurie – that’s the name on the birth certificate. He was the last of eleven children by the same woman. When the doctor put the newborn in the mother’s arms, he asked what she would call this one. She said, ‘I’d call it a baby,’ and then she died. And that’s the truth.”

While she set out the coffee cups, he was told that Babe Laurie had started out as a child evangelist on the tent-show circuit through the prairie states. Charles volunteered that his cousin Max had once journeyed across the country with a tent show, but Max had done a magic act. According to Miss Trebec, Babe Laurie had done much the same thing.

He watched the hot water from the coffee machine drip into a carafe as she explained that the murdered man was the figurehead of the New Church, which was not so new anymore, having been started thirty years ago when Babe was only five or six years old and still called Baby.

“Wouldn’t be too surprised if your friend did kill him. Didn’t like him none myself.” She put a sugar bowl and a cream pitcher on the table. Each belonged to a different pattern of china, and both were familiar to him as priceless museum pieces.

“You’ll be staying in town at the Dayborn Bed and Breakfast – am I right?”

He nodded, pulling out the newspaper photo of the stone angel and unfolding it. He stared down at the likeness of Mallory’s mother. “This sculptor, Mr. Roth? I gather he knew Cass Shelley very well.”

“Yes, he did. And Kathy too. That child spent as much time in Henry’s studio as she did at her own place. Did I mention that the dead man was found near the old Shelley house?”

“Who found the body?”

“Your friend did. She found Babe by the side of the road while she was driving the deputy back to town in his own patrol car. Oh, I didn’t tell you that? She saved the deputy’s worthless life – delivered him to the paramedics at the volunteer fire department. Travis is in the hospital now. I hear he’s in critical condition.”

“But if the deputy was with her when she found the body – ”

“The deputy was driving toward town when he had his heart attack. Babe was found further up the road on ground your friend had already covered. She could have killed him before she met up with the deputy.”

A moment ago, the golden cat had been perched on the refrigerator. Charles had only blinked once or twice, and now the cat was standing on the table a short distance from his right hand. How like Mallory was that trick of disappearing from one place and appearing in another.

“You said she drove the deputy’s car to town. She was on foot?”

The woman nodded. “She was walking in the direction of her old house. It’s on this side of the bridge, but not that much of a walk from the town square.”

Miss Trebec poured coffee into his cup and then turned back to the half-emptied grocery bag and unpacked the rest of the canned goods.

The cat hissed and arched its back as Charles’s hand moved toward the sugar bowl. Apparently, he had violated some house rule of table manners. Slowly, his hand withdrew from the bowl and came to rest on the table by his cup. The cat lay down, stretching her lean body across the checkered cloth, and the tail ceased to switch and beat the wood. When his hand moved again, she bunched her muscles, set to spring, relaxing only while his hand was still. The cat controlled him. Now who did that remind him of?

The old woman was back at the table. “Don’t touch that cat. She doesn’t like people – barely tolerates them. She’s wild – raised in the woods. When I found her, she was too set in her ways to ever be anybody’s idea of tame. She had buckshot all through her pelt and chicken feathers in her mouth. Now that told me, right off, she was a thief. And she is perversity incarnate. Sometimes she purrs just before she strikes.”

Charles nodded while the woman spoke, and he ticked off the familiar character flaws as she listed them. Now he peered into the cat’s slanted eyes. Mallory, are you in there?

Miss Trebec bent down to speak to the cat, to explain politely that an animal did not belong on the table when company was calling. The cat seemed to be considering this information, but she left the table in her own time, as though it were her own idea. The tail waved high as she disappeared over the edge.

It was disconcerting that the animal made no sound when she hit the floor. It crossed his mind to look under the table, to reassure himself that the cat did not float there, waiting to catch him in some new breach of etiquette. Instead, he peered into his cup as he stirred the sugar in his coffee. When he looked up to ask his hostess a question, the cat was riding the woman’s shoulders.

“So, have you thought of a story to give the sheriff?”

He shook his head. Making up stories was not his long suit. Under Mallory’s bad influence, his few attempts at lying had been disasters. “Could you take a message to Mallory? Tell her I’m here and I want to help?”

“I’m your worst possible choice,” she said. “Me and Tom Jessop – he’s the sheriff – we’ve been sticking pins and needles in one another for years and years. He wouldn’t leave me alone with that girl for a minute.”

“I have to see Mallory, but I don’t want to create any problems for her.” He tapped the newspaper clipping spread out on the table. “Do you think Henry Roth would help me?”

“Well, Mr. Butler – ”

“Charles, please.”

“Charles, then. And you must call me Augusta. Yes, he might help you. Henry’s a mute, so be sure you got a paper and pencil on you. He doesn’t always carry his notebook.”

“My father was a deaf mute. Does Mr. Roth use sign language?”

“Yes, he does. Kathy and her mother used to be the only ones in town he could talk to with his hands. Well, you and Henry should get along just fine.”

So, like himself, Mallory had been fluent in sign language as a child. In the past thirty minutes, Charles had discovered more about her early childhood than his old friend, the late Louis Markowitz, had learned over the years of raising her. For all poor Louis knew, his foster child had sprung to life as a full-blown ten-year-old thief on the streets of New York City.

And now, because Augusta Trebec wanted to keep an eye out for an expected visitor, he picked up his coffee cup and followed the old woman back down the hall toward the small door in the brick wall. He was wondering where the cat had gone. Then he saw the animal’s bright eyes gleaming in the shadow of an ancient porcelain umbrella stand. She was set to spring, and her gaze was fixed on him.

“Be sure you don’t let that cat out,” said Augusta, as she passed by the umbrella stand. “I can’t have that poor animal getting her hopes up, thinking she might catch a bird for supper.”

“I thought cats were rather good at that.” He would have bet his life that this one was particularly good at bloody violence.

“She shows real talent with mice, ‘cause that’s a footrace, and the quickest wins. But the birds usually see her coming in time to fly off. It’s that bright yellow fur. She’s like a little bonfire in the grass.”

Charles nodded. Mallory had much the same problem. So she had certainly not been in Dayborn all these months – not if one appearance could cause the commotion of a heart attack, a beating and a death. Surely she would have wiped out the entire town by now. The sign which had welcomed him to Dayborn had only boasted a population of eleven hundred people.

He was closing the door, when through the crack, he saw the cat bounding down the hallway, her lips pulled back over sharp white fangs and her eyes outraged. He pulled the door shut, and heard the angry cat’s body hitting the wood three feet off the ground.