Stone Angel

CHAPTER 2

CHARLES WAS BREAKING the tradition of courting staircases, admiring Augusta’s fine legs and trim ankles as she led him up to the wide veranda. Black birds perched on the curving wrought-iron rail, unperturbed by the old woman’s presence. But, one by one, they took flight as he climbed the stone steps behind her.

When he was eye-level with the massive base of one column, he could see patches of encroaching moss. At the top of the stairs, he stepped over a thick vine, which had crawled up from the yard and now reached out for the front door in bursts of new sprouts. He could almost hear it growing, creeping across the boards. Autumnal wildflowers bloomed all around the house, and their perfume was layered over the heady aroma of chicory coffee wafting up from the cup in his hand.

“I’m waiting on a relative,” said Augusta, walking to the far side of the veranda. “Her parents phoned me this morning to say she was coming to town. Lilith’s father would have told her to pay a courtesy call before she even thought of sitting down to dinner.”

She settled into a high-backed throne chair, the sturdiest piece among the collection of aging wicker. As he sat down beside her and gazed across the wide expanse of tall grass, he understood why the porch furniture was clustered here at the far end. Now he believed in Augusta’s invisible ten-foot hill. According to his guidebook, the levee was nearly thirty feet high along this stretch of the river. Only the rise of Augusta’s and and the added footage of the brick foundation below them would have afforded this panoramic view across the barrier.

Sea gulls dipped and soared, screamed and swooped above the surging Mississippi. A majestic white steamboat was heading downriver toward New Orleans and churning the muddy water with her paddle wheel. He could see all three tiers of the vessel’s superstructure. For one moment of magic, the great ship seemed to glide with perfect balance along the top of the earthen dike. He followed its slow progress until he was distracted by the runner on the levee.

Against the backdrop of bright light reflected on the water, she was a lean, dark silhouette with the long legs of a colt and the speed of a longdistance runner. She turned down the steep incline of the embankment and was lost behind the trees near Henry Roth’s cottage.

“That would be Lilith Beaudare, my cousin’s child,” said Augusta.

He caught sight of the runner’s shadow sprinting through an exposed sliver of the cemetery and then disappearing behind the cover of encircling trees.

The running woman had cleared that ground with amazing speed, appearing again at the foot of the oak alley to his right. She had settled into a slower gait, jogging up the dirt path toward the house. Charles could see the runner’s true colors now: the red of her T-shirt, the purple shorts – the black skin.

He turned to the pale woman beside him.

In the manner of delivering the last line of a fine joke, she said, “The world has changed, Charles. You must try to keep up.”

Augusta laughed, and he liked the sound of it, no matter that she was laughing at him.

“My cousin, Guy Beaudare, moved his family to New Orleans when Lilith was a little girl. They used to come back every summer for a visit – but no more. I haven’t seen that child in years. It’s strange that Lilith should turn up in Dayborn just after your friend was jailed.” There was a caution in her voice as she leaned closer. “You should find it odd, too.”

The young woman was walking toward them with an easy confident stride. Charles noted the detail of the serious competitor’s track shoes. While the young woman was still out of earshot, Augusta smiled at him. “You think Lilith is dark? Her mother is so black she’s blue – pure Africa.”

As the introductions were made, Charles believed he saw African suns in Lilith Beaudare’s eyes, twin orbs of yellow on the rise as she looked up to his face. Her black hair was cropped close to a finely shaped skull, and her lips were the color of plum wine. It was an intoxicating array of hue and form. She was a bit taller than her elder cousin, and he guessed her height as closer to Mallory’s five foot ten.

After kissing Augusta on both cheeks, Lilith took his hand in hers, and she kept it a few moments too long for a first handshake. She was smiling, but not with her eyes.

“Lilith is on loan to Sheriff Jessop,” said Augusta. “I think I mentioned that his deputy was in the hospital.”

Charles detected a warning note in Augusta’s tone. But six blunt questions into the conversation, he would have guessed Lilith’s occupation anyway. Her style of conversation might have been off-balancing for some. The young woman never phrased a sentence that did not elicit – demand – information, and she left him no room for return volleys. But she had no edge, no leverage with him. Charles was long accustomed to the interrogation mode. Sometimes Mallory could not turn it off.

“How long have you known Augusta, Mr. Butler?”

“We met this afternoon.”

Lilith leaned toward him to press her next question. “And exactly what is your business with my cousin?”

Augusta waved her hands behind Lilith’s back to stop his mouth. “Will you listen to that? She graduated from the police academy not two weeks ago, and she’s already interrogating people.” Augusta paused to glare at her young relation before the next rush of words. “Not that it’s any of your business, Lilith – I hired him to investigate a woman who might be Cass Shelley’s daughter. If she is, then it’s time to turn over her mother’s estate.”

Augusta rose from her chair, and Charles stood up, taking this as his cue to leave.

The old woman lowered her eyes like gun sights. “In case your daddy never mentioned it, I’m the executrix. I’ve been collecting rents and paying taxes on the house since Cass died – and I’m tired of it. So as soon as Mr. Butler nails down the line of inheritance, I can get rid of that chore.”

The young woman nodded and turned back to Charles. “Are you licensed in the state of – ”

“That’s enough, Lilith. Don’t mess with my affairs again.”

The two women locked eyes, and in this peculiar form of wrestling, the younger woman’s gaze was beaten back – not sufficient experience in the world to outglare the old one, not yet.

“I expect you’ll be wanting to get on with your business.” Augusta reached out to shake his hand in farewell.

Charles said good evening to the women and walked back the way he had come, down the covered lane of oaks. A bird screamed after him, and other birds flew overhead as he crossed the open ground and entered the wide circle of trees.

A fat black starling perched on the roof of a tomb and followed him with its eyes and the cock of its head. As he walked on through the cemetery, he heard the flap of pursuing wings and felt a rush of air as the starling lit on a marble monument level with Charles’s head. The creature pointed its sharp beak at his face. Its eyes were cold, showing no more emotion than a reptile.

He could well believe the theory that the dinosaur had not died off, but had taken wings and lived on in the smaller form of modern birds. A memory of majesty must survive in this one, for it looked upon Charles as no threat whatever – merely a man, an upstart creature in the scheme of time on earth.

He watched the black bird fly off toward the low-riding sun, and now he noticed that all the graves and monuments were aligned east to west. Perhaps local custom arranged the dead to face the sunrise, ancient symbol of resurrection.

Only one tomb was facing north.

Curious.

He went back to the rim of the cemetery and walked around this structure to stand before a door gated with intricate designs of ironwork and flanked by narrow windows of exquisite stained glass. At first, he placed the tomb in the colonial period, for it was showing the wear of ages: corners rounding and fissures running through the walls. And then he realized that it was constructed with a soft, porous stone. Given the fine craftsmanship of the tomb, this use of shoddy material made no sense at all.

Above the door was the bas-relief carving of a man’s face, minus the nose which had crumbled to dust. The stone eyes were gazing through a break in the trees which allowed a view of Trebec House. The first name engraved over the door was lost to erosion, and the surname was barely legible. Trebec? Yes, that was it. Well, what would Mr. Trebec think of his ruined mansion now?

Charles walked around the tomb and headed for the path back to Henry Roth’s house. Before leaving the ring of trees, he remembered one more anomaly and turned to Cass Shelley’s monument, visible through a narrow alley of tombs. The stone angel was facing south. And what was she looking at?

A gust of wind came ripping through the trees, tearing leaves away, and sighing off with them to the other end of the cemetery. The soft racket of thrashing branches stopped suddenly, as though the wind had closed a door behind it. The air was colder now and unnaturally still. No sound of insects, no birdcall. The stones were casting their longest shadows toward the close of day.

He felt a light breeze on his skin, as though someone unseen had just walked by, caressing his face in passing. His involuntary shiver was delicious.

Oh, what Cousin Max could have done with a stage like this. Cemeteries were primed for the illusionist’s art. The atmosphere alone would have done half the magician’s work for him.

As Charles left the circle of trees and drew closer to Henry Roth’s yard, he heard the sound of an engine. His own car sat in the wide driveway, its silver metal gleaming, throwing back light from the sunset sky. There was no other vehicle in sight. He approached the front door, already sensing the stillness of no one home. The sound of the engine stopped now, but suddenly, not tapering off down some road in the distance. It must be close by.

He followed the curving driveway as it wound around the house and past a large chicken coop attached to an empty garage. The meandering road led him into the trees and ended at the heart of a grove. A brace of heavy branches concealed the upper portion of an old chapel made of large, rough-hewn blocks of gray. Only the religious arches of the windows and the open doors were not obscured by leaves. A large and blocky tarpaulined shape lay in the bed of a red pickup truck parked in front of the building.

Charles rounded the truck and walked up a short flight of steps. He paused on the threshold and peered inside. Two massive skylights were set into the steep pitch of the high ceiling. Slow floating clouds of pink and gold seemed within grazing distance of the glass.

The vast room was full of day’s end shadows. The pews and religious trappings were gone. At the back of the church, ghostly shapes in white drapes formed a circle on the raised floor where the altar had been. Uncovered sculptures stood about the room in a more casual arrangement and varying states of emergence from granite and marble. Many of these figures had wings and appeared to be flying out of their uncarved sections.

A small, delicate man came out of the shadows to dance with the tall statue of a woman. The strange couple glided past a long worktable, and now Charles could see the feet of the man and the wheeled pallet beneath his stone partner as he rolled her to the wall.

Charles would have called out, but remembered that Henry Roth only conversed in sign language and written notes. He came up behind the man as he was arranging a drape around the statue. With no hint of surprise, the sculptor turned to face his uninvited guest. Charles assumed the man had felt the warning vibrations of approaching footfalls on the wooden floorboards.

This person was neither white nor black, but a stunning new race of golden skin and light brown eyes with sparks of green. His hair was pure white and tightly kinked about his crown. The sculptor truly belonged in this company of angels, for his smile was charming and gentle as he spread his hands on the air. His face was an open question.

Charles fumbled for a moment, but the movements came back to him quickly enough. As a toddler, he had signed his words before he had ever spoken aloud. This was his first language, though he had abandoned it over the twenty years since his father’s death. With broad gestures and finger spelling, his hands said, “My name is Charles Butler. You are Mr. Roth?”

The man nodded. Charles made more signs, his hands curving and pointing. When memory failed him, he spelled what he could not sign in a fluid movement. Here and there, he made a slip of the fingers and erred, but all the intricate nuances of tense and adverb were coming back to him as he stabbed the air and danced one hand in a circle. Facial expression gave depth to his feeling when he described his relationship to Kathy Mallory, whom Henry Roth would remember as young Kathy Shelley. He raised his brows to punctuate with a question mark when he asked for help. He tightened his lips for the sense of an emphatic exclamation point when he explained his dire need to see her again.

Only the ignorant believed that sign language was dumb show, simple mime. This graceful three-dimensional voice of hands flying through space, this was the true art of conversation. One gesture flowed smoothly into the flight of a bird, and then he finger-stepped across the stage of midair to describe the details of Augusta’s ruse with Lilith – his role as Augusta’s agent. And then, after one last plea for aid, Charles’s hands fell silent.

Throughout the long and involved explanation of events, Henry Roth had been extremely attentive and patient. Now the man smiled broadly, and his hands said, “I’m not deaf – only mute.” And then he laughed in silence as though this were a great joke, and Charles supposed it was.

“Sorry.” Charles spoke aloud this time. “I shouldn’t have assumed – ”

“Everyone does,” signed the mute. “People in town have been assuming that for sixty-five years.” He went on to explain that he didn’t mind, because people would say the most amazing things when they believed he couldn’t hear them. “I live in an eavesdropper’s paradise.”

When the conversation came back to Mallory, Charles said, “I don’t want to alarm her by barging in with no warning. She might be afraid I’d given something away to the sheriff.”

Actually, she would just assume he had done that. Mallory knew she had wasted her time tutoring him in the sister arts of lies and poker. Despite his freakish IQ, she regarded him as learning disabled.

“So, would you prepare her for my visit? You could tell her Augusta will back up the story that I’m working for the estate. Will you help me?”

The sculptor used both hands, upturned and open, alternately moving them up and down, weighing one thing against another to say, “Maybe.” He went on to say he might speak with Mallory, perhaps tomorrow – but only if it could be done without the sheriff asking questions, and that was unlikely. He did not enjoy the idea of lying to a man he had known for so many years, and Charles should not count on his help. Then his hands dropped back to his sides and hung there with nothing more to say.

Charles’s hands rose, as though to speak, but instead, they splayed wide in helpless frustration. He lowered his eyes and nodded. “I understand.” Of course he did. This man had no reason to trust him, to help him or lie for him.

Henry Roth shrugged to say that he could offer nothing more solid. And then his hands explained that he had work to do, and he must get on with it.

Charles followed the sculptor to the door and watched him unfold a metal ramp, extending it over the stone stairs to the back end of the truck. Now Roth unhinged two metal legs to level the ramp. He moved a rolling pallet in place near the open truck gate, and began to work the large canvas-covered shape from the flat bed, patiently rocking the massive stone and pulling it toward him.

Charles guessed, by metallic sounds, the pads beneath the stone must ride on ball bearings. Still, it was a tremendous weight, and this would be slow work for a man not much over five feet tall. Now he grasped the sculptor’s problem of weight, balance and leverage. In a moment, he had doffed his suitcoat and rolled up his sleeves. “Allow me, please.”

Henry Roth stood aside, and Charles pulled on the block until half of it jutted out from the bed of the truck. He eased it into an incline, and the bottom edge of the stone was sliding down toward the rolling pallet. As it touched the edge of the pallet, quickly, with one foot, he moved the rolling platform underneath it. Braced against the truck bed, the block was leveraged into an upright position. Next, he put his shoulder to the stone and pushed it along the ramp until it was housed inside the sculptor’s studio.

The man smiled his thanks, then signed, “It takes me an hour to unload a block that size.”

Roth locked the doors, and the two men walked away from the chapel and back toward the house. Now the sculptor made a firm date to meet at the town square in the morning, for he had thought of a way to avoid the sheriff and his questions.

Charles was still smiling as his Mercedes pulled out of the driveway. He traveled back along the dirt road, circling around the cemetery. Near the bridge was a signpost topped by a board in the shape of an arrow and weathered to blank, gray wood. All that remained of its lettering was an ironic y at the edge of the board. The mystery arrow pointed down a side road, a dark and narrow tunnel through dense woods of low-hanging branches. A notice posted on a near tree warned him not to enter the swamp by Finger Bayou, a narrow waterway running alongside the nameless road.

The sign for Upland Bayou was freshly painted and fixed to the metal girders of the bridge. This wider body of slow moving water was black in the evening hour and edged with a lace of pale green algae. Along the banks, the tree limbs were draped with gray beards of Spanish moss. On the far shore, wooden houses perched on feet of brick, and small flat-bottom boats were moored to gray wharves standing over the water on stilts.

At the other end of the bayou bridge, he was offered a choice of paved roads. To his right was the turnoff for the main highway and green fields of sugarcane extending out to the horizon line. He turned hard left toward the town. On both sides of Dayborn Avenue, the houses sat on conventional foundations, children played in the front yards, and windows lighted, one by one, as people returned home from work. Except for the warm weather and the occasional banana tree, he might be anywhere in America at the close of an autumn day.

When he rolled into the town square, his vista widened and perception altered radically. He was back in time. It was everything the brochure from the Dayborn Bed and Breakfast had promised – a collage of architectural history. The formal Georgian structure at the far end of the square must be the municipal building. Its walls were painted Federal green, and the white rooftop cupola mimicked a capitol dome.

The square was flanked by Italianate row houses of brick and mortar in hues of purple, pink, blue and yellow. Graceful galleries of ornate iron lace supported flowerpots in a smaller riot of colors above the ground-level storefronts.

He pulled his car to the curb in front of the hotel. There were private homes of Gothic Revival on either side, but this massive Colonial before him was the oldest building of all. The slanted roof of the bed and breakfast sported five gables and a chimney at either end, and its dark shingles sloped down to the support posts of the front porch.

He carried his suitcases up the stairs and met his hostess, Betty Hale, a white-haired woman of generous size and a more than generous smile. After the formality of checking in and depositing the bags in his room, she led him back out to the front porch and gently pressured him to sit down alongside the other guests, whose chairs were lined up by the rail like spectators at a sporting event. They were all facing north and holding field glasses to their eyes.

Betty unstrapped her own binoculars and put them in his hand. “Mr. Butler, I’m so sorry you missed the evening bat races. But if you look real quick, you can still see some of the losers.”

He followed the point of her finger to the triangular peak of Augusta Trebec’s house above the distant trees. He focussed the twin lenses on the tiny silhouettes of three bats flying upward from the roof. They were backlit by clouds which had lost all their color after sundown.

“Now look across the square, above the sheriff’s office,” said Betty, speaking to the larger audience and directing them to the south side of the municipal building. All heads turned in unison. “You see that light that just came on? See the bars on the window? That’s where they keep the woman who murdered Babe Laurie, though that’s not her window. Hers faces the alley between the sheriff’s office and the fire department.” She tapped Charles on the shoulder, speaking only to him. “You can see a real good likeness of her in the cemetery tomorrow morning – if you want to take the tour with the other guests. It’s included in the cost of your room.”

Charles was so startled, he only caught the odd word in Betty Hale’s ongoing monologue of breakfast and checkout times. This was even more inconceivable than the murder charge – Mallory had become a tourist attraction.

He slumped low in his chair, and stared at the window above the sheriff’s office.

So there you are. So close.

He remained on the porch long after the other guests had retired to their rooms, or gone off in search of evening meals with Betty’s advice on local cuisine. Long after nightfall, when the house lights had gone out, he was still sitting in the same chair, fixated on the light in the window across the square, until that too flickered out.

Good night, Mallory.