The Girl in the Glass

SHE'S A CON

The air in the Bugatorium was very still that night, moths splayed out on the walls and butterflies closed tight on branches and stems. Only one two-tailed swallowtail drifted in circles up near the skylight.

"I'm sorry we never got to Barnes before his daughter disappeared," said Schell. "He and his wife are true believers. They've had spiritualists, cold readers, psychics, in their parlor. The missus claims to be an adept at the technique of automatic writing. The house is littered with talismans and volumes on the occult. We could have made a small fortune on them."

"How's Barnes strike you?" asked Antony, setting his wineglass down on the table.

"I have to question either the intelligence or sanity of anyone who goes in for the mystical to the extent he does, but otherwise he seemed a man distraught at the loss of his daughter. He showed me around the garden from which she was taken and then had to leave to attend to some business. After that, his wife did the honors. She's very quiet and clearly heartbroken."

"Well," said Antony, "anyone who can make the kind of money he does legally can't be completely stupid."

"Did you find anything in the garden?" I asked.

Schell shook his head. "Nothing there. We went through the entire house. Of course, I had to stop every now and then and make believe I was picking up an impression from the country of spirits-a shiver, a nod, a gasp. It was a pitiful thing to see the expectation bloom in the eyes of Mrs. Barnes and then wilt again when I had nothing substantial to offer."

"This whole thing gives me the creeps," I said.

"The charity angle, the fact that we're trying to do something real, has me all bollixed too," said Antony, nodding.

"Either of you can back out if you'd like," said Schell. "For me, I have no choice but to continue until there's nowhere left to turn or I've found the girl."

"Yeah, yeah, Johnny, save it," said Antony. "What did you find?"

Schell laughed. "I met the staff, questioned them a little, but detected no signs of dissembling. Then Mrs. Barnes led me to her daughter's room. It's on the first floor with a huge bay window, and has a view of the grounds at the back of the house. A lovely room for a child-dolls, a dollhouse, a canopied bed, rocking horse, just beautiful.

"I looked around, but found nothing remarkable until I got to a desk in the corner and began going through a stack of drawings Charlotte had made. It was the first time I got a sense of the child as a person and not merely an image. Mrs. Barnes told me that in the days prior to her disappearance, her daughter had complained about seeing a ghost at night walking the grounds, staring in her window. She'd cried out in the middle of the night two evenings before she was abducted, and Mrs. Barnes remembered going to her room."

"Did the mother see anything?" I asked.

"No, but the girl did three pastel drawings during that time, trying to capture what she'd seen. A male form, glowing in the night, head like a big white potato, and crystal blue eyes. In one, it crouches in the bushes, in another it's back by the tree line. The last is the most startling because it's a full-on portrait of the face at the window. As Mrs. Barnes attested, the child was a wonderful little artist and drew quite often."

"What kid doesn't see things in the dark, though?" said Antony.

"Maybe somebody was casing the place at night," I said.

"I thought both these things myself," said Schell. "Some of the girl's other drawings hung on the walls of her room-portraits of her parents, her kitten, and the like. I would say she had a knack more for realistic depiction than for fantastic imagining. Also, Barnes has two night watchmen who patrol the grounds, and a guard at the front gate."

"Did the mother seem to think there was a connection between the drawings and Charlotte's disappearance?" I asked.

"In the Barneses' view everything has some kind of supernatural connection," said Schell. "But she was visibly rattled by the drawings. She didn't use the word ghost when talking about them. The term she used was 'dybbuk.'"

"What the hell's that?" asked Antony.

"I don't know," said Schell, "but she used it in a way that indicated she expected me to understand. Not to shake her confidence in me, I simply nodded as if I did."

Antony lifted his wineglass and drained it. "What do you say, Boss, can I have a cigarette in here?"

"No," said Schell.

"Okay, I'm just gonna lip one." He took a cigarette out and held it in his mouth without lighting it. "The whole deal's screwy, and the one thing that makes no sense at all is that there's been no ransom demand."

"We don't know enough about Barnes," I said. "He might have enemies."

"We don't know enough about a lot of things," said Schell. "I got that list of names from him of people who had visited the house in the last month." He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

"Anything stand out?" asked Antony.

Schell unfolded the paper and scanned it up and down. "It looks like mostly society women, and five or six men's names. Our friend, Mr. Parks, is among them. I'll start looking into them tomorrow while you two are driving Lydia Hush around."

"Did you find out how Miss Hush came to the Barneses' attention?" I asked.

"All Mrs. Barnes would tell me was that she showed up at the mansion two days after the girl disappeared, suggesting she might be able to help. Hush instantly convinced Barnes's wife of her abilities by revealing things about the family's personal life. That's it. I didn't want to seem too nosy on that score."

"I think Antony's fallen for her," I said.

The big man looked over at me and slowly shook his head.

"She's a con," said Schell. "She's a con and a lousy con at that."

"You think she might be involved in the girl's abduction?" I asked.

"I considered it," said Schell, "but basically I think she's just making hay while the sun shines, so to speak."

After a long pause in the conversation, Antony said, "I'm going to go have a smoke in the kitchen and then turn in. I've got a long day tomorrow with junior G-man, here, and Madame Snowflake."

We wished Antony a good night, and then Schell leaned back and closed his eyes, as if he was trying to figure out how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together. The whole thing was too confusing for me to sort out. I let my mind wander, first thinking about Lydia Hush putting her hand on my shoulder, then about her singing at lunch. Somehow these thoughts bled into a memory of Isabel and the night we sat on the boulder by the sound. I wanted to see her again.

The next thing I knew, Schell's eyes were partially open, and he was staring at the yellow and black flutter of the two-tailed swallowtail hovering above the table between us. He smiled wearily, and said, "The Aztecs called that specimen Xochiquetzal, which means 'precious flower.' There was a goddess who followed warriors into battle, and when they were mortally wounded and lay dying, she'd copulate with them while holding one of those swallowtails in her mouth."

"I remember my mother telling me that mariposas were the souls of the dead," I said.

"Do you think about Mexico often?" asked Schell.

"I didn't till I met Isabel," I said. "Now I'm starting to see pieces of it in my dreams. I'm remembering little bits and pieces. Funny thing is, I was just thinking about her when you mentioned the Aztecs."

"Maybe we need to take a trip back there for you to remember," he said. He turned his left hand over, and there was a bridge deck in it. Where it had come from, I'm not sure. As he began manipulating the cards, he said, "Maybe it was wrong of me to want you to forget Mexico, but I did. I thought if you carried it around your whole life, it would weigh you down with sorrow for all the things that had happened."

I smiled, not wanting to trouble him, and waved my hand. "I'd say I've been pretty lucky."

"I wonder if," said Schell, "when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly"-here, he fanned open the deck-and gains the ability to fly, it remembers what it was like to be a caterpillar?"

"It's probably just happy to be free," I said.

"Or," said Schell, closing the deck, "perhaps all of its restless movement from blossom to blossom is merely an attempt to return to and regain its caterpillar nature." He raised his eyebrows and then shrugged.

While continuing to work the deck, now with both hands, Schell eventually closed his eyes again, returning to his thoughts. His musings struck me at first as insightful and profound, but the longer I sat there the more something bothered me about what he'd said. I couldn't precisely put my finger on it, but it had to do with his equating Mexico with a caterpillar.