Ivory Apples

by Lisa Goldstein

  “That was pretty dicey, having you kids turn up just then,” he said. “You almost gave the game away.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “What game? Weren’t you talking about business?”

  “A kind of business.”

  I started to get up. “If you’re not going to tell me anything . . .”

  “Sit down. You said there was a reward.”

  I sat again and got twenty dollars from my purse. “Oh, it’s worth more than that,” he said, taking the money.

  “Tell me what it is and I’ll see.”

  He scowled. “And I just have to trust you, is that it? All right, here it is, what I was doing for your friend Kate. I’m a forger. I was forging things.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Do I have to spell it out? I was forging signatures on a will. Your father’s will, I gather.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I thought you’d like that. She’d gotten his will somehow and copied it, except she’d changed a few things. And then she needed—”

  “Wait—what?”

  “She needed your father’s signature, and she hired me to do that.”

  “You mean I was right—the will was a forgery? We should have gone to Uncle Len after all?”

  He held up his hands, palms facing me. “Jeez, calm down. I was just doing a job.”

  “And we had to spend all those awful years with her, and now I don’t know where my sisters are, she lost them somehow, and it was all because of you?”

  “Hold on, hold on. She just wanted a small bequest from your father—she told me right up front that she wasn’t going to take everything he had.”

  He hadn’t understood anything I’d said, or hadn’t been listening. “She was lying to you. I’ll tell you what she did, why she changed the will. She made herself our guardian.”

  He laughed.

  “Right, very funny,” I said.

  “Sorry. It’s funny if you know her. She would have made a terrible guardian.”

  “What do you mean, would have? She was terrible at it.”

  “But I thought—well, your father was pretty young, wasn’t he? I saw him that night at the restaurant. Did he—did he die?”

  “Yeah. And she was worse than you could possibly imagine.”

  “But why did she want to be your guardian?” Ned asked. “She hated the idea of settling down, of having a family.”

  “She wanted to know something about us.”

  “What?”

  “Like I’d tell you.”

  “Okay, fair enough. She always did have some weird angle going.”

  His revelation had blown apart a lot of what I thought I know, and I was still sorting out the debris in my head. She had been sneaking around our house—she’d even gotten into Philip’s bedroom, into his computer files. “What did you get out of all of this?” I asked Ned. “How much did she pay you?”

  “Well, that’s a funny thing.” He wasn’t laughing this time, though. “She paid me the first half, five thousand dollars, but not the second. She said she hadn’t gotten what she wanted yet. And I can’t, you know, go to the police about it.”

  “So that’s why you’re telling me all of this. Because she didn’t give you what she promised.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, sounding surprised that there might be any other reason.

  “Where did you get those witnesses?”

  “On the will? I just made them up. The signatures were pretty illegible, in case anyone wanted to track them down.”

  I thought about what he’d told me, trying to work out when and how everything had happened. We’d seen Ned at the restaurant just after Ms. Burden had gotten back from her trip. “Were you the one who went to Europe with her?”

  “One of your sisters already asked me that, Cuisinart or somebody. She went to Europe alone, actually.”

  “No, she said—oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. She lies a lot. You might have gathered that.”

  “So why did she go? Do you know?”

  He laughed again. “Yeah, I do. You know she’s crazy, right?”

  I didn’t much like the word “crazy,” maybe because people had used it about me. I just nodded, hoping he’d continue.

  “She has this idea about muses. You know what a muse is?”

  Piper laughed soundlessly within me. I nodded again.

  “Well, she thinks you can, I don’t know, capture one somehow. That’s why she was so interested in your family, because for some reason she thought you had one. And I bet that’s what she was asking you about—where it was, if she could see it, something like that.”

  I said nothing. It alarmed me that he had gotten this close, though.

  “Anyway, like you said, you never told her anything. Finally she got so frustrated she decided give up on you and try to find one herself. They’re supposed to live in Greece, mostly, on mountaintops. So she went off to Europe, to all kinds of mountains, Olympus and Parnassus and another one called—called Mount Hell-I-Can, or something like that. That didn’t work out so well, though, big surprise, so when she came back she asked me to forge those signatures.”

  He paused. “You know, it’s weird. Something happened in Europe. She seemed worried when she got back, or scared, maybe. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, though.”

  “How’d she find you in the first place, though? I mean, how do you go about getting a forger?”

  “We worked at a bank together.”

  The bank he named was very familiar. It was the same one that Maeve and I used, that Philip had used. The last piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place with a satisfying click. Ms. Burden had seen Maeve’s account at the bank, had seen checks that were made out to Adela Madden and deposited by Philip Quinn, and then money withdrawn by Maeve Reynolds. For an Adela Madden fan it would have been like finding the Holy Grail, or an ivory apple.

  She’d known Maeve’s name all along, then. The address on the account had been Philip’s, though, which was why she’d attached herself to us—she still needed to find out where Maeve lived.

  “Funny thing,” he said. “We were both fired around the same time. She’d looked up confidential information about one of the bank’s clients, your family probably. And I’d forged a few signatures, people who never looked at their bank statements from one year to the next. People with enough money for everyone in Oregon, so you’d think they wouldn’t miss a few dollars here or there. Anyway, we got together after we left.”

  “Why didn’t the bank have you arrested?”

  “They did, actually. I got a year inside. And of course they never gave me a recommendation.”

  “You could forge one,” I said, half sarcastically.

  “I did. But human resources departments don’t trust letters for some reason—they want to talk to actual people these days. So that’s why you find me here, in these illustrious circumstances. And now I suppose I won’t get that reward you promised.”

  I didn’t want to give it to him, of course. He’d ruined years of my life. Still, I had promised. And, as he said, he hadn’t known what she was doing.

  On the other hand, if I gave him money I’d be rewarding a criminal. But there was still another hand, which was that no one ever lived a perfectly blameless life. I’d stolen things too, though not out of greed as Ned had. And there was that woman in the bar, the one who had been sober for ten months, and whose glass we had exchanged for something alcoholic. I still thought of her sometimes, of the way she’d nearly fallen off her stool at the end.

  I could feel Piper objecting, but I ignored him. I opened my purse. How much did you give the man who had destroyed a part of your life?

  In the end I gave him thirty dollars more, hoping he’d think of it as an incentive. “Let me know if you see her again, or hear from her,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d do the same for me? She still owes me money, you know.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d testify again
st her, tell the police you’d forged the will?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay, then,” I said.

  CHAPTER 17

  A FEW DAYS LATER I went back to my old house and looked around again, but nothing seemed to have changed. I’d come prepared with a few large shopping bags, and I packed away our birth certificates and other important documents.

  As I was leaving, locking the front door, someone behind me called out: “Hey, can I talk to you?”

  I turned quickly. It was the blond man, the one I’d thought had been following me on the streets. Now he was standing on the front path to the house. I looked left and right, but the lawn was too overgrown to escape through.

  “I just want to ask a few questions,” he said. “I promise.”

  Ms. Burden had promised things too. Still, I thought, I might as well talk to him, as long as I took precautions. Maybe he could tell me where she was, what she was doing.

  “Okay,” I said. “But out in public somewhere. A coffeeshop or something.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  We went to a place where I used to go with my family. The moment we walked in I realized I should have picked somewhere else. I was surrounded by old memories: the first time Philip let me have a taste of hard cider, the time Beatriz had fallen and knocked out two of her baby teeth.

  We got coffee and found a table, and I settled all my shopping bags around me like a bag lady. “So,” I said. I was determined to go first, to take the advantage and keep it. “Where is she?”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Who do you think? Your friend, Ms. Burden.”

  He looked puzzled at that. “She isn’t my friend. In fact, I’m looking for her too.”

  “What? Why? Who are you?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Oh, no—you first,” I said. “You’re the one who wants something from me. And why do you look so familiar? Where do I know you from?”

  “Very well. You don’t know me, not really.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then why do I—”

  “It’s your muse. He recognizes mine.”

  I sat back. All the advantage had passed to him effortlessly, as if he’d won a chess match while I was still admiring the pieces. “They—they can do that?”

  He nodded.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Let me tell it, all right? You can ask questions later. I’m Craig.”

  “Ivy.”

  “Well, then. I met Ms. Burden, Kate, in Greece. This was—let’s see—I think five years ago. I was at a hotel in Athens, and we were the only people eating breakfast by ourselves, so we started talking. There was a lot of back and forth, each of us feeling the other out, but finally she told me why she was there. She’d rented a car and was going to drive to Mount Helicon and make an offering to the muses.”

  “An—an offering?”

  “Yeah. Some people think that helps, that they’ll pay more attention to you if you give them something.”

  “But—I never did that with Piper. I didn’t even know about the muses then, about what they do. He just slammed into me, took over my life. Anyway, I don’t think they’re interested in things, in objects.”

  “Yeah, I never gave Alonzo anything either. They just—they feel a kinship with some people. I think that whole offering thing is something people tell themselves, a way of making them think they’re in control.”

  The idea of kinship warmed me, made me feel closer to Piper. And I could sense Piper grinning within me as well.

  “Anyway, there was something odd about her,” Craig went on. “Maybe it was that she’d brought an offering, that she didn’t seem to have faith in herself as a candidate. Or maybe Alonzo had picked up some strangeness.

  “I’d visited Mount Helicon before, and I’d met a muse named Claudio. He told me he’d lived there a long time, and that hundreds of years ago he’d fallen in love with another muse named Talia. She was very powerful, more than any muse he’d ever seen or heard of, and, well . . . I know this is fanciful, but the original Greek muses were supposed to live on Mount Helicon, nine of them, the inspirations for poetry and art and history. And I wondered if she could be one of the Nine, Thalia, the muse of comedy and idyllic poetry. It would explain the way he described her, his feelings toward her. A fire in the shape of a woman, he called her.

  “They aren’t monogamous—well, they can’t be, they go wherever their fancy takes them. But these two stayed together for a long time, even by their own count.

  “Claudio was old and powerful in his own right, and the others listened to the two of them and went to them for advice. They weren’t what we would call leaders, though—they don’t allow anyone to rule over them, or to give them orders.

  “Then someone came to the grove, and Talia accepted him, took possession of him. They can’t leave without a person, they have to stay where they are until someone comes to petition them. But when they go they can take others with them. Talia’s new person wanted to go back to his home in Oregon.

  “So Talia asked Claudio to come with her, but he said no, that he’d started a dalliance with someone else. Talia left without him, and others went with her, enough to found a new grove over here. Didn’t you ever wonder how they came to be in this obscure spot in Oregon?”

  I shook my head.

  “Some years later, fifty or a hundred or so, Claudio began to think about Talia again. All he knew was that she’d gone to Oregon, and that it had been long enough that the person she’d left with was probably dead. He waited for someone to come to the grove and petition him so that he could leave, but the world had changed in those years and people had forgotten the muses.

  “Then I met Kate in Greece. And Kate was from Oregon, coincidentally. Well, not so coincidentally, as I found out later.

  “Kate left for the grove the next morning, early, so I didn’t see her go. I waited for her that evening so I could hear how it went, but she didn’t come back. I asked at the reception desk, and they told me that she’d called to check out.

  “So the next day I rented a car and drove to Mount Helicon. It takes about two hours to get there, and then you park in the village of Agia Anna and hike up the east side of the mountain. You go through these old trees, big shaggy firs, and then you follow the trail to the Valley of the Muses—the real one, not the one the tourists go to. There’s a spring there, flowing into a pool, and near it—well, it looks like an old brick building, a shed, but it’s really a temple to the original Muses. It’s been there in some form or another for thousands of years.

  “I looked around for Claudio, to ask him what had happened with Kate. But he wasn’t at the grove, and a lot of the others were gone as well. The ones who had stayed seemed frightened about something, so it took a while before they calmed down enough to talk to me.

  “Kate had gone to see them, but none of them thought she was a worthy candidate, none of them wanted to leave with her. She started talking to them, asking them to become her muse, even begging them. But still none of them would accept her.

  “She got angry at that. She started yelling, ordering them to come with her. The muses I talked to had become bored by then and wandered off, but Claudio and some of the others stayed.

  “Some of them saw Kate say something, but they were too far away to hear what it was. The ones closest to her—well, something happened to them. She spoke to them and raised her arms, and they came up out of the lake and went toward her. Then they disappeared, or that’s what it looked like, but the ones I talked to said they could still sense them around her, like a cloud. They said it looked as if she had put them under a spell, or trapped them somehow. They became terrified of her, of what she could do, and they ran away. So they didn’t see where Claudio and the others went, where Kate had taken them.

  “The next day I flew to Oregon. And then, well, I just traveled around the state. I saw you downtown and my muse called to yours, but I didn’t know you had anything to do with Kate. Finally I ch
ecked the property records and found out that Kate owned a house. But when I went there it was empty—she’d already moved on.”

  Kate had gone to Europe in early 2000, and it was now January, 2005. “You spent five years looking for her?”

  “Well, I did other things too. But I didn’t like the idea of Claudio and the others being forced to do Kate’s bidding. They’d given me so much, all this talent and ability, I might as well do something for them. And they made me independently wealthy, so I can afford to do it.”

  He didn’t look wealthy; in fact I’d thought him another street person when I’d seen him before. He wore faded jeans and running shoes, and an old T-shirt with the words “Gogol Bordello” on it, which I guessed was a band.

  I wanted to ask him what they’d given him, how he’d become wealthy. I was starting to understand that whatever joys poetry gave me, it wouldn’t help much in earning a living. But I didn’t want to interrupt his story.

  “Another thing I learned from the muses was that Kate had left the offering she’d brought them, and they took it out to show me. I thought—well, I thought it was a ball at first, a white ball. But really what it was—”

  I looked up sharply. “Do you know what I’m talking about?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I’ll tell you later,” I said.

  “Anyway, it was an apple, a white apple. They liked the gift, I think, but they still wouldn’t accept her.

  “How did she trap them, do you know?”

  “I don’t, unfortunately. There have always been stories about people coercing the muses, making them do their bidding. One of those stories says something about ‘turning them inside-out.’ I don’t know what that means, but I don’t like the sound of it.”

  I didn’t either—and I could feel Piper curling up in fear within me. “Did they tell you all of that? The ones you talked to in Greece?”