Fallam's Secret

by Denise Giardina

  He was just as adamant about the house called Soane’s Croft, but when Lydde was laundering his shirts she found a ticket stub for admittance to the place in his breast pocket. She said nothing. At Heathrow she promised him she would come back—home, he insisted she call it—when her contract with Norchester Rep was done. Eight months, Lydde said.

  It was too long to wait. Three weeks later Aunt Lavinia called. She had found Uncle John slumped over his desk, dead from a heart attack.

  Chapter 3

  Lydde Falling

  UNCLE JOHN’S DEATH set Lydde in motion. It was past time, she decided, to return to West Virginia. He had wanted her there to show her something important, and now it was too late. But there was still Aunt Lavinia. And the mystery with which Uncle John had tantalized her might still be able to be discovered. She was done with England anyway. Two years in Norchester had cost her close contact with London friends, and she’d made few new ones in the small town. So she resigned her position, sold her London flat for a tidy sum, and headed home.

  Aunt Lavinia met Lydde at the Charleston airport. She seemed little changed, her hair iron-gray and styled the way she’d always had it, parted at the side and worn straight to the bottom of her ears. She had a long nose, high cheekbones, and a broad mouth—more English than the English, Uncle John used to say. She had on a blue cotton knit skirt and striped seersucker blouse, since she never wore pants unless she was working in the garden.

  She immediately turned the car over to Lydde, saying driving was beginning to be a strain at her age. It was a bit of a mistake, since Lydde had been driving on the left side of the road so long, but she got them back home with only a few minor scares. Lydde was jet-lagged, but she wanted to see Uncle John’s grave before she went to Roundbottom Farm. She was afraid otherwise she would be expecting him to be waiting at the door. He was buried in the community cemetery on the outskirts of Lafayette, although Aunt Lavinia was waiting for Lydde’s return before holding a memorial service. Lydde had thought Aunt Lavinia might have had Uncle John cremated. But Aunt Lavinia was uncomfortable with cremation, seeing it as a foreign and somewhat disreputable practice. Besides, she said, there were the terrible memories of fire.

  Aunt Lavinia had marked the grave with a bronze plaque provided by the U.S. Army for deceased veterans, rather than a granite headstone. A built-in vase held an arrangement of plastic roses. Beside Uncle John’s name and dates—John Thomas Cabell, born June 6, 1924, died April 17, 2001—she’d had her own name added—Lavinia Alice Henley Cabell, born November 14, 1925 and a space for the date of death.

  “I’ll be beside him when my time comes,” said Aunt Lavinia. “And of course your mother is right over here.” She gestured to the nearest grave. Margaret Cabell Falcone, May 10, 1917–December 24, 1948. “You remember, we used to bring you here on Memorial Day.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “There’s plenty of room,” Aunt Lavinia said. “You could be here too someday. A regular family plot.”

  Lydde shuddered visibly.

  “Not that it will be anytime soon,” Aunt Lavinia hastened to add.

  But it wasn’t the thought of her own death that had given Lydde a start. At age fifty-five she was acknowledging that she was on the downhill path, that what once seemed unimaginable was now unavoidable though hopefully postponable. No, what she found disquieting was the idea of a family plot with most of the family missing. Her father had, strangely enough, left a will in his motel room in Las Vegas, spelling out his express desire to be cremated and scattered to the desert wind. And her brothers and sisters? Carlo Falcone had steadfastly refused to consider the possibility of their deaths and had dared Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia to put up a memorial stone.

  The cemetery left Lydde sad and exhausted. She turned the wheel back over to Aunt Lavinia for the drive to Roundbottom Farm.

  “I suppose I should show you what they’ve done to the mountains,” Aunt Lavinia said when they were within a mile of home.

  Lydde glanced fearfully out the window, but she couldn’t tell what Aunt Lavinia was talking about. Walls of mountain rose on all sides, sporting their late spring green. “It looks the same as always,” she said. Except, it occurred to her, they hadn’t passed any familiar houses for a while.

  “You can’t tell from the road,” said Aunt Lavinia. “They’re real careful about that. What you’re looking at is like those fake fronts of western towns they use for cowboy movies. Nothing behind. We could stop and—”

  “No,” Lydde said quickly. “Not today.” They passed the Mystery Hole, which now had a CLOSED sign in the parking lot. Lydde forced herself not to look to the right, where Montefalco had been. She wanted to lie down, turn her face to the wall, and cry herself to sleep.

  AT breakfast the next morning, Aunt Lavinia said, “You’ll want to see the study. I doubt if you’ll notice much different. I tried now and then to talk him into new furniture, or a nice painting for the wall, but he would never let me touch a thing.”

  Lydde stirred a bowl of granola. “Did he ever talk about his work? Since his retirement, I mean.”

  “Not much. He was working on a lot of calculations, I know that. But it’s all Greek to me.”

  Calculations. Lydde wouldn’t understand them either, no more than Aunt Lavinia. What could they have to do with her?

  “When he came to see me,” she said, “he hinted that he’d found out something he wanted to show me.”

  Aunt Lavinia sat down at the table and shook her head. “I wouldn’t know about that. To tell the truth, the last few days were very odd. You know I was in Arizona visiting Edith? When I got home he was back from England. But he was acting strange, very strange.”

  “What do you mean?” Lydde tried to recall Uncle John as she had left him at Heathrow. Subdued, but not strange.

  “To be honest,” said Aunt Lavinia, “I think he must have suffered a small stroke. You read about that, you know, and I expect it might happen to me too. Old people have them and don’t even know it sometimes. Physically he seemed fine, but he didn’t talk much. And when he did…” She hesitated. “You’ll think I’m the strange one,” she said.

  “No, go on.”

  “It’s just that he talked funny. Sort of halting, and not in complete sentences. Sometimes it sounded like he had an accent. He called me ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’ as if he were a Quaker or something. He had a look on his face like he had to concentrate hard to get the words out. And most of the time he’d just communicate with gestures, as though he knew he sounded odd and was hoping I wouldn’t notice. Plus he had a hard time understanding me. When I suggested he ought to go to the doctor and have his hearing checked, he just shook his head. But he did tell me he was having some chest pain, so I took him to Lafayette to Dr. Khan.

  “Actually, that’s something else that was odd. He refused to drive and he seemed terrified in the car. You know he always insisted on driving. Anyway, we found out John’s heart was in terrible shape. Dr. Khan couldn’t figure it out, it had deteriorated so suddenly. He scheduled surgery, but the next day John was gone. I didn’t even have a chance to tell you how sick he was.”

  “Is Dr. Khan a good doctor? You trust he didn’t miss something?”

  “Oh yes, he’s always been very dependable.” Aunt Lavinia started to clear away the dishes, but Lydde beat her to it. After she closed the dishwasher, Aunt Lavinia said, “Something else. Silly to talk about. But when I got back from Arizona he insisted on separate bedrooms. And all he ever wanted to do was watch television. He’d sit there for hours and stare at it.” Then she started to cry. “Of course, I shouldn’t talk about such things to you. But we had been very happy, in our way. And I felt like—like there was something wrong with me all of a sudden. Did he—did something happen over there in England?”

  “You mean—No, of course not! He was looking forward to seeing you again, I’m sure of it.”

  Aunt Lavinia had barely listened for an answer. “I know I’m old,” she
sobbed. “But so was he. It never seemed to matter before.”

  Lydde patted her hand awkwardly. “I’m sure it wasn’t that. Nothing happened in England, Aunt Lavinia. But he was very preoccupied, and he kept hinting at some kind of secret. I don’t think it had anything to do with you. I think he had something on his mind and I bet he was just wanting some privacy.”

  “He didn’t keep secrets from me,” Aunt Lavinia sniffed, dabbing at her nose with a napkin.

  Not true, Lydde thought. But she merely said, “He was still working it out when he died. Whatever it was.”

  LYDDE decided to spend the day in his study looking for “whatever it was.” She climbed the stairs with a mug of hot coffee and sat for a long time in his chair, watching dust motes floating in a shaft of light from the window. Trying to recall him, to send a message to him wherever he might be. Uncle John and Lydde used to speak of death when she was a child. He had a telescope he’d bought in Charleston and he would set it up in the lower yard and look at the stars. Lydde often tagged along, but frankly the telescope didn’t interest her. She preferred to lie on her back and soak in the starry expanse with her own eyes, to feel as though she were riding the earth through the air, like a captain lashed to the mast of his ship. Sometimes Uncle John would abandon the telescope and join her.

  “Is this what it feels like be on a ship in the ocean?” she asked once.

  “Yes,” he said, “it felt just like this when I crossed to Europe on the troop ship.”

  “Why are the stars so small?”

  “They’re not small, just a long ways off.”

  “Can a spaceship go there?”

  “Not yet. But we don’t have to wait for a spaceship to be invented. As soon as people die, they take off for the stars. Faster than any spaceship. And they can go anywhere they want, to the stars or across time.”

  Many people don’t approve of bringing up the subject of death to children. One of our culture’s hangups, Uncle John said. But he decided, given Lydde’s history, to acquaint her with his ideas on the subject. He didn’t want her to be afraid of death, he said, he wanted her to wonder and marvel at it.

  “Do we go to heaven when we die?” Lydde asked.

  He shook his head. “No. Heaven is just what people settled on because they don’t have enough imagination to think of anything else. We go to more than heaven. We go everywhere God is, and that means everywhere.”

  “Is that where my brothers and sisters are? Are they everywhere?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” He took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Don’t worry, Lydde. If that’s where they are, we’ll find them someday.”

  Sitting in his chair, she could almost imagine him holding her hand again. Is that where you are, Uncle John? she wondered. Are you everywhere? Lydde wished she had seen his body, as Aunt Lavinia had. Then she could know that the real Uncle John was no longer with them, that what was left was not him at all. As it was, he seemed as lost as her brothers and sisters.

  Lydde swiveled abruptly in the chair and began going through his drawers. Not much there except the usual odds and ends, envelopes and typing paper, thumbtacks, paper clips, a box of staples and a stapler. In the bottom drawer, though, she found a small red notebook which she removed and laid on the desk.

  It was bound with metal rings and filled with closely lined pages, many of them covered with calculations. She flipped through the pages, only half paying attention, until she came to a diagram at the back. Uncle John had superimposed a Chartres labyrinth over a topographic map of the Gorge. He had marked an X at a point on the map where the Mystery Hole stood—which coincided with the entrance of the labyrinth—and labeled it PORTAL I. Beneath that he’d added a mathematical formula of some kind.

  Whatever, Lydde thought, disappointed there was nothing else on the diagram. Then she turned and studied the wall behind her. The pictures and quotations were still there. But hanging by a nail beneath the Shakespeare quote was something she hadn’t seen before—two keys on a chain. One looked perfectly normal, small and coppery and bearing the name U.S. Lock. The other was large, nearly four inches long, and looked very old, like a movie prop. A piece of paper had been rolled like a cigarette and stuck through the handle of the large key. She removed the paper, actually a thick piece of parchment, and unrolled it carefully, for it seemed fragile, the edges somewhat discolored. It was written in a strange hand which was difficult to read, for some of the characters were oddly shaped. It took a while, but she finally deciphered most of it.

  Do not forget—secure keys in pocket go through red door past skeleton, GO ON heedless of fear chin down, try not to look over the edge of the cliff

  Lydde stared at the note, turned it over in her hands trying to fathom it.

  Skeleton? GO ON? And whose was this strange handwriting?

  She studied the gallery of frames hanging on the wall. The quotes from Arthur C. Clarke and William Shakespeare. The Dalí print. The litho of St. Pancras Church, Norchester, and Batts and Fallam. The photo of the Hawks Nest Tunnel.

  She tried to recall what she knew about the tunnel. A mile downriver from Roundbottom Farm, it had been blasted through lower Fallam Mountain so the New River could be rerouted for hydroelectric power. A strange idea, to take an entire river, an entire, ancient river, and send it tumbling down an artificial channel beneath an equally ancient mountain. It had been called the engineering feat of its time, which was 1931. Hundreds of men died in the drilling of it. That was all she knew. Probably something that upset Uncle John, that he wanted to memorialize.

  Back downstairs Lydde asked Aunt Lavinia, “Have you ever seen these keys before?”

  She studied them, handed them back. “The smaller one is the key to the Mystery Hole. I don’t know what the big one is.”

  “Did you get back from Arizona earlier than you expected?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” Aunt Lavinia answered. “Edith was getting on my nerves, and I was homesick for John. So I came on back.”

  LYDDE didn’t tell Aunt Lavinia about the note. She wanted to do some exploring herself before she worried her aunt with it. Instead she offered to drive Lavinia into town for Saturday morning altar guild duties at All Saints Episcopal Church.

  Aunt Lavinia chatted the whole way, pleased to have Lydde along. “You remember All Saints? Where we took you when you were a girl?” As if decades abroad had wiped clean Lydde’s memory of her childhood. Of course I remember, Lydde assured her. She parked the car, and while Aunt Lavinia went inside to her chores—washing and polishing the chalice and paten, arranging the table with fresh altar hangings, setting out flagons of wine and water for the early Sunday service—Lydde walked around the little town, reacquainting herself. Lafayette perched on the rim of the New River Gorge, away from the mining on the other end of the county, still as green and pretty as Lydde remembered. It was an old town with a stone courthouse built in 1844, a square of brick buildings and quiet streets of Victorian gingerbread houses with turrets and bay windows. But much had changed. When Lydde had gone to high school there, the buildings on the square housed a dime store, hardware and clothing and shoe stores, a movie theater. Those were all gone, run out of business by a Wal-Mart and multiplex on the four-lane highway south of town. But few of the storefronts were empty. Now there were outdoor outfitters selling tents and sleeping bags, bicycle and canoe rentals, a combination book and health food store, restaurants and gift shops with hand-made wooden signs. Some of the Victorian homes now advertised as bed and breakfasts. The movie theater had become the New River Opry House, home of live music and community theater. All in all, Lydde approved, and thought she might want to look into buying a place in town after she had her bearings.

  After a cup of coffee and a bagel (bagels in Lafayette!) Lydde returned to All Saints. The church was three streets from the courthouse square, with only its own back garden and a low stone wall separating it from the edge of the Gorge. Several large poplars hovered over the church, but unl
ike similar settings in England, there were no graves. Lydde did, however, notice something new, a plaque engraved with the names of people whose ashes had been scattered in the garden. She knew at once that was where Uncle John would have wanted to be, but she resolved not to mention it to Aunt Lavinia for fear of hurting her feelings. She slipped through the front door, painted the traditional bright red of Episcopal churches, and settled in a back pew. The three women who comprised the altar guild were finishing their tasks, arranging flowers and candles, replacing the numbers on the hymn board.

  It was a lovely little sanctuary, a copy of English country churches but looking more prosperous than the originals. The roof had richly burnished oak beams, and the stained glass glowed in the morning light from northeast of the Gorge. When Aunt Lavinia joined her at the back, Lydde asked, “Who’s the priest now?”

  “We’re too small to call our own priest,” Aunt Lavinia said, “so we’ll have a vicar appointed by the diocese. Our last one got married and moved away, so we’re in between.”

  “Where’d he go?” Lydde asked lazily.

  “She went to Wheeling,” Aunt Lavinia replied primly. “Really, Lydde, you’re behind the times.”

  ON the way home Lydde said, “I want to see the mountains now. Or what’s left.”

  Aunt Lavinia pressed her lips together and nodded. When they were close to the Mystery Hole she said, “Take the Old Road down into the gorge and cross to that overlook on Gauley that John used to like so much.”

  The Old Road had once been the only way to Charleston, before the four-lane highway—still new to Lydde—went in. They wound down hairpin curves to the river, crossed on a new concrete bridge, and climbed the other side of the gorge on Gauley Mountain to the wide shoulder where Uncle John had liked to stop and “rest my eyes.”