The Lace Reader

by Brunonia Barry

  I am still leaning forward. I can’t seem to right myself. A splitting pain cuts my head in two. The pounding of fever. A chill runs down my arms and legs.

  As I struggle to stand up, I spot the Italian silk.

  Cal is standing close enough to touch. His lips are moving, but no sound comes out. He is praying.

  When he finally speaks aloud, it is a bellow. “Lord save this girl from the fires of hell.” He raises his hands to heaven. His eyes stay on me, tracking every movement and twitch of muscle, the way I’ve seen the dogs do when they hunt their prey.

  I am frozen.

  He begins to speak again, but the words are indiscernible. He is speaking in tongues.

  I am hallucinating. I must be.

  But then the smell hits me. A memory sense. I know his smell. It is sickening.

  I look for the dogs. This is the time they should start to appear. To help me. To kill him. This is the dream.

  But even as I wish for it, I know that this is no dream. There are no dogs. This is what Rafferty warned me about.

  I feel myself going under, losing consciousness. I dig the key into my palm, and the hard metal wakes me up. The key…the door. I gauge the distance. I start to run.

  Cal follows.

  I can feel him behind me. Closing in.

  I struggle with the key. Finally get it into the lock when he grabs me.

  He is shaking me. Imploring devils to come out. “Kneel and pray!” he demands. “Kneel and pray with me!” He tries to push me down, but I manage to stay upright.

  “Who are you, demon?” he bellows. “Name yourself!” His eyes glow yellow.

  I push the door hard, and it gives way. The portal opens, and I move into another world, Eva’s world.

  The loose hinge shifts the weight of the door, and Cal falters. I push the door against him, closing it.

  “Jesus died for your sins!” he screams at me. “Jesus died for you!”

  I can hear him through the broken bull’s-eye of glass, still, imploring, demanding the demons to depart. “Kneel and pray!”

  He reaches through the cut glass, grabs a fistful of hair, and pulls my head back, slamming it against the door.

  “Demon, depart!” he yells, smashing my head hard enough to drive them out. I feel a piece of glass slice my scalp.

  Sparks ring around my vision. We are inches apart through the shards of the glass, the same glass I broke the first night I came here.

  He is trying to kill me. He is trying to save me.

  “I died for you.” It isn’t Cal’s voice now. It is Eva’s. It wakes me up.

  “Kneel and pray,” he demands once again, and this time I obey, grabbing his hand in mine as I drop to my knees, forcing his wrist down on the broken glass.

  His screech is like a wounded animal’s.

  It stops time.

  “Run for your life,” I hear Eva say.

  I run for the phone, dial 911.

  I yell for Rafferty, and then I drop the phone, severing my connection to everything that is real.

  PART THREE

  Hold the lace to the visage. If the person you are reading is unavailable or has passed on, some belongings or even a photograph of the person will sometimes do—though the life-force is always more powerful than any rendered image.

  —THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

  ITEMS REMOVED FROM CRIME SCENE

  Two matching red journals with red leather covers

  First journal: “The Lace Reader’s Guide” by Eva. Contains lace readings, recipes, daily observations. Appears to be primarily a manual for telling fortunes by reading lace.

  Second journal: Written by Towner in 1981 and used in psychiatric treatment as some kind of therapy. Contains one short story, which appears to have at least some basis in real events. The story continues by way of dated journal entries. Some speculation about events as fictional; the journal was part of a creative-writing class for inpatients sponsored by McLean Psychiatric Hospital in 1980. Further study is needed to determine if any of this material can be used as evidence against Calvin Boynton in either case.

  1981 McLean Hospital, Creative Writing

  FLASHLIGHT TAG BY TOWNER WHITNEY

  We played every summer, sometimes two and three times a week, but never before Lyndley arrived from their home in Florida, which was sometime between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. They never called ahead, not even ship-to-shore, and when they finally came into port, it was always under full sail, and the kids from the mainland and the outer islands took it as a sign that the games were about to begin.

  May had an “open-door policy” when it came to the game, and when we first started, before it got so competitive, she actually played it with us a few times. This was partly because Beezer wanted to play and didn’t want to be the one “left standing,” as we called it then, so she used to play with him as a team to kind of even things out. We allowed it only because Beezer was so little and because when you scared him, he had the greatest scream/laugh. It was a silent scream, and his face contorted like something out of a horror film; when he inhaled, he hooted like an owl, partly due to his asthma and partly because he was the funniest kid in the world. When you heard his hoots, you couldn’t help giggling (no matter where you were hiding), so it often worked in his favor. He might be scared by one person running in, then flush three other players out of their hiding places just by laughing like that. As he got older, it became a tactic, and when he’d get close to where he thought you were hiding, he’d actually turn the flashlight off and sneak up and just hoot at you until you were laughing so hard you couldn’t run in and save yourself.

  The rules of flashlight tag are simple. I’m sure you know them. It’s basically a variation of hide-and-seek, except that it’s played in the dark and the only light allowed is the flashlight you get to carry when you’re “it.” When we first started playing, all you had to do to win was find a person who was hiding, tag whoever it was with the beam of the flashlight, and then, also with the beam, tag the big old oak tree, which was always “home.”

  But that got old fast, because really it was too easy for the person who was “it.” All that person really had to do was to turn off the light and wait by the tree until people started to run in, then turn on the flashlight and tag them out. What ended up happening was that no one took a chance and ran in, so one round of the game could go on for hours, until everyone got tired of it and went home, leaving whoever was “it” out there alone for hours in the dark. That’s what we referred to as “left standing.” When you were the one left there all by yourself, it was pretty bad. It was crazy-making. You couldn’t tell if everyone was just hiding really well or if you were all alone on the middle of the island with the seagulls starting to talk to you and saying your name like they always do if you’re alone with them for too long. You’d end up sitting endlessly with your back against a tree, scared shitless, too afraid to move. Once I actually stayed out all night when it happened to me, but I got in real trouble, because May caught me sneaking in at dawn and decided we had to put an end to the left-standing thing.

  “Why can’t you just play like normal children?” she asked Lyndley and me when she started speaking to us again, which was sometime the following afternoon. I remember Lyndley bursting out laughing when she asked that, and it was such a ridiculous question that even May had to smile a little, although you could tell she was trying hard not to. But she ordered us to either change the game or stop playing. Those were our choices.

  So we changed the game. And the change made it better. We made the game more difficult. Like in regular hide-and-seek, when you found someone, you had to race that kid home. It worked much better that way. It became more competitive. It was about this time that the other kids started coming to play the game with us. Lyndley told one townie kid about it, and Beezer told a kid he sailed with on Baker’s Island.

  Word spread. At the game’s peak, we played four or five times a week from the Fourth of July unti
l Labor Day weekend. We didn’t stop doing the left-standing thing, though; it just evolved into something else. We modified it. Instead of a tactic, it became a rite of initiation. Every time a new kid joined the game, it was an unwritten rule that the new kid would be “it” for the last round of the game. Sometimes we had to quit earlier than we would have liked, just to make it happen. Other times we would run in early and tell where the new kid was hiding so he could be tagged out for the next round. Then the new kid, the new “it,” would face the oak tree and count to a hundred. While he was counting, the game ended and we all went home. We left the new kid standing there until he either figured it out or got freaked out when it had gone on way too long and he was starting to think the worst—that maybe there was some killer out there who was picking us off one by one or that we’d been taken away in a flying saucer or something. Seldom did it occur to anyone that we had simply gone home. That wasn’t something kids ever did, at least not voluntarily. But eventually they caught on to the joke, the betrayal. If the kid came back after that, if he came back for more, he was one of us. If not, we figured it was no great loss. No one ever mentioned the dirty trick. It was our unwritten rule, our rite of passage.

  And, of course, it almost goes without saying that we had a “no wimp” policy. If you got scared or hurt, you’d better keep it to yourself. One time a kid from one of the other islands fell into a rabbit hole and sprained his ankle. He was such a trouper that he didn’t even complain about it and played the rest of the game, even though his slowness running in made him the object of great ridicule. Better that than admit a weakness, because if you did, you wouldn’t be asked back. As it turned out, that kid was on crutches most of the summer and couldn’t come back anyway, but he earned our respect and played every summer from then on.

  After his accident we tried, at May’s suggestion, to put little flags in the rabbit holes, little white flags that could be seen in the dark, but it didn’t work. There were too many holes, and one kid tried to jump over a flag and “almost impaled himself” on its point, as Lyndley put it when she told the story to May. So we stopped the flag thing. Besides, the truth was, we liked the rabbit holes. We figured it was a good thing that we knew the obstacles and they didn’t, the same way it was good that we knew the best hiding places. These townie kids were pretty tough players, and we needed some kind of home-court advantage, if you know what I mean.

  Our island was laid out with our house on one end of the figure eight and Lyndley’s on the other. In the middle by the dock was the red schoolhouse and behind that, more on our side of the island than on Lyndley’s, was the saltwater pond where we’d take baths and wash our hair in the summertime. In the winter May melted snow for washing, which we did once a week “whether we needed it or not,” as Beezer liked to put it. There was an old copper tub in the upstairs washroom, and we’d put the pans of hot water on the dumbwaiter and pull them up to fill the tub. But in the summer May sent us down to the saltwater pond with a cake of Ivory soap and some puffy shaving cream to wash our hair. Beezer, Lyndley, and I would strip, dive in, pop up, lather, and dive back in, leaving a floating trail of soap suds all the way across the pond. You couldn’t do that now, because it isn’t good environmentally, but we were not conscious of such things then. Since it was salt water, we could never get really clean but walked around all summer with a whitish film over our tans. The only time you could get really clean was if there was a rainstorm, and then May sent us out with our soap and told us to dance under the raindrops until we stopped foaming or our lips turned blue, whichever came first. She never did this in a thunderstorm, of course, just regular rain.

  Usually we bathed in the saltwater pond. I remember one time we forgot to bring home the Ivory soap, and May made us turn around and go get it, but it wasn’t there. The next day we found it washed up on Back Beach, where we had found my dog Skybo after Cal killed him earlier that same summer. Cal always said it was an accident, but we all knew better. But that is another story, and a bad one, which I do not want to go into here. Suffice it to say that these occurrences led to a lot of speculation on our parts. That, and the fact that the lake was very deep, led Lyndley and me to the idea that the saltwater pond was bottomless and that it flowed out somehow into the ocean at Back Beach. We thought that the Ivory Soap Incident proved our theory, but Beezer insisted we were wrong about it all, because, of course, Ivory soap floats and does not sink to the bottom anyway. “It doesn’t prove that the pond is bottomless,” he said. He was disgusted with us and very upset at the same time, and he clearly didn’t want to talk anymore about it to either of us, so we eventually dropped the subject and never talked about it again.

  Beezer was so upset about the whole thing, in fact, that Eva had to talk to me about it. We ended up talking more about the differences between Beezer and me than we did about the saltwater pond. “There are mystics and there are mechanists,” she said, “and they see things with different eyes.”

  The year we played flashlight tag with Jack and Jay-Jay was the year Lyndley began to change. Looking back, I realize I knew it before that night. When Lyndley arrived that summer, there was something different about her. Something I couldn’t put my finger on. She didn’t run off the boat and up the ramp and grab me and wrestle until we both fell into the water laughing and dunking each other the way we usually did. Instead she waved and smiled but walked up the dock like one of the grown-ups. She didn’t fight with me at all; she just gave me a hug. “Oh, Towner, you’re all grown up” was what she said to me, although it was clear that she was the grown-up, not me. She said it all sad, like some old lady or something. Even her voice was different that year. The hint of a southern accent she had at the beginning of each summer and lost by the end had crystallized; it was more affected. I called her on it, but she said she had no idea what I was talking about.

  No one else had any idea what I was talking about either. May couldn’t see it, and it wasn’t something you could talk to Beezer about. It was like the Body Snatchers or something, like someone had replaced Lyndley with a pod person, and that person didn’t know how to act. I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to tell someone that this wasn’t my sister and to demand that they bring Lyndley back, but I didn’t know whom to tell. Auntie Emma and Cal were acting just as strangely as usual, so I knew there was no way that they had been replaced by pods. Later that year, after that whole weird summer was over, I told Eva about it, and at least she listened, although she didn’t draw any conclusions, none that she told me about anyway. I knew she didn’t believe in colonizing pods from outer space, never having even seen the movie or anything. Still, Eva is the one who seemed to come the closest to understanding, which was always the case.

  “Who is Lyndley, really?” Eva asked me when I was finished ranting. She often asked strange questions like that, so it didn’t surprise me. It wasn’t the answer I’d wanted, though, so I didn’t try to answer it then. Instead I just gave her a very frustrated look.

  “Think about it” was all she said.

  She had a way of reframing things for me, Eva did, a way of helping me sort things out. It truly did get me thinking. I thought about Lyndley a lot. It wasn’t until a few days later that I figured out what Eva meant. The quick answer, the answer you’d tell anyone who asked, was that Lyndley was my twin sister and that I’d known her since the womb.

  But the actual answer was not as clearly defined. Because the truth was, I didn’t really start to know my sister until I was thirteen. My mother had given her away soon after we were born, gift-wrapped her and presented her to her half sister, my aunt Emma Boynton, who could not conceive a child of her own. Much as I longed to know my twin, I didn’t know her at all. They lived south of here, where Emma’s husband, Cal, raced sailboats for a living. So I didn’t know Lyndley until the year I turned thirteen and the Boyntons started spending summers up here, when Cal began to race for the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead.

  The Boyntons spent a total
of five summers in New England, which amounted, in total time, to little more than a year. If you figured it out mathematically, as my brother Beezer might have if Eva had asked him the same question, the picture began to look a lot different. Most of Lyndley’s life had occurred in places far away from me. So when Eva asked me who Lyndley really was, I thought about it a number of ways before I tried to answer the question, and I found, in the end, that I just couldn’t answer. The things that were happening to my sister, all the formative and life-changing things, were happening while she was far away from me, in a life I had no part of. I would ask myself Eva’s question several times in the years to come. By the time Lyndley died, I would come to wonder if I had ever really known her at all.

  The summer we played our last game of flashlight tag was the same summer that Lyndley started seeing Jack LaLibertie. He and his brother Jay-Jay had come out a few times to play the game with us. There were a lot of town kids who played with us, six or seven of them in all including Jack and his little brother. If you counted the summer kids from Baker’s Island, we usually had ten or twelve kids per game, mostly boys. Both Jack and Jay-Jay had already taken their turn at the left-standing thing, and on this particular night there was a new kid named Willie Mays, who was a baseball star from Beverly High. His name wasn’t really Willie Mays, but he was a good runner, and everyone said he would probably turn pro, and he did, too, for a while, but he never got past the minors, and he didn’t play much even then.

  Everyone knew that Jack had a crush on Lyndley. She was sixteen that summer, and I think Jack was seventeen, although he looked older. Lyndley said it was because he spent so much time in the sun working on his father’s boat. He was gorgeous. We’d seen him before—some of the LaLiberties’ traps were near Back Beach, and Jack had taken them over after his father got in trouble for shooting a poacher, which was still legal in Massachusetts at the time but was still sort of frowned upon. He’d smiled at us once when Lyndley and I were spying on him from shore, and we both almost fell over.