by J. S. Volpe
“What time did you arrive at the park?” Agent Schmidt asked.
“Um…”
“Keep telling the truth,” Emily said. She leaned in toward Agent Rowan, her gaze fixed on his left temple. Or on the brain and thoughts behind it. Was she reading his mind the way she had seemed to read Roger’s in the car?
“I think it was somewhere around three-thirty,” Roger said. “And I was there about an hour, as I recall.”
“Did you see Emily Crow?” Agent Schmidt asked.
“Yes,” Emily said.
“Yeah,” Roger said. “She was jumping rope in the southeast corner of the park, right by the woods. At least I think that was her. It looked like the girl on the news.”
“Did you see her talking to anyone?” Agent Schmidt said.
“No,” Emily said.
“No,” Roger told Agent Schmidt. “She was just jumping rope.”
“Did you interact with her yourself in any way?” Agent Schmidt said.
“No,” Emily said.
“No,” Roger said.
“Do you go to the park often?” Agent Schmidt said.
“The truth,” Emily said.
“Yes, I do,” Roger said. “I’m there nearly every day. I work at the bank across the street, and when it’s nice out I like to eat my lunch in the park.”
“But you weren’t eating that late on Thursday, were you?” Agent Rowan asked.
“Oh, no. Actually I’m on vacation right now. Two weeks off, thank God. I went to the park that day because it was so nice out. I figured we might not get many more nice days like that this year, so I’d better enjoy it while I could.”
“What, no big trip for your two-week vacation?” Agent Schmidt asked.
“On my salary? Please. I’m lucky if I can take a trip to the supermarket.”
Everybody laughed. Except Emily, who nodded approvingly and said, “Good.” She drew away from Agent Rowan and walked past him to Agent Schmidt. Neither man noticed anything. They kept smiling and looking at Roger. Emily leaned toward Agent Schmidt the way she had with Agent Rowan, her eyes on his forehead, her expression blank and unconcerned.
Roger couldn’t help feeling gratified that he had earned her approval and that he seemed to be doing a decent imitation of Joe Citizen, even though he suspected much of the FBI agents’ good humor was feigned. Especially Agent Rowan’s. Watching them, it was clear that Agent Rowan was the sharper of the two. Schmidt did most of the talking, and thus attracted most of the attention, but that was a feint. While all attention was on Schmidt, Rowan was quietly watching the interview unfold, stepping in occasionally to ask a question, usually a very apt one. Rowan was the one to watch out for.
“Do you recall who else was in the park that day?” Agent Schmidt asked.
“Tell them,” Emily said without looking away from Schmidt’s head.
“Um…” Roger sat back with a frown, thinking hard. “There were two women, as I recall. One was, um, African-American, the other white. Each of them had a baby in a stroller. I think they arrived separately, but they stopped to talk to each other for a while. Frankly, they were kind of loud.”
“The babies or the women?”
Roger chuckled. “The women. They were laughing and cooing at each other’s baby. You know how women get around babies.”
“Yeah.”
“And let’s see. There were kids playing baseball down on the baseball diamond. Oh, and there was, uh, that fellow who runs that antique store downtown. I’m not sure what his name is. He’s in the park a lot, just like me.”
Emily Faux turned to him. “Tell them there was a man in his late thirties or early forties in the park when you first got there, but that he left after about ten minutes, or at least you didn’t see him anymore.”
Roger repeated this to the FBI agents.
“Can you describe this man?” Agent Schmidt asked.
Repeating whatever Emily told him, Roger described a slightly pudgy white man with short receding brown hair, blue eyes, and a light-colored button-front shirt.
“He was just walking around and around on the paths,” Roger concluded, per Emily’s instructions. “That’s why I noticed him. He passed by me, like, three times. I kind of got the impression he was looking for something, or waiting for someone, or something like that.”
There was a brief silence. The two FBI agents were staring off at the floor, thinking. Roger hoped they were about to take their leave to discuss this new information. Or rather disinformation.
Instead Agent Rowan looked up at him and said, “You say you were on the gazebo?”
“Um, yeah,” Roger said, rattled by this sudden change in direction.
“The whole time?”
Emily looked sharply at Rowan as if she had sensed a thought she didn’t like. She turned to Roger and swiftly said, “Tell them no. Tell them you got up and strolled around a few times.”
Roger repeated this. As he did so, Emily watched Rowan closely. The moment Roger finished talking she turned to him again and said, “Tell them you wandered over to watch the kids play ball.”
“In fact,” Roger said, “I, uh, I strolled over to the baseball diamond to watch the game awhile.”
“You were impressed with a home run hit by a red-haired boy,” she said.
“It was a good game,” Roger said. “This little red-headed kid hit a great home run.”
“It went into the woods.”
“The ball went right into the woods.”
Agent Rowan nodded. His expression didn’t change, but Roger sensed him relax a little as if a suspicion he had harbored had been allayed by Roger’s answer.
“I think those are all the questions we have for now,” Agent Rowan said. He stood up. Agent Schmidt and Roger did likewise. Emily Faux stayed where she was and watched the trio move toward the front door.
“Thanks for your help,” Agent Schmidt told Roger. “We may want to come back and ask you a few more questions at some point.”
“That’s fine,” Roger said with a fake earnest nod. “Whatever I can do to help.”
5
After seeing them out, Roger returned to the living room with a huge grin plastered on his face. He—they—had successfully fended off the FBI. The stupid bastards had sat there, and he had lied his ass off, and they had swallowed every word, and all the while Emily’s body had been almost directly beneath them. Fucking morons.
He wanted to gloat to Emily Faux, and to thank her, and to ask her again why she was helping him (she said she would explain, after all), but when he looked around she was nowhere to be seen.
He waited until he heard the FBI agents’ car start up and drive away, then said, “Emily?”
There was no answer. He called her name again, louder. The sound of his voice ringing in the room made him realize how strange and ridiculous the situation had become. Here he was, calling out for the ghostly doppelganger of the girl he had murdered. If she hadn’t been right about the FBI waiting for him and if she hadn’t helped him answer their questions, he would assume he was going mad.
He searched the whole main floor. She wasn’t there. He stood at the top of the basement stairs and looked down at the concrete hallway. He wasn’t afraid of going down there anymore. Not now. Not after she had helped him.
He went down and searched the laundry room and the workroom. He didn’t find her.
At least not the ghostly one. The real Emily was still in the freezer, looking exactly the same as before.
He reflected that since he had successfully fended off the authorities, now might be the best time to dispose of the body.
But what if Emily Faux’s appearances were somehow connected with the presence of the body in his house? What if dumping the body severed whatever link he had with her? Then she wouldn’t be able to help him if the FBI came back. And they would almost certainly come back.
He turned in a circle, looking all around the workroom.
“Emily!” he called.
His voice echoed in the silence.
Chapter 13
House of Mystery
“I won’t give you the grand tour of the house,” Mr. May said as he led Calvin and Cynthia out of the parlor and down the painting-lined corridor toward the spiral staircase. “We don’t have time for that, and large swaths of the house aren’t terribly grand anyway. Old Turner incorporated too many damn rooms into this place, far more than I can possibly use, with the result that many of the rooms currently exist only to provide a landing platform for dust. There’s a game room and a smoking room and a study and a host of other completely useless rooms. Perhaps someday you can see them, but not right now. Right now there are only a handful of rooms you need to see.”
“Need to see?” Calvin said.
Mr. May looked at him over his shoulder. “If you want to understand why I am uniquely qualified to help you investigate Emily’s disappearance, then yes.”
“Wow, that’s a pretty bold statement,” Cynthia said.
“You’ll see.”
The spiral staircase stood in a circular space at the center of the house. From there, they could see down all four corridors to the four porch doors. Calvin expected Mr. May to lead them down one of these corridors, but instead the old man headed straight for the stairs and began to ascend.
The stairs wound downward as well as up, and as he followed Mr. May, Calvin peered down the shaft to the bottom of the stairwell. All he saw was a bare concrete floor. He remembered the rumors he had heard over the years about Mr. May burying bodies in his basement, and he shook his head at how absurd those stories now seemed.
It took a while to reach the second floor. Mr. May moved slowly and with great care, planting both feet on each step before moving on to the next. Calvin couldn’t help wincing at the sight. Mr. May probably navigated these stairs on a regular basis; it was only a matter of time before an accident happened. Calvin imagined Mr. May slipping and falling, the old man’s old bones snapping like kindling on the metal steps.
“Have you ever thought about putting in an elevator or something?” he said.
“I thought about it,” Mr. May said, his voice breathy with exertion. “But I don’t want to destroy Turner’s design any more than I already have. As it is, I regret putting in the modern bathrooms and making a few other changes.”
On the second floor was a circular area identical to the one below, with four corridors stretching away down the house’s four wings.
“This place really is symmetrical, isn’t it?” Cynthia said.
“For all his seeming madness, Turner loved regularity,” Mr. May said. He hobbled off down the east wing. Calvin and Cynthia followed.
Halfway down, a pair of doors faced each other across the hallway. Mr. May stopped before the door on the south side of the corridor and laid his hand on the knob. He looked back at Calvin and Cynthia. His eyes were bright and nervous as if he were about to bare his deepest, darkest secrets. Calvin wondered what the heck Mr. May was about to show them.
“Here we are,” Mr. May said. He turned the knob and pushed open the door. “The Collection.” The way he said it made it a proper noun.
He led them through the doorway and into a large room whose walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling wooden shelving units. There were also rows of freestanding shelving units running the length of the room, forming aisles like in a library. But the shelves bore few books. Instead they were crowded with a bewildering variety of items. The first shelf Calvin and Cynthia paused to examine held a stuffed and mounted seven-headed rattlesnake, an old dirt-smudged baseball, a sealed glass jar in which a coiled foot-long worm floated in a translucent pink liquid, a six-inch-long humanoid figure made of white wax, and a lidless white cardboard box containing five ceramic tiles, a bunch of red threads in a clear plastic bag, and a small plastic dolphin. The shelf below it held a Polaroid Sun camera, a brass carriage clock that displayed thirteen hours instead of the usual twelve, a frog mask, a coffee can full of pennies from the year 1898, a boomerang, and another white lidless box, this one containing half a dozen audiocassettes, a book of Asian love poems, a fist-sized chunk of granite, and an eight-inch-long segment of a tree root. The rest of the room’s hundred-plus shelves held equally weird and diverse items. On the shelf in front of each item or boxed batch of items was a white sticker with a number on it.
Calvin and Cynthia glanced at each other in bewilderment, then at Mr. May. The old man was eyeing them closely, watching their reactions. He looked more nervous than ever. Clearly their response was important to him. Calvin realized that the Collection—whatever it was—was the real key to understanding Robert May. Everything downstairs—the antiques, the paintings, the old-fashioned atmosphere—all of that was secondary, if not an outright façade. The Collection was the central fact of his life.
Calvin shook his head. “What is this? Some kind of museum or something?”
Mr. May waved his arm at the assembled mass of items. “These are anomalies, mysteries, oddities, or at least artifacts relating thereto. I have spent my life investigating anything the standard view of reality regards as bizarre or impossible. These, in my opinion, are the true wonders of the world. Each item in this room has a unique and remarkable story.” He took a large, flat rock from a shelf and held it up so they could see the fossilized fern on its surface. “For instance, this fossil was found in strata over four hundred million years older than when ferns are thought to have first appeared.”
Cynthia shrugged. “Well, that’s not too amazing, is it? I mean, the fossil record is still kind of spotty, right? So maybe they just don’t have all the dating worked out quite right.”
“Oh, no one would deny that the fossil record has its gaps and inconsistencies. But still, ferns in the Precambrian? Try arguing that with a geologist. You’ll get laughed right out of the room. And that is among the least of the Collection.” He picked up an ornate, silver-handled mirror. “What about this? This is a haunted mirror. At certain times, anyone looking into the glass will see the face of the woman who died holding it over one hundred years ago.”
“Have you seen the face yourself?” Calvin asked.
“Once. Since then, I haven’t been terribly keen on taking another look.”
“Whoa!” Calvin stared at the mirror with his mouth agape, both afraid and hopeful that a rotting zombie face would materialize in the glass.
“And then there’s this.” Mr. May pulled a vial of thick green goo from a shelf and held it up for them to see. “This was found in the core of a meteorite that fell to earth in Venezuela in 1963. A dozen labs have analyzed it, but none could identify it. They couldn’t even agree on whether it was organic or inorganic. It possessed a chemical structure no one had ever seen before.”
“Cool!” Calvin exclaimed.
He and Cynthia spent a while exploring the room and examining the items on display: an antique revolver; an earthenware bust of a young woman; formaldehyde-filled jars containing eyeballs, diseased organs, fetuses, fish; an electronic Casio keyboard; a locked, leather-bound diary, its cover crusty with dried blood; a ventriloquist’s dummy; a box full of plaster casts of huge bare footprints.
Calvin halted in front of this last item and looked up at Mr. May with big, excited eyes.
“Are these Bigfoot footprints?” he asked.
“Possibly. They were cast from impressions found in a muddy riverbank in northern Minnesota in 1983, not far from a reported sighting of a large hairy humanoid two days earlier. Interestingly there were also strange lights seen in the sky at around the same time.”
“Wow. I never would have guessed there was a real-life paranormal investigator living here in May.”
Mr. May frowned. “I investigate much more than the so-called paranormal. Many of these items do not contravene any known laws of nature but are simply at variance with currently accepted scientific theories. Anomalousness means far more than groaning spirits and little grey aliens. The fossil fern, for example. It’s not i
mpossible that plant life—and life in general—evolved far earlier than our present data and theories suggest. But at the moment the concept is thoroughly heretical in the halls of science.”
Cynthia tapped one of the stickers affixed to the shelves. “So what are these numbers, exactly? Some sort of cataloguing system or something?”
“Precisely,” Mr. May said. “The numbers refer you to a file concerning the anomaly in question. I keep the files in another room. Come along. I’ll show you.”
He led them to the circular area in the center of the house, then down the north wing to a room arranged much like the Collection room, only with file cabinets instead of shelving units. In a corner of the room was a small desk and chair. A closed manila folder sat on the desktop.
“These are all full of files?” Calvin said, looking around.
“Mostly. The file cabinets along the south wall are reserved for magazine and newspaper clippings pertaining to anomalies and mysteries in general. But the rest contain files dealing with all the evidence I have collected. Each file contains a full report on the anomaly, including the date, the location, the circumstances of its discovery or occurrence, and any other pertinent facts. Most files also include photographs. The files are arranged in numerical order, which is also, for the most part, chronological order—number 1 being the first anomaly I investigated, number 3,997 being the most recent.”
“There was that much stuff in the other room?” Cynthia said.
Mr. May laughed. “Oh, no. That was only a portion of the Collection. Follow me.”
He led them across the hall to another Collection room, which was nearly twice the size of the first one. While Mr. May watched with a smile, Calvin and Cynthia toured the room, pausing often to inspect some of the more interesting artifacts, among them an unidentifiable animal skull with long, curling horns; a one-foot-square obsidian cube; a Hawaiian shirt; a long thin strip of shiny silvery metal covered with mysterious black symbols; a scrimshaw turtle; a cardboard box full of small, teardrop-shaped stones; and a mummified hand too simian to be human, but too human to be simian.
“How did you get all this stuff?” Calvin asked.
“Perseverance. Luck. Charm. Lots of traveling.” Mr. May shrugged. “Having a large inheritance at one’s disposal helps, too.”