Carnival of Shadows

by R.J. Ellory

  “I would think that a little harsh, wouldn’t you, Michael?”

  “Harsh? I think they have been harsh, sir. They call me Juvy Boy and Michael Tragic. They don’t know that my mother killed my father and now she is going to be tried and executed.”

  “Who calls you these things, Michael?”

  “It doesn’t matter, sir. Really, it doesn’t matter at all. I am fine. I am here to get my high school diploma, and I want to go to college if Mr. Redding can arrange it.”

  “So I do not need to have any concern about you?”

  “No, sir, you don’t.”

  “Well, Michael, you certainly seem to be a levelheaded and responsible young man, and I must say that your teachers consider you bright and diligent and well mannered. You are respectful of your elders, and as far as I can see, you have never been in any trouble here at the school.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Very well. Off you go now, and if there is anything you wish to talk about, any personal matters, anything that’s troubling you, then don’t hesitate to come and find me, okay?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

  And that, as they say, had been that. Or so Michael thought.

  Somehow word got out, word regarding the real reason that Michael Travis had been in juvy, and in some strange way that made things worse.

  Now he was the son of a killer. Now he was someone who may very well have inherited his mother’s homicidal tendencies. Now he was potentially more dangerous than he’d ever been.

  Michael, however, had long since decided to stoically weather whatever may have been directed his way, and when those who were attempting to upset him saw that their efforts came to naught, they directed their efforts elsewhere. Michael did not become the cowed and timid victim that they wished him to be, and thus they grew bored. Michael existed as a student, but not as a friend, as a school attendee, not as a participant. He was just there, going on about the business of studying and learning as best he could, and it was only when he returned home that he found some slight degree of solace in the company of Esther Faulkner.

  However, things became awkward between Esther and Michael after their first visit to see Janette at the State Reformatory outside of York. Unbeknownst to Michael, Esther had been working with Howard Redding on obtaining visitation rights for Michael and herself. Those rights were granted in the early part of September 1943. York was due west of Grand Island, no more than sixty or seventy miles. Thus, on Friday, September 17, 1943, Michael Travis and Esther Faulkner boarded a bus for the journey to York, Nebraska. Here they would find a car waiting for them, courtesy of Howard Redding of the State Welfare Department, and that car would take them out to the State Reformatory.

  Michael had not seen his mother since that fateful day in August of the previous year. The very last words she had uttered to him were still imprinted in his mind: Now come here and hug me good, and then off with you, boy. You go get Sheriff Baxter and tell him I done killed your daddy with a table knife.

  He did not know what to feel or how to feel it, but as he stepped from the back of that car and walked toward the gate of the reformatory, Esther Faulkner clutching his hand as tight as could be, he knew that this was going to be difficult.

  The visit itself lasted no more than thirty minutes. Janette cried a lot, and all the time she cried she was trying desperately not to. Esther cried as well, simply because there was just too much emotion to be borne by Janette and Michael alone.

  “I did what I had to do,” Janette told Michael. “He was a violent man, Michael, a truly dangerous and violent man, and I just got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore. And the thing that frightened me most… the thing that terrified me more than anything else in the world, was that I knew you couldn’t bear to see it, and one day you might just up and kill him. Or maybe he would have killed you. Either that, or you would spend so long listening to his lies and deceptions that your mind would turn. Truth is, I was deeply afraid that you might become like him one day, Michael. I thought that whatever drove him to do the things he did were already inside you, and the more it went on, the more likely…”

  She looked down and shook her head. “The truth is, Michael, that I don’t know what I thought.”

  Michael sat and listened, watching his mother as she wept and explained and justified and apologized.

  He felt for her, there was no doubt about it, but he struggled to feel for himself. He kept looking at Esther, watching this scenario unfold before her eyes, perhaps trying to imagine how she must have felt, trying to come to terms with how the unpredictable and unrelated action of some distant relative had impacted upon her life in a way that was immeasurable and irreversible.

  In a strange way, Michael felt closer to Esther, even though he had known the woman a bare handful of weeks. They were the effect of a common event, an event caused by Janette. Janette would stay behind, whereas he and Esther would walk away together. He and Esther would spend the next weeks and months, perhaps even years, living under the same roof, talking to each other, sharing meals, whereas he would see his mother as and when he was permitted by law.

  When they finally parted company, it was to Janette as if her son were being wrenched out of her arms a second time. For Michael, it was different. He did not react in the same way, not immediately. He did not feel the full force of what had happened until he sat at the back of the bus with Esther and they headed out of York toward Grand Island.

  It was then that he cried, and he did not simply cry; he sobbed. He sobbed uncontrollably at first, pulling away from Esther and burying his face in the crook of his arm, uncaring as to who saw him or heard him in his grief.

  Esther, believing herself unable to do anything to really help him, just sat with her arm around his shoulder. She would listen when he spoke, and that was all she could do. She could not even begin to appreciate what he was experiencing, but she knew that it broke her fragile heart just to hear him.

  Finally, the emotional tidal wave spent, he turned to her, and she pulled him closer against her, and they seemed to console each other wordlessly with the simple fact that at least they were not alone.

  “Her trial will be soon enough,” Esther told him.

  “I know.”

  “Before Christmas, I think,” she said.

  “Yes, before Christmas.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  Michael was silent for a time. “I don’t know,” he finally said.

  “I don’t either,” Esther replied.

  “I think it will be a short trial.”

  “Yes. And if you want to go, I will go with you,” she said, hoping that he would decide not to.

  They did not speak of it again, seated there at the back of the bus, the road spooling out like a black ribbon behind them, holding each other as if each sought nothing but an anchor in this sea of madness.

  Esther could not see it, and Michael did not speak of it, but the words his mother had uttered had burned through to the very core of his being.

  Truth is, I was deeply afraid that you might become like him one day, Michael. I thought that whatever drove him to do the things he did were already inside you…

  That day, that very same Friday, was the day that everything changed between them.

  They arrived back at her Grand Island house as evening fell. Michael said he was tired.

  “Not physically,” he added. “Tired in my mind, I think.”

  “Take a bath,” Esther said. “That will relax you. I will make some dinner for us. Maybe we could have a glass of wine.”

  Michael went upstairs. He drew the bath. He took off his clothes and stood naked in the bathroom, looking from the small window into the yard behind the house.

  The season had turned; the air was crisp and chill, and fall was settling in for the duration. Those few plants and shrubs that Esther
managed to maintain in the dry topsoil had conceded defeat until spring of the following year.

  Once the bath was full, Michael lay in the water and closed his eyes.

  He let the warmth envelop him, and he tried hard not to see his mother’s face as she had looked that day. It was not his mother, at least not as he remembered her. She was frail and exhausted and scared. Perhaps, of all things, the greatest difficulty he faced was accepting that he could do nothing to help her. Not now. Not ever. Her fate was sealed, and she had sealed it by killing his father and confessing to the premeditative intent. Perhaps if she had not said that…

  “Michael?”

  Michael sat up suddenly. Water splashed over the edge of the tub onto the floor. The door was unlocked, and through the two- or three-inch gap between the edge of the door and the jamb, he could see Esther standing in the hallway.

  “I’m going out on the veranda to have a glass of wine,” she said. “When you’re finished, come down and join me.”

  “Yes, of course,” Michael said. “I won’t be long.”

  An awkward silence hung in the space between them for just a moment, and then Esther said, “Good… I’ll see you downstairs then…”

  Michael did not stay long in the water. He felt a little self-conscious. There were thoughts in his mind, thoughts that he’d had before, but Esther’s presence at the bathroom door had brought them very much to the fore. He got out, dried himself, put on a clean pair of pants and a T-shirt, and then headed downstairs, barefoot, his hair still damp. He found Esther on the back veranda. She was seated in a chair, her back against the wall of the house, a glass of wine in her hand.

  “Tough day,” she said.

  “Yes,” Michael said. He walked toward her, perched on the railing facing her.

  “How’re you doing?”

  Michael glanced sideways, a little less awkward now, but still aware of what he was feeling.

  “Good as can be,” he replied.

  “Hurts me to see you so sad.”

  “Hurts me to be so sad.”

  “You miss your father, Michael?”

  Michael didn’t know how to answer the question. He was silent for a time, and then he looked back and smiled at Esther. “I miss the man I thought he was, not the man he was.”

  “That’s a very profound comment.”

  “I didn’t mean it to be.”

  “I didn’t mean that critically,” Esther said. “I meant it as it sounded. It’s a very profound statement for someone—”

  “So young?”

  She smiled. “You’re not so young, Michael Travis.”

  “Sixteen is pretty young.”

  “Well, you might be too young to buy a drink, but you’re old enough to deal with one of the most difficult things I ever did hear of.”

  “Can I ask you a question, Esther?”

  “Sure, sweetheart. You go right ahead and ask me whatever you like.”

  “Why did you take me in?”

  That was not the question she’d expected, and she coughed as she swallowed. A drop or two of wine spilled on the front of her housedress.

  Gathering her thoughts, she made a fuss of dabbing those spots of wine away with her handkerchief, and even as she was done, she realized that she was not going to get away with anything but the truth. There was something about Michael Travis that made you want to tell him the truth. You just had to look into his eyes, and before you knew it, you were talking.

  “Honest?” she asked.

  Michael smiled. “What else is there, Esther?”

  She wondered if he actually believed what he was saying, as if he really believed that there was nothing but the truth.

  “At first,” she said, “I thought I was agreeing because of the money. Mr. Redding said the state would pay me to feed you and house you, you know? It isn’t a fortune, but it isn’t peanuts. But then, after I agreed, I realized that I didn’t do it because of the money. I was doing it because I wanted to make a change in my life…” She smiled, shook her head as if questioning what she herself was about to say. “It seemed to be—”

  “Fate?” Michael asked.

  Esther laughed suddenly, almost as if she had been caught out in a fib and there was no denying it.

  “Do you believe in fate, Esther?” Michael asked.

  “I think that sometimes things happen simply because you believe they will.”

  “I think you’re right,” Michael said, and he looked back toward the yard and smiled so artlessly, so sincerely, that she couldn’t help but smile back.

  “All I know now is that I want to help you,” she said. “Having gotten to know you, if they told me they were going to stop giving me that money, it wouldn’t matter. I’d want you to stay here.”

  “I feel like I need to tell you something, Esther,” Michael said, and there was a presence, a tension in his voice, that made Esther feel immediately on edge. He looked at her, then turned sideways, almost as if to face her while he was speaking was more than he could stand.

  She set down her wineglass on the veranda and steeled herself for whatever was coming.

  “I don’t know why I have to tell you, but I feel that if I don’t tell you, then we might have difficulties between us. I want us to be friends. I want to stay here with you. I don’t want to go back to State—”

  “And I don’t want you to go back—”

  Michael looked back at her then, just for second, his eyes unerring. “Let me say what I have to say, Esther, or I might just lose the will to say it.”

  She nodded. Her heart was beating ever such a little bit faster.

  Michael looked away once more.

  “I want to stay here with you, Esther, but there is something in my mind, and I don’t think it should be there, and it stops me…” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I think about you, Esther. I think about you a lot.”

  Esther didn’t know where to look. Her heart—beating ever more rapidly—was right there in her chest. She could feel it so strong. Why was it that the heart, the very thing that seemed to represent all that love entailed, was nevertheless most evident when you were afraid? Was she afraid? Was that what she was feeling? Or was it something else entirely?

  “I think about you in a way that someone like me shouldn’t think about someone like you…”

  And then—as if to defy all the laws of rightness and rectitude—Michael turned toward her, and he reached out his hand and touched her arm. His fingertips merely drifted across her skin, but it was as if they possessed a fierce electrical current.

  Esther flinched, but she did not withdraw.

  She sat there on the chair, all of thirty-four years of age, and felt every joint go weak and useless.

  Esther, without looking, reached for her glass. It was right there at her feet, but she misjudged, and the wineglass, now almost empty, toppled over. Miraculously, it did not break, but the last inch of wine spilled out across the plank-board floor. It looked like blood.

  Esther reached to set the glass straight, and even as she did, she felt Michael’s hand touch her shoulder. She looked up. He rose to his feet, and then he took her hand and brought her to her feet also.

  Esther shuddered, both in excitement and trepidation. She did not know where to look, and so she simply held his gaze as he stood there, the expression on his face one of almost unashamed simplicity. Her knees barely held her weight. He raised one hand and touched the side of her face. She believed she would faint.

  “No,” she said, but she did not shrink back from that touch.

  His hand was beneath her chin then, and he somehow drew her toward him without her even being conscious of moving.

  Without thinking, she reached up her left hand and placed it on his waist. Michael breathed deeply, and then he dipped his head and kissed her hard on the mouth at fi
rst, and then more gently across her cheeks, her eyelids, her forehead.

  It was as if everything fell away then—every agreement, every opinion, every now-I’m-supposed-to, every accepted rule about how one should behave and why.

  Michael was unbuttoning the front of her housedress, and she paused for just a moment before she said, “Not here… Inside…” She took his hand and led him back into the kitchen, to the stairs, and once on the upper landing, she knew there was no going back. She opened her bedroom door; he followed her inside, and they kissed again, fiercely, hungrily, and when he struggled with the clasp of her bra, she simply undid it for him. His hands were on her breasts, her dress was around her waist, and then she felt it just slide to the ground, almost as if gravity itself was telling her that this was inevitable.

  Esther stood before him in nothing but her stockings, her garters, and her panties. He smelled so good. He kissed her again, harder, and for a moment she believed she would lose all consciousness. Her head was swimming, and it was merely due to the fact that he was holding her so tight that she did not fall to the floor.

  A momentary flash of something made her say, “No, Michael…” But she did not mean it, and it sounded more like a plea for forgiveness rather than a request that he stop.

  Michael tugged his T-shirt over his head. Esther unbuttoned his pants; they slid to the ground and he kicked them away.

  Her hand moved on his thigh, and before she could think a further thought, he had taken that hand and put it right between his legs.

  She closed her eyes and exhaled. She touched him, and he was so hard, and the smell of him, the warmth of his skin, the way it felt as he pressed himself against her…

  And then he said, “Oh…” And for a moment there was an awkwardness in his body. He pulled back and glanced down.

  Only then was she aware of the sensation on her thigh, that feeling of warmth, the way it trickled down toward her knee.

  She smiled awkwardly, almost embarrassed for him, and then she started to laugh and found she couldn’t stop, and when Michael realized that she was not in fact laughing at him, he started laughing too.