Legacy of Masks

by Sallie Bissell

  “They nabbed Hugh’s Ani Zaguhi for murder.”

  “Murder? Good grief!”

  He listened as she related the whole saga of Hugh, Ridge Standingdeer, and Bethany Daws. Despite the seriousness of her words, he felt like smiling. Mary was not leaving. Nothing had happened to burst the charmed bubble that had surrounded them since the night before. He rinsed Lily off as Mary went on about the reporter who’d called Ridge a “witch-boy” and Hugh Kavanagh’s cane-waving tantrums.

  “So how do you figure into all this?” he asked when she came to the end of her story. No criminals, she’d promised last night. No rapists, child molesters, kidnappers, or murderers.

  “I’m not figuring into any of it, but I don’t think I’d better come over tonight, Jonathan.”

  “Why not? Isn’t the kid already in jail?”

  “Yes. That’s just the problem. I’m afraid to leave Hugh here by himself.”

  “Oh.” He tried to mask his disappointment. It was only one night she was talking about, not the rest of their lives. Still, he hadn’t seen her in so long. His skin still tingled from her touch, and all day he’d kept looking out the window, listening for the high-pitched hum of her little black convertible, pulling into the parking lot. He’d replayed yesterday a thousand times in his head, recalling her voice at the door: “Hello? Anybody home?”

  “I’m sorry,” she continued. “But he’s already had to take a handful of heart medications. He’s hurt and confused and he’s got no one here to help him with these horses.”

  “Okay.” Jonathan was unpleasantly surprised by the petulance in his voice. Christ, he sounded like some horny housewife whose husband had gotten stuck working late at the office. “Maybe you can come tomorrow night.”

  He heard some static on the line, then she spoke again. “Why don’t you and Lily come over here? I’ll fix supper and she can see the horses. She would love it.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” He liked Kavanagh well enough, but he didn’t want to intrude upon the old man’s distress, especially with a toddler in arms.

  “Please come, Jonathan. It’ll do Hugh good to see Lily. He had to spend most of the afternoon with Deke Keener.”

  Jonathan considered their redheaded classmate. He’d regarded Keener as an asshole ever since ninth-grade gym, and the ensuing twenty years had not changed his opinion. “Pisgah County’s answer to Donald Trump? Why was he there?”

  “He wants me to do some real estate work for him,” Mary replied. “Please say you’ll come.”

  Jonathan glanced at Lily, who was intent on rubbing her plastic yellow duck with a bar of Ivory soap. Wild, woodsy creatures she knew; she’d never seen a horse up close. It might be a good experience for her. Seeing Mary again would certainly be a good experience for him. “Okay. Let me get Lily dressed and we’ll drive on over.”

  “Great!” said Mary. “Come on up to the main house. I’ll be watching for you.”

  He packed up Lily and her diaper bag, closed the store, and headed for Hugh’s. As he drove down the twisting mountain roads, he thought of what Mary had said. Hugh Kavanagh’s employee had been arrested, on suspicion of murder. Naturally the old man would have called Mary, and of course Mary would have responded. But what next? Could she really not get further involved? Hunting was in her blood, no less than in his. Was extracting her promise not to do criminal law akin to asking a deer not to run? He couldn’t say. All he knew was that ever since her phone call, the great joy that had exploded through him yesterday now felt tentative, held in check by the specter of her past vocation.

  Forty minutes later, they reached Kavanagh’s farm. As they rode down a long drive that bisected verdant pastures, Lily pointed one tiny finger at the horses that grazed along the fence, gurgling a word of her own invention.

  “That’s a horse, Lily,” Jonathan told her, thinking he should probably start teaching more in English than in Cherokee.

  “Hoss,” Lily echoed, looking so solemn that he couldn’t help but laugh.

  When they pulled up in front of Kavanagh’s low-slung ranch house, Mary came out to greet them. Even wearing an apron with her shirt-sleeves rolled up to the elbow, she looked like something from a dream. What a fool he’d been! He should have done anything to have kept her from going to Peru.

  “Meyliii!” Lily squealed as Mary hurried up to the truck.

  “Lily Bird!” Mary leaned in the open window and kissed him, a quick but sincere buss on the lips. “I’m so glad you could come.” Once more she smiled the smile that somehow always reached down and caught his very soul.

  Lily kept up her squealing, so he unbuckled her from her car seat, whereupon she crawled over him and into Mary’s arms. He got out of the truck as Kavanagh came out on the porch. Lily took one look at the wild-haired old coot and lunged for her father, burying her head against his neck.

  “Its okay, Lily,” Jonathan told her softly. “He’s ehdudu. Grandfather.”

  “She thinks I’m a fright, likely,” Hugh said, his thick, bristly brows making him look like a porcupine. “And God knows, today she wouldn’t be wrong.”

  “Mary told me what happened.” Jonathan tried to loosen his daughter’s stranglehold from his neck. “I’m sorry to hear things have gone so badly.”

  Hugh nodded, morose. “I’m not having half the bad time of poor Ridge.”

  Mary glanced at him and tried to lighten the subject. “Hugh, our roast should be done in about an hour. I thought we might show Lily around till then. Are you still going to take a nap?”

  “I reckon.” Hugh smiled sadly at Lily, then turned his gaze toward the barn. “You two mind that goose. A mean one, she is.”

  With that, Kavanagh went back into the house, the screen door slapping shut behind him. Jonathan looked at Mary, surprised by the old Irishman’s brusqueness. “I see the troubles have come to County Pisgah,” he said, affecting a brogue.

  “The troubles arrived this morning with badges and guns.” Mary sighed. “Come on. Let’s give Lily the ten-cent tour.”

  They fell into step together. Away from Hugh, Lily squirmed out of Jonathan’s arms and toddled a few steps ahead of them. As they made their way to the barn, his hand brushed against Mary’s. Nervous as a schoolboy, he intertwined his fingers with hers. She smiled, and suddenly the only thing he could think of was what it would be like to take her up to the hayloft and remove her apron and that blouse and make love to her until the hot gold sun shrank to just a small white light in the darkness. Though the thought of it made him weak with desire, that could not happen now. Now he had Lily to take care of.

  Mary introduced them to Fireball and Geezer, the barn cats, who curled their tails around Lily’s short little legs. Napoleon, the aging German shepherd, greeted her with his own tail-wag while Lucy, the goose Hugh had adopted when Irene Hannah died, waddled up and regarded Lily with a beady blue eye. Dropping Mary’s hand, Jonathan scooped the child up into his arms before the bird could strike.

  “Guess what lives in here, Lily?” Mary crooned as they neared the barn. “Horses!”

  “Hosses?” Lily repeated, her little voice piping like a flute. She looked at him, her brown eyes wide. “Hosses?”

  Mary led them into the cool, sweet-smelling shadows. Though most of the horses were still out grazing, one small dun-colored mare stood waiting for dinner, her head poked over the back gate. As they walked toward her, Mary stepped over to a small door next to the tack room that had been left ajar. She stepped over to close it, then jumped, startled. “Good grief!” she cried. “Come look at this!”

  He walked over, Lily in his arms, then gave a low whistle. Staring down from the walls of the room were a dozen different masks. Birds, snakes, medicine men—all were carved in the starkly primitive style of the ancient Cherokees. All glared down from the wall with hollow, eerie eyes.

  Mary opened the door wider. A cot was positioned beneath the window, next to a bookcase that held a small CD player, a pouch of pipe tobacco, a minuscule TV set
, and a flute fashioned from river cane.

  “This must be Ridge’s room,” she said, studying the boy’s strange conglomeration of the very old and the very new.

  “Not much into housekeeping, is he?” He pointed to the other end of the room, where a closet full of discarded blue jeans mingled with the spill from an overturned workbench—wood shavings, glue, some small knives, an upended cane basket.

  “That’s cop mess,” Mary replied, disgusted. “They must have searched this room while Hugh and I were downtown.”

  “Don’t they need a warrant to do that?” He remembered all the warrants she’d stewed over when he’d lived with her in Atlanta.

  “Yep.” She leaned over and pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from beneath an old T-shirt. “And here it is. Signed by Turpin and some magistrate.” She read the sheet, then began folding Ridge’s jeans into an orderly pile. “There’s no point to leaving all this stuff out on the floor.”

  “Here.” Jonathan put Lily on the cot and knelt beside her. “I’ll help.”

  They worked cleaning up the mess in Ridge’s room. Lily played with two feathers from a blue jay while her father was happy to be close enough to breathe in the slightly spicy smell of Mary’s hair, and to watch the ever changing shadows of her eyes. When he managed to focus on something other than his amazement that she was indeed here, he realized that most of the boy’s carving implements were simply razor-sharp pieces of dark flint, and much of his clothing was deerskin, decorated with intricate beadwork.

  “Look at these.” He fished out a pair of moccasins from under the cot, and ran his finger down row after row of tiny red, white, and black beads. “These look like they belong in a museum.”

  Mary turned the moccasins over. The soles were buttery-soft deerskin, but obviously worn, stained with grass and dirt. “Hugh said Ridge came from way up in the mountains. I guess these are just sneakers, to him.”

  Grinning, Jonathan leaned close. “Woooooooooooooo,” he moaned softly in her ear, much to Lily’s delight. “Better not mess with those! They’re Ani Zaguhi witch moccasins!”

  “Oh, Jonathan.” Mary wiggled away, laughing, then she turned to him, her eyes serious. “You know, he did do something weird today.”

  “What?” He’d always loved it when she confided in him, when she told him things she would tell no other. He regarded them as little gifts, things of importance to her.

  “We were up here, in the hayloft. I was trying to convince him to turn himself in. Ridge looked at me and changed his face.”

  Jonathan watched the steady throb of her pulse in her neck. How soft her skin looked. How he longed to touch her! “What did he change his face into?”

  Mary stared at the masks. “I don’t know. His mouth got feral-looking, and his eyes sort of glittered. . . .” Her voice faded and she shook her head, embarrassed. “I’m sure I imagined it. Haylofts are spooky and it was a pretty stressful situation.”

  Suddenly Lily pointed up at one owl mask that hung over the window. “Ugugu?”

  “That’s right, Lily,” Jonathan said. “Owl.” He pointed at the mask next to it. “What’s that one?”

  “Guhli.” Lily answered, catching on to the game.

  “Good! Raccoon. And that one?”

  Jonathan laughed as Lily started naming all the masks, shifting between Cherokee and English. Squirrel. Fox. Crow. As they went around the room, he tried to catch Mary’s eye, hoping she would join in their game, but she was staring at a medicine man mask, which hung just above the door.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked, disappointed that she hadn’t paid the slightest attention to Lily’s latest accomplishment.

  “I was just wondering why he hasn’t carved any bear masks. If the Ani Zaguhi are the Bear people, you’d think they’d carve bear masks.”

  Jonathan hoisted Lily to his shoulders. “He can’t. It’s forbidden.”

  “Forbidden? What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you remember what Aunt Little Tom told us? Bear masks are such big medicine that Bear people don’t like to carve them.”

  “But I see lots of them every time I go to Cherokee.”

  “They aren’t carved by the Ani Zaguhi.” Jonathan widened his eyes and mimicked his aunt’s breathy speech. “If Ani Zaguhi ever carves a yonah ahgudulo, run. That’s such big medicine, the moon will chase the sun from the sky and possums will feast on foxes.”

  Mary studied him a moment, then she started laughing. “And possums will feast on foxes?”

  He shrugged. “I’m just telling you what Aunt Little Tom says. You’re the one who thinks this kid’s an Ani Zaguhi.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” Chuckling, Mary pushed the moccasins back under the cot. “It’s been a very strange day.”

  “So do you think he killed this girl?” he asked, abruptly serious.

  Mary sighed. “I’m not as convinced of his innocence as Hugh.”

  “How come?”

  “Young love is strong stuff.” He noticed that Mary’s cheeks had grown pink: was she remembering their own manic, teenage passion for each other? “Ridge seems like a nice kid, but I’ve seen nothing in him that would convince me he’s incapable of murder.”

  With a deep sigh, Jonathan finally drummed up the courage to ask the question that had gnawed at him since she’d called. “So you really aren’t going to get involved in this?”

  She shook her head. “Today, I was the emergency room attorney. Tomorrow, I’m turning Ridge over to Timothy Brendle.”

  “Who’s Timothy Brendle?”

  “Ben Bryson’s criminal defense guy. You’ll be happy to know Tim was the third person I called when we got back from the jail.”

  He frowned. “Who were numbers one and two?”

  “Number two was Turnipseed, my well digger. He mentioned last week that his son needed work, so I arranged for him to come out here tomorrow and take over for Ridge.”

  He gave a low whistle. “You’re pretty damn efficient. Who’d you call first?”

  A twinkle came into Mary’s eye. “Gosh, I can’t think of his name. Tall, good-looking guy. Lives out by the Little Tee with the cutest baby girl you’ve ever seen. I practically had to beg him to come have dinner with me.”

  Jonathan looked at her. “So you weren’t kidding last night? You meant what you said?”

  Mary scooped Lily up in her arms. “Tonight, I’m going to fix us a nice dinner and help Hugh with his horses. Tomorrow, I’m going to introduce Ridge to his new attorney.”

  She reached up and pulled him toward her. “After that, I’m going back to my office and hang out my shingle. Hopefully, some new nonlethal clients will find their way to my door.”

  Jonathan leaned over and kissed her. “Sounds like a plan to me,” he said. Once again joy swept over him. Mary was not leaving, nor was she returning to criminal law. More than that, he dared not hope for.

  18

  The next morning, Jonathan drove her downtown, dropping her off in front of the frilly mustard-colored Victorian that housed Bryson & Finch. As she got out of the truck, he asked when he would see her again.

  “I’ve got an appointment with Deke Keener this afternoon,” she replied, leaning in to kiss Lily good-bye. “How about I call you after that?”

  He chuckled knowingly as he pulled away from the curb. “Talk to you later, then. Have fun with the Deke.”

  The prospect of spending the afternoon discussing real estate with Keener held about as much excitement as trudging up a hill through wet cement, but Mary pushed that feeling aside. For Jonathan and Lily, she had committed to a noncriminal law practice. If that meant brain-numbing afternoons with a self-righteous chatterbox who owned half the town, then so be it.

  She walked into Bryson & Finch and announced herself to the secretary, who promptly led her into Timothy Brendle’s office. Brendle was a small, slender young man who looked as if he’d slid off the pages of GQ. Dressed in a perfectly tailored blue suit that matched his eyes, he kept
his dark blond hair moussed back from his face, and took notes with a thick Mont Blanc fountain pen that looked far too heavy for his slender, manicured fingers. “I read a terribly lurid account of the murder in the paper,” he said, his accent tinged with a faintly British inflection.

  “They charged Ridge early this morning,” said Mary. “I think way prematurely.”

  “Tell me everything you know.” Brendle’s pen was poised over his legal pad.

  She sat down and turned her case over to him with just a twinge of wistfulness, telling him everything she knew, noting with relief that he asked for clarification at exactly the same points she would have. “Okay.” He capped his fountain pen when she finished. “Let’s go see Mr. Standingdeer. I can’t say I’ve ever defended an Arty Galoshi.”

  Mary smiled as she stood up. “Ani Zaguhi,” she corrected him softly.

  Half an hour later, they sat around a Formica-topped table in one of the jail’s interview rooms. It smelled of pine disinfectant and the pizza that the kitchen was apparently readying for lunch. Ridge sat across from them, his shoulders straining against his too-small orange jumpsuit, the tattoos that decorated his arms looking like dark bruises on his skin. His eyes had the same look Mary often saw in Jonathan’s—a wary watchfulness that white people read as hostile, but for Cherokees simply meant I am here, I am listening, what do you want of me? She herself loved that look; often searched for it in her own reflection, but her face had too much of her father in it. His fair Anglo-Saxon-ness softened her Cherokee features like cream in strong coffee.

  Although Mary hoped that Hugh’s dire prediction about imprisoning Ridge would prove false, he already seemed somehow less than he had just yesterday. Less muscular, less bright-eyed. Less Ani Zaguhi. “Ridge, how are you? How are they treating you?” She would not have this boy beaten; she would take it up with Jerry Cochran again, if she had to.

  “Ostah,” he replied, speaking in Cherokee. “I’m okay. How is Hugh?”