The Map of True Places

by Brunonia Barry

  “I’m so stupid.” She was crying in earnest now. “I can’t believe I ever started up with him.”

  “You’re anything but stupid,” Zee said. “You made a mistake.”

  “One I can’t recover from,” Lilly said.

  “I think you can,” Zee said.

  “With a restraining order?” Lilly asked.

  “As a start,” Zee said.

  “Do you know how many women are killed every year who’ve gotten restraining orders?”

  Zee had to admit she had no idea. But it was interesting to think that Lilly had been looking into it.

  “A lot,” Lilly said.

  ZEE WENT TO MATTEI AS soon as the session was over.

  Mattei called a detective she knew in Marblehead, a woman she’d been on some panel with a few years back, who agreed to look into things.

  “Can you do it discreetly?” Mattei asked. “We already have confidentiality issues with the husband.”

  “Do you have a last name for Adam?” Mattei asked, turning to her.

  Zee shook her head. “But he drives a red truck. A Ford. With the name of a construction company on the side.”

  “Do you know the name of the company?” Mattei asked.

  “No,” Zee said. “I think it’s an Italian name.” Zee thought for a moment. “It starts with a C?”

  A FEW HOURS LATER, MATTEI came into Zee’s office.

  “We might be lucky,” she said. “This Adam guy seems to have left town.”

  “Really?”

  “The truck belongs to a local company. Cassella Construction, I think it was. They said that Adam drove the truck once in a while. He hasn’t been around lately. He got into some kind of fight with the foreman, and he took off. They said he’s a good worker. They were actually hoping he’ll come back to work,” Mattei said.

  “That doesn’t mean he left town.”

  “The police stopped by his house. None of the neighbors has seen him for several weeks.”

  “Are you sure Lilly was telling you the truth?” Mattei asked. “The only reason I ask is something the detective said.”

  “What was that?”

  “She told me that this wasn’t the first time there’d been trouble involving Lilly Braedon,” Mattei said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Evidently the Marblehead police have gotten calls about her before. Not just with this Adam but with other men as well.”

  Zee sat staring. “Men? As in plural?”

  “Classic bipolar if you think about it. Sex with multiple partners certainly qualifies as risky behavior.”

  Zee thought about it for a moment. “It doesn’t mean that one of them isn’t stalking her,” Zee said.

  “No,” Mattei said. “It doesn’t.”

  Zee looked shaken.

  “The police will keep an eye out for Adam,” Mattei said.

  “Which won’t help a bit if she takes off with him again,” Zee countered.

  “Well, at least we now know it wasn’t William,” Mattei said.

  Zee shot her a look but said nothing.

  6

  THE FUNERAL SERVICE WENT on for far too long. Zee was aware that many people spoke, though she could not keep her mind on their words. Her eyes scanned the crowd.

  Sweet William sat silent and obviously drugged in the first pew.

  Zee realized that both Mattei and Michael had been right about her coming here today, if for different reasons. Mattei thought it was unprofessional and strongly advised against it. Michael hadn’t advised her at all; he simply put forward a question: What good could come of it?

  She wondered just that as she sat here. The family certainly wouldn’t want to see her. Years later, as they looked back on this day, they might be glad she’d paid her respects. But today it would only serve as a harsh reminder that she hadn’t been able to save Lilly.

  There was another reason Zee had come, though she hadn’t admitted it to either Michael or Mattei. She needed to see for herself whether or not Adam showed up. If he did, it would mean one thing. If he stayed away, it would mean something else entirely. By all rights he shouldn’t come anywhere near them today. But if he had been stalking Lilly, as Zee still believed he had, he probably wouldn’t be able to stay away.

  Even if she was right, though, there wasn’t much to be done about it. Lilly had jumped off the Tobin Bridge and into the Mystic. It was suicide, not foul play.

  It turned out that Adam didn’t come to the funeral. But, to Zee’s surprise, two of the eyewitnesses showed up. Not the woman who had been so competitive for camera time, as Zee might have expected. It was the other woman, the toll taker, who came. And the man in the blue van, the one who’d been so reluctant to talk with the newscaster, was there as well.

  WHEN THE ORGAN SIGNALED THE end of the service, the funeral director gave the sign to the pallbearers to lift the coffin, and the congregation filed out behind, family first and then, row by row, the other congregants.

  As the family passed, Zee was careful not to catch William’s eye. Whatever he might feel when he saw her, she didn’t want to make it any worse.

  As the crowd moved out into the bright sunlight, Zee followed them to her car. She didn’t see the red truck until it was directly in front of her. It was pulled over illegally, half blocking the street. Adam watched the pallbearers and the family. When she looked up, his eyes met hers. He looked at her coldly. Then he put the truck in gear and pulled out, tires screeching, leaving about twenty feet of rubber.

  Shakily, Zee let herself into her car. Stuck in the middle of the funeral procession, she moved with it through old town and around Peach’s Point to West Shore Drive and Waterside Cemetery.

  She wanted to pull out of the procession, to head directly to the police station and tell them what she’d seen. But she and Mattei had already talked it through. Lilly’s death was a suicide. The police were not likely to open any kind of investigation. And if they did, and the story of Lilly’s affair with Adam came out, it would only hurt the family more than they’d already been hurt.

  “Let it go,” Mattei had told her.

  When the other cars turned right, into the cemetery, Zee went straight, following the signs on West Shore Drive that aimed her toward Salem. She had waited too long already. She needed to see Finch.

  BOTH OF THE OLD MAN’S knees had stiffened to the point that movement had become nearly impossible. Even his arms would not move, and so he stood near the window looking out at Maule’s Well, or at the re-creation of it now on his cousin’s property. After The House of the Seven Gables became well known, his cousin had grown obsessed with re-creating the building as befitted the story. No, not his cousin—his mind was playing tricks on him again. It was not his cousin but someone else entirely. The strands of his memory were breaking. Often now he would struggle to make his way from one room to another only to find when he arrived at his destination that he had no idea why he had come. Names escaped him. Even the simplest of language eluded him now, as if his words, yet unformed, had been stolen by the salt air and blown out to sea.

  He looked out over Turner Street at the old house. It had changed so much over the years that it was difficult to picture its reconstruction. At first it had been simple, just a few low-ceilinged rooms. As fortunes grew, the house had been added to, so that eventually there were the full seven gables of his famous book. But Federalist fashion had dictated simplicity, and so gables had been removed, then added back again when his book had made the house so popular. It was amusing, truly, that this woman, whose name he could not even remember, had undertaken to display the house to the public, and more amusing indeed that the public wanted to see it, seemed willing to pay money in fact to see not just the house with its secret room but other things that had never existed in the house before his fictional account, things like Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop and Maule’s Well.

  He was not certain how he felt about any of it. He was a shy man by nature and did not appreciate th
e accolades afforded to him. Still, he loved the house more than any dwelling before or since, and he felt a deep responsibility to watch over the property. It seemed his only job now. His hands could no longer hold the pen. And his words were gone. But he was aware (because his writing had made it so) that the gabled house, however cursed it might be, belonged, always and forever, not to the family who originally built it, or to his cousin, or to the woman whose name he could not remember, but to the characters he had created in his story, to Hepzibah and Clifford and Phoebe.

  Somewhere in the distance, he could hear a phone ringing. He was not well today. It was not simply his knees. His head was foggy, more foggy than usual. And his hands had a rigidity he could not soften. He had taken something for it. A visitor, one he had at first thought to be his beloved Hepzibah, had given it to him. He was going to die soon. He could feel it. Slow and steady, death seemed to crawl over him. He could sense the rigor mortis already, in his knees. He was leaning against the wall, looking out across the street at his famous house, and he could not move. He had turned to stone, and all he could do was wait for the medicine or for some force of nature to release him.

  Where were the ones he had so loved in life? Where was Sophia? Dead, he thought, though he could not remember her passing. He thought then about Melville, and the tears started to fall. Melville wasn’t dead. Couldn’t be. Then an anger rose up in him, an almost murderous rage.

  He stood here now, a statue, a formation of cold granite that trapped just a trace of life inside its chill. The statue could see and feel and want. What he wanted now—wanted desperately, it seemed—was to see the gardens across the street where, in his famous story, the old rooster he had named Chanticleer and his two aging hen wives had been able to come up with only one last diminutive egg, which, rather than ensuring the rooster’s aristocratic line, had been served for breakfast. He had found the words amusing when he’d first written them. But today he mourned Chanticleer and the hens and their loss of lineage. But of course it wasn’t real, had been real only in his imagination and on the page. And there was a wall between them now, a very real wall that his vision could not penetrate. Standing here today, he could not see his beloved gardens, though he could still manage to see the ocean beyond.

  He wanted to cry out for Hepzibah, though he knew she wasn’t real, and she seemed to him now two different people, the wizened old woman he had created, the one the actual shop was modeled on, and someone as young and beautiful as he might have once imagined her. And he was filled with love for this last Hepzibah, who was really in his mind more like his character of Phoebe might have been, Phoebe who had come into their lives and changed everything and brought the light back to the old house and love to it as well. He started to cry and was aware that he was crying for what once had been, and for what had passed.

  More than anything now, he wanted to see his Hepzibah, and he willed her to him with a force so strong that his knees released their grip and his throat loosened. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, he could feel the stone cracking to release him. He moved first a hand and then an arm. Then, carefully, he took a step away from the wall and toward the window.

  When he was able, he began his daily work. His strength growing, he raised his shutter and opened the cent shop. It was not Hepzibah’s shop, the one he had created in the book; it was not even a bad rendering of it. But it was the best an old man could do.

  The customers bought what he put out. One by one they came, shyly at first like the little boy in his story, but then more boldly.

  ZEE COULDN’T FIND A PARKING place on Turner Street. Tour buses lined the lot at the House of the Seven Gables, and the tourists who came in their own cars parked on the sidewalk, ignoring the RESIDENTS ONLY sign in favor of a ten-dollar ticket they would never pay.

  She finally parked on the small patch of green where Finch kept his bird feeders. As she got out of the car, she noticed a tourist walking away with an antique ship’s model, which seemed to fly through Finch’s first-floor window and into his hands.

  Her first thought was that Finch was being robbed. Then she noticed the tourist’s bags hanging from the guy’s arm, a small child at his side. As she got closer, she spotted the hand-lettered sign in the top of the window: HEPZIBAH’S CENT-SHOP. And underneath it a smaller sign, also hand-lettered: EVERYTHING MUST GO.

  Finch’s hair stood up in white tufts. His voice was hoarse. He didn’t recognize her until she stood directly in front of him, and when he did, he immediately started to cry.

  The tourists moved back, out of the way.

  “Dad,” she said. “What’s going on here?”

  “Hepzibah,” he said. “My Zee.” He reached out for her, gripping her hand as hard as he could. “I willed it so,” he said, and then turned to his audience, his faith in life itself renewed. “I willed it so!” he cried.

  PART 2:

  June 2008

  The ancient method of Dead Reckoning or deduced reckoning is often unreliable. Winds, tides, and storms can easily push the ship off course. Every mistake is compounded, altering her passage in critical ways, often with tragic results. For this reason, sailors eventually turned to celestial navigation. The stars are a constant. The earth spins, but the stars remain fixed in the heavens. Even the stormiest sky eventually will clear to reveal them.

  7

  FINCH PRACTICED TOUCHING HIS thumb to his middle finger as rapidly and accurately as he could. He had succeeded fairly well with his right hand but was slower and clumsier with his left.

  “There’s usually one side that’s weaker than the other,” the doctor said, taking notes.

  “I’m aware of that,” Zee said. They’d been through the routine at least a dozen times. “We’re here about his medication.”

  “Unfortunate,” he said. “But we did know that this one might not work. This particular medication came with warnings. It causes hallucinations in some people.”

  “And clearly he’s one of those people. He thought he was Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

  The doctor’s eyebrows raised. “Creative. Of course, considering his background…”

  Zee fired him a look.

  “Often men believe they’re working for the CIA, some covert-ops kind of thing. Women’s hallucinations often tend to be more sexual in nature,” he said, grinning at her.

  Zee ignored his remark.

  Neurologists have a rather warped sense of humor, Mattei had told her more than once.

  “We’ll take him off it.”

  “I’ve already done that,” she said. When she hadn’t been able to reach the doctor by phone, she had checked the PDR and had called a friend of Michael’s who was also a neurologist. There was no danger from sudden withdrawal, no weaning period.

  “Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here,” Finch said. His voice, once loud enough to be heard unmiked in lecture halls of a hundred or more students, was now barely audible.

  “Sorry, Dad,” she said.

  “The hallucinations are not usually unpleasant. They’re generally more alarming for the family than for the patient.”

  “Nevertheless,” she said, ending any possibility of continuing the meds. It seemed astounding to Zee when she thought of the side effects some doctors expected their patients to contend with. Any television ad for pharmaceuticals these days came with a list of contraindications so long it sometimes seemed amazing to Zee that people would dare to take so much as an aspirin.

  The doctor stood up. “Can you walk for me, Professor Finch?”

  Finch stood shakily. Her first impulse was to help him, but she willed her hands to stay at her sides.

  With great effort Finch shuffled fifteen feet across the doctor’s office. Zee could tell how difficult his effort was only by his breathing. His face was masked, a classic sign of Parkinson’s.

  Once a reserved New England Yankee, Finch had become more emotional with the progression of his disease. But his emotion showed neither on his face nor in any vocal infl
ection. It was a more subtle energy that told Zee how frustrating and impossible this short walk had become for her father.

  She had often wondered at the fact that Finch didn’t have the shaking so common to Parkinson’s. Ten years into the disease, he had only recently developed any kind of resting tremor, and even that was so slight that anyone who was not looking for it would never notice.

  Curiously, none of these symptoms had been the first signs of Finch’s illness. The first cause for concern had happened in a restaurant in Boston, the night Finch had taken them all out to dinner to celebrate the release of his new book based on Melville’s letters to Hawthorne. The book was aptly titled: An Intervening Hedge, after a review that Melville once wrote for one of Hawthorne’s books.

  Finch had been working on the book for the better part of ten years. The fact that he had finished it at all was cause enough for celebration; the fact that someone had actually published it represented job security. Finch didn’t need to work. His family had left him money. But teaching was something he loved, and teaching Hawthorne and the American Romantic writers was his greatest joy in life.

  Finch presented a copy to both Zee and Melville, the name of the man for whom Finch had left Zee’s mother. That’s what Zee often told people who asked, though neither statement was very accurate. Actually, Finch never left Maureen, though he had met Melville for the first time during one of Maureen’s extended hospitalizations. And Melville’s name was really Charles Thompson. Melville was a nickname Finch had given him, one that stuck.

  Zee opened her book to the title page, which he had inscribed to her. To my sweet Hepzibah, he had written in a hand that was much diminished from the one she remembered. A million thank-yous. Zee was contemplating just what those thank-yous might be for when she caught the dedication that was printed on the following page: FROM HAWTHORNE TO MELVILLE WITH UNDYING AFFECTION.