by Peter Straub
“But I can assure you that I am cooking on every one of the burners that I possess,” Fleck added. “Such is the nature of my employment. I wish to add that you are my dear lady’s most truly unconventional acquaintance. She knows no others who request a monetary contribution upon releasse from priss-on.”
With a languid flap of a hand that resembled a broken bird’s wing, he waved us to the furniture in front of the fireplace.
“A contribution she was as happy to offer as I was grateful to receive.”
“Mr. Fleck,” I asked, parking myself on the sofa’s rigid and unyielding cushion, “might I ask where you are from? Your accent is very musical, but I’m afraid I can’t place it.”
“You may, you might,” said Fleck. He was bowing slightly and backing toward a baronial door with a cornice and a grand entablature on the left side of the room. An identical door stood in the wall to our right. Behind these would be many others, leading to interlocking rooms. All of the rooms would be as anonymous and impersonal as this one.
“It is an un-usual story, if I may permit myself. I was born in Alsace-Lorraine, but my childhood was spent in Veszprém, Transdanubia, in the Bakony Mountains.”
“Fleck is a Hungarian name, is it not?”
The man’s smile became almost alarmingly toothy, while his wet-looking eyes remained cold. “Mine is a Hungarian name, as you remark.” His upper body inclined toward the floor at an even greater angle, and he reached behind him for the knob, swung the door open, and disappeared through it backwards.
For a couple of seconds we heard his shoes pattering away. Then the footsteps ceased, as if Fleck had taken flight.
“You see him often?”
“Without you see Vardis, you don’t see Meredith. I think even the senator has to make playdates and dinner arrangements through that guy.”
“Does the senator know about your visits?”
“Of course not. Why do you think we had to wait for him to leave?”
“She’s a pretty brave woman, whatever you say.”
“Because of what she’s risking? Meredith Walsh doesn’t give a shit about risk, she has the guts of a burglar. Hold on, she’s coming.”
Audible through the vast door to their left, light footsteps ticked across a wooden floor.
“I thought she’d come from the other side, didn’t you?” I asked. Olson put a finger to his lips, staring at the great door as if in expectation of something wondrous or appalling.
When the door opened, the first thought that came to me was, Well, now I can say that I have seen at least two extraordinarily beautiful older women.
Coming toward me was a lush, slender woman in a short black dress cut low in front, a handsome jacket of a subtle blue, and black toe-cleavage pumps with three-inch heels. She was taller than I had expected, and her silken, well-shaped legs made her seem almost obscenely young. Her abundant hair seemed to shimmer between light blond and silver-white, first one, then the other, then back again. All of this had an impact, of course, but what made my heart pick up speed and my vision lose focus was her face.
Abandon and control, warmth and teasing distance, deep humor and deep gravity informed her face, along with a hundred other promises and possibilities. Meredith Walsh looked like a woman who could understand everything, and explain it all to you in words of one syllable, patiently. She also seemed to be of no particular age whatsoever, apart from possessing an undeniably attractive maturity that made youth seem like a mere chrysalis. Her stunning looks, her obvious intelligence, her warmth, her sexuality, her humor, these things flummoxed and upended me, and by the time the gorgeous, sexy, witty, grown-up blur that was Meredith Walsh had somehow magically appeared beside my chair, I wanted, in no particular order, to take her home with me, spend hours in bed making love, and marry her. Standing to greet her came more from reflex than a conscious decision. Once I was on my feet, I was grateful she extended a hand instead of leaning forward for a kiss on the cheek: being that close would have been too intoxicating.
“Lee Harwell, this is such a treat,” she said. “I’m so pleased that Don made it possible for me to meet you. Please, sit down. We have only about an hour, actually less, but we should be as comfortable as possible during our time together, don’t you think?”
She sat where no chair had been, but instantly one appeared beneath her.
“Yes, of course,” I heard myself say. “I certainly want you to be comfortable.”
I found myself taking in the top of her head before it came to me that I was supposed to sit, too. How could Donald Olson ever have come to such absurd conclusions about this woman?
When I sat, her gaze surrounded me.
“What a gentleman you are. No wonder you charmed Vardis so completely. Of course Vardis is one of your most ardent admirers. I wish I could say that I have read your books, too, but a politician’s wife leads an absurdly busy life. However, I will get to one of your books as soon as is possible. I will make time for it.”
I made the usual self-deprecating noises.
“And Don, you are in good health, now that you no longer have to eat institutional food? You’ve been staying with Mr. Harwell?”
“He’s been amazingly good to me.”
“How very nice for you, Donald. Would the two of you care for a drink of some kind? Scotch, vodka, martini, gin and tonic? Coffee or tea, perhaps? Vardis will be happy to prepare anything you might want. I’m going to ask him to bring me some water.”
She looked brightly from face to face. We both said water would be fine for us, too. Meredith Walsh turned sideways to punch a button on an elaborate telephone that had come into existence at the moment she extended her hand.
Without picking up the receiver, she said, “Vardis.”
In seconds, her creature slid in through the door by which he had exited. Head bent low, hands steepled before him, he listened to the orders and pronounced the words “Three waters, yes.” Again, he opened the door without looking at it and backed out.
By this time I had recovered a portion of my sanity and could look at the woman before me with sufficient clarity to see that she had undoubtedly had facial surgery, probably several times. The skin over her cheekbones seemed too taut by an infinitesimal degree, and there were no lines on her forehead or at the sides of her eyes. She was maybe twice the age she seemed to be, I thought, and three or fours years older than me. Everything about her belied these facts.
“You knew each other in high school,” she said, and gave us the benefit of her extraordinary eyes. “In fact, as I understand it, Mr. Harwell—Lee, if I might—you were part of that lovely group I met one day in a little coffee shop on State Street. And you’re interested in that disastrous evening Spencer Mallon orchestrated out in a meadow.”
“That’s exactly right,” I said. “I avoided this subject for years and years, and after all this time it became something I finally had to work out. Then all of this information about Keith Hayward dropped into my lap, and I began to learn more and more about Mallon and the meadow.”
I waited for Meredith Walsh to respond, but she merely looked back at me with the suggestion of a smile.
“I guess my interest in all this is more personal than professional.”
She smiled more broadly. “So I gathered. Obviously, I invited you here to help you, as far as I can, satisfy your personal interest in all of us back then. I promised Donald, who has always been extremely discreet about our contacts, to give you an hour when my husband was scheduled to be elsewhere. Right now, he is or shortly will be speaking at a rally for a local member of his party, and after that he will meet and greet at a cocktail reception.”
A hint of sadness and regret deepened her beautiful smile. Here it comes, I thought, preparing myself to be dismissed.
“My husband is an important and ambitious man whom I am going to assist in his quest for the presidency. He knows nothing at all about that curious incident in 1966 or my brief relationship with Spencer Mallon. He
never can know anything about that, and the same is true of the press. We went into the meadow, and before we could get out, a young man was murdered there. Hideously, I might add. And equally unfortunately, the whole event smacks of magic, of the occult, witchcraft, elements that can never be associated with someone in my position.”
“You’re telling me that whatever you say to me cannot be used in anything I write.”
“No, I am not. I don’t want to hinder you in the writing of this book of yours. You are a well-known author. If this book adds to your fame, you might be able to give a public endorsement of my husband’s candidacy. All I ask is that you conceal my identity and keep it secret for as long as anyone is interested in your story.”
“I could probably do that.” I was a little taken aback by this cold-blooded swap. “You could have another name, you could be a brunette, a freshman instead of a sophomore, or whatever you were.”
“A junior,” she said. “But I wasn’t a junior there for long. That evening scared me right out of school. Without even bothering to pack more than a very small bag, I dropped out of school and went back home to Fayetteville.”
Her luminous eyes called to me, then summoned me in. Apparently, she could do that whenever she liked. “The Arkansas Fayetteville.”
“Oh,” I said, as if knew all about the Arkansas Fayetteville. “Yes.”
“I made enough money from local modeling jobs to move to New York, and in two weeks I was working with the Ford Agency. Never did go back to college, which I regret. There are a lot of great books I’ll probably never read—there are probably a lot of great books I’ve never even heard of.”
“I’ll send you lists,” I said. “We can have our own book club.”
She smiled at me.
“Lee, I’m a little puzzled by something. Can I ask you about it?”
“Of course.”
“When I talked to Donald this morning …”
The door on the right side of the room opened, admitting Vardis Fleck, hunched over a silver tray that contained a silver ice bucket, three small bottles of Evian, and three sparkling glasses.
“And you took a long time, too, Vardis,” Meredith Bright said, putting a sharp edge on her voice. “Everybody’s operating on some sort of delay this morning.”
“I had to attend to some duties,” said Fleck.
“Duties? Surely …” She caught herself. “We’ll discuss your duties later.”
“Yess.” Fleck used silver tongs to drop ice cubes into each glass, then unscrewed the plastic caps and poured a careful half of each bottle into the glasses. He set the glasses down on red paper napkins he must have pulled from his sleeve and made a quick exit.
“Please let me apologize for my tone,” she said, speaking only to me. “Vardis should have remembered that our first obligation is always to our guests.”
“Believe me, we hardly feel overlooked,” I said.
“But if you take the poor guy’s head off,” Olson chimed in, “make sure you sew it back on at that same angle.”
“Please, Donald. Anyhow, gentlemen. When I spoke to you this morning, Donald, we arranged that you and your friend were going to take a plane from Madison, rent a car at the airport, and arrive here very shortly after the time when I was led to believe that the senator would be leaving for his engagement. Now, the senator had misled me, and he left almost an hour later than I thought he would, so it all worked out in the end, but still I’m wondering … why didn’t you get here when you said you would?”
“You haven’t been listening to the news, have you?” Olson asked.
“I never listen to the news, Donald,” she said. “I hear more than enough about current events at the dinner table. Why, though? What happened?”
He explained they had been warned against taking the flight, which had subsequently crashed, killing everyone on board.
“Isn’t that amazing?” she said. “Imagine, all those poor people. You were rescued from a tragedy! Really, the whole thing is just staggering.”
Meredith Walsh did not appear to have been staggered, however, and she did not look as though she were responding to news of a tragedy. Instead, she seemed for a moment nearly to be suppressing an upwelling of mirth. Her eyes glittered; her skin acquired a delicious, peachlike flush; she brought her hand to her mouth, as if to conceal a smile. Then the moment passed, and the mingled wonder and sorrow in her eyes and face made it seem an illusion, a cruel misinterpretation of her mood.
“Do you ever listen to Joe Ruddler on the local NBC affiliate?”
“I heard him on our last visit here. The man is a dolt, but he tries to tell the truth.”
“We heard about the crash from Ruddler. He already knew that two people had booked the flight and changed their minds at the last minute. He made a big point of saying that those two people were saved for some kind of purpose.” Although I did not believe Ruddler’s ideas had any validity, speaking them made me feel as if a golden light surrounded me.
“How silly,” Meredith said.
“According to him, our lives now have a meaning.”
“Meaning like that doesn’t exist. If you want to be totally self-centered, fine, be self-centered, but don’t pretend that the universe agrees with you.”
As she spoke, my sense of being wrapped in a warm golden light dwindled and vanished. I also noticed that the signs of her cosmetic surgery were not as subtle as I had first thought. Nor was she as flawlessly beautiful as she had at first appeared to be—I could detect traces of bitterness in her face. Bitterness was fatal to beauty.
“What is interesting about your story,” she went on, “is that you were warned off taking the flight. Who warned you?”
“I never even saw the guy,” Don said. “He came up to Lee when I was on the other side of the terminal.”
Meredith Walsh’s powers had not deserted her. Again, the wondrous deep warm playful eyes took me up and swallowed me whole.
“Tell me about it, Lee.”
She had created a private game, with only two players.
“He was a distinguished-looking guy. Dressed all in black. Lots of long white hair, chiseled face. I thought he could either be an orchestra conductor or a fabulous con man. He marched up and said he liked my books. He apologized for being rude. Then he said he’d had a premonition that I shouldn’t take my flight. If I got on the plane, I’d be risking everything, and would lose everything. I asked for his name, and he said, ‘Rasputin.’ Then he turned around and walked away.”
Smiling, Meredith Walsh brought her hands together in a silent clap. “Maybe he was from the future, sent back to save your life! Maybe he was your as-yet-unborn child!”
“Not very likely,” I said.
“No, come to think of it, to have a future child you’d have to get a new wife. Lee Truax, the sweet little thing everyone called the Eel, would be well past childbearing age. You did marry the Eel, didn’t you, Lee?”
“I did.”
“So you share a first name, and if she had changed her last, you’d both be Lee Harwell, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, not happy with her tone.
“Is she well, the Eel?”
I suddenly took in that for some reason Meredith Walsh detested Lee Truax.
“Yes,” I said.
“I—and I should say we, to include Spencer Mallon, the man we all loved—we did love him, didn’t we, Donald?”
“Did we ever,” Olson said.
“We never saw you, we never met you, though we did hear just a little bit about you. You and the Eel looked so much alike that you were called ‘the Twin,’ weren’t you?”
“I was ‘Twin,’” I admitted.
“You must have been adorable. Did the two of you really look so much alike?”
“It seems we did.”
“Would you say you’re a narcissistic person, Lee?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
Meredith’s arms and neck were stringy, and her hands h
ad begun to shrivel. In a decade they would resemble monkeys’ paws.
“You have to have a healthy narcissism to take care of yourself, to keep on looking good. But you’d also think that a person whose partner resembles him would have to be a little on the cautious side. How long has your wife been blind? Donald didn’t really know the answer to that.”
I glanced at Don, who shrugged and looked down at the buttery lace-ups I had given him on our first day together.
“Completely blind? Since about 1995, somewhere around there. It’s been a long time now. She began gradually losing her sight in her thirties, so she says she had plenty of time to practice. Lee gets out and about, she travels by herself all the time.”
“Don’t you worry about her?”
“A little,” I said.
“You give her a lot of freedom. If I were you, I might be uncomfortable with that.”
“I’m uncomfortable about everything.” I smiled. “It’s my magic secret.”
“Maybe you’re not uncomfortable enough,” she said.
Her eyes were bright but not luminous, her forehead was unlined but not youthful, her smile lovely but not at all genuine. Under Meredith Walsh’s regard, detached and cruel and curious, I saw that during the first seconds after she came into the room, I had briefly but thoroughly lost my mind.
“What an odd thing to say, Mrs. Walsh.”
“Such a beautiful little girl, with that funny tomboy appeal.” Having flashed her claws, she indulged her curiosity again. “The other beautiful child among you was Hootie. Honestly, Hootie was practically edible. A little blue-eyed china doll! How is he doing, after all this time?”
“Hootie was very sick for a long time, but in the past few days he has made amazing progress. He was living in a mental hospital, but now there’s some hope he will be able to move into a halfway house.”
“He had a real, honest-to-God breakthrough,” Don said. “Ever since that day out in the meadow, Hootie could only communicate by quoting from The Scarlet Letter. Later on, he added another book or two, but he only used his own words when his doctor tried to throw us out.”