Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 23

by Kelly Link Gavin J. Grant

  Thirty years together and then nothing but a note, not even signed.

  She had no close relatives any more anywhere for John to call. She had taken out enough money to keep her a month or two, was all, that she had said was for a shopping trip. John's birthday had been coming up.

  He figured she would be back sometime.

  Dan Anderson settled back in his chair after John walked in. Dan had an often cheerful countenance, his smile partly hidden by the bristly gray mustache but visible all the same. His eyebrows had a thickness and disorder akin to his mustache, in contrast to his hair that he kept combed close against his scalp and that seemed thin and sparse. Right at the moment little humor lit Dan's face, although he seemed glad enough to see John.

  "Thanks for coming in,” said Dan. “Something I want to talk about that I didn't really want winded about over at the restaurant."

  "About Delancey's house?"

  Anderson nodded. “I scoured that area behind the back door and as carefully as I looked I wasn't finding trace of any shoes, no prints at all, except that short track you and Tom left leading out a short ways. But it's clear something was coming out of that house."

  "That deer."

  "And that's strange, isn't it,” said Dan. “Did someone break in sometime recently, leave that door swinging? And this deer pushed in and got itself up the stairs somehow? I've never seen a deer go up stairs but I suppose it could do so, given a reason. And then I suppose it could go across the landing straight to the front room and then push its nose out through the curtains. And that was what you saw."

  "Must have been. You checked the house?"

  "You know,” he said, “it seems fine. I had to check in there once before, a month ago, since Delancey's sister had asked us to do so, now and then, until she could get here and sort things out. And this time it looks about the same as before. It's as though the doe just got in, somehow, walked up the stairs, crossed to the window, and then left when you came up to the porch. Strangest thing."

  "Yes,” said John, knowing Anderson was thinking how Delancey took his fall.

  "But that's not quite the strangest thing about it,” said Anderson.

  "What is, then."

  "Got it in my head to follow the spoor out into the woods. I figured they would just go in among the trees and wander a bit, and disappear somewhere. But I had this notion to follow them, and I suppose it was how straight they were that got me curious. You saw how straight those tracks went."

  "That I did."

  "It's one thing if a deer is running but this didn't look that much like a deer running but rather one just going at a steady and easy pace away from the house, but not dithering and poking around, either. It was going somewhere but not scared the way you might have thought, with you at the door looking in."

  "I guess I'm not too scary to a deer."

  "Well, in any case I tracked it. The tracks went straight up that low ridge and then down, still going as straight a direction as could be taken, given the trees and bushes here and there. It would come to a clump of bushes and just walk around it and then go back to that straight line. That was kind of disturbing to see—that it was going off its straight line, and then going right back to it. Once you're over that ridge you don't see the house any more, but I was certain that if you took a bead back along that track you'd still have a line going directly in that back door."

  "That's how it seemed from where Tom and I were looking."

  "So I kept on following it. There's a hollow, then a small rise again, then another hollow, with the spoor going straight back. Then there was a gap, a pretty long one, about six feet. The deer had jumped, and once it jumped, I could see from the tracks, it was all the sudden skittish and nervous and moving this way and that before taking off. Judging from the tracks it really hightailed it then."

  "As if spooked."

  "About right."

  "What made it jump?"

  "Far as I could tell there was no reason for it, except that the floor of the woods did change right there. There was a depression that it jumped over. Just barely there. You know, as if the dirt had settled in a bit."

  "A depression?"

  "As I said, about six feet long."

  * * * *

  Maybe the strangest thing about Lane Delancey's death, not long after Ginny's disappearance, was that it was witnessed, and so well witnessed it was impossible for anyone to cast doubt on the story. Delancey was out with a group of his friends at the lookout over the valley south of town. If anyone said anything seemed out of the ordinary it was just that the view from Hansen's Hill was spectacular that day, with the sky clear and deep blue as the sun was sinking low toward the horizon, and the hills farther south covered with the yellows and oranges and reds of birch and alder and maple. It was one of those warm days before the cold settles in for good when it is impossible to resist the yearning to go out into the country, even if proposed on a Saturday afternoon among a group of friends gathered for their weekly nip at the bar. According to those who spoke of it afterwards, it was Ken Spillard, from the east side of town, who proposed the jaunt. They piled into two pickups, the six of them, and went the three miles to Hansen's Hill, parking in the visitor's area. A few other people were there, to judge from the cars, but not at the lookout itself, probably off wandering the trails beneath the color-laden trees. Someone had a bottle six-pack behind a truck seat, so that the men were perched on the wooden rail above the cliff, sipping beers and gazing over the valley and feeling the faint updraft from below. The steep slope and its dried brush and rocky outcrops have a way of heating up even under September sunshine, sending unseasonable warmth rising to the lookout.

  The way Ben Orowski describes it, suddenly they were surprised out of their reverie by a shout and sudden commotion on one end. Delancey had been sitting there. Spillard said Delancey had been quieter than usual that afternoon. He had noticed. Orowski said he looked over and saw Delancey's beer sailing up into the air, and with that strange stretching-out of time that occurs when you are deeply startled by the unexpected he noticed flecks of the beer emerging from the bottle as it tumbled forward, catching and diffracting the sunlight, making a rainbow that was visible for a moment after the bottle had fallen away.

  Orowski swore he saw all that first, and then noticed Delancey's hand, which he thought for one split second was trying to reach for the flying bottle. Then he saw Delancey was striving for balance, reaching into midair not for the beer but only because he had nowhere else to reach. Lane looked as though he had leapt from the railing, except that he had one foot still on the lower cross-piece, as if it had become stuck there for a moment. Then he was entirely free, not yelling and not screaming, but making a low noise almost like a groan as he fell forward over the edge. He somersaulted once going down and struck against the rocks with his head. Likely he was knocked unconscious before he hit bottom. At least everyone hoped he was knocked cold so as not to feel the end when it came.

  Orowski saw only Delancey in those moments. Everyone else in the group saw the deer, too, although they all spotted it a moment too late. It must have come quietly out of the brush on the west side of the path leading to the lookout. It was a young buck, and one with such an unusual spread of antlers it riveted the four who saw it: they fixed on its branching rack and thought first of the season coming upon them soon and how here was the buck they would love to find walking past their stand: they relished the thought of the trophy, and of the stories they could then tell; and they dwelt upon the time to come, the hunting season, before it struck them how strange it was to be in a group of a half-dozen men sitting together and to have a deer walk up, calmly and quietly, and then to have it suddenly jump forward, head down, jabbing its horns into the back of the one sitting farthest off to the west, the one placed so he was impossible for the others to see, almost, because of the sharp brightness of the sun low in the sky beyond him—bucking forward and slamming into the back of Delancey, who shouted at the attack and th
en went forward, moaning, into the air to strike against tree branches and rocks in his descent to crumple in a wrecked heap alongside Eagle Creek.

  Then the buck turned and ran, disappearing behind them into the brush, although everyone became so absorbed in the spectacle and horror of seeing Delancey going over they saw nothing else of the deer. No one saw it disappear.

  The first thing the five men did was jump off the split-rail fence as if afraid that after Delancey's deer others would come for each in turn. The second was to confirm with one another what they had seen. They had seen Delancey fall almost certainly to his death; and, all but one of them, who, or what, had made him fall. Once they established they had imagined nothing, or if they had then they had done so together, they hurried back up the path and piled into the trucks to get down to the base of the cliff along Eagle Creek.

  * * * *

  Going through the memorial service for Ginny was hell, now that it was happening, but John sat through it silently and drank only a little too much afterward. She was reburied on the other side of town from Delancey's house. The dozen condolence cards that came in the mail he left unopened a week. A heavy snow fell at last. Anderson told him about but never showed him the dozens of photographs he had found in that second-story room of the white house down the dirt road, snapshots John remembered Lane Delancey having taken of him and Ginny, that happy Weeks couple, from their wedding day onward through the later years: photographs now with one figure cut away with scissors and another figure pasted in. Lane Delancey had a way with throwing a knife so it would stick point-first in a pale birch trunk no thicker around than a neck; and John could only contemplate that fact and wonder how it was that it had not been he who had fallen, not he the one who was cut out of Lane's real world, but that it was instead the one who always remained intact in those mutilated photos, the smiling one, the one John had married, the beautiful one he thought was saving him permanently from the world he had managed to trick so far: his good luck, the beautiful good luck he had come back from the Navy to find. She had always been there. Except for these past few months she had always been there.

  Now in some ways she was back. Even that note might never have been left in the door, that one he thought he found there. He had thought it was her writing but now could only think how it might not be. She had not signed it. Or he had not, the one who had written it and left it. Like birds flying overhead: silhouettes, but not the ones he had expected.

  "It doesn't make sense,” said Anderson. It was late morning at the gas station restaurant, a few weeks later. John had made no appearances here for a while. “The whole sequence of events. A buck doesn't come up from behind to charge a man sitting on fences. And a doe isn't going to catch your eye from a second-story window and then lead you to a grave. None of it makes sense."

  "No,” said John. “It doesn't."

  "But what does make sense—and there is a little that does. Like Ginny's shopping trip you said she was going on."

  "Yes."

  "She was shopping for you and needed someplace to store the thing until she could give it to you. Maybe something big."

  "It's a stupid thing to think about now but she'd been wanting to get me that snow blower at last."

  "Not stupid. Must have stopped along the way to see if she could leave it with an old acquaintance. Wanted to find that out before she went and picked up the thing."

  "That could be.” The words felt like mud in his mouth.

  "It was a bad business, all of it. I can't tell you how sorry I am about Ginny."

  "You don't have to, Dan."

  "I never told you,” said Anderson, “but I had my eye on you after you had word from Ginny about leaving. I knew there was some bad blood between you and Delancey around then."

  "All I could guess was that it was him. I told you that myself."

  "To your credit."

  "But you were watching me."

  "Duty to keep my eyes open,” said Anderson, staring now into his coffee. “I tell you, had there been footprints in the dust showing someone running up to that fence behind Delancey that next weekend, though I didn't much care for his ways myself, I would have checked your shoes."

  "So what was there, there in the dust?"

  "Hoof prints."

  "A size too small for me, I would think."

  "I have to say I was glad about that."

  "You were right to suspect me because I sure did think Delancey had done me wrong."

  "Which he did."

  "Not the way I thought, but yes. He did. And it was worse. I didn't think there could be anything worse."

  "Worse than anyone thought,” said Tom.

  The two of them stared out the window for a while: snow, a truck getting a refill, a lot of muddied slush on the pavement.

  "You've never gone deer hunting, have you, John?"

  "Never been the sort, I guess."

  Light sheered through the windows brightly and made the colored shapes within the formica table top seem to float in the air underneath their coffee cups.

  Janice from behind the counter finished wiping up another table and brought over the pot for refills. She smiled at Dan, then John.

  She's smiling because she sees sadness here, thought John to himself.

  He imagined her unknotting her apron and pushing back her hair and wiping the tiredness from her face and then disappearing down the road and past the fields and to the woods beyond and running quickly between the cold trees with the snow heavy around her on the ground, her nostrils widening at the shock of the brisk morning air. He could imagine it only a moment before the picture fell apart and vanished into the brightness over the quiet restaurant tables.

  "Well, we just have to go on, however we can,” said Dan. “It's hard sometimes but we just go on."

  Or the other way around, thought John. We run for a while and then we must stand still. We stand still and we look and we listen before moving again: and if there is silence everywhere, then maybe that is how the world will be, for a time. We stand and we look and we listen and whatever we see and hear is how the world is. That is all it will be. Whatever we see and hear; and the stillness of the world around us; and the arrows of birds pointing us directions we maybe never understand until we, too, are gone: that is all. Sometimes that is all.

  "I guess that's so,” he said.

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  The Girl With No Hands

  Angela Slatter

  The Devil reclines on the rails of the old bridge, picking at his teeth with a long fingernail.

  He's well dressed, handsome, looks like a feckless youth with nothing better to do. In many ways, it's the truth. A fallen angel, a disinherited son, he must pass his days as well as he can, taking not-so-subtle revenge on his father. Today, though, things are a little different.

  The Devil has it in mind to take a bride. Not just any bride, but one as pure as she is beautiful, kind, gentle and pious. He could have his choice of glorious succubi, but what he wants is the thing he cannot have. He has chosen his playing field, set his pieces, and is waiting on the bridge for the pawn to arrive. He does not have to wait long.

  The man is short, stout, balding. He is bowed under the weight of a sack, and leaves a thin golden trail behind him as wheat pours pitifully from a torn corner. The Devil smiles as the man looks up. The old man nods as well as he can to the handsome youth and continues on.

  "Stay a while, good man, I'm in the mood for a chat,” begins the Devil.

  Reluctantly, the man drops his sack and leans against the bridge for support. “What would you like to discuss, young sir?"

  "What would you like best in life?” The Devil is charming when he chooses, for it's easier for him to get his own way.

  "I'd like to not be carrying sacks about the place.” He wipes the sweat from his face. “I'd like to be rich, that's for sure—rich and able to employ a boy to do my carting for me."

  "Then so it shall be if you agree to a trade.” Luc
ifer smiles winningly. “Let me have whatever is sitting in your backyard when you return home."

  The Miller thinks of the apple tree and its reaching limbs, of the discarded barrels lying in the grass, of the fat gray mouser stalking its prey, and he laughs. “Surely, young man, you shall have your way. It's a deal."

  He knows the lad is either touched or having a joke at his expense. The sack is not so heavy when he picks it up, as if the joke has lightened all his burdens.

  "Excellent, good fellow! I shall call by tomorrow morning to collect my prize.” He leans back on the struts, well pleased, and watches the Miller, who is convinced he will never see the youth again, stagger away beneath his load.

  Miller is still chuckling when he rounds the corner of his house. His heart contracts to something small and cold. Beneath the arms of the apple tree his daughter, her hair glinting in the sun, breaks into an impromptu jig. She smiles: Jephtha's daughter dancing for her father's return.

  * * * *

  The girl watches herself in the mirror.

  Her hair is platinum and her eyes silver as the moon, in a face with the slightest blush of pink in her cheeks. On her wrists are two bracelets, plaited bands of gold and silver that appeared there not half an hour before her father returned home. These are her bride-gifts; they have grown on her like something organic but malevolent.

  Madchen slips the straps of her shift from her shoulders. It pools at her feet as her eyes move across what will soon belong to someone else. Pouting breasts, firm curving hips, pink lips at the apex of her long thighs. She is a prize by any standard.

  Her parents have been yelling for almost an hour. Hilde, fearful of the chests that now overflow with treasure, demands to know what her husband has done. When he told his story, she shrieked and beat him about the head. He defended himself as well as he could until she said, do you not know who that was? A name slipped from her lips in a whisper and took the fight from him. He dropped his hands to let her do her worst. Madchen went to her room.

  The Devil watches her from the other side of the mirror. He traces her shape with his sharp nails, an artist etching her into mercury, a silver princess to be caught forever. The planes of her face, the curves of her body, the hints of her secret places, all are recorded by his tracing talon. His tongue protrudes as he performs his art in anticipation of the taste of her flesh. He leans forward...