She Stopped for Death

by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

  “Was she in it?” Jenny asked but didn’t want to hear his answer.

  He shook his head. “No sign of her.”

  A relief. But what was next?

  “Five days! I don’t understand.” Dora, holding Fida in her arms, patted her as fast as her hand would move. “Where would she have gone?”

  “Ed Warner’s thinking maybe she was dazed from the crash and wandered into the swamp.”

  “Oh no. Not five days in there,” Jenny moaned.

  Tony was about to say something, then snapped his mouth shut, letting the thought that it wasn’t likely that Zoe was still alive hang in the air between them.

  “What’s the chief doing?” Jenny didn’t dare take time to feel anything.

  “He’s got a wrecker there now. They’re winching the car out of the water. I’ve been calling as many men as I can find, telling them to spread the word to meet up at Freddy’s. We’ve got to form a search party and start looking.”

  “What can I do? I don’t want to leave town.” Dora shook her head.

  “You’ve both got your hands full with the Emily Sutton thing. You go do what you have to do, and I’ll call as soon as we find her.”

  “I want to help search.” Jenny meant it.

  “You promised Abigail.” Dora’s voice broke. “As long as Tony calls us . . .”

  Tony put a hand on Jenny’s arm. He leaned down to look into her eyes. “You can’t go into that swamp anyway. Next thing we know, we’d be looking for you.”

  “Zoe did.”

  “Listen, trust me, if Zoe’s in there, we’ll get her out. And I’ll call you as soon as we do.”

  Jenny nodded. Good sense wasn’t attractive right then, but it was still good sense.

  “I’m late now,” she said, looking at her watch. “I’d better get to Emily’s before she throws a fit.”

  She grabbed Tony’s arm as he turned to hurry out.

  “Call me. One way or the other. I mean it. I’ll be going crazy until I hear.”

  Nobody asked what Jenny meant by “one way or the other.” Everyone in the room seemed to know.

  Jenny hurried back to her room and changed into the first dress she found in her closet. It wasn’t the new dress. Not fancy. More summer than fall, but it didn’t matter.

  Speed mattered. Getting this thing over with mattered.

  Zoe mattered.

  Minnie Moon stopped by to pick up Dora. She knew about Zoe’s car and the men out searching in the swamp.

  “Never saw anything like it,” Minnie said, her wide eyes looking very scared. “Can’t get that little person out of my mind. Wish we weren’t going to this thing tonight.”

  Jenny delayed leaving the house for another half an hour, hoping Tony would call. He didn’t. She put Fida into a bathroom with her food and water and with plenty of newspapers on the floor. She kissed the dog’s head again and again, looked in her one good eye, and promised what she knew she had no right to promise: “We’ll find her. Don’t you worry. Zoe’ll come home soon.”

  * * *

  The shortest route to Emily’s house was cordoned off by police cars with flashing lights. A few of the cars were Traverse City police cars. Jenny felt slightly better knowing that other departments had been called in. Maybe it wouldn’t take any time at all. She could picture Zoe clinging to the top of a tree or sitting on a hillock of grass. Pictured her and prayed, then couldn’t stop the tears, even as she laughed at the image of Zoe on a hillock.

  She had to back up and turn around to take the other way, through town, over to Emily’s house.

  Jenny sprinted across Thimbleberry, being careful of a particular crack in the pavement where her heels could catch. She was up the sunken walk and standing on the porch, knocking, before she realized she’d expected more, here at the house. She’d got it into her head that the house would be brighter, the door might be open. Maybe the sun would shine through the windows and puddle on the carpets inside because the heavy curtains would be gone. She’d had a vision of reformation and deliverance. This was Emily’s triumphant day. Something should be different. It was a disappointment that it was all the same.

  She knocked again, then thought she heard an echoing tap from inside the house. But when she listened harder, she didn’t hear it.

  Jenny knew she should be getting angry. Even today Emily was being difficult and would come to the door whenever she pleased. But anger wasn’t what she felt. It didn’t matter to her how Emily indulged herself. No matter what she pulled, Jenny was going to wait.

  She gripped the railings around the porch until her knuckles were white. She stared into the swamp. If anything, the underbrush was thicker now. The water was darker. For a minute she tried listening for a voice, then called out: “Zoe! Zoe!”

  She listened with all her might. She’d been so sure she’d get an answer.

  She called again and held still, trying to convince herself she heard an answering voice.

  She heard birds. She heard leaves rattling.

  She knocked at the door again then sat on the top step, though the back of her dress would probably get dirty and she’d walk around all evening with a smudged behind.

  She waited.

  A half hour went by. Thirty slow minutes. Jenny decided either there would be no reading tonight or Emily had gone ahead with someone else, afraid Jenny wasn’t coming.

  Which meant no supervising her outfit and no prereading of the work. She’d let Abigail down.

  Jenny clamped her teeth together. “Shit,” she whispered, reaching for her phone. She had to call Abigail and tell her Emily was loose, on her own. She had to call Dora. Maybe there was no reason for her to go to town at all. She’d failed at every job she’d promised to do.

  “She’s probably on her way now. My secretary was supposed to pick her up, but not this early.” Abigail sounded neither hopeful nor too upset. Evidently she was willing to take anything that happened in stride.

  “I’m not coming then,” Jenny said. “There’s nothing more I can do. I’m going to Freddy’s to wait . . .”

  “Please come into town, Jenny Weston. We need a ticket taker.”

  * * *

  It was a long, slow drive to Traverse City, waiting all the while for her phone to ring. Jenny found a parking place down Union Street.

  “Emily’s here.” Abigail ran to Jenny at the theater door, grabbing her by the arm.

  “Have you seen her? What’s she wearing?”

  Abigail shook her head. “She’s locked herself in the backstage bathroom. She says she will come out when she hears applause from the audience.”

  “But that’s still an hour.” Jenny checked her watch. “And who brought her?”

  Abigail shrugged and hurried off.

  Dora was next, running up to take Jenny’s hand and pull her around to the front hall of the opera house to take tickets. “You’ve got the first half hour. Cassandra will take the next half hour.”

  “Who brought Emily, Mom? Do you know?”

  Dora shook her head, then hurried off.

  Jenny waited as a crowd gathered on the sidewalk in front of the building. An older woman she didn’t know came down to join her. “It’ll be a madhouse when they open the doors,” the woman said, then leaned close to Jenny. “Have you heard the stories going around about her? Just awful. You’d never believe what people are saying. All these years of not writing and now—and I have this from a reliable source—her new work is terrible.”

  Jenny wanted to groan. All the worrying and time spent trying to make this one night a special time for Emily and she’d blown it herself. Or the gossips had blown it for her.

  If she didn’t have so much on her mind, she could be almost sympathetic.

  When the doors opened at six thirty, people pushed in, swamping the ticket takers at the bottom of the stairs. When Jenny was relieved at the end of a half an hour, she headed up to the theater, then backstage.

  Abigail stood outside the bathroom, looking of
f into space.

  “Have you seen her?” Jenny demanded.

  Abigail nodded absently, as if she wasn’t there.

  “Is she showing body parts?”

  Abigail focused with difficulty. She nodded. “I don’t really know if those are body parts sticking out here and there or if she’s got a costume on under her flapping scarves. She’s wrapped herself in blue with a red scarf around her head. Her makeup is . . . I would call it artistic, but I’m not feeling kind at the moment.”

  “Oh, no. Don’t worry. People are here for the spectacle. She won’t disappoint them.”

  “She’s clutching sheets of her poetry in her hands. She won’t let me see them.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She’s on stage, supervising. She demanded that velvet chair—I got a shop in town to bring one over. Now she says her feet don’t reach the floor. Dora’s hunting for a footstool. She wants a floor lamp. Can you imagine? Now! The floor lamp must have fringe around the shade. Dora called around and found one. It’s coming. If this night doesn’t end soon, I’m going to choke the woman.”

  Chapter 31

  Jenny walked through the double doors into the darkened auditorium, just in time to witness the thunderous applause and a standing ovation from the main floor to the balcony.

  She stood at the back, inside the closed doors, as the small woman, only a dark shadow with gauzy scarves waving around her, came onstage. She walked quickly, in mincing Geisha steps, to the front of the stage where a spotlight caught her. Her head of blazing red hair, wrapped in an even brighter red scarf, was bowed. Her hands were clasped in front of her, as if in prayer. When she reached center stage, she stood very still, highlighted in that single spotlight. The crowd roared, then stood again to clap and whistle.

  Jenny could see it on Emily’s plain face. She sensed that she was a sensation; her return to life was being celebrated.

  After a long dramatic pause, she lifted her face to the audience, then threw her arms in the air and bowed deeply.

  The applause went on and on. Emily Sutton soaked it in.

  It wasn’t until the applause was dying and Emily wasn’t moving that Abigail Cane came onstage and gently led her to the waiting chair. People noisily took their seats.

  Before Emily was settled in her large red chair with a red footstool, a stagehand came out to clip a mic to her dress, or whatever it was she was wearing. The kid looked at her right shoulder, and then the left, mostly covered by veils. He opted for someplace in the middle, gathering a handful of chiffon and sticking the mic there.

  Emily sat, now only lighted by the fringed floor lamp. She cleared her throat—which echoed out to every corner of the theater. She reached for the crystal glass filled with water. She drank, looked over the glass of water at her audience, flirted with them, then laughed as she set the glass back on the table.

  “Thank you so much for the wondrous greeting. It’s been a very long time since I sat on a stage like this.” Her voice, at first, was weak. It seemed to come from a place as far away as Emily had been for so long.

  She smiled to every corner of the audience and up into the balcony, though, even with no stage lights, Jenny doubted she could see anyone.

  Emily settled herself, looked up, and smiled around again, then reached into the veils and chiffon. Out came—as if by magic—a handful of papers. It took some time for her to get settled, to get into a comfortable position, and finally she open her mouth and begin to read in sonorous, melodramatic tones:

  Echoes in the house

  Predict the universe.

  Simple sounds that

  Only death can know.

  She finished reading to another standing ovation.

  And on and on she read, until people clapped after each poem, but no longer stood.

  She read awhile, then stopped to take a drink and smile. When she began each poem, she lowered her head to read in what soon became a monotone.

  There was a thing in the whispering then raised voice that felt hypnotic to Jenny.

  She stopped listening to watch the few faces in the audience she could see, those lit by wall lights. The rest was a sea of silhouetted heads. So many there for the poetry. Some, Jenny imagined, for the spectacle. She never would have thought a poet would draw such a crowd. But, though the poems were decades old, they resonated. Sometimes it was by a cluster of words, or with a string of sounds. Sometimes it was an image drawn far beyond the image’s true existence. She read her death poem series, then her life poems. Jenny listened as the poems lodged themselves inside her head. She enjoyed herself more than she’d expected to.

  In a few minutes, she checked her cell phone. She hadn’t dared turn it off, but it was on vibrate.

  She shifted from one foot to the other.

  Eight fifteen and no call from Tony. One hour of Emily reading poem after poem. It was going beyond Jenny’s attention span.

  She wasn’t alone. There were the growing sounds of moving chairs and coughing.

  And then Emily stopped reading. Abruptly. Just like that. She put up both her hands at the clapping, stood and bowed, then bowed again. When the applause stopped, Emily went back to her chair and sat down.

  “For the second part of my presentation . . .”

  Her voice lilted over the words, as if playing with the people in the room.

  “I will read new work. Some of these I wrote only today, especially for all of you who have gathered here to honor me.”

  There was an unenthusiastic smattering of applause, and Emily began again, a new batch of papers in her hands.

  “I caught a toady in the grass. / It jumped and jumped at me. / I thought I’d squish him with my foot, / but pained by death, I set him free.”

  Emily looked up and smiled. The applause was tepid. Jenny figured people’s hands were hurting by now, or the audience was half asleep, or they felt as she did: the poem was awful.

  Emily was on to her next poem. Another bad poem.

  Chairs moved and squeaked in places around the auditorium. A few people, bent almost double to escape, hurried from the darkened theater, sneaking by Jenny to go out through the doors.

  Emily started another poem without waiting for applause, as if she had a mission to fulfill and would fulfill it no matter what happened.

  She read faster, as more people headed for the doors, the glare from the outer hall flashing light into the darkened theater again and again.

  Emily didn’t stop reading. She didn’t lift her head. She heard only her work, cocking her head to one side, enjoying herself.

  Jenny was beginning to pity her. She wished she could start applauding loud enough to stop her—to get what was left of the audience to join in.

  This house has rooms at the very top.

  Rooms that lock with keys.

  When I am closed inside a room,

  I’m a specter no one sees.

  Jenny listened with her eyes closed—imagining the place, the locked rooms. Odd. Why did it sound familiar, as if there was a message buried in the words? Nonsense, Jenny told herself. She was beyond the point of true response. She wanted to go home. She wanted Tony to call.

  Emily read another.

  Jealousy snares me in its claw.

  A slurred pewee makes a call.

  Soon the one of us are two.

  Cloistered friends, we’re held in thrall.

  The new words circled inside Jenny’s head. She saw a spinning wheel. Where do you or it begin? They’d brought Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems to Emily, a gift from Amy at Horizon Books. And poems in shapes and Morse code. New ideas for Emily Sutton.

  “Soon the one of us are two—Cloistered friends . . . A slurred pewee makes a call.”

  Jenny pictured the house on Pewee Swamp. She’d heard the sounds. She’d watched as a curtain was pulled aside.

  After waiting only another minute, she pushed through the doors to the lobby, rushing to find Dora and Abigail.

  Abigail, wringing her hand
s, saw Jenny first. “She just ran off the stage,” Abigail moaned. “Between poems she looked up and saw that the theater was empty. Poor soul. I don’t know what to do. We don’t know who brought her. How will she get home? Please help me find her.”

  They looked first behind the curtains at the back of the stage to see if she’d hidden herself. The stage manager said Emily Sutton had run out the stage door.

  Outside the theater, on Front Street, the last of the parked cars were pulling away from the curb.

  “We’ll go out the back way. She could be there,” Jenny said and drew Dora after her as Minnie Moon pulled up in her Jeep and rolled down a window. “You see Emily in that red car? Almost clipped me, pulling out like a bat out of hell.”

  Abigail waved her on. “We’re looking for her now.”

  “Long gone, you ask me,” Minnie said and drove off.

  The theater lights went out. The building was dark and soon locked up tight. The three of them stood there, not knowing what to do.

  “Minnie was mistaken,” Abigail, exhausted, said. “It couldn’t have been Emily leaving.”

  Dora’s face was stricken. “Then where is she?”

  Abigail looked up and down Front Street as the sidewalks emptied.

  “Did you hear those poems?” Jenny turned to her mom.

  Dore nodded. “Strange.”

  “Remember Zoe and I bought her a book called Code Poems?”

  Dora nodded.

  “Emily read about the one being two. She mentioned the slur of the pewee. Cloistered friends. I’m thinking . . .”

  Dora put a hand on her arm. “Do we know where Emily’s gone? And where she’s put Zoe?” Dora’s eyes grew large.

  Jenny nodded. “I think so.”

  There was no time to explain to Abigail, only time to say they had to get back to Bear Falls. Only time to get into Jenny’s car and head north.

  * * *

  The drive home was endless. Lights along the side of the road barely moved, though Jenny was doing seventy. Dora made call after call, trying to get a hold of someone in Bear Falls to warn them. No one answered. Even the police station seemed to be closed. Myrtle’s, which should still be open, didn’t answer.