Face on the Wall

by Jane Langton

  Annie watched. Flimnap’s hands were wonderful in action, those hands that could juggle balls and bananas and pebbles so deftly and paint window frames so neatly. His long fingers moved as if they had brains of their own. They gripped and lifted and carried, adjusted and tested. She imagined them touching her hair and cradling her face.

  “It was you, wasn’t it, Flimnap?” she said dreamily. “You put it there. You painted that face yourself.”

  He glanced at her from the high plank, then came down the ladder. “Look.” He picked up a piece of chalk and scrawled something on the newspaper covering the table, a clumsy pair of circles with two ears and a tail. It was a child’s drawing of a cat. “That’s the best I can do,” said Flimnap, and, smiling at her, he put down the chalk and climbed up the ladder again.

  He couldn’t draw, and yet he seemed to know about children’s picture books. Not hers, but Miguel Delgado’s crazy clowns and Antonio Amici’s dazzling colors, and one day she saw him leafing through Joseph Noakes’s Gulliver’s Travels.

  Annie was surprised and pleased. “He’s great, don’t you thinks?”

  Flimnap closed the book and said, “I hear he’s dead.”

  “Dead!” Annie was shocked. “Oh, no! Who told you that?”

  “I read it somewhere.”

  “Oh, I’m really sorry.” Annie stared at Flimnap, feeling a sharp sense of loss. “What a shame! I love his impossible staircases that go around and around, and that picture of Gulliver tied down by his hair, with every strand casting a shadow. Oh, I can’t believe it.”

  “Well, I guess it’s true.”

  This morning, when he finished blotting out the bleeding face with its yellow hair, Flimnap picked up the garden fork again, tossed it over his head, caught it behind his back, waved it at her, and went back outside.

  Annie watched him descend the hill in loping strides. Then she went into her bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror over her dresser.

  The thing was, never to be wistful again. Never to yearn after somebody, never to be pathetic. Not after all those gruesome mistakes in the past, getting married to Grainger Swann, and then falling stupidly in love with that screwball Burgess, and then with jut-jawed Jack, only to be dumped not once but twice. Never again would she be abject. The hell with Flimnap’s wonderful, nimble, extraordinary hands.

  The mirror was whimsical, as usual. Three or four days a week she looked all right, as though a good fairy were in charge of the mirror. But then an uglifying witch elbowed the fairy aside. The state of Annie’s looks was completely random. She was beautiful sometimes—really!—homely at other times, and most of the time only so-so.

  Today she was so-so.

  On the other side of the wall that divided the old and new parts of the house, Roberta Gast too was looking in the mirror, the beautiful Chippendale mirror she had inherited from her mother. She had hung it in the living room, where the light was just right, flattering her, doing away with the awful wrinkles she had seen on her face on moving day. Now, in the morning light, it gave back the image of a handsome, clever-looking woman. Smiling, Roberta walked away from the mirror and looked out the window.

  Was the car there? Yes, Bob had left it on the brow of the hill, at the very edge of the sloping lawn, just as he had promised.

  Eddy was playing outside, stumbling slowly over the grass, following a meandering parade of ants. All the ants were carrying tiny green pieces of leaves.

  Roberta did not see the ants. She put her face against the screen and called to Eddy, “Look, Eddy, there’s the old car. Wouldn’t you like to play in the car? Look, one of the doors is open. Why don’t you play in it for a while? You can pretend to be driving a car, a real car.”

  Annie was back at work, mixing paint, trying to get the right depth of black for Andersen’s tall hat, when she heard the squeal from outdoors and Flimnap’s shout. Running to the window, she saw him race across the hillside, trying to intercept the car that was plunging toward him in free fall.

  Annie threw open the screen door and ran after him, screaming, “Stop, stop! Let it go!” But he wasn’t stopping, he was galloping along beside the car, throwing open the door, heaving himself inside. The car skidded as he wrenched at the steering wheel, but instead of slowing down it plunged faster and faster, heading for the thick forest of oak trees at the bottom of the hill. While Annie stumbled after it, shrieking, there was an awful grinding as the driver’s door burst off its hinges and the left side of the car crunched and scraped past one tree, narrowly missed another, and came to a stop in a wild arching thicket of buckthorn and honeysuckle.

  Sobbing, Annie floundered through the thicket and grasped the shuddering frame of the door. Flimnap looked up at her, his face white, his hands shaking on the wheel. There was a whimpering bundle on the seat beside him. It was young Eddy Gast.

  “Oh my God, Flimnap,” whispered Annie.

  And then Roberta Gast was there, opening the door on the other side, extracting Eddy. “He loves to play in the car,” she said, her voice trembling. She turned away and started up the hill, carrying Eddy, whose frightened face looked back at Annie over his mother’s shoulder.

  Flimnap got out. Shakily he turned away from Annie and looked at the car. “Where the hell did it come from?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ve seen it before.”

  The car that had plunged down the hill carrying little Eddy Gast was not his father’s Bronco or his mother’s Mazda. It was the old Chevy in which Robert and Roberta Gast had appeared in Annie’s life for the very first time.

  Chapter 15

  “Then get thee gone, and a murrain seize thee!” cried the Sheriff …

  “I have a good part of a mind to have thee beaten for thine insolence!”

  Howard Pyle,

  Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

  The police and fire departments in Southtown were housed in a big flat-roofed brick building. Most of it belonged to the fire department. Huge red engines filled the driveway, their chromium fittings glittering in the sun.

  Homer found the entrance marked POLICE and walked in. The white-haired officer on the other side of the counter looked up from his computer screen and said, “May I help you?”

  “Chief McNutt?”

  The officer shook his head and stood up. “Sergeant Kennebunk. You’re Homer Kelly?” He smiled and glanced at his watch. “The chief’s expecting you. You’re right on time.” He stretched out his hand. “Glad to meet you. You’re pretty famous around here.”

  “For bungling and general mismanagement?” But Homer was flattered. Grinning, he shook Kennebunk’s hand and glanced down the hall. “Is the chief here?”

  “I’ll get him.” Kennebunk disappeared.

  Homer looked at the pictures on the wall. They were all alike, photographs of a tubby man in a tight uniform standing beside one famous person after another—Ronald Reagan, Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, Ross Perot. One showed him smirking beside a gorgeous woman who might be Madonna, or perhaps some other shapely female.

  Kennebunk came back, looking embarrassed. “He’ll be a minute or two.”

  “Well, maybe you can help me, Sergeant. I’m looking for a man named Small who lives in Southtown. I understand Mrs. Small has disappeared. She was a student of my wife’s.”

  “Yes, I know Small.” Kennebunk spoke hesitantly. “He runs a sand-and-gravel company, or used to. I hear he’s in real estate now. He lives way out on the Pig Road. I mean Songsparrow. It’s Songsparrow Road now. All the old pig farms are being turned into housing developments. Meadowlark, Songsparrow, there’s a whole lot of new ones out that way.”

  “They’re trying to forget the malodorous past, is that it?” Homer leaned his elbows on the counter and leaned closer to Sergeant Kennebunk. “Do you know if there’s any truth in the rumor that Small beat his wife? Mary read it in one of those supermarket scandal sheets. What do you think? Was he the kind of creep who knocks his wife around just for the hell of it?”

&
nbsp; Kennebunk glanced warily down the hall. “Well, maybe. Sometimes she had bruises on her face. I felt sorry for her, but there was nothing we could do unless she lodged a complaint.”

  “And now she’s disappeared. Do you think she ran away?”

  “Perhaps, but, then again, I wouldn’t put it past Small—” Kennebunk stopped in mid-sentence. “I guess you’d better wait and talk to the chief.” He sat back down and stared at his monitor, making it clear that he would answer no more questions.

  The chief of the Southtown Police Department kept Homer waiting for twenty minutes. When he bustled down the hall at last, Homer stood up to greet him, but Chief McNutt didn’t look in his direction. He barked an order at Sergeant Kennebunk: “You’re due at the mall in ten minutes. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Tomorrow, sir,” said Kennebunk patiently. “That’s tomorrow. Griscom’s there today.”

  Chief McNutt had lost face. “Well, then, get those invoices out pronto, and I mean right now.” Turning, he glowered at Homer.

  Homer was charmed. Chief McNutt was that rare bird on the face of the earth, a genuine son of a bitch. There was nothing Homer enjoyed more than a good hate. He beamed at the chief and explained his errand.

  At once McNutt shook his head. He did not offer Homer a chair, or invite him into his office. This was obviously a matter to be swept out the door. “Your wife thinks Fred Small was a wife-beater?”

  It was clear that the testimony of wives was unreliable. “It was in the paper,” explained Homer, “the rumor that Mrs. Small was a battered wife.”

  “My God,” said Chief McNutt, “it’s all the rage today, weepy women claiming they’ve been mistreated by their husbands. It’s like a virus, one female gets hysterical and the infection spreads and pretty soon they’re all screaming they’ve been beat up. Christ! It’s worse than sexual harassment.” McNutt reached across the counter, snatched up a folder from Kennebunk’s desk, and held it under Homer’s nose. “This here’s all rape cases. So-called rape cases. Oh, yeah, maybe one or two’s legitimate. Boys get liquored up, grab the nearest piece of flesh. The rest, well, you know those women, they invite it. Look at the way they dress, with those real tight skirts and low-cut necklines showing their tits. I wouldn’t mind having a go myself.” The chief slapped the folder down on the counter and laughed loudly.

  Homer’s good humor vanished. He could clearly see the burly chief wrestling some poor woman into the back seat of a car. “But in this case, I think—”

  “Forget it.” The chief turned and walked away, firing a final shot. “Fred Small is a law-abiding citizen of this town. His wife, the story is, she’s got a boyfriend. There’s some guy, used to hang around. Take my word for it. She’s gone off with some gigolo.”

  Homer gaped at McNutt’s retreating back, and called after him, “Well, thank you very much.”

  There was silence. Then Sergeant Kennebunk stood up and said softly, “I’m going off-duty now. How about meeting me at Jacky’s? Doughnut place, just down the road.”

  “You bet,” said Homer. Outdoors, he sucked in deep drafts of air uncontaminated by the lewd breath of the chief of the Southtown Police Department, and climbed into his car.

  Jacky’s stood in a sea of asphalt, sandwiched between a gas station and a mattress outlet. A gigantic plastic doughnut wobbled on the roof in the wind from passing cars. Inside, the place was fragrant with good smells wafting from coffee machines and kettles of simmering fat. Homer ordered coffee and a plate of sugary doughnuts and sat down with Kennebunk. The two men loomed over the plastic table nose to nose. Homer picked up a doughnut and ate it hungrily, spilling powdered sugar all over his coat.

  Brushing it off his necktie, he said, “Why aren’t you the chief of the Southtown Police Department instead of that creep?”

  Kennebunk burst out laughing. He had a hearty laugh. It was obviously a release from the groveling tension of life as a traffic cop under Rollo McNutt. Heads turned at other tables. Homer grinned. Then Kennebunk stopped laughing. “His father’s town manager. His uncle’s on the board of selectmen. His brother—”

  “Oh, right, I get the picture.” Impulsively Homer said, “Look, why don’t we work on this together? You and me? And nail that Bluebeard Small?”

  “Bluebeard?”

  “Oh, it’s my niece Annie. She’s obsessed with folktales. Bluebeard murdered one wife after another. There was this locked room full of corpses.”

  “You think Small’s like that?” Kennebunk looked at Homer soberly. “You think Pearl Small didn’t go away, he killed her?”

  “And maybe six or seven wives before her.” Homer was carried away. He waved his doughnut at Kennebunk. “Princess, they called her Princess. She’s got this long golden hair.”

  “Princess, oh, right.” Kennebunk’s rugged face softened. “Her hair is yellow as straw. She’s like the princess in the tower, the one with her long golden hair hanging out the window. She always reminds me of that.”

  “What, another fantasist in our midst?” Homer beamed at Kennebunk. “You’re as bad as Annie. Listen, do you have any idea who told The Candid Courier she was missing? Somebody must have given them all that stuff about Pearl’s disappearance.”

  Under his thick white hair Kennebunk’s ruddy face grew redder still. “It was me, I’m afraid. McNutt wasn’t doing anything about it and he refused to let me look into it. Small’s his old drinking pal and lodge buddy. So I thought a little publicity wouldn’t do any harm. I tried the Globe and the Lowell Sun, but they didn’t seem interested. So I worked my way down to the Courier.”

  “I see,” said Homer. “Well, good for you. At least it got my wife all excited.”

  “There’s something else that’s sort of strange,” said Kennebunk. “After Pearl disappeared, Small showed up with his arm in a sling.”

  “Oh? How did it happen, did he say?”

  “I asked him, when I stopped at his house to ask about Pearl.”

  “Well, how did you know she was missing?”

  “My wife’s her boss at the Southtown Public Library. When Pearl didn’t show up for work, Dot was worried. She suspected for a long time that Pearl was being knocked around. One day she asked her point-blank why she didn’t leave her husband, and Pearl said she couldn’t leave her trees.”

  “Her what? Her trees?”

  “That old pig farm. Pearl was trying to improve it, planting trees.”

  “I see. So what about Small? You asked him about his wife?”

  “Right. He was mad as hell. Said it was none of my business. If a man’s wife chooses to go off for a while, it’s no business of the police, that’s what he said. And then of course Small called McNutt, and McNutt bawled me out.”

  “You poor bastard. Well, what about the sling on his arm?”

  “He said he fell downstairs. He’d been drinking, he said, and he fell downstairs. I’d like to think Pearl knocked him down, but she was pretty small and fragile.”

  “What about a doctor? Did he go to an emergency room or anything?”

  “Apparently not. I checked with the hospital. I mean, my wife kept after me. My wife—”

  “You don’t have to tell me about wives.” Homer laughed. “She should get together with Mary Kelly, they’re two of a kind.” He stood up. “How about another doughnut?”

  “Oh, no thanks,” said Kennebunk. “My wife’s got me on a diet.” He took an appointment book out of his pocket, wrote down Homer’s phone number, and promised to keep in touch.

  Left alone in Jacky’s, Homer ordered two more doughnuts and ate them slowly. They were a mistake. When he waddled outdoors and climbed into his car, the four deep-fat-fried morsels sat like a dead weight in the bottom of his stomach.

  Chapter 16

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes in holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
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  As soon as Annie walked into the house with her bag of groceries, she heard a strange noise, a rhythmic humming. She dumped the bag on the counter and turned around.

  There was a whirl of color on the floor in front of the window. It was a spinning top. It droned and hopped and spun as though it would never slow down.

  “Flimnap?” called Annie. At once there was another sound, a loud engine-driven noise, the lawn mower. Flimnap was outside, cutting the grass for the first time.

  Mesmerized, Annie watched the top until it wallowed to a stop and lay on its side. Then she picked it up and looked at it. It was an ordinary old-fashioned wooden top. Her brother John had owned one just like it a long time ago.

  Later on, when Flimnap came in from mowing the entire front lawn, Annie showed him the top. “This is yours?”

  “Perhaps.” Flimnap took it, pulled a string out of his pocket, wound it carefully around the top, and flung it on the floor. Again the top whizzed and sang.

  Annie laughed and began putting away her groceries, comparing the prosaic contents of her kitchen shelves with the sprightly presence of Flimnap O’Dougherty. Flimnap didn’t belong in the world of paper bags and canned tomatoes and cartons of milk. He was a refugee from her wall, an escapee, a participant in its astonishing events. He belonged up there in that gallery, along with Aesop and Beatrix Potter and Hans Christian Andersen. Their enchanted plaster was the air he breathed.

  Someone knocked on the glass of the French door. “Hello there, Eddy,” said Flimnap, opening it, letting him in.

  “Oh, Eddy,” said Annie. “I’m sorry, but I can’t read to you today. I have to go to Cambridge.”

  “It’s all right,” said Flimnap. “I’ll be here for a while. Come on, Eddy, look at this.” Once again, while Annie hurried the rest of her groceries into the refrigerator and slammed her cupboard doors, Flimnap spun the top.

  Eddy wanted to try it. Flimnap wound the string for him, but when Eddy threw it down, the top fell on its side and rattled across the floor. Annie hurried into her bedroom and changed her clothes. When she came back, Flimnap was juggling plastic plates. “One, two, three—whoops!” The fourth plate bounced on the floor. “I can never manage four,” said Flimnap, grinning at Eddy. He tried again, while Eddy laughed and clapped his hands.