by Fred DeVecca
“You picked her up here,” Sarah asked. “Where did she start out?”
“She said she was from Shelburne Falls. Born and grown up there.”
“How did you get that bandana?”
“Just found it on the seat after she got out. It was down behind the cushion. Actually, I didn’t find it till she was long gone or I would have returned it to her.”
“Did she seem nervous? Scared? Happy? Sad?” I realized Sarah would do just fine in an interrogation room.
“Wait a minute. Who is this girl to you?”
Sarah took a deep breath before answering, perhaps realizing she needed to tone down the intensity. “She was my friend,” she said in a calmer voice.
“What happened? Did she run away or what?”
“We don’t exactly know yet.”
We had learned about as much as we were going to learn from Bert. And we had missed our plane, but that was okay. There would be other flights to New Orleans if that was still where we wanted to go.
But Bert wasn’t done yet. “You know I said this girl was a mystery and I meant it. She gave me all this generic high school talk and she looked the part too. But she also said one thing I didn’t quite get.
“It was just when she was getting out. At another truck stop, just off 95 in Jacksonville. Maybe her defenses were down by then. Anyway, she turns and looks at me and I say my goodbyes, all the usual stuff about how it’s been fun, wishing her the best, etcetera, etcetera. And she looks me right in the eye. And, Jeez, those eyes can pierce right through you. You guys must know what that’s like. So I say, ‘Have a good life,’ which is what I always say to people, you know.
“And she says something like, ‘I’ve had a good life. And I thought it was over. And it still might be. At least this life.’ Then she got out. And that was the last I saw of her.”
I paid for Bert’s coffee this time and we headed back to the parking lot with him. We walked him back to his truck. He pulled himself in and cranked down the window.
The roar of his engine rolled over us and we were just about back to my Subaru when he pulled up next to us, heading toward the exit.
He had to shout to be heard over the cacophony. “Hey, I almost forgot to say have a good life, you guys.”
Sarah hollered back to him that he should have a good life too.
Then he added one more thing, “That Jillian was cute and smart but she might get lost. I’ve been all over Jacksonville many times. And there’s no Lavender Street in that town.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Hints of Traces of Ghosts
We went back to Shelburne Falls. I had no idea what to do next. Thanks to Mooney, we had all the money we needed to go anywhere and do anything, but I did not know what these places or things should be.
We were going to New Orleans because we believed Frack was there and that he knew something—or perhaps had even pushed Julie into the river.
Now we were sure that Julie was still alive, or had been alive a couple weeks ago. She had survived the fall into the river.
But her curious words about her life, and yes, about Lavender Street, echoed loudly.
It was one of those nights when I could not fall asleep. We now had a hint of a trace of the ghost of our dear missing Juliana Velvet Norcross, and that was exciting and invigorating news. But there was another missing girl—Edith Marie Pasternak, aka Victoria Diamond—and I was obliged to find her too. She had slipped far into the back of my mind, and I felt bad about this.
I still kept her crumpled photo in my pocket. I would un-crumple it and look into her eyes on occasion, and then re-crumple it. And I had never stopped looking for her.
I mean that in its broadest sense. I was looking everywhere, but since Julie was my major concern, my looking for Edith occurred in the everywhere places I would go anyway. I was not digging deep. I was not asking people about her anymore. Hell, I had asked everybody who might know anything long ago. I was not going anywhere special to look for her. I was living my life and hoping she still had a life to live, hoping the two would intersect somehow.
Then they did. At least I thought they did. And shortly after that, I knew they did.
I was lying in bed, heart pounding, wide awake. Midnight turned to 1 a.m. turned to 2 a.m. and I tossed and turned. I finally got up and found my smart phone to play back some bird songs. They usually calm me down.
That was all I had on the phone—a series of bird calls that by now added up to about forty-five minutes of songs, some more relaxing than others. But to me, they all sounded soothing, even the cackly, piercing ones.
I listened to the chideep-chideep of the barn swallow. Penelope was on there with her fateful fweep-fweep. But it was the oo-wah-hoo of the mourning dove that made me freeze up.
Lying there, yearning for unconsciousness in the middle of the night, I listened with unusual concentration. All was still and very quiet. Marlowe sat soundlessly, furry head on his paws. The mourning dove voice was clear and loud.
This was recorded on Mayday, just before we danced at the top of the Hill of Tears, just before Danny had started playing his accordion, just as the blinding sun was peeking over the trees and light was overtaking the darkness.
I had picked up some ambient sound behind the bird, barely audible.
It was a voice. A female voice. It must have been one of the dog walkers. There was no one else up there besides them and the guys on the team, and it was a woman’s voice, soft.
I was near sleep when I heard it. There were some garbled words, sentences, and then it ended with two unmistakable words: “Victoria Diamond.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Sisters
I did finally doze, but sleep was restless and brief. Now I had someone else to find—the dog walkers. I had no idea who they were. I’d seen them one morning a year for twenty years or more, but that was it—one fleeting morning. And I had no idea who they were.
But I had a good lead—I knew the dogs, or at least what they looked like. Yes, I had reached that pathetic point in my life where I paid more attention to the way dogs look than the way women look.
A lot of people walk by my house, it being on the Hill of Tears. It is a popular route, since it starts in the village and quickly turns into countryside, and village people like to walk in the countryside.
So there I was, sipping a weak cup of coffee and staring out my window, when one of the dogs walked by—a spunky, cheerful black and white border collie mix, led by a nondescript fortyish woman bundled up in more jacket and hat than was necessary on this day, which would probably become warm but was now chilly.
I walked out to greet her, coffee cup still in hand, hair uncombed, still rumpled from my basically sleepless night.
“Hello,” I said.
“You’re one of the Morris dancers,” she said.
We continued in this vein for a while. I had never spoken to this person, despite seeing her each Mayday morning for twenty years. A shame. She seemed like a lovely lady.
Brief intros were finished as were cute comments on the weather. I wasn’t quite sure how to approach the subject, so finally I asked directly, “Oh, hey, by the way, do you know Victoria Diamond?”
“Well, yeah. Do you?”
“Only in a manner of speaking.”
She didn’t press me too much on this vague statement. It turned out that this woman, whose name was Cheryl, had met Victoria when Mooney and his crew had first come to town. Cheryl had been a fashion designer in New York at one point in her life, and Mooney found her and approached her about costuming for the film. She had met with some of the actors and done some preliminary measuring for costumes. One of the actors was Victoria Diamond.
They had developed a bit of a friendship, meeting up for coffee a few times, but then Victoria had gone back out west. Or something. In any case, Cheryl had stopped hearing from Victoria and had not seen her for a long time.
Until last month, when Cheryl had seen Victoria from a
distance, passing on the street, not near enough to speak to.
“And that’s what I was telling Molly about that day we saw you guys dancing—just us girls catching up.”
So Edith, or Victoria, was here in town and alive, at least as recently as last month. That was good news. I would have called Amy right then, but I wanted to have a confirmed personal sighting before I did that. And it was possible they had re-established their own communication anyway, since it seemed Victoria had rejoined the living.
My own personal sighting occurred soon after. When circumstance and good luck find you, they find you in bunches, just as bad luck does. I must have been having a streak of good luck.
I was walking in town, on Bridge Street, at about noon when there she was, big as life, walking toward me. She would have bumped right into me, had I made a quick leftward turn.
So I didn’t turn leftward. I tried to make eye contact and it worked. She looked right into my eyes. It was enough to make her stop in her tracks, right there in front of Mocha Maya’s.
She said, “Do I know you? How do I know you?”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “But I know you. Sort of.”
A few very convincing words from me and we were soon occupying one of the window seats inside Mocha Maya’s, where we could watch the town stroll by as if on a big movie screen. And talk.
“I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” I said.
She was smiling, with sweetness bursting out of her pores. She was a kind soul. “I’m not hard to find.”
“Yes, you are. You’re elusive. And evanescent.”
“You use funny words.”
“I’m a funny guy.”
She smiled. “Yes. I can see that.”
“Where have you been?”
“I’ve been back in L.A. I was in a commercial. I even had a line. It was for Toyota. Very cool! It’s going to play nationally.”
“Congratulations.”
She sighed, her bright green eyes pleading with me to understand. “I was so close to giving up. It’s so hard to make it in this business. You have to sell out so much. I’m an artist. I’m an actor. Smiling and being sexy to sell cars sucks. But I got paid. Pretty well too.”
I echoed her enthusiasm, my tone chipper and encouraging. “And now you’re back. You were going to be in the movie they were shooting here, right?”
“Yeah.” She laughed, a pretty, tinkling sound, a bit rueful. “That was going to be a big deal. It could really have helped my career. Mooney was promising the moon.” Realizing what she had said, she laughed again. “Mooney … moon.” I gave a polite laugh, hoping to keep her talking, and she did, “I’m never sure how much to believe from that guy, but he does real good stuff, or at least he did. Who knows what he’ll do now.” She looked around the café, as if he might walk in at any moment.
“Why did you come back?” I asked gently. “This movie is dead, right?”
She picked up her water glass and took a drink. “Well, yes. But I don’t have anywhere else to go. No other work lined up. We’ve got a place to stay here that’s paid up for a while, and a bunch of the other girls are still here. So there’s that.”
She paused, and then said, “And, of course, Mooney’s here. He’s kind of falling apart, but he’s here.”
“You’re pretty close to him.”
She actually blushed a little.
“Well, sort of. For a while. He gets ‘close’ to a lot of his actors. If you know what I mean.”
“The female actors.”
“Yeah. Mostly.” Another blush. She had freckles. A lot of them, even down her neck.
“I heard you guys had a bit of a scene at the Blue Rock one night.”
She looked a little startled that I knew, her green eyes widening, but quickly recovered. “That was bad,” she said. “But then it ended up okay. We made up and we even went for a midnight moonlight swim in the river. That was amazing.”
“I heard Mooney doesn’t swim.”
“Oh, no. That’s crazy. He loves to swim.”
“Fully clothed? The guy was dripping wet all over.”
She narrowed her eyes and tensed slightly. “Wait. How do you know? You weren’t there, were you?”
“No. I just heard.”
She exhaled a sigh of relief. “No. We went swimming in the nude. Then we got dressed. We were fooling around, pushing each other and teasing, you know? Then I pushed him in in his clothes. He grabbed me and pulled me in in my clothes. It was fun! We were playing there in the river with all our clothes on and the moon real bright overhead. It was like a magical night. I’ll never forget it.”
She sounded wistful. We chatted some more. Wistful, yes—but she also seemed relatively happy and healthy.
Our conversation was over. We both stood up. She shook my hand. Then she hugged me. I hugged back.
Finally I said, “I hope you’ve been in touch with your sister. She was worried about you. You should keep in touch with her.”
“Sister?” she said. “I don’t have a sister.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Falls Falling
I had found Edith, or was it Victoria? One small triumph, but at least it was something. Well, I had found Edith but I had lost Amy, whoever she was. I called the number Amy had given me to give her the news. It had connected me to her before, when she was here in town. But now it had turned into a “non-working number.”
Normally I would have pursued this further, but I had someone else to find and that was my main priority. This, at least, was a success and I let that console me while I moved on to the main event—finding Julie.
Back at Clara and Sarah’s home, no one was thinking about Edith Marie Pasternak, aka Victoria Diamond. They had never even heard of her. That was my own job and I had not shared that story with them. Sarah was obsessed with Bert’s story. She pulled up Google Maps on her computer. “Look at this,” she said. “Highway 10 goes right from Jacksonville to New Orleans. That’s definitely where she was going.”
I suppose that’s where we were going too. Except that fate once again would stop us.
Clara was working at the hospital. I took Sarah to lunch at the West End. A crow hoarsely cooed, cawed, rattled, and clicked at us as we walked, and I recorded it. We both ordered burgers. I had a root beer. Sarah wanted a real beer. “I can pass,” she said, “and I’m doing real adult work for you now. I deserve an adult beverage.”
I would not hear of it. “They all know you here. They know how old you are. Order a 7UP.” So she ordered the 7UP.
We were sitting at the bar, not saying much, when in walked Lorenzo. He sat next to Sarah and ordered a martini. The kid drank hard. Not a good sign.
He sipped half the thing down before he spoke. Then, addressing Sarah, not me, he said, “I’ve got more pictures for you guys. Back at my room.” He was out of breath.
“Anything good?” she asked.
“Absolutely un-freaking-believable,” he replied.
“Something new?” I asked.
“Hot off the presses. A couple hours ago.”
I didn’t get it, so I asked, “So you get something earthshaking and the first thing you do is run to the nearest bar and order a martini?”
“I was looking for you. This is always where I find you. You should talk.”
“Well, I’m not drinking cocktails. Anyway, you’re talking to her, not me.”
“You guys are a team, aren’t you? What’s the difference?”
I allowed as to how there was none, or hardly any.
Lorenzo chugged down the rest of his drink. Sarah picked up her napkin and wiped her face. “Let’s rock, Frankie.”
So I, reluctantly, rocked.
We crossed the Iron Bridge and went up to Lorenzo’s room. Cello Lady was playing some more Bach as we passed by her kitchen.
Lorenzo opened his laptop computer and pulled up a file.
“This is a time-lapse series I set up at the falls a week or so ago. It sna
ps a shot every thirty minutes. I wanted to get stuff of the water rising and falling. It’s been raining, not like before, but it’s rain and it comes and goes and the falls vary dramatically. It’s very cool. My camera was set up just in front of the old candle company building. Unfortunately for us, it’s stationary. It doesn’t move around, so we get what we get. But I think you’ll find this fascinating.”
At first, it was just the falls falling. One shot every thirty minutes meant forty-eight shots per day, and the camera had been there about a week, so that was over three hundred consecutive shots, making it look like a choppy, slow-moving movie, with little plot but lots of sense of place.
Finally, as they say, the plot thickened. It thickened like crazy near the end.
There she was—Julie, our Nutting Girl. First you could see her off to the top of the screen, a small, lonely body standing, watching the river flow.
Then she passed right in front of the camera—bigger than life, totally turning the screen to black with her body at one point.
Then she was down on the rocks—standing, looking, moving her head around.
She was dressed all in black and her hair was tied back so you could not see its full splendor. Lorenzo’s camera was far enough away that we could not see the details of her face. We could not see her move much, with one still shot at a time. There was little sense of whether she moved with an easy dancer’s grace or a clunky, awkward, lost-girl shuffle.
Still, it was clear enough who this mysterious figure was that Sarah audibly gasped and put her hands over her mouth. “Oh, my God,” she half-whispered.
Then Julie was gone. She was in one shot and then she wasn’t. She was perched atop one of the jutting rocks, gazing downward, body weight shifted delicately toward the waters below. Then, in the next shot, not there at all. And she did not appear again.
Once more, she had disappeared into the river.
Lorenzo let it play out for us. A few more seconds of the falls falling. Followed by the girl falling. Or at least we presumed that was what was happening. Then it grew dark on screen as night fell.