Broken Strings

by Nancy Means Wright

  “You knew Marion then?” Fay pursued.

  “Not really. Well, I met her once somewhere but never got to know her. I heard about her death,” she said, lowering her voice. Sammy was a pretty woman, with a sweet, high-pitched voice. “Terrible thing.”

  Sammy kept a yew stick by her back door, she told Fay. “It wards off evil.” Then someone tapped her on the shoulder and she excused herself and moved on.

  Evidently, Marion kept her yew stick with the rest of the marionettes. Evil had crept in through the back door.

  Or was it the local school door?

  * * *

  Home again, Fay phoned Puss, who was still at Cedric’s, and made a date to meet her at The Hungry Mind Café for tea. She wanted to learn more about Marion, she told the woman. “I’m thinking of writing up some P.R. for the Valentini Marionettes. So people will know the company’s background.” It was a convenient lie, but not a bad idea at that.

  “Oh. Well, I’m having my hair done at four. It’ll have to be before that. I’m not supposed to walk on my bad ankle much, but…” It was like, with no visuals, Fay had heard Puss’s voice for the first time: a husky voice with a kind of purr at the end of her sentences. The nickname was apt.

  Fay was busy around four, too – not her own hair, but the goats to groom. And then a little goat milking, along with Dandelion, the old cow she’d rented when she’d begun and then failed at a B and B business. They’d have to meet at one o’clock, she told Puss.

  She’d just put down the receiver when a call came in from Willard. “Come over and see the head,” he said.

  “Head?” She was still thinking of witches and yew trees. “Head, Will? Whose?”

  “Why, Beauty’s,” he said with a laugh as if she should know, and of course she should. Her grandson called her spacey and she guessed she was. She wasn’t a multi-tasker. What had Beauty to do with witches?

  Nothing at all, she saw when she got to Willard’s house and he held up the papier mâché head he’d modeled. And instead of Marion’s face she saw brown eyes, prominent Celtic cheekbones, a slightly upturned nose. Why, he’d modeled the puppet’s head on her! What could she say? Yet there he stood in the narrow hallway with an expectant look on his face.

  To cover her confusion she said, “But it’s me on that face, Willard. You’re going to poison me and put me to sleep for a hundred years?”

  His face fell. “I didn’t mean – ” She smiled and he chuckled his soft chuckle and did a slow burn until his face flamed. “It just happened. It was like my knife did it. I started out Marion and ended up Fay. You don’t really mind? I can do another if you want.”

  “Hey, I’m honored. I’d like to be eighteen again.” Thinking back, she modified: “I guess not.” She was stuck in a girls’ boarding school at twelve when her father died and her mother went south to live with a pregnant older sister. So Fay spent every vacation at an aunt’s with four sadistic boy cousins. She was better off now at fifty-seven.

  Willard’s house was a small cape, painted pale yellow on the outside, with the look of an old English cottage. Pink and yellow hollyhocks still grew up and nodded under the front windows. Beyond the garden the Green Mountains humped up like rising bread, one of them, called Bread Loaf, visible from the window. Willard kept up house and gardens for Mother, of course. Would Mother ever give up and join the other ghosts? Her portrait gazed proprietorially down from the fireplace shelf.

  Mother wasn’t in the puppet workshop though, it was all Willard there. He’d painted the dining room walls a glossy apricot color, and removed the oak table and high back chairs. In their place were racks of marionettes hanging from their controllers, and above, newly constructed shelves for glue, paper, paint, all the puppet paraphernalia they’d brought from Marion’s house.

  Which reminded her: “Are any of these controllers made of yew?” The police had the one Marion used for Beauty, so Puss would have to find her own controller. If, that is, she wanted to hang the Beauty marionette, who lay on her wooden back on the work table.

  “Nope. Just plain old pine or maple. No yew in this room, Fay. I’ve checked.”

  She told him about the five-thousand-year-old yew tree in Glastonbury. “Marion was there, did you know that?” She’d looked up the place in a reference book. It was one of the three ancient power points of cosmic energy. And it was allegedly the site of King Arthur’s tomb. “Thousands of witches and new age pilgrims travel there every year to see and touch it. Imagine! And Marion was one of them.”

  He whistled. “She was no witch, though. Not with a, um – ” he grinned at Fay.

  “Face like that, you mean,” Fay said. “I still don’t know why you didn’t – ”

  “But I did,” he said, and blushed.

  Were they starting to finish each other’s sentences now? What did that mean? There was a sweaty silence and then outside, the rasp of a motor bike skidded up the drive and squealed to a stop. A rap-a-rap-rap on the door. They both knew who it was. Before Willard could say ‘Come in,’ she was in: Stormy Moon, Willard’s psychic cousin, hurtling her crimson-wrapped two hundred fifty pounds through the door.

  “Saw your truck, Fay. I heard about what you’re doing. I love puppets. I use them sometimes in my business, you know.”

  Fay knew. Stormy had used her trial-and-error method to help locate Chance when the girl had run away one time for five days; she’d embraced Chance’s tee shirt as a psychic aide. She’d used a horse’s tail to discover a horse thief, and once a pair of blue polka dot underpants to locate a sex offender. And still the police denied her powers. As for rational Fay, well, she’d have to wait and see.

  “Wow!” Stormy said, picking up Marion’s Beauty. “I can use this. To help find the perp. Somebody killed her, right? The papers were vague as usual. That saccharine obit, I suppose Cedric wrote it.”

  Cedric had, but with no mention of yew, no mention of any cause of death except the ambivalent unexpected. “We’d love to have your help,” Fay told Stormy, “but that marionette goes back to Marion’s sister. Willard’s just making a copy of it.”

  Stormy inspected the new head. “Looks like you, Fay.” She giggled. Now it was Fay on fire. “Well, that sister will have to wait. I’ll need it, if I’m to find anything out. Even better with the strings. I can bring it to life, well, in a manner of speaking. Right, Will?”

  Willard shrugged. He was caught between two strong-willed women.

  Fay, though, had plenty to say. “We don’t know it was homicide,” she told Stormy, although she did know it, dammit. “If we need your help we’ll call.”

  Stormy wasn’t listening, she was cradling the puppet against her roomy bosom. “I’ll need a holder,” she told Willard. “That stick that controls the strings.”

  “Controller,” Fay said.

  “Exactly. And made of yew, of course.”

  “How did you know about the yew?” Fay asked. “That wasn’t in the papers.” She looked at Willard and he coughed.

  “She came over,” he stammered. “I guess I, um, said something.”

  Fay gave in. The woman was a worm, you couldn’t keep her out. “Then make her a controller, Will.”

  “Out of yew,” Stormy repeated.

  “Yew,” Fay passed on, and Willard, who had excellent hearing, nodded.

  “Give me a couple days,” he told his cousin. “If I can find the yew.”

  “Glenna Flint has a bush, I’ve seen it,” Stormy said, and before they could stop her, the psychic was out the door with the Beauty puppet stuck into her massive carry-all. The red Vespa screeched off down the road, and then there was a blessed silence.

  “So what do I say when I see Puss at one o’clock?” Fay asked.

  “About the puppet?” Willard looked at her, and shrugged. He had a question of his own. “How do I tell Glenna I need to cut into her yew bush?”

  Either way, Fay told herself, there would be fireworks.

  * * *

  On her way to The Hu
ngry Mind, Fay stopped by the Branbury cemetery. It was a gorgeous autumn day, leaves just beginning to turn orangey-red, mountains a periwinkle blue. Fay had picked Marion’s favorite wildflowers to put on the grave: daisies, cornflower-blue vetch and Queen Anne’s lace. At the arts center across from the cemetery the college orchestra was rehearsing Mozart. Fay wondered, irrationally, if Marion, who loved Mozart, could hear.

  Marion’s grave stood behind a marker for a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian prince whose frail black-market mummy had been purchased by a local museum. When the mummy began to disintegrate in the museum’s hot attic, someone had cremated the little fellow and buried the ashes. Intrigued by the prince, old Dominick Valentini had bought the adjacent plot for his family’s resting place.

  Fay looked down at Marion’s stone – in shock. Someone had laid, crosswise, two sprigs of yew. It was yew, oh yes, Fay recognized the dark needle-like leaves and the single green female flowers. Who had put those here? Already the wind was blowing the pollen in a spray of yellow dust. Some landed on Fay’s sleeve and she flicked it off. What if there was some on her lips and she’d imbibed it? She worried now about Willard cutting into Glenna’s yew bush; she recalled the warning she’d read online about the bad luck that could come from cutting or burning a yew tree. “Crazy,” she said aloud.

  “What’s crazy?” a voice said behind her. She turned to see Chance.

  “Oh, those old wives’ tales about yew. Willard’s making a yew controller for Stormy.”

  “Don’t bring that psychic in on this,” Chance said. “She’s a kook.”

  “She helped locate you when you went missing that time.” Fay might denigrate people, but she didn’t want others doing it. “Anyway, what are you doing here?”

  “Same as you. We came to see the grave. Billy liked Marion – you’re too hard on him. But we didn’t bring that.” Chance pointed to the yew sprigs.

  “We?” Fay said. Then, hearing a crackling of brush beyond the poplar trees that lined the southern edge of the cemetery, she saw the boyfriend. Billy the Kid, lurking there in his tight jeans and dirty white tee that read Ghouls. He gave a weak wave, but didn’t offer to come forward. The pair had been meeting in the cemetery, she bet, the local lovers’ rendezvous. She didn’t like that, but what could she do? Chance seemed to prefer older guys to younger, perhaps because of bad experience with adolescent boys in her foster homes.

  “Okay, Chance,” she said, “so I’ll leave you to go at it. Hope you didn’t skip a class.”

  “Only calculus. I hate calculus. I hate the teacher. I don’t care if I fail.”

  “You’ve made your point, girl. So you’ll have to make your own bed – metaphorically speaking, that is.”

  “I plan to,” said Chance, who scoffed at the old Scots ballads where crossed lovers were always making their beds and dying in them. When Fay started up the cemetery path, Chance called: “By the way, I saw them again.”

  “Them?” Fay veered about.

  “Cedric and Mademoiselle, of course,” Chance said.

  “Oh! Alibi?”

  “Here. In the cemetery.”

  “Whoa. But they might have been visiting the grave.” Might have put the yew by it, Fay thought. Hmm.

  “Maybe, but when I saw them they were visiting each other. Behind that big tombstone. I couldn’t see exactly what they were doing, but when they came out they were, like, glued together. You could make ’em dance on a single controller.”

  “Nice metaphor,” Fay said, imagining a little sex-behind-the-tomb during Mademoiselle’s free period. But in sight of Marion’s stone? How tacky could you get? “So keep watching. Listening maybe.”

  “For sounds of conspiracy?” Chance looked amused.

  “You got it.” Fay aimed a quick kiss on the cheek but Chance warded it off as usual.

  Her watch said five before one so she dashed back to the pickup. She didn’t want to be late and give Puss a chance to scamper.

  * * *

  Puss wasn’t there when Fay arrived at the coffeehouse. John, the proprietor, hadn’t seen anyone of her description. “Only college kids,” he said, shaking his head, “taking up a table for two or three hours with a laptop, and nursing a single coffee.” John had put his life savings into the place which was still “on the edge.” But he was obviously in love with the place – and his clientele.

  Fay ordered a mocha latte and prepared to wait. There was a lull and so John sat down with her. He was a tall, good-looking, congenial fellow who conversed with a lot of people. He might have seen something. “Ever heard of Glastonbury?” Fay asked.

  “Connecticut?”

  “No, England. An old ruined abbey on a hill called the Tor? A kind of terracing around the hill that they call a maze, based on some ancient pagan pattern. And according to legend, constructed around the same time as Arthur’s round table, Holy Grail, Stonehenge. You been to Stonehenge?”

  John had, and the name Glastonbury was starting “to ring a bell. That Ghouls band who plays here once a month, using the old instruments? Penny whistle, flute?”

  “Sounds Irish.”

  “Well, mostly new age-y – it draws a crowd, anyway. I’ve seen one of them with a Glastonbury tee shirt.”

  Ghouls. Hadn’t she just seen that on Billy the Kid’s shirt? He played drums, yes; she remembered Chance mentioning it. How had her practical Chance got mixed up with a ghoul? There was little new-age about Chance, who liked her Abenaki heritage and her shepherd’s pie-cum-turkey or beef. Chance, who deplored tofu, even when Fay camouflaged it with cheese, olives, carrots, walnuts and raisins.

  “Hello there, Fay. So sorry, time got away from me.” Puss peered down in skin-tight black pants and a flowery scarf draped over one shoulder like she was about to sing in that Ghouls band. She gurgled at John, and when he got up, flung her butt into his chair. Like a cat, going for the warmed-up seat.

  “Looking through Marion’s things,” she professed. “It was hard, so hard. To think she’s gone. And so young. So, so young.” Her green eyes filled. Crocodile tears?

  “I’m sure it was hard,” Fay said. “Did you find a diary or anything? Your sister kept a journal for puppetry.” Not yet time to mention the Beauty puppet the psychic had taken. “If so, it might help us to find who gave her the ground yew.”

  “No diary,” Puss said quickly. So quickly, Fay was sure there was one. Of course Puss would have appropriated it. She’d been jealous of newcomer Marion, that was clear from an earlier conversation. Puss wanted her father’s estate for herself, Fay figured, and so how did she do it? How did she get the yew into Marion’s blood? Would she smother her mother Gloria one of these nights?

  Whew. What was Fay’s imagination doing? Offering up the truth?

  “If there had been, I’d have given it to the police,” Puss said, her elbows hitting the table on the word ‘police.’ “It’s up to the police to find out what happened, not you, Fay.

  So if you don’t mind, I’d like to have you stop asking questions. Go on with the puppet shows if that interests you. The shows never made any money to speak of. Hard on Cedric, who poured his good money into the business and got zilch in return.”

  “Your dad had a lucrative marionette ‘business,’ I understand?” Fay disliked the word “business.” Marionettes were an art in her vocabulary.

  “If you can call it that.” Puss’s sigh came up from her toes. “We lived off Dad’s father, if you must know. Poor Mummy with all those disembodied arms and legs lying around the house!” Puss’s lips twitched to speak of them. “She never could keep up with the housework. And now piles of Dad’s money, I mean what we inherited, goes into Green Pastures for Mummy.”

  Fay nodded, tried to look sympathetic. Her mother had died in Cork, Ireland, the very day her Patsy was born; just flung up her arms and keeled over, according to Fay’s older sister who’d taken her there for a holiday. Her mother had breast cancer, too, but it was the heart that finally got her. Idly, Fay wondered if they�
�d gone to Glastonbury. Would Fay have to go there? Not that she wouldn’t like to, but she couldn’t afford the air ticket.

  “You went with her to Glastonbury, did you?” she asked Puss. “I mean, on a tour or something? I’ve seen those tours on the internet.”

  “It was Marion said I had to go. So romantic, she said. But nothing to see there but a muddy hill and a lot of new-age kooks. Looking for a grail they’ll never find. Just a broken-down abbey on top of a hill and a swarm of tourists tearing up the grass.” Puss’s nose wriggled as if she could hear them coming.

  Fay liked rational people, but this was too much. One had to nurture a little romance in one’s life. “Marion liked it though?”

  “Oh, sure. She spent the night with a bunch of other questers, as she called them. All sitting cross-legged in the old abbey, reeking of incense, probably pot – or worse.” Puss’s red lips twitched again. Now she was pulling out a cigarette. Fay pointed at the Thank You for Not Smoking sign, but Puss ignored it.

  “There was a yew tree there once,” Fay said – she’d checked it on the web. “Roots still visible, thousands of years old.”

  Puss yawned. Was she up late making out with Cedric? Or was he saving himself for Mademoiselle? “So I heard,” she said, swallowing the yawn. “That’s why Marion wanted a yew controller. For luck, she said. And now the police have it, I heard.”

  “Where did Cedric get the yew? I mean, he had it made for her, didn’t he?”

  Puss’s charcoaled eyebrows knit sternly together. “The police have already asked that question and I do not know the answer, no. It’s for the police, I’ve said, to determine. So if you’ll kindly stay – ”

  “Out of it,” Fay finished. And decided she’d lay the question on Higgins or Nova. “I get your point.” She softened her voice. “Well, I’m so sorry about what happened to your sister. It must be hard for you. Such a shock, especially since you were so close.”

  Puss sniveled into her latte, finally doused her cigarette. “She was my only sibling.”

  “You grew up together.”

  “After my parents adopted her. They couldn’t seem to make another child. Not that I needed one! I was already going on six, I had my animals.”