Broken Strings

by Nancy Means Wright

Fay would go straight to Billy’s apartment, that’s what she’d do. Confront the pair, or one or the other of them. She had to head things off before they did something crazy like running off together with Chance dropping out of school, or worse, getting pregnant. Well, most likely the girl was no virgin, not with all that running away. Yet there was a certain vulnerability about her. Surely she’d never been in love before this. Most likely Billy was the first person who took that kind of interest in her. A real boyfriend. But too old! What awful things had he done with his life?

  She filled a mug with coffee and headed out to her pickup. The greyhound followed, wanted to jump in beside her and for some reason she let him. Gandalf was comfort, a kind of ballast, the grey pointed muzzle staring ahead at the road. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she told the dog. “Interfered with a girl’s life.” Not that Patsy didn’t give her ample opportunity, oh yes! All the boyfriends that came and went. One negative word from Fay and her daughter would strike back, tell her off. And already Patsy was on her second husband, but “living apart.” Nor was Fay any role model. One husband down the tube, boyfriends didn’t work out. She’d passed the genes on to her daughter. Suck up the guilt, Fay!

  She parked behind the apartment and hoped she had the right one from Ethan’s vague directions. Chance’s green bike leaned against the building. It was like a green light, pulling Fay out of the car, up to the building. She saw the names of four occupants on narrow bronze plaques; the only Billy was on the second floor. Billy Kidde. My God, so it really was Billy the Kidde! She would have laughed if she weren’t so mad. She stomped on up the steps, followed by the greyhound. She didn’t care if dogs were allowed or not, Gandalf was her bodyguard. Banged on the door. Twice.

  “Yes?” A woman’s voice.

  “I’m looking for a girl – I’m looking for Chance. She, um, she didn’t come home last night. I thought she might be here.” Already she heard her own voice backing down. Chance would be furious to know she’d come here. She held on to Gandalf’s collar, felt the grey nose nuzzle her knee.

  “She’s not here,” the voice said, and for a moment Fay envisioned Chance tied and gagged, a handkerchief stuffed in her mouth.

  “But her bicycle’s here! And she’s not in school.” Fay heard her voice whining, pleading, crescendoing. “Open the door, please.”

  The door opened. A woman stood there in jeans and neat tangerine-colored shirt, purse slung over her shoulder as though she was about to leave. She was smiling. “Why, Ms. Hubbard,” she said. “I thought I recognized your voice. Chance was here last evening, but then left quite early on. For home we assumed.”

  “Without her bike?” Fay said, seeing the girl accosted, thrust into a stranger’s car.

  “Oh, probably got a ride with a friend. Or decided to walk. I wouldn’t worry. This is Vermont. Actually, I had to leave myself a few minutes later. I’m Billy’s sister,” she added. “Well, half-sister. We grew up together as kids. I work at the Natural Foods Co-op – you may remember me?” She tapped the badge on her shirt with a red fingernail.

  “Sammy,” Fay said, reading the badge. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry to – I mean I was worried.” A half-sister, she thought, and the first of the love scenarios faded in her head.

  But where was Chance?

  “Of course you were worried,” Sammy said. “I have a child myself, you know. Well, she’s with my ex for the fall. He lives in Santa Fe. That’s not easy!” Fay shook her head. The woman seemed genuine. “But you’re welcome to come in and look around. Billy’s rehearsing with his band. I just came by to pick up a map. I’m taking some time off. He’s been helping me.”

  “It’s on the floor,” Fay said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Your map.”

  “Oh. I must have dropped it when I – ” She laughed and leaned down to roll it up.

  “Merry old England,” she said. “We’ve relatives there, Bill and me. First cousins on our birth mother’s side. That’s how we’re siblings.”

  Gandalf was sniffing about the room. Sammy patted his head, her long yellow hair falling onto the short grey fur, the scarred ear. She rubbed it tenderly. “I love animals. But they’re not allowed here. You know.” She smiled apologetically. “Coffee? I’ve a few minutes before I have to go.”

  “Just had some, thanks anyway.” Fay’s defenses were all the way down. “I’ll be going then. Sorry to bother you. But if you run into Chance, in the Co-op or…”

  “I’ll tell her to go straight home,” Sammy said. “Or I can call you.”

  “No, just tell her. I don’t want her to think I’m checking up on her.”

  “Of course not,” Sammy said sweetly, although they both knew that checking up on her was exactly what Fay was doing.

  Gandalf was moving into the kitchen now and Fay whistled him back. He returned with something in his mouth. Why, it was the Ganesha puppet! That long elephant nose, something Marion had picked up in India, she’d said. What was it doing here? The two women looked at it. Sammy shrugged. “A puppet Chance brought over?”

  “One I was looking for actually.”

  “She probably forgot to mention it to you. Like me, leaving my purse at the store yesterday. We all forget things – at any age.”

  “Yes,” Fay agreed, noticing the tiny pleats above Sammy’s upper lip, the crinkle lines at the eyes. She was an older sister, it looked like. She could be in her late thirties. And she and Billy played together as children, she’d said? Hmm. “Did Chance seem upset about something? Had she and your…your brother argued or anything?”

  Sammy cocked her head as if in thought, and her yellow hair fell across her face, hiding her expression. “Nothing I particularly noticed,” she said. “I was telling her about the trip. Billy said, or I said something – I don’t remember what – that seemed to upset her a teeny bit. It was after that she left. I think, well, I think, Ms. Hubbard, she –”

  “Fay.”

  “Fay. I think she wondered what I was doing here. I mean, I think she thought Billy and I were, well, you know, a couple, and she left before I could explain who I was. I’ll bet that’s what it was! When Billy would never – well, he’s not a womanizer, if that’s what you think. I know he’s older, but only twenty-five.”

  “And Chance only just turned seventeen.”

  “Look, Fay. Your Chance knows more than you think. She’s been through the foster care mill. You know that. What you may not know is that so did Billy and me. Yeah! You’re surprised, huh? I won’t go into why right now because I have to leave for work.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m already late. So if you don’t mind, I’ll have to lock up. But I’ll keep an eye out for Chance. I’ll let Billy know. She may be at his rehearsal.”

  “And where’s that? The rehearsal?”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t know. They take turns at each other’s houses. Afraid I can’t tell you more than that.” She was all but pushing Fay and the dog out the door. “I’ll call if I hear anything.”

  The door locked behind them and Sammy ran lightly down the steps. At the bottom she gave a jaunty wave. “Try not to worry now!”

  * * *

  Fay left Chance’s bike there in case the girl came back to retrieve it. She shut Gandalf in the pickup and ran across the street to Alibi to see if Chance had been there last night. But the owner, who was mopping up, hadn’t seen her. “She’s underage,” he said. “Don’t like these high school kids hanging around. Don’t want her here. You tell her that. Parents have to help these kids.”

  “Mmm, “ Fay said, not needing another moment of humiliation. When her cell phone rang just as she reached the pickup, distracted, she said, “Chance?”

  “Your lucky chance!” the exuberant voice said. “Stormy Moon here. I had another vision. Willard gave me that puppet you took from the Alzheimer woman – the witch?”

  “What? It wasn’t his to give away! I only gave it to him to copy.”

  “Actually, I found it in his
house. I’ll give it back,” Stormy promised. “Anyway, I sat with it up in my tree, you know the gingko with that long low bough?”

  “Yes, but what…”

  “…and she started to move! The strings I mean. I was holding her away from the branch and she started dancing. I swear it! A slow, swaying kind of dance. So I began to sway with it, holding her strings, I said: “Bubble, bubble…toil and trouble…” It’s from Macbeth, you know.”

  “’Double, double,’ not ‘bubble’.” Fay had played one of the three witches on several occasions. Typecast, one of her friends had said.

  “Well, what I said was ‘bubble.’ Makes more sense.”

  “Okay. So get on with it, please, Stormy. I’m not in a good mood, I have to tell you.

  Chance didn’t come home last night and no one seems to know where she is.”

  “Can’t speak to that, but like I said, I saw something.”

  Fay waited. This is my life, she thought. Hurry up and wait. Was that T.S. Eliot?

  “I saw the old lady, the demented one – I think it was her – with all the frills? Like an actress who’d forgotten her lines? She was at that puppeteer’s funeral?”

  “You saw her rocking in her chair, did you? Fighting with someone over a puppet?”

  “Exactly. You got it!” Stormy’s voice rose an octave. “Someone was trying to take the puppet away. And the old lady was fighting back. Clawing, scratching…”

  “But that already happened, Stormy. I witnessed the fight. I think I told Willard. And he told you about it?” Tell Stormy, she thought, and she has a new vision.

  “Not between two ladies, Fay. No! It was a younger woman. An aide maybe. They were in a cave, I thought at first, but it could have been a closet. One thing I do know, it was that glamorous old mother and she was losing the fight. You’d better go on up there. She could be dead by now.”

  “What? I can’t go up there now. I’m looking for Chance. I’m going back to the high school to see if she’s returned. She and Billy the Kid had a misunderstanding of some kind. Anyway, if anything happened to Gloria Valentini, someone would’ve phoned.”

  “Phoned you, Fay?”

  “Oh. Well, maybe not. Cedric perhaps. And he’d have phoned me. Glenna’s on the home line. She’d call me.”

  “Okay. But I think you better get up there, Fay. I was sweating all over when the vision ended. If I recall, Macbeth died and then Lady Macbeth – ”

  “Killed herself, yes. Good lord, Stormy. Well, I’ll see if I can fit it in. Green Pastures is thirty miles up Route 7, you know.”

  “To save a life?”

  Fay sighed and clicked off. What did she owe Marion’s mother, anyway? She couldn’t save the world by going on Stormy’s wild goose chases. She stuck the cell back in her purse and went down to look at the creek. She needed to chill, let go of the stress that was tying her neck in knots. Why she couldn’t turn her head left or right without a stab of pain! Was she going to look straight ahead the rest of her life?

  Even the water didn’t calm her today. It was wind-whipped, rushing on toward Vergennes, carrying sticks and fish with it, maybe a body…

  Oh, why would she think that? Stop, she told her brain, stop. But her brain sped on, agitated, like the gulls swirling above the creek. Maybe it wasn’t the fight over the puppet she’d seen at the nursing home that Stormy was describing. Maybe the fight involved the puppet in the closet that she’d taken. The little witch she’d given to Willard to copy. The one with the skull earrings and the note on the back that said From me to yew. The witch being who – Marion or her mother? Or somebody else? How old was the puppet? How could one tell – by the thread used? The fabric? She’d have to give it to the police. DNA? How about that?

  She felt suddenly excited, like she had to get back to Green Pastures and look in the closet again, see if there was anything else there that might shed light on the puppet. A letter, perhaps, a journal. A photograph of someone with the puppet. Who knew?

  Her mind wandered back to Chance. She was probably at Billy’s rehearsal, waiting to work things out with him. And already he’d have explained that Sammy was a half-sister, not a rival. A first love overpowered all else. Fay remembered Rory Sinclair, the boy she’d gone to the senior prom with. He’d kissed her, and she was in love. Then she caught him with Sally Chizowati, an ash blonde to Fay’s drab brown. They were in the back of an empty classroom, smooching, his hand under her skirt. Oh Jesus. Oh God. It still got her in the gut to think of it. Even when she realized he wouldn’t have been right for her anyway, the way an older Billy, she felt, wasn’t right for Chance.

  As soon as she pulled into Green Pastures she sensed something was wrong. The residents were whirling about in their wheelchairs. An old man grabbed her when she arrived. “Are we gonna eat? Who’ll feed us?” he shouted in her ear.

  A woman tugged at her elbow. “Armageddon,” she screeched. “It’s coming. We’ll all be killed in our beds!” She clung to Fay’s sleeve, would have ripped it off if an aide hadn’t come along.

  “We tried to keep it quiet,” the aide said. “But it was Esther. She’s new here, she’s easily frazzled. She was the one found her. She started screaming and then the whole place was a pandemonium. We called the police.”

  “Found who?” Fay asked, though she already knew. “When?”

  “Gloria. At lunch time today. Gloria was late to lunch and we came looking for her.

  And…” She looked hard at Fay. “You knew her, yes? You were here just a few days ago. You’re a relative?”

  Fay nodded. No one challenged her. The aide called the next-in-charge, who took her to Gloria’s room. “We haven’t dared touch her, it’s for the police to tell what to do. No one here would have strung her together like that. Some of them get violent,” she whispered, “but nothing like this! How’s your heart? You don’t have to go in. We can describe it. She looks like – ”

  “A marionette.” Gloria was stretched out on the bed in her purple and rose scarf, tied tightly around her neck, skull earrings in her tiny ears. Loose strings were attached to her head, arms and legs and tied to the bed. One rigid hand held up in protest, eyes staring open. No one had thought to close them. On her chest lay a yew branch and a placard that read To Yew from Me. No strings attached.

  Attached? No, they were hanging loose, dangling to the floor. A symbolic hanging.

  Gloria appeared to be smiling – had she known her killer? To the extent, that is, that she knew anyone. The killer had gone after that puppet – how had he gotten in the room? Ah. Easy. There was a large picture window, open on the crack. The killer had only to push it up. A pot of mums was tipped on its side. Gloria had come back in the room, surprised him – it always seemed to work that way. The killer would have grabbed her scarf and strangled her. Then ransacked the closet, yes, it was a shambles. Had he found what he was looking for?

  Suddenly a pair of policemen loomed up, shattering her sordid little scene, ordering everyone out of the room, slapping up a crime scene tape. She was glad now she’d taken the witch puppet. It was evidence; she’d have to share it, but first she wanted it copied.

  So much though for exploring the closet. Outside the room, the director cornered her. She was needed in the office. As “next of kin” she’d have to sign papers.

  The owner was here. “Upset, heavens, yes, we’ve never had something like this happen. Suicide once or twice. But a – a murder?” She shuddered and glanced about as though someone might jump out from behind the flowered drapes and tie her up in strings.

  And Fay confessed of course. “Not exactly next of kin. It’s just that her daughters, the husband, are all dead. I’ve been, well…” What had she been? The nosy neighbor? Then seeing Cedric stride down the hall, overalls and dirty fingernails as though he’d just been summoned out of the garden, she pointed. “Here’s the son-in-law.”

  Cedric scowled to see her. Why was she here? He didn’t say the words but they were vibrating on his lips. He wou
ldn’t want her here, no, he was playing a role, a role that told the director he was shocked, he had no idea who could have done it. “A third murder, the whole bloody family! There’s no one left. Just a distant cousin somewhere, a brain as addled as Gloria’s.” He paused. “And myself.” The last words were spoken in a husky voice that said I’m next. Me. I’m the heir. I’m next to die.

  Fay left him with the director. He’d have to sign papers, deal with Gloria’s effects.

  “Clothing?” she heard him say. “Give them to the other residents. Take some yourself. There’s a beaver coat in there. I want none of it. Not a stitch.”

  Fay was on the way out when she thought of that beaver coat. How had Cedric remembered if he hadn’t been looking in the closet? Like last night – here for some reason, looking for that witch? Worried it might somehow lead the police to him? And then Gloria walked in on him. She’d find him familiar after all the years, some smell of booze or shaving cream, even if she couldn’t remember his name or the relationship.

  She hurried out before the police could spot her, ask questions, ask why she was here. Because she couldn’t answer that question. She couldn’t say, well, a psychic told me there was a fight. Cops scoffed at psychics, even though Stormy had given direct evidence in the past. Why, she’d actually lain once with a dead person to reconstruct a crime! And been dead on. Literally.

  Was it too late for that? But here was the state medical examiner, making no bones about his business here. Striding in, purposeful, his bag of forensic tricks in his hand. They’d whisk Gloria away, do an autopsy, no doubt – it certainly wasn’t self-inflicted. Well, Fay would hear about it from Higgins. He’d get a report and call her. Or she’d give in, have that lunch.

  * * *

  They’d driven maybe thirty miles now and jeezum, the driver hardly spoke. He just kept his neck bent forward like he’d already forgot he had a passenger. And Beets wasn’t going to disturb him; he just wanted to drive away from that town where his face, the bully said, was plastered all over. Then he’d take his chances somewhere new.