Broken Strings

by Nancy Means Wright

  “A voice,” the woman said, her own voice sounding urgent. “You said you called her cell and got a voice.”

  Nodding, he wrapped his arms around his knees, and got serious. This was the scary part, he didn’t know what to do with it. How to tell it. What it meant. He heard his voice crack when he said, “Male voice. Sounded young. I asked for Chance and he hung up.”

  “Oh my God.” He had her full attention now. The goat wandered off and she didn’t notice. “Did you hear anything else – I mean in the background? Other voices? Chance’s maybe?”

  He tried to recall. He’d heard only the beat of his own heart. “I shouted her name, but they’d already hung up.”

  “They?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe just a he.”

  “Did you try again? A little later?”

  “Yeah. Nothing. No one answered. Could’ve been –”

  “Been what?” The eyes were hot, swallowing him up.

  “Could’ve been nothing. I mean, like someone stole her cell. Or she still had it, was with friends maybe, didn’t want to speak to me, I don’t know. I didn’t think to yell ‘It was my sister you saw.’ Chance gets an idea in her head, you know, and it’s stuck there. You can’t change it – not till she decides to come round.”

  Fay was quiet a minute. A second ewe came in for milking and she began to stroke it. “I know,” she said finally. “We’ll have to hope that’s it. Though we could trace the call maybe? I mean, the police could.”

  “I thought of that. But there’s no way to find out who answered on her cell.” His palms were red where his nails had been digging into them. He laid them flat on his thighs. “To see if they’ve kidnapped her or something.”

  He heard her make a sound in her throat.

  “You can’t remember anything else?” she said finally. “No other sound – something to suggest where she was – what was going on in the area?”

  He dropped his head in his hands. He couldn’t think, he was too rattled, thinking of Chance. He could feel the sweat from his temples oozing onto his fingers. Now he heard the sound of a motor bike outside the barn, a female voice. He looked up at a fat lady in red pants.

  “Glenna said you were here, Fay,” the fat lady said. “I came to see if Chance is back. I got a client wants to see me tonight, during your rehearsal. I thought if the girl was back, I’d bow out. Oh, hello,” she said, grinning at Billy.

  The Fay woman introduced her as Stormy – that was a real name? He waved a limp finger, then got up. He didn’t need a third party in the conversation. Especially a blimp in red. Though he’d met creeps like that in Glastonbury circles.

  Fay held up a hand and he waited. “You do any hypnosis?” she asked the woman.

  “It’s part of my business,” Stormy said. “What’ve you got in mind? Something bothering in your childhood? I can take you back there, you know. No sweat.”

  “It’s him,” Fay said, pointing at Billy. “About Chance,” she told Stormy. “To see what else he remembers about that phone call.” She explained about the male voice answering the girl’s cell phone.

  “Sit down,” the blimp ordered. He looked at Fay and she nodded, got up off her stool. He didn’t like the thought of hypnosis, to tell the truth. He knew he was susceptible. Someone in England had done it to him, and he’d spilled all the beans in his head. It got him in major trouble with his woman. It was the beginning of the end with her.

  “Sit,” the blimp repeated, looming up in front of him, poking a finger in his chest.

  “It’s important,” Fay said. “Go along with her, please. Tell what you remember about that phone call.”

  “That’s all. Just the phone call. Nothing more.” He was worried now and didn’t trust himself. Things he might blab, that he wouldn’t want the Fay woman to know.

  “Just the phone call,” Stormy said. “Now keep quiet and cooperate. Take a deep, deep breath… Look in my eyes and breathe. Breathe… Keep looking. Look deep, deep… Go back. Back to that phone call. You dialed. It rang, two, three…

  “Four times… then a male voice.” He felt himself relaxing.

  “Young voice or old?” The woman’s voice sounded farther away.

  He listened again. “Yeah,” he said. “The voice said ‘Yeah.’ Then a sound.”

  “What sound, Billy?”

  “A kind of, sh-sh, shushing sound.”

  “People? Or what? Listen hard, Billy. What do you hear?”

  “Like water…and then…a faint, a faint…”

  “Yes, go on.”

  “A faint…horn, yes, like a horn.”

  “On water maybe? A boat horn, Billy? Could that be what you heard? Go back to the beginning. Dial the number again. Put the male voice in the background, just listen to that shushing sound, that horn.”

  Billy was dialing; his fingers were tapping out the number of the cell. “Two rings, three. Four – and that shushing, booming sound…hoo-ooo…the horn. And then...”

  “Then, Billy? Something else? Listen hard. What else do you hear?”

  “Nothing more. Just that booming sound. And then a click. The guy hung up.”

  Fingers snapped in front of his eyes. There was the whimper of a goat, then the two women talking. He rubbed his eyes. He’d been on the lake. The shushing sound was still in his ears. He thought of the waterfall down by Alibi, of the lady of the lake in the Arthur legend, rising up with Excalibur’s sword. Then sinking down again, just out of his reach. Like Chance.

  “But she wasn’t there,” he told the women. “Not by the waterfall.”

  “Was that waterfall the booming sound you heard?” the hypnotist asked.

  “Not that waterfall. I told you I looked.”

  “There’s a waterfall in Vergennes. On the creek,” Fay said. Her voice was throbbing with what she had to say. “They could’ve been near there when you called. Someone was holding her on a boat. But boats move about if that was the horn you heard. Why didn’t you come to me right away?” She was staring, hard, into his face.

  He didn’t know, he was too tired to think. He’d stayed up late last night, writing a song for the band. He didn’t want to be here, women asking questions. His sister after him: do this, do that, go to England with her – she had tickets. The foster woman, this weirdo hypnotist. He was pissed now at Chance running like that.

  The Fay woman was hauling out her own cell, dialing. Here was a chance to make his escape. He was uncomfortable, exhausted; he didn’t know what else he might have said while he was under. Yawning, he squinted at the foster mother – Jesus, she was talking to some cop. He didn’t like it, he was sweating like a damn pig.

  The blimp was patting his shoulder. “Good work,” she said. The shrill voice reminded him of the time he’d finished the oatmeal the foster mother made him eat. Then she gushed like he’d brought home a straight-A report card. Usually he got all Fs, except a C in English. He dropped out after that. Read books, traveled. Lived. Loved. And lost.

  “Thanks for listening,” he said, mopping his forehead with his sleeve. He was almost out the barn door when the foster woman hollered at him.

  “Sergeant Nova wants to talk to you,” she said, holding out the phone. And this time he froze.

  * * *

  “Why’d you run off like that, huh?” Rudolph bawled at Beets after Fay let him talk to his father, some woman cop hanging nearby. “So what for? What’d I do? Slam you around or somethin’? No! Just made me look guiltiern’ hell, that’s what, with you takin’ off like that. Forty minutes we’d a been to Canada. A new life. But you had to jump out like I was abusin’ you or somethin’ and I lost time lookin’ for ya. When I...”

  Beets couldn’t follow the thread. After they did more questioning that evening, they gave him ten minutes to talk to his dad –– and all his father did was bawl him out.

  “You shouldna run off. You shouldna talked back to that lady.”

  Shouldna this, shouldna that. Beets tuned out finally, stared int
o his bandaged hands. They got bruised and scraped when he jumped out of that guy’s truck and hit the pavement with his hands. He’d finally figured out the lock – something he’d learned from the old man.

  “So it was you got us caught,” was the final thrust, and that did it for Beets.

  “You were never home,” he hollered back. “Mom had all the work. You didn’t meet my teachers. You kept stealing people’s stuff, you kept going to jail!”

  “Hang on there, boy, hang on. I met the one of ’em. Missus Lacey, in third grade, I ’member like it was yesterday. She was wearing somethin’ see-through and she said you wasn’t working up to your potency.”

  “You never listen. I don’t want to grow up like you. And now I have and I hate it.

  They’re asking all these freakin’ questions. What happened to that Puss lady? What’d she say? What’d you say? When it was you, Dad. You! Why’d you hit her?”

  “Wait a minute now. I didn’t – ”

  “You did! I saw you. Don’t lie to me. I was there. You made me carry that stuff out back to the truck and when I got back, she was in the house, yelling. She come in the front door, I told ’em that. Though I don’t know how she got in. Or when.”

  A steely hand reached out to grab his wrist. “You didn’t tell ’em I hit her in the head. You wouldn’t say that. You wouldn’t rat your old dad out.”

  It hurt. The thick fingers were twisting. He didn’t cry. He could take it.

  “You didn’t tell them, right? I’ll know if you’re lying, boy. I can tell. You’re just like your mother. She was a rat fink, too.”

  “No! I said I was out by then, in the truck. I didn’t see nothing. That’s what I said. Leggo my wrist or I’ll yell. They’ll come runnin’ then. I’ll show ’em how you hurt me.”

  Rudolph let go and looked down at Beets’s wrist.

  “Sorry, son, didn’t mean to. Just want to be sure we got our stories straight. Here, lemme rub it.”

  “No! Don’t touch me!”

  “Two minutes,” the woman cop said. She smiled a minute at Beets, and then her face got serious again as she left, like cops weren’t supposed to be sorry for people, even if they weren’t yet twelve years old.

  They were quiet a minute. Beets could hear his heartbeat. Boom boom boom, like a drum. He put a hand over his chest to silence it. They had two more minutes. Now there were questions he wanted to ask his dad.

  “Did you kill her?” he whispered. “I won’t tell, I just need to know.”

  His father sat up on the bed and looked at the barred window. Looked at it like if he had three wishes every one of them would happen outside that window. Then he lay back down and said nothing.

  The woman cop was coming back. Suddenly his father got up from the bed, grabbed his shoulders and spun him around. “You tell ’im you was there when she come in. You tell ’em you saw. You tell ’em I never laid a damn finger on that woman, hear? I never hit her. You tell ’em that.” He spaced out his words. “I never hit her. Just tossed that red boot at her feet and she lost her balance.”

  “Time’s up,” the woman said, half smiling to see the father’s hand patting his son’s shoulder. Father and son: it made a pretty picture, sure, Beets thought, and followed the cop out of the cell without a word. And without looking back.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Weedy White Tee and a Trained Puppeteer

  Friday, October 5

  Fay was with Willard by the MacDonough Shipyard in Vergennes, looking across at the falls. At least Fay was looking at the falls. Willard was leaning open-mouthed over the historical marker. Vital to the American Victory over the British Royal Navy at the Battle of Plattsburg, he read. “Imagine it, Fay.”

  “Gorgeous, those falls,” she said, gazing wide-eyed at them. “The way they sparkle in the sun. And that old classic white building just beyond.”

  “Commodore MacDonough’s flagship,” Willard read, and looked expectantly at her, as if she knew who Commodore MacDonough was. “The twenty-six-gun Saratoga. Built right here on the spot. Right here, Fay. In 1812. Lumber and fittings came from the local sawmill, forges and furnaces. Think of that.”

  “Wow,” she said, without expression. She hadn’t come here for a history lesson. She was looking for Chance. Only small boats, she’d read, could pass the eight or so nautical miles between the falls of Branbury and those at Vergennes. Unless they portaged around the falls and put in at this spot, which entered into the border section of the river and led to Lake Champlain. Anyone anchored here could hear the falls. They sounded like something out of a Star Wars movie. Had Chance hitched a ride to Vergennes or even swum? Willard had taught the girl. Swimming was his one athletic skill, unless you counted running a model train or lawnmower.

  “Takes my breath away to think of it,” Willard said, still gazing at the marker.

  “To think of Chance somewhere in the area. That takes my breath.”

  “Sure,” he said, coming back to the present moment. He put a finger on her elbow.

  “Ask over there – that motor yacht?”

  “Motor yacht?” Willard must have sailed in his youth or read about Admiral Nelson. He kept surprising her with his breadth of experience. He was pointing at a cream-colored boat. A woman was on the deck, lounging in a folding chair, reading a paperback. Fay went to the edge of the dock and hollered. “Ahoy, over there.”

  The woman looked up. She was wearing white pants and a blue-striped shirt. Very nautical. “You’re speaking to me?”

  “Question,” Fay said, moving closer. “We’re looking for a young girl. Seventeen. Tall, dark hair. She disappeared two nights ago. We think she might be on a boat. Have you seen anyone like that around here?”

  The woman repeated the question to someone inside the cabin. A young man in sailor whites came out and hollered back. “Can’t help you, I’m afraid. We’ve only been docked here since yesterday. Haven’t seen any girl. You might ask down there.” He pointed to a man who was putting a patch on the side of a fiberglass boat.

  “Damn fool kids did it,” the second man complained when she asked her question. “Ran into me, hit the starboard side. Nearly swamped me! Five of them, fooling around. All boys far as I know, I didn’t see a girl.”

  “When would that be?” Fay asked.

  “Shee-it,” the man said when his hand slipped and the patch missed its mark. “Uh, Monday, Tuesday? Uh. Monday, yeah. Saw ’em again Tuesday. High school kids, dropouts—I dunno. Whatever they were, making trouble. Drinking, you know. Worse. Cruising around after dark, a blaring radio. I called the police, and they were quiet after that.”

  “You didn’t see a young woman with them Tuesday night?”

  “Tuesday? Well, I can’t really say. Gets dark so early now. They had a light on the boat but they were just figures. Some of ’em with long hair, could be either sex I guess.”

  “I think we should talk to the police,” Willard suggested, his voice always soft when he made a suggestion – in case she vetoed it, Fay supposed. She did tend to come on strong now and then. But she had more questions.

  “Do you know any of their names? If we could contact one of them? My girl might be with them. Some spat with a boyfriend.” But would that keep her away two nights? Chance had been really excited about the marionettes. She wouldn’t join a gang of noisy boys, why would she? Fay didn’t think she was a drinker. But she didn’t really know for sure. There seemed to be a lot she didn’t know about Chance.

  They were walking back to her pickup. Willard grabbed her arm when she slipped on a wet spot. She was spacier than ever these days; she didn’t know port from starboard. Hopefully Willard wouldn’t ask.

  “We’ll have to believe him, won’t we, Will? So Chance is teaching Billy a lesson by staying away for a couple of days. But she missed a rehearsal. And dress rehearsal’s tonight. She wouldn’t do that to us, she wouldn’t! I know she wouldn’t.”

  “Of course not,” Willard said, patting her arm. “Though th
is boy-girl business. Folks do crazy things for, um, for love.”

  “Did you, ever?” she asked, and he blushed down to his toes.

  “Well, I, I, um… Nothing serious.”

  “Sure.” She’d embarrassed him enough. “Okay, you’re right. Let’s go see the Vergennes police. Let them search the area. They may know who these kids are.”

  They walked back toward Main Street. Then on a whim, they crossed the bridge on the near side of the falls, where the white building she’d seen from the shipyard loomed up on the right hand side. WILLIAMS WINDOW SHADES, the sign announced.

  “Nobody making them now,” Willard said. “Look at the rusted doors. The broken windows.” Once white, the place was now yellowy with age. An archway-corridor led from a three-story building to a smaller one-story. She tried a door and it almost gave way. It wasn’t locked; it felt more as if something were piled against it. “Good place for kids to hang out,” she said, and started around back.

  “Police station’s just down the road,” Willard reminded her. “I expect they keep an eye on this sort of place.”

  Cautious Willard. She kept on anyway, wanting to find Chance without benefit of police. Her concentration would never focus on anything else until she did. She wanted to do everything at once – and didn’t seem to have gotten anywhere at all. The papers she took from Marion’s box had to be sorted and she still had to check on the skull artist Beets had told her about. Though the skull with its earrings he described did sound like the ones on Gloria’s witch puppet. The sparkles in the ears, the two gold teeth. Beets was pleased that he’d done something to help. Yet he had a starved look about him. And scared to death of the police, of what they might do to him. And to his father.

  Willard had come on a rear door in the three-story section of the building. It opened when he turned the knob and he quickly shut it again. Honest Willard. Herself, she was more devious. She had to be. Chance was her responsibility now. She reopened the door and went inside. “You can wait out there,” she told Willard, but he followed her in.