Grave Images

by Jenny Goebel

  “Plus, people were jealous of Isabella. They said all kinds of nasty things after the breakup.”

  “Like she had limp hair and wore cheap clothes?” Michael offered.

  Giovanna looked like her canine instincts were kicking in and she was ready to snap, but she just ignored Michael and continued. “I have all sorts of experience with people getting jealous. You’ll have to learn that, too, if you make the cheer squad, Bernie.” Giovanna dropped a hand from her heart and placed it on my hand.

  “Why were people jealous? What did they say?” I asked. Keeping Giovanna on track was as difficult as getting her to stop bounding around the room.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I guess because she lived in that big house and carved stone all day, and because some people thought she was pretty, they envied her. But she never gave them the time of day. And, even though nobody knew who her fiancé was, it was like he suddenly disappeared — ring and all. Then people started saying she was crazy. That either she’d made him up or she’d done him in.”

  I’d iced up inside and my mouth seemed frozen, too, but not Michael’s. “Did you say Isabella carved stone?” He asked what I’d meant to, and he leaned backed in to hear Giovanna’s answer. Guessing the gum had done the trick, I leaned in closer, as well.

  “I just told you everyone thought she might’ve killed her fiancé, and you’re worried about her sculptures?”

  Michael and I both nodded.

  “Did she carve portraits?” I asked, my tongue melted at last.

  Giovanna looked back and forth between Michael’s begging face and my own, waiting breathlessly for her reply.

  “Um, no. I don’t think so. I’ve only ever seen the one at the Silverton Art Gallery. The rest are probably gone. I bet they burned up with everything else in the fire.”

  Michael stood up. “You mean there’s one of her carvings here in Silverton?”

  “Yep.”

  I stood up now, too. “Can you take us to it?”

  Giovanna grinned. Cheer moves. Information. It didn’t seem to matter what it was, I think she liked having something we wanted. “Of course I can,” she said proudly.

  GIOVANNA CALLED OUT, “WE’RE HEADED INTO TOWN,” AS Michael and I hurried out the front door and clambered over each other, competing for the backseat of her beat-up yellow Volkswagen. In the end, it didn’t matter, though. We both sat in back and Giovanna didn’t seem to notice that neither of us wanted to ride shotgun.

  Giovanna drove just like she cheered — loud and all over the place. She couldn’t seem to get the old stick shift into gear, and it made angry, deep-down-in-the-gut noises as she turned wide corners and crossed yellow lines. I really had to wonder how Giovanna got away with this type of driving. Did all the cops look the other way just ’cause her daddy was sheriff?

  At long last (really just a few minutes later, but it seemed like forever), we clunked and banged to a stop outside an old red barn on the far end of Main Street. “Ms. Greene owns the gallery,” Giovanna said. “She was one of Isabella’s only friends, and she’s a former Silverton Stallions cheer captain.” She said that last part like it was the most important. I pictured in my mind an older version of Giovanna, and I cringed.

  We emptied the car and looked around. The words Art Gallery were painted across the top in big white letters, and Giovanna’s car was the only one parked in the dirt lot.

  “Do you know why barns are painted red?” Michael asked. Still feeling the effects of Giovanna’s driving, it was all I could do not to slip and stumble on the gravelly ground, let alone answer Michael’s stupid question.

  But Michael never let being ignored stop him from saying what was on his mind. “In the old days, farmers used animal blood for paint. So all the blood from the slaughterhouse wound up on the barn walls. Today they just use the regular stuff like everybody else, but they decided to stick with the red part.”

  “Gross,” Giovanna said.

  Thanks to Michael, besides having wobbly legs, my stomach started feeling all swirly-whirly, too. I felt a rush of aggravation toward him, but strange as it sounds, being annoyed with Michael just reminded me how much I’d missed having him around. The trip, Giovanna, all her enthusiastic cheer moves, and her crazy driving had distracted me from it before. However, walking alongside the red barn, careful not to bump into the sticky siding (it seemed like plain old red paint, but you never know), I felt the dread once again welling up inside me.

  A string of bells on the door jingled as we entered, and Ms. Greene appeared from behind a row of vivid green and rich-purple clay pots. She wasn’t nearly as old as I had been expecting — maybe in her late twenties. She wore a cherry-colored shawl around her shoulders and a glass bead dangled from a thin silver chain around her neck.

  Ms. Greene said hello, and after asking Giovanna about the upcoming cheer camp, she reached out long, thin fingers to shake my hand. She moved slow and careful-like, and her breath smelled like peppermint candy. She didn’t remind me of Giovanna at all — or any kind of dog for that matter. It was a pleasant surprise.

  “What brings you here today?” Ms. Greene asked, looking straight at me.

  Giovanna didn’t give me the chance to answer for myself. “Her name’s Bernie. She’s my cousin Michael’s friend, and they want to see Isabella Freemont’s sculpture.”

  “Giovanna, part of being a good team captain is listening, too,” Ms. Greene said. “Not just talking.” Giovanna’s face dropped, and Michael’s lifted in a smile. I could tell he was pleasantly surprised by the gallery owner, as well.

  “Now, Bernie, do you consider yourself a serious buyer? I have to warn you, Isabella’s artwork is not for sale.” Ms. Greene gazed at me with intense hazel-colored eyes, and then, like her handshake, came a soft and slow smile. She may have been toying with me, but if there’s anything I’m good at, it’s recognizing lines of grief etched on a person’s face. The mention of Isabella’s name had stung, and the effects of it were pricking the corners of her eyes.

  Ms. Greene motioned for us to follow as she turned and walked away. I tucked my arms close to my sides. Other than the clay pots, there were glass shelves full of fragile-looking figurines and colorful paintings on the wall. None of it looked inexpensive. And all of it would make my sketches back home, even the one of Mama and me done the by the artist at the county fair, seem like beggars at a royal ball.

  Ms. Greene brought us to the back of the shop and up an old wooden staircase. The boards were shiny and looked like they’d been refinished, but they still dipped and groaned as we climbed to the top. Up above, a hayloft had been turned into a cozy work space with a big, fancy table in the center of the room. On it sat a sculpture about the size of a human head. A hole had been carved in the center, and a twisty column flowed like water from one edge of the abyss to the other. It wasn’t at all what I’d expected, but I knew it was Isabella’s.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Michael stood rigid as a lamppost, and even Giovanna was quiet and still, waiting for Ms. Greene’s reply.

  Ms. Greene tapped the polished table with one carefully shaped fingernail.

  “Yeah, what is it?” Giovanna blurted out. Her silence lasting a whole, I don’t know, five seconds.

  “I’m getting there.” Ms. Greene frowned — making me think her feelings for Giovanna might just mirror Michael’s.

  “Many artists name their pieces — even those that are abstract. But Isabella was … superstitious. She didn’t want anything, even something as harmless as a name, attached to her work … Never took payment. Never signed anything.”

  I stepped forward. I couldn’t stop myself from touching the creamy-white marble sculpture. It felt smooth in a slightly different way than the stones we usually worked with. This stone hadn’t been polished by a machine; rather, it had been caressed to a glossy finish. Sanded to an almost skin-like sheen by rough paper held in whose hand? Isabella’s? There was no coldness — not like that which seeped inside the cracks o
f my fingers when I touched one of Mr. Stein’s portraits. There was an aching emptiness instead.

  Ms. Greene watched me closely. Curiously. But she didn’t say a word. In a store full of breakables, contact with the artwork was probably strictly prohibited. I was in dangerous territory.

  I brushed off her stare. Upsetting the gallery owner wasn’t high on my list of concerns. I did, however, have a list of mounting questions for her, and not a single one seemed more or less important at the moment. I finally settled on, “Can you tell us more?” hoping Ms. Greene would fill in the blanks I didn’t even know were there.

  She took a deep breath. “Right before I opened the gallery, I approached many of the local artists to see if they wanted to put their work on display. Isabella had this house full of sculptures, all of them stunning. But she said no. She felt her sculptures were not art, but a fulfillment of what she described as an unquenchable yearning. It didn’t make sense to me. I mean, look at it.”

  Ms. Greene gestured to the lovely sculpture I couldn’t quite let go of. “If art is to be appreciated for its beauty and its ability to provoke emotion, her work was some of the finest.” Ms. Greene sighed. “At least Isabella finally relented enough to allow me this one small piece for the gallery. I’m so thankful she did, as the rest of her work perished in the fire.”

  Giovanna looked smug and I expected an “I told you so” out of her, but after not one, but two slaps on the wrist, I guess she’d finally decided to keep quiet.

  “How’d she do it?” I asked. “Make the sculptures, I mean.”

  Ms. Greene made a noise that was empty, an exhaling of air that was neither cheerful nor snide. “That’s the craziest part. Her tools were old and ugly, and yet she turned out sculptures that were beyond enchanting.”

  My body went rigid. My hand, still frozen in place on the marble — an extension of the stone itself. “What do you mean?” I whispered, hoping I’d spoken loud enough to be heard.

  Whether or not I had, Ms. Greene continued. “She used this rusty iron hammer and chisel that had been passed down through generations of her family. Apparently one of her ancestors was a blacksmith in the late 1600s.”

  “The dust of bones was used to harden the iron,” I said, remembering what Mr. Stein had told me. I thought he was just trying to scare me, but it had been true.

  All eyes landed on me — Michael’s, a little forcefully. Had I forgotten to share this small detail with him? I shrugged. “History book.”

  Ms. Greene let out a quizzical, “Yes,” and then continued. “The rest of the story is rather chilling. Maybe I shouldn’t tell it.”

  “Please,” I pleaded, and at last dropped my hand from the sculpture.

  “Well … The tools Isabella used had a particularly grisly origin. Her ancestor, the blacksmith, was an orphan. He was taken on as an apprentice by the village smithy after his parents and sisters were robbed and then brutally murdered. After the boy returned from the fields to find the” — Ms. Greene stopped, cleared her throat, and then continued — “lifeless bodies of his family members, he was plagued by nightmares. Isabella said he had an artistic streak as well and that he sketched horrific charcoal drawings thereafter.”

  I gulped. The only muscle working in all of my body appeared to be my throat. I had seen the drawings on the cobblestone wall. And the blacksmith who’d taken the boy in. I’d seen it all in my nightmares. That this evil had risen from somewhere far in the past made it that much scarier. I glanced at Michael, who was focused intently now on what Ms. Greene was saying. I grimaced. What had I gotten him into?

  “It gets worse,” Ms. Greene said. “The blacksmith, the one who taught Isabella’s ancestor his trade, took a liking to his young apprentice. He dug up the graves of the boy’s parents and those of his two younger sisters. He ground their bones, and after forging the iron hammer and chisel, he baked them in the bones’ dust. Then he presented the tools to his young apprentice and told him to create not what was, but what could be.”

  “What could be.” The words rang from my lips in a faint echo of Ms. Greene.

  She nodded. “The master blacksmith was later burned at the stake. As were many blacksmiths in those days — suspects of wizardry and witchcraft. Perhaps in his case it was justifiable … Anyway, a short while later a man’s corpse was found in the same field the boy had been plowing when his family was murdered. A locket that had belonged to the boy’s mother was found in the dead man’s coat pocket.”

  “It was the boy. The young apprentice and … his tools,” I said. “He used them to seek revenge.”

  “So Isabella thought,” replied Ms. Greene. “The thief was a young man, and yet, he seemed to have died of natural causes. There wasn’t a mark on him anywhere, or so the story goes.”

  A heart that simply stopped beating — like Sam’s and Mrs. Finley’s, and what the coroner would probably discover about Mrs. Evans’s heart, too — wouldn’t leave a mark, either. “But you said the master apprentice said to create what could be. That could mean someone’s death, couldn’t it?” I glanced fearfully again at Michael.

  Ms. Greene’s smile waned. “You sound like her. Isabella was convinced the hammer and chisel held some sort of power of their own … that one could somehow craft the future with them … as if such things are possible.”

  “Then why would she use them?” I asked. “Why didn’t she just get rid of the tools, destroy them if she thought they were evil or powerful or whatever?”

  Ms. Greene looked at the ceiling, like somewhere up there was a jumble of words she could pull down and string together. Finally she returned her gaze to me. “Do you remember me saying the tools were passed down through multiple generations?”

  I nodded.

  “Isabella thought the tools had been both a blessing and curse for her family. In fact, she believed they helped her own father to amass great wealth, but they also drove him to be a selfish and ruthless man. And those who opposed him, like the thief, were met with untimely, yet seemingly natural deaths.”

  “But you don’t believe the tools had anything to do with it?” Michael prodded.

  This time I made sure Michael caught my eye, and then I gave him a small smile and a slight nod; my way of thanking him for chiming in. Giovanna, on the other hand, was staying silent even though her mouth was hanging open like she was waiting to catch a bone.

  “What I’m getting at is this: I don’t believe luck — good or bad — can be generated or sculpted with a chisel, or with anything else, for that matter. But Isabella believed it could. That’s why she never sculpted anything but the abstract. She was afraid — afraid to end up like her father, and afraid of not having the tools if she needed them. And although the tools were somehow at the center of her fear, she couldn’t let them go.” Ms. Greene paused and then continued. “Sometimes the things we fear losing the most begin to own us. Isabella used the tools because she couldn’t not use them.”

  “Wow.” Giovanna had finally closed her mouth, only to open it again.

  Michael started to say something, too, but this time I cut him off.

  “A big house like that and all those fancy possessions … Isabella Freemont probably had it all insured. Right? You know in case of, like, the fire that actually did happen?” I said it casually as though the thought had just occurred to me, when really, it’d been forming in my brain since Ms. Greene started talking.

  Ms. Greene’s eyes opened wide and then she closed them for a second, like her nerves were getting raw, but she answered me anyway. “Yes. Certainly. I referred her to the same person who insures all the art here in the gallery.”

  “Who’s that?” I said. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Just a local insurance agent,” Ms. Greene said dismissively. “Abbot Stein. His shop’s right down the street if you care to ask him more about her work. Actually,” Ms. Greene paused and shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Why?” Giovanna blurted out, and for
once, I was thankful for her candor.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Ms. Greene looked years older than she had when we first walked in the door. Her slow movements, what I had taken for grace and poise, now just made her seem very, very tired. As she inched toward the staircase and none of us moved to follow, she finally relented. “Look, the three of you are nice enough, and if anyone could make him talk … I just don’t think he’d take well to you pestering him, that’s all. Abbot is harmless, but …”

  “What?” the three of us said in unison.

  “He’s reclusive. Withdrawn. The only person he ever seemed very fond of was Isabella. And now she’s gone … Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him at all since Isabella’s memorial service. It’s probably best not to bother him.”

  I would’ve pushed further, but I could tell we’d far outworn our welcome. “Okay. Thank you,” I said sincerely, and then reached out to touch Isabella’s sculpture one last time.

  Ms. Greene softened. She’d almost regained the shimmer of her former elegance; however, she lost it again as she fell all over herself bustling us out the door.

  “ISABELLA WAS CRAZIER THAN I THOUGHT,” GIOVANNA SAID as soon as we were back in her Volkswagen. “Should we go see that insurance agent now?”

  “No,” Michael and I said together.

  “Suit yourself,” Giovanna said, and then proceeded to yap all the way back to her house. She went on and on about Isabella and the tools (I could only imagine what kinda fuel we’d given her gossip train to track all over town with). Didn’t matter that Michael and I weren’t talking — without Ms. Greene to shut her up, there was no end to what she had to say. Not that I heard any of it, really. And feeling as blown away and flabbergasted as I was, I even ignored her crazy driving.

  Then, as soon as we arrived at Giovanna’s house, it was time to leave again. What had started out as a nice break from the horror back home now felt like the spin cycle on the washing machine. I was chucked back and forth between Rocco, Celeste, and Giovanna, saying my good-byes and trying to pretend the scary story I’d just heard was exactly that — a story — and not real terror leaching into my life.