Travellers in Magic

by Lisa Goldstein

  “Husband?” He puts down his sandwich, for which I am grateful, and wipes his mouth with a napkin. “So that’s what happened to her. I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She stopped coming to class a few months ago. I don’t usually stick my nose in my students’ business, but I was worried about her and I went to the registrar’s office to get her phone number. She doesn’t have a phone, it turns out.”

  I nod. I had already noticed that.

  “So I thought, that was that,” he says. “Husband, you say. Sometimes you get a man who’ll pull his wife out of school, even in this day and age.”

  I say nothing. He’d be surprised if he knew what goes on in this day and age.

  He gives me the photograph back. “Shame,” he says, shaking his head.

  “Do you know anything about her?” I ask. “Any friends you might have seen her with? Acquaintances?”

  “No. I never saw her outside of the classroom or my office.”

  I thank him and leave. The professors of her other two classes aren’t in, so I scribble something on the backs of two business cards and push them under the doors. As I drive back to the office I turn on the radio; someone is explaining how to put on snow-chains.

  There are two messages waiting for me at the office. A company I’ve worked for before asks me to run a credit check, and a friend wants to go see a movie tonight.

  I should call both of them back. Instead I take out a legal pad and write down columns of numbers. Stroller, car seat, crib, play-pen. So much for clothing, so much for medical expenses. College, and classes in Classical Literature with Professor Burnford. I’m staring at the pad of paper when the phone rings.

  I let the machine catch it. “I’m sorry I was angry with you the other day,” a voice says, much to my surprise. “We should talk. Please call me.”

  It’s my mother. She’s wrong, though; we have nothing to talk about.

  “Your test results came back,” the doctor says. “They’re positive.”

  I take a deep breath. “That was quick,” I say.

  “Oh, we’re very efficient these days,” she says. She smiles; I guess she’s trying to put me at ease. “We don’t have to kill rabbits anymore.”

  For some reason this makes me think of Dr. Burnford, shouting at his student about rabbits and fertility symbols.

  “Can I ask—” The doctor pauses. “Is this welcome news?”

  I’ve checked the box marked “Single” on the intake form. “I don’t know,” I say slowly. “It was a one-night stand, really. A friend came into town unexpectedly. I don’t—”

  The vastness of what I’ve gotten into hits me; I have to stop and take another breath. I’m not going to break down in front of this woman, though; I’m not going to treat her the way my clients sometimes treat me, as if she’s a wisewoman capable of solving all my problems. If I start I’ll end up telling her about the screaming fight with my mother, about all my doubts, about God knows what else. “I’d just like some time to think about it,” I say.

  The doctor nods. She puts me up in those awful cold stirrups and examines me, and then, when I’m dressed, gives me some vitamins and a list of foods I should and shouldn’t eat, and a pamphlet on abortion. “Do you need to talk to someone?” she asks. “I can recommend a good counselor.”

  I can’t remember the number of times I’ve said the same thing to my clients. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to manage my own life, to stay out of the kinds of messes my clients seem to get into. I shake my head.

  Dora Green is waiting for me in front of my office. I nod to her and unlock the door. “I wanted to know if you made any progress,” she says.

  I feel very weary. It’s far too early for her to expect results. I motion her inside the office and sit at my desk. “I’m sorry,” she says, taking the chair opposite me. Today she’s wearing a green print dress that’s even busier than her skirt, more leaves and flowers and what looks like little animals peering through the foliage. “I should have waited.”

  “Your daughter seems to have moved, and she’s stopped going to classes,” I say. “Other than that, I can’t tell you anything yet.”

  She nods. Her calm expression does not change. I wonder if she’s had the same thought I had, that her daughter is dead, killed by her husband. Satanic rituals, I think.

  “I’m meeting someone for lunch,” she says. “You must be hungry too. Can I get you something to eat?”

  You’re supposed to eat enough for two when you’re pregnant, but at the same time you’re usually sick to your stomach. Just another example, I think, of how impossible the whole thing is. “I’ve already eaten,” I say.

  For a moment I think she knows I’m lying; worse, that she knows everything about me, including where I went this morning. I have never felt this way about any of my clients; usually it’s the clients who feel the need to justify their behavior.

  “Come with me anyway,” she says, smiling a little.

  The animals on her print dress are moving. I shake my head, trying to focus, but the hallucination doesn’t go away. A badger or something shoulders aside a flowering vine and pads forward, its nose twitching.

  I look away. I’d better eat something. “All right,” I say, and we head out into the street.

  She stops at a restaurant a few blocks from my office, and we go inside. I have never seen this place before; probably it’s new. There are posters of flowers on the walls, and vases filled with bright flowers at the table.

  Her friend is already there. “This is Mickey,” Ms. Green says as we sit down. “Mickey, this is Liz Keller.”

  Mickey nods at me, amused at something. He is slender, with curly blond hair and light gray eyes. There is a slight family resemblance, and for a moment I think he is Carolyn’s brother. But surely Ms. Green would have told me if there were others in the family. I wonder who he is, how they know each other.

  The waitress comes soon afterward. I study the menu, trying to remember the list of food the doctor gave me. I could use a cup of coffee, but I’m almost certain the doctor would disapprove. “I’ll have some tea,” I say.

  The waitress takes the rest of the orders and leaves. “How do you know Ms. Green?” I ask Mickey.

  “We’re related,” he says. “Cousins. What about you? How do you know her?”

  “She’s hired me in a professional capacity,” I say. It’s all I can tell him without breaking my client’s confidentiality.

  “Ah,” Mickey says. “You’re the new detective.”

  “New detective?” I say, looking at Ms. Green. The animals on her dress are motionless now, thank God. “You didn’t tell me about this. What happened to the old one?”

  “She wasn’t very good,” Ms. Green says.

  “And time is running out, isn’t it?” Mickey says.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  We’re interrupted by the waitress, bringing food for Mickey and Ms. Green and a teapot and cup for me. “So,” Mickey says. He reaches over and pours me some tea. “What have you found so far?”

  “I can’t discuss it without my client’s permission,” I say.

  “Oh, Mickey’s family,” Ms. Green says. “You can tell him anything you tell me.”

  I sip my tea, enjoying the warmth. My stomach feels fine now. I remember the first time I met Ms. Green, when she came to my office to hire me, and how the nausea had disappeared then too.

  I tell Mickey about my trip to Carolyn’s old apartment, my visit to the university. He’s still smiling. I’m almost certain he’s hiding something, that Ms. Green is wrong to trust him. He seems to feel very little concern for his missing cousin.

  He pours me another cup of tea. “What do you plan to do now?” he asks.

  It’s a good question. I’ve pretty much run out of leads, but it doesn’t do to say so in front of the person paying your salary. I take a sip of tea. “Did you know her husband?” I ask him.

  “A lit
tle,” he says.

  “Did you like him?”

  Mickey laughs. “Like him? The boyfriend from Hell?”

  “Why do you think she married him?”

  He shrugs.

  “They seem very different,” I say, pushing him.

  He pours more tea. I look at the small teapot; it can’t possibly hold that much. I lift the lid. It is filled to the brim.

  I look up quickly at Mickey. He’s grinning, as if daring me to confront him. “How did you do that?” I ask.

  “Do what?” he says.

  He must have switched teapots somehow, maybe while I was looking at Ms. Green. “Got to fly,” he says. He stands and kisses Ms. Green on the cheek. “It was good seeing you.”

  I watch him go. My earlier suspicions of him become a certainty: he knows something he’s not telling. “I’ve got to go too,” I say. I stand and hurry through the restaurant, trying to keep him in sight.

  He hasn’t gotten that far ahead of me. He turns left out the door and heads east. A few miles farther on is Carolyn’s old apartment. I drop back a little, keeping him in sight. Surely he doesn’t intend to walk the entire distance.

  He continues on for about a mile. The neighborhood slowly changes: the shopfronts here are dingier, and several of them are boarded up. Some of the buildings are painted three or four colors in a vain attempt to cover the graffiti; they look as if they have mange. A man moves to block me, his hand held out. “Spare change?” he asks.

  I sidestep him and continue on. Mickey is still in front of me. He is hurrying a little, as if he’s getting closer to his destination.

  He comes to a corner. He stops for a moment, as if trying to make up his mind. Then he turns and looks directly at me, grins, and goes right.

  I take the corner after him. I’ve never had anyone spot me, never, not in any of the dozens of tails I’ve done. How had he known?

  There is no one at all on the street. Grimy warehouses face each other, some protected by corrugated doors or iron gratings, all of them locked. One warehouse has rows of tiny windows on the second floor; about half of them are broken, as if they’d been the target in some game. Trees with branches like sticks line the street. No one seems to work here.

  I walk up and down the street for over an hour, looking for Mickey in likely and unlikely places, but he is gone.

  I go back to my office to get Ms. Green’s phone number. I need Mickey’s address, need to ask him a few questions.

  The phone rings as I’m paging through my files. I pick it up. “Liz Keller, Private Investigations,” I say.

  “Liz?” the voice at the other end asks.

  It’s my mother. I don’t need this right now. “What?” I say.

  “Did you get my message?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want to talk to you. I want—I changed my mind. I had no right to interfere with anything you do. It’s your life.”

  “I’ve always thought so.”

  “Did you see a doctor?”

  She promises not to interfere, and then the first thing she says is interfering. “Yeah,” I say.

  “What did—”

  “The test was positive.” Even over the phone lines I can feel her straining to ask a question. “I haven’t decided what to do yet.”

  “Did you think about what I said?”

  “No.”

  “If you’re going to have a child—”

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to interfere.”

  “Well, I just thought that you could take less dangerous work for a while. At least until the child is born.”

  “I’ve told you before. This is what I want to do.”

  “I know that. I’m not saying you should stop being a detective. But maybe you could take different cases—”

  I sigh loudly. My mother has never held a job in her life, and yet she thinks she knows everything about everything. If she meets a jeweler she’ll talk with great authority about gem-stones. If she meets a car mechanic she’ll go on about what the best makes of cars are. You can’t correct her misconceptions; she feels absolutely no embarrassment when she finds out she’s wrong.

  Now she wants to tell me how to run a detective agency. “There are no safe cases,” I say. “You can never tell how a case will turn out.”

  “Well, then, maybe you can stop—”

  “No.”

  “I’ve talked it over with your father—we can afford—”

  I hang up. Next thing she’ll suggest I move back in with her and my father, into the old bedroom they’ve kept for me all these years.

  Angry now, I pull Dora Green’s file. I start to dial her number and then change my mind. I’m going to go visit her. If Mickey’s been hiding something then who’s to say she hasn’t been? What do I really know about her anyway?

  I put on my coat and two scarves and leave the office, slamming the door behind me. My stomach has started to feel queasy again.

  There are huge plants on Ms. Green’s lawn, pushing up against her outside wall. Somehow they have managed to put forth a few leaves, though the trees on the sidewalk are bare. I ring her doorbell, wondering what it is about this woman and flowers.

  Her house is light and warm, with wooden beams and hardwood floors, and, of course, pots of plants placed to catch the sun. Red and green and blue weavings cover the backs of white couches and hang from the walls. She leads me to one of the couches and sits across from me.

  Once again I notice how calm she is, how composed. There is a stateliness to her that I don’t associate with the parents of missing children. “Have you found my daughter?” she asks.

  “No, not yet. But I have found—Well, I wonder how much you know about Mickey.”

  “Mickey?”

  “Yes, your cousin. He didn’t seem very concerned about Carolyn at the restaurant. I wonder if he’s holding something back.”

  “Mickey.” She sits back on the couch and smooths down the edge of the weaving. “I’ve been thinking the same thing myself. I think that’s one of the reasons I asked you to lunch, so you could meet him and form your own impressions. I don’t think he’s telling me everything he knows.”

  “Do you have his address?”

  “Yes, of course.” She recites his address from memory. It’s in a very mixed part of town, with apartment buildings and middle-class houses and small neighborhood shops all jumbled together. It’s miles from the warehouse district he led me to this afternoon.

  I thank her and start to leave. “Take care of yourself,” she says.

  Once again I get the unsettling feeling that she knows all about me. For a moment I want to tell her everything, to pour out the things I held back from my mother and the doctor. Why on earth did Carolyn Green run away from a mother like this?

  Suddenly I realize that it’s not the financial aspects of having a child I’m worried about. That would be tough, but I can handle it. What I’m terrified of is being the kind of mother my own mother was, interfering, small-minded, unable to let go. What other example do I have?

  As I go back to my car I see that the streetlights are starting to come on. I’ve wasted more time than I thought following Mickey. I go home, and turn the heat up as high as it will go.

  The next day I am parked across the street from Mickey’s house. There is a car in the driveway, a late model Mercury. He might be out on one of his long walks, but I gamble that the car means he’s still home.

  Time passes slowly. My car is freezing, but I can’t risk turning on the engine to start the heater. Finally the front door opens, and Mickey steps out. He passes the car in the driveway and heads for the sidewalk. Another walk today, I think.

  I let him get a half a block ahead of me and then ease open the car door. This time I am certain he hasn’t seen me. He walks slowly, as though he has no destination in mind; it is easy enough to keep him in sight.

  He continues this way for several miles. He shows no sign of stopping. Finally he turns down a main street, and I s
ee that he is heading toward the warehouse district he visited yesterday. He is moving faster now.

  I follow, hurrying to keep him in sight. He comes to the corner at which I lost him and turns. I take the corner after him. He is still in front of me, moving very fast now, almost running.

  The rain starts again, lashing the bare trees. He goes halfway down the street and pushes on one of the warehouse doors. I run after him, but by the time I get there the door is closed. I try it; it opens with only the slightest squeak of rusty metal.

  I step inside and close the door quickly. The first thing I notice is the smell of corroded metal. I can see nothing; even minutes after I have shut the door the warehouse is pitch dark. I can hear nothing either, not Mickey, not anyone he has come to meet. After a few minutes I make out the distant sound of water dripping on metal.

  A flare burns suddenly across the room, too dim to reach me. I move toward it cautiously, keeping close to the shadows by the wall.

  As I get nearer I see two huge chairs made of rusted metal. One is empty; a man sits in the other. It is too dark to tell, and I am too far away, but I am almost certain he is the man in the photograph, Carolyn’s husband. The sight of the empty chair makes me uneasy.

  The light flares higher, and now I see Mickey among the shadows, standing before the man in the chair. The man wears a crown made of iron; its points catch the flames and glow red.

  I feel the nudge of an elusive memory, a story I once heard or a lesson I learned in school. I know this place: the dark hall, the two chairs, the harsh smell of rusting metal. But before I can remember it fully the man in the chair speaks.

  “Greetings, cousin,” he says. “What news do you bring me from the upper world?”

  “She know nothing,” Mickey says. “She is unable to find her daughter.”

  “Good. Her daughter is mine, gained by lawful means.”

  “Of course,” Mickey says.

  The red light erupts again. The shadows fall back. The man in the chair looks up and sees me. “Who is that woman?” he asks.

  I turn and run. I find the door to the outside, but it is stuck, locked. I am still pulling on it when Mickey comes up behind me.