by Jeffrey Ford
"How's the fishing?" asked Antony as we drew near the car. He began to open the door to get out and do his chauffeur thing.
"Nothing yet," she said, smiled, and waved for him not to bother getting the door for her.
We drove out to Cedar Swamp Road, and Antony bought a few sandwiches and Cokes at a little market. Behind the place were a table and chairs set up beneath a huge oak tree, where we sat and ate. Miss Hush had nothing but a crust from one of my sandwich halves and a sip of Coke. No one said anything for the longest time until, at one point, out of the blue, she just started singing a Ruth Etting tune, "Ten Cents a Dance." Antony sat staring at her with his mouth open and a glazed look in his eyes. She sang the whole song, and when she was done, she bummed one of the big man's cigarettes.
After Miss Hush sang that song, Antony never complained about the boredom again. There were three more fruitless stops that afternoon, two more fields and a wooded lot. When the sun started to go down, we headed back to the Barnes estate.
Schell was waiting for us on the front steps of the mansion. As we pulled up and parked, he descended and walked over to open the door for Miss Hush.
"Anything?" he asked.
"Nothing today," she said. "But soon. I'd say in the next day or two."
"Will you need Antony and Ondoo tomorrow?" he asked as she stood up and stepped past him.
"If you would be so kind," she said.
"Shall I have them pick you up at your own address?" asked Schell.
"No, here will be fine. Ten?"
"Very good," said Schell.
Before heading toward the mansion, she turned and leaned over to look into the car. She waved to us and called, "I had a delightful day, gentlemen. Thank you."
Antony and I both waved back.
"You're quite a cozy trio," said Schell as he got in the car and shut the door.
"Boss," said Antony, giving the Cord gas and pulling away down the long driveway, "that Miss Hush is a cupcake."
"Anything else?" asked Schell.
The big man thought for a moment as we passed a long line of hedges. "She's probably crazy."
I noticed that up ahead another car, headlamps on in the twilight, had entered Barnes's drive and was headed toward us.
"And you, Diego? Did you find out how she knows who we are?" asked Schell.
"No," I said, and as I spoke, I turned to look into the passing car. There were three large shadowy forms in it beside the driver-two in the back and one in the passenger seat. I caught a clear glimpse of the driver, not noticing his face in any detail but focusing on the fact that he wore a large, broad-brimmed hat. The car passed quickly, but that hat looked awfully familiar.
SHE'S A CON
The air in the Bugatorium was very still that night, moths splayed out on the walls and butterflies closed tight on branches and stems. Only one two-tailed swallowtail drifted in circles up near the skylight.
"I'm sorry we never got to Barnes before his daughter disappeared," said Schell. "He and his wife are true believers. They've had spiritualists, cold readers, psychics, in their parlor. The missus claims to be an adept at the technique of automatic writing. The house is littered with talismans and volumes on the occult. We could have made a small fortune on them."
"How's Barnes strike you?" asked Antony, setting his wineglass down on the table.
"I have to question either the intelligence or sanity of anyone who goes in for the mystical to the extent he does, but otherwise he seemed a man distraught at the loss of his daughter. He showed me around the garden from which she was taken and then had to leave to attend to some business. After that, his wife did the honors. She's very quiet and clearly heartbroken."
"Well," said Antony, "anyone who can make the kind of money he does legally can't be completely stupid."
"Did you find anything in the garden?" I asked.
Schell shook his head. "Nothing there. We went through the entire house. Of course, I had to stop every now and then and make believe I was picking up an impression from the country of spirits-a shiver, a nod, a gasp. It was a pitiful thing to see the expectation bloom in the eyes of Mrs. Barnes and then wilt again when I had nothing substantial to offer."
"This whole thing gives me the creeps," I said.
"The charity angle, the fact that we're trying to do something real, has me all bollixed too," said Antony, nodding.
"Either of you can back out if you'd like," said Schell. "For me, I have no choice but to continue until there's nowhere left to turn or I've found the girl."
"Yeah, yeah, Johnny, save it," said Antony. "What did you find?"
Schell laughed. "I met the staff, questioned them a little, but detected no signs of dissembling. Then Mrs. Barnes led me to her daughter's room. It's on the first floor with a huge bay window, and has a view of the grounds at the back of the house. A lovely room for a child-dolls, a dollhouse, a canopied bed, rocking horse, just beautiful.
"I looked around, but found nothing remarkable until I got to a desk in the corner and began going through a stack of drawings Charlotte had made. It was the first time I got a sense of the child as a person and not merely an image. Mrs. Barnes told me that in the days prior to her disappearance, her daughter had complained about seeing a ghost at night walking the grounds, staring in her window. She'd cried out in the middle of the night two evenings before she was abducted, and Mrs. Barnes remembered going to her room."
"Did the mother see anything?" I asked.
"No, but the girl did three pastel drawings during that time, trying to capture what she'd seen. A male form, glowing in the night, head like a big white potato, and crystal blue eyes. In one, it crouches in the bushes, in another it's back by the tree line. The last is the most startling because it's a full-on portrait of the face at the window. As Mrs. Barnes attested, the child was a wonderful little artist and drew quite often."
"What kid doesn't see things in the dark, though?" said Antony.
"Maybe somebody was casing the place at night," I said.
"I thought both these things myself," said Schell. "Some of the girl's other drawings hung on the walls of her room-portraits of her parents, her kitten, and the like. I would say she had a knack more for realistic depiction than for fantastic imagining. Also, Barnes has two night watchmen who patrol the grounds, and a guard at the front gate."
"Did the mother seem to think there was a connection between the drawings and Charlotte's disappearance?" I asked.
"In the Barneses' view everything has some kind of supernatural connection," said Schell. "But she was visibly rattled by the drawings. She didn't use the word ghost when talking about them. The term she used was 'dybbuk.'"
"What the hell's that?" asked Antony.
"I don't know," said Schell, "but she used it in a way that indicated she expected me to understand. Not to shake her confidence in me, I simply nodded as if I did."
Antony lifted his wineglass and drained it. "What do you say, Boss, can I have a cigarette in here?"
"No," said Schell.
"Okay, I'm just gonna lip one." He took a cigarette out and held it in his mouth without lighting it. "The whole deal's screwy, and the one thing that makes no sense at all is that there's been no ransom demand."
"We don't know enough about Barnes," I said. "He might have enemies."
"We don't know enough about a lot of things," said Schell. "I got that list of names from him of people who had visited the house in the last month." He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.
"Anything stand out?" asked Antony.
Schell unfolded the paper and scanned it up and down. "It looks like mostly society women, and five or six men's names. Our friend, Mr. Parks, is among them. I'll start looking into them tomorrow while you two are driving Lydia Hush around."
"Did you find out how Miss Hush came to the Barneses' attention?" I asked.
"All Mrs. Barnes would tell me was that she showed up at the mansion two days after the g
irl disappeared, suggesting she might be able to help. Hush instantly convinced Barnes's wife of her abilities by revealing things about the family's personal life. That's it. I didn't want to seem too nosy on that score."
"I think Antony's fallen for her," I said.
The big man looked over at me and slowly shook his head.
"She's a con," said Schell. "She's a con and a lousy con at that."
"You think she might be involved in the girl's abduction?" I asked.
"I considered it," said Schell, "but basically I think she's just making hay while the sun shines, so to speak."
After a long pause in the conversation, Antony said, "I'm going to go have a smoke in the kitchen and then turn in. I've got a long day tomorrow with junior G-man, here, and Madame Snowflake."
We wished Antony a good night, and then Schell leaned back and closed his eyes, as if he was trying to figure out how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together. The whole thing was too confusing for me to sort out. I let my mind wander, first thinking about Lydia Hush putting her hand on my shoulder, then about her singing at lunch. Somehow these thoughts bled into a memory of Isabel and the night we sat on the boulder by the sound. I wanted to see her again.
The next thing I knew, Schell's eyes were partially open, and he was staring at the yellow and black flutter of the two-tailed swallowtail hovering above the table between us. He smiled wearily, and said, "The Aztecs called that specimen Xochiquetzal, which means 'precious flower.' There was a goddess who followed warriors into battle, and when they were mortally wounded and lay dying, she'd copulate with them while holding one of those swallowtails in her mouth."
"I remember my mother telling me that mariposas were the souls of the dead," I said.
"Do you think about Mexico often?" asked Schell.
"I didn't till I met Isabel," I said. "Now I'm starting to see pieces of it in my dreams. I'm remembering little bits and pieces. Funny thing is, I was just thinking about her when you mentioned the Aztecs."
"Maybe we need to take a trip back there for you to remember," he said. He turned his left hand over, and there was a bridge deck in it. Where it had come from, I'm not sure. As he began manipulating the cards, he said, "Maybe it was wrong of me to want you to forget Mexico, but I did. I thought if you carried it around your whole life, it would weigh you down with sorrow for all the things that had happened."
I smiled, not wanting to trouble him, and waved my hand. "I'd say I've been pretty lucky."
"I wonder if," said Schell, "when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly"-here, he fanned open the deck-and gains the ability to fly, it remembers what it was like to be a caterpillar?"
"It's probably just happy to be free," I said.
"Or," said Schell, closing the deck, "perhaps all of its restless movement from blossom to blossom is merely an attempt to return to and regain its caterpillar nature." He raised his eyebrows and then shrugged.
While continuing to work the deck, now with both hands, Schell eventually closed his eyes again, returning to his thoughts. His musings struck me at first as insightful and profound, but the longer I sat there the more something bothered me about what he'd said. I couldn't precisely put my finger on it, but it had to do with his equating Mexico with a caterpillar.
THIS MOVING WORLD
The next day, in between stops to let Lydia Hush get out of the car and psychically sniff the surrounding area, I entertained her and Antony with select stanzas from the Isa Upanishad. Using my swami voice, I recited the lines with a heightened solemnity that both honored and mocked the material.
"When once one understands that in oneself
The self's become all beings
When once one's seen the unity
What room is there for sorrow? What room for perplexity?"
Antony laughed and pronounced the holy utterances "double-talk," and Miss Hush praised me for my ability to memorize. She said that she could almost make out what the words were getting at. Like a child vying for attention, I milked the act for a solid hour until I began to bore myself. Afterward, we traveled in a peaceful silence broken only by Lydia's occasional whispered requests for Antony to pull over. A little while after lunch, for no apparent reason, she offered a breathy rendition of "As Time Goes By."
Her perfume carried the scent of fresh-cut lemons. It filled the car and dazed the big man and me, so that even while we waited by the side of the road for her, we kept to our own thoughts. Her pale beauty was bewitching, and it made me think of marshmallow, cream, clouds, and snow. Whenever she put her hand on Antony's shoulder to get his attention, I noticed that it caused him to shiver slightly, and I felt a stab of jealousy with each touch.
Not until the end of the day, the sky growing overcast as twilight came on, when we'd pulled over at the edge of a wood in a little town named Mt. Misery, did her spell dissipate. I sat in the front seat next to Antony, who had begun humming the tune she'd sung earlier. More than an hour had gone by since we'd last seen her drifting like a ghost amid the gray trunks beneath the darkening sky. Only then did I recall something I'd meant to tell him first thing that morning.
"Oh," I said, "yesterday, after we picked up Schell and were driving out of the Barnes place, do you remember the car that passed us?"
He took a drag of his cigarette, flicked the ash out the car window, and said, "Yeah, now that you mention it."
"I tried to get a look at whoever was in that car. I'm pretty sure it was four men-big guys too. I couldn't get a look at any of their faces, but one thing I could see was that the driver was wearing a hat."
"So?"
"I think it was that hat. You know, the one you wore when you were Parks's mother."
Antony sat still for a moment, taking in what I had told him. Then he turned to me, eyes squinting, brow furrowed. "Why?" he said.
"Same style, same color, same big brim. If I remember when we bought it at the thrift store, it was actually a man's hat."
He turned and stared out the windshield. "Oh shit," he said. "I wonder if Barnes is bringing booze in from Canada."
"Why would he?" I asked.
"I'll give you a million guesses," said Antony. He held up his right hand and rubbed his thumb and first two fingers together. "If you have a big enough operation, there's a fortune in it. You bring it in on Long Island, less cops, and you've got the city close enough to unload all of it and then some."
"Would he do something like that?" I asked.
He laughed once and rubbed his chin. "'Illegal' takes on a whole new meaning when you're loaded like Barnes. The rich have a separate rule book. To them if it makes money, it can't be wrong."
"The only thing is, we have to tell Schell," I said.
"Damn it," he said and smacked the steering wheel. "We are gonna have to tell him. I've got nothing against bootlegging. Prohibition is complete bullshit anyway, but this shows us something about Barnes that could be important. Are you sure it was that hat?"
"No," I said. "But I'm mostly sure."
"Jeez, trapped in my own spiderweb," he said. "My con is busted."
"I don't think Schell's going to care," I said. "He'll be happy to get the news about Barnes."
"Yeah, but if we tell him, you better be right," he said. "I'm gonna look like an ass."
"Why should this instance be any different?" I said.
I managed to open the door and get out of the car before Antony could grab me. He let himself out and stretched. Then he looked over at where I stood and said, "If I catch you, kid, I'm gonna wrap that turban around your neck."
"Whatever moves in this moving world, abandon it and then enjoy," I said in my swami voice.
"Enough of that," he said. "It's gonna get dark in about fifteen minutes. Where's Miss Hush?"
"She's been gone a long time," I said.
"Too long," said Antony. "We better find her."
"I think she went this way," I said and pointed at a path that wound among the trees.
We followed the path
for a few minutes, looking all around, but saw no sign of our passenger.
"Miss Hush," I called out. There was no response.
We walked on a bit more until we came to a fork in the trail. "Lydia," he roared. We listened for her voice but heard only the sounds of crows in the treetops and a squirrel running through the brambles. Red leaves fell around us, joining others that littered the ground.
"Okay, kid, you go that way," he said, pointing to the right. "I'll go this way. Just keep calling her. If you don't see anything by the time it gets dark, get back to the car."
"All right," I said and took off down the path, calling her name. We yelled at intervals, and I heard Antony's voice for a good distance as I walked along. Darkness was falling quickly, and I wondered where she could have gone.
About fifteen minutes later, when I was just about ready to turn back, I thought I heard something. When I looked around, I saw a crow lift off a fallen tree and fly up between barren branches. That's when I caught sight of a small structure sitting amid a thicket of pines. It was a dilapidated old shack with a tar paper roof. There was a broken window to the left of the door, which hung crookedly from a leather strap-hinge at the top; the bottom one was torn. The place was small, and looked like it had once been a toolshed or woodshed.
I made my way over to it, and as I approached, I called Miss Hush's name, a little more quietly than before. I heard nothing but silence. I stepped up on the cracked, moss-covered concrete block at the entrance. Anxiety was building in my chest. I reached out and pulled the crooked door back, and the leather hinge just sort of crumbled and broke. The door fell away, almost clipping my shoulder, and hit the ground with a crash. What meager daylight was left, rushed in, lessening the gloom. As the light poured in, a smell came out-a horrid stench of mildew and bad meat. There was a buzz and flutter as flies and moths rose from something lying on the floor.
I knew it was her before I could even focus on the pale form at my feet. There was the Barnes child, maggots in her curly hair, naked, and white as Lydia, a small square of material with a bizarre circular design on it covering her from waist to midthigh. She was staring hard with rotting eyes, and the sight of her made my knees buckle. Suddenly, the smell registered with full force, and my stomach heaved. I turned away from the door, tripped on the concrete block, and hit the cold hard ground with hands outstretched. I vomited, supporting myself on all fours. I don't know how long I stayed like that, but all I could hear above the buzzing in my ears was the wind in the trees, the sound of the leaves blowing along the ground.