Face on the Wall (40 page)

… When he came to the hedge of thorns it had turned into flowers, which drew apart and let him through …

The Brothers Grimm, “Little Brier Rose”

“B
ut where is he?” said Annie.

“Oh, you know Flimnap,” said Mary. “I offered to drive him home, but he said he wanted to walk.” Mary looked at Annie's anxious face and took her arm. “Come on, Annie dear, why don't you spend the night at our house? Homer will stay here and stand guard.”

“I will?” said Homer. “Oh, right, okay, I'll stay.” He smiled at his niece with pitying affection. “I'll mind the store while you go home with Mary.”

Annie glanced up at her wall, which was shadowy and dark under the clotted shreds of the remaining ceiling. “No, no, I can't leave. All those media people will be back in the morning, waiting around for the wrecking machine. I've got to stay. I'll be all right. Good night, Aunt Mary, good night, Uncle Homer.”

Alone, she sat gloomily beside the mound of broken clapboards and fractured windows and chunks of plaster. Bits of glass glinted in the wreckage like splinters of sky. Fireflies glittered over the field. Bats darted overhead, and a throng of mosquitoes floated around Annie, whining, landing delicately on her arms. She told herself to take refuge in Flimnap's shelter, because Aunt Mary had nailed up a mosquito net around the door, an old curtain from the farmhouse on Barrett's Mill Road. Instead, Annie tore the curtain off its nails.

It was a hot summer night. She undressed in the open air, lay down on top of her sleeping bag, and pulled the curtain over her naked self from head to toe. Through the torn gauze she could see the pink brightness of Boston to the east, and one or two stars high in the blue-black sky. There was no moon.

Then a light appeared, and flared up in the darkness in front of her wall, illuminating the Owl and the Pussy-cat and the wooden leg of Long John Silver.

It was a camping lantern with a glowing mantle. A dim face bent over it. Long fingers adjusted the knob at the side. The light increased. A stepladder appeared out of nowhere. The fingers lifted the lantern and set it on the top step. Then face and Hands vanished. There was only Flimnap's dark silhouette between Annie and the lamp. He was climbing the ladder and setting a box down on the folding shelf.

Annie watched as he passed his hand over the bare place on the wall where he had painted out one mysterious face after another. Now, with a piece of chalk, he began to draw. His strokes were solid and sure.

So it had been Flimnap, all along. Of course it was Flimnap. He could draw after all. He could draw very well.

Annie sat up, wrapping the curtain around her, and watched as he laid in the structure of the small round skull, then added the slightly tilted eyes, the flat snub nose, the too-large mouth, the too-small ears.

By the time he began painting over his chalk lines, she guessed whose hand was holding the brush. But she waited in silence as Eddy's head became three-dimensional and round, his cheeks plump, his body a chunky cylinder in overalls. His stubby fingers were miracles of light and shade.

At last, toward morning, Flimnap lowered his brush and stepped slowly down from the ladder.

The missing piece of the puzzle had now been found. Every part of Flimnap was at last hooked firmly into every other part. “Joseph Noakes,” murmured Annie. “I should have guessed.”

He came and stood over her and touched the gauzy veil covering her face. Annie drew the curtain aside. Noakes fell to his knees beside her, whispering, “Annie, oh, Annie.”

She wrapped her arms round him and pressed herself against him and murmured in his ear, “Too bad, Joseph Noakes. Three plates, is that all? I'd set my heart on a four-plate man.”

Chapter 60

It does not matter in the least having been born in a duckyard, if only you come out of a swan's egg!

Hans Christian Andersen, “The Ugly Duckling”

N
ext morning, as she was getting dressed, Mary remembered something. She pawed in the pocket of the jacket she had been wearing the day before. “Look, Homer, see what Charlene gave me.”

“Charlene
gave you something?” Homer couldn't believe it. “After what she did? After she almost killed that little girl?”

Mary held it up. “It's a roll of film.”

“Uh-oh,” said Homer. “Watch out. It'll be embarrassing. Catching us in the latrine.”

But he took the film and held it in both hands like a jewel. “I'll take it to that place where they make prints in a hurry. In fact, I'll take it there right now. I am extraordinarily interested in this roll of film.”

Three hours later, standing at the counter in the photo-finishing shop, he leafed quickly through the twelve pictures that had been taken by Charlene Gast. Eight were images of her frilly dolls.

The ninth was an out-of-focus image of her father, half obscured by a cloud of leaves, inserting a key in the French door on the south side of Annie's house.

The tenth had been taken through a window, and most of it was blurred by the edge of the window frame. But there he was, Robert Gast, right there on the other side of the glass, inside Annie's house. He had his hands on the scaffolding in front of her painted wall. His young son Eddy stood above him on the highest platform, still very much alive.

The eleventh was a wild picture of the ceiling, obviously a mistake.

The twelfth was a perfect shot. The lens in the camera that Charlene had conned out of Cissie Aufsesser was not much better than a chunk of bottle glass, but the automatic mechanisms had worked. The electric eye had measured the amount of light, the shutter had opened for the right fraction of a second, and the focusing apparatus had adjusted itself perfectly, creating a sharp image of Eddy Gast lying on the floor while his father towered over him with a sledgehammer.

Homer looked at the twelfth print long and hard, then put it back in the envelope with the rest. He glanced up at the kid behind the counter, who was making change for another customer. “Do you people ever look at your prints? I suppose all sorts of shocking things turn up, right?”

“Shocking things?” The kid snickered. “You mean little tots in the bathtub? Dogs and cats? The mother of the bride? Those poor guys in the darkroom, their life is boring enough without looking at every newborn baby in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

“Oh, right,” said Homer, laughing, slipping into his pocket the picture that would send Robert Gast to prison for the rest of his life.

The wrecked car had not been enough. The copied key had not been enough. The sledgehammer on the workbench had not been enough. This was enough.

Charlene had said, “I'll tell,” and she had told.

Chapter 61

“A secret is with me as is a house with a lock, whose key is lost, and whose door is sealed.”

The Thousand and One Nights

T
he siege was over. The pressure from
Globe
editor Harvey Broadstairs and the rest of the media swelled for a while, then sagged. For a few days it scandalized the nation to learn that Annie's landlord had been arrested for the murder of his little son, but then other villainies caught the national attention and interest faded.

But not before Jerry Neville made a phone call.

“Homer? This is Jerry. I read about it in the paper. Tell Annie her champagne is waiting.”

“You mean it's all okay now? She'll get her house back?”

“Of course she'll get her house back. I'm asking for a revocation of judgment, the cancellation of that goddamned out-of-court settlement.”

“He'll have to pay, won't he, Jerry? I mean, even from prison, he'll have to pay to put her house back the way it was before he started tearing it down?”

“The trouble is, he's a turnip.”

“A turnip? Oh, I see. You mean—?”

“The proverbial vegetable without any cardiovascular system to squeeze blood from. Don't get your hopes up. Gast's partnership with Frederick Small didn't do him any good.”

“Frederick Small? You mean Pearl's husband? The wife-murderer? The one who turned up dead in his own gravel works? Gast was in partnership with Small?”

“Songsparrow Estates in Southtown, Gast was the developer. He got a huge bank loan and spent a couple million on the place before he learned Small didn't own it, his wife owned it, and she was dead, and Small had forged her signature. Which left Robert Gast in desperate financial circumstances, to say the least.”

“My God, Jerry, how did you find out all this stuff?”

“I learned to read in second grade. It's in today's
Globe.
Interview with a police sergeant in Southtown.”

“Bill Kennebunk,” exclaimed Homer, delighted. “Bless his heart. But, Jerry, you said Bob Gast is bankrupt. That means he can't pay Annie any damages?”

“I'm afraid that's right. She's out of luck.”

“Oh, God, poor Annie.” Homer's high spirits turned to gloom. “Listen, Jerry, do you think some people are disaster-prone? You know, they invite bizarre misfortune? They trip over the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and break their leg?”

“Well, I suppose some people are like that. Who do you mean?”

“Annie, my. niece Annie. She's that kind of girl. Hang in there, Jerry. Don't fall off a cliff. Sooner or later she'll need you again.”

No sooner had Homer put down the phone than it jangled a second time. Another familiar voice boomed in his ear. “Homer?”

“Oh, hey, Bill, is that you I've just been hearing about the far-famed exploits of Sergeant William Kennebunk.”

Kennebunk cleared his throat with mock self-importance. “That's
Chief
Kennebunk, if you don't mind.”