Flight of the Stone Angel

PROGOLUE

In the idiot’s philosophy, a cloud could never be
just a
cloud. Seeking portent, he read much into the shapeshifting. This particular cloud was bereft of any wind to drive it. Thwarted in its forward movement, it billowed upward in a silent explosion of form, pluming high and angry, boiling over the face of the midday sun and killing its light.

Now the cloud was alone in the sky.

The town square flickered in and out of the dark as a succession of quick bright flashes of gaseous green lit the cloud from within. Then came a low rumble – prelude to the main event.

All dark now, like a stage.

It was coming; it was surely coming. He knew a jagged bolt of lightning would hit the earth, and soon, for the air was primed – electrified. The idiot’s flesh tingled. He felt an exquisite, unbearable tension as he waited for the strike.

And the cloud let him wait.

It loomed above him, massing higher and darker, as he counted off the seconds.
One, two

The young stranger came to town just past twelve noon.

Within an hour, the idiot had been assaulted, hands bloodied and broken; Deputy Travis suffered a massive stroke at the wheel of his patrol car; and Babe Laurie was found murdered.

The young stranger who had preceded all of these events was sitting in a jail cell.

Sheriff Jessop made out a receipt for the prisoner’s possessions, which were fewer than the average woman carried: one .357 Smith & Wesson revolver and one handed-down pocket watch. Inside the cover of the watch were the names of the generations: David Rubin Markowitz, Jonathan Rupert Markowitz, Louis Simon Markowitz and, last to inherit, Mallory – just Mallory.

The rain had finally ended, and the sky was a noisy circus of life on the wing, birds getting off to a late start on the day. Every fish hawk was screaming after its supper, and the woman wondered if the fish could hear them coming.

One osprey flopped its catch onto the grass. The fish struggled under the bird’s talons; its silver scales were striped with watery blood. The fish hawk was so intent on tearing flesh from bone, he paid the woman no mind as she drew closer, smiling benignly on the creature and his bloody, living meal, nodding her approval of a good catch.

If reincarnated, Augusta knew she could depend on coming back to the earth with feathers, for she had the ruthless makings of a fine bird, and God was not one to waste talent.

A breeze off the river whipped the faded green cotton dress around her bare legs, and long waves of hair streamed back over her shoulders. The finer detail of cornflower-blue eyes would be lost from the distance of the town below, but any citizen of Dayborn would have recognized her tall and slender silhouette striding along the top of the levee, that great sloping barrier which was the high ground for the lands along the mighty Mississippi.

A sudden cloud break made her tresses into a brilliant flowing shock of white, wildly upstaging the few remaining strands of black hair. She winced at a twinge of bursitis in her left shoulder and shifted the weight of her grocery bag onto one hip as she moved down the steep incline of dirt and spotty clumps of Bermuda grass.

When she stepped onto level ground, she walked slowly toward her house perched behind distant trees. One dark window, round like an eye, could see and be seen through the choke of foliage. It watched her progress from the base of the levee to a narrow dirt road.

The mansion of forty-seven rooms had been standing for nearly a hundred and fifty years. She wished it would finally crumble back into the earth. Toward that end, she had made no repairs on the place in the half century since her father’s death. She had done nothing to abet her incarceration, nor anything to free herself. For the majority of her seventy years, she had been known by the titles of Miss Augusta Trebec, spinster of Dayborn and professional prisoner.

She paused in front of Henry Roth’s cottage, a small one-story affair of red brick walls and a fine slate roof. The garden was ablaze with exotic flowers growing in wavy bands of brilliant primary colors. She had always coveted this house for its simplicity of form and manageable space. If it had been hers, she would have let the garden go to a more natural state of untended wildflowers. But Henry was an artist who could not help but improve upon nature. Every day of his life, he improved blocks of stone with his chisel to create beautiful and most unnatural things.

A stranger was standing at Henry’s door, and a silver car was parked in the driveway. Augusta did not know the style of one car from another, but she could recognize a Mercedes hood ornament when she saw one. The license plate was obscured by shrubs and could not tell her where the man and his vehicle had come from.

Henry’s visitor was a tall one, well over six foot, and a good figure of a man by the back of him. As he turned away from the door, she was struck with admiration for his profile. That nose was a thing to behold, right formidable, nearly a weapon in its size and length.

The man turned around to face her. His eyes were large and heavy-lidded, with small blue irises. They put her in mind of a fairy-tale frog who had not quite completed the transition to a prince by way of a kiss from a beautiful maiden. Perhaps he had not been properly kissed, or maybe the maiden was flawed.

Augusta walked up the flagstone path to Henry’s door. The visitor nodded to her in the modern version of a gentleman’s bow.

Respectful – she liked that.

He was not a very young man, but there was no gray in the longish brown hair to help her fix his place in time. He might be in that awkward phase before the onset of middle age. She was near enough to note the fabric of his three-piece suit, and by that heavy material she made him a northerner from a colder state of autumn.

“Hello,” he said, with a smile that was at once loony and beguiling.

Augusta smiled back before she realized what she was doing. Now she pressed her lips together in a more dignified and noncommittal line. “Henry’s not expected back from New Orleans till early evening.”

“Thank you, I’ll come back later.” He handed her a white business card.

She was charmed by this small gesture. It reminded her of the gentleman’s calling card, a custom from her father’s generation.

He pointed to her grocery bag. “May I help you with that? It looks rather heavy.”

Apparently, he was from good family, or at least his mother had raised him right. By his accent, she narrowed his compass points to the northeastern corner of the country.

Augusta placed her brown paper sack in the crook of his arm, slyly reveling in his look of surprise as he realized how heavy the bag really was. She had carried greater weights. Beneath the light cotton dress was a well-toned body, kept in good order by spurning any form of transportation but her own good legs, and by carrying all her own burdens.

She scrutinized his business card. “Charles Butler, consultant.” A line of academic credentials trailed after his name, like boxcars on a train.

Could any man be that overeducated?

And now she learned that Mr. Butler had carelessly misplaced a very good friend. “Perhaps you’ve seen her.” With his free hand, he pulled the folded page of a newspaper from his inside pocket and handed it to her.

Augusta opened the sheet and looked down at a large, grainy photograph of a stone angel. She recognized the page from last Sunday’s edition of the
Louisiana Herald,
which had featured famous plantation gardens along the River Road. The caption gave a credit line to the sculptor, Dayborn’s own Henry Roth.

“That statue was commissioned five months ago,” he said. “It looks so much like my friend, I think she must have posed for it.” Now he produced a wallet photograph of a young woman with blond hair and green eyes. Both the carved angel and the glossy portrait of a living woman were good likenesses of an unforgettable face.

“She was here. I knew her.” Augusta refolded the sheet of newspaper and handed it back to him. “She’s gone now. It was a sudden death.”

During the long silence, she watched questions welling behind the man’s eyes, crowding up against his lips, mad to find an exit. But she had just wounded him, deliberately and severely; he was incapable of speech. His head tilted to one side, as though to empty out her words and cure himself this way.

Well, obviously, he was not good at death.

“You can leave your car here.” She turned back to the road and motioned him to come along with her. “My house is only a short walk through the cemetery.”

He was slow to follow her, moving mechanically as he carried her groceries along the path leading into a broad circle of trees and a city of small whitewashed houses, each one home to a corpse. The roofs of the tombs were topped by crosses of stone and crucifixes of wrought iron. Less impressive graves were slabs made of concrete to prevent the dead from rising in the buoyancy of sodden ground.

Many a grave was spotted with the colors of dying blooms. The wilted bouquets were remnants of All Saints’ Day, when the local people had left flowers for dead relations – the very day the young stranger had arrived, and Babe Laurie had violently departed from the world, leaving a nasty red stain by the side of the road.

The crunch of shoes on the gravel path was masked by the incessant music of birds as Augusta’s tall companion walked beside her, still speechless. And all the while, she was measuring his state of shock as a sign of good character. Evidently, he had been telling the truth. He was merely a man in search of a friend, and that friend was certainly beloved.
Ah, but one could never be too sure of anything,
she cautioned herself as she guided him toward
a
statue with the same face as the one in his newspaper clipping. But this one held a different pose, and she didn’t carry a sword.

“Now this is her monument,” said Augusta as they approached the back of an angel poised for flight, stone wings spread on the air. “There isn’t a corpse, though.”

The sheriff had never found her body.

The young woman had not gone into sacred ground, but certainly to her death. Her lost blood had grown to the dimensions of a river in the talk of townspeople. And a child had also vanished, gone to that famed place of Only God Knew Where.

As they rounded the monument, Augusta pointed to the angel’s face. “Now that’s a real good likeness of her. Is that your friend?”

She looked up at the stranger beside her. His face was a waffling confusion of anguish and relief as he read the date of death, seventeen years in the past.

Yet it was undeniably Mallory’s face.

Charles Butler stared up at the delicately sculpted features, the long slants of her eyes, the high cheekbones and full lips. The wings were unfurled in the disturbing and masterful illusion of levitating stone. In her arms, the angel carried a smaller version of herself, a child.

He felt a tug at his sleeve and looked down into the old woman’s dispassionate blue eyes. “Is that your missing friend?”

“No. My friend would have been a little girl when this woman died.”

The old woman pointed to the stone child in the angel’s arms. “Well now, that’s Cass’s daughter. The girl ran away, or was carried off – we don’t know which.”

The carved child was perhaps six or seven years old. The age was right. Yes, the child was Mallory; he was certain of it now. So, after all the months of searching for her, he had stumbled onto the beginning of the road and not the end of it. “You have no idea what happened to the little girl?”

“No,” she said. “Those seventeen years between the day the child disappeared and the day she came back to town – well, that’s a total mystery to everyone.”

“She came back?”

“Three days ago.”

“And she’s
alive
?”

“Oh, yes. By all accounts, she’s very healthy.”

He looked into the old woman’s cunning eyes, only now realizing what a cruel joke she had spun out for him. He glared at her in silent accusation, and her foxy smile offered no denial whatever.

The agony she had put him through, knowing all the while that Mallory was alive.

“Perhaps that was a nasty trick,” she said. “But I’m old. I have to get my fun where I can.” Her smile slowly spread into a glorious grin.

She was at least thirty years his senior, but he was not entirely immune to what beauty survived in her. His mind’s eye worked backward in time, undoing her wrinkles and restoring the dark glory of her waist-long gray hair. In his imagined reconstruction, she astonished him.

The woman pointed to the roof and round window of a house, all that was visible over the trees beyond the rim of the cemetery. “That’s my place, up there on the hill.”

“What hill?” In his travels along the west bank of the Mississippi River, he had yet to see a hillock or even a bump on the Louisiana landscape.

“According to the surveyor’s report, my house sits ten feet above sea level.” Her tone bordered on combative. “In these parts, that qualifies as a damn mountain.”

She threaded her arm into his, and they walked along the path leading out of the graveyard and toward the imperceptible hill, which he was taking purely on faith. “Where can I find my friend? Do you know where she’s staying?”

“Oh, yes. The whole town knows where she’s staying. I hear she’s called Mallory, but I don’t recall if that’s her last name or her first.”

“Her first name is Kathy, but Mallory is the only name she answers to.” He glanced back to the angel and her child. So Mallory had finally found her way home.

“That cinches it,” said the old woman in the spirit of
eureka.
“Kathy is the name of Cass Shelley’s daughter. But Sheriff Jessop only knows your friend as Mallory. He found that name inside an old pocket watch she was carrying. When you see the sheriff, don’t you tell him any different.”

“Why not?” And what did a sheriff have to do with –

“Don’t help him. He’s no friend of hers. So, don’t give him anything useful. Oh, perhaps I should have mentioned that a local man was found murdered, and your friend was put in jail shortly thereafter.”

Charles stopped dead on the path, and his eyes rolled up to the sky.
What next?
What new torture might this woman be fashioning for him? He looked down at her and caught the smile that was just stealing off.

“All right, let’s have it – all of it.” It was a fight to keep civility in his voice. “I assume the murder and her jailing are connected, but I don’t want to take anything for granted – not with you. What happened?”

She drew out the silence, eyes squinting at that middle ground of focus, as though reading the small print of a contract. Charles popped off the balls of his feet and settled down again, inclining his head to prompt her.

“What happened?” she echoed him, and held a pause for a few more maddening seconds. “Well, I guess a number of odd things happened the day Kathy came back. The deputy nearly died of a heart attack. And then they found Babe Laurie’s body, his head all stove in with a rock. Oh, but wait – I’m misremembering the day. First, the idiot got his hands broken, but that was done with a piano.”