The Man in the Woods (16 page)

“Dad,” she said, “if it was such a well-kept paid-off secret about the prince being ... bumped off, how come
you
know about it?”

“Ah,” said her father and blew five perfect smoke rings into the air, “because there were people who whispered, then and afterward. A servant’s diary here, a doctor’s paper there. Nearly a hundred years later it all came out, and people say the prince might have been Jack the Ripper. You see, babe, no matter how careful someone is, no matter how thorough, there’s always something that leaks out because we are only human creatures, all of us, and the most prudent plotter in the world will still make mistakes.”

Helen kissed her father and squeezed his hand tightly for a long moment, a little too long. She wondered that he didn’t seem to wonder why. Then she went upstairs to face two pages of algebra equations.

The numbers and signs all blurred before her eyes. She looked out the window. Staring at her from the branch of a maple tree were the phosphorescent eyes of a cat.

Mistakes
, she thought as she relaxed. She closed her eyes.
You out there, with the Thurber and the needle or the ice pick
, she whispered to herself.
Have you made a mistake yet?

And Lorenzo, careful, thorough Lorenzo with the precise handwriting, labeling every picture like an accountant.
Every picture but one!

“Because,” she said aloud, her eyes closed with the little tintype of Lorenzo and his daughter clearly pictured in her mind,
because you couldn’t label it. It was Lucy. And you couldn’t throw it away either because you still loved her too much.

Under the grainy cinnamon fog the trust and tenderness in Lucy’s eyes, the care and gentleness in Lorenzo’s arm laid across her shoulders were so pure and powerful that they broke out of the settlement of ghosts and into a September evening a hundred and thirty years later.

Outside the cat in the tree blinked and disappeared as quickly as a magician’s trick coin, as if in fear.

H
ELEN SAT COMFORTABLY IN
one of the Fairchild library’s leather padded chairs.
It’s my lucky day
, she told herself firmly,
for once and at last it’s my lucky day.
To begin with, she had passed her algebra test with an
A
, an amazing happening because she’d hardly studied the night before. The second thing was that Barry de Wolf had finally approved her Hummel drawings, but the lucky thing about that was that he was on the
Whaler
telephone when he nodded his smiling, serious approval and had not had a chance to ask her for the Hummel statue back. Aunt Stella had still not found a replacement for the chipped one that stood on her desk. After that, Jerry Rosen, with some embarrassment, had asked her for new football booster tag drawings. Apparently the principal had hit the roof at Beverly’s altered faces and had demanded that they be done by one person, the person who’d drawn the bodies in the first place. And then there was Dr. Wilberforce. She had found his name two minutes after she’d opened the Fairchild sisters’ file. She had checked it in several other files. Apparently the Fairchilds only consulted this one doctor. Apparently he was
the
family doctor.

She had time on her hands. Aunt Stella was to pick her up wherever she called from at five-thirty. It was only ten of four. She looked at the sweetly smiling sun above the face of the grandfather clock and smiled back. She looked also at the grim painting of Lorenzo and, when the custodian’s back was turned, stuck out her tongue at him.

“May I see the photographs again, please?” Helen asked.

“Well of course, miss,” came the answer. “Mrs. Fairchild herself has come by. She asked that you be given every help I can extend.”

Houses. The photograph collection abounded with houses. One of them had to be Lucy’s. There were ten or eleven different houses pictured. Among them were Elizabeth Fairchild’s own house on Orchard Street and the mansion. The custodian knew them all.

He brought out a large map of New Bedford drawn up by the town fathers just before the Civil War in 1860. Helen held her breath. Somewhere among the crisscrossing of old roads and farmlands that no longer existed Lucy’s house had to be. But the custodian pointed to every photograph and then to a tiny square or oblong on the map and identified every house that had belonged to a Fairchild. With the exception of the mansion itself and Mrs. Fairchild’s house they had all been replaced by parking lots or urban renewal housing projects, or they had fallen into the sea during landslides and storms. The custodian was not lying. Helen had lived in New Bedford all her life. The streets, the squares, the farmlands where all the other old houses had been no longer existed. Even the coastline of the shore was different.

The day was beginning to turn unlucky. She could feel that. Still, she had the doctor’s name. She would call Pinky, and he would try to find the doctor’s papers in the Preservation Society while she went to the public library, but the house, the house that was the key to where the Thurber lay, was hidden. The house was not on any map. She looked at three other maps of later dates. It didn’t exist.

Before she put the photographs away, she looked for the little tintype, the unlabeled one, that she knew was Lucy.

It was gone.

“Everything that was in the collection is there still,” said the custodian.

“But I saw it with my own eyes!” Helen said. “I can describe every detail of it.”

“I’m sorry, miss. There are so many pictures. You must have made a mistake.”

“It was the only one that was unmarked.” Helen’s temper began to flare. “It was there Sunday. It
was
.”

“No one has been near the photo collection,” said the custodian.

“That’s a lie!” said Helen. “Elizabeth Fairchild’s been here. She took it, didn’t she?”

“No, miss. She only came in the parlor. Not the library.”

Helen stood up. “That is a lie!” she repeated. “A lie. You are hiding Lucy Fairchild. It was her picture.”

“No such person ever existed,” said the custodian sadly.

“All right,” said Helen, warning herself to shut up, “but I’ll tell you something, and you can tell Mrs. Fairchild. I’m going to find Lucy. I’m going to find what Lorenzo did to her, and I’m going to write it up in the school paper, and the following week it’ll be in the
Post-Dispatch
. I’m going to expose every lousy thing Lorenzo Fairchild did, including torturing innocent little Irish children who came over to work his mills and lost their fingers in the machinery!”

Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!
she told herself. She didn’t dare ask the custodian if she could use the telephone, and now she’d have to find another—heaven knows where.

Out on Orchard Street there were no telephone booths. Nor on Hancock Street, as if the presence of a phone booth in the historic district might attract the riffraff. Helen walked twelve blocks in the now chilling and swirling wind until she came to Dock Street. There she found a telephone booth. It was filled with dirty paper cups and newspaper, but at least the phone worked.

She dropped in a dime and waited patiently for the telephone down the hall from the
Whaler
pressroom to be picked up. Pinky would probably be alone. It would take ten rings before he ran up the stairway and answered it.

She watched the legs of a man who was lying half on the pavement and half under the jacked-up rear end of a car.

The man pulled himself out from under the car. He banged his wrench against the pavement. A nut, stuck in the wrench’s claw, would not come loose. He reached into a toolbox and began working at the nut with a long pointed awl. A breathless Pinky answered the telephone. Helen kept her eyes on the man. He had now sauntered up to the telephone booth and was leaning against its side with his full weight on his arms. The awl was in his right hand. He wore a navy blue ski mask that hid all his face but the eyes, and they were covered by a pair of yellow-tinted welder’s goggles. He began to whistle.

“Pinky, I have the doctor’s name,” she said, trying to keep the trembling out of her voice. It would do no good to worry Pinky. He was too far away to help. On the other hand ...

“Great,” said Pinky. “Spell it.”

“W-i-l-b-e-r-f-o-r-c-e,” said Helen. The man outside was impatient. She could see nothing of his face behind the mask. He gestured with his awl for her to hurry. The awl was a steel spike with a wooden handle. His teeth when he grinned were large and as yellow as his welder’s goggles.

“What’s the matter?” asked Pinky. “Your voice doesn’t sound right.”

“Pinky,” said Helen as quietly as she could, “I’m in a phone booth. Corner of Dock and”—she looked up between the swaying telephone wires—“Wharf. Get a police car here as quick as you can.”

Pinky hung up the phone. Helen pretended to keep talking. She prayed the man outside hadn’t heard her, as she could not hear his whistling from behind the thick glass of the telephone booth door. The wind howled around the street corner. Dock Street, lined with old tenement buildings, was entirely empty. No child came out with a yo-yo. No woman walked a dog. The man was staring at her. He kept whistling. Once he tapped on the door with the awl. The door of the telephone booth opened inward. If he wanted to, he could push it in with his enormous strength. She would not be able to hold him back.

She jabbered into the empty telephone line for five minutes. He hung, shifting his weight from foot to foot, like a gorilla waiting to be fed.

The squad car pulled up with a screech. Helen put back the phone and ran to it.

“Thank you,” she heard the man say sarcastically, and as he dialed his number, she heard the whistling, for he did not bother to close the door. He whistled nasally, off-key, the shrill commercial jingle for Narragansett beer.

“What’s the trouble?” asked the policeman.

Too stunned and shaking to answer, Helen leaned against the open window on the passenger side of the police car. “I couldn’t ... couldn’t get the phone booth door open. I was trapped. The door stuck,” she lied.

“Uh,” said the policeman, “why didn’t you ask him to help you?”

“He ... he looked so scary,” said Helen.

“I suppose so,” said the policeman. “With the ski mask. He always wears it when he’s under a car. Keeps the oil drips off his face. He’s just a pussycat, though. Off-duty cop. Moonlights as a mechanic. Name’s Sandy Reynolds.”

The policeman offered to have Pinky, who was waiting at the public phone at school, called and reassured via the dispatcher. He then volunteered to drive Helen across town and drop her at the public library, as it was on his way. Slowly, as they drove, she stopped shaking and the color came back into her cheeks.

“Say,” said the policeman, “weren’t you that girl who was out on the hill after the rock thrower?”

Helen nodded.

“I’d say you have a bad case of nerves,” he observed.

Helen nodded again.

“You shouldn’t worry,” said the policeman kindly. “Stubby Atlas is in the maximum security facility in Pittsfield. That’s two hundred miles away. He won’t bother you or anyone else for ten years.”

“Did you ever find the little red book?” asked Helen.

The policeman shook his head. “We weren’t that lucky,” he answered.

“Did you ever find out the real reason why Stubby was throwing those rocks at the trucks?” asked Helen.

The policeman looked at her curiously. “He was a loony,” he said. “A medically certified one hundred percent criminal. Some of them are born that way, you know. It’s in the blood. In the genes.”

The public library had all sorts of files on New Bedford history but Helen found no doctor’s records of any kind dating before the First World War.

Pinky called right in the middle of dinner, to Aunt Stella’s annoyance. The Preservation Society had nothing on doctors at all.

After dinner Helen summoned all her will. She hated, more than anything in the world, calling strangers on the telephone, but she called every Wilberforce in New Bedford. There were five. None of them had lived there for more than fifty years. None had had an ancestor who was a doctor.

Helen took a bath. She made it hot and poured half of Aunt Stella’s French bath-oil beads into it. One by one she popped open the brightly colored gelatinous beads. They were like small oil-filled eggs. She kept the water running hard to cover the sound of her crying. She cried for the stolen picture of Lucy, for the unfindable doctor, for her own terror in the telephone booth, for the hours spent searching, all for nothing. There was no Thurber. There was no Lucy’s house. The maps showed nothing, and if Lorenzo, as mayor, had had the maps redrawn to hide the house, he’d done well. He’d made only one mistake in not labeling the little picture, and that mistake was too long ago and it was not enough.

All of this went through Helen’s mind. All the pieces that did not quite fit, like dappled bits of separate jigsaw puzzles. Then she let everything fall from her mind and cried still harder into her washcloth. This time it was not out of terror that someone was after her with a weapon. This time it was because ever since she’d been little, she’d been raised to be intelligent, to follow things through and not drop them in the middle, to use her eyes and ears and good brain and good heart, and she had failed. Was everything in the real world a lie or a trick?

Aunt Stella knocked on the door timidly. “Aren’t you using a lot of water?” she asked.

“Sorry,” said Helen. She shut off the tap.

“May I come in?” asked Aunt Stella. “I have something for you.”

“Yes,” said Helen. She wiped her face with the washcloth and wiggled her big toe around inside the faucet.

“You’ve been crying,” said Aunt Stella, sitting on the edge of the tub. “Is it your gold medal article on the Fairchilds?”

Helen nodded.

“We must never count our chickens before they hatch,” Aunt Stella stated. “But don’t worry, dear. This will cheer you up. Here’s a letter for you from Jenny down in Texas. And another thing. I found a little Hummel boy just like the one you broke.”

Helen dried her hands and opened the letter. Aunt Stella opened the cardboard box. The Hummel figurine was identical to the chipped one, except the little boy held a shepherd’s crook instead of a staff in his hand. “Thank you, Aunt Stella,” said Helen. She did feel slightly cheered. She’d run into Barry in the library that afternoon, and he had asked her for the statue again. Otherwise she’d have to pay for it. She’d promised him she would bring it in the next morning, having no idea how she was going to keep the promise. She guessed she’d have to tell him the truth and pay for it with her hair-straightening money.