The Man in the Woods (17 page)

Perhaps things were not all as bad as she thought. She put failure out of her mind and looked closely at the two photographs Jenny had sent in the letter. One was of her new house with a swimming pool, and one was of herself on a horse.

“Cheer up, dear,” said Aunt Stella, holding out a big, soft blue bath towel for her. “You’ll write another paper. Something easier.” She wound up the little Hummel music box. It was in perfect order. It played “Edelweiss,” a song that Helen hated and one that her father had said was a Hitler youth anthem.

“Isn’t it pretty?” asked Aunt Stella.

“Aunt Stella!” said Helen. “You know I hate those things!” But she felt better.

In bed she let her thoughts pile up pleasantly. She began to convince herself that maybe after all she had lost the locket at school. In the
Whaler
office? In the gym? While she was looking for the janitor? And maybe someone at school did have a grudge against her. A jealous freshman who thought she had gotten more than she deserved with her cushy junior’s job on the
Whaler
? A jealous junior who’d wanted to do the paste-ups and the Perry and Crowe ads? She had more Perry and Crowe ads to do. Barry had given her a brochure full of Royal Doulton mice and rabbits. They would be easy to draw.

Time to get back to normal
, she told herself. Jenny, down in Texas, was making new friends. She was on the school swimming team, and every day after school she got to ride horseback. Jenny missed her, but not as much as she missed Jenny.

More than anything else, now that Jenny was gone, Sister Ignatius reminded Helen of normal life. She decided she would pay Sister a visit the following afternoon. She pictured her pouring tea for them both in the spare, elegant common room of the convent. Sister’s great green eyes would flash with secret jokes.

Sleep began to weigh heavily on Helen’s eyelids. Faintly the image of her mother, eyeless, came to her, and faintly, as well, the image of the gold medal for Lucy’s story. For an instant she pictured Stubby off somewhere in a terrible cell.
He deserves to be there
, her sensible self announced.
Yes, but so does somebody else
, a tiny faraway voice answered instantly.
Stubby is only half a story. There’s another part to the crime, and I saw just a split second of it.

Successfully Helen squeezed these thoughts and voices from her mind, because there was no hope of finding the Thurber, Lucy, the house, or the doctor. In place of these thoughts she squarely put Sister Ignatius. Sister would tell Helen all about her silliest students this year. She would say what a thing it would be if they could send their tea tray back to the kitchen on the patients’ old dinner trolley from the days when the Sisters of Mercy Convent had been New Bedford’s first hospital. And she would tell Helen how she’d found all this out by rummaging in the basement through papers and plans from that time.

Nothing in the night stirred, save a church bell in the middle of town. It was followed by another church bell somewhere else, as if it had waited for the first one to finish. Helen thanked God for not letting her get into trouble so far. Gratefully she promised Him and her poor dead mother, whom she imagined to be frantically worried about her up in heaven, that she wouldn’t go an inch further in her spiraling search for the man in the woods. Blissfully she melted into sleep, thinking of nothing more serious than the dinner trolley high up on the walls of the convent. She counted with the tolling bells. One. Two. Three. Four.... Sisters of Mercy Convent. New Bedford’s first hospital. Papers in the basement. Doctor’s papers. From over a hundred years ago. In the basement.

Sister Ignatius sat in one spindle-backed chair, Helen in another. As Helen accounted for all that had happened since her last visit, Sister gazed dreamily through the window and rocked back on the chair’s hind legs, ever so slightly, just the way she told her students not to do. At last, stirring the sugar out of the bottom of her teacup, she said, “I don’t think I am any different from the other adults who love you, Helen. I worry about where this may lead. You may run into somebody very nasty at the end of your search. I’m frightened. I do beg of you to write your splendid story about Lucy Fairchild if you can, but don’t pursue this Thurber typewriter. Be satisfied with the gold medal you will surely get for original historical research—a pretty fish on your hook. Leave the Thurber machine and the thug behind it to the police.”

Helen nodded, not agreeing or disagreeing with this warning, but Sister Ignatius’s eyes were sharp, and her knowledge of Helen was shrewd. “I will help you, of course,” she said. “I would do anything in the world for you, Helen.”

The convent’s basement lay many steps below the first floor. Vast, mildewed chambers bounded by low Gothic arches, the granite green with slime and mold, led in four directions. The room directly at the bottom of the stairway held dishes stacked untidily on wooden shelves. There were countless plates of all sizes, cups and soup tureens of different sets. They all looked as if they’d once belonged to a star-crossed diner. They were chunky, coarse china with colored stripes on the pitted rims. Sister Ignatius paused to tinker with this collection before they went on.

Nearly an hour later they came to the vault they were looking for and the papers from St. Joseph’s Hospital. Helen’s hopes plummeted. The hospital had been built in 1873, eight years after the Civil War had ended. Probably about ten years after Lorenzo had asked that Lucy’s house be condemned. Ten years too late. She shoved the pile of papers she was about to look through disgustedly back in a moldering box.

Sister Ignatius looked up at her over her spectacles. “I know you think we’re ten years too late,” she said, “but I’m not going to give up the ship. Not yet.” And the reflection from her hurricane lamp, placed on an upturned sea chest, glinted like phosphorus on the gold rims of her glasses.

“See!” said Sister Ignatius. “Some of these papers go way, way back. Here’s one from 1832. It’s my guess that the doctors who worked here when the hospital was built left all their previous records in this basement. Here’s a Dr. Pettigrew who treated a Mrs. McCarver for vapors five times in the year 1840. Wilberforce? No Wilberforce.”

Helen waited for Sister Ignatius to finish off the box. The light was too dim to see more than one paper at a time, and she waited at Sister’s elbow, peering over her arm at the crabbed old writing. The papers were nothing like those at the Fairchild mansion. They had putrefied over the years, suppurating filth into the decomposing boxes. Helen hoped against reason that in one of them would be Lorenzo’s second mistake.

It came at the end of the very last box. Sister Ignatius was about to close it because she’d seen nothing of interest in it. What Helen saw, on a decaying sheet of paper, the middle of it literally soaking into the bottom of the box, was the word
Valdosta
. She grabbed the box.

“Wait!” said Sister Ignatius, just as excited. “Don’t touch it. It’s so old one touch will destroy it. Put those other papers over there, and let’s bring it out into the light.”

By the grim, chilly illumination of a moss-covered window they began deciphering the scratchy writing. “Doctors had terrible penmanship in those days too,” remarked Sister Ignatius. They read what they could of the short paragraph, Helen holding one end of the box and Sister the other.

I have concluded an examination of Major Freder Valdosta Light Horse. He remains in good health, b mind and body, excepting his blindness that can healed by the hand of God alone. He suffers this im with courage and grace, thanking God each that the Union shell, which exploded and cruelly robbed him of the gift of sight did not take his life or limbs Though he passed many months recovering his sensiblilty despicable conditions in the swamps of Louisiana, he shows no symptom of swamp fever, dysentery, malaria or cholera. His personal effects and household are comp free from contamination, thus no quarantine is held to be necessary.

Duly sworn before

The Magistrate, Court of Assizes

County of Bristol, City of New Bedford

Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Roger Wilberforce, December 4, 1863

“My God! Oh, Sister”—Helen’s hand flew to her mouth in apology—“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take the name of the Lord in—”

“Go on, Helen. What does this mean to you?”

“It means,” said Helen simply, “that Lucy had the Thurber.”

“How do you know that?”

“Sister, this man was blind! Lucy’s husband was blind! I’d clean forgotten that Uncle Max told us the Thurber was also invented as a braille writer for blind people. The letters it printed were raised so that you could read them with your fingertips. It says right here he spent months in a field hospital in Louisiana. Lucy must have written to him there. The only way he could read was in braille, and that’s why she had the Thurber!”

“I think you are right, Helen. Lucy must have owned the Thurber braille writer. You are getting very close to Lucy now.”

“I still haven’t any idea where she lived. Where the house was. The house Lorenzo had burned to the ground.”

“Your Asa Roche was not making up a story,” said Sister Ignatius. “Lorenzo did indeed trump up a reason for destroying everything. The doctor says right here there was no disease. No reason for quarantine. I wonder why Lorenzo did it? What a pity all the reasons and records and all memory have been burnt to the ground.”

“All except her Thurber machine,” said Helen. “That’s here in New Bedford somewhere.”

Sister cleared her throat. “You will get closer and closer to Lucy,” she said. “I have no doubt you will find her one day, but be careful if you find her and she leads you to the Thurber, because someone else has found it first. Do you understand me? Go and discover Lucy and all the story around her. Write about it and win your medal, but don’t take that last step and go after the writing machine. It’s too dangerous. I implore you not to.”

Sister Ignatius pressed the gangrenous wooden box deep against the front of her habit. Her smooth face broke into a clear smile of triumph, just as the sun broke through the cloud cover outside, transforming the ugly mossy windowpane into a web of translucent spring green.

Suddenly, as if they had been instructed to, Helen and Sister Ignatius both peered at the paper in the bottom of the box. They watched the free sides of it rise and curl of their own accord. Then the paper sagged and disintegrated, the whole of it now only a patch of gray dust.

Sister Ignatius whispered, “We let it into the oxygen and daylight for the first time in nearly a century and a half. It was too much.” She hesitated and whispered again, “But it was alive for one moment, child, and it spoke to us!”

“S
TUPID, STUPID, STUPID. DUMB
, dumb, dumb,” said Mr. Bro, cracking open his fiftieth pistachio nut and sweeping a pile of shells into his wastebasket.

Helen had already read Mrs. Fairchild’s letter. Pinky was in the process of reading it. In clear and animated handwriting Elizabeth Fairchild had written the principal of the school asserting that Helen and Pinky had been loud and abusive to the custodian of the Fairchild mansion, and Pinky had damaged property there.

“I just dropped an old whale tooth,” Pinky complained.

“What did you call the custodian?” asked Mr. Bro.

“A ... a fish-faced old barnacle. I could have said worse,” said Pinky.

Somewhere behind Mr. Bro’s stern face Helen saw the twitch of a smile. “The custodian lied to me,” Helen said. “I told him I’d write up the story of Lucy.”

“And blow it sky-high, right?” asked Mr. Bro.

Helen nodded unhappily.

“Well, you guys are up a creek without a paddle. I can’t believe you’d be so boneheaded,” Mr. Bro said, opening another nut and pushing a few across the desk for them. “You were almost there. Almost there, and now you’ve blown it. Blown it! You know about Lucy, you know she had the Thurber. You could have gone to Mrs. Fairchild and gotten the rest of the story from her. Believe me, she knows it. Now she’ll never talk to you. And I doubt you’ll find the house or the Thurber.”

A wasp banged itself again and again into one of the back windows of Mr. Bro’s classroom. Helen wondered why it didn’t have a concussion. It had been banging for ten minutes. Mr. Bro’s shoulders relaxed. “I don’t blame you,” he said after peering at Pinky and Helen for a curious minute. “I suppose if I were your age, I’d have called him a fish-faced old barnacle too. Let’s think.”

Helen allowed herself to hope.

Mr. Bro went on. “This ... this Ladies’ Aide Society. I think Lucy, with a southern husband, probably was in on that with her sisters.”

“Sending all that junk down South,” said Pinky.

Mr. Bro assembled a new pile of nutshells on his blotter. “Junk!” he said. “Do you have the slightest idea what conditions were like then? During the Civil War doctors used to have races to see who could cut off a leg fastest! They had no anesthetics, nothing but morphine. That and opium were the only pain-killers in the world. You could buy them at any general store in America. But
try
having a leg cut off with just morphine! They had to strap the soldiers onto the operating tables with saddle girths to stop them from flying through the top of the tent. They had to stuff their mouths with shirt sleeves to keep down the screaming. Do you know that dentists back then, even with morphine and liquor in their patients, strapped them into chairs and pulled teeth with the head of a
key
? So don’t call it junk. It was needed. Now. Get back to the point. The only thing you can do is to go back to Elizabeth Fairchild and apologize. And then see if you can make her talk to you.”

“Could you,” Helen stammered, “could you call her ahead and sort of calm her down first?”

“It’s not
my
apology,” said Mr. Bro. “It’s yours!” Mr. Bro collected himself and added, “But I’ll tell you just how to approach her.”

The moment Elizabeth Fairchild answered the door and stood over them on the top step like an eagle examining a couple of mice, Helen forgot everything Mr. Bro had told them to say.