The Man in the Woods (18 page)

“I suppose you’ve come to apologize,” she said.

“Yes,” said Helen and Pinky together.

“Good!” said Mrs. Fairchild and slammed the door.

“Hatchet-faced crock of lard!” muttered Pinky to the closed door.

But Helen got down on her hands and knees on the steps and, pushing open the mail slot, yelled, “Please, Mrs. Fairchild. We are truly sorry. Please help us.” She fumbled in her pocketbook and took out her locket. She dropped it through the slot in the door. “Please look at this. Somebody sent it to me. Inside is my mother’s picture. The eyes have been poked out with a needle. Someone wants to do that to me! To my eyes. I need your help!”

A minute went by. The bird-of-prey eyes peered down through the fanlight at the top of the door. “Go to the police, then, why don’t you?” was Mrs. Fairchild’s answer.

“They won’t believe us, Mrs. Fairchild. Please just hear me out!”

Very slowly the door opened. Elizabeth Fairchild gave the locket back to Helen. But it was open. She had looked at it. “You may explain,” she said, “If you take under a minute and do your explaining on the doorstep.”

Helen’s explanation took many minutes. During it she kept her eyes locked on Elizabeth Fairchild’s. Little by little, as she told about the whistler and Uncle Max and the search for Lucy’s Thurber, the patronizing steeliness melted. The stiff-necked posture relaxed.

“You should have told me all this the first time you came,” said Elizabeth Fairchild.

“I tried,” said Helen.

They waited in the sitting room while Mrs. Fairchild fetched tea. Once again she refused any help with the heavy silver tea service and did not talk until she had stirred lemon and sugar into her own cup and made sure they did the same.

Then she began awkwardly, tracing the pattern of a running deer in the Persian rug idly with her shoe. “I’m a Roche, of course,” she said. “Only a Fairchild by marriage. I would never have heard the story of Lucy if it hadn’t been for Asa.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Asa was always a blabbermouth,” she added. “How
he
found out I don’t know, but my husband, John Fairchild, the Lord rest his soul, made me swear with my hand on the family Bible that I would never tell it.” Mrs. Fairchild stopped for a moment, as if to recall that moment of swearing. “But now that you’ve told me about this ... this criminal who’s threatened to ... to poke out your eyes or worse, I suppose I must break my word.” She picked a tea leaf off the tip of her tongue and placed it delicately on her napkin. Pinky stared at his cup of tea. He hated tea. “That’s Earl Grey tea,” said Mrs. Fairchild. “Don’t waste it!” Pinky swallowed about half a spoonful. Satisfied, Mrs. Fairchild continued. “I cannot in good conscience let old Lorenzo reach out of his grave with his bloodstained hands and cause any more trouble than he did during his lifetime.”

“What did he do to Lucy?” asked Helen.

“Dynamited her house. Or so they say. It may be a rumor, but there was a great explosion that night. Lorenzo removed most of the valuables”—here Mrs. Fairchild chuckled—“including the gold buttons off her husband’s uniform, one of which I see Asa gave you.”

Helen nodded and felt the little button instinctively.

“Yes, well. Even the uniform buttons. How
terribly
cheap! At any rate, I have no idea whether Lucy died in the fire. I know her husband did. They found his body—he was blind, you see. Blinded in the war. I suspect Lucy was not in the house or else Lorenzo would never have been able to remove the valuables that afternoon. Perhaps he never intended to kill the husband—but he did. He was a murderer, Lorenzo. All I know about Lucy is that she worked shoulder to shoulder with her sisters in Bedford Ladies’ Aide Society. Whatever happened to her is lost.”

“Where was the house?” asked Helen.

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Fairchild. “No one knows that. Lorenzo was mayor of New Bedford at that time. He not only destroyed every record of Lucy’s existence but had all the town maps changed so the location of her house would be erased forever. Lorenzo was a very methodical man.”

Helen had finished her tea. Her cup was empty. The Persian rug was deep and soft, and the cup did not break when she dropped it.

“Dear child!” said Mrs. Fairchild and was at Helen’s side in an instant, her hand tentatively patting Helen’s back, as if Helen were a puppy who’d choked on a bone. “My dear, don’t cry. Crying helps nothing. I wish I could help you. I would do anything to help you, but I simply do not know where her house was.”

“Thanks anyway,” said Pinky. He picked up Helen’s cup and saucer.

Helen steadied herself just to be polite. She took the teacup from where Pinky had put it on an antique cherrywood drum table and set it back on the silver tray, where it wouldn’t make a wet ring.

Mrs. Fairchild had settled herself in an armchair, as if nothing had happened. “I wish more than anything in the world I could help you,” she repeated, “because I have something to ask of you.”

Here it comes
, thought Helen. She said nothing.

“If you write up this story,” said Mrs. Fairchild, “and I can’t stop you after all, our family will be remembered for evil and not for all the good we have done in this town. It will appear first in your school paper, and then, as you said in the mansion, it will be picked up in the Sunday supplement of the
Post-Dispatch
. Helen, is it?”

Helen nodded.

“Helen, you have a long life ahead of you. I have only a few years and Asa little time at all. Reporters will badger us, because the family is an important one. People will not leave us alone. I have a heart condition. I don’t think I could bear the questions and the scandal this would cause. Please keep this story away from anyone else until Asa and I both pass on.”

At the door Mrs. Fairchild pressed the little tintype of Lucy and Lorenzo into Helen’s hands. She touched Pinky’s sleeve and looked at them both brightly, trustingly, more like a wren than an eagle. “There’s a dear,” she said to Helen, holding both Helen’s hands over the portrait with her own and with great warmth.

That evening Pinky was invited to dinner for the very first time. Aunt Stella watched him the way a cat watches a canary. Pinky contentedly downed two platefuls of homemade lasagna and asked for more. He even ate the edges, which were so hardened by their trip into the oven that Helen decided he must have teeth like razors.

Cheerfully and with care Pinky filled Helen’s father and Aunt Stella in on all the details of their visit to Elizabeth Fairchild, except of course for any mention of the Thurber or why they wanted to find Lucy’s lost house. When he came to Mrs. Fairchild’s begging them not to write the story at least until she was dead, Helen’s father snorted loudly, almost gleefully.

Aunt Stella let her knife fall on her plate with a clank. “Helen will of course be good and charitable,” said Aunt Stella, looking warily in Helen’s direction. “She has never had a mean bone in her body and I’m certain will not break this poor woman’s heart in order to win herself a gold medal. She is not a Judas who would betray her nature for thirty gold medals.”

Helen said nothing. The lasagna stuck to the roof of her mouth.

Her father looked at her just as warily. “You
are
going to write this splendid story, aren’t you?” he asked.

Everyone waited for Helen to speak. At last she washed down the lasagna and said, “I don’t know, Dad.”

“You don’t know!”

“Dad, it was a big thing for Mrs. Fairchild to break the promise she made to her husband. She has a heart condition. I don’t want her to have a stroke or a seizure because of me.”

“Stroke!” he trumpeted. “She’s faking. She’s only broken her promise because you two came up with some evidence. The old bat’s probably terrified she’ll die and not get into heaven if the Fairchild family name is ruined. That’s why she asked you to wait until she dies. She figures she’ll squeak past Saint Peter, and then it’ll be all right. You don’t get banished from heaven once you’re in. That’s what she’s betting on.”

“Duncan Curragh,” said Aunt Stella sharply. “Heaven is not like your Boston Red Sox, where you look over your shoulder to make sure they don’t send you down to the minor leagues. Heaven is a state of grace, as you well know!”

“Not to the bloody Anglicans, it isn’t,” he snapped. “Their idea of heaven is a bloody yacht club with no Catholics or Jews or Hindus allowed. They may let the good Lord run the place, but you can believe me they make Lorenzo Fairchild and his sort chairman of the board.”

“The child is being wise and charitable, Duncan,” said Aunt Stella. “Button your lip.” Then Aunt Stella asked if Pinky would be so kind as to bring some of his mother’s Norwegian recipes with him when he came over to pick Helen up for the Wareham game the next day.

Helen’s father glared at her. “Doofus,” he said. “You’re being a bloody doofus if you don’t write that story, that’s all.”

Pinky volunteered to do the dishes with his sweetest smile. Aunt Stella agreed to let him take Helen to the movies. “A movie will cheer you up,” he whispered to her over the lasagna dish, even though he knew it wouldn’t.

Aunt Stella fussed over them at the door and said it looked like rain and didn’t they want to take an umbrella. Helen put the umbrella back in its stand, and she and Pinky ran down the slate walk to catch the approaching bus, but Aunt Stella’s voice trilled after them.

“Yes, Aunt Stella?” said Helen wearily. They would now miss the bus. They had been warned about everything from purse snatchers to drunken drivers running red lights. “Something in the mail for you today!” Aunt Stella waved a manila envelope under the porch light. “From Georgia!” she added, as if to say Afghanistan.

A late summer moth flapped wildly against the yellow light on the porch. The photocopy in the envelope was too illegible to make out in the dimness.

Helen took it inside. She stared at it without speaking. She felt as if she had lifted up a giant rock and was about to peer under it.

Impatiently Helen’s father took the copy from her hands and, holding it under the dining room chandelier, began to read.

“It says here,” he said, “‘Dear Miss Curragh: At Mr. Brzostoski’s request we are writing to you about Lucy Fairchild de Vivier. Sorry it took us so long to find her. Her married name, de Vivier, is how we all remember her down here.’” Her father paused and then went on to the newspaper article reproduced in clotted black print on the photostat. “From the Valdosta
Clarion
, April 5, 1911:

Mrs. Lucy de Vivier, one of Valdosta’s most beloved citizens, passed away in her sleep last night, at her home on Lee Street. Mrs. de Vivier shunned the limelight all her life but was called “the Angel of Shenandoah” by General Stonewall Jackson for the part she played in his great victory there.

Fearing discovery and hanging for treason to the Union cause, Lucy de Vivier shipped over twenty thousand rounds of ammunition and seven thousand Enfield rifles to our brave boys in grey. Working out of a hidden basement at the end of a private railway line in New Bedford, Massachusetts, “Miss Lucy,” as affectionate Valdostans called her, sent arms secretly to our troops for over two years. Believed to have been cast out by her Yankee robber baron father, whose name was Fairchild, she never revealed her past to her many friends in town. She was the wife of Frederic de Vivier, major, Valdosta Third Light Horse, who distinguished himself and his regiment at the Battle of Shiloh. Miss Lucy chose to spend the rest of her life here, in her departed husband’s home town.

May Miss Lucy rest in peace forever in the proud and grateful hearts of all Valdostans, this brave and unsung heroine of the War for Southern Independence.

There was a silence following the reading, broken only by the violent rattling of Pinky’s imagination, which Helen alone could hear.

“You can write your story now,” said Helen’s father. “Your Elizabeth Fairchild has nothing to fear, Sweet Pea. Leave out the part about the husband dying in the fire if you wish. Lorenzo may not have intended that. But he saved his daughter’s life, didn’t he? She was a traitor to everything he believed in, she stole Union Army weapons, and she would have been hung or shot for it, so he wiped out every trace of her and let her go in peace to the South.”

“He did?” Helen said, then added in a murmur, “A house, with a basement, at the end of a railroad line that no longer exists.”

“Where has your lovely brain gone to?” asked her father, impatiently slapping his thigh. “Lucy was running guns to the enemy, smack in the middle of New Bedford, one of the biggest Union strongholds in the war. If she’d been found out to be a spy—worse than a spy, a collaborator—she’d have been put in front of a firing squad for high treason! And every widow and mother and sister and lover in the state of Massachusetts who’d lost a young man in the South would have gladly pulled the trigger on her.

“Lorenzo gave her safe passage down to Georgia. Then he wiped out every shred of her memory so she could live the rest of her life as Lucy
de Vivier
, not Lucy Fairchild. He made sure no one knew what she’d done so she wouldn’t have to live out her days in fear someone would sneak up behind her and shoot her.”

“I understand, Dad,” said Helen, but she was repeating his last words to herself,
Sneak up behind her. Sneak up behind her.

Aunt Stella stood in the doorway and waved good-bye under the same tireless flapping moth. As she did, she sighed and said, “Who would have thought they took the Civil War quite so much to heart down South?”

Squares of light from the streetlamps flickered onto Pinky’s face, a mask of urgency.

“They’ve been microfilming the files every night for a week in the Preservation Society. They started when I was looking for the doctor’s papers. Let’s hope they’re still open,” Pinky said.

“If Oliver Jenkins isn’t there,” Helen asked, “do you know where to find the railroad maps?”

Pinky nodded. “I think so. In one of the big flat wooden drawers on the back wall. The railroad spur!” he went on and pounded his fist like a ballplayer into his other hand. “If only I’d remembered. I remembered the indoor plumbing, the gas lamps, the oil refining, even the long pants Asa told us about. But I forgot the railroad spur. I guess maybe because I didn’t believe there really was a Lucy’s house till now.” Helen gazed at the photostat of the Georgia newspaper. There was a picture of Lucy on it; the face was half eclipsed by bad printing, but the same mesmerizing black eyes that had glowered at her from Lorenzo’s official portrait stared back from this very elderly Lucy. The same determined mouth, only on a woman’s face. Helen felt a small rush of air, soft as a sigh. Through the screen that divides the dead from the living Lucy slipped without warning. For a tick of a second her eyes held Helen’s, lively as a heartbeat, and seemed to signal her desperately. But was it to keep going or to keep back?