Fallam's Secret

by Denise Giardina

  Then they heard a fireman remark as he carried away a sodden bundle of books, “The fire wasn’t as hot at the back. It must have started up front somewhere.”

  He began to toss the books onto a pile of rubble, but Carlo roused himself suddenly and said, “Let me see those.”

  There were two thick volumes, browned around all four edges, missing their binding and stinking of smoke. And yet, as Carlo and Uncle John turned the brittle pages, an area of print at the center of each page could clearly be read. Out out brief candle I come not to bury Caesar there are more things in heaven and earth Horatio… Louis’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

  Carlo looked at Uncle John and said, “The children. They aren’t here. Something else has happened to them.”

  “Carlo.” Uncle John put his hand on his brother-in-law’s shoulder. “In a fire like that—”

  Carlo shook off the hand. “They would find bodies. You know I’m right, you and I saw bodies incinerated by firefights in Sicilian cellars and still something was left. Here they found my Margaret. They found these books. My son’s books.” He wheeled and ran, flailing his arms like a madman, grabbing this fireman, that policeman, crying, “My children! My children! They aren’t dead! You must find them!”

  No one found them, though they raked the coals for days looking for anything, a fragment of a limb, a skull, a finger. Nothing.

  They found other things. Scraps of furniture. Bits of dishes. A metal canister that might have held gasoline. The fire chief told the local newspaper he refused to speculate on the cause of the blaze.

  They found the phone line outside the house cut through.

  The police came and went at Roundbottom Farm. They thought it unlikely the Falcone children would have escaped the fire at Montefalco, because where would they be? Why would they have run off?

  They regarded Carlo with suspicion and without telling him searched the area for newly dug graves, but found nothing. And then there was the matter of the cut phone line, and the fact that Carlo had carried baby Lydde from the house. If Carlo Falcone was a man intent on doing away with his family, why had he done that? At last they concluded there was no evidence against him, and charges were never brought.

  Still Carlo haunted the local state police barracks. Someone has my children, he insisted.

  Who? the police asked, bewildered. And why would anyone do that?

  Uncle John was present the first time the police asked that question. Carlo had looked like he’d seen a ghost, Uncle John told Lydde. He hadn’t answered, except to sit back in his chair and whisper, My God.

  “Did he think someone kidnapped them?” Lydde asked.

  Uncle John nodded. “That’s why he left, to look for them.”

  Lydde was never quite convinced when Uncle John said this. She thought her father left to get away from her, because she had kept him from returning to the fire, because she had survived.

  “Do you think they were kidnapped?”

  “I don’t know,” Uncle John said. “Maybe it had something to do with what happened in Sicily when he was in the Army. But sometimes I think something else happened too.”

  They had this conversation when Lydde was ten, when Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia thought she was old enough to know. Uncle John didn’t say what else he thought might have happened. Carlo would never talk about what happened in Sicily that might have to do with the disappearances. The police decided the Falcone children had stopped at the Christmas tree to rescue presents and been incinerated when the roof fell on them, but Uncle John, the scientist, scoffed at that. “We found the spine of the Christmas tree. And even a crematorium leaves something behind.” He’d shake his head.

  Lydde grew frustrated at the lack of answers. At first she was afraid to visit the ruins. But at ten—for Lydde the age when she dared her fears—she went to look for herself, scraping through the ruins with a long sturdy stick she kept for the purpose, hoping to find a clue someone had overlooked. One October day she trudged up Shades o’ Death Creek, stick in hand. She was conducting her search meticulously, a few inches at a time. Uncle John had described the layout of the house and she had memorized the location of each room. It was an exercise in spatial imagination, invisible rooms existing in height width depth and time past.

  That day Lydde was digging in a corner that on one level had been the living room and on another her brothers’ bedroom. Now all was collapsed in a thin layer of ash, which she patiently loosened. Never mind that the ruins had been sifted and sifted and sifted yet again. They had missed something, Lydde was sure of it. And she was right.

  What she found was a corner of silvery metal, which gradually emerged, after much scraping, as a cigarette lighter. She wiped it carefully with the sleeve of her sweatshirt and carried it home in the pocket of her jeans. Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia, seated at their kitchen table, turned it over and over, passed it back and forth.

  “Is it my dad’s?” Lydde asked.

  “No,” Uncle John said. “He never uses a lighter, only matches. I don’t know—”

  “Maybe it was Louis’s,” Aunt Lavinia said.

  They both looked at her in surprise.

  “He was sneaking smokes,” she explained. “I caught him once when he was doing some work for me in the garden, and he begged me not to tell. I don’t think Carl would have minded in those days, but you know how Margaret was. She told Louis eighteen was old enough to start smelling like tobacco.”

  Lydde didn’t know how Margaret was, but she didn’t point this out. They sat and passed the lighter back and forth like a talisman.

  “Do you think that’s how the fire started?”

  “A fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t start fires,” Uncle John said. “Not Louis. He was a good, smart kid.”

  “Maybe one of the little ones got ahold of it,” Aunt Lavinia said.

  But Uncle John shook his head again and Lydde thought he was right. She fiddled with the lighter and couldn’t even get it going herself.

  “It won’t be working now,” Aunt Lavinia said.

  But Uncle John took it from Lydde and flicked it. A pearl of flame perched atop the silver rectangle. Fire from fire.

  CARLO Falcone came and went. Came again and left again. He would stop by Roundbottom Farm twice a year like clockwork, once in July and once right after Christmas. Never on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. Never.

  Lydde didn’t ask where he was living, just sneaked a glimpse at his license plate. Each time it was different, Florida, New Jersey, Louisiana. The last time was Nevada.

  Carlo was a tall, lean man, stooped as if he were older, with graying black hair, a long, crooked nose, and, for the last few years, eyeglasses. He would have cut a romantic figure, Lydde supposed, when he was twenty-two and Margaret Cabell fell in love with him.

  He would say very little when he arrived, only hug Lydde. His hugs were not enveloping, just an arm around her shoulder, pulling her to lean against him for a brief moment. Nothing else, not even a touching of cheeks. As she got older, she resisted him and turned away from the pained look on his face. He would watch her with his eyes, everywhere she went. She avoided him as much as possible. She feared him, as he did her. Neither wanted to know what the other might regret, or what blame the other assigned. Carlo would not touch Lydde again until he was ready to leave. Then he would put his hand awkwardly on her shoulder. “Poppa loves you, bambina,” he would say. “You are all I have left.”

  Not nearly enough, Lydde would think. For either of us. And Carlo would disappear just as surely as the past.

  LYDDE poked through the charred foundation of Montefalco until she was sixteen and word came of Carlo’s death in Nevada. He’d been on the highway driving toward California. Probably spent a night on the town in Vegas. Probably fell asleep. Ended in a ditch alongside the road, where his car caught fire and burned, sometime in the early morning hours. A trucker had seen the flames and found him.

  Enough, Lydde thought. Now I can forget it all. I wi
ll be a different person. I will go away to school somewhere that is not the New River Gorge. I will be something no one expects. She even thought she might change her name, though she never did.

  Lydde Falcone. The last.

  Chapter 2

  The Mystery Hole

  UNCLE JOHN WAS six feet tall. At little Gauley Bridge High School that had been enough to play center on the basketball team, despite a dollop of clumsiness. He carried a slight stoop through his adult life. By the time Lydde was a teenager, Uncle John had a shock of brown hair that didn’t thin in front even after it turned gray, but a bald circle gradually appeared on the crown of his head, like a tonsure. All this made him look like what he was, a physics professor, and what he was not, a medieval monk.

  Roundbottom Farm was a mile down Fallam Mountain from Montefalco, isolated at the end of a dirt track that snaked into the Gorge from the highway. Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia had been at Roundbottom Farm less than a year when the house at Montefalco burned. They had met when John took a literature class at West Virginia Tech while completing the undergraduate work interrupted by the war. Lavinia was a new instructor and uncertain in her first job. She assigned twice as much reading as she should have. But the class of veterans tolerated this, for after their ordeal they could not even think to complain about bookwork. Lavinia was a petite woman from a wealthy Charleston family, who wore wool skirts, cashmere sweaters, and a string of pearls in the classroom. She soon had her students standing beside their desks and reading Andrew Marvell aloud. Former Lieutenant John Cabell addressed the poems to her, and they fell in love.

  When Lydde came into their lives, Uncle John was absent part of each week, at Ohio University finishing his dissertation in quantum physics while continuing to teach part-time at West Virginia Tech. The unexpected presence of an active two-year-old on top of his stunned grief for his sister Margaret caused him a number of sleepless nights.

  “The timing is tough,” he told Aunt Lavinia as they lay side by side in bed, staring at the ceiling.

  “No,” Aunt Lavinia said. “It’s perfect.”

  “How could that be? It’s so hard on you. You’re here by yourself half the week, and even when I’m home, I’m holed up in my study.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “I’ve been to Dr. Brook. I’ve got fibroid tumors. He says I should have a hysterectomy.”

  When Uncle John was silent, she added, “I can’t give you a child, John.”

  He sensed she was crying and wiped her cheek with a thumb, then pulled her close. His own tears left damp spots in her hair. They listened as Lydde, asleep in a crib across the room, babbled in her sleep.

  “She could be ours,” Aunt Lavinia said.

  “Don’t get too attached,” Uncle John warned. “Carlo will want her back after he’s come to terms with all this.”

  “No, he won’t,” Aunt Lavinia said. “Whatever it takes to raise a child has been killed in him.”

  She was right.

  THEY were different—Uncle John the dreamer, Aunt Lavinia the practical one—but both were independent and they gave each other plenty of room. After finishing his dissertation, Uncle John had time to nurture an obsession for ancient mathematicians he developed during the war, when he had been stationed in Britain, then North Africa, then Sicily. He read all he could about the Druids, the ancient Egyptians and Arabs, and the Mayans. Incredible mathematicians and astronomers, he told Aunt Lavinia. He had a notion that those ancient cultures might have spread farther than anyone suspected, that North American Indians had been in touch with them. An old man in Lafayette who claimed to be part Indian said his grandfather told stories of monks who crossed the ocean in reed boats and settled in the New River Gorge, that they scratched runes on the walls of caves. Uncle John decided to search the caves on Fallam Mountain for any markings that might remain.

  “What if you find them?” Aunt Lavinia said, looking up briefly from the storybook she was reading to Lydde. “You won’t be able to read them.” Aunt Lavinia was not much interested in what she considered outlandish ideas, and only liked outdoor activities that produced tangible results, like gardening.

  Uncle John shook his head and smiled as he pulled on his field jacket. “Then I’ll get some good exercise out of it,” he said. He headed up the dirt road, then turned into the woods, making for a rock outcropping shaped like a giant clamshell that hung just below the highway.

  When he returned, he was so silent and shaken that Aunt Lavinia was alarmed. “What did you find?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said at first. When she persisted, he admitted that was not quite true. “I found a skeleton,” he said.

  “Good Lord!” Aunt Lavinia exclaimed. “You should call the police.”

  “No,” Uncle John said. “It’s an old skeleton, been there a long time. Probably an Indian. I don’t think it would be right to disturb it or cart it off to some museum. It seems at rest.”

  For a while Aunt Lavinia insisted, but finally Uncle John said, “No. I don’t want anyone going up there and messing around. I’ll go back and say a prayer over it, if that will make you feel better. Otherwise that cave should be left alone.”

  He played with Lydde while Aunt Lavinia cooked supper, crossing the living room on all fours while the child clung to his back. When he tired, he pretended to buck so that she slid gently to the floor, then he caught her up in his arms.

  “You know, Lydde,” he whispered, his face close to hers, “I just may have an idea what happened to your brothers and sisters.”

  Lydde squealed with delight and pinched his nose.

  THE New River is ancient, the oldest in the world, Uncle John was fond of claiming.

  “It’s silly to call it the New,” Lydde said once with a child’s logic.

  Uncle John only shrugged. “That’s not its real name,” he said.

  After that Lydde just called it the River.

  The River runs north. It is littered with boulders the size of houses and cuts its way through worn humps of mountains so ancient themselves that the River is indeed new to them. On some stretches there are rapids and every summer flotillas of bright yellow rafts filled with tourists ride the watery roller coaster. But that came later. When Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia moved to Roundbottom Farm, the River was empty save for the occasional fisherman.

  Deep in a West Virginia hollow, you cannot see much of the mountain that shelters you. There were two ways to see Fallam Mountain properly. Lydde could ride in Uncle John’s car across the River on a low highway bridge and up the flank of the mountain on the other side, Gauley Mountain. Partway up a winding road stood a rock outcrop Uncle John called the Overlook. It wasn’t far from Roundbottom Farm but too dangerous to walk along the narrow shoulder of the switchback pavement.

  The other view, from Fallam Point, was Lydde’s favorite, even though they had to walk across Montefalco cove to reach it. Lydde liked that the only way to reach the Point was a path through the woods past stands of dark green rhododendron thick and tall as church walls. Sitting on the rock at the Point’s end was like flying through the air on the back of a stone bird. This was where Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia took her when they were in the mood for a long walk, and told her stories about her family, and about the New River Gorge. Standing on the narrow nub of Fallam Point was, Uncle John said, like being an ant and perching on a person’s outstretched fingertip to gaze at his or her head. Or heads, in this case. From the Point, Fallam appeared to be several mountains. But all was serpentine Fallam, with its folds and coves and cliffs. Beyond Fallam came Black and Droop and Sewell and on, a tangle of peaks seeming to stretch into infinity.

  On the wall in Uncle John’s study was a print of two men in rough garb standing in a formal pose on a rock outcrop, the mountains falling in waves behind them. Below them was the River. These were the explorers Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam, the first Englishmen to see the New River and its mountains, in 1671. Lydde learned about Batts and Fallam in school. Robert Fallam kept a j
ournal and in it he wrote, It was a pleasing tho’ dreadful sight to see the mountains and Hills as if piled one upon another.

  From the house at Roundbottom Lydde could only see the wall of Fallam Mountain close on three sides, not the mountain whole. But her bedroom was on the back corner of the second floor, the southeast corner, wedged into those three sides of Fallam like a puzzle piece about to be locked in place.

  ROUNDBOTTOM Farm sat at the bottom of a chute where Shades o’ Death Creek bumped and dumped its way down Fallam Mountain, creating stairsteps of little waterfalls as it went. The property included some bottomland along the River where corn once grew, and there were gnarled fruit trees on a shelf of land around the mountain’s curve. But such a fine house had not been supported by meager farmland. It was a miller’s place. The old mill had burned down long before, but the house had stood since 1840. It was wood and solid, three stories high and odd because its porch did not wrap around the house but instead hid in a recess on the ground floor, walled in on three sides. Double doors were built into each wall and in the summer Aunt Lavinia threw them open to the breeze.

  The house had other odd features. The built-in bookcase in the living room pulled away from the wall on a hinged door. Each bedroom had a large walk-in closet, which Aunt Lavinia said was unusual for houses of the time period.

  “Why?” the ever-curious Lydde asked.

  “They didn’t have that many clothes to keep,” Aunt Lavinia replied.

  “Then what did they put in the closets?”

  “People,” Aunt Lavinia said.

  Roundbottom Farm had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, Aunt Lavinia explained. “That’s why your Uncle John’s study has a little door in the wall. It’s a secret hiding place. You could put a bed or desk in front of it and no one would know it was there.”