The Lace Reader

by Brunonia Barry

  A nervous shiver ran through the crowd. No one spoke.

  “Come on. You don’t need me to recite the Lord’s Prayer for you. You know the Lord’s Prayer.”

  “I do. I was just wondering if you did,” Charlie said.

  “This is ridiculous,” Angela said.

  “She doesn’t know it,” one of the women said.

  “She doesn’t know the Lord’s Prayer.”

  “Of course I know it.”

  “Please recite it.”

  “No, I won’t recite it, this is ridiculous. And Reverend Cal isn’t going to like it when I tell him how you’re treating me.”

  “I prayed on it, and the Lord answered….” He leveled his eyes at Angela. “Reverend Cal would never set foot in Las Vegas,” he said.

  “Well, he’s going there with me. Tonight.”

  “I don’t think so,” Charlie said, stepping in front of her.

  “Your baby does not belong to Reverend Cal,” one of the women said.

  “Your baby belongs to the devil,” Charlie said.

  Angela laughed at that. “Right,” she said. “The devil.”

  Some part of her still thought they were kidding.

  “She has the mark,” one of the women said. Another of them fainted.

  This couldn’t be happening. Angela’s eyes darted, searching for an escape route.

  Charlie grabbed her quickly, slamming her face into the side of the trailer. Angela reeled, saw the blood.

  “Name yourself, demon!” Charlie roared.

  One of the women picked up a rock and heaved it.

  Angela dropped the backpack and took off down the other side of Waikiki Beach toward the rocks and town.

  “Get the witch!” one of the bodyguards shouted.

  “Get her!” Charlie ordered.

  Roberta saw everything from the booth. She got on the phone quickly, calling Rafferty first, then, when she couldn’t get him, she called 911.

  Chapter 32

  THE FOG CLEARS AS I enter the harbor. The milagros disappear, and the water goes deep blue. The air is warmer here. I can see Derby Street.

  Just get to the house.

  I see two police cars in the parking lot at Winter Island as I pass.

  Instead of slowing, I speed up. It’s getting late. I have to make that plane.

  As I pull into the channel toward the boathouse, I notice the Calvinists out at the end of Derby Wharf, halfway into the harbor by the tiny lighthouse. They scramble over the rocks that surround the wharf, looking for something.

  Two of them sit in front of the boathouse.

  I should put the Whaler away, but I don’t want to go near them. And I can’t wait for them to move. Instead I tie up and leave the Whaler at the dock. When I get to the airport, I’ll call May and tell her to have someone pick it up.

  I feel sick. Bad idea, probably, taking the pill on an empty stomach. Or at all. But I am here. I am safe.

  As I walk up the street toward the house, I see more Calvinists. Searching in doorways, behind the Custom House.

  I cross the street, trying not to look at them, keeping my eyes leveled. All I have to do is get my bags and call the cab. I’ll relax when I get to the airport.

  My hands shake as I unlock the door. I lock it again behind me, go to the kitchen for a piece of bread, put my head over the sink and gulp from the faucet.

  Behind me glass shatters.

  I stiffen, waiting for another sound. I hear the thump of a body as it hits the floor.

  Someone is in the house.

  Cal.

  I start for the door.

  “Help me!” a voice cries.

  This is a female voice. One I have never heard in life before, one I recognize only from my dreams.

  I reel around to see Angela Rickey. She stands there shaking and terrified. The bruise I mistook for a birthmark has faded now to just a shadow across her right cheek, and new bruises have formed, one across an eyebrow and another, bloodier one where one of her eyeteeth has been pushed through her upper lip.

  “They’re trying to kill my baby.” She’s crying now, trembling, trying to make me understand.

  “Cal?”

  “No.” She shakes her head urgently. “The others.”

  I look in the direction she’s pointing, toward the park, and I can see the Calvinists lined up on the sidewalk. They watch the house, waiting. They look like Hitchcock’s birds gathering on the jungle gym at Bodega Bay.

  “They think I bewitched Cal. They think our baby is the devil!”

  “This is Cal’s baby?” I say weakly. I realize I should have known. It was the one detail everyone was keeping from me.

  A hand over a mouth. Smothering. Don’t move, don’t make a sound.

  I throw up. Right on the floor in the middle of the pantry. I see the cracked blue shell of the Stelazine still undissolved.

  They’re crossing the street now. There are more of them than before. A torch is lit, then more lit from the first.

  There is noise. And chanting. “Get the witch!”

  Angela starts to cry.

  I grab the phone, dial 911.

  “Oh, God.” Angela freezes in place. She’s staring out the window, still as death.

  The 911 operator picks up. “What’s the nature of the problem?”

  “I have Angela Rickey here. She’s pregnant and she’s been beaten.”

  “Stay on the phone,” the 911 operator orders. “I have your location.”

  I can hear her in the background giving directions to the cruisers.

  “They’re on their way,” I say to Angela.

  She is sobbing.

  “She’s hurt pretty bad,” I say.

  Angela sobs harder. “My baby,” she sobs.

  I see them crossing the street, torches blazing. Traffic stops for them, creating a jam of onlookers. I see the looks of amusement from the tourists. They think they’re watching one of the pageants they’ve seen over and over again in this city.

  “Get the witch!” they chant.

  The tourists think it’s Bridget Bishop, or one of the other reenactments. They are trying to do their part tonight as well, trying to engage the hysteria, to show they’re comfortable with it. Getting their children involved, too. “Get the witch! Get the witch!” they cry.

  A woman stops her car, gets out to watch with her children, sitting them on the hood so they get a good vantage point as the Calvinists push by them across the street and into the yard.

  “They’re coming.” Angela’s voice climbs an octave. She’s moving all over the room now, unable to stand still anymore.

  She goes to the window and yells for help. The crowd applauds.

  The torches bob endlessly, nightmarishly forward.

  “Please,” I say to the 911 operator. “They’re coming!”

  “The cruisers are on the way,” she says.

  “Oh, God, oh, God!” Angela moans.

  “Make sure your doors and windows are locked,” the operator says. She’s well trained, trying not to sound alarmed.

  Sound of footsteps on wood, as the first Calvinist ascends the front steps.

  “They’re on the porch!” I yell toward the phone as I scramble to make sure everything is locked. Using all my strength, I push the hutch in front of the window Angela broke.

  “Get the witch!” It’s louder now. I am reading them. It’s inside my head.

  This can’t be happening. This must be a dream. Or a hallucination. I have to fight to stay here. Part of me is already going away, distancing myself from the inevitable. I am going under.

  For a minute I can stand back from it and just watch it happen. This is not real. It is too much out of time to be real. It is not real, and at the same time it is very real. Hyper-real. Every detail stands out and lingers as if in slow motion.

  Kill her! Kill her!

  In this place the scene has become simple and universal. What we are seeing is history repeating itself, one scene superimposed
over the other. We are both here and back in old Salem at the same time, with the real Calvinists, the first ones. There is a feeling of impending doom here, and when I look at Angela, for just a moment, I see her in the drab brown Puritan dress, her hair tied back and covered. And we are back in history in the days when they came to get you because you were a woman alone in the world, or because you were different, because your hair was red, or because you had no children of your own and no husband to protect you. Or maybe even because you owned property that one of them wanted.

  Every part of me fights to pull myself out of this scene. To create the distance of the divide. It is not real. I am not real.

  But Angela is real. That is the one truth to the scene, the only thing I know for sure. And all my life I have remembered this. Standing here, out of time, with this woman, whom I realize now that I recognized from my own dreams the moment I saw her standing at the tearoom door, coming first to Eva and now to me for help.

  The voices are still inside my head, chanting. Kill her! I push them away, struggling to hear the voice of the 911 operator. “I have a car in your area,” she says. “Can you get to a secure location until we can reach you?”

  “I think so,” I say. Mind racing, settling on the widow’s walk, figuring it’s the only place they can’t get to. If we get up to the widow’s walk and sit on the trapdoor, no one can push it open from below. I used to do that when I wanted to be alone. There’s only the narrow ladder leading up to it, and only room for one person to climb. One person can’t get enough leverage to push the trapdoor open.

  “The widow’s walk,” I say to the operator, so she’ll know to tell them where to look. “We’ll be up on the widow’s walk.”

  “Go!” she says, and we run.

  They’re blocking traffic as they cross the street, still coming. There must be fifty of them. So many. Not just men but women, too. Angela’s eyes are desperately searching the crowd for Cal. She keeps saying he will save her. Over and over, this is what she says. But Cal is nowhere in this. He is still in jail. And while she waits for the rescue that I know will never come, the mob is beating down the gardens, trampling them as they surround the house.

  I see their faces. They are at the windows.

  Another shattering of glass. A change in the air, olfactory, a smell remembered from another time and place. The smell of summers and sun on the wood of the dock at the Willows or maybe at Trani where Jack is filling up the boat before we head out for a day of pulling traps together. And me lying on the deck getting some sun on my back before we go, letting him do all the busywork. Still tired from last night, happy. Drifting and dreaming while he fills up the gas tank.

  I loved this smell then, the smell of gasoline. It was such a pleasant smell to me that it now takes me a moment to break from its hypnotic spell and realize it’s in the room with us here, that someone has poured gasoline through the broken window and is soaking the floor with it.

  A popping sound as someone throws one of the torches through the opening. A larger explosion, and the room fills with flames. And the chanting changes on the spot. They are good at improvisation, these Calvinists, able to change their chant to suit their circumstances. “Get the witch!” morphs into the older, more historically correct “Burn the witch!” And then to an even shorter chant, the one I heard in my head just moments ago: “Kill her! Kill her!”

  I glance outside at the watching crowd that has suddenly gone quiet. Some look confused, no longer certain what they’re seeing. Is this theater? Is Salem getting so good at their special effects that they actually have the budget to burn down a real house? I watch as one man, the only one in the crowd who gets it, runs across the street to the corner by the Hawthorne Hotel and pulls the red fire-alarm box.

  “The house is on fire!” Angela screams, starting up the stairs toward the widow’s walk. I grab her.

  “No!” I yell. “Don’t go up!”

  “Get out of the house!” the operator says. She’s still with us, I realize now, but it’s the wrong idea. If we step outside the house, they will kill us. From outside I can hear the sound of sirens, but distant, too long to wait for. The streets are completely crowded with spectators. Horns blaring. Some of them getting out of their cars now, trying to get a closer look.

  “The cellar!” Angela says, starting toward the door “There’s a tunnel in the cellar!”

  I follow her down into the blackness, closing the door behind us against the smoke. I know that this is the right move to make—there’s a bulkhead down there, behind the house, and I’m thinking maybe we can get out that way. They won’t see us back there, maybe, and we can somehow sneak past them. But there aren’t any tunnels left that I know of, not anymore. Beezer and I had looked for the tunnels when we were kids. We’d spent long hours searching—whole days, even. The tunnels were here a hundred years ago, weaving a web of deception under Salem Common, keeping the British tax collector at bay. Maybe they remained later, during the Underground Railroad, the last stop on the way to Canada and freedom. It would have made sense for May’s new Underground Railroad. But the tunnels had all been filled in. That’s what Eva had told us anyway, when she’d had enough of our searching or when she felt bad that we weren’t finding anything, or maybe when she just decided that we should play outside and get some fresh air for a change instead of hanging out in her basement all the time. Eva told us the same thing our teachers had told us, that the city of Salem had filled in all the tunnels at the end of the last century. They were sorry about it, too, when World War II came, and even sorrier during the Cold War, because the tunnels would have been a good place for an air-raid shelter, and the city wouldn’t have had to spend good money to build its own.

  Angela is groping along the back wall, clawing at it. “I know it’s down here somewhere,” she says. “That was how Eva got me out of here the last time.”

  So that was it. It must be true. The tunnels must have been how Eva made Angela “disappear.” They were the reason Cal and his followers thought Eva was a witch. What was it Rafferty said? They saw Angela go into the house, they had the whole house surrounded, but Angela never came out again. When she finally showed up again, she was on the island with May’s girls. Until Rafferty brought her back. May was angry at Rafferty for helping Cal, but she didn’t get the point. The point was that Cal was scared of both Eva and May. He believed his own accusations about them. He didn’t know about the tunnels. What he believed was that, with the exception of his ex-wife, all the Whitney women had magical powers.

  They have the house surrounded now, the same way they did that night. I can see the sandal-clad feet outside the high basement windows. There is no way to get out the bulkhead exit now. They are standing on it. Holding it closed. We can see their figures, like shadow puppets lit from behind, their profiles projected across the basement walls by the headlights of the few cars that are still able to pass on the streets, the ones not stuck in traffic.

  Angela pushes on the wall again, giving it everything she’s got, almost knocking herself out before I stop her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I know it’s here!” she says. “Behind this wall. There’s a whole room in there. Eva hid me there the last time. Until she could get me out.” She is hurting herself. She coughs. It is damp and smoky in here—damp and smoky, with the vague smell of mildew….

  And I think of the Realtor looking at the wine cellar, inspecting the water on the floor. That’s where it had to be. The wine cellar. I had always wondered why Eva had a stocked wine cellar put in when she didn’t drink at all. The secret door is on the wine cellar’s wall. It has to be. The slats and cross-hatchings must be a way of disguising it. The liquid on the floor wasn’t spilled wine or a leaky pipe. It was the salt water that was making the flowers mildew. The tunnel was tidal.

  “Where does the tunnel come out?” I say, just to double-check, to make sure I am right in my hunch. But I’m already pretty certain. I’m moving toward the wine racks
. Even as I’m asking the question, I already know the answer.

  “The boathouse,” she says.

  I move my fingers slowly along the wall, feeling for the cracks, the world behind the world: spiny wooden racks, a lattice of wood and bottles, dust. I’m looking for what is different. What does it say in Eva’s journal? “Look for one of two things: something that enhances the pattern or something that breaks it.”

  It’s getting too smoky to see. I feel along the spiny racks, reading them with my fingers, like Braille. And then my fingertips find a small slice across the grain of the wood. Small as the blade of a razor. I follow the tiny crack with my fingers as it moves three bottles up, cuts ninety degrees, goes four bottles across, then heads back down the wall. I have found it. It is real.

  It’s a secret Alice in Wonderland door, smaller than me, the right size for a person the year it was built, maybe, but not anymore. I reach in between the bottles at the same height a handle should be, and I find a small lever. I push it down. It engages. I can hear the cylinders turning, but the door doesn’t open. It is locked. I feel around, looking for the thumb turn or a keyhole or something, one hand in my pocket already searching, trying to find something to pick it with. Then my fingers hit the smooth, round plate where the key should be but isn’t. My heart sinks. It’s a keyed dead bolt.

  It’s getting harder to breathe. I call out to Angela, but she cannot hear me over the building noise of the approaching fire.

  It smells of old wood and horsehair plaster as the fire burns through the walls of the tearoom above us. The heat seems to drive the mold spores into the air. I can smell the lavender from the flowers that Eva had drying on the racks next to me, the ones I forgot to throw away.

  And then I remember the combination. From the house inspection. And from the Realtor’s telling me it was half the problem. Mildew in the basement, from the drying flowers. Hung upside down like a distress flag.

  “Who in the world would dry flowers in a basement?” It annoyed me when she asked the question, as if she thought Eva were stupid or senile. But I had to admit that I’d wondered about it, too. Who in the world would dry flowers in a basement? The answer was, no one. No one who knew what they were doing anyway. Eva wouldn’t. And it becomes another thing that breaks the pattern, that stands out—the flowers, of course. Eva was nothing if not consistent. The key to the dead bolt was in the drying, moldy flowers.