“So let’s get started on the armoire!” Frank said. Nicholas heard clinking sounds as his father gathered up the wine and corkscrew to take them to the barn. “Nick! Nicholas!”
Nicholas considered ignoring him. A silent dash up the remaining stairs and into his room, and maybe he’d be safe. But his father was suddenly there in the hall, and Nicholas felt his gaze on him like a hook.
“Hey, you’re going to help with this, right?” Frank said.
There was a time when Nicholas would have gone to great lengths and even told lies to get out of a school function—like this stupid dance—in order to stay home, whatever the cost of staying home might be. How could it be that all of that maneuvering to hide from the social demands of school had been so much easier to pull off than simply saying no to his father now?
“I told Kevin I’d hang out.”
“What do you mean? We already talked about this. You stayed home tonight to help me.”
“But, Dad, you don’t need me.” His tone sounded childishly pleading to his own ears. “She’s here.”
“Don’t tell me what I need, Son.” Frank’s tone was stern. “And do not go back on your word so easily. Come on out to the barn, and bring some snacks when you do.”
Nicholas recognized the intensity that always lit his father’s communication as soon as he started to drink, and his nervous system registered it as a warning. He watched his father and Drew head cheerfully outside, chattering energetically, and a prickling rage that began in his throat spread quickly through his whole body.
He stomped heavily back downstairs to the kitchen, yanked a platter from the cupboard, clunked it down onto the counter, and crossed to the refrigerator, where he grabbed cheeses, apples, and nuts, then dumped everything, along with the contents of a box of crackers, onto the platter. Then he picked up the saltshaker and shook salt violently over all of it. He leaned close to the food, examining it to ensure that the salt was not visible, but was gripped by remorse and tried frantically to brush it all off.
At last, he carted the food out to the barn and slumped down in an old chair. What had happened to the hot dog and popcorn idea? Now who wasn’t keeping his word?
“Sit up here, boy. I need your nimble fingers. Take the doors off first. Let’s have a look under those hinges.” With his toe, Frank scraped the toolbox across the dirt floor toward Nicholas.
“Who was it that turned you on to this piece?” Drew sank deeper into an old, cushioned wing chair, swirling a thimbleful of wine at the bottom of her glass.
“Got a call from a Craig DeVries, a Grand Haven dealer, who said it was owned by a professor at Hope College. He wasn’t one hundred percent sure of the provenance before that, but when I saw this, I felt pretty sure it was a decent bet. I just have a feeling about it.”
“Ooh!” Drew pitched her voice high and tapped her feet in excitement, widening her eyes with a broad smile directed at Nicholas. “Isn’t this great?”
Nicholas raised his eyebrows to imply agreement, then turned back to trying to keep the tiny screwdriver point in grooves worn shallow with age.
“You know, sometimes I think it’s her beauty that gets to them, makes her critics think she was inconsequential,” Frank said as he pried at the hinges of a cabinet door. “That she was just fluff.”
“Mmm. Maybe so.” Drew shook her head, face sad. “Of course, these days it’s different, in my opinion. Women poets are taken seriously now, regardless of what they look like. Don’t you think so?”
“Just look at any of the photographs of Mary. She’s angelic, with soul-piercing eyes. Gorgeous, curling gold hair. A perfect female form.” Frank shook his head, lost in the vision. “They think she was a fake, incapable of genius. Chauvinistic bastards. Jealous.”
“You got it, Professor Carroll.” Again, Drew flashed a giant smile at Nicholas as he removed the first door.
These comments were all things Nicholas had heard in various permutations a hundred times, but Drew had been around for only a year or so, a favorite of his father’s, an apparent standout from the string of faces that had been dropping by the house all of Nicholas’s life to discuss Mary Stone Walker. Nicholas had given up trying to figure out how his father maintained interest in his collection of unchanging observations.
“Ah-ah-ah, wait! Let me take that.” Frank lifted the door high and away so as not to splinter the wood. He brushed it off and handed it back to Nicholas, then put his magnifying glass up to the strip of wood that had been concealed beneath the edge of the door.
“You think she might have taken the door off to…write on the wood?” Nicholas asked, confused.
“Well, probably not to write on it.” Frank was distracted. “But we have to consider…” He stooped down to look at the lower hinge point.
“Oh, look who’s here!” Drew cried, standing up. Two dim figures stood a few feet outside the barn doors.
“What’s up, Drew?” a male voice said.
“Come on in,” Drew replied, pointing toward a folding chair and a crate for the two to sit on. The young man wore a black fedora, a yellow scarf, and a baggy, striped cardigan that looked as if it could have been his grandfather’s. His eyelids were lazy over brown eyes that did not seem to notice Nicholas. The woman did not look any older than Nicholas, though he could tell she was by her demeanor, her casually spiked blond hair, and the crazy hodgepodge of her clothing, along with the fact that she also ignored Nicholas entirely, her eyes going straight to Frank, apparently enthralled. She stood close to him, radiating admiration. Frank’s gaze remained fixed to the furniture with such ferocity that Drew stood and leaned over next to him to ask what he was seeing.
“I can’t be sure…” Frank’s voice trailed off, and after a moment Drew nudged his arm, gesturing toward the visitors.
“Joshua and Amanda, Professor Carroll,” Drew said.
Frank stood straight, facing them as if he had not noticed their arrival until this moment. He held out his hand and gave a suave half smile that Nicholas referred to privately as his “I’m the professor” smile, tipping his head toward each student.
Josh, who was over six feet tall but slender, straightened as if he wished to meet Frank’s height and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
Drew put her hand on his. “No smokes in here,” she said.
“Oh, sure,” Josh responded vaguely, still holding his pack and a lighter. He nodded toward the armoire. “Is this in any way similar to some other piece of furniture where a Walker poem was found?”
Frank did not respond. He had moved to the back of the armoire and was examining the panels. Amanda cleared her throat. Drew offered the students wineglasses and poured a couple of inches of wine into each. Amanda cleared her throat again, then spoke in a high, querulous voice.
“Professor Carroll, I think it’s so important what you’re doing,” she said. She glanced at Drew, who nodded. “I mean, I have this one anthology where there are hardly any women poets. There are, like, two.” She gave a short, indignant laugh. “What’s the deal, you know? It’s like women were trapped in cages and not even allowed to express themselves or something.”
Frank gave an appreciative, low chuckle and sighed, backing up from the armoire and reaching for his wineglass. Then he looked intently at Amanda and sat down in his favorite velvet chair.
“That’s a good word, Mandy,” he said. “A choice word. Trapped. That’s exactly what we see suggested in much of Mary Stone Walker’s work, especially from the last months of her time here in White Hill.”
Frank paused for what was intended to be only a moment in a flowing narrative that Nicholas recognized well, but Josh interjected.
“What I don’t get,” he said, turning his left palm open, his eyes still apparently only half-interested in this gathering, “is how you can look for so long and find nothing and…just keep looking. You know, in the same way,
over and over.”
Both women looked into their wineglasses, and Nicholas closed his eyes and pressed deeper into his chair. Josh turned his head and gazed slowly around the dimly lit barn full of antiques. “Is this all stuff you’ve examined looking for something Mary Walker wrote?” He scanned the crowded landscape of dark forms, then shook his head. “Wow.”
Frank’s smile was patronizing as he looked at Josh and said nothing. The others were silent.
Josh shifted uncomfortably, and his eyes opened wider. “But yeah,” he said, “I have to admire your…dedication.” He tried to wrap up his interruption with a shallow nod of approval, but Frank continued to stare as if he were trying to identify an insect on his dinner plate. “After all, you did help find that one poem, right?”
“No,” Drew said quickly with a nervous glance at Frank. “There were poems found, but—”
“Wasn’t that… That wasn’t you?” Josh looked at Frank, then Drew, whose brow was furrowed as she gave Josh tiny warning shakes of her head.
“Well, Joshua. You’ve stumbled onto one of the problems in the world of knowledge and judgment,” Frank said. Elbows on his knees, he held out his hands and gazed between them as if studying the space there. “And that is, when you essentially don’t have any knowledge about a subject, then it’s hard to make a judgment that’s worth a damn.” He turned his eyes toward Josh, and the young man opened his mouth to speak, but Frank held up one index finger.
“Sometimes…sometimes,” he said softly as he narrowed his eyes, “when you’ve entered someone else’s area of expertise, and, let’s say, you know very little about their work, and absolutely nothing about them, it’s best to just”—he flung his hands open and smiled—“keep your adolescent nonsense to yourself. You know what I mean, son?”
Drew forced a laugh and leaned forward. “He’s just curious, Frank. It’s understandable, considering—”
“Hmm,” Frank interrupted, appearing puzzled. “Curiosity wearing a mask of ignorance and rudeness. Fascinating, Drew.” He shook his head and went back to examining the armoire as if no one else were in the room.
Nicholas barely breathed and hoped Amanda and Josh really had forgotten he was there. After a full minute of silence, except for the sound of Frank’s file on the hundred-year-old cherrywood, Drew stood up.
“Well,” she said with a hearty exhale, as if she’d just finished cleaning a room, “I believe we’re interrupting your concentration. Maybe we’ll check back in with you later in the week, Professor Carroll. When you have had a chance to focus on your work here.”
The three of them stepped lightly out of the barn while Frank made no response. Nicholas heard the jingle of someone’s car keys but no voices as they crossed the dark yard. He feared that if he stood to leave, his father would continue the lecture meant for the student, so he slowly sat up straighter in his chair and waited. But his father worked in silence for more than ten minutes, at last saying simply, “Get to bed, Nicholas. I don’t need any help.”
For hours, Nicholas read in his bedroom and listened for his father to enter the house but heard nothing. It was after two in the morning when he was awakened by the sound of Frank’s voice downstairs, and he cracked his door open to listen.
“No, no, no. Nothing like that.” His father seemed to be on the phone, speaking loudly. “I’m telling you, no. Nothing’s going on. It’s natural, isn’t it? To miss your wife, who’s never home?… You are not… Maybe so. Soon. That’s all I’m saying. Not a goddamn festival. A more romantic destination. Yeah. What?” He laughed, then after a long pause when Nicholas assumed his mother was talking, his father said, “Well, you can tell me about it tomorrow. No, not now. I’m whipped. And hopefully you’ll sleep it off. Good night… Yep. See you then.”
Nicholas carefully pressed his door shut and went back to his bed. In the not-so-distant past, when he knew his parents had made amends after an argument, his mind would be washed with relief and he could return easily to the simplicity of his world. More often now, however, he felt only partial pleasure that was not strong enough to dispel a growing unease as his mind groped helplessly for answers, and even questions, that he could feel but not quite identify. He turned his eyes toward the side window where stars appeared now and then from behind slow-drifting clouds, and eventually, though he thought it would never happen, he fell back asleep.
6
Misquers and White Hill, Michigan—March 1999
When foxes eat the last gold grape,
And the last white antelope is killed,
I shall stop fighting and escape
Into a little house I’ll build.
~ Elinor Wylie (1885–1928), “Escape”
Lydia hung up the phone and lay back down on the paper-crisp sheets of the motel bed. Wonderful—Frank had told her to “sleep off” her curiosity about the herbalist and the strange man at her shop. She’d mentioned the scrapbook Charlotte had passed along, and Frank had laughed. When he was like that, she usually concluded that it was just a mood or drunkenness and that she might find him open-minded at another time.
But she was starting to suspect that such moments revealed a lack of respect for her intelligence, and those later times when she hoped he might listen to her ideas never actually came to pass. She no longer seemed to have any credibility with him—not like in the days when she was dedicated to the same viewpoints he had. Everything she did in the real world to try to pin down the truth about Mary Walker’s fate met with his unconditional resistance.
Lydia had always theorized that Frank could write a fascinating book about their long effort to find the poet, even if the outcome of the woman’s life remained uncertain, and he could conclude with an exploration of the numerous, intriguing questions that still remained unanswered. But he had never given that idea much credence, and as time went on, his vision had narrowed from the scholarly exploration of every issue relevant to Mary Stone Walker’s life and work to an appealing string of daydreams about her beauty and mystique, her life after she disappeared, and the nature of the work she might have gone on to create. Any fresh, worldly information about the years of her life during which she actually drew breath and struggled to write in White Hill had become irrelevant.
As Lydia lay in the motel trying to ignore the occasional roar of semis passing on the highway twenty yards from her window, she contemplated her own career path. Was it just as repetitious and disengaged from real life as Frank’s seemed to be? She did not know if the romance novels were increasingly difficult to write because her power to create was failing her, or if she was just bored with genre writing, but she suspected that the fact that romance had become disconnected from anything she could call real life made the endeavor dead for her.
Now Lydia felt compelled to write about those subjects that mattered to her: motherhood, poetry, the human struggle to find love and meaning, and the history of life here on Lake Michigan. But she had a contract to fulfill. She would have to do both at the same time, beginning with gathering facts from the past that might give rise to a new novel.
The scrapbook! Her circling thoughts had pushed the day’s events far away. Lydia got up and brought the book to bed with her. The cover was deep red with a gold chain of fleurs-de-lis imprinted around the edge, although partly rubbed off by hands through time. When she lifted the cover to open the book, the spine gave a small creak. Inside were about forty pages of crumbling black paper. Newspaper articles had been attached with daubs of glue, but many of the articles were loose, and all were yellow and brittle. Lydia felt a tremor of excitement. Stories of real lives spilled from every page.
Due to the difficulty of obtaining meat on a regular basis—this article was from May 1931—White Hill’s Greyhound bus station cafeteria was introducing Meatless Mondays, featuring macaroni and cheese and four-bean chili, and Spaghetti Saturdays when the protein source would be cheese. Hero Outfitters was expan
ding its line of sporting gear in July 1928 to include men’s and women’s winter coats, with plans to add more clothing items by the next year. Both articles had photographs, the first of a dish of macaroni, the second of Hero’s front window full of fishing gear. Lydia scanned the rest of the pages and found that every article was a simple little story about an area business. Most included the names of key people, and some of those seemed to have been underlined in pencil.
She would read everything in the scrapbook for ideas, if not clues about Mary Walker. She set the book on the bedside table and stared at it for a minute, imagining it lying somewhere in Ethel Van Zant’s cottage when Mary Walker visited the herbalist. She reached over and opened the cover again. No, there was no date. She turned to the inside of the back cover, and there the dates 1918–1953 were written. She smiled, closed her eyes, and felt the imagined companionship of both women.
At last she dozed off, but was awakened by a sound outside. Close to her motel room, a car door slammed, and then Lydia thought she saw a beam of light darting around. She sat up and inched toward the window.
A bulky form was leaning forward over the hood of her Jeep, beaming a small flashlight onto the windshield. The person stood straight, and it became clear that it was a woman. In fact, it looked like Theresa Evans in a rain hat and trench coat. Lydia gasped and backed away, watching through the gap in the curtains as the woman jammed something flat under the Jeep’s windshield wiper, then got back in her own car and returned to the highway. When the taillights vanished, Lydia put on her coat and rushed outside.
She snatched the object from the wet windshield and went back to her room. It was an envelope inside a clear plastic bag, and the distinctive handwriting was the same as that on the label of the bottle Theresa had given her. Lydia tore the envelope open and pulled out a short letter.
Mrs. Carroll—
I can’t let my husband know I am sharing personal information with you. But my instincts tell me that unburdening myself of a few facts will improve my situation. Bill thinks that we mustn’t ever speak about Mary Walker, and I have seen enough unaccountable misery in our lives to understand why. We have been the victims of a curse.
The Lake and the Lost Girl Page 6
