by Bruce Wagner
“But what does she want?” asked the incredulous Tull. “What’s she going to do with them?”
“She wants,” chimed Lucy, “to bury them.”
Pullman rose indifferently, and in doing so, violently jostled the buggy, whose tire had been resting on his flank.
“Weird,” said Tull.
“And the perfect thing is that it’s not even an original thought! There’s a woman who’s been burying throwaways for years—that’s where Mother got the idea. From People magazine. You see, her tragedy—and ours—is that Mother Joyce cannot even be original in her Buddha Compassion phase.” Edward yawned with boredom, circling back to his aunt. “You know, there were so many things Trinnie might have done besides build a fucking maze. I mean, she could have gone Versailles: some conical hedges, a hegemony of hedges—big drippy grotto with waterworks automata—no Hefty bags here! Maybe un grand escalier … I did see them haul in a Rodin, but your mom assured it wasn’t the centerpiece; that’d have been such a cliché. She’s too clever by half.” He clutched his hands theatrically to his bosom. “ ‘Aunt Trinnie, this is too cruel!’ I said. ‘A labyrinth—and here me, with my deformity—Mini-Me the Mini-Minotaur!’ ”
“And how did she respond?” asked Tull, playing along.
“With something very … Trinnie-like,” answered the cousin.
“I believe,” said Lucy, “it was: ‘Edward, shut the fuck up.’ ” Her brother rasped and hooted, then Lucy got a grand idea. “You know what we should do? We should just drive in! Come on, Edward! Journey to the center of the labyrinth—I dare you!”
“We’ll tie some yarn to the cart,” said Tull. “In case we get lost.”
“I’ll pass.”
“He’s afraid,” shouted Lucy gleefully. “Edward’s afraid!”
“That would be you,” said the cousin. “I’ve seen how far you’ve gotten. You won’t even go in with Pullie.”
“That isn’t true,” she said defensively. As impossible as it may seem, the Trotter children were, in regard to the maze, wary of exploration.
“Then no one’s been to the center,” said Tull.
“What? Not even you?” asked Edward, a bit stunned.
“Well, when would I? They only just finished it.”
“Nearly two weeks ago, they did,” said Edward, thoroughly pleased. “Well, well, we are a timid group!”
“Then let’s do it,” said Tull. “What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is what your mother put in the middle of the damn thing.”
“The Rodin?”
“Guess again.” He paused, striking his Benny pose. “A dumpster fetus—what else?”
While Tull and Lucy laughed, exhaustion darkened Edward’s face like a cloud, and his sister sprang to help. They walked from bench to buggy, supporting him on each side. Lucy got in to drive and smiled at Tull, pained and poignant; Edward would need to skip a few days of school to get his strength back, and she hoped he wouldn’t have to go to the hospital. Pullman cantered about the carriage, then licked Edward’s hand, but the cousin twitched it away. As Lucy drove the serpentine path to the house, the Dane galloped toward a rakish figure on the hill: Grandpa Lou.
Trinnie shouted at the children that it was time to see Bluey, then Ralph shouted to her that they would be late and she hurried off. As they entered the living room, Tull called out hello, but the old man didn’t hear.
He was already down on all fours, chuffing with Pullman at the door of the Palladian doghouse.
CHAPTER 5
A Lucy Trotter Mystery
A child should always say what’s true
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table:
At least as far as he is able.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
After they dropped Edward at the cousins’ home on Stradella Road, they descended Saint-Cloud in the four-wheel Cadillac truck that took them to and from school. The gentle driver, Epitacio, was aptly named; he rarely spoke, and when he did, one could imagine the words being his last. The children were enormously fond of him.
“Epi, can we stop at Rexall for nonpareils?” The chauffeur shrugged as if to disappoint, then toothily grinned. Tull turned his attentions to Lucy. “So what’s going on with Edward? Seemed like he had a fever or something.”
“He’s OK.” She tapped her fingers and stared out the window. “He might have another surgery. No biggie.”
They sat quietly while Epitacio guided the SUV toward Cedars, down, down, down through the stone West Gate.
“That is weird about your mother and those babies.”
“My parents are kind of insane, if you haven’t noticed. The whole Trotter dynasty—and that means you, too. And ever since this Forbes thing—”
“How high was your dad on the list?”
“Like, the eighteenth-richest person.”
“How much?”
“Nine-point-four.”
“Billion?”
“Duh.”
“Whoa.”
“He’s been on this giant binge.”
“What do you mean?”
“He got totally freaked when someone told him Ted Turner was the biggest private landowner in the country.”
“Like how much?”
“Turner? Like a million and a half acres.”
“In the U.S.?”
“And the world. Argentina, I think.”
“Whoa.”
“Dad doesn’t really want that. I think he visited a few ranches for sale in Wyoming, but—can you imagine my father on a ranch? So he started buying … really strange things instead.”
“Like?”
“Buildings. Big, empty buildings. Foreclosure stuff. You have no idea how many empty buildings there are.”
“For investing?”
“He doesn’t do anything with them—they just sit there with homeless people inside.”
“Squatters.”
“Whatever.”
“He probably has a master plan.” Tull fiddled with a mahogany air vent. “Lucy … do you think Edward’s serious about all that maze stuff? You don’t think he actually thinks my mother would—”
“Oh, don’t be so paranoid. We have to take him into the maze, we all have to go, right into the middle—just to get it over with. Put him in a wheelbarrow! I’m writing a mystery about it, you know.”
“About what?”
“The Mystery of the Blue Maze—Mr. Hookstratten said the school would publish five hundred copies to sell at the fund-raiser. And the lady said I could sell them out of Every Picture Tells a Story.”
“What’s that?”
“A store for kids’ books. Mr. Hookstratten says it’s a natural. He said publishers love it when a real kid writes a book, it could be a franchise. He said I should make it a little hard-edged, like maybe the girl’s grandma is dying.”
“That’s depressing.”
“It’s real. He said that’s the trend.”
Lucy glanced out the tinted window at the Beverly Center as they swooped toward the drugstore. She surveyed it with abstracted hauteur—as if she owned the dun-colored retail fastness and all the serfs who desperately congregated within. A man with an aluminum crutch stood outside the Hard Rock with a sign: SOMEONE HELP ME.
“That’s sort of why I wanted to come tonight. For research.”
“But Bluey isn’t dying.”
“I know that,” she said disdainfully. “It’s still good for research. Mr. Hookstratten says the When a Grandparent Dies books do really well in the marketplace.” Tull frowned at his cousin’s mercenary ways. “The Mystery of the Blue Maze. Isn’t that cool? Mr. Hookstratten said it’s better when you put a color in the title.”
“Shouldn’t it be green? A green maze?”
“That’s the cliché,” she said, sounding much like her brother. “Anyhow, green looks blue in the dark. I already have the cover—I get all my ideas that way. I always start with a cover. Want me to desc
ribe it?” Without waiting for an answer, she hunched like a witch ready to conjure. “It’s midnight, and a girl—I may name her Lucy—creeps toward the dark mouth of the maze. I’m calling it a maze, not a labyrinth, because Mr. Hookstratten said maze is less complicated. That with children’s books you could be ironic but not complicated. Anyway, Lucy—if that’s what I decide to name her—is in a long, flowing robe. She glides across the lawn, carrying a brass taper in her hand. The flame flickers across her thin, anxious, pretty face—”
“Did you hear about the tapir at the zoo?” he asked impetuously.
“I mean taper, as in candle …”
“It tore off the keeper’s arm.”
“I really don’t care.”
The spell was broken; her expression curdled as Tull gave rein to a diabolically mischievous impulse. Impious and inspired, he leaned across the front seat and reached upward. “Let’s talk to the man!” Epitacio smiled as the boy pressed a button on the roof console; a little arpeggio played, like the one that languorously strummed when he turned on his ThinkPad. Then came a Voice from the mystical GPS ether.
“Good evening, Mr. Trotter!” the Voice greeted, setting Tull to giggle. “How may I be of assistance?”
Lucy crossed her hairy arms and fumed.
“Trotter Junior here. Can you tell us our location?”
“Right now we have you on San Vicente and La Cienega,” said the Voice, absurdly mispronouncing the latter boulevard.
“And where are you?”
“Detroit, Michigan, sir!”
They pulled into the Rexall; Tull could barely contain himself. “We’re, uh, looking for someplace to eat.”
“All right, Mr. Trotter … let me just check my guide.… I have a Locanda Veneta, on Third? Let’s see—just bear with me, Mr. Trotter, while I pull this up—if you’re in the mood for meat, there’s Arnie Morton’s, on La Cienega …”
Tull, in the firm grip of a virulent strain of silliness, merely gaped at his cousin. Lucy violently froze him out.
“We’re actually in the mood”—now Tull looked at Epitacio as he said it—“for a Cedars salad. Where do you think we could get a nice Cedars salad?”
After a few moments’ interchange, he jumped out.
When Tull returned with his bag of Sno-Caps, the voice from the satellite had apparently long since departed. They doubled back to the hospital. Lucy waited until they were upstairs in the enclosed pedestrian bridge before speaking.
“Tull,” she said in low tones. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about—about your father.”
“What about him?” he asked hesitantly.
“I’m thinking of using it for my story.”
“What story?”
“The Mystery of the Blue Maze.”
“Using what?”
“Do you mind if I ask you about him? For research.”
“Go ahead.”
They entered a kind of hushed sitting area, bordered by a wall of lithographs. He felt suddenly uneasy, and it wasn’t solely from the subtle shift in the balance of power.
“Well, would you mind—and you don’t have to answer—would you mind if I asked how he died?”
“You know how he died.”
“I have to ask—for journalistic reasons.”
“But you’re writing fiction.”
“It’s just the way you have to ask when you’re researching. So, do you want to talk about it or not?”
“In a snowmobile accident.”
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where did he pass away?”
“You know where he passed away. In New Mexico.”
“When?” She paused, then said, “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“Why wouldn’t I want to, Lucy?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t want you to be uncomfortable. I’m not that kind of writer—I don’t believe in forcibly interrogating a subject. You never get the truth that way.”
“This is bullshit.”
“Fine. You don’t have to answer.”
“March, the year I was born. ’Eighty-eight.”
“Then he passed away right after you were conceived.”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“Mr. Hookstratten said nothing is obvious. And what did your father do? I mean, for a living? You don’t have to answer.”
He wondered what she was up to. If it was payback for his earlier high jinks, she’d gone overboard.
“He studied the classics. He went to the Sorbonne in Paris.”
“A scholar. Really …”
“Why do you want to know?”
“My parents were having an argument. They were talking about Aunt Trinnie—you know, Mom’s always been jealous, she always thought Dad paid her too much attention or something. Anyway, Mom and Dad were having this fight. I think what happened was, Mom called to ask Trinnie if she wanted to name one of the dead babies—they give them names before burying them—and you can imagine what Trinnie said. Probably something really mean and funny. So Mom ran back to Dad and said she was trying to be friends with Trinnie but Trinnie was being a major bitch and that Trinnie should just get over it and get a life. Mom said Trinnie was putting on a big act and all that Dad and Grandpa Lou ever did was indulge her and she’d never get off drugs that way. Then Mom started talking about the tragedy of Edward and how much courage it took for them to raise him and how Trinnie could never face anything like that herself and was always running away—that it was sad what happened with Marcus—your dad—but that she had to take some responsibility, because she picked him in the first place and people don’t wind up together for no reason and Trinnie was probably better off it happened right away instead of later.”
“That what happened?”
“That he left the way he did.”
“By dying—”
“But he didn’t die. He never died. That’s what I’m saying. That’s the whole point of the story.”
CHAPTER 6
The Great Race
The two cousins visited Bluey awhile, ensconced in her twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-day high-roller suite—twenty-five hundred above Blue Cross, that is—with the concealed cardiac monitor wiring, silent infrared call system, marble bath and sitting room with parquet floor, Scalamandré brocaded sofa under Jasper Johns collage, orchids—Rhyncostylis gigantea, smelling of cinnamon and nutmeg—and faux Chippendale desk and chairs. It was even nicer than Mount Sinai’s 11 West, where Mr. Trotter once stayed with his pneumonia. She was attended by Winter, Trinnie and Dodd’s erstwhile nanny, but occasionally a “floor concierge” (trained, courtesy of the Laguna Ritz-Carlton) poked his head in, bearing fresh linens and imported magazines, anime for the kids and doctor-approved treats Bluey had bused in from Frenchie’s, her favorite downtown bakery. The hospital bed, its quilt and duvet brought from home, was covered with obituaries from the Times, both coasts’. Winter busied herself by placing the ones not under current scrutiny in a suede photo album, its cover bearing the Trotter family arms within an embossed cartouche.
In fact for most of the children’s visit Bluey was on the phone with her son, the aforementioned eighteenth-richest person in the United States, reading death notices aloud like they were funny pages. Bluey was strong as an ox; the memorials were a tonic. She’d been an aficionado for years and now included Dodd in her enthusiasms, tracking him down to announce a public figure’s controversial or banal demise (actually, the figure needn’t be all that public to qualify). If he’d already heard it on the news, Dodd liked to feign surprise. At first, he thought it macabre, but since he’d never had easy ingress to Bluey’s heart, he let her build this supernal bridge of bones; before long, mother and son stood on the great span and warmly communed, watching a back-page parade of departed souls.
Tull supposed that his cousin got enough “research” watching Bluey—what with her preternaturally keen eyes darting like Pixar bug antennae as she jotte
d things down in the green leather Smythson of Bond Street ms. notebook with the whimsical gilt heading: BIRD NOTES. He listlessly pushed tarragon around on the rack of lamb (Lucy had kimchi) delivered from the hospital’s gourmet kitchen by a bow-tied blackjacketed server, and was glad Grandma was preoccupied with her call, because his braided friend had delivered a blow from which he had not, nor ever would, recover.
He went to bed early, like an invalid. The sudden notion of his father being alive had conferred a strange new sickness, and his head grew as heavy as Edward’s. Swathed in six-hundred-count Pratesi sheets, a goose-down pillow over his face, Tull sweatily descended—first imagining himself in the labyrinth, shuffling through narcotic mist to mysterious middle, then on to more prosaic fields—a dark school playground, where cottony smoke also swirled. His dreams were unsettling that night. He had shed his innocence; Lucy had fired the pistol and the perverse, arduous race of life had officially begun. Twitching in troubled sleep, Pullman’s was the only familiar face, but even the Dane was creepily confabulated, a dog patch of ill-fitting body parts amid Tull’s tule fog REM. The rest of the supernatural school yard’s denizens were strangers, more phantom than corporeal, and filled him with anguish and apprehension. It seemed as if they were beings of pure emotion, pure feeling, but the emotions and feelings of luminous deep-sea creatures whom he could never know.
Grandpa Lou chuffed awhile with “my Danish friend” before retiring to the library to look over the maquettes of his future grave.
The walls of the vast “Withdrawing Room,” three thousand square feet in area and two stories tall, were fronted by an ornately paneled restoration of fifteenth-century Italian wood intarsia. Trompe l’oeil murals of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons hung in other spaces: mossy, forbidding underground expanses. Amid thousands of vellum volumes were priceless gouaches and oils—smallish Bonnards, Twomblys and Klimts—old spheres and compasses, a letter and poem written in French in van Gogh’s hand—
