Mr. Pickthall stared at the man, who seemed breathless with memory, and for a moment he thought that he could see images flickering across the man’s eyes, as though they were windows that looked out at an ugly backyard world passing by.
When Whipple did not immediately go on, Mr. Pickthall cleared his throat and wetted his lips once again. “I . . . I fail to see what this has to do with—”
Mr. Whipple snorted derisively, giving a twist to his features that was anything but ordinary. “Yes, you do, don’t you? Your sort always does. Fail to see, I mean.”
And then Whipple merely looked at him, and Mr. Pickthall felt as though something pushed past his eyes, like insects digging in through the orbits. He clapped both hands to his face, covering them, and squeezed them tightly shut against the pain, hissing through his teeth. Cursing at God and the Devil alike.
It passed. He was breathing heavily and when he swallowed his throat was raw and sore. The fire was not burning nearly as hot, but sweat had begun to form upon his brow. There in the dead of winter, Mr. Pickthall was sweating. It was only with great reluctance that he looked up at Mr. Whipple again, his confidence eroded almost to nothing. He had to tell himself over and over that there was business to be conducted here.
“Get to the point, damn you!” he cried, hating the infantile shrillness of his voice, and the way his hands trembled.
“You can stare for hours at the branches of a tree and never see the birds amongst the leaves until they begin to stir,” Mr. Whipple said. “It’s all about what we want to see, isn’t it? And what we want others to see. The faces we paint on. Eleanor Rigby knew. Had that face in a jar by her door, yeah?” He smiled softly. “Love that song.”
For a moment he was lost, humming. Then his eyes refocused. Mr. Pickthall, afraid now of those eyes, looked away. He’d say whatever he had to say, now, just to get Whipple out of the house. If he’d just get to the bloody business of his blackmail, Mr. Pickthall would even give the man a downpayment. If all he really wanted was his sodding job back, he’d promise that. But only until he could have the police pick the bastard up. Without Kit, the filthy whore, Whipple hadn’t a chance of convincing anyone of his claims. And even if he had the girl to back up his story, without a baby, there’d be no proof.
Yet there was no swagger in these thoughts. No arrogance. Only a kind of desperation. Anything to get Mr. Whipple out of his house.
“All those years,” the trainman said, gazing back across time, or so it seemed. “And one day I was helping this elderly lady and her scarecrow of a daughter carry their bags up from the platform at Manningtree station, and I looked the frail daughter in the eye and I saw the venom she had for the old woman, and I saw the poison she put into her own food because she hadn’t the courage to give it to her mother. Killing her own self slowly instead.”
All the breath went out of Mr. Pickthall. He wrung his hands and when he realized Whipple had been doing it earlier he forced himself to stop.
“You . . . you expect me to believe that, do you? That you’re some kind of mind reader?”
Mr. Whipple shook his head. “It isn’t like that. Not at all. I couldn’t say what you’d had for breakfast this morning, or what number you were thinking of, or whether you fancied the maid.
“It’s the secret backs of things, Mr. Pickthall. I spent so many years on the trains, spying into the places people wanted to hide or forget, it got so I can see the secret backs of things. I look at you, sir, and I can see what you most want to hide. Your fears and your sins. The sorts of things you’d never share with another soul. Eleanor Rigby wore that face, and so do you, Mr. Pickthall. So do we all. But I . . .”
He whimpered, and tears came to his eyes, and his face was contorted with torment.
“I can see it all. The worst in all of us. It takes an effort not to see, though I manage most of the time. It’s better on the trains. When I can look out the windows at the backs of walls and the rust and the rubbish. It soothes me. It’s all I know. But now you’ve taken it from me, haven’t you?”
Mr. Pickthall was paralyzed. His gaze shifted toward the study door and for once he found himself hoping for interruption, sent up a prayer that one of his staff would come and enquire about Whipple staying for lunch. But they were trained too well. Trained to fear reprisal. He could only imagine several of them commiserating at that very moment as they attempted to decide how to handle this breach in both schedule and protocol.
Ridiculous. That was what it was. Absurd.
But when he tried to meet Mr. Whipple’s gaze, he turned his eyes away. The intrusion of the man’s attention was too much. The violation. He could feel traces of Whipple’s presence inside of him like muddy footprints tracked across his mind. The pain in his eyes had been real. The anger and malice flowing from Mr. Whipple . . . he had felt it.
And really, how else could the man know?
It was the black secret of Mr. Pickthall’s heart.
“That’s . . .” he rasped, coughing to clear his throat. “That’s truly all you want? Your job?”
Hope flickered pitifully in Whipple’s eyes. Slowly, he nodded.
“And if it’s out of my hands? If I can’t do what you ask? You’ll tell what you think you know?”
Mr. Whipple’s eyes went dark again and ice ran through Mr. Pickthall. He was convinced then that there really was a kind of devil behind the trainman’s eyes, even if Mr. Whipple himself was not quite aware of it.
“You don’t ride the trains much, Mr. Pickthall. But Mrs. Pickthall does. As do your children. Your son, Martin, in particular. Fancies himself a man of the people, rides the train to the office every day. I’ve seen them all, though of course they don’t notice me. Just taking their tickets is all. Who’d see me?”
Mr. Pickthall took a long, ragged breath. “So you’ll tell them my secrets, is that it?”
A sickening, brutal smile blossomed upon Mr. Whipple’s face. A cruel thing, scarred with all of the private sins he had never wished to see. “Oh, no, sir,” he said. “Who’d believe me, after all? I’ve no proof, have I?”
He paused and the smile went away. Mr. Whipple smoothed his moustache and narrowed the flickering windows of his eyes. “But you believe me, Mr. Pickthall. I see that you do.”
Mr. Pickthall gave the tiniest of nods.
Mr. Whipple perched on the edge of the antique chair in the corner, firelight throwing shadows on his face.
“I’d like my old job back. On the trains. But no, sir, I’m not going to tell anyone what you’re hiding. Not at all. I’ve looked into the eyes of your wife and your children, Mr. Pickthall. If you don’t help me, I’m going to tell you their secrets. Each and every dark, wriggling worm that eats away inside of them.
“Ugly stuff, indeed.”
NESTING
The weather man had predicted rain, but those guys would be right just as often by flipping a coin. That warm May evening, the sky was a clear, star-filled indigo, and even downtown Covington smelled like springtime. Whittier Street ran parallel to Washington, the main drag along the Merrimack River, which was lined with restaurants and boutiques. But if Washington Avenue presented the tight facelift of the old factory town’s gentrification, Whittier’s cafés and art galleries were the Bohemian, liberal heart of the place.
Mike Shaughnessy had dropped his wife, Cori, at the door of the Papillon Gallery and parked halfway down the block. Cori had balked, insisting that at six months’ pregnant she was perfectly capable of walking a hundred yards, but Mike wouldn’t hear of it. He liked taking care of her, indulging her. Until she’d gotten pregnant, he’d sort of forgotten just how much.
A trio of well-dressed women approached the gallery from the opposite direction, coming toward him along the sidewalk, and Mike slowed down to allow them to reach the door first. They were the perfect soccer moms, a species perfected in suburban Massachusetts. Mike and Cori had moved to Covington—
just a few miles from the New Hampshire border—from blue collar Melrose, Massachusetts. They’d both commuted into Boston for work, and were used to a different breed of mothers in the neighbourhood, either working women or the stay-at-home wives of men who worked with their hands and spent their spring weekends with beer and fishing, and the fall with beer and football. Mike had felt torn between the two, a lawyer with a father who’d painted houses for a living for forty years. He felt just as comfortable with either extreme.
But he had no idea what to make of the Covington women, college-educated stay-home mothers who doted on their children while organizing charity events, book clubs, and artist receptions. They had perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect teeth, and every third woman had the same aquiline nose, the product of a small surgery necessary because of a “deviated septum.” There were a lot of deviated septums in Covington.
There were other neighbourhoods in the city with a real cross section of race, age, and average income. But Mike and Cori had bought a house on a street loaded with other transplants who’d come north to find a neighbourhood where their kids could ride bikes without getting run over or shot, where they could afford a decent-sized yard as well as the landscaping service to groom it every week. There were women who still worked. Many of them, in fact. But a great many of these couples had moved specifically so they could afford for the new mother to stay home and raise their children. The New Feminism at work.
Mike had come to like Covington, with its half dozen home-made ice cream shops and funky restaurants, little book stores and music events at the library. The soccer moms were just a bonus. Some of them were nice to look at, some of them drove him nuts, but he had to give them points for sincerity. He doubted these women knew much more about art than he did—and he knew for sure that their husbands, whom they dragged off to various events when the guys got home from jobs in Boston, didn’t—but they certainly cared an awful lot about it.
And they’d adopted Covington as their home town with great enthusiasm, though most of the couples in his neighbourhood hadn’t grown up anywhere near the city.
Hence tonight’s Local Artists’ Spring Gala Exhibition at Papillon Gallery. A lot of words to express a simple concept, but as a lawyer Mike understood that approach all too well; why use two words when you can say it with twelve?
The women preceded him into the gallery. He spotted two couples walking down Whittier from the parking lot in Railroad Square, and realized that the gallery was going to be packed, tonight. He only hoped the fruit and cheese table had not already been ransacked. He’d gotten home late, so the free nibbles the Papillon provided would be his dinner tonight, along with a glass of whatever they were pouring.
“Mike, hello!” a happy blonde woman said as he stepped through the door. Her sharp features tugged into a grin and her long earrings swung like chimes as she turned to gesture toward the crowd jammed into the gallery. “Quite a turnout, don’t you think? I saw your lovely bride a second ago. God, I wish I’d looked half that good when I was pregnant.”
He smiled. Cynical as he liked to pretend to be, Mike really liked living in Covington. He liked his neighbourhood and most of his neighbours, and he especially liked Whittier Street’s self-proclaimed Covington Arts District. If he could get Cori to like the city as much as he did, he’d be overjoyed. At first, adjusting had been hard for her. But now that she’d met some people, made a few friends, and been adopted by the Covington Arts District Council as a potential member, she was coming around.
“I’ve always thought pregnant women were sexy, Ellen,” he told the blonde.
She arched an eyebrow. “Liar.”
“Seriously. I’m sure you were a smokin’ hot mama-to-be.”
Ellen laughed and then turned to greet the two couples coming in behind him. Mike took a breath to get his courage up, then immersed himself into the crowd, working his way through the shifting labyrinth of people. He glanced at various paintings as he walked through, wondering if any of them were by Theo Bowden, the one local artist he was actually curious about.
A familiar laugh turned his head, and he spotted Cori talking with a couple he vaguely recognized—people from their neighbourhood, but what were their names? Mike had always been terrible that way. If he hadn’t spent any significant time with someone, they floated to the bottom of his brain like pennies in a wishing well.
A waiter passed by and Mike gratefully accepted a glass of white wine from his tray. He took a sip as he walked over to Cori and the neighbours. His wife looked radiant, her auburn hair in ringlets and her mischievous eyes sparkling. Her nose crinkled when she smiled, drawing attention to the spray of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.
“Hi, honey,” she said.
“Hey.” He slid an arm around her and bent to kiss her hello, and he felt the muscles in her back tense, saw the way she stiffened.
With the wine and the company and the whole atmosphere of the place, maybe she’d forgotten for a moment the tension between them. Mike hadn’t forgotten. He couldn’t forget even for a moment, and now he was sorry that he had reminded Cori. She’d been enjoying herself and now he’d tainted that.
“Mike, you know Doug and Jane Morgan from around the corner, right?”
“Of course,” he lied, shaking their hands. “Though I don’t get to spend as much time in the neighbourhood as I’d like. Nice to see you guys.”
“You, too,” Jane said. “Have you looked at any of this art? It’s amazing we have this kind of talent in Covington.”
Mike nodded, glancing around. “We were hoping to get a look at Theo Bowden’s stuff.”
“Right, right,” Doug said. “You live in his house.”
“Well, it’s our house,” Cori corrected. “He just lived there once.”
“It’s right over here,” Jane said, leading the way into a rear corner of the gallery. “I don’t know if they put the dead artists’ work at the back because they don’t think anyone’s going to care, or because they think people will care and it’ll make them walk past all of the other paintings to get back here.”
Doug and Jane walked together, slipping through the crowd. Mike took Cori’s hand as they followed. He thought she might pull away, but she did not.
“You didn’t get a glass of water or something?” he asked.
Her smile had a bit of sadness in it. “You could give me your wine.”
“You’re not supposed to drink wine.”
“Just a sip.”
He handed it to her, then bent to kiss her temple. The discovery of Whittier Street had given Mike Shaughnessy hope that his marriage would survive. He and Cori had endured a great deal of change lately. Work and commute time had kept them apart much of the time, building lives away from each other, creating whole existences and other relationships that had nothing to do with who they were together. She had started to ask him awkward questions about one of the women at the office, and his denials had been just as awkward.
It was an old story. Typical. But when they were going through it, nothing about it felt typical. It just sucked.
Massive life surgery had been necessary to save their marriage, but he doubted either one of them would have taken drastic measures if not for the baby. He—or she—had changed everything. One day, perhaps, when the baby wasn’t a baby any more, they would be able to tell him or her how the arrival of their first child had saved them.
Mike hoped for that. Wished for it.
Now the best he could do was take back the wine glass and give her growing belly a little Buddha-rub, and hope that when the baby arrived, it would make them a family again.
Cori slid between a couple of red-faced, white-haired guys who had to be local politicians, just by the look of their stiff collars and buttoned jackets. Mike had to actually go around them. Cori might be pregnant, but she was still small enough to slip through.
He caught up with her and the M
organs in a corner, where they were all admiring a series of small paintings, each seemingly tinier than the last. Theo Bowden had been known for the detail of his work and for working on small canvases. There were several larger paintings, but none more than eighteen inches wide or tall. Small town artists, people who painted for themselves and not in the hope of having their work hung in galleries like this one, could afford to be eccentric.
Bowden’s paintings were mostly street scenes: Covington after a snowfall, children at the lake, a lone car driving down Washington Street, back when there had still been a Woolworth’s on the corner and people still used the word “apothecary.” A bicycle leaning against a lamp post. Men fishing from the bridge over the Merrimack River.
The artist had done a series of odd paintings of enormous stones, partially buried in the ground. Standing stones, Mike thought. They were more common in England, but there were examples of them all over northern New England, even a place in New Hampshire that marketed itself as “America’s Stonehenge.” Bowden might have done these still life studies up there, or elsewhere, but it was obvious he’d had a particular fascination for the things.
“Now it makes sense,” he muttered to himself. They were having a swimming pool put into their backyard, and when the crew was clearing part of the woods behind the house they had come upon one of those stones and asked his permission to remove it. It was still lying around somewhere on the property, but looking at it, Mike realized he probably should have donated it to the historical society or something.
Tell My Sorrows to the Stones Page 19
