She touched the ring through the fabric. Or could she? Maybe they hadn’t run off. Maybe they were dead.
Maybe their bodies would be found. She felt as if the skin had been raked from her palms.
Victor stood outside the shop for a long moment before he rapped on the window. The light tattoo of his knuckles on the glass startled Isobel so she nearly dropped the beret.
If he was surprised at what he saw — the rows of hats, the new sign, the sudden order — his face didn’t show it. Isobel watched him, her needle still poised, bracing herself as he walked in the door. His blue eyes shone pale under the brim of his hat. When he turned she saw his neck was brown save the white crescent of skin under his jagged cowlick, as if he’d just cut his own hair.
He stepped lightly into the shop. He did not speak but scanned the room, taking in the additions of the tacking table, the framed watercolours, the bolts of labeled felt, the stack of hatboxes. He picked up one of the box lids and examined the silhouette, then compared it to Isobel’s profile. His eyebrow raised in approval. After carefully replacing the lid, he gently took the beret and needle from his wife and settled his hands upon hers.
“Hello, Izzy.”
When she began sobbing he wrapped his arms around her and rocked her, his next words a whisper nearly lost among her cries. “There’s my girl. There’s the girl I married.”
Isobel clung, fighting for space between sobs. “Victor, I...you don’t know. Cathryn, this woman who...my friend, and this man, Jack… ”
“Shh, Isobel, I know. I know all about it. I’ve just come from the sheriff.”
“My God.”
She shook her head. “What have I done?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
~ ~ ~
Isobel testified at the inquest into Liam Malley’s death. Victor stood close as she gave her curt answers. Yes, Your Honor, or No, Your Honor.
She embellished nothing. She did not take off her hat or her white gloves.
Afterward Victor held her hand and walked her to Our Lady of the Lake, where she lit a dozen candles for Liam’s soul. At the church door she hesitated, then went back and lit another dozen for Cathryn and Jack. Wherever they might be.
Once home Victor poured her a neat gin, which she gulped before taking the purse from her arm. She spoke of the memorial service to be held for Liam in the chapel at Our Lady, but Victor was hesitant.
“Maybe you better sit tight, Iz.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Malley didn’t have too many friends, Iz, but I reckon those few might not be very friendly to you. Those miners are a pretty tight crew.”
“They blame me?”
He wouldn’t meet her eye. “Well, I wouldn’t say blame.”
“Call it what you like, Victor, blame, responsibility. I do own a share in it. If I didn’t go to the service it would look like I was denying that. Besides, I need to go. I owe it to Liam.”
Could Cathryn really know all this was happening and stay away? Isobel was almost reassured by not hearing any word. It meant Cathryn and Jack were spared, oblivious, off somewhere to begin their new lives.
There was no casket. Liam’s body had been shipped back to Chicago. Isobel couldn’t help but wonder to whom. The service was brief, and afterward coffee was served in an awkward gathering in the private dining room of the Vermilion Hotel. Victor stayed close, and it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. It was a simple matter of meeting looks and not crumbling.
She gave Cathryn’s gramophone and seventy-eights to Louisa for safekeeping. She wrapped the wedding ring in tissue and put it in Cathryn’s satchel in a corner of the attic. She could keep them for her. For her return.
“It’s not over, is it?”
She pressed closer to Victor in their bed.
He tucked her in against him, trying to warm the chill length of her back. “No. No, it’s not.”
They watched the shadows of trees on the ceiling and listened as sounds of summer softened behind breezes.
The children were back in school. After they left each morning Isobel waited at home for the mail to arrive. There was no word. She knew Cathryn had a sister in Toledo. After a week of rehearsed starts she gathered the nerve to find the number. The operator came back on the line to say the phone had been disconnected and there was no forwarding number. She tried Cathryn’s house in Oak Park. The phone there was answered by a man from the real estate firm hired to sell the house and its contents. He would not say who had hired him, that information was “privileged,” but when she pleaded, he caved in and told her he had been contracted by a Mr. Colin Malley of Cork, Ireland. The real estate man’s voice was effeminate and haughty. “I believe he’s the father of the deceased. My client is a rather elderly gentleman, and frail. It wouldn’t do to upset him.”
She resumed going to the shop each morning. It was better to work. Better to be sitting next to Victor with something to keep her hands busy.
The banks of sumac along the road out of Cypress heralded autumn by shifting nearly overnight to scarlet. Cool winds brought days of steady rain until muddy water flooded the gullies and ditches and soaked the hay-coloured lawns back to a last striving of green. The Fire Danger sign at the edge of town had its arrow repositioned for the first time since May. Aspen and maple began their change as the last search party drifted away.
A bulldozer leveled the remains of the cottage at Granite Point.
Victor drove Isobel out to the spot.
A crop of green spears poked up at the base of scattered logs, a mantle of moss already spreading over the shallow depression where the cottage had been.
The two chimneys had tumbled into conical piles of granite, twin cairns at either edge of a void.
The only other evidence that a building had once stood there was the uneven stone path and the columns of the stone arbor, still framing a vista to the lake. The leaves of climbing rose had curled away to expose charred thorns. Bits of glass blown out from the cottage windows were imbedded in scorched mortar like shrapnel. Isobel pried a piece loose. It was jagged on the piercing end, while the outer edge had been melted smooth by the heat of the blaze.
Isobel stood in the arch and looked out toward the lake. She had clung to the notion that Cathryn or Jack would make some contact, a sign, send her some cryptic hope. But it had been nearly a month since the fire and Liam’s death. The accumulation of anxious days — and now the destruction at her back — gnawed dull this hope. She wondered how many more days would feel like the glass in her hand, two-sided and jagged with disquiet. Only the nights were tolerable, burnished indistinct by a sleep that came only when she drank the merciful concoction the druggist had given her.
Victor stood next to her in the ruins of the arbor. She pointed down to the granite slope at the water’s edge and managed a smile. “Louisa waded there with Cathryn once. You should’ve seen her, Vic. She went in all the way up to her neck, wasn’t the least bit scared!”
Victor laid his arm over her shoulder, scanning the slope and the lake for a moment before whispering to his wife, “That’s what you should be pulling from this wreck, Iz, the better bits. You’ve got to let go of the rest.”
Jack’s cabin had been similarly burnt. Arson was suspected, but there was no real proof. The newspaper accounts had speculated that whoever had started the fires had known exactly what they were doing. Someone accomplished in the ways of fire. Others said lightning was the culprit.
She did not go to Jack’s island, but Isobel could easily imagine that scene: An empty square of singed foundation ringing a mound of debris. Perhaps a remnant from Jack’s quilt tagging the branch of a nearby tree, a cotton rose trailing a faded cotton vine. Sky reflected in the shards of glass jars that once held wild mint and trillium.
Victor came home smiling and fluttered a pair of train tickets in front of Isobel. “We’re going.”
“Going where?”
“Vacation. To Michigan.”
Isobel sighed. “We can
’t, Victor.”
Business had been slow, and Victor was just catching up from being away. He had lost the contract he’d had supplying uniforms for the mine’s band, as well as several customers connected to the mine. It was hard to say if Liam’s death had anything to do with it, but Isobel knew she would be punished one way or another, through Victor if not directly.
She knew she wouldn’t be doing much trade in Cypress, at least not until the next June, when the summer people came, strangers who didn’t know. She’d managed a few large orders of spring hats and Easter bonnets for two department stores in Duluth. Kathleen from the millinery had recommended her. She was busy working on those orders, glad for them, though she would only break even after costs.
She looked at the tickets in Victor’s hand. “Have you lost all reason? We can’t afford to go anywhere.”
“Yes we can, Iz. I’ve already borrowed the money.”
“Victor. Borrowed?”
“Izzy, you need to get away.”
“And the children?”
“All arranged. Sima’s oldest girl will stay at the house with them.”
Isobel moaned. Victor pressed the tickets into her hand and insisted, “Just a couple weeks, Izzy. You need the rest.”
They changed trains in Duluth and got a sleeper compartment heading east through Wisconsin. A blurred palette of gold-and-white birch throbbed past the rainstreaked compartment windows. Isobel spent most of the last leg of the trip in her window seat, her forehead on the pane, letting her head loll gently with the sway of the train. As they neared the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, rain and birch trees gave way to shaded pine forests with ticking shafts of smoky sunlight.
Victor came back from the smoking car smelling of cigars and spearmint chewing gum.
“I talked to some folks from Sault Sainte Marie. They recommended this little resort.”
He handed her a slip of paper with a name scrawled on it. “It’s on the mainland.”
“But what about Mackinac Island?”
Victor smiled at her. “It’s an island, Izzy. We’d have to take a ferry to get out there.”
“I can do that.”
She sat up and tested the buttons at her throat. “I can take a ferry.”
The Island Inn was close enough to the shore that Isobel could hear the surf shush through the night. They spent the days walking the beaches, gathering shells, and building afternoon fires nearly invisible in the daylight. She napped before dinner and wrote daily letters to the children.
On the portico Isobel let her tea go cold while the last of the leaves fell to upholster the wicker in ragged cushions of ochre. Victor often reached for her hand, but they spoke very little in their first days alone. He never asked directly about Jack and Cathryn. In fact, he was strangely silent. Days went by until his patience seemed almost another presence in the room, waiting next to him while she gathered the events like strewn playing cards and put them in some order.
In increments, she found her voice and spun out scenes until they were knotted into the flawed length of summer. She began with the cloud of mayflies that ushered Cathryn into the shop that first sunshot day in June. She finished her story with the odor of seared pine cloaking the very wind that swept Cathryn away.
Isobel leaned toward Victor. In the cold mornings they clung to each other, made love upon waking, and afterward lay spooned against the sharp air whispering through the half-opened windows. They burrowed under blankets and looked out at clouds thickening above the bones of oaks. And then she would tell him more, filling in hours to build days.
She told him about teaching Cathryn to drive; about the many kindnesses Cathryn had showered upon her and Louisa; about the snake in the quarry; about making the daisy-chain crown that made Louisa sneeze in fits. About the day Cathryn lured them underground…
The mine held its annual company picnic. Cathryn, Louisa, and Isobel went together. It was the anniversary of the mine’s founding, and the company opened the shafts, inviting anyone from the picnic down to tour.
Louisa held back, but Cathryn urged the girl on.
“Louisa, you know what the world looks like up here. Why, you can even imagine what mountains and tropical lands are like. For heaven’s sake, we’ve seen all that at the cinema. But underground? Now that’s another world, that’s something I’d like to see. Won’t you come?”
Just then a miner next to them barked in a sour voice, “You’ll catch me down there on my one day of rest when Satan hisself sends me.”
He leaned over and spat, just missing Cathryn’s foot.
It only fed Cathryn’s resolve. Her response was determined. “See? It’s the least we can do, experience one hour of what these men live day in and day out.”
At the entrance, a volunteer outfitted them with helmets and old-fashioned headlamps of the type original miners used. The helmets were heavy and the stench of kerosene burned Louisa’s nostrils. She was frightened, but if Cathryn was going down, so was she. They were herded into a metal box, pressing in with giggles at the intimacy. The volunteer told them the elevator usually held fourteen men. There were fewer than ten in the group, but still they were close and uncomfortable, limbs finding space among limbs like jigsaw pieces.
When the door closed they were jerked downward. Pulleys and rattling chains and enormous hooks followed them. The rough wall of the shaft was just visible in the tiny square of wired glass. The racket and bumping made Isobel fight off an image: a metal coffin slipping down a stony well.
Deeper into the shaft, the bit of light from above suddenly went black and Louisa pressed into Cathryn’s side, moaning.
Isobel was on the opposite wall, separated by bodies. The girl burped, her face grown blotchy in the light cast from the flame in Cathryn’s headlamp. “I’m gonna v-v-vomit.”
In the crush there was no getting to Louisa. Cathryn licked a thumb and reached up to pinch the flame on her lamp and tipped the helmet off her head, saying, “In here, that’s a girl.”
Most passengers groaned against the sound of retching, the splash onto metal. Cathryn paid no one any mind. “We’ll get another helmet just as soon as we’re down.”
Somehow people made room so Cathryn could crouch down and wipe Louisa’s chin with a handkerchief.
The descent took a full five minutes, but it seemed longer, with the heat of iron walls and the smell of vomited knockwurst and potato salad. At the bottom, the door clanged open onto a damp corridor lit by a string of hanging bulbs. Pools of red water reflected lamplight. Wind moving through the tunnel was icy, and the volunteer proudly offered, “Fifty degrees year round. That breeze you feel is shifts in air pressure.”
He led them around the puddles, Louisa still fitted to Cathryn’s side.
The volunteer spoke as if the mine were one big house, going on about hallways and rooms. The group was quiet, flames of headlamps winking with each step. There was just enough room to squeeze single file next to the line of small rail cars.
“The ore’s brought out in these here cars.”
The rusted open boxes bulged with huge dents. Everything Isobel could make out was reddish brown, a phalanx of pickaxes and curved truncheons the size of men’s legs were lined up against a tunnel wall of the same bloodlike hue. The whole corridor was in monochrome; even the bulbs cast dull iron light.
At the end of the tunnel, they pulled themselves up a narrow winding staircase to emerge into a vast, unbraced cavern. The man lit a sulfur torch and held it up to the wall so they could see the linear striae of the stone. “Layers of history right here to examine, folks.”
He held out his free fist as if to represent the earth. “The landscape, the earth’s crust, looks secure up above, but below, down here, there’s ceaseless change. You can see it in the stone.”
The women shifted in place, occasionally ducking and covering their hair against swooping bats.
“The greenstone in this region is some of the oldest known in the world. You can see it here among
the veins of ore. That’s a metamorphic rock, altered from lava flows of basalt tens of millions of years ago, before man.”
He traced an oval in the stone. “This stone here… come closer, see these shapes next to the veins? That’s your greenstone. Like eggs trapped in ice.”
He gathered the group into a half-moon, and they took turns touching the stone.
“What I’m gonna show you next is something most people never experience, ’cept maybe the blind.”
He extinguished his torch and licked his thumb and forefinger, chuckling. Without warning he reached out and swiftly pinched out the wicks of their headlamps. One by one they sizzled under his damp squeeze. “Welcome to true darkness.”
His smile was mischievous as he reached up to put out his own flame.
The last Isobel saw was his hands covering his forehead in shadow.
There was a moment of shocked silence as the black engulfed them. One of the women gasped. Isobel reached for Louisa but found only air.
“Hold your hands out in front of yer faces.”
The volunteer’s voice echoed in the cavern. “See? Total blackness. Even babies in the womb have more light. Jonah in the whale had more light.”
The air around Isobel became tangible, wrapping her in seamless velvet. The sounds of breathing and a bat squealing overhead became amplified. The falling of a pebble skipping down a rock slope might have been a boulder.
And then all sound stopped.
Isobel felt she was being absorbed into herself. It was extraordinary, the loss of light. She let herself dissolve. Were the others experiencing the same sense of tranquillity?
“No, no,” someone moaned. “Light the lamps. Please!”
There was a rustle of clothing, the striking of a match, movement as the volunteer lit his torch. The face of the terrified woman was illuminated.
It was Cathryn.
She lunged for the torch. “Give it to me!”
The box of matches was knocked from the man’s hand and the torch fell to a puddle. Blackness again and the smell of phosphorus and cold sweat.
These Granite Islands Page 24
