by Robert Levy
Jason emerged from the woods between Maureen’s house and her studio. And there she was, hanging laundry on the clothesline, linen tablecloths and wrinkled old napkins trembling on the line like stripped bark. He thought of the desiccated meat inside the circle of stones.
“Out for a run?” Maureen said as he approached.
“Yes. Well, an impromptu one.” He gestured to his khakis, sweated through at the knees. “I didn’t think to pack workout clothes.”
“I’m sure we can manage to rustle up whatever you need. Free of charge.”
“Thanks. Hey, I didn’t know you were back from Halifax.”
“We’re only here for a brief stay, unfortunately. I would have come found you but things have been so hectic. Donald hasn’t been doing so well lately. He hasn’t been the same since—well, since that night.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Jason had figured as much, what with all the appointments. “Is there anything I can do?”
“I think I should be asking you that instead, no?”
“We’ll call it a draw.” He looked over his shoulder and back at the trees, and felt that familiar and uneasy sensation of being watched from the woods. The sound of skittering through dry leaves, of pencil on paper.
Maureen placed down the plastic laundry basket and wiped her forehead. “Tell me, how is your canvass going? Find out anything?”
“Heard a few things. Some of them pretty strange, actually. As in, Body Snatchers strange.”
“You didn’t happen to speak to Fred Cronin, did you?”
“Indeed. He told us something about people living under the ground. Ultraterrestrials?”
She laughed. “Is that what he’s calling them this week?”
“What’s his story, anyway?”
“Oh, Fred’s always been something of a character. Even as a young man, he had that lone gunman bit down to an art form. But he really does believe in all that stuff.”
“I can tell.”
“It’s of a certain time, I suppose. He’s full of it, like a lot of the folks that have moved here over the years. Free thinkers that sometimes think too freely. It’s all devils and fairies to that lot.”
“Fairies . . . I’ve been hearing that word a lot lately.”
“There’s a ton of fairy talk around here. Done in private, mostly. Honestly, I never would’ve thought in a million years Donald would be a believer, but even he is. Surprising, for a scientist. But it was passed down to him in early childhood.”
“So he’s basically in Fred’s camp, then.”
“Well, funnily enough, Donald first came up here to debunk some of the more bizarre theories about the cove. That it held special power, contained a vortex of spiritual energy, like Stonehenge or down in Sedona, ley lines or what have you. We do have a great vibe going, I can tell you that—this is the only place I truly feel creative, for one thing. Is Starling Cove a magical place? I suppose. But who can say for certain?”
“So you don’t think there are otherworldly creatures inhabiting these woods.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t go around talking about it. That’s how you land up in the funny farm. Others, of course, have no such concerns.” Her face was still, tightening for a moment before her expression slackened and she smiled. “Start asking enough people in these parts what they really think and you’ll be waist-deep in baloney by dinnertime. There are some folks in the Highlands who think the CIA has a secret underground station out here. No kidding. They would blame a seasonal flu on the U.S. government if they could get away with it. This lady who sells native jewelry, down at the docks in Ingonish? She goes around telling anyone that’ll listen that the mussel factory in St. Ann’s Harbour is a front for a military experiment in psychotropics. She’s not alone in that one either.”
Jason had forgotten how reassuring it was speaking with someone who shared his skepticism. “I try to be a patient listener,” he said. “It is my profession, after all. But sometimes it does become difficult.”
“I hear you. Donald’s always liked to talk nonsense about the cove. Mostly that’s how he passes the day, though not so much as of late. He may not be from these parts, but he once knew as much about the Highlands as any local historian. There was a time when the mere mention of the name William MacLeod was enough for him to chew your ear off.”
“William MacLeod? You mean the man who built the house we’re staying in?”
She nodded. “Donald used to collect all these wonderful old MacLeod artifacts. Maps, legends, you name it. I cleared out the attic last year and donated it all to the Gaelic College. Technically the MacLeod House is our guest house, but it’s far older than ours, at least the back half. The night MacLeod finished building it for his daughter and her family, or so the story goes, he banged his last nail into the wall, put his hammer down, and set fire to the place. Then he walked out into the woods, never to be seen again.”
“That seems to happen quite a lot around here.”
“Don’t people ever go missing in New York?” She sounded perplexed, and maybe a little offended. “Anyway, that was almost two hundred years ago. It’s a legend, which is pretty much code for claptrap. But hey, who knows? Maybe it is true.” Maureen stared across the lawn at the trees. “Like I told you a couple of weeks ago, these are some strange woods.”
“Did you?” Jason thought for a moment, listening to the wind in the leaves, the snap of a pair of faded brown corduroys on the clothesline.
She looked down at the ground, the laundry basket. “Oh. No. I suppose not. I mean, I did say that, only not to you. I must have said that to someone else. Some time before . . .” She shook her head. “Anyway, I would hardly think to mention it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but what do you think people do up here all winter? They drink, my dear. Been doing it since the Scottish landed, and long before that, I’d wager. And what most of them do in the winter, half do in the summertime as well. So if what they say about MacLeod going off into the woods is true, believe me, he had a bottle in his hand as he went.”
She stared past him, over his shoulder; it was a gesture of pure obfuscation. Dig deep, get inside a few heads, he heard Dream Blue say. If you’re ready to hear the truth.
“Blue was born here,” he said. “Did you know that?”
“He was?” She said it somewhere between a question and statement, and began fussing with the laundry basket, her fingernails, anything to avoid Jason’s eyes.
“Yes. His real name is Michael. Michael Whitley.”
“I—I knew that . . . He booked the house under that name. It’s been in the papers as well.”
“But that’s not the only reason you know it.”
She froze. Jason put a gentle hand on her arm; outside the confines of his practice, he was free to make physical contact to facilitate intimacy. There were no firm rules of ethics here, professional or otherwise.
“Maureen,” he said, and all of a sudden he understood. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew he was one of the children who’d gone missing in the cove.”
“Yes.” Her head wobbled, and steadily gyroscoped into a sort of nod. “Oh yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell us that? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I suppose I didn’t want it to actually be him, back after all that time. I thought he’d gotten away.”
“Away from what?”
She allowed herself a faint smile. “Come inside the house. I’ll make us some coffee. Or something stronger if you’re interested.”
They went in through the back. Halfway down the hall abutting the living room, she stopped to peer inside an open bedroom door. Donald was seated on the edge of the bed in only a pair of white briefs, his aged skin spotted and wrinkled; he was hunched over a book, its purple cover cracked along the spine.
“The first volume, gone,” Donald muttered into the pages. “It’s gone.”
“We’ll find it, darling,” Maureen said wearily, pulling the door halfway closed.
Jason av
erted his eyes and followed her into the kitchen. They sat at a small table, its surface bare but for a green ceramic napkin holder and matching salt and pepper shakers, the table’s yellow leaves folded down like a wilted tulip. She poured them two mugs of coffee, and spiked hers with whisky; she tilted the bottle in his direction but he declined.
“I should have said something,” Maureen said after a while. She scrutinized the inside of her mug, a tea leaf reader searching for a sign. “To Michael, most of all. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I could tell he didn’t know anything about what had happened to him, and the thought that he was going to start digging around and unearth what’s best left buried . . . I couldn’t stand it. Especially since I was close with his mother, back in the day.”
“Yvonne,” he said.
“Yes. How is she holding up?”
“Not well.”
“I’d imagine not.” A bird cawed stridently from behind the house; the cry of a hawk, maybe, as it circumnavigated the cove. Maureen sipped from her mug, and it was a long time before she spoke again. Which was fine; Jason knew well the distilling power of silence. If need be, he could wait all day.
“So, yes,” she eventually said, as if she’d caught her breath, though her voice had a fresh undercurrent of defensiveness. “I pretended that he was just another tourist on a summer getaway. He didn’t exactly volunteer what you all were doing up here, that he’d come to sell his grandma’s house. But I knew. I figured the second I got the inquiry about the rental that he must be coming to settle some business of Flora’s. So I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t want to stir up what had happened to him as a boy in the woods.”
She looked at him funny. “The woods?”
“What happened when he went missing.”
“Well, sure. But really because of what happened after that.”
Jason shifted in his chair, puzzled. Maureen sighed and rested her hands on the scratched wood of the tabletop. “I wanted to protect him from Flora.”
“From his grandmother? But why?”
“She was a troubled woman. Very troubled. Even before the kids went missing. She could never get a handle on her daughter, who was truly wild before she had Michael, just wild. Yvonne and Flora weren’t on speaking terms, what with Flora being very old-time religious and Yvonne being your average hippie girl. But then she got knocked up, and they softened to each other. When Yvonne would go on one of her magic mushroom trips—quite frequently, I might add—she made sure to drop the baby off with Flora for the night. Sometimes for up to a week, or more. I’d say Michael lived at Flora’s place as much as at the Colony.”
“So you knew Blue, before. Back when he was Michael.”
“He was a lovely little boy,” she said quietly. “We were crushed when he went missing. It was like someone had cut a knife right through the heart of the cove. It was probably the first and last time the Colony felt any kind of real love from the surrounding community. But then the kids came back, thank God. To be honest, most people didn’t look too closely at what had happened, me included. We were just happy they were safe and sound.”
The enduring trauma was plain in Maureen’s expression, her gray eyes so clouded that Jason reflexively glanced out the window at the fog milking over the cove. “Did the children say what had happened, where they’d been?” He asked the question in a near whisper, and she leaned in closer to hear.
“All they said was that they got lost. Didn’t say if anyone took them, or what they’d been eating for two weeks, nothing.”
“Was it true they came back naked?”
“There were rumors. No one really knew for sure, except Flora.”
“Why her?”
“She was the one who found them. Flora was baby-sitting for Michael and the girl, Gavina, who was the daughter of another Colony girl. The kids disappeared off Flora’s property, and came back to the exact same spot where she last saw them, like homing pigeons. Or so she said.”
“You didn’t believe her.”
“I did at the time. But then she and Yvonne started fighting over Michael. One time not too long after the kids came back, Flora had him over at her place for a visit but wouldn’t let Yvonne back inside to get him. His mama had a couple of the Colony boys kick Flora’s door in. When they broke into her basement, they found him locked inside a cage hanging from the ceiling.”
“Jesus.” Had Blue’s visit to the house that day set him off? So much so that he hit the road to parts unknown? And he convinced Elisa to go along for the ride . . . It did fit the police’s scenario, as well as the property agent’s account. “And that’s when Yvonne took off with Blue?”
“No. That’s when the custody battle started. On one side was Flora MacKenzie, an upstanding member of the community, and on the other her drugged-out, good-for-nothing daughter. That was the narrative, at least. Who would entertain the thought that this woman kept her grandson locked in a cage? It sounded preposterous! So at this point, the legal fight between Flora and Yvonne became a battle between the community and the Colony. In-fighting started dividing us. And then in the middle of all that tension, the Colony went up in smoke. Literally.”
“Sounds like it might have been arson.”
She peered in the direction of the darkened hallway. “No one knows exactly what went down. Lord knows there was enough conjecture. What else is new, right? The fact is it happened in the middle of the night, and no one saw anything. Fortunately we all got out, but with not much more than the shirts on our backs. We camped for a while, but as it got colder people started looking for real shelter, and real work. So began the Colony’s diaspora days. Eventually we got absorbed into the greater population. We’re all really lost souls at heart, and a lot of us just kind of stuck around, trying to feel the old magic again. Since the fire, none of us have really been connected in the same way.”
Maureen waved her hand as if shooing an invisible fly. “But that’s all ancient history. Look at me, chewing your ear off! I must sound like my husband.” She dropped the last word to a whisper.
“I love listening to you talk,” Jason said. It came out sounding more flirtatious than he intended. “Like I said, this is what I do for a living.”
Her loneliness was written across her face. “What was I . . .”
“You were telling me about the Colony. We were up there our first week, actually. We ran into Donald out back.”
“He spends a lot of time there.” She spiked her coffee once more and took a quick slug. “Lots of memories. Some good, others . . . not so much.”
“That place is something. The murals of the animals, and angels and demons . . .”
“That was all Gavina Beaton’s stuff. She was the most precocious artist I’ve ever seen. She did all that work before she turned six.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“That’s when we really started getting worried about what had happened in the woods. Before they went missing, Gavina used to be Miss Congeniality. Always doing a little dance, putting on a performance. Girlie little showoff. But after, she was changed. She wouldn’t talk to anyone, wouldn’t look you in the eye, wouldn’t so much as go out on the porch unless Michael was by her side. It was like she’d become a deaf-mute, though I guess now you’d say autistic? That was when she started the paintings. She would sit inside all day and cover one wall after the next. All those crazy scenes, violent and sexual. It was like she’d suddenly aged a thousand years.”
“And what about Blue?”
“He had always been shy. The timid type. In his case it was much harder to tell how he’d been affected. Flora, though, she was sure he was different when he came back. Real different. She had her old-world beliefs about good and evil, the kind that are near impossible to rid yourself of, once they’re entrenched. She convinced herself that her grandson was an imposter. That he was evil.”
“Did she think that he was—was what, possessed by the Devil?”
“Nothing that Ca
tholic, no.” She took a long sip from her mug and stared out the window. “She thought he was a changeling.”
“Like a fairy in disguise?” He vaguely remembered the term from Fred Cronin’s newsletters.
“Fairies are said to swap out human children for their own kind, yeah? So changelings were an old-country way to explain problem children. Deformed ones, the mentally handicapped, crib deaths, even. People can reason anything away, can’t they?”
“It’s certainly easier than facing the truth.”
Blue and Elisa in bed together, sweat and semen and saliva.
The shrill cry of Elisa’s cellphone on her nightstand, the chipper voice of the doctor’s receptionist.
Just make sure Mrs. Howard gets back to us.
Jason winced. “It’s no wonder the boy seemed different,” he said. “He’d been lost in the woods for two weeks and was traumatized by the ordeal. Why would his grandmother feel the need to create an entire fantasy around it?”
“Can’t say. But if you knew Flora, you’d know she wouldn’t let it be.”
“I don’t understand. If she thought her grandson had been replaced by an imposter, why in the world was she trying to get custody?”
Maureen leaned in, close enough to kiss. “She felt she had need of him. Flora was first generation, her folks over from Scotland. Fairy wisdom was ingrained in her belief system. According to legend, the only way to get back a child stolen by fairies is to trade back the changeling for the real child. Some lore says even worse than that. That you have to kill the imposter in order to make it right.”
She sat back in her chair. “Faith and family, they both make you do crazy things. Combine the two, and you’re in some really twisted territory. Yvonne was worried. Really worried. And then Gavina died. So she ran.”
“What happened to Gavina?”
“She drowned. Not too long after the fire at the Colony. At that point she was living with her family in a trailer parked at the beach, just down the road. Her poor mother only ran up the hill to use the telephone, left the girl by the water with her big brother. But he wandered off. I think that’s why Daniel eventually went into law enforcement. It was his way of dealing with the guilt over his sister. He had a hard life before he found the Mounties, got into a lot of scrapes. Became something of a vandal as a teenager, if I recall. I suppose that’s often the case, though. Cops and robbers, flip sides of the same coin.” She drained her coffee and set down the mug.
