She Stopped for Death

by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

  When she stood, her hair brushed the ceiling on one side where the ceiling sloped. The door at the end of the room was full height, and locked.

  She knocked and waited. She knocked harder. She threw her body at the door. It didn’t give and her shoulder hurt more than it had already.

  She put her ear to the wood. There was no sound beyond the hum that came from everywhere. She listened harder. She listened with all her being and heard the faintest sound, though not of a voice. It was music. What she heard was a sonata. Chopin.

  She knocked louder, pounded, and then yelled until her lungs hurt and the yelling brought on pain, so she had to stop, swallow hard, and sit with her back to the door, tears finally rolling down her face as she remembered sinking into black water, remembered vines twining around her legs. And she remembered a snake, at least something long and undulating, brushing past her face.

  Then a branch had poked at her. She remembered grabbing on and seeming to fly out of the water to lie again in that circle of dead flowers, until something hit her hard on the back of her head.

  * * *

  “Have you tried calling Zoe?” Dora asked the next morning. “Why won’t she answer? She’d have her phone with her, no matter where she’s gone.”

  “Maybe it’s dead. She might have forgotten to charge it, that’s what makes me think she’s somewhere where she’s too busy for phone calls. Probably New York, after all.”

  “And took Fida with her?”

  “People do take dogs on trips with them.”

  “On an airplane?” Dora shook her head.

  “Her car’s gone, remember? She drove.”

  “I don’t believe she’d go away without telling us,” Dora said, yawning. “I’m going to lie down for a while. That woman pulled me everywhere yesterday—one place and then another. She’s going to be the death of me yet. I wish Zoe were here.”

  “Emily’s making her own dress. She ordered needles and pins and thread last time Zoe went shopping for her. Don’t let Abigail talk you into anything.”

  Dora turned in the doorway. “But Lord save us from a repeat of her hoochie-coochie dress.”

  By afternoon, Jenny was on her way to the post office. The last alimony check was late, and she wanted to put a trace on it. If it happened one more time, she swore, she would get a hold of Ronald herself and demand he pay on time or she was going to petition the court to have her check sent to them and they would send it to her. That would do it. Ronald was afraid of anything with muscle behind it.

  She had enough money in her account to go shopping. She wanted something new for Emily’s reading.

  It was at the bank that her phone rang, and she grabbed it out of her purse and hit the button.

  “Where the heck have you been?” she demanded before checking caller ID.

  * * *

  Zoe stopped caring about time. She was hungry, and she was thirsty, and she couldn’t tell which one was worse. She slept a lot. Like Fida, she told herself, who always slept if nothing exciting was going on.

  Now Zoe was sleeping for the same reason.

  The only thing of any use in the slope-ceilinged room was the wide-mouth jar. At least she wasn’t peeing on the floor, but that probably wouldn’t be a problem. With nothing going into her body, nothing was coming out. At least peeing gave her something to think about—how to squat properly. She smelled bad already. She could hardly stand her own stink.

  When she was awake, she worked on the Emily Dickinson book in her head, editing and writing the ending, then committing it all to memory. And she hummed to herself. She sang every song she could remember: a lot of the Beatles. “Eleanor Rigby” got stuck up there for a couple of hours. Then she’d sing as many hymns as she could remember from childhood church on Sundays, then marched around her space, bent over, to “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

  Once in a while, the sound of the radio came through the floorboards again. When the music went off later, she figured it must be night. When the music came back on it had to be morning. In that way, she figured out she’d been there two full days.

  Her head wasn’t hurting the way it had at first, but from time to time shooting pains went across her forehead. Her stomach had stopped rumbling. She thought about all the people across the world who were on cleanses and starvation diets. If they could make it, so could she.

  Her main concern was: Make it for how long?

  She ran her hands along the walls and thought maybe she was in a box room, where Victorians kept their trunks and suitcases for long ocean voyages. Or maybe—since this had been a farm family—just an unfinished space in the attic.

  There wasn’t the smell of mold around her. Dust—plenty of dust, which made her sneeze from time to time. But at least it wasn’t a basement room, which Zoe shuddered to think about in this old house.

  The worst thing about her situation was not knowing how long Emily would hold her. And why she had been put here to begin with. That was her biggest worry.

  And the thirst. That was getting so bad she tried licking her arm to see if she had spit left.

  She sank into the boredom of silence, tapping rhythmically with one finger: one and two and three . . .

  Seconds ticked by. Then, after what she thought was an hour, she’d picture the number of the hour in her head and try to hold on to it. But after she fell asleep she had to start all over when she woke up—leading nowhere and to nothing.

  When she thought of food now, the thought made her sick. The thought of water made her sad.

  When she was awake, she tapped.

  At one point she crawled back to the door. She was going to become a nuisance. Even if it cost her everything.

  She tapped a simple tap tap tap then stopped to listen. Maybe Emily had forgotten she was up here. In all the scrambling toward her grand occasion, only a few days away if Zoe figured right, maybe it had slipped her mind that Zoe was in her attic.

  The thought made Zoe happy. Only a slip of the mind. She liked the sound of the word—slipped. If she kept tapping, Emily would hear and come running to let her out.

  She tapped and tapped until she made up a song to go with the taps. She tapped and sang until she fell back to sleep.

  Later, when she wasn’t certain if she was awake or asleep, the tapping still went on, though her own hands were buried beneath her head, where she lay on the floor.

  It was in the room with her. Could be she was going crazy. There’d been nothing there before. No sound but hers.

  She listened hard. She held her breath and went on listening.

  “Are you there?” said a soft voice that came from everywhere.

  “Yes,” Zoe answered, then scurried around the walls, saying “yes” again and again.

  “I’m at the inside wall. Not the wall under the sloped ceiling, but the long wall.” The voice was a whisper.

  Zoe laid both hands on the inner wall, trying to feel what could be beyond there. Not only “what,” but “who.”

  “Feel down near the bottom. Run your hand along the base of the wall slowly. I have something for you.”

  Zoe did as she was told. Carefully, she ran her fingers along the floor, where it met the wall, until her fingers touched something that hadn’t been there before. A cup. She stuck her finger in the cup. It came out wet.

  Someone had pushed a cup of water through a hole in the wall.

  “Emily?” Zoe said the name softly.

  “Yes,” the whisperer answered. “Yes, it’s me.”

  Zoe drank and wondered if she really held a cup in her hands or if this was a grotesque dream. Maybe a dying dream. She finished drinking and wiped the cup with her finger to get the last of the water. The cup in her hands was real. She held it, felt it, and then settled down to hold the cup delicately in her lap for hours.

  * * *

  “Zoe? Zoe? Is this you?” Jenny hung on to the phone, wishing hard.

  “I’m sorry? Is this Jenny Weston?” The voice on the line was hesitant.r />
  Jenny realized she’d made a mistake. The woman’s voice sounded nothing like Zoe’s.

  “Yes, I’m Jenny Weston. I thought you were someone else.” She hurried out of the bank to her car.

  “I’m Constance Proust. It seems you’ve been leaving me a message every half hour or so.” Her voice was cool.

  “Oh, Miss Proust. I’m so happy to hear from you. I’ve been calling about . . . well, about the time you worked at the Traverse City State Hospital.”

  “Really?” There was almost humor in her voice. “I suppose you’re a writer. A historian. And you want me to give you a lot of salacious detail about my time there.”

  “No, it . . .”

  “I’ll tell you right now, I’m not interested. Those people there were my friends. When they closed the hospital, I worried about many of them. It wasn’t an easy life, you know. Some still needed some form of structure, but the state abandoned them. That’s all I can tell you. Abandoned them.”

  “You don’t understand. I need to talk to you about Myrtle Lambert. She says she was a patient there.”

  Constance Proust said nothing for a while. “Myrtle’s one of the patients I’m proudest of. She’s got her own restaurant in Bear Falls. Very successful. You won’t be getting a bad word out of me about her.”

  “That’s not it.” Jenny was afraid she was losing her, and fast. “Please call Myrtle, if you don’t believe me, but she’s the one who gave me your name. I live in Bear Falls. We have a problem here and . . .”

  “I’ll call Myrtle. If she says I can talk to you, I’ll call you back. If you don’t hear from me, please don’t call this number again.”

  Jenny heard Constance hang up and felt as if she was slipping off the edge of a cliff. Who else was there to turn to for the information? No public records. No one else she knew that had been in the hospital with Myrtle and Lorna. And if she could find someone, she wouldn’t contact them. She could only imagine how anyone would feel, being asked about another patient after all these years, when maybe they’d put the hospital behind them.

  Oh, where was Zoe when she needed her? Jenny moaned as she drove home.

  Jenny didn’t leave the house all day. She waited for Constance Proust to call back.

  She sneaked in another call to Zoe, but the phone rang and rang.

  She got the sinking suspicion that Myrtle had said no, that Jenny had no right calling anybody about her.

  It was almost six o’clock. Dora came in with a bag of groceries, set the bag on the table, and declared that she was still worn out and dinner would be canned soup.

  “Zoe call?” she asked, then shook her head when Jenny said no. “I think we’d better get over there and at least leave a note on her door. This isn’t like her. She’s not the kind to make people worry. At least not her friends.”

  Jenny was about to agree when her phone rang.

  “Jenny Weston?” the woman’s voice demanded. “This is Constance Proust. I spoke to Myrtle. She says you’re as good as anybody to talk to.”

  “Yes,” Jenny hurried to nail her down. “It’s about Emily—or maybe Lorna—Sutton, a patient Myrtle says she knew.”

  “I won’t talk to you over the phone about anything having to do with a patient. I don’t know if you are recording this or not.”

  “Believe me . . .”

  “Well, I won’t,” Constance said. “I will meet you at the hospital tomorrow. I have to go to Traverse in the afternoon. Two o’clock would be fine.”

  She went on to describe where they should meet, in the building where she used to work, and how to get to there. And then she lowered her voice and asked what kind of car Jenny drove.

  “Please park in front of the building I described. We’ll talk there. And Jenny,” she said before hanging up, “if the woman that you want to know about is the one I remember . . . I can tell you plenty.”

  Chapter 29

  “I’ll knock,” Jenny said, going up the front steps of Zoe’s house.

  “Yes, you do that, dear. I’ll look in the window, see what I can see.”

  Jenny pushed the bell.

  The response inside the house was immediate. A high, hysterical barking. Jenny’s mouth dropped. Dora’s eyes grew wide. They ran to the window, cupping their eyes to see into the living room. At first they only heard Fida, and then her panicked face was on the other side of the glass. She stood on the back of Zoe’s sofa, running back and forth, then reaching out with her paws to touch the window, falling off the sofa, only to climb back up and bark frantically at the familiar faces.

  They called Ed Warner. He was there in three minutes. He had the door open and stood out of the way as Fida raced out to jump on Dora, then Jenny, then Dora, then Jenny, and then even on Ed. Her happiness was unbound. Jenny gathered her into her arms and endured face licking and ear biting while Ed Warner went inside to look around.

  “Better stay out there,” he turned to warn Dora, who was on his heels. “The dog’s been in here a while. It stinks.”

  His smile, when he came back to the porch, was priceless.

  “Nothing,” he said. “She’s not in there. But man oh man, that little dog’s left her mark.”

  Ed called one of his deputies to get right over there.

  Someone told someone they’d seen two police cars at the Zola house, and the word spread fast through town. Abigail was the first to arrive, offering any help she could give. Minnie Moon was there. Neighbors gathered on the sidewalk to watch and ask worried questions about their friend, Zoe Zola.

  Tony Ralenti pulled his truck in front of the house, then ran up the grass, only to be turned away by Deputy Nash. He stepped back and yelled out Jenny’s name.

  She went running down the front steps to hold on to him, then tell him that Zoe was gone. Just gone.

  “She’d never leave Fida alone.” Jenny talked fast. “I’ve got to get back inside. They’re checking fingerprints and want me and Mom to point out anything that looks wrong.”

  “I’ll wait in my truck.”

  “Mom’s in the house now calling Christopher Morley. We found the number in Zoe’s office.”

  “That’s her agent, right?”

  She nodded. “He invited her to go to New York. Paid for the tickets. But it wasn’t for a week or so, I thought.”

  By the time Jenny got back inside Zoe’s house, Dora was hitting the button on her cell, hanging up.

  She looked from Jenny to Ed and shook her head. “Christopher said the trip isn’t until the week after next. She’s not in New York, as far as he knows.”

  Jenny looked down into Fida’s worried face.

  “I told him Zoe’s missing. He’s very upset. Wants to get on the next plane and come out here to help search for her.”

  “Not yet,” Ed broke in. “There’ll be plenty of us out looking. Hope you told him to wait until he heard from us.”

  Dora nodded. “I did, but I’m not sure that alone will keep the man away.”

  The crowd, gathering out on the lawn, grew. Cassandra heard and rushed over, as did the other cashiers from Draper’s. Demeter and Delaware came over for a moment, but Delaware was on her way to the restaurant, and Demeter had to go shopping for Myrtle, who was out of vanilla extract and distressed about it.

  People from the stores along Oak Street showed up. Everyone postulated places Zoe might have gone. They talked about her poor dog. They mentioned strangers they’d seen in the neighborhood and guessed where she might have been taken.

  Ed called Detective Minty and waited fifteen minutes for Minty to call back. Minty thought nobody should push the panic button, not yet. “Maybe she went off to think. Don’t writers do that?” he asked.

  “Not without her dog,” Ed said.

  “Her car is gone. Let’s get neighboring departments to start checking the roadsides.”

  Ed gave him the make, model, and color to look for and hung up. Minty would get the license plate number.

  Abigail raised a hand to put in
her two cents. “Isn’t Zoe still shopping for Emily? If you ask me, Emily might have been one of the last people to see her.”

  Tony offered to go to Emily’s and ask when she’d last seen Zoe.

  Ed said he’d send a deputy, then remembered Deputy Swenson was over at the high school. There’d been a fight at an early football practice.

  “Go,” he said to Tony and Jenny. “See if she’ll answer her door. It’s pretty late. If she does, just ask if she’s seen Zoe. Don’t enter the house or go anywhere else on the grounds. If you think there’s cause for worry—that Zoe might be there, or might have wandered out in the swamp—I’ll take it from there. As a citizen, you know you can’t force your way in anywhere.”

  “Let’s go.” Jenny reached for Tony’s arm.

  * * *

  The jar in the room was full, which gave Zoe something to worry about. It was almost a relief to have something to obsess over. Thinking about nothing but dying in this place was getting dull.

  She sat with her back to the wall, picking at her fingernails and waiting for Emily to come back to the other side of the wall. Back to that place where food and water were being pushed through to her. A rat hole between the rooms; a half circle chiseled through the drywall from the other side.

  It was a ritual now, to wait for the knock. She would crawl to the hole. If it was daylight, and sunny outside, there’d be enough light through the hole to guide her so she didn’t have to feel along the wall.

  When Zoe sat in front of the hole, her hands out to take the food and water, she would say, “I’m here,” and a cup of water and a sandwich or a pack of vegetables would come through, and Zoe would grab them both up and drink and eat as fast as she could.

  From time to time, she tried talking to Emily. She told her she should be getting home soon. Fida was alone. She tried to laugh. “You know how dogs can be. She’s going to be pooping everywhere. And she’s probably hungry . . .”

  That’s as far as Zoe got. The thought of Fida alone and waiting broke her heart. If there were only a way to get a message out to somebody.