“I think so. Please prepare some hot broth, for when they are able to take it.”
Already, they were stirring. Sylvanus eventually produced a spiced bouillon, and in another twenty minutes all five were sipping it as steam rose from tea in cups, from wet clothing on racks beside the hearth, and from their hair.
Swathed in a warm robe, Oberon spoke with a catch in his weak voice. “Mary?”
“We haven’t found her, Oberon. Don’t give up hope—she’s probably safe somewhere. Just drink the broth. At least you two idiots are safe.”
“You must have rescued us, Annie. Were we hit?”
“Thomas reckons ground flash. The entire slick surface of that mountain must have been conductive. But you two were darned lucky—only knocked you out, apparently. I’ve been on rescues where people were badly burned or killed by ground shock or direct hits. And I was lucky too—lucky to have brought Grimalkin today, lucky to have the travois along, lucky you’d made it nearly to the trail—hell, lucky to have spotted you at all.”
“Lucky with the travois, or prescient?” Oberon asked.
“Were you expecting bodies?” Mead asked, his first words since “Oh, shit!” on the rocks.
“Well, I almost got ’em, by the looks of you. Or maybe a broken leg? Anyway, I knew I couldn’t carry anyone down by myself. Actually, I had the travois out for a demonstration at the lodge. I came by here afterward so Grimalkin could visit Betsy, and Sylvanus told me you two were missing. Faster to sling the travois and set out from here than load, ride home, and drive.”
“Well, thank the gods,” said Oberon, “and thank you, Annie. I didn’t use the best judgment up there. I should have called the Park. Sorry, James, for getting you into it.”
“It’s okay, we’re down. Is there a search on for Mary?”
“Telephone’s out; no way to reach them,” said Sylvanus. “Maybe in the morning, if we haven’t heard anything, someone can walk out to the rangers.”
“But that will be two nights!” Oberon erupted feebly. “She’d never survive the storm, even if she has lived this long . . . if Attalus hasn’t found her.”
“Do you really think Attalus would harm Mary?” Annie asked.
“Well, he has threatened her. Where is he?”
“Maybe, feeling threatened, she just left,” said Annie, “and will contact us later.”
“Or maybe Attalus kidnapped her,” offered Sylvanus, “just to take her far away and drop her, as the Park Service does with bad bears.”
Oberon did not appreciate their ideas. “I was too damn busy to go with her,” he said.
“Me, too,” said Annie. “She asked me to take her up.”
“And I was away,” said Mead.
Lightning flared outside, and its recent victims jumped. Thunder percussed. The power went out, dowsing the few small lights that had been lit and casting the room into an even deeper gloom. Mead felt a prick of guilt. Hadn’t he urged Mary to go see the butterfly? The others nursed their own guilt as moroseness overcame the little cluster huddled around the fireplace, shoving out the relief of their own rescue. Then the flames sputtered as the door flew open and Carolinus Bagdonitz took its place. “We have a woman,” he said, “and she is hurt.”
Annie rushed to the knot of people at the door. “It’s Mary!” she cried, “and”—she checked to be sure—“she’s alive!”
Mead made the sound a child makes when its parent banishes a nightmare. “Thank God,” he uttered at the same moment Oberon choked out “Thank Pan!”
“Thank CB while you’re at it,” said a young voice from the doorway behind Bagdonitz, but the teacher hushed him with a knuckle in the ribs.
They laid Mary down on the mat in the warm shadows of one of the inglenooks, gently pillowing her battered head. The old hermit, paramedic of the mountain, drew near. With Annie’s assistance, and for the second time, he tenderly and adroitly examined an unconscious Mary Glanville.
“May we come in and get dry, please?” Bagdonitz asked.
“Oh, yes, all of you. I’m sorry! Come in here, get near the fire,” Sylvanus insisted, promising more hospitality than the already crowded fireside could readily deliver. He threw on more wood. As the dripping contingent of the BFC pressed close to the hearth, the steam from so many sopping bodies—not to mention the smoky, sweaty pong of the unwashed trampers—rose into the beams as if the clouds themselves had breached the sanctum.
By now dusk was indiscriminable from tempest, and little light came through the eastern windows. The wind howled like wildebeests wounded in pride. “Carolinus,” Mead called out above it, struggling to be heard. “Sterling, Kate. Hello, everybody.”
“Why, it’s young James!” CB recognized the third recumbent form, if not his partner. As for Mary, he still had her blood on his cheek. “What happened to you, son?”
“A light touch of lightning,” Mead replied.
Kate was beside him in a cricket’s breath, and his head was suddenly in a better place.
“Wow,” said Brian. “Guys got hit by lightning and they aren’t even dead.”
As soon as Oberon saw that Mary was in Thomas’s hands, and Annie’s, and there was nothing he could do for now, he turned and said, “Thank you with all our hearts for bringing Mary to us, sir. Will you please tell us what happened to her?”
“You’re very welcome. We did nothing but show up by luck, and then nothing more than anyone else would have done.”
“Not that they could have,” said Randy.
“Go on.”
“Well, I don’t know how she got to be where she was, but when we came upon your friend up above Peacock Lake, a maniac was about to drop a big rock on her.”
“Attalus!” cried Oberon. “He really meant to kill her after all!”
Annie and Mead looked on, appalled, as Sylvanus shook his head sadly.
Carolinus went on. “I guess we disturbed him, and he dropped the rock.”
“So where is the bastard? Did he get away?”
“Well, not hardly . . .”
“He slipped, and the rock fell on his head,” said Lisa, “and his brains just busted out.” Saying it, she almost repeated her previous performance.
Thomas crossed himself.
“Very gross,” added the member who’d been closest to the scene.
“Anyway, we carried her . . .”
“You carried her,” came a chorus.
“. . . down to the trail and on down to the ranger station. There was only a volunteer on hand, with no power or phone, and she said we’d better come here, where there might be some medical help.”
Oberon, torn between gratitude and rage, uttered a muddle of both. Then he said, “Thomas, how is she?”
“It sounds as if she very nearly died. But she will not, I think.”
Oberon let out a little sound somewhere between a groan and a sob.
“She may have a concussion, but I can’t feel any fracture of her skull or other bones. All her limbs move. She must have X-rays as soon as possible. She is bruised all over, has some cuts and scratches. We’ve dressed the worst, but none seem deep or dangerous. She is not comatose, her pulse and blood pressure are strong. She’s just sleeping deeply, as when she arrived here the first time with you and Attalus.”
Sylvanus continued his diagnosis. “Miss Cloudcroft thinks there was no bodily assault, apart from the blows.” (Rape was not a word he ever could have uttered.) “And no serious exposure, which is remarkable, since she must have been out all night at high altitude without protection. I don’t know how that could be—it nearly froze last night.”
“More luck,” muttered Mead, “or something.”
“Oh, and one more thing,” said Thomas. “Minor, but odd.” They all waited to hear, as he looked around the curious faces. “Mary has a number of small red welts around her body—they look very much like fleabites.”
In the general hubbub at that end of the Great Ha
ll, no one noticed when another two forms slipped in from the farther, darker side, where the glimmer from the flames didn’t reach. Thomas was saying, “Yes, I believe Mary will live, though I can’t say whether this additional blow to her head will have any effect. But now I have a question: Who is this poor sister, whom I have twice examined now in piteous condition?”
“There is some question . . .” Sylvanus suggested.
“Not in her mind,” Mead interjected. “She is—”
“That’s Mary Jordan,” came a voice from the back of the knot. Then another, similar, pitched just a fifth higher, “No, that’s Mary Glanville!”
The first continued, “I recognize her from Yale.” The second followed, “Yeah? Well, I recognize her from the home.”
“Yale?” Mead echoed in perplexity. “Who said that?”
“Hi, Jim. Hi, CB, Annie. We came in a back door, I guess. We’ve just been listening until things calmed down and our eyes got adjusted. Hope nobody minds.”
“Well, I’ll be. Michael, you ol’ son!” Carolinus said, giving Heap a big bear hug.
Annie’s was more of a mountain lion hug. “And who’s this with you?”
“This is my brother, Howard Heap. I sprang him from his digs in the big D for a couple days out in the hills. We stayed in a cabin down at Raymond where we used to go with our mom. We were on our way to Baldpate for a bite when these guys passed us at a hell of a rate and we thought we’d better see what’s up.”
“We were in a hurry,” said Lisa.
“With good reason, it sounds like. Anyway, I’d recognize the Nordic Green Aphid anywhere, even in a hurricane, which it is out there, by the way. We just followed them and blew in in their wake. Playing hero again, huh, CB?”
“But Michael,” James said, “you say you knew Mary at Yale?”
“That’s right. She was a grad student in the Yale Divinity School last time I was back in New Haven, maybe three or four years ago, as a guest lecturer for a course George was team-teaching on Evolution and Other Creation Myths. He asked me to come speak on creationism in the rural West—it’s alive and well out where I live.”
“But how did Mary—” Oberon began to ask.
“Mary was taking the class. She was striking and smart and warm, I thought. We had a good talk at dinner with the Winchesters and her own prof from the D. School before I left. He was pretty cool, too—the university chaplain, an agnostic named Reverend Caskette. It was a memorable evening. Except that her husband, an economist named Max Jordan, was kind of a jerk; he kept belittling her idea for a thesis topic, as I recall.”
“Which was?” asked Annie.
“Well, let’s see if I can remember.” He tugged his long, woolly beard as if it were a gong pull. “Yeah, of course, that’s it! She was interested in Saint Mary Magdalene, and how she became a sexual scapegoat for the church, or something like that. I told her about Maggie May the butterfly and suggested that George could show it to her in the Peabody.”
“Good God,” said James.
“So to speak,” said someone.
“We stayed in touch for a while. I got a postcard from Egypt a couple of years ago . . . and then one from Marseilles. Later I heard from a mutual friend that she was divorced, and casting about for a suitable surname; I never learned what it was. I knew her only as Mary Jordan.”
“Ah—so perhaps that’s why the police found no Mary Glanville after the accident,” said Oberon. “Are you sure this is the woman you’re thinking of?”
Heap regarded the reclining woman again, bending closer to examine her face in the firelight. “This is Mary, all right . . . just as striking as I remember her, even with the bandage.” He shivered, in spite of the fire. “But what the hell is she doing here, and why did someone try to murder her, for Christ’s sake?”
“She came here in our care,” said Oberon, “having escaped from a nursing home in the city. She was kept there after a bad auto accident a year ago. We found her on Loveland Pass—the would-be murderer and I—after she got away.”
“Right!” spoke up the soft-voiced Howard, suddenly excited. “I know about that part! I live in that in-sti-TOO-tion. But I come and go. Mary couldn’t. I got to know her last year.” He cleared his husky smoker’s throat. “She wanted to kill herself. I told her not to—told her what my big brother here tells me, that it doesn’t solve anything. It never works, anyway . . . you always come back.” Howard spoke slowly, carefully, enunciating each word. Eyebrows went up at his hypothesis of circularity. “I was in a car wreck too,” he said, “I know. Anyway, Mary wanted out, so I said, why don’t you just go? And one day, she was gone. I was sad to see her leave, she made that place so much nicer. But she really needed to get out. Boy, did it cause a hassle around the home when she did! HAAA!” Howard roared an odd, hoarse laugh, ending on a falsetto note as he recalled the incident. “So now she’s here. Wow. Wooow. Whoooo!” He spoke for everyone with that final, feral whoop.
“Wow is right,” said Oberon. “Thank you both for filling us in. So now she’s suffered another head injury.”
“Not as bad as that Attalus cat,” said Randy.
“Hush!” said Carolinus.
“So we brought her here, much against Attalus’s will. It seems she may have been bound for here in the first place.”
“Cool!” said Brian.
“Will you please keep your corks in?” CB pleaded.
“Was she interested in the place because of its name?” Michael asked. “That would accord with her studies of Mary Magdalene.”
“More than that,” Annie said, taking up the narration, as Oberon was taxed from the effort. “When Mary arrived here, she believed”—she glanced over at Oberon, who nodded—“she believes that she actually is Mary Magdalene, reincarnated.”
“Really?” asked Michael.
“Really!” said his brother. “I knew that.”
“Heavy duty,” “Weird,” and similar outcries emerged from the kids, whom CB could no more stifle than he could tie down a circus tent in the wind outside.
“Mary has no recollection of being Mary Glanville, except for the name itself. She’s a lot clearer on the other, ancient Mary,” explained Annie. “Oh! I hope her new injury doesn’t make her delusions worse!”
“So who’s to say it’s a delusion, Annie dear?” Michael asked, surprising his friends, who knew him as an unreconstructed rationalist. “I don’t believe in reincarnation as such—can’t imagine any biological mechanism for it. But I do believe in separate realities. My brother Howard here suffered severe frontal-lobe damage from a head-on with a cattle truck. His reality is a little canted away from mine sometimes . . .”
“I’ll say,” said Howard, smiling aslant, one eyebrow up almost to his scar.
“. . . but it is totally true for him, as a psychiatrist friend helped me to see. His mythos about the accident, its prequels and sequels, is every bit as real in his mind as Maggie is in mine. Maybe it’s the same way for Mary.
“Besides,” Michael added, “lots of scholars come to relate so closely to their subjects that they virtually become them. I daresay George Winchester would love to be Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle. Sometimes I think I’m watching the rocks below through Maggie’s eyes. Mary obviously admires the other Mary immensely. So if she has become her—let it be! Lucky woman to be who she wishes to be.”
“And to be alive,” said Thomas, silent through all of this.
“Amen,” said Kate. “That goes for these guys, too.”
Thomas, still a Roman Catholic, asked, “And what of Attalus? Should someone lead me up to him when the storm abates?”
“Absolutely not!” said CB. “Unless you can pull off a Lazarus, you can’t help that sonofabitch. No offense.”
“No offense taken. I’ve heard worse, even up here,” said Thomas.
“Or unless somebody here has more faith than I think they do. Did you guys notice that Jesus has a lightning rod down
there?” Sterling meant that crack to be for his teammates, but just then there was a lull, and everyone heard it. He blushed and sputtered, “Sorry about that.”
“Worse than that, too, has been spoken here, I assure you,” said Thomas. “In fact, that sentiment has been observed before. And I suspect he may need it out there tonight! In any case, when I asked if I should go up to Attalus, I was thinking in terms of administering last rites, ex post facto, and recovering his body.”
“I’m not even sure I could find the spot again,” said CB. “Or”—with a shudder—“that I’d really want to.” The shudder spread and became a collective shiver, whether from contemplating the beastly weather beyond the log walls or from the thought of the dead monk’s sodden body and shattered head running off the rocks above.
Oberon spoke. “I call for a consensus.”
“But, Oberon,” Sylvanus objected. “There are just the two of us here!”
“Then it should be easy, shouldn’t it? I propose that Attalus be left to rot among the rocks and the ravens. Since he was both a Christian and a pantheist, that is the worst curse and the best blessing I can contrive for him. Let his body return to nature like all the rest and his tortured madness dissipate onto the pure mountain air. That should be last rites enough for anyone.”
“So be it,” said Sylvanus. “It seems both the loving and the just thing to do.”
Thomas held his peace, and no one dared make any cracks at all. At least not for the minute of silence that no one called for but everyone observed. And then someone from the circus spoke, borrowing a line from every B movie with a body to account for:
“And the authorities?”
“For now,” said Oberon, “the only authorities concerned are the rockslide rodents whose territories his corpse pollutes. Let them deal with the formalities as they see fit.”
“Nicely spoken, Oberon,” said Annie, “and I agree that the question is irksome—but it’s relevant too. Surely the law—”
“Look—” Oberon interrupted. “Does anyone here want to drag Mary into court to relive her ordeal? Do any of you witnesses want to try to explain all this to an inquest?” For once, all three rings were still, along with the ringmaster and everyone else. “The crime is redressed. After a while, I’ll notify the archdiocese that Attalus has left us over irreconcilable differences of procedure. He has no family, and no one else to worry about it.”
Magdalena Mountain Page 33
