The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

  She flung her dripping body into the car, slammed the door. I braced myself for the storm I could see coming in her face. She turned to me, wet with tears and rain, her breathing hard and shallow, like water tumbling over rocks.

  “I have to know. You have to tell me.” Her voice was rough and hopeless. “Did you mean to kill Dad?” Her blue eyes pierced me, held me as if I were a butterfly pinned in a specimen case.

  “Oh, Gracie, no. Oh, honey … of course I didn’t mean to kill your father!” The simple words couldn’t exonerate me in my own mind, but when I reached for her, she collapsed against me, spent. Sobs racked her thin body, and I held her close until they stopped.

  I’d forgotten about the letter, until after the grave site, after all the tears and hugs and Marisol’s feast at the house that we scarcely touched. Until everyone else was in bed, the girls with my mom in the guest bedroom, Nathan in his room, my dad snoring finally on the couch after keeping vigil with me. I didn’t think I’d ever sleep again. I shook the letter out of its rain-pocked envelope and read the spidery handwriting of an old and frail woman.

  My Dearest Reve,

  I trust Falcon Eddy will bear this message to you. You need to come home. Hawley Five Corners is waiting for you. You’ll be safe there. Don’t be your stubborn self. Find a way. Remember the story of the Fetch. And remember, history often repeats itself.

  Yours in Haste,

  Nan

  My heart slammed in my chest when I read the word Fetch. Of course I remembered that story. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, calm and steady. Crushed the letter in my hand.

  But our home was here. I would stay, and damn Nan’s tangle of stories. This was the real world, with a real killer who would be found. When that happened I would cobble our lives together again. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

  Yet I thought, too, every day from then on, of Nan’s letter, of what she had written. For of all her many stories, it had been the story of the Fetch that sparked nightmares when I was a child. I could still hear her voice beating inside my head, telling it.

  “It was the winter of 1832,” Nan would begin in the dusky light of my nighttime bedroom. She held my hand, and hers was warm and supple, not like a witch’s claw at all. She dressed in practical clothes, jeans and flannel shirts, things her hawks couldn’t ruin. But her thin face was steeped in shadow, her voice pitched to the timeless resonance of fairy tale, so she seemed otherworldly. She told a story better than anyone, and I always thrilled to hear her tell even this story, the one that terrified me so.

  “The snow was deep. Lucius Gowdy could hear the wolves howl just past his fence line. But his family was safe now, he thought. He had cut enough wood to supply the five fireplaces in the house through the harshest winter. They had food stored in the cellar, venison dried to jerky, the good big pig killed in the fall smoked and hanging from a rafter. His wife had canned and pickled and preserved; row upon row of jeweled colors in glass bottles glowed in the shadows. He had moved his family more times than he could count, and he was determined to stay in the big house on the Plainfield flats that seemed to suit them so well. But it was a wraith that forced these frequent moves on him. A wraith that looked exactly like him. Often and often, when he was out mending fences, it would come in and sit down at the table in their other homes, and his wife would set a plate down before it, thinking it was her Lucius.

  “The spirit began to follow him everywhere. When he plowed the fields, it would follow. When he went to hunt, it would appear clambering over rock walls and downed trees to get to him.

  “His wife told him, ‘It’s surely a Fetch, come to take you. We must move, we must confound it.’ For a Fetch was a shadowy figure, a creature made from earth by a wizard, meant to ‘fetch’ a living person to the fairy world. Lucius did not want to go to his grave, or to any fairy world. So they moved and moved. Each time his wife began packing their belongings, the Fetch would appear and cry out, ‘No matter where you go, I’ll find you! For I shall take you to my master after all! He’ll have you yet.’ And it was true: The Fetch always found the Gowdys, until they moved to the Plainfield house. There Lucius had gone through the summer and fall, and now in the midst of the harsh winter, neither he nor his wife or children had seen the dreaded thing.

  “Then one day, the wind howled and the storm raged around them, more fierce than ever. Lucius had banked the fires well that morning, but by midday, the flames were nearly out. It wasn’t like him at all to let the fires die on such a day, so his wife sought him from the top of the house to the bottom. In the cold cellar, she found the Fetch curled on the dirt floor. The thing was shivering, sick and pale, its skin nearly transparent. It scarcely resembled her husband anymore, and it seemed to be fading. Even so, it was full of venom. ‘You’ll not see your husband more in this life,’ it hissed at her. ‘I knew I should have him, and now I’ve taken him away.’

  “ ‘Where have you taken him?’

  “ ‘He is with my master, where no mortal can follow.’

  “But the wife was stubborn, and not exactly mortal. She took a warm cloak and went out into the snow and wind. She saw her husband’s tracks and followed them to where their field met the edge of the wood. There his tracks ended, and the tracks of wolves circled. One drop of bright red besmirched the blinding white of the snow. She thought of her husband, then of her children. She’d left them alone with the Fetch! The thing was weakened from its soul stealing, but might it recover, take another form, seek another soul? One of her children’s, while she had left them unprotected?

  “Her tears froze on her cheeks as she turned and ran through the heavy drifts back to the house, where she found her children safe and warm, the Fetch nowhere to be seen. Lucius Gowdy’s wife hugged their children to her, and cried some, and sat with them around the leaping fire that seemed to be laughing and winking at her. For the fires in every hearth mysteriously blazed hot once more. And the fires burned merrily in every hearth all winter, without even the need for her to add a log. Sometimes, in the dead of night, the woman thought she saw eyes in the flames, watching her, watching her children, watching as she wrote in a book of her own keeping.

  “The woman never saw her husband again. The next spring, they moved from that place, and kept on moving. The one thing she was certain of was that they’d never be entirely safe from the Fetch. For who knew what would satisfy his master?”

  I tried mightily to put Nan’s story of Lucius Gowdy from me. Yet it haunted me, the tale of the Fetch, the stealer of souls. I tried to act like myself in the strange weeks that followed, made the girls go through the motions of regular meals and bedtimes, never let them see me when I wept. But every night I would go to a secret drawer in our bedroom that I’d forbidden Marisol to touch, take up the shirt Jeremy had put in the laundry basket to be washed the night before I shot him. I’d wrap myself in it, press the collar to my face, and breathe his scent in, pretend he was in bed next to me. Wake in the morning and weep silently into the shirt that was empty of my husband, my love. Whose soul had been stolen from me, from himself. And would we ever be entirely safe again? Like the woman in Nan’s story, I just didn’t know.

  5

  I closed the show. Without Jeremy, there was no show. I’d lost my husband and my job in the same instant. I missed Jeremy almost every waking moment, but I missed our show, too. Every evening I missed it like a lost limb. I tried to take stock of my skills, but they weren’t much, without magic. I had enough money to float us all for a while, if I was careful, a little breathing space before I had to find work of some kind. Which was convenient, for I didn’t feel safe out in the open. I felt eyes on me at the grocery store, at the barn, in crowds, and in nearly empty parking lots with the hot sun beating down on me. I cut my trips outside the house down to the absolutely necessary.

  Maybe the girls sensed my terror. Not one of them wanted to return to school. Nathan fell into his old role, staying with us and tutoring them as he had during the happy time
s we were on the road performing. He was far better at it than I was, and I knew it. I cooked with Marisol, and she put up with my poor attempts at cleaning. Nathan kept the girls busy. None of us wanted to leave the house. We wanted only to be together in some listless configuration of a not-quite family.

  Nathan set out jigsaw puzzles on an end of the dining room table, and they became a thread to lead us through the days. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, a Landseer Newfoundland. The Lady of Shalott.

  One day, I stopped in my wanderings to fill in part of John Waterhouse’s Lady. It had been a month and a day since Jeremy’s murder. The strange weather of summer had given way to a dazzling September. There were still no leads on the man I’d come to think of as our Fetch. It was as if he’d never really existed. If it weren’t for the gun and Wesley, he might not have been real; he might have been just an ancient story.

  Caleigh was at the table, plying her string. Fai was reading to her from The Wind in the Willows. Until Jeremy died, Caleigh’s favorite books had been about families. The Five Little Peppers, the Little House books. Now they gathered dust, and she asked for books with only animal characters. No mothers or fathers. The names of her string patterns had changed, too. Now she made “Sleep in the Afternoon” or “Float in the Pool.” The one she made most often was called “Missing Dad.” It had a big gap in the middle.

  I picked up a puzzle piece, a bit of the Lady’s flowing red hair, the color of my own.

  “She left the web, she left the loom, she made three paces through the room. She saw the water lilies bloom … the Lady of Shalott. Tennyson,” Grace piped up behind me. Maybe Nathan was managing to get something besides grief to stick in their heads.

  Fai looked up from her book. “Mom, do you think it’s time for us to leave the web?”

  “But when the Lady left the web, the mirror cracked from side to side and she was cursed.” Caleigh frowned at the string tangled in her fingers. “She died in her stupid boat. Although I’m not sure why.”

  “She couldn’t ever be part of the world. She could only see it in her mirror,” Fai told her, then sighed as if she were the one reflected in the mirror.

  That snagged my heart. I didn’t want my girls to be like the Lady of Shalott. Neither would their father.

  “I think you’re right, Fai. It’s time to leave the web.” It was four o’clock, past the heat of the day, yet with plenty of time till nightfall. “Let’s go to the barn. Then we can have dinner at Teriyaki Madness.”

  Grace whooped and Caleigh leapt up and did a little dance, bumping the table and scattering pieces of the Lady far and wide.

  That day, we all realized there might be life after Jeremy’s death.

  The next morning, Marisol brought a plain manila envelope in with the mail. It had no stamp or return address. It smelled of burning: not cigarette smoke, but sulfurous, like the smoke from an open flame. My nerves leapt wildly as I broke the seal. A sheaf of photos fell into my lap. I opened my lips to cry out, but no sound came. In the photographs, Caleigh carried a water bucket. Grace and Fai cantered their horses in the ring, laughing. Every photograph was of the girls the previous day. And each was scorched by fire. The mirror had cracked, and the curse was upon us.

  The Fetch crept through our lives then, like something unseen but deadly: a poisonous snake, our big bad wolf. He photographed us, myself and the girls, even inside the house. Somewhere out there he must have been lurking in the hills surrounding the house, with a camera, a long lens. Daily, somehow unseen, he’d leave the photos where I would be sure to find them. They were always singed, melting to brown ash at the edges. It was as if he knew my fear of fire, my innermost thoughts. As if he knew me from a past I didn’t want to think of. The police scoured the hills after the photos began appearing. They didn’t find so much as a Twinkie wrapper. Although he left the photos every day, the police found no fingerprints, no stray hair, nothing they could get a DNA sample from.

  I’d kept Nan’s letter, crumpled but whole. I hadn’t answered it. I didn’t want to think about that story. But I had to do something. I called her.

  Nan has always loathed phones. She usually let the voice mail pick up, but this time she answered on the first ring.

  “Nan, I need to come home.”

  “Yes. You do.” I heard the high-pitched keen of a hawk in the background.

  “Have you been to see the Hawley houses?” I asked her. “How much of a wreck are they?”

  She laughed her old lady laugh, like a nail being wrenched out of a board. “The houses just need a little loving care. They have for many years, you know.”

  I did know. “Maybe we should stay with Mom and Dad.”

  “No!” Her voice was fierce. “I’ll give you Carl Streeter’s number. He lives in Hawley Village. Anything you need done, he can see to.”

  So I called Carl Streeter, and he saw to the basics of running water and hiring a roofer and a company to install the fence I wanted. In ten days’ time, the house was ready and we could be bound for Hawley Five Corners. I just had to take care of one more needful thing.

  6

  I scheduled a free memorial performance at the Bijoux in Jeremy’s honor. Most of the magicians on the Strip and many from farther afield signed on to perform. Dan planned the show, assisted by Nathan and Wesley, who’d recovered speedily from his ordeal in an old Westward Ho bathtub.

  We went to the theater early that night. Even so, a line of people snaked around the building. The girls wanted to see the exact spot where their father had died. Of course everything had been cleaned, and there was no trace of blood. But as we approached, Caleigh clung to me, hid her face in my sleeve. I heard Grace’s sharp intake of breath, and Fai stifled a sob. I reached to take their hands, led them to the urns overflowing with white roses at the edge of the stage. We all wore white: white T-shirts, white jeans. No magician’s cape for me that night. I wasn’t performing any trick that would require it.

  We placed white roses where Jeremy had fallen. Dan turned on the mist machine, and wisps of fog crept around our feet as we made our way toward chairs in the wings. Just then three huge displays lit up, and there Jeremy was, larger than life, his elegant, dexterous self, performing all the tricks we loved best. The girls had helped me choose the videos, but we hadn’t seen them writ large, and the girls stopped, stunned, mesmerized by their father, silvery and ghostlike on the screens. At the bottom of each ran the caption “The Maskelyne Mind, 1967–2013.” Jeremy’s stage name. Forty-six years old. The tragedy of it tore at me again, the uselessness.

  “I wish we could stay here forever, watching him,” Fai whispered.

  I hugged her to me. “So do I, honey.”

  “But we have to go,” Grace said fiercely.

  Caleigh said, “Shh! Let’s just watch.”

  The audience filed in, everyone encouraged to take a white rose from more big urns at the entrances. The Bijoux was packed to the rafters that night. We sat in the wings until we went on. Detectives and security guards flanked us, the stage, the exits. I scanned the audience, watched the performers with anxious eyes, searched for clues, but found none. The Fetch had to be there, somewhere. Maybe onstage performing, for all I knew. But all the magicians were good friends, and I just couldn’t believe any one of them would be involved in Jeremy’s murder.

  We watched rope tricks and straitjacket escapes and fake beheadings and flying unicycles, all performed under the displays alight with Jeremy’s smiling face. Grace and Fai were texting, their fingers flying. Each of them had friends in school, and Grace had a sometime boyfriend named Matt, whose parents were in a Cirque show. I had always trusted my girls to make good decisions, but since the Fetch’s haunting, I’d been checking their incoming texts. To my surprise, I found that they texted each other constantly, and almost exclusively. Usually they were right in the same room. I could see they were at it again, texting each other throughout the performance. Caleigh lay across my lap, looping her string, watching her father’s face. />
  When Lance Burton was being hanged and resurrected, Wesley crept up. “Siegfried’s speech next. Then you’re up.” I expected him to creep away again, but he put a bony hand on my shoulder. “It was … you were … better than Devant.” It was Wesley’s highest compliment, I knew, and my eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m more sorry than I can say that I let you down,” he told me. I took his hand. He squeezed mine, and left us.

  Siegfried’s speech moved the audience to tears. I heard sobs as I led the girls to their marks behind the curtain, and talked them through the trick one final time. So I missed most of his ode to Jeremy, his fallen comrade. The story of his life and his death.

  Then Siegfried introduced us, “the magical Maskelyne family,” and the curtain opened to thunderous applause. We all bowed from our platform set high above the stage. When the audience settled, I began, “Just over a month ago, my husband was performing a trick called Defying the Bullets.” I walked down the stairs to the spot Jeremy had died. “This is where he fell.” Some audience members groaned. One man yelled, “I was here!”

  “Many of you were,” I gestured to include them all. “And so was his killer. Someone took my husband from me, and from our children.” I pointed to my girls standing square on their marks, their hair flaming under the lights. “And from all of you.” I strode to the edge of the stage. I snapped my fingers. “Abracadabra. But one of the cardinal rules of magic is that you can’t just make something disappear. You have to bring it back. Now, for my final illusion, on this or any stage.” A scrim was lowered behind me, a gauze curtain that blurred the outlines of the girls, but through which their three shadows could still be seen.