Sister Wolf

by Ann Arensberg

  For some time Marit had felt her pace grow faster. She smiled in the dark to think that revenge had put wings on her heels. Now the darkness began to lift, troubling her vision for a moment, but not her footing. The trees had thinned out, admitting some rays from the moon. In the paler light, she could see that the woods ran downhill. Gravity, not revenge, had quickened her motion.

  The girl up ahead had risen to her feet. She was leaning backward, her chin tucked into her chest, one arm in front of her face to protect her eyes. On such steep terrain she could not control her balance. She stumbled headlong, breaking her fall against one tree, losing her grip and pitching forward against another. She was on a runaway course, unreined, flung from trunk to trunk, playing blindman’s buff with giants in a waking nightmare.

  The girl was hurtling downward. She was losing her. Marit was running with extra care, to save her neck. The downgrade grew sharper, inclining to perpendicular. Marit lengthened her stride; she was still several trees behind her. The girl’s head bobbled as if it were working loose. From her mouth came a high trilling scream, a sound heard sometimes in extremes of pleasure. Her head jiggled and turned, making almost a full rotation. Marit saw her face. It was wizened with fear, old and doomed, screaming words or parts of words, louder and louder on the final plunge, five zigzag falls before Marit could hear that she had cried for help.

  The woods cleared, giving way to a narrow bank. There were no trees here to curb Aimée’s last fall—into Yoke Pond, fed by springs and deep as a mine. Openmouthed and unwarned, she swallowed two lungsful of water. She sank as if she were weighted down with stones.

  Marit heard the splash as she fell. The unexpected sound, as sharp as gunfire, made her remember the rock-bound pool beyond the trees, a pond that she had only seen from the other side, the side that lay within the boundaries of her land. As she moved down toward the bank, she hesitated, waiting to hear more splashing in the water, or coughing, or another cry for help, the sounds of the blind girl flailing on the surface. It was such a little pond, seven strokes at most to swim its entire length, surrounded by rocks that offered a ready handhold.

  At the edge of the clearing she slid on matted leaves, and braced herself against a leaning birch. She saw the water churning into ripples. Wavelets beat against the rocks and drenched the bank. There seemed to be no cause for the disturbance, no shape upon the surface or below. She had lost sight of the girl for no more than ninety seconds. Drowning takes longer, even in deep water. The girl had escaped and climbed out on dry land. She had groped her way up the bank and found her footing. She would blunder into the open where Marit could spot her. Marit would lift her up and take her by the hand, and guide her through the forest back to Meyerling. When they had reached the lawn, she would point her toward the mansion, waiting to see that she did not stray again.

  It was taking the girl too long to show herself. Marit leaned on the birch to brace her trembling limbs. The pond was ebbing into glassy calm. If the girl was safe, she must be very near, near enough to hear Marit’s faulty, ragged breathing, near enough to have sighted Marit’s own position, with the extra senses given to the blind. She was hiding from Marit, or waiting to make a move. Her feelings for her pursuer would not be friendly. She would take her revenge in kind, close in on Marit by inches, and hunt her down.

  All at once the night was filled with warning sounds, a chittering on her right, a thud, like an object falling, from behind. A swish, repeated twice, the sound of a branch or stick swung through the air. She heard a clatter and a hollow plop. A stone rolled over rock into the pond. There was movement at the far side of the water, two young trees swaying when there was no wind.

  Marit felt her scalp rise and her chest grow cold. A dark shape filled the breach between the saplings, looming as she watched, then shrinking out of sight. On feet that felt as soft as dampened putty, she edged away, still clinging to the birch.

  A cloud passed over, blocking out the moon, plunging the forest into sudden darkness. Another light went off, in Marit’s mind. A grouse whirred out of hiding, just uphill. She heard the drumming louder than a siren. She screamed and ran, like running through a quagmire, where every footstep seemed to pull her down.

  When the sun came up in the morning, the surface of the water reflected the first red rays. The pond was empty, except for dragonflies fishing. The grass on the bank had sprung back tall and wavy, erasing the human footprints that had crushed it flat.

  NINE

  DURING THE SUMMER CAMP season, all of Meyerling rises, or is wrenched from sleep, at 6:30 a.m., to the sound of Daisy Fellowes singing “Good Morning, Mr. Yellowbird,” piped at top volume over speakers that were set on every floor and hall. Miss Fellowes had been singing reveille for so many years that it had become a camp tradition, and had given rise to another accepted practice, sabotaging the loudspeakers.

  This Tuesday morning, August 12th, black-haired Miss Muskie climbed on a chair to untie the down parka that she had wrapped around the speaker on the older girls’ hall the night before. One parka had failed; but three would not have done the job. The boys’ wing was still asleep. Conrad, the new swimming instructor, had disconnected the lead wires; he had been told that it would be unsporting if he cut them. Other methods had been tried, under the mistaken notion that plugging up the cloth face of the speakers would lower the volume of Daisy Fellowes’ gravelly voice. Earlier in the season, John had stood on Wyeth’s shoulders, chewing a mouthful of bubble gum, and popped large pink bubbles against the nylon mesh. The episodes of the rubber cement and the Spackle, three years before, had resulted in the firing of a woodworking counselor who was barely older than the boys on his floor. No one knew when Dufton and Fellowes might crack down on the speaker pranks; they seemed to play it entirely by whim.

  Out of forty campers at Meyerling, ten boys were missing at breakfast, not to mention Conrad. Such a striking number of truants concealed the absence of a lone girl camper, a girl who had been late in the mornings in any case, and who complained that at home she always had breakfast in bed. Boys began straggling downstairs, singly or in twos, tripping on their shoelaces, shirttails slopping over their belts in back, looking hangdog and pleased with themselves. Each time a new group arrived, Miss Fellowes walked around all four tables, slapping the tops of heads and counting out loud. After seven headcounts she called the roll. Then she ordered Gabriel to take attendance again to verify her tally.

  Aimée Dupuis was not accounted for. Fellowes ordered Muskie to get her up. Looking as remorseful as if he had been one of the latecomers himself, Henry Dufton announced that the whole camp would be benched for the day and confined to their rooms. The children began growling and buzzing. Mr. Dufton relented, as he always did at the first sign of protest. Miss Fellowes intervened and restated the punishment. Twenty cords of wood had been cut for the winter and lay stacked at the bottom of the meadow near the tennis courts. The campers would take the logs, as much as frail or husky arms could carry at one time, the quarter of a mile from the meadow to the woodshed, until every log was neatly piled inside: “Like busy ants, children, working for the good of the colony!”

  Miss Fellowes was explaining how the pyramids had been built, evoking long files of black Egyptians hauling stones; Wyeth was squashing pieces of bread and stuffing them in his ears; and Nannie was sinking slowly beneath the mahogany horizon of the table when Miss Muskie came back, flapping like a hen, too distressed to take Miss Fellowes aside, and blurted out for all the children to hear that Aimée was missing. Her bed was made up and her toothbrush was dry. Her clothes were in the closet and the drawers. The maids and the cook had not seen her; neither had the groom nor the handyman. The gardener had found a wadded handkerchief near the rhododendrons with the initial “A” worked on one corner. Miss Muskie stretched the handkerchief out in front of her, the way bridal sheets are displayed after a peasant wedding.

  “She was waylaid.” Miss Muskie broke down. “Waylaid and raped!”

  The di
ning room broke into an uproar, composed of one part shock and two parts glee. Those children who did not know what “rape” meant were clued in by those who did. Preston was wrestling Nannie to the floor. She had eclipsed herself under the table and pinched the first flesh she made contact with, Preston’s calf. Several chairs toppled backward. One of them hit Preston, who collapsed over Nannie, pinning her down with his full weight. This looked remarkably like the fate of poor lost Aimée. Miss Muskie began to scream. Mr. Dufton was tapping his water glass with a knife blade. Gabriel cocked his head at Conrad in the direction of the terrace doors. They converged on Miss Muskie from opposite sides of the room. Too late. She had had her say: she had seen a hatted man in the lemon garden, and a bearded youth on one of the floors, who claimed to be a glazier. She had reported both men, but no one had paid attention.

  The cook entered the fray. She would like to know who had stolen her boning knife; moreover, what were those muddy streaks on her clean kitchen floor? And with the price of Scottish oatmeal, she would not take the blame if most of it went to waste.

  John took this as a signal to flip blobs of cereal, stone cold in his bowl, off the end of his spoon. Some fell on the floor; some landed in the hair of his tablemates, who were forced to fight back with milk, eggshells, toast rinds, saltcellars, tea bags, and jam. Six boarding counselors, one of whom was beside herself, were not enough to quell thirty-nine storming children. There would have been seven counselors on hand, but Miss Fellowes had left the scene, pressing her palms to her temples, a flighty gesture that was most unlike her.

  The fire alarm cut through the room, a noise that can paralyze the nervous system. Frozen in place for several moments, the children were docile when Fellowes reappeared and called them into drill formation. In a real fire drill they would have been led down the driveway to the gates. For this diversionary exercise she marched them out to the back lawn, where she left Conrad to run them through an hour of tiring calisthenics.

  No one but Gabriel wanted to call the Sheriff. Mr. Dufton wavered. Miss Muskie was not consulted. She was lying on a cot in the infirmary with a wet tea bag covering each of her swollen eyes. The discussion raged around the issue of Muskie’s credibility. Muskie was both coquettish and fearful, a textbook hysteric. She saw rapists and perverts behind every bush. She wedged a chair under her bedroom door, and set empty bottles on her third-story windowsill which would crash to the floor and alert her in case of a break-in. When she was relieved of after-dinner switchboard duty, the number of breathers, and worse, had dwindled to zero. She hoarded food in her room, which attracted mice.

  This sort of free-for-all character assassination, known in boarding schools—both blind and sighted—as a lemon-squeeze, usually takes place in the presence of the person who is under fire. Gabriel raised his voice and objected that Muskie was not on hand to defend herself. Fellowes remembered that Muskie had allowed Nannie to sleep with the school cat. Gabriel pushed the issue of Aimée’s disappearance front and center. Mr. Dufton appealed to the group. Her family were lovely people, related to the Bourbons. Miss Withus spoke up; she had been there a week, running the arts and crafts program. She believed in attitude probation for girls like Aimée. Aimée’s nightgowns had matching peignoirs. She had brought her own linen sheets. She was insolent in Braille tutorial. She moved her lips during morning meditation. At some point between the nightgowns and the tutorial, Gabriel went to the switchboard in the hallway and dialed Sheriff Stoeber.

  Three people saw Marit’s white convertible Buick parked near the main gates of Meyerling: the Sheriff, answering the emergency call which had come through on his van radio; Gabriel, pacing up and down the road, waiting for the police; and Lola, who was driving to Niles on an errand for Mrs. Gilliam. The white convertible was parked at Yelping Hill overlook, a rest area equipped with a coin-operated telescope. The telescope was out of order, and trees had grown back so high that they blocked the view. If the Buick had been set neatly between the lines painted on the asphalt, it would have attracted no notice. It had been backed in at an angle, across four marked spaces. The top was raised part of the way, with a wide gap between the canvas and the window frame. The door on the driver’s side was ajar. The car looked abandoned.

  Lola was carrying two lengths of silk from a wrong dye lot to return to Sarah Rippey. When she arrived, Rippey’s Yard Goods looked like the scene of a year-end sale. As she pushed her way through the crowd roosting and squawking on the porch, she could see that all the customers were outside. Only Sarah herself was inside the shop, stationed by an open window. Lola put her package on the counter and turned to Sarah, who waved a hand to silence her. Lola went over to the window.

  The center of the commotion seemed to be Eleanor Stoeber. Eleanor had all her teeth in her head and was beaming satisfied smiles, like a person receiving congratulations. Lola wondered what happy news could collect such a swarm, all women except for a few male teenage hangabouts. If Anna Weebs had left the post office unattended, it must be the birth of a grandchild or a transfer for the Sheriff. Anna’s face was grim; but then, she did not have a hopeful temperament. She had an arm around her daughter’s shoulders; Rosie squirmed in her grasp. Everyone was talking at once. Lola’s view was a pool of open mouths and clacking teeth. She made another attempt to lure Sarah back to business. She was leaning toward Sarah to shout her request when one word floated up from the din and hung over the crowd like a caption in a comic-strip balloon. The word was “kidnapped.”

  With a verbal clue to guide her, Lola’s brain came to the aid of her ears. After that, she could piece things together. A girl from the blind school was missing. The girl was rich. All those children were rich. That fancy school paid taxes to sneeze at, and they had made no exception to help out a local boy. Tick Brower, blinded cleaning his gun, had to go to the state school in Griggsville, that ugly place that was part of the mental hospital. The Sheriff had warned the principal at Meyerling that he was asking for trouble, with no guards and no fences, not even a pair of watchdogs. Eleanor did not like to say that the Sheriff had powers, but something had told him to put on an extra car the night three North Adams boys tried to hold up the filling station. When her husband said something was wrong up at the Deym estate, she would be the last person to doubt him. The Deym girl might be free with her money, like her Russian parents, but she kept apart. The father was some kind of royalty, no proof against dying with his mind gone. The Sheriff said the daughter had had her own way once too often, making her place into a private zoo—the same as having a prison right in town, with convicts getting loose and harming the neighbors.

  Lola could no more have walked through the group on the porch again than work a hive on a cloudy day without a bee veil. Sarah was carried away, and sniping along with the rest of them. Lola let herself out by the rear door, which was hidden behind a paneled screen. As she slipped back to her car, the voices seemed to grow louder.

  This was the part of life in a village that made her sweat, all these women thinking with one mind, gulping down bigger and bigger chunks of alarm and figment, competing like entrants in a pie-eating contest, except that an excess of rumor did not make them sick, but greedier.

  There was no proof that a child had been kidnapped, only the Sheriff’s intuition. The Sheriff had intuitions in the way carcasses have maggots, from moldering too long in a backwater. The Sheriff went to police seminars in Boston to make his work lively, since race riots, espionage and book-making did not flourish in Niles. His conversation was a perpetual bid for omniscience, a habit that he had passed on to his bride. Lola recalled the little panic of ’56, when the Stoebers had predicted a national shortage of white candles. Stores laid in by Mrs. Gilliam alone would have been enough to start one.

  But the Stoebers’ self-importance was not so humorous when it threatened Marit, whose showy car had been dumped near Meyerling, for no good reason, before nine in the morning; who was flaunting the law in secret, harboring wolves like marked cards in a crook
ed poker game; whose natural cunning was being sapped by a priggish schoolteacher named Gabriel Frankman. There had been swells of talk about the animal sanctuary from the beginning, talk about drafting a petition, about taking Marit to court, about sending in an inspector from the village—namely, the Sheriff. Like a deceived wife, Marit had heard little of these murmurs, even at their loudest. Lola never played the role of the well-intentioned friend, bringing loose talk back to Marit for her own good. Villages were fickle toward the objects of their malice; in another year they would brag about their wildlife preserve and take the credit for it.

  At ten o’clock, Mrs. Gilliam expected Lola at her bedside to go over the mail and menus and to plan her wardrobe. After breakfast, there would be a session with the auction notices and the fall bulb catalogues. Then, Lola had promised to bake her mother’s Benne wafers for a formal tea. Between three and four Mrs. Gilliam took a nap, for the purpose of wearing her frown patches. During that free hour, Lola could try to get through to Marit, if only to relieve her fretful imagination, which kept flashing pictures of Marit’s white car still unclaimed by nightfall.

  The rays of the sun woke Marit from a stony sleep. For a moment she thought she had gone to bed with all her clothes on, rank garments which made her nostrils wrinkle at their smell. She was very hot, as if there were too many blankets covering her. Her head ached and she resisted opening her eyes. She reached out to fumble for the clock on the bedside table, but her arm fell instead on a solid mass of fur. She raised her head and saw that Nikolai was pressed up against her. She saw a section of wire mesh fence and two metal bowls. She was not upstairs on the little cot in her childhood bedroom; she was lying on the concrete pavement inside Nikolai’s pen.