The Halo Effect: A Novel

by Anne D. LeClaire

  I had overslept that morning and was relieved to find Elaine Neal was not waiting for me. She had agreed to pose as Monica, and with her narrow face lined with suffering, she appeared every bit what I envisioned the old nun might have looked like, not dissimilar to the painting by Vivarini I had come across in one of Father Gervase’s books. Elaine was a member of Holy Apostles and the owner of Port Fortune Books and had been enthusiastic about the project from the beginning. Occasionally in the past weeks she’d shown up at the studio with another volume about the saints to add to the library I was acquiring. Before I knew it, people would be gifting me with rosary beads.

  “Hello,” she called from the doorway. “Not late, am I?” She was slightly out of breath and leaned on her cane, a sturdy, serviceable stick of some hardwood—walnut or oak perhaps—with a knobbed top. In her other hand, she carried a folded copy of the Boston Globe.

  “Right on time.” It hadn’t occurred to me to offer to pick her up, and I regretted this oversight.

  “I was delayed at the store. A bit of trouble there.”

  I switched on a couple of fans. “Nothing serious, I trust.”

  “A broken window in the back door. Kids making mischief. Nothing taken, as far as I can tell. Just the inconvenience of it all. Vaughn’s been after me to get a security system installed, but I just hate the idea of it, not to even mention the expense. But I have to admit it’s a bit worrisome. Things like this didn’t used to happen in town.”

  Was that true? Or did things like that happen and people just forgot? Had most of the townspeople already started the blurring of memory required to forget about Lucy, recollections faded as surely as the green ribbons tied around trees now limp and nearly white while my own memory haunted me daily? The memories plagued me mostly at night, but they never evaporated, even with dawn. I unfastened the straps of my backpack and took out my camera.

  Elaine limped to the riser, her Birkenstocks scuffling along the floor as she went.

  “If you’d like, you can sit,” I offered. “I can get you a chair.”

  “Oh, this is fine.” She tossed her paper on the chair. “It’s walking that gives me problems. Standing’s fine. By the way, did Valentina Walsh get hold of you?”

  “Valentina? No. Why?”

  “I ran into her yesterday, and she said she was coming to see you. Well, be prepared. Forewarned is forearmed.”

  I had to smile. Sophie used to say that with the wind at her back, Valentina could give a nor’easter a run for its money. I wondered what she could want with me.

  “She has an idea,” Elaine said, as if I had spoken. “I hate to spoil her surprise, but like I said, forewarned and all. Well, you know how she fancies herself a poet?”

  “Yes.” I recalled the sentimental, rhymed couplets that appeared on occasion in the Port Fortune Sun Times, leading Sophie to suggest once that the editor must be a close relative or accepting bribes.

  “She wants to write a poem to go with each of the people you paint. She sees them as sort of companion pieces to the project.”

  “Oh Lord,” I murmured.

  “Exactly,” Elaine said. Then, after a minute, “I suppose you know her story.”

  “Old Glory?” I said.

  “Her story. No? That’s right, you moved into town after that. Sometime in the early nineties, correct?”

  “Ninety-two.”

  “Yes. Well, it all happened long before that. Still, I’m surprised you haven’t heard. You know how this town is for gossip, and she gave them grist for the mill for quite some time.” She looked up toward the skylights, lost momentarily in thought.

  “What happened?”

  “She always has been a little—well, not exactly strange—but unique.”

  My curiosity was awakened. I set the camera on the worktable.

  “People put it down to her being a change-of-life baby. I think her mother was in her late forties when she was pregnant, and even as a girl Valentina was different. Eccentric, you know? For instance, she didn’t start talking until she was almost four. And when she was about sixteen she started to dress completely in white. Summer. Winter. Didn’t matter. All in white. Shoes and everything. Pretending to be Emily Dickinson or something. And she’d talk all whispery, so soft you could barely hear her, like a mouse she was.”

  I tried and failed to imagine the bold and bossy Valentina as subdued and mouselike.

  “Naturally, right after the accident people were worried about her, afraid she’d disappear completely, have a total come-apart, but the funny thing is that just the opposite happened, a complete U-turn. She was nineteen at the time and started wearing so much jewelry she looked like a Christmas tree shot up with steroids. And scarves enough to give Isadora Duncan a run for her money. Then she started ordering people around, acting like she’d been elected mayor.”

  “She was in an accident?”

  “Not her. Her fiancé. Drowned. The day before they were supposed to marry.” Again Elaine paused in thought before continuing. “There was gossip, people being people and all. Some talk that it wasn’t an accident. That he—James Wells was his name, the youngest son of Ellie and Peter Wells. You must know them. They own the gallery on West Main. Well, the talk was that James committed suicide. The strange thing was that his passing seemed to let something loose inside of Valentina. She was like a creature set free.” She grinned and added, “Not that that improved her poetry a whit.”

  I tried to wrap my mind around the whole story: the quiet girl in white, the boy who drowned, the wild woman who now wrote drivel verse.

  “Well, there’s nothing for it,” Elaine said, sweeping her cane like a golf club in an arc an inch from the surface of the riser. “There’ll be no stopping her with this new poetry idea. Once she gets a hold of something it’s best to just take yourself out of her path.”

  “Yes.” I pictured Valentina’s face and pondered the idea of asking her to pose. She was a little old for Saint Joan, but perhaps some other saint of a fierce and fiery nature. Or maybe, it occurred to me, maybe I could capture her as a mature Joan, the woman the real Joan hadn’t lived to become. I wondered if she would be open to the idea. When I’d begun the project, I’d wondered how the people of Port Fortune would respond to my request to pose, but their reception had been more positive than I’d foreseen, and several people had even called to volunteer. Thus far, only one person had refused. The teenager in the park. I replayed the scene. How I had introduced myself to the boy and explained about the project, although most everyone in town had heard of it because of Cardinal Kneeland’s publicity campaign and the stories that had appeared in both the local and Boston papers. When I’d asked the boy if he would be willing to pose, the request had clearly disturbed him. He had shaken his head violently. No, he’d said, and then had left the playground so quickly it seemed more an escape than a departure. I wondered if I should track him down and approach him again. There was something haunting about the teen. And his age would be a plus. So far Rose of Lima was the only one under twenty to be represented on the panels.

  The boy would make a perfect Saint Sebastian.

  I pondered the idea while I focused on Elaine’s hands, her swollen and arthritic knuckles clasped in prayer.

  My next model was Payton Hayes. Earlier in the summer, after the appointment he’d set up for me with Gillian Donaldson, he’d phoned to see how the meeting went and then again several weeks later to see if anything had come of the whole episode. I was happy to inform him that the reporter had never followed through with a formal complaint. Another man might have suggested we get together for a drink, but I had never been that kind of men’s-night-out kind of guy and our relationship remained what it had been, cordial but not close. So when I’d asked him if he would pose for Saint Vincent de Paul, he’d seemed surprised and hesitated so long I believed he would refuse, but then he’d shrugged and said, not without amusement, “Why not?”

  After Payton left, I took a break to stretch, regroup,
and have some water. The Globe Elaine had brought with her was still on the chair where she had tossed it and I scanned the front page, flipping idly through the front section. One headline caught my eye: “Study shows war veterans report hearing problems.” The opening paragraph spoke of a study released by Johns Hopkins that reported on a number of war veterans returning home who were experiencing both distorted hearing and hearing loss. The story was continued further in the section, but before I could turn to it, I was interrupted by my next model and I set the paper aside. I had two more sittings that day and so stayed on late. It was after dark by the time I returned home, and later still—after I’d showered and eaten dinner—when I noticed the red message light blinking on the phone.

  “Hi, Will.”

  My reaction to Sophie’s voice was physical, a jolt that coursed through me.

  “Just checking in to see how things are going. Is it still hot as hell there? We’ve had a nice breeze coming in off the water here today, and it’s actually been quite comfortable. Call me when you get a minute. Okay? Nothing important.”

  I checked the time. Nine forty-five. Too late to return her call? Better to wait until morning? I replayed her message, listening hard to what she said, trying harder to hear what was left unsaid. The paper where she had written the number for her Maine rental was on the table next to the phone, and without giving myself time for second thoughts, I punched it in the keypad. I counted five rings and was about to hang up when Sophie answered.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “Hi, you.” Her voice was soft.

  “I know it’s late, but I just noticed the message on the machine. Hope I’m not waking you.”

  “No. I was just sitting here with a book.”

  “What are you reading?”

  She laughed, and I realized how long it had been since I’d heard that, the sweet, joyful sound of her laugh. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Something for your research?” I thought of the books she had taken with her. The Plight of Our Murdered Children: Our Nation’s Shame.

  “Hardly. Do you remember the cottage we rented for a week the first summer we were married?”

  “By the lake in New Hampshire?”

  “The very one.”

  Memory took me. The cabin with its splintery wooden dock jutting out into the lake. Early-morning swims and afternoons spent paddling a canoe across Sunapee. Simple meals cooked in a kitchen outfitted with a mismatched collection of dishes and pans. Fresh-picked blueberries and soda crackers in a bath of the cream-clotted milk purchased from a local farmer. Grilled trout, sliced tomatoes, and a salad of fiddlehead ferns. The one bedroom with a lumpy mattress on the double bed. The living room with wicker chairs and faded chintz cushions that flanked a fieldstone fireplace and, on the opposite wall, two plain pine shelves nailed between studs. “By any chance are you holding a Reader’s Digest condensed book?”

  She laughed again. “You got it,” she said. “They even smell the same. You know? Kind of musty. I swear, this is the only time I can stand that smell. In an odd way, it’s almost comforting.”

  I thought about the old boat barn where I was working, the smell of tar and salt, wood and must. “So what’s the story you’re reading?”

  “The Snow Goose, by Paul Gallico.”

  “Sounds familiar. What’s it about?”

  “Love and loneliness.”

  I swallowed against a closed throat.

  “The main character is a reclusive artist,” she said.

  “Oh yeah? How does it end?”

  “I don’t know, Will.” She paused then as if we were talking about a different story. “I haven’t reached the end yet.”

  “Should I keep my fingers crossed then? For a happy ending?”

  Instead of answering, she said, “I’m glad you called.”

  Glad you called. I parsed the three words carefully, as if by doing so I could mine a deeper meaning. “Is everything okay up there?” I asked. “Are you okay?” Are you okay? Immediately I wanted to take back the question. How I had hated when people asked me that in the weeks after Lucy’s death. As if anything could ever be okay again.

  “I’m doing okay. I’m making good progress. What about you? How’s your work going?”

  “Pretty well. Today I started photo studies for the second panel. This afternoon I had Harold Weaver.”

  “Harold from the hardware store?”

  “The same. He’s posing for Simon. And Payton Hayes came in too.”

  “Really? I didn’t know he was one of the models.”

  “He seemed surprised when I asked him. With his Van Gogh beard he’s perfect for Vincent de Paul.”

  “Yes. I can see that. Did he mention Ellen? I often wonder how she’s doing. We e-mailed a couple of times after they divorced, and she wrote last fall. A lovely letter expressing her sorrow for us and how wonderful Lucy had been with their boy. But then we fell out of touch.”

  Lucy. The sound of her name opened wounds, as did anything I associated with our daughter. “Payton didn’t mention her. I got the feeling that’s a chapter of his life he has left behind. This morning Elaine Neal came in. She’s posing for Monica.”

  “How was Elaine? I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  “She was Elaine, you know, the walking history of the citizens of Port Fortune. Oh, you’ll appreciate this. She told me Valentina Walsh wants to do a series of poems about the project.”

  Sophie chuckled. “In rhyming couplets, no doubt.”

  “No doubt.” I settled back in the chair, struck by the ease of our conversation. “Elaine also told me an interesting story about Valentina.”

  “You mean about her fiancé, the boy who drowned the day before their wedding?”

  “You know about that?”

  “Oh, Will,” she said. “Everyone in Port Fortune knows. It’s one of the local legends.”

  “Apparently. That’s one of the odd things. I’ve been hearing a lot of local history from the people who come in to pose.”

  “Like what?”

  I told her Leon’s story about Louie Johns.

  “Leon posed, too? I have to say that surprises me.”

  “Why?” This was the easiest conversation we’d had in months.

  “I would have expected it of Elaine Neal and even Harold Weaver, but Leon doesn’t seem the type.”

  “Actually,” I said, “there’s only been one person who hasn’t agreed to pose.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A boy. I don’t know his name, though he looks vaguely familiar. I’ve seen him a number of times around town. At the playground. Always alone. When I asked him, you’d think I was suggesting he commit a major crime. He couldn’t get away fast enough. The thing is, you should see him, Sophie. There’s something about him, something vulnerable and proud. He would be perfect for Saint Sebastian.”

  “What does he look like?”

  I pictured the boy as I’d last seen him, sitting on the wall, shoulders slumped. “I’d say he’s around sixteen or seventeen. Thin.” I did my best to describe him.

  “Is his hair sort of reddish-brown, a little shaggy? Was he wearing yellow high-tops?”

  “You know him?”

  “You do too. It’s Duane,” she said. “Duane LaBrea.”

  “LaBrea?”

  “Rain’s brother.”

  It came to me then why the boy had seemed familiar. Once Duane had given Lucy and Rain a ride to our house after some event at the school, and another time he’d dropped Rain off for an overnight with Lucy.

  “If you want,” Sophie continued, “I could get in touch with him.”

  Did I want? Suddenly I was reluctant.

  “I mean, I know him. He used to sing tenor in the chorus. If I asked him for you, he might say yes.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Look,” Sophie said, mistaking my silence, her voice more businesslike. “I’m not trying to interfere. If you rather I stay out of it, I will.
”

  Again I pictured the boy, imagined him as Sebastian, decided. “No. No. That would be great, Soph.”

  “I’ll call his house tomorrow. If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.” I paused to draw a breath. “It’s just, earlier, when you told me he was Rain’s brother, it just took me by surprise. It was unexpected. And—” My voice trailed off. Rain. Lucy’s best friend.

  “I know, Will.” I heard her deep inhale. “I understand. I do.”

  For the first time in months, we were in sync, understanding without needing words, like we used to be. Before. “I guess I better let you go,” I said, wanting to hang up before the connection shifted.

  “Will?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You sound—” She hesitated. “You sound different.”

  Was that a good or bad thing? “I do? Different how?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice grew thoughtful, tentative. “Lighter, I guess.”

  Was I? “And you sound happy, Soph.”

  “I am, Will. Or at least, if not happy, I’m feeling a kind of contentment. It’s been good for me to be here. Will, I’ve been thinking. If you ever take a day off, maybe you could drive up. We could have lunch or something.”

  “I’d like that, Soph. Maybe some weekend? Would a Saturday or Sunday work for you?”

  “Any day would work for me, Will. Just let me know.”