A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

  “No,” replied Sembles. “I’m a local boy, as they say. I used to do corporate events and private parties, but now I’m semiretired. I still like to work the fair, however. Such a lovely variety of faces.”

  He began looking from me to the paper, alert now and making deft snips with the tiny blades. He worked the scissors with his thumb and middle finger.

  I was trying to think of a good way to introduce the topic of the murders, but Dean’s absence made me even more self-conscious.

  “Are these portraits on the wall of people you know?” I asked. “Family?”

  “Merely likenesses with which I was particularly pleased.”

  “Of customers?”

  “Certainly.”

  “But didn’t they want to keep them? I mean, your work is so lovely,” I said, gesturing toward the wall. “It must have been difficult, convincing people to part with these.”

  “Doubles,” he said. “Another benefit of folded paper: one completes two likenesses at a go.”

  I tensed up, feeling my pulse in my throat. “What do you do with the spares?” Please, let him say he’d saved them all . . . that he still had likenesses of the Rose Girls, of the soldiers. . . . “Are these the only ones you’ve kept?”

  He laughed, affording me another glimpse of those black teeth. “I have every one. Even my first sorry attempts preserved, Grandmother saw to that.”

  Just ask him. . . .

  Maybe Dean was back by now. Maybe he’d change his mind and come in, which would be great because if he asked Sembles about the Rose Girls, it would come out sounding all casual and charming, like he didn’t really care but it was just kind of interesting . . . because he didn’t really care, and because he was very talented at coaxing.

  I wasn’t. I sucked at it, especially when it mattered.

  I tried to make my voice sound relaxed, offhand. “So, all those doubles . . . do you keep them here?”

  “In those cabinets behind you. Album after album, sorted by year. I hope to equal Edouart’s record—thirty-eight hundred cuts, though he lost nearly all of them at sea. So far I’ve amassed some twenty-seven hundred.”

  I wanted to rip the felt backdrop down and throw all the doors open, start pawing through those albums until I found the right year. Instead I tucked my hands under my thighs, squashed them against the piano stool.

  Sembles had finished cutting. I watched him reach for a piece of cardstock. He fixed one slip of black to it, after laying the other on the arm of his chair.

  “Mr. Sembles . . .” I was all croaky. Nerves putting asphalt in my throat. I tried to cough before continuing. “If you could spare the time . . . I’d love to see more of your work.”

  He looked up, pleased. “Only if it wouldn’t bore you.”

  “I’d be honored . . . and if I . . . I mean, may I ask you . . .”

  “Fire away.”

  “You said you have every portrait. . . . Did you keep your doubles of the Rose Girls?”

  Sembles’s hand jerked, and the second cut fluttered from his chair to the floor.

  He tried to smile, but it wasn’t a tremendously convincing effort. “Who, dear?”

  “The Rose Girls?”

  He looked at the doorway, like he was checking to see if anyone could hear us.

  “In my line of work, dear . . .” he said, eyes dropping to the card with my profile on it. “Really, to recall any specific person . . . one meets so many. . . .”

  Oh great. I was totally blowing this. . . . Maybe act decisive?

  “You cut silhouettes of them in 1969,” I said, trying for a little sternness, “and of the two soldiers they were with.”

  He glanced around the room, focus lighting on everything but me. “I’m not familiar . . .”

  “Mr. Sembles?” I said. “You were quoted in the papers about it. In fact, you gave a detailed description of each person and each of those silhouettes.”

  Sembles brought his hands into his lap. He looked down at them, then made fists with his thumbs tucked inside.

  “I’ve told you. Over twenty-seven hundred people,” he said. “A great many people . . .”

  “How many were murdered the same night you completed their portraits?”

  He didn’t answer. And then I just felt mean. What a horrible thing to say . . .

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, leaning toward him. “I just can’t believe that would slip your mind. Even if you didn’t live here . . . even if you traveled to different fairs all summer and this was just a stop on your circuit, I don’t believe that. . . . And you’re local. Anyone who lived here then, anyone old enough—they all remember what happened to those girls.”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it.

  “Sir, it wasn’t just what you said to reporters. The police had to’ve questioned you, probably more than once. . . .”

  His legs started trembling, right when I’d said “police.”

  “Please,” I said. “If you still have those doubles . . . if you can tell me anything . . .”

  Sembles shook his head. He opened his fists and pressed both palms against his quivering knees, trying to steady them. It didn’t work, just made the palsy spread to the rest of his fragile body.

  Great. I had successfully terrorized an old junkie. Totally ham-fisted, stupid, lame-ass thing to do. And now I had no idea what the hell else to say.

  “Mr. Sembles . . . I am so sorry,” I said. “I’ve obviously upset you, and that’s not at all what I wanted to do.”

  He checked the door again.

  I couldn’t get him to look at me. “It must have been tremendously disturbing, and I feel awful, asking you to revisit something that’s obviously still very painful. . . .”

  I tried to make my voice softer. “It’s just that you’re the only person I can ask about this. You must have been one of the last people to see them alive, and I don’t understand why you’re so . . .”

  He turned back toward me, legs going double-time.

  “I don’t mean any offense, sir,” I said, “but somehow I’ve frightened you, bringing this up, and I don’t know why that is.”

  He started to sweat. Upper lip, then forehead. His hands slipped on his jiggling legs, revealing wet palm-prints beneath.

  “Because,” I continued, “you weren’t worried about talking to reporters, after it happened. I’ve read the articles. . . . You even explained how you asked the victims to style their hair before cutting their silhouettes. You gave one a mantilla and a comb to wear. . . .”

  I climbed off the piano stool and stepped toward him, very slowly.

  “Mr. Sembles?” I leaned over to touch his hand, wanting to reassure him, but he yanked it away so my fingertips only brushed his thumb.

  At that contact, he swiveled sideways, like he was going to bolt from the trailer.

  He closed his fists over his thumbs again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Silence. Sembles wincing like he was trying not to cry.

  “You know something,” I said. “Please . . .”

  I crouched down by the arm of his chair. “You should tell me,” I said.

  I wanted to reassure him . . . tried reaching toward his nearest hand again. He crossed his arms, shoved those fists under his armpits.

  “Don’t you touch me,” he said, voice low.

  “Mr. Sembles—”

  He turned his head away.

  “Why won’t you talk about it?” I asked. “You weren’t worried about it back then. You weren’t afraid to tell people. What changed? What happened, afterwards?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Something did. Someone.”

  “I don’t remember. I’m an old man. You have no right to threaten me. . . .”

  “I’m not threatening you,” I said, then felt like a jerk because I’d obviously made him think I was, which was what mattered.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want you to . . . I’m just asking for
your help. I mean, you make your living studying people’s faces, committing their likenesses to paper. You’re a sensitive man, a keen observer—”

  He closed his eyes. I was just making it worse.

  My legs were cramping up from squatting. I lowered myself to the floor, gingerly.

  “But what you said . . . it’s part of the public record. Has been for decades. Plus it didn’t lead to any arrests, any solution. So all those details, the things you were quoted saying . . . they turned out harmless. They didn’t change anything, didn’t have any effect. They had no power.”

  “Then there is no point in bringing those details up,” he said. “Whether I recall them or not.”

  Okay, so I was a total loser, and he was staring at the doorway again—craning forward to get a better view, like he thought someone was going to jump through it.

  “Please,” I said, “I’m not a threat. If you have those doubles . . . if there’s anything you can tell me . . .”

  Sembles turned back to me. “I want you to leave.”

  We stared at each other, and finally I just said, “Why?”

  He shook his head.

  I’d blown it. Didn’t matter what else I said, and I was so pissed at myself my next words came out all testy.

  “See, we’re up against the central question,” I said, “that ‘why?’ That whatever-it-is, making you want me gone.”

  Sembles sat up straighter.

  “In that assumption, you are mistaken,” he said. “The central question is not why I yearn for your departure. The central question is why you came.”

  “I came because of those girls.”

  “And what else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “They’ve been dead for twenty years,” he said. “You couldn’t have known them. You’re too young. So who told you? Who sent you here?”

  “No one sent me here. I swear . . . if I knew any way to convince you of that . . .”

  We stared at each other again. I struggled for something else to say, some hook to win him over, some way not to come off like an idiot for once. . . . Then I realized he hadn’t seen Dean.

  “I’m alone. You keep checking the door. No one’s there. No one’s listening. No one even knows I’m here,” I said. “And no one will. It’s just me.”

  “Then leave it alone,” he said.

  “Mr. Sembles, please believe me . . . I wish I could leave it alone. I wish I’d never heard about you or those girls or any of this.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I tell you. Nothing will change.”

  “It does still matter . . . what you know is still important. To me.”

  “Those girls . . . It’s finished. You won’t bring them back.”

  “Please, just show me the doubles. That’s all you have to do. It will never be traced to you.”

  Sembles shook his head. “I can’t,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He dropped his eyes, started scratching at the back of his spotty hand, kept sneaking looks at the table next to him.

  His nails were ragged. He knocked a little scab off his hand, then moved the scratching away from it, started attacking another patch of skin. Blood welled up in the tiny crater.

  “Why the hell not?” I said. “You can sit there and let the whole damn thing fester, let whoever was responsible get away with killing two women? Those girls don’t even have names anymore. What about their families? What about the people they never went home to? How dare you tell me you won’t show me their portraits?”

  “I didn’t say won’t. I said can’t. It isn’t possible.”

  He sighed, still scratching, gaze flicking over to me, to the doorway, back to the table. “They no longer exist. I had to burn them. A long, long time ago.”

  “You burned them. You just . . .”

  “The slips, the backing. Everything. I had no choice,” he said. “That was made quite, quite clear.”

  His nails wandered back to the center of his hand, to where the scab had been. He pulled the dome of blood out into a thread—back and forth, back and forth—each pass smearing the red streak wider.

  “You’re bleeding,” I said.

  He stopped scratching, but he didn’t look at his hands, or at me. “And so there’s nothing left for you to see, nothing left to learn,” he said. “Nothing to delay your departure.”

  “Why didn’t you have a choice?” I said. “Tell me that, and I’ll go.”

  He leaned forward and started examining the floor. When he located the little card with my silhouette on it, he kicked it at me.

  It skidded, spinning, coming to rest beside my knee.

  I didn’t pick it up. “Who made it clear? Tell me. Answer that one question, and you get your wish.”

  “Struwwelpeter.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Mr. Sembles? Who is Struwwelpeter . . . one of the cops? One of the soldiers?”

  “Your one question has been answered.”

  “Please . . . I just . . .”

  Sembles pulled open a drawer in his little table.

  “Get out,” he said. “Now.”

  “Please.”

  “I am an old man, but I am capable of forcing you to leave.”

  I stood up.

  Inside the drawer, I could see the spoon. The stub of candle. The tip of a syringe.

  “All right,” I said, moving toward the doorway. “I’m sorry.”

  I backed down the stairs, right into Dean.

  CHAPTER 14

  The trailer door banged shut, and we could hear the click of the latch. The winking lights around Sembles’s sign went dark.

  “So he’s done for the night?” asked Dean.

  I just stood there.

  Dean gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You okay?”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “Kind of?”

  “Kind of not.”

  “Want some soda?”

  “No,” I said. “Just let’s go.”

  “Find something out?”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “Like?”

  “I don’t even know.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Let’s go. Come on.” I started walking.

  The wind picked up, heavy with sugar and grease. Smoke. Rancid beer.

  “Bunny?”

  I whipped my head back toward him. He hadn’t moved.

  He started toward me. Long strides. “What the hell happened?”

  I turned full forward again, kept going with my back to him.

  They had the Cortina Bob loaded full, some bored guy walking along the snake of sleighs, clanking down lap-bars one by one. Then he threw a big switch and it all started up, the riders in a whirl faster and faster, with “Freebird” blistering from the speakers.

  Dean caught up, falling into step.

  I went faster. Couldn’t shake him.

  We finally reached my Rabbit in the parking lot. I went for the driver’s door, Dean for the passenger’s. I dug in my pocket for the keys, still wondering who the hell Struwwelpeter was.

  “Bunny, you’re shaking.”

  Taking a deep breath, I turned toward Dean, locked eyes with him across the car’s orange roof.

  He looked worried. “What did he say? Did he tell you it was Lapthorne? What happened?”

  What happened was I proved to myself that I was just as scared and sorry and stupid and useless as I suspected.

  What happened was I had no fucking idea what I was doing, which was exactly why I’d wanted Dean to go in there with me, only the whole thing was so pointless he’d been right to make me do it alone.

  I opened my mouth to tell him that. Everything.

  But what came out instead was, “You are such an asshole for ditching me. You really are.”

  “Bunny, look . . . it’s time to get someone official involved.”

  We were sitting in the car, still parked. />
  I’d told him what happened with Sembles. Bad idea.

  “You want me to call the cops?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I could see the top of the Ferris wheel. It was stopped. The seats were rocking.

  “That’s so stupid,” I said.

  He crossed his arms.

  “No, really,” I said. “I tell you this name that might be a cop for all we know, and your response is I should talk to the police?”

  “This is bullshit,” said my husband.

  “This is not bullshit.”

  “Don’t get all pissy with me,” he said. “I didn’t goddamn kill anybody.”

  “You’re the one getting pissy,” I said. “I’m totally fine.”

  So then we had to sit there, glaring at separate points on the windshield to prove how not-pissy we were.

  Which, sadly, just allowed me to reflect on how totally psycho I was being. I have a weakness for snark but I normally really pride myself on not acting like a bitch, even under duress. I felt guilty, lashing out at Dean.

  Plus, the cranky thing wasn’t doing crap to buttress my argument.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. I mean, if it’s . . .” And then I just stopped. Had no idea what to say.

  I shoved my fingers into my hair and then made fists, strands sticking out everywhere from between my knuckles. I could see my reflection in the windshield: Portrait of the Artist Totally Losing Her Shit.

  I growled.

  “What?” asked Dean.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I. Have. No. Clue. There’s just a big swirling nest of crap in my head. . . .”

  I put my hands in my lap. Tried to look vaguely sane.

  “Like,” I said, “um . . . what if this means that Lapthorne’s—”

  “You don’t know what any of it means. You can’t know. That’s the whole point. That’s the only thing that matters.”

  “So you’re telling me to just give up, just hand over the dog tags?”

  “You said you would. You said the first thing you found out . . .”

  “But this isn’t finding anything out,” I said. “Nothing’s more definitive. Nothing’s clearer. This is just more.”

  “You want to start qualifying a bargain . . .” he said, letting the thought trail off in a particularly annoying way, all fakey-fake lighthearted and reasonable.

  I resisted the urge to bash my forehead against the steering wheel. “What if it was someone else? Maybe it’s the Struwel guy, but maybe it still leads back to Lapthorne. You’re telling me you’d call the cops on one of your cousins if you weren’t totally sure?”