Flight of the Stone Angel (15 page)

Then began the straggle of elderly arthritics, who seemed genuinely shocked when Malcolm laid his hands on their heads, compelling them to be healed in the name of Babe Laurie. One of Malcolm’s hands went to the small of an elderly woman’s back. He pressed on her forehead and she flew backward to the arms of the catchers as though propelled by lightning. She made her way down the stairs in shock, stunned and weaving from the assault. But her expression might be taken for exaltation, for her eyes were wide and brimmed with tears of pain.

Done with minor wonders, the program moved upscale to the collective miracle – each heart’s desire – preceded by collection plates.

“Do you believe?” Malcolm had shed his brother’s skin to pace the stage with his own charisma. “Say, amen.”

“Amen!”

“Then give all that you have. Every dollar in your wallet, every dime in your pockets. Give everything you have and you shall receive more than all your gifts combined. Do you want a miracle? Say amen.”

“Amen!”

Piles of cash were growing in the plates. People in the first row were indeed emptying their wallets as they chanted the name of Babe and fixed their eyes on his billboard image. They prayed to Babe now. He was a god, and Malcolm was his priest on earth.

“It’s time to demonstrate your faith. Do you want to buy a miracle?”

“Amen!”

“Then empty those wallets. Give no thought of the morrow.”

As Charles recalled, Christ had said this last phrase to Judas, but only to deter him from passing the hat at a similar gathering.

“Let go of that cash, and it will come back to you a hundredfold and then some. You will live in the light of faith and every good thing in life will be yours. I guarantee it. In proportion to your faith, you will receive your heart’s desire.”

Now Charles had found the escape clause in the warranty of Malcolm’s covenant. If the miracle did not occur, then the petitioner was obviously lacking in devotion and belief. Not Malcolm’s fault, and no refund for those of little faith.

“I want you to dig in those pockets and come up with all your bills and coins. This is where it begins. If you lack the faith, you have wasted your time here. Open those wallets and pour your faith into those collection plates for God’s work. As we help one another, we participate in the flow, and it flows right on back to us. It’s a holy circle, you cannot stop it, you cannot prevent it from flowing back to you – so long as you believe. You must demonstrate your faith. You must walk out into the night with nothing
but
your faith. Say, amen!”

“Amen!”

“You women!” He stomped his foot on the stage. “Empty out those purses. I say
dig
for that money. You don’t want to get home and discover that you have held back a single coin. Your faith will surely crumble to dust, and you will be dogged by the misery of this lost chance for all your days.”

Charles looked araund him. Well, the curse was a nice touch. Two seats away in the third row, a formerly reticent woman was digging deeper in her bag. And to his left, and one chair down the second row, another woman had emptied the contents of her purse into her lap. Tissues and gum wrappers spilled to the floor. Charles stared at the store of pharmacy bottles in the spread apron of her skirt. Her hands were malformed, ugly knots of flesh. She was young for such an advanced case of arthritis – such desperation.

He looked into the faces of the surrounding believers. Hunger was here, an ocean of it. People all around him were rising to their feet and groaning with the power flowing through them in Babe Laurie’s name. They shouted their amens, and Charles felt an electrical current which shocked him and hooked him up to his fellow man, as surely as if they had all been touched by the same jolt of Saint Elmo’s fire.

“Do you believe?”

And the crowd roared with one voice, “
I believe!”
screaming as one devout petitioner with one desire.

They were plugged into Malcolm, charging him with light and energy – all save Charles, who detached himself to sit with his fears, at odds with the enormous animal roaring and rearing up all around him. At any moment, the crowd might discover the unbeliever in their midst.

He knew all the darkest things about crowds – mobs.

Malcolm was gathering size, growing with the love of the multitude, towering over them on the stage, energy flowing out to them through his extended fingertips. They fed one another, Malcolm and the faithful.

The elbow of a fervent prayer knocked Charles’s head to one side, and now he saw Henry Roth standing in the wide center aisle, searching the faces of the front row, where he knew Charles would be seated. Charles only had to stand up to be noticed above the people of standard sizes. Henry waved to him, and his hands began to speak, to tell Charles that he must come away and right now. There was a great urgency in Henry’s hand movements and in his eyes.

When they had cleared the opening in the canvas and traveled as far as the parking lot, the lights of the tent went out behind them. Charles stood in the center of the road. He could imagine what was going on in the blackness of that vast space. Unity would be displaced by fear in the dark, and that would grow to panic.

Henry pulled on his sleeve and formed the letter H. His hand moved up and down quickly to say,
“Hurry.”

As they moved into a jog, Charles looked back over one shoulder at the silhouette of the tent against the evening sky. The crowd was dispersing to its individual parts, each seeking the way into the light. He watched them pour from the tent opening, ant-size and antlike. And then the tall poles caved in on one side, and the canvas structure listed like a great wounded animal, deflated by the sudden flight of Malcolm Laurie’s flock. Headlights came on in pairs, and a slow caravan of cars led away from the tent, moving toward the highway.

As Charles and Henry cleared one block of Owltown, the lights at their backs went out, and the night snapped shut behind them. The same thing happened on the next block.

And whose little miracle was this? Oh, just a guess, a shot in the dark
–
could it be Mallory?

Of course she had done it. She had hacked into the computer of a local utility company. He could think of no other explanation for the timing and selectivity of the power failure – and Henry’s appearance at just the right moment.

So, in addition to joining Henry’s list and the sheriff’s list, the Lauries now had Mallory’s attention as well. What a worthy opponent for a family of evangelists – Our Lady of Cyberspace. That irresponsible brat. Someone in that tent might have been killed.

Charles stopped at the windbreak of tall trees and turned back. Car headlights illuminated the fleeing mob. Henry pulled at his sleeve again, and they moved through the streets into Dayborn Square. As they passed the fountain, Henry slowed their pace to a comfortable walk. When they stepped outside the boundaries of the square, all the streetlamps and window lights went out, and Charles felt somehow responsible.

He cast his eyes over the woods on the other side of Upland Bayou and wondered what tree she perched in, watching their progress, switching off the lights behind them.

When Charles and Henry had crossed the bridge, the lights came on again, and the distant telephones of Owltown began to ring, all of them, ringing constantly, until one by one they were taken off their hooks as people returned home, almost as if their phones were calling them back to their houses and trailers.

As they were crossing the bridge over the bayou, Charles said, “Poor Malcolm. The collection plates never finished the first row.”

Henry smiled.
“Then he didn’t make the cost of raising the tent. The first row is stocked with relatives.”

Herd instinct? Of course. Family members put all their money in the collection plates, and the rest followed suit.

A gunshot exploded in the woods beyond the bridge. Henry seemed unconcerned.

“It’s
only Fred Laurie shooting owls again. I saw him go into the woods. Or maybe it’s Augusta shooting Fred Laurie. It’s a big mistake to fool with her owls.”

Fred Laurie searched the woods, his brown eyes alighting on each dark shape that moved. He raised his rifle and squeezed the trigger again. He crept closer to his target, and now he could see it clearly. He had killed yet another leaf – shot it straight through the heart. This was the third such bit of vegetation he had murdered while his brothers were playing to the crowd back in Owltown.

Jane’s Cafe had been a fund of information. In an overheard conversation, he had learned that the sheriff wouldn’t allow Jane to carry a dinner tray to the prisoner’s cell, and the lunch tray hadn’t been touched. The sheriff was twice as mean as usual, or so Jane told Betty Hale, and that useless new girl wouldn’t even look her in the eye when Jane asked if something was wrong.

Betty had allowed that not much got past Jane, and maybe Tom Jessop should have made
her
the new deputy.

Then the postman had chimed in with his bit of news: The sheriff had been driving the roads all day, looking for somebody, scanning every tree he could see from the car windows. But first thing this morning, he had torn out on the road to the old Shelley place like a bat out of Augusta’s attic.

The prisoner was gone all right, vanished. Everyone in Jane’s Cafe had agreed on that. “Just like her mother,” Jane had said.

Fred had searched the old Shelley place, hunting Cass’s brat, but found no trace of her. She would not have gone into the swamp around Finger Bayou. No one but Augusta could navigate that mire in the dark. This wood was the likely place. This is where
he
would have gone.

He emerged from the trees and stopped in a clearing to light a cigarette. He would not have found the dog’s body if he had not tripped over the canvas parcel concealed by broken branches. He struck another match and held it over a hollowed-out log. Black leather protruded from the opening. He didn’t have to pull it out to know it was the duffel bag that had sat for three days in the sheriff’s office. It belonged to her, as did this damned dog stiffening in the canvas shroud.

He blew out the match. Footsteps? Yes, someone was coming this way.

Fred moved quickly to replace the branches over the dog, and then he pulled back into the woods. He slung the rifle over one shoulder by its strap and reached up to a tree branch. He pulled his body up and into the cover of dense leaves before the woman entered the clearing.

She was soft-stepping like a deer. Every now and then, she stopped and listened, just as a deer would do. The tan of the deputy’s uniform was light against her dark flesh. When she paused against the black bark of a tree, the outline of her skin lost all definition, and there was a heart-stopping moment when Fred believed her uniform was haunted by a woman he could no longer see.

His heart was beating again, and harder now. He could swear he heard it thumping on the wall of his chest as her gun glided out of the holster, and the barrel pointed skyward. Though she never looked up, twice she had aimed the gun straight at him, and he forgot to breathe. Now she was very still, listening again.

Could she hear it – his heartbeat?

No,
that’s crazy
. But he held one hand over his chest.

Finally, Deputy Beaudare ran off into the woods, stopping once to look back, then running on, graceful as any animal he’d ever killed.

They stopped by the telephone pole near Henry Roth’s cottage. Henry motioned him to stay, signing,
“See you later.”
Then he walked off and left Charles standing in the middle of a dirt road.

Later?

A familiar voice called out to him. “Look up, Charles.”

His eyes followed the pole’s long line high into the air. Silver spikes sprouted from its sides, and in the dark at the top of the sky, the thick shaft spread out wooden arms laden with thick cables and blinking lights.

Going on faith that Mallory was up there, he began to climb the silver ladder. When he neared the crossbeams, he could see her silhouette working over the wires. Closer now, nearly there, he grasped one arm of the pole, and then they were face-to-face. Her hair was luminous in the dark, curls catching light from a waxing moon, and where the strands strayed into wisps, the stars shone through them.

She gave him a brief smile in lieu of hello. She didn’t like to waste her words, or perhaps she didn’t understand the average human’s need of them. She had always preferred the company of machines, which were quiet, efficient and disinclined to argue. Behind her back and to her face, the officers of NYPD had called her Mallory the Machine.

“Hello, again.” He made the mistake of looking down at the tiny road below them and the toy town in the distance. He hugged the crossbeam and focussed on her face. “I see you’re still working without a net.”

She seemed quite comfortable seated in her leather sling bearing the name of a local telephone company. “I assume you stole that.”

She nodded absently, taking no offense. She was intent on her handiwork with exposed wires. “I worked for the phone company’s computer operations up north.”

She reached across the nest of wires to undo his tie and pull it away from him. With one hand she undid the buttons on his vest and laid open his white shirt. Up here in the stars with Mallory – it was probably the most romantic moment of his life. He waited to see what she would do to ruin it.

She pointed a small dark box at his chest and sent out a projection of light. He looked down at the crisp computer screen glowing on his shirt-front and said, “I see you solved the resolution problem.”

“Uh-huh. I translated the pixels to analog waves. But it still sucks too much battery power.”

He gathered the backup battery must account for at least one of the wires running out of the tiny computer and into the pocket of her blazer. The image on his shirt changed as she bent her head over the minicomputer in the palm of her hand and worked the small keyboard with a silver pick. Her face was awash in reflected blue light.

It troubled him only a little that he was now conversant in computer jargon, though he loathed high technology. He was particularly well versed in this prototype of hers. A year ago, she had talked about little else. He so loved the sound of her voice, he had listened with rapt attention to the buzz words that were her poetry, as she explained the schematics for customized components which passed for high art in her world. The conversation had been one-sided then. It was so rare to hear her expend more than the necessary amount of words, he had not wanted to interrupt, to argue, to end it.

Now that he had finally been incorporated into her computer as a living screen, he wondered if she would look on him with greater affection. “I suppose your next project will be an electronic book.” This was his growing fear, that the beloved, friendly handheld book would turn into a creature with megabytes.

“You have to let go of the twentieth century, Charles. It’s almost over now.”

“So you don’t care for my theory that the Luddites will inherit the earth?”

No, they both knew that she was the inheritor, this strange child of high technology. Look at her now, glowing with electronic light – wires running in and out of her clothes.

He looked down at the projected diagram on his shirt. “What’s that?”

“You’re looking at a power company grid. I worked for them for a while, too. Watch this.” She turned toward Dayborn below. The lights went out again, and so did those of Owltown beyond it. Now the streetlamps switched on and off, one by one. And then all the lights of Dayborn came on at once. Owltown remained in the dark, as did everything on this side of Upland Bayou.

“Neat trick? It was a lot of work planting independent switches.”

So now he knew where she had been all these months from spring into autumn – laying traps, planning, scheming. “And how long did you work for the tax assessor?”

“Very good, Charles. But I downloaded what I needed during the proficiency test. I didn’t stay for the job interview.”

The tax records would tell her which citizens had lived here seventeen years ago, who had died, and who had moved away. By now, she would have bank records and credit reports. She would know what debts they owed, and who tithed to church or charity and how much. She hac probably been listening to the phone conversations of Dayborn for months, gathering information, planning her homecoming. “The tax base helped me with my list.”

“Your list? Does everyone in this town keep a damn list? It’s the mob, right? All the people who killed your mother.”

Mallory was staring at him. “Who else keeps lists?”

“Well, Henry has a list. The sheriff keeps one, too. Henry didn’t tell you that?”

“We haven’t had much time to talk. I’ve been busy.”

“I can see that.”

She touched his hand to prompt him. “The sheriff’s list?”

“Jessop never stopped investigating your mother’s murder. He’s been torturing his suspects. Well, actually, only two that I know of – Alma Furgueson and the deputy.”

“Travis? The sheriff thinks Travis was in that mob?”

“Yes. And he’s been making the man pay for it all this time.” And now he thought he saw a regret in Mallory’s eyes. But he had never seen it there before, and he was uncertain. “You didn’t know he never gave up, did you?” No, she hadn’t known; he was sure of it. “Well then, you’re both on the same side really. You don’t have to hide. You could – ”

“Charles, he’s a cop, and I’m not. I left my badge in New York. I thought you understood that.”

“What are you planning, Mallory? A little vigilante justice? Henry tells me there were nearly thirty people in that mob. You can’t get them all.”

“Oh, sure I can.” And in the same tone, she said, “Hand me those pliers, will you?”

He picked up the pliers from the crossbeam and held them out to her. “I would think the next logical step would be to find out who killed Babe Laurie. Then once you’re clear of suspicion – ”

“Why should I care who killed Babe Laurie?”

“But don’t you wonder
why
Babe was killed?”

“No. It doesn’t matter.” Her voice was in the irritation mode. But she quickly shifted out of it with a sudden change of subject. “So what did you think of the show tonight?”

“Yours or Malcolm’s?”

“The circus, Charles.”

“Well, the magic act needs work. It’s a little crude for my tastes.”

“Not up to Max Candle’s standards?”

“Not at all. Too much flash. Malcolm has no polish.” And now Charles looked down again and remembered that he was on top of a telephone pole. The earth seemed to shift, or was that his stomach?

“Did your cousin ever dabble in icons and religious miracles?” Her tone was so offhand he might have taken it for small talk, but she never did small talk.

“Well, no, but Max knew the trade.” He looked down at his shirt again as she flashed through an array of diagrams, finally settling on one she liked.

“Could you give Henry a few pointers for a small-scale religious miracle?”

And now he beheld a Mallory miracle. She touched the keyboard and then there was light in Owltown.

“This interference with the electricity, won’t they trace that back here and –?”

She looked up at him, affronted. “The power company will send a crew out to check the lines. Ten miles down the road, they’ll find the problem on a main line. Then they’ll figure the backup circuits kicked in. I left a squirrel on the exposed section. He’s burnt to a crisp.”

“You didn’t – ”

“Charles, would you feel better if I told you the squirrel died of natural causes before I fried him?”

Her sarcasm was light, but it exposed a nerve. He knew he must seem like a clown in her eyes. “I was about to say, you didn’t overlook a thing. And now if you’ll excuse me, it’s been a long day, and I’m tired of playing the fool.”

He was climbing down when he felt her hand on his arm.

“Stay,” she said.

He hesitated.

Well, it was not quite the command she would give to a dog. The inflection was slightly different. In fact, coming from Mallory, that single syllable could almost be construed as an apology.

Her hand tightened on his arm, as if she needed force to restrain him. She didn’t – she never did. He had a sudden clarity of sight, a hyper-awareness of Mallory. She leaned across the dangerous cluster of exposed wiring. The electrical meter in her hand was aglow with pulsing red lights. Her lips grazed his cheek, his ear, and she whispered, “I won’t kill another squirrel – I swear.”

Before he could be insulted anew, she covered his mouth with her own. He was very still, not wanting to lose this connection with her. Had he been standing on knife points, he would not have moved. He could hear the humming in the phone lines, and feel the vibrations where his legs embraced the pole, throbbing in time to a blinking red light, an electronic heartbeat. His eyes closed to the computer-blue wash of her skin.

It was all too brief. She pulled back, but only a little. As the euphoria ebbed away, he wondered if she fully understood the effect she had on him; he thought she might. He would lose sleep wondering why she had kissed him, toward what ulterior motive. No, actually, he wouldn’t.

He didn’t care why she had done it. And he would cheerfully fly down from the pole and kill a score of squirrels for her if she asked. He knew she would ask something.

“I want you to go back to New York, Charles. Go tonight.” Why couldn’t she want something simple like every last drop of his blood? He had no problem with dying for Mallory. But he could never abandon her. She mustn’t expect that. Going back to New York without her was unthinkable. He was shaking his head.

“Henry can help me with everything. Okay? I don’t need you, Charles.”

“Well, thank you very much.”

“You don’t know this place. You can’t – ”

“Good night.” He began climbing down the pole. The metal spikes were cold under his hand. He fixed his eyes on the pole and strengthened his resolve not to look at her again. If he didn’t see her tensing for the strike, then she had no power over him.
Yeah, right
– as Mallory would say.

“Where are you going?” Her tone rebuked him for the temerity of going away without being dismissed.

Well
,
tough
– another Malloryism. He had learned a lot of them over the years of abuse at her hands; the abuse mainly consisting of him loving her, and Mallory loving no one. “Charles? Where are – ”

“I’m going to find out who killed Babe Laurie.”

“Charles.” Her voice was faint in the growing distance between them.

He was doing so well. He made his way along the dark road and didn’t look back. As he approached the artist’s cottage, it was dark. Mallory sitting on her telephone pole, tapping at her computer, turned on all the lamps in the house, all at once, to light his way.

After a quiet hour of housebreaking, Mallory returned to the woods with a shovel from her mother’s garden shed. She wondered what the sheriff would make of her recent visit to his empty house, and what she had left behind. The tool case was slung on a shoulder strap and thumping against her side as she moved through the trees, guided by a narrow golden beam. The penlight exposed every root and rock lying in wait for her. When she brushed a fern away from her face, the penlight shone on one hand, and she froze.

Her long red fingernails were torn and broken, and the polish was flaking away. The flesh showed scratches, raw red knuckles and blue bruises. She stared at this damage for a moment, incredulous, as though such things as chipped nails were inconceivable in her universe. And this was true.

From the age of ten, she had been compulsively neat, never suffering any chips in her facade, nor one thing out of place in her environs. Her foster mother, the late Helen Markowitz, had prized a neat, clean house. Young Kathy had worshipped Helen and made this ethic part of her religion, which did not include God, but certainly every type of mop and brush, every solvent and powder known to God and professional cleaning women. Back in her New York condo was a pantry, where each can, each bottle and jar stood at attention in the perfect formation of little soldiers in the service of the obsessively tidy Mallory, who was marred only in the places where it didn’t show.

Until now.

She leaned the shovel against a tree and covered her face with the ruined hands. So tired, deflating now, as if the air had been let out of her lungs and the blood from her veins. If she could just sit down in the cool darkness and not get up again. This day had been years long, painful and difficult, but she had only come undone at the sight of chipped polish and broken fingernails.

No – it was not quite that simple.

Everything had been lost – all the family she had ever known, and she had also lost important memories. She had not been able to remember the name of the dog when he lay dying. And now she was alone again, in a state she had always believed preferable to the company of people who would eventually leave her, every one of them, by death, or on foot, as Charles had left her tonight.