I'll Let You Go (16 page)

L
ucy Trotter had a mission. She would help her cousin, the boy who was first—next to Edward, of course—in heart and in blood. She would do this large and amazing thing for him
and
be Author in the process. She had finally solved the Mystery of the Blue Maze—or was at least well on her way, for the riddle now had a designation: Marcus Weiner, long-lost father extraordinaire. She had pried the surname off a reluctant Winter, then backed away from further interrogations. Vanity would not let her take the easy route.

So, she Yahoo!'d and Google'd, fidgeted and stressed; there were a million pages to sift through on the Web. She back-slashed, skidded and WWW'd her way from Net Detective 2000 to The Skip Tracing and Locating Missing Persons Resource Center, The Hollywood Network's Missing Persons CyberCenter, How to Find Anyone Anywhere, Tracing Missing Heirs, Missing Persons Throughout the World, and TrackStar Inc.—America's Missing Person Locator (an Infotel Company). Each site offered Certified Missing Persons Investigator courses and on-/off-line seminars in locating specialized detectives (the latter would have been a cheat). Lucy staved off tears of anxiety, frustration and boredom—YOU ARE VISITOR 193,784—mailing in subscriptions to
PI
and
Pursuit
magazines and
Professional Repossessor
once she got her seventh wind.

The free sites were filled with suggestions on how to track down the vanished through genealogy, local 411, voter registration, birth and civil records, criminal and military, real estate and alumni, news archives, former husbands, former wives, licensing bureaus, hospitals, et alia.

There were Netherlands databases and comprehensive national White Pages and what seemed to be an infinity of pathetic, once-poignant notices from those looking for loved ones stretching all the way back to the birth of the Net—how could she possibly sort through it? She enlisted her phlegmatic brother to root out Social Security numbers on Lexis-Nexis while she, with halfhearted incompetence, tackled property deeds. It felt hopeless.

There
were
certain obvious details that would have made things easier. For example: what, at the time of his leave-taking, did Marcus Weiner actually do for a living? Until she hit the PowerBook wall, Lucy made a pact with herself not to approach her parents—a true girl detective would never need to resort to such tactics. After conferring with AltaVista (there were 608,540 pages found pertaining to “Marcus Weiner,” many of which were translated from other languages), she decided to do a little flat-footing at the Beverly Hills Library to check local newspapers; one of them
must
have reported the Weiner-Trotter nuptials. But it was rainy that week, so Lucy found herself glued to the enormous screen of Joyce's unused G-4 instead. Truth be told, there
were
some Webby diversions from her main cause—per usual, the pigtailed researcher was IM'd so many times that she couldn't make much headway; a veritable fusillade of “creaking doors” and harmonic tantaras announced that endless Buddies were on-line. Along the way, she surprised herself by becoming seriously obsessed with the Boulder Langon homepage, a development the actress herself found hysterical.

Whenever the thought of approaching her mother with a few queries reared its torpid head, she stubbornly ruled it out. Anyway, that wouldn't have been easy: an unnerving secrecy had dropped like a veil after Aunt Trinnie sat her son down and told all—as if there were nothing more to reveal! The party-line spin on “closure” was sorely artificial. Mysteries abounded, and the body of Marcus Weiner floated, pickled and unquiet—like the story she had read during an epic Internet tangent of a teenager who slipped and fell into a river in Georgia. Lucy and her Buds were riveted: trapped beneath the surface, wedged vertically between rocks for months, the teen's body was impossible to retrieve save for damming the waters. Locals said leave the river alone, it would “give the girl up” in its own time; but that wasn't good enough for the girl's father—and
not
good enough for Lucille Rose, who loved Cousin
Tull more than she could ever admit, even to herself. She would not wait for time or the river
or
Bel-Air to give Marcus Weiner up. She could see the crown of his head just below the surface and would do anything in her power to pull him ashore, and to rest. She was convinced Tull would one day thank her for kayaking him through such a watershed; it might even make him drop a knee and propose.

Meanwhile, the boy around whom these rapids swirled couldn't be bothered. He became irascible, and refused to pay homage to Lucy's night-surfing or the double-clicks of her anxious heart. Whenever she made the mistake of alluding to her ongoing detective work, he lashed out, leaving a jellyfish sting of hurt. She forgave him everything.

He raged. He plastered bumper stickers—
MY KID SHOT YOUR HONOR STUDENT
—on faculty cars. He stole hard-boiled eggs and batteries from 7-Eleven and a Schwinn from outside Borders on the Promenade. He provoked fights with stronger, wilier boys and for the first time felt the exhilarating, nauseous pain of hard knuckles against cheekbone, sinus, gut. He was winded and bruised, snide and weepy. He was all over the place. When Mr. Hookstratten beckoned him into his office, Tull said go to hell. At home, on the labyrinth's cold stone benches or in the narcotized darkness of the cavernous living room, enfolded by walls with shutters of macassar ebony, sprawled on the Jean Royère sofa between Ming-style cabinets of gold-leafed
wenge
wood, under the Chardin or black-gold Rembrandt, he let his mother stroke his tousled hair, smelling her skin and clothes while he cried all over the fine bushy hairs of her arm.

But no one took him seriously, not even himself—his anger being merely a plot development of
The Wounded Boy
, Act Two. When a Four Winds Care Team suggested the boy be medicated (they'd carefully interviewed him after a rumor spread that he had a “hit list”), his mother went ballistic. Half the school was on Zoloft, Effexor or Serzone; Tull knew a twelve-year-old who'd been on Prozac since age five. Trinnie was of a mind to pull him out of there. Lackadaisical assholes! With their much-hyped zero-tolerance policy for drugs (whenever a child was caught using, power parents brought in attorneys and the school caved)—Hypocrites! Pushers! Sleazy
fucks
—she knew all about their fund-raising tactics too: a mom whose kid had been rejected told her how she and her husband were taken out to lunch as part of the “enrollment
process” and hit up for half a million because a TRW on an estranged relative had shown income in the high nines.
That's
how much the Care Team cared!

With what then besides a fresh delinquency was he left? The idea of a newly minted father, at first intriguing, now disgusted. King of dead-beat dads, a man who'd botched visitation on a heroic scale … Tull conjured a face floating in the air like a newsprint terrorist's: Marcus the Jackal. He watched the sadistic groom flee in white tux and tails from that strange cracked column while his martyred mother slept. The jackal had ruined her, and Tull would make him pay. As he gamboled with Pullman through the sculpted grounds of Saint-Cloud, he imagined his father blowing up Buddhas with the Taliban—then, in a weaker moment, as the subject of an A&E hagiography—speedily supplanted by a careering, poorly lit chase and capture on
America's Wildest Police Videos
. Authorities would usher the boy like a dignitary to his father's cell. There, shackled, Marcus X (Lucy had not yet vouchsafed the last name) stood cowering in his dirty formal wear and sleepless coward's eyes as the boy sent a gob of spit his way. The guards laughed approvingly and steered him out by his small shoulders while dearest Dad sank in supplication, old cold hands on cold steel bars.

“A
n amazing feat,” crowed Edward from the quaint, cozy middle of the Black Lantern Book Shoppe. “Replicating a folly as complex as that—and all in a year's time! Look! Look here—”

He motored excitedly toward the reticent Tull, a pristine volume of the Amazon FedExed history of Le Désert de Retz in his gloved hand. La Colonne itself graced the cover, while the tower of Edward's
own
head wore a blousy façade of red silk; his face the delicate half-mask of a raccoon-like beast he'd fashioned out of feathers and bamboo.

“But what I find
so
truly weird is how you found your way there! I mean, before
knowing
any of this.”

“And why you didn't ever
tell
us,” whined Lucy.

“Pullman took me,” said Tull, his casualness a bit contrived.

The magnificent animal could be heard cavorting on the streets of the small European-style village where Edward lived. His father had built the fantasia for his son's convenience and amusement—Edward called it Olde CityWalk—on an acre or so tucked behind the property on
Stradella Road. The mobile invalid thought the corny “village” conceit trying, yet its ramps and customized dimensions
did
make it extraordinarliy livable. A full-time nursing staff was housed in a cobbler's storefront; the workshop where Edward designed vizards and prosthetics from clay, wood and papier-mâché occupied the Boar's Head Inn, with his private apartments above. Black Lantern was the perfect model of an English den of antiquities, its shelves stocked with both contemporary fare and volumes two centuries old.

“I mean, Pullman found it.”

“And
you
kept it all to yourself. Rather elitist, no?”

“How
could
you, Tull? I
hate
you!” said Lucy, unconvincingly.

“Still,” said Edward, “it
is
an astonishing coincidence.”

“There are no accidents,” said Lucy, sagely peering over from her celery-green Smythson steno pad. One thing was certain: she was thrilled to see her brother excited again, about
anything—
until the discovery of the broken Bel-Air column and its French counterpart, he'd been inscrutable and queerly unenthusiastic about the business of hunting for Mr. Marcus Weiner. “All is predetermined.”

“Then it's settled,” Edward said, snatching the book from Tull's hands. “You
have
to take us.”

“Vive La Colonne!”
shouted Lucy.

“A major field trip is in order.”

“Fine,” said Tull, his languidness sounding more staged than he would have liked. If it weren't his cousin who was asking, he'd have flat-out refused.

“You don't really have a choice—this whole
father
thing has you backed into a square corner. That's a phrase pilots use: it's when you run out of ideas at the same time you run out of experience.
No bueno!
”

“I'm not afraid to go,” Tull said, “but it won't be easy for
you
. It's not exactly wheelchair-friendly.”

Edward stared at the picture book a moment, like a preacher absorbed in a favorite verse before looking up at the flock. “La Colonne Détruite …” he mused, practically licking his chops. “Created on the eve of the Revolution by François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville, gentleman of fashion. The most extraordinary folly in Europe, visited by everyone from Marie-Antoinette to Thomas Jefferson to famed Surrealist André Breton.
Vive l'ancien régime!
Nestled within a vast park of sycamores and chestnuts, lindens and blue cedars—oh! and let us not forget
the imported Virginia tulips! The ‘shattered column': an image common to the iconography of late-eighteenth-century Freemasonry. And who do we have to thank for this relocated heaven on earth? Why, none other than Grandpa Lou! Our very own Grandpa Lou! How crazy is that! Oh! How absurd! I knew Grandpa was a genius, but this! And kept
secret
all these years! Hidden! From even the architectural cognoscenti! How, how, how? I tell you, nothing short of astonishing!”

W
hile the children made their plans, Bluey's birthday was celebrated in the main house. The honoree, in her beloved Oscar de la Renta sequined jacket, sported a vintage Frances Whitney millinery
mobile
spiraling neatly off her head like a junior Guggenheim, from which it was inspired.

“But wouldn't it be fun,” said Joyce, “having your old grade school named after you? I think it'd be a hoot.”

Hoot
was a word Trinnie loathed. Though she
did
think her sister-in-law looked particularly becoming, sort of the way she remembered Claire Bloom—sexy in that rock-hard cold-mountain-stream sort of way. All the primping and preening had paid off; tonight, the skin and hair stars were definitely in alignment.

“Oh,” said Dodd. “I think that was bogus—you know, something that popped into Marcie's head. She doesn't have any say about that. The district would never consent.”

Trinnie fidgeted with her South Sea pearls. She wore a marabou-trimmed cardigan and a crocheted halter dress as green as her eyes; piercing her brother with the latter, she said, “You
hated
that school.”

“But why
would
he?” interjected Bluey. “It was
wonderful
. And that wonderful Dr. Janklow!”

“Yes,” chuffed Louis. “Extraordinary. Wonderful educator. Sensitive man. We had him to the house for dinner.”

“He came to dinner because he was a
fag
.”

“Oh come on, Trinnie.”

“Dr. Janklow,” said his sister witchily, “was interested in Dodd because Dr. Janklow was a
fag
.”

Her brother smiled, amused.

“And
who
was Dr. Janklow?” asked Ralph.

“The school psychologist,” replied Trinnie. “My brother spent
lots
of
time with the school psychologist.” She turned on him again and sneered. “
Dodd Trotter Elementary
—why would you even
dream
it?”