Transgression (3 page)

J
enny stared at the puffy white finger and its trailing blackened fingernail for the longest time. She could see tiny splits in the skin where an iridescent purple showed through. The smell of it was faint and familiar, like the smell of the groundhogs that Brandy would catch on occasion, and shake and leave stinking out in the sun.

Jenny looked toward the edge of the woods. She couldn’t see the witch anywhere. Maybe her stomach was full now. Maybe she was having an after-dinner nap in her cave.

Jenny looked down at the finger again. She knew she had to do something. But what? Maybe she could take the finger with her and then when her family found her hiding under the bridge she could prove how horrible Madeleine had been. Madeleine had been so horrible that she’d had to risk being eaten by a witch. That’s how much Madeleine’s teasing had hurt her.

The more Jenny stared down at the swollen finger, the more it seemed to pulse with some kind of ominous magical power. It hushed all the sounds in the world, it stopped the sound of her own breathing.

Witches could smell children from a long way away. Jenny knew this. Her heart was beginning to race again.

A tall dusty weed stood beside her, its broad leaves pierced through with a myriad of tiny holes She plucked off two leaves, rolled the finger into them, stuffed everything into her dress pocket and, ducking through a hole in the wire fence, began to run. The farther she travelled into Mr. Timmon’s
oats the safer she felt but she didn’t stop running until she’d reached the embankment on the other side.

She climbed up to the edge of the road. The dust there felt deep and soft as powder on her stinging feet. It felt warm and comforting. She hurried along, trailing a little dust cloud behind her.

By the time Jenny reached the wooden trestle bridge, she’d developed an alternative plan. There was something so profoundly bad in her pocket, something so beyond any words of explanation she might manage to get out of her mouth that it would make her bad, too. Just the sight of it would sicken her mother. It would sicken everyone but Madeleine.

After tiptoeing up the thick scorched planks to the bridge’s highest point and crouching by the rusty iron railing, she settled down to wait for a passing train. It could come from either direction, it really didn’t matter. Madeleine dropped things like stones and old school books off the bridge into open freight cars all the time. That’s what Jenny would do with the rolled-up finger. And the train would carry this bad thing away. And no one would hate her.

Jenny waited. It seemed to be taking a long time for a train to come by. The smell of tar from the planks on the bridge filled her nose and made her stomach feel sick. The sun danced everywhere and dazzled everything.

After what seemed a long time, she noticed a plume of dust coming along the road from the other direction. She wasn’t sure whether to run and hide in the shadows under the bridge or stay where she was and pretend she wasn’t doing anything of any importance. Maybe whoever was coming along would wave at her and drive by. But it was too late. She recognized her father’s battered yellow truck. She knew he’d already seen her.

Jenny stood up and waited for her father to close the distance. The truck rattled up on the bridge and came to a stop. Her father’s face was speckled with flakes of silvery straw and looked sweaty and hot. His large tanned arm rested on the edge of the rolled-down window.

“What are you doing back here?” he asked.

Without a word and contrary to her plan and against her very best judgment, she pulled the bunched-up leaves out of her pocket and held them out.

Her father’s tired eyes went from her face to the leaves, now partially unfurling in her hands, and back to her face again. “What have you got there, Jen?” he asked, pushing open the door and getting out, which was an amazing thing because normally he would have stayed in the cab. Jenny took it as a sign that her father somehow knew that a shadow was falling.

She remained silent.

Her father parted the leaves. The finger, just as milky-white as before and emitting its faint, frightening smell, rolled a little inside the cup of leaves. She could hear her father’s breath come to a stop.

Jenny found her voice.

“There’s a w-w-witch in our w-w-woods,” she said.

A
dele waited under the trees in the small park across from her old school for Simone Ducharme. Unlike Adele’s situation, Simone’s family remained well-to-do, so she could afford to stay in school.

Adele was beginning to feel a small wave of nostalgia for her lost scholastic life by the time Simone came out carrying an armful of books. It lasted only a moment, though, for she had much more important business on her mind.

“Lend me some money?” she said, falling into step with her friend and taking a few books to lighten her load. Simone always carried home more books from school than anyone else. They’d been best friends since the age of six. By the time they were twelve, Simone could see over Adele’s head but Adele, despite her small size, was the superior athlete. Simone, among all of her other achievements, was the most uncoordinated girl in the school.

“All right,” Simone replied. She didn’t ask why. That was part of their secret code. All their lives people had been interrogating them: the nuns at school, priests at confession, the other girls, and in Simone’s case a mother who had nothing better to do with her time than attempt to know every detail of the private lives of her seven children.

“I have to go to Paris,” Adele added.

Any information had to be voluntarily offered between the two of them, which made having a conversation difficult but kept them intensely interested in each other. They walked along together in their usual comfortable silence. When they reached the iron gate in front of the Ducharme house,
Adele further added, “A German clerk has given me the name of an officer in Paris who might have some information about my father.”

Simone turned to look at Adele, her eyes instantly quizzical and on guard behind their shiny plates of glass. “What German clerk?”

Simone had broken the code.

At first Adele thought she wouldn’t respond, and then she knew she would, surprised to realize that this was what she’d had in mind all along, to ask to borrow money, yes, but also to tell Simone about Manfred Halder. She could count on Simone to be appropriately horrified. Simone was always appropriately horrified about everything. But why would she think, even for one moment, that she might need some bulwark against Manfred Halder?

“He’s just this stupid clerk,” she said.

“How did you meet him?” Simone was really breaking the rules now.

“He met me. He came out on the street. I couldn’t do anything about it. But he wants to help me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do. Wake up!” Simone’s angular face looked fierce and full of virtue.

Adele tried to look fierce, too. “There’s no question of that,” she said.

Avoiding Madame Ducharme, the two girls snuck up the back stairs to Simone’s bedroom. Simone took down a carved wooden box from inside a mahogany armoire, placed it on her canopied bed and counted out enough money for three nights’ lodging in Paris, or as close as they could estimate. Adele thought she had enough money hidden in her dresser drawer at home for the train fare and for food.

Simone knew that Adele’s mother was in a fragile condition, at least that’s how her own mother expressed it, so she didn’t question Adele’s need to keep her trip to Paris a secret. They made a plan. Simone would drop in on Madame Georges to ask if Adele could stay with her for a few days. Because Madame Georges had always been impressed by the Ducharme’s money, and in her current penurious situation would be even more anxious to keep the lines of communication open, she’d be sure to come out of her bedroom and agree, just as long as Old Raymond took care of Bibi and Jean. And Adele would talk Old Raymond into walking across town to the factory
where she worked to tell her foreman that she was sick and must stay in bed for a few days. Given any chance of finding his beloved Dr. Georges, Old Raymond could be talked into most anything.

René was a more serious problem. He’d found work in a scrapyard and lived apart from the family, but he continued to come around to the house. All she could do was pray that he’d stay away for now, at least until she could tell him the glorious news, that despite the risks she’d taken she’d found out that their father was alive.

“I couldn’t stand it if my father was missing for a year.” Lately Simone had been keeping the long velvet drapes on her two windows drawn, no matter how many times her mother opened them. Now she was poised like a tremulous deer in the middle of the large shadowy room. “Do you think there’ll be a price to pay?”

Simone’s father owned the largest tool and die shop in the district, and if he’d been wealthy before the Germans occupied the city he was even more wealthy now–up to his neck in German contracts, people were saying.

“For what?”

“For dealing with the Germans.”

Adele was well aware of what was being said about Monsieur Ducharme’s growing financial health, but what was the similarity with her situation? How could Simone compare the two?

“Whatever the price, I’m willing to pay it,” Adele said. And she would, any sacrifice at all for her father. She expected to feel brave and proud, a kind of exhilarating rush in the blood, but all she felt was a sense of foreboding.

It was raining hard when Adele jumped the queue and stuck her head inside the open doorway. Manfred, working at the back of the room, saw her almost immediately. He whispered something to a fellow clerk and hurried toward the door.

“Come this way,” he said, running down the steps. He waited until Adele had caught up and then he ducked under her umbrella. She had to lift it a foot higher to accommodate him.

They began to walk down the cobbled street together. Manfred lit a cigarette. Water splashed noisily down drainpipes and ran off the edge of the umbrella. Manfred’s one shoulder was getting soaked. He turned and smiled at her.

“Have you got the papers?” Adele asked sharply, averting her eyes.

Manfred pulled out an envelope from inside his jacket. “I have drawn you a map of Paris.”

Such a German, Adele thought.

“You will go to see Lieutenant Max Oberg. Show him my letter. He is a kind man. He will do everything to locate your father. I have given you the name of Madame Germaine Bouchard. Please stay there. I know you will be safe there.”

Adele took the envelope and tucked it inside her coat.

“Good luck,” Manfred said.

Adele didn’t reply.

They’d come to a stop under a streaming awning. Adele kept her eyes fixed on her wet shoes as if they were the most amazing sight in the world. Rain clattered everywhere. She could smell his cigarette smoke.

“I would like to apologize,” Manfred said.

Adele looked up at him. His face seemed even paler than usual, his dark eyes uncertain. He turned away and walked quickly through the rain.

A
s Chief of Police Jack Cullen drove along the road, a fine dust began to cover his windshield and collect on his windshield wiper blades. He turned on the wipers. Only one worked, the one on the passenger side.

“Goddamn it to hell,” Jack muttered to himself, trying to peer through the dust. The town council was out to get him and, in particular, the mayor. The one police car the town owned, the one he was currently driving, was old, and he was old, too. The mayor and council were waiting for both of them to fall apart.

Jack allowed himself a tight smile. The car might be at the wreckers by the end of the year, but he wouldn’t be. He turned into Clarence Broome’s lane and raced up to the house like a minor dust storm. The car came to a halt and Jack, all six foot three of him, six foot five in the black regulation boots he never failed to polish to a high shine every working day of his life, stepped out.

It was close to a hundred degrees but it didn’t make any difference. Grey face as tough as a side of old beef, silver hair buzzed into a brush cut, in full uniform, blue shirt, necktie, jacket and pants, he reached back into the car and put his cap on his head at a snappy angle.

A wiry-looking farmer came down the steps of his side porch. “Hello, Chief. Clarence Broome,” he said, walking across the yard.

“Where’s it at?” Jack replied.

“In the drive shed. Wife wouldn’t have it in the house.”

Jack looked toward the porch.

A woman and two girls were watching him through a screen door. The woman opened the door. “Good afternoon, Chief,” she called out, and though she tried a welcoming smile her face looked strained. The smaller of the two girls followed her out on to the porch and clung to her dress. The older one hung back in the shadow of the kitchen.

Jack touched the brim of his cap but didn’t return the salutation. “Show me,” he said to Clarence.

The finger was under an oil-stained rag on a workbench in the drive shed. When Jack saw the rag with the little bump under it, it was all he could do not to break out in a cock-eyed grin. Clarence Broome, out of some sense of decorum, had covered it up as if it were a corpse. It told Jack something important about the man in front of him, though. It told him, if a crime had been committed, this squeamish fellow hadn’t likely done it. But then you could never be absolutely sure.

Jack picked up a corner of the rag and pulled it aside. A detached finger, luminously white, lay there in front of him. He pressed down on it, testing its sponginess, its condition of decay. The finger curled a little into itself as if he’d just touched a caterpillar.

“Anybody lose a finger around here, Mr. Broome?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Somebody’s hired hand, maybe?”

“Hired hand?” Clarence wasn’t sure whether the chief was making a joke. “No. I would have heard, for sure.”

“People lose fingers in machinery all the time, don’t they?”

“Sometimes.”

“Is there a cemetery close by?”

“Behind the stone church, but that’s a good four miles away.”

“Anybody buried there lately?”

“Old Mrs. Waggson. In the spring. She was ninety-four.”

Jack picked up the coal-black nail. The finger spun below on its sinewy string. He held the fingernail close up, examining its shape and its size.

“I didn’t have the heart to look at it much,” Clarence said. “Maybe it’s a tramp’s finger. We’re close to the railroad here. Or maybe one of those Europeans.”

“The DP camp, you mean?”

“It’s just a couple of miles down the tracks.”

“I wonder if there are any displaced women out there,” Jack said, but more to himself than to Clarence. He went back to examining the finger.

Clarence could feel his throat tightening. “Could that be a woman’s?”

“Maybe.”

Clarence stared at the disgusting thing. He wished it off his farm, he wished it as far away from his family as possible, he wished it to perdition.

“I hope it’s not a woman’s finger,” Clarence said.