Walking the Labyrinth (15 page)

“But then she says that what she did was wrong. She apologizes, she offers to send her money—”

“And a lot of good that did after Dorothy squandered her fortune on Emily and her family.”

“We don’t know she squandered—”

“She lost the house a few years later. Maybe she’d had to bail out Emily and Harrison one time too many.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Molly said, suddenly angry. “I still think Emily was a good person. She hired that maid who was pregnant, for example, and she did try to help Dorothy, at least in the beginning. No one’s perfect. I mean, look at you. You stole that book from the Westingates.”

“Yeah, and we’d better put it back before someone steals it from us again. We’ll Xerox it tomorrow and then invite ourselves back to Applebury and sneak it into the library. And let’s hope no one notices those three or four pages are missing.”

“Didn’t the police tell us to stay in London?”

“What—you think they’re going to follow our every move? We’ll go up for the day, come back before they even have time to suspect we’re gone.”

That night, as Molly closed her eyes to sleep, she saw the wax figure of Lydia lying on the bed, her red hair fanning out from her face. What had happened to Lydia? Emily might have taken money from Dorothy, but she would never commit murder—of that Molly was fairly certain. But it had shaken her more than she would admit to John to see Thorne’s name in Emily’s journal.

John’s plan worked better than they had hoped. He called the Westingates from London and set up an appointment, and they took the train to Canterbury and a cab to Applebury. During another tour of the house John excused himself to go to the bathroom; when he came back he nodded to Molly slightly. The book had been returned to the library.

They left Tantilly feeling giddy. “Oh, God,” Molly said. “I can’t believe we got away with it.”

John reached for his notebook, stopped in the act of taking it out. “Don’t look around. There’s a man behind that hedge over there.”

“Not Flat Cap again. No, it couldn’t be—Flat Cap’s dead. Who is it?”

“I don’t know. Don’t go after him—Molly!”

“Hey, it worked the last time,” Molly called over her shoulder. But the man was leaving the safety of the hedge and walking quickly toward her. He had a sharp narrow face, a pointed nose. His right hand was tucked into his jacket pocket. Was he holding a gun?

“Hello,” Molly said. “Do you want to talk to us?”

“That’s right,” the man said as he came nearer. He sounded almost cheerful, as if he was doing them a favor.

“Why?” John asked, coming up next to Molly.

“You returned something to the Westingates, didn’t you? What was it? It looked like a book.”

“What difference does it make?”

“None, really. Except that I think a man named Joseph Ottig had the book before you, and he’s dead now. The police would be interested in that, don’t you think? Your fingerprints over Ottig’s, on stolen property? And then there’s the fact that you were told to stay in London after Ottig’s murder.”

“Who are you?” Molly asked. “Why are you threatening us?”

“Well, for one thing I’d like to know what was in the book and why you took it. They didn’t give it to you, that’s for sure. Charles Westingate would sooner part with the family silver than let a book out of his sight. Odd, when you consider that he doesn’t even read much.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m interested in the Order of the Labyrinth. The secrets of their power. I shouldn’t like to resort to blackmail, but I thought it best to put my cards on the table before we begin. You tell me about the book and I don’t go to the police.”

“You and Ottig weren’t working together,” Molly said slowly. “He must have hidden the book for safekeeping and then wouldn’t tell you where it was. And so—” She stopped.
And so you killed him,
she had been about to say, but it would be dangerous to let him know she knew that.

“Very good,” the other man said. “Now tell me what was in the book.”

“Why don’t you just steal it yourself?” Molly said.

“Never you mind why.”

“You tried something in Lord Westingate’s house and he caught you at it. Is that it?”

“Never you mind, I said. You tell me what you know, or I’ll talk to the police.”

“Go to the police, then,” Molly said. “I’ll bet you have a criminal record. I’ll bet your relationship with them isn’t as cozy as you’d like us to believe.”

“You’d bet that, would you?” the man said. “Would you bet a lengthy stay in prison on it? I’ll give you a day to think about it.” He still sounded cheerful; anyone watching them would have thought he had just concluded a tremendously profitable transaction. “I’ll be waiting for you at the shop in Camden Town tomorrow. Bring your notes.”

The cab they had called was pulling up to the circular drive. They hurried toward it and got in. Molly looked back and saw the man taking his hand out of his pocket. She braced herself for a noise, a shot, but the hand was empty.

John directed the cab to the train station. “God,” Molly said. “Flat Cap wasn’t the only one. We’re still being followed. Are we going to see this guy tomorrow?”

“No.”

“But then—”

“We’re going to leave the country.”

“Leave?”

“If he goes to the police they’ll check Emily’s book, find the torn pages. We’re foreigners, Americans, who might have damaged historical British property. We’d be in trouble, especially since we were questioned in a murder investigation.”

“But the police told us to stay. Won’t they have our names on a list at the airport or something?”

“I’d rather take that chance than stay here. They may have our names, but on the other hand there’s this crazy person with damaging information and a gun—”

“He had a gun, then. He was the one who shot Flat Cap.”

“I’m pretty sure, yes.”

“And then what? What do we do when we get home?”

“Go talk to your aunt. Fentrice.”

“I don’t want to bother—”

“Molly. She lied to you about her sister. She’s got information I need. I’ll have to talk to her sometime.”

“Okay,” Molly said suddenly. “Okay, I’ll introduce you. On one condition: you let me meet your client.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Fine. Then we’re not going to see her.”

“Don’t you want to know what happened to your family?”

“Not badly enough to hurt my aunt. First I have to see your client, find out why he’s pursuing this.”

“I’ll tell you what,” John said. “I’ll ask him. If he says yes then I’ll set up a meeting.”

“And if he says no?”

“Then I won’t.”

“Then you’ll never meet Fentrice.”

“Look. I can probably find the information I need some other way. It would just be easier—”

“You know, I haven’t been too impressed with what you’ve done so far. You found Emily’s journal, yes, but then you lost it again. You managed to get us involved in a murder, and you’re more vulnerable than anyone else would be because you have a police record. Now we’ve got to leave the country before we’re really finished here—”

“We’re finished.”

“All right. You call your client and get back to me.”

“I will.”

They woke hours before dawn the next morning. It was chilly, and the streetlights outside their bed and breakfast turned everything the same flat gray. They said very little to each other as they checked out and rode the underground to the airport.

A car bomb had exploded the day before, and lines at the airport moved slowly as inspectors checked through luggage and questioned passengers. To her surprise Molly and John were waved through without a second glance.

“I guess we don’t look very suspicious,” Molly whispered.

“Yeah. There’s nothing less suspicious than someone whispering in front of a police inspector.”

Molly said nothing. John was angry at something, she knew. The fact that he had not yet discovered the answer to Thorne’s disappearance? The fact that she had placed conditions on introducing him to Fentrice? She didn’t know, and she didn’t much care. She had called Peter’s hotel the night before and left a message with her flight number; perhaps he would be waiting for her at the airport.

But Peter wasn’t there when they landed in San Francisco. She tried not to feel disappointed. He was probably busy or out of town—he had work to do, after all.

“I’ll let you know what my client thinks,” John said at the luggage carousel.

“Okay,” Molly said. Her bag came around on the carousel and she reached for it, slung it over her shoulder. “ ’Bye.” It was an oddly unsatisfying end to what had promised to be an exciting adventure. She wondered if she would ever see John again.

The next day she went to the temp agency and signed up for new assignments. Peter’s voice was waiting for her on the answering machine when she returned home. “Hey, Moll,” he said. “I’m in town. Give me a call—we’ll go out to dinner.”

She called him back and then drove to their usual restaurant. His face was smooth; he was at the stage in his three-day cycle where he had just shaved. She kissed him and sat at the table. “What’s new?” she asked. “How’s it going?”

“Just got back from my publisher in New York,” Peter said. “The latest deal fell through. I thought the idea was a natural, but they disagreed. Someone’s doing an authorized biography, apparently, and they didn’t want an unauthorized one.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Oh, I’ve got plenty of ideas. There’s no shortage of celebrities out there, and no shortage of people with nothing better to do than to read about them.”

Molly frowned. She had noticed this before, the contempt that Peter felt for his readers.

“How about you?” Peter asked. “How are you doing?”

“I went to England,” Molly said. “Remember? I told you about that guy—”

“Right. The private investigator. How did that go?”

“Pretty good. I learned some things about my family, my great-great-grandmother—”

Peter wasn’t listening. Put like that it did sound dull, like a home movie or something. How could she convey to him the strangeness of the trip, the feeling of moving down tangled corridors toward unexpected sights and revelations?

“There was this guy, a lord in a castle who wears leather pants and listens to Tibetan bells, has a labyrinth in his basement. And then I found a dead body. We were actually involved in a police investigation for a while.”

“That doesn’t sound very healthy. What do you know about this investigator, anyway? What’s he been getting you into?”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t his fault that someone got killed.”

Peter raised his hand. Molly realized that she had spoken louder than she meant to; a few of the other diners were looking at her curiously. “Did you see his credentials?” Peter asked.

“I saw his license, if that’s what you mean.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

She should have been angered by the question. Instead she felt a rush of evil pleasure that she had roused him to jealousy. “No,” she said levelly.

Peter looked down at his menu and said nothing. Molly cast around for something to say. “How long are you staying in town?” she asked.

“About a week, at least. I need to make some inquiries, send out some letters. Then I’ve got to get back to New York, pitch a few ideas.”

There was another awkward pause. For the first time in a long while Molly remembered John and his strange bits of knowledge, the way he had discussed the Oneida commune and their silverware at the airport. She picked up her fork and turned it over.
“Stainless Korea,”
it said. She sighed.

Over the next few days the events in England receded, faded into memory. They seemed like something that had happened years ago, or to another person. She fought jet lag, found another temp job, went out to dinner and movies with Robin Ann and other friends. She wrote a long letter to her aunt and read the letter Fentrice sent in return, filled with chatty gossip about the garden and the strange things Estelle had done lately. She waited for messages from Peter, felt her heart race as she rewound her answering machine tape.

One day on her lunch break she went to the Oakland library for books on the occult. All the interesting-sounding ones had been checked out or lost, and she turned away from the computer terminal in frustration.

Well, but she and John knew, more or less, what had happened to the Order of the Labyrinth. It was when Emily and Harrison and their children came to America that the trail had disappeared. She typed in “Vaudeville,” and the word conjured up dozens of books on the screen.

She went to the shelves and checked out a few of the likely-looking ones. That evening, waiting for Peter to call, she began to read.

The magicians known as the Allalie Family, like most vaudeville performers in the early part of the century, traveled on their own from town to town (she read). The act at that time consisted of Neesa Allalie and her children Verey and Lanty. They played fairgrounds, beer halls, civic centers, school auditoriums. As their fame spread their bookings grew, they began to get noticed by the local critics, and finally, in 1916, they signed on the Orpheum Circuit with E. F. Albee.

Magicians in vaudeville were not as popular as comedians or jugglers or even female impersonators. Harry Houdini, who started his career as a magician, soon found that it was his spectacular escapes that would draw the crowds. But the Allalie Family managed to succeed where others had failed. Perhaps it was their air of having come from somewhere else (other performers spoke vaguely of their “British accents”), perhaps the fact that they refused to condescend to their audiences.

From all contemporary accounts, though, the Allalie Family had more to offer their audiences than the run-of-the-mill sideshow. They never filmed their act for posterity, so at this late date we can only guess what the difference was. Alexander Woollcott, writing in the New York
World
in 1926, speaks of “the poetry of their performances, the sense that they are not acting but presenting a sonnet or sestina. There is an inevitability to their actions, so that when we watch we find ourselves nodding in agreement, not amazement. Of course the woman turns into a tree, of course the stars fall into the lake and become swans, of course, of course …”