Walking the Labyrinth (19 page)

April 10, 1935. I thought of a hiding place for this diary that Fentrice will never discover. And then I went looking for her, angrier than I’ve ever been.

But when I finally find her I see that something is dreadfully wrong. I know what it is, of course, at least part of it, but I ask her anyway. “What’s the matter?” I say.

“Tom’s not at home,” she says. “His mother says he’s out on business, but what business can he have that doesn’t involve the show, the Allalie Family?”

Another woman, I think, someone he knew before in San Francisco. I know that Fentrice is thinking this as well, and that she’s trying not to, trying to persuade herself that she’s the only one he sees. Unbidden, the names of other women he’s mentioned come to her mind.

April 11, 1935. Things at the boardinghouse are tense, and so I go for a walk during the day, find out how Jake is doing. When I come back I see all the signs of another family row—Fentrice is screaming, Verey and Lanty are trying to placate her. Her face has gone white again, and yes, the tip of her nose has turned pink.

“He was supposed to—She—That miserable bitch—”

“What is it?” I ask Fentrice. “What’s happened?”

“Oh, it’s all right for you to talk,” she says bitterly. “She doesn’t envy you. It’s just me she takes it out on, because I’m better looking.”

I had never thought of one sister as being prettier than the other. “What did Thorne do?” I ask.

“You won’t believe it. Tom was supposed to pick me up tonight—we were going to go to a movie. But when I got here I found out that he’s been and gone. Gone with Thorne, who changed to look like me.”

There was a time when Thorne and Fentrice would trade places, would each turn into the other by some magic I don’t entirely understand. Normally they don’t look very much alike, but at first their illusion was enough to confuse even members of the family. Later, of course, we found ways to distinguish them, and they stopped playing the trick on us. Or so we thought.

“Verey and Lanty just stood there, watching them go,” Fentrice said. “Didn’t even try to stop them. I’m so sick of this family—”

“We didn’t realize, dear,” Lanty said.

“You didn’t realize,” Fentrice said sarcastically. “You must have suspected something. She’s not that good.”

“We had no idea,” Lanty said.

April 12, 1935. Thorne returns this morning, looking happy and smelling of sex. The minute she sees her Fentrice begins screaming. I leave quickly, take another walk.

April 13, 1935. Thorne’s gone. Verey is angrier than I’ve ever seen him—he says that he’s about to give up on the whole pack of us, that he’s ready to retire and let us bicker among ourselves. He’s convinced that Fentrice had something to do with Thorne’s disappearance, but Fentrice hotly denies it. She says that Tom the trumpet player is also gone, insists they must have run off together. Verey calls our mother, asking her to send us someone to replace Thorne, and to let us know if Thorne shows up.

Our performance tonight goes well despite all the tension.

April 14, 1935. We left for Los Angeles today. We waited as long as we could at the freight yard where we board, stowing away our bags and boxes, the statues and musical instruments and tiger’s cage, but Thorne never arrived. She knows our itinerary—maybe she’ll catch up with us later. We hope so, anyway. No one has the slightest idea where she could be.

April 15, 1935. Los Angeles. Fentrice is certain Thorne isn’t coming back. That might be wishful thinking on her part—if Thorne stays away she’ll be the one to take over when Verey and Lanty retire. I truly hope this won’t happen. I like Fentrice well enough, but she has always had this bitter rivalry with her sister, and now that Thorne’s taken Tom it’s grown worse. Fentrice sees Thorne’s disappearance as her chance in the limelight, and she could ruin a lot about the act just to give herself more to do.

April 16, 1935. Los Angeles. Last night Fentrice took Thorne’s place in the sketch with the statues. Although the bit is a pantomime, she began to cry out when Corrig chased her—“No! Stop! Please stop!” At one point she looked truly afraid. Stage fright? I thought. It didn’t seem likely with all her experience.

This morning she asked me how I thought it went. “I don’t think you should say anything,” I said. “It destroys the mood.”

“That’s all right for you to say—you get to talk every night when you do your fortune-telling number. Do you realize I don’t speak once in the entire act? I might as well be mute, like Corrig.”

“Well, bring it up in rehearsal. The act works—don’t take it upon yourself to change it.”

She started to say something. I didn’t need to be a fortuneteller to know what it was—she was sure Verey and Lanty would never change a thing. And it’s true that we’ve been doing some bits ever since Grandmother Neesa first set foot on the stage. Still, they work—that’s the important thing.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said, interrupting her. “When you come to life you can do a little dance. I’ve seen you dance—you’re good. Show the audience how happy you are to be free. Then Corrig plays the clarinet, trying to enslave you again, and you and he struggle. You become a tiger to escape him, but he freezes you and starts to take you away. And then the other statues close in on him. The whole thing can work as a dance.”

She nodded eagerly. “Great idea,” she said.

“Rehearse it first, though. Give Corrig some idea of what you’re going to do.”

“Oh, Corrig knows everything anyway,” Fentrice said.

April 17, 1935. Los Angeles. I hadn’t seen Fentrice and Corrig rehearse, but the pantomime went off as smoothly as if they’d done it for years. Another minor crisis averted.

April 18, 1935. Los Angeles. Fentrice is gone again. I don’t understand it—I thought she was happy now that Thorne’s left, excited about having more to do in the act. We spend a frantic day rehearsing with the cousins Edwina’s sent us. The show tonight goes better than I expected, though of course we still need a lot of work.

Molly skimmed through the rest of the diary, curious whether Fentrice had ever returned. The Palace Theatre closed in September of 1935, two months after the Allalies played there. More theaters around the country closed or showed only movies; the family toured less and less.

When the United States joined World War II in 1941 Callan and some of the others traveled around the country entertaining the troops. Callan quit the next year. “I look into a crowd of uniforms and I see that this one will die, and the one sitting next to him will lose his arms,” he wrote. “It’s all too much for me. I can’t face it anymore. Verey and Lanty will come out of retirement and visit army camps with Corrig and some of the other cousins.”

While touring Callan met Mathilda Dunstone, a dancer in the chorus line of another show. “She’s beautiful—I’m very much attracted to her,” he wrote. “Would I be as attracted if I didn’t see us in the future, see our house, our children? The first child will be named Joan, I think, and the second Samuel. The fashion in our family for strange names has passed—we don’t need to hide any longer.”

Molly read the paragraph over. The first mention of her lost mother. She wanted to cry, and angrily told herself to stop.

Callan and Mathilda were married in 1943; Joan was born in 1945. Molly turned the page, realized with surprise that it was the last one. Surely Callan hadn’t fit the rest of his life into one page. When had he died? She didn’t know.

The last entry was dated February 10, 1946. “Joan sat up by herself today. Mathilda had gone to do the shopping. When she came home I told her about Joan’s progress. She didn’t believe me, and Joan refused to do it again.”

The light outside had faded while Molly read the diary. She sat in the darkness a while. Callan must have written more books, books that continued the story. Joan grew up, married, left the family. Did Samuel have the rest of the journals?

Statues becoming women, women becoming tigers. People who disappeared on stage, and then disappeared in life, the final magic trick. Streamers and music and stories … What a time it must have been, in spite of all the arguments. She wished she could have been there.

One mystery at least was solved, had turned out not to be so mysterious after all. Thorne had run off with Fentrice’s boyfriend, Tom the trumpet player. Fentrice left the act soon after, angry with Thorne for stealing Tom and disgusted at not being given enough to do.

John was going to be disappointed, Molly thought. He had been so certain someone had been killed. She grinned and reached for the phone to call him, to tell him that he could read the book now.

The scrapbook, she thought. Her hand was still outstretched; she returned it to her side. Callan had said that Thorne had cut out the clippings for the scrapbook, and yet somehow it was Fentrice who had wound up with it. And the last clipping was … She was pretty sure it was Andrew Dodd’s review of the performance in Oakland. The last show that Thorne had attended, but Fentrice had gone on to Los Angeles. How had Fentrice gotten Thorne’s scrapbook?

Molly shook her head. Thorne might have left the book behind when she went. Or Fentrice might have had a scrapbook of her own; Callan hadn’t mentioned one but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. And clearly Fentrice had been eager to leave Los Angeles. She wouldn’t stop to cut out clippings.

Everything made sense now. Fentrice had never mentioned her sister for any number of reasons: Thorne had had far more to do in the act, Thorne had stolen her boyfriend. Callan had written the story from his point of view but it seemed to Molly, reading between the lines, that the family had treated Fentrice shabbily. It was easy enough to understand why Fentrice had cut off all ties with them.

NINE

Dig Deeper

J
ohn’s phone was busy. Molly waited half an hour and called again, and once more fifteen minutes later. It was nine o’clock. Who the hell could he be talking to? He’d said he didn’t have any other cases.

She was eager to talk over what she had learned. She looked in her phone book for his address, then grabbed her coat and the diary and went outside to her car.

John turned out to live fairly close by. The neighborhood had flirted with gentrification in the last decade, but during the real estate slump it had settled back into its former shabbiness. A house painted pink with blue trim sat on a well-maintained lawn next to a peeling house with a broken washing machine out front.

John’s place was a duplex. She rang the bell. No one answered, and she rang again.
He’s got to be home
, she thought.
Unless he’s taken the phone off the book, but why would he do that?

She tried the bell a third time. A black woman opened the door slightly but left it on its chain.

“Does John Stow live here?” Molly asked.

“Yes, he does,” the woman said, a little suspiciously. “Who are you?”

Oh my God, it’s his girlfriend,
Molly thought. The one who was mad at him. “I’m working on a case with him,” she said. “I brought a book he wanted to read. My name’s Molly Travers—maybe he’s told you about me.”

“He doesn’t talk about his cases,” the woman said. She hesitated, then slipped the chain and opened the door. “Well, you might as well come in. We can wait for him together. My name’s Gwen.”

Molly went into the front room and looked around curiously. It contained a battered sofa, a television set, a table with two chairs, and a bookshelf. The TV was on; the table was set with two plates, but only one of them held the remains of a dinner. There were no posters, no plants, nothing except the books to give any indication of personality. Did Gwen live here too? Molly would bet that she didn’t.

Gwen motioned her to the sofa and sat next to her. Her hair was straight and cut short, framing her face. She had high cheekbones and large, slightly upturned eyes. “Can I get you anything?” she asked.

“No, thanks,” Molly said. “Look, I’m sorry to barge in this way, but the phone was busy—”

“I took it off the hook.”

“Why?”

“Why? Listen, I don’t know you—I’m not about to tell you the story of my life.”

“When do you think John will be back?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“Then why did you invite me in?”

“It seemed a better idea than having you wait out on the street.”

Something exploded on the television screen; someone fired several rounds into a burning building and then drove away quickly.

Gwen stood. The noise from the television had covered the sound of the door opening. John came in. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. Then, seeing Molly, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Visiting you,” Molly said.

Gwen looked from one to the other, smiling a little. She seemed to enjoy the sight of John at a disadvantage. “What do you want?” he asked, unfreezing slightly.

“I brought you the diary. I finished it.”

“How was it?”

“Pretty interesting. I think I know what happened to Thorne.”

“How could you? Samuel’s read the entire thing and he has no idea. That’s what he hired me for.”

“It was pretty obvious to me. She ran off with a trumpet player named Tom.”

For once John had nothing to say.

“Sorry,” Molly said. “Fentrice didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Then why did Fentrice lie when you asked her if she had a sister?”

“For any number of reasons. Here—read the book.”

John took the diary. “What about visiting Fentrice? Did you ask her if I can talk to her?”

“I haven’t had time. I’ll call her tomorrow. But I really think you’ll have to try another approach on this thing.”

“Thanks for the diary,” John said.

“Sure,” Molly said. “See you around. Nice meeting you,” she said to Gwen.

John frowned, no doubt wondering what the two women had talked about while he was gone. “Yeah,” Gwen said. She sounded a little warmer this time; perhaps she considered Molly an ally in the battles she fought with John.

Serves him right,
Molly thought as she went to her car. He’d obviously missed dinner, and he hadn’t even called to tell Gwen where he was. But he couldn’t have called, she remembered; Gwen had taken the phone off the hook. She shrugged. Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten involved. There didn’t seem to be any right and wrong here; probably both of them were at fault.