Walking the Labyrinth (23 page)

“He could,” Callan said. “You should listen to him.”

“Listen to him?” Molly said, frustrated. “He doesn’t
say
anything.”

Corrig threw her an orange.

She caught it and went outside, feeling angry and puzzled and even slightly amused all at the same time. A path wound through the trees, looping and turning in on itself. She followed it, brushing the overhanging leaves from her face as she walked. Voices and laughter and snatches of song came from up ahead.

She went on. To her right she saw a small green meadow among the trees. Kate was there, and Alex and Matt. They lay facing the sky, their heads close together, their bodies forming a star upon the grass.

“Hey, Moll!” someone called, Matt or Alex.

She left the path, sat down next to them. “What’s up?” she asked.

“Corrig’s up to his old tricks again,” Alex said. Alex was the one with the mustache, Molly remembered.

You bet he is,
she thought, but she didn’t want to share her frustrations with the others. “Is Corrig my third cousin too?” she asked.

“Corrig?” Kate said. “He’s Lanty’s son, isn’t he?”

“But then he’d be much older, wouldn’t he?” Molly asked. “As old as Callan, at least.”

“I suppose,” Matt said.

“Is he immortal?” Molly asked.

“Immoral, maybe,” Kate said, and they all laughed.

“Amoral,” Matt said.

“Inamorata,” Alex said, murmuring. The sun grew hotter, turning his light brown hair the color of polished wood. He made an effort to rouse himself. “But he’s not going to get away with it this time. Not when he turns my bed into a horse.”

“He turned your bed into a horse?”

“He did. I woke up in the woods somewhere.”

“But why?”

“Because that’s where the horse had taken me.”

“No, I mean why did he turn your bed into a horse?”

“Because he can,” Alex said. “I’d do it myself if I could.”

Molly sighed. The air grew hotter. Kate lifted a hand to her yellow hair and pushed it off her forehead; it seemed heavy, like massy gold. A bee buzzed close to them and then flew away.

“We’ll have to retaliate this time,” Alex said.

Who?
Molly thought sleepily, but Matt was speaking. “The trouble, of course, is that Corrig always seems to know what you’re going to do before you do it,” he said.

“Well then, we’ll have to distract him somehow,” Alex said. “Lure him out into the woods, maybe. Or put something in his coffee.”

“I could use some coffee right now,” Kate said. “Why do people say, ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’? Shouldn’t it be ‘Smell the coffee and then wake up’?”

“Pay attention,” Alex said. “I’m serious this time.”

“Remember when he lined the floor of your bedroom with eggs?” Matt said. “And you ran in to get something without looking?”

“If he has so much power,” Molly asked, “why does he only use it for practical jokes?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Alex said.

“Yes, it is,” Molly said. “Are any of you ever going to give me a direct answer?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “That was straight enough, don’t you think?”

“I give up,” Molly said, standing.

“I wouldn’t,” Kate said, not unkindly. Molly realized, surprised, that they wanted to help her, but that they were as constrained by the rules of the labyrinth as she was. She understood that she was supposed to learn something here, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what it was.

She sat back down and listened to their soft, rambling talk. The shadows of the trees grew longer, drowning them in shade.

“Dear John,” Molly wrote a few days later. “I’m writing you because I thought you might be wondering where I am. Though maybe not—we didn’t exactly part on the best of terms. I hope things have worked out with you and Gwen.

“Anyway, I’ve learned a lot more about the case. I found Callan, for one thing. I know we thought he was dead, but it looks as if my aunt didn’t tell me the truth about this. I’m here in his house, though house might not be the right word. College, maybe, or retreat.

“If you got the impression from the above that I don’t understand everything that’s going on, you’d be right. Lots of people live here besides Callan, other relatives, but I haven’t sorted them all out yet: Samuel and his wife Elizabeth and his daughters Kate and Elizabeth, and some second or third cousins of mine named Alex and Matt and Jeremy and their parents. I think Alex said he and Matt are brothers—they look a lot alike, anyway.

“I called this place a college because I think I’m supposed to learn something here. I don’t mean that there are teachers, because there aren’t. But people keep speaking in these enigmatic phrases and then looking at me as though they expect me to understand something. I have to say I don’t get half of what they’re talking about. Well, more than half, if I’m going to be honest.

“This ties in with something I learned a while ago, something I never told you about. Peter and I went and took a tour of the Paramount Theatre. You should go there, if you’re still on the case. Talk to a man named Jake Polanski. He was an usher in the thirties, knew the Allalie Family.

“Anyway, what he told me helped me understand more about how the family worked. They were teachers, as I thought, traveling the country and showing people truths about their lives. At the time I thought this was wonderfully exciting. Now, though, it looks as if I’m one of their students, and I have to say it’s not as much fun when you’re on the receiving end. What it is is frustrating as hell.

“I think the Allalies learned from their experience with Dorothy Westingate that you can’t teach people by talking at them. You can put them on the path to wisdom, but they have to come to it by themselves. Emily’s son did this to Emily, for example. Callan tried to do this with Polanski, but I think he failed there. You can show people the labyrinth, but they have to find the center by themselves.

“Now I think they’re doing it to me, but I don’t have the slightest idea what I’m supposed to learn. I have a lot of time to think about it, though, because everyone in this house seems wrapped up in his or her own concerns. Callan spends most of his time cooking. I wonder if that’s a family trait—the older you get the more you withdraw from the world, the way Neesa did by playing pool.

“This is what I think so far. Samuel and Callan hired you to find me, so I would find this house. That’s why I asked you if you were still on the case. They may have taken you off now that you’ve done everything they wanted you to do.

“And that’s as far as I’ve gotten with this thing. Oh, and yesterday I found a book about Greek myths in the library. Did you know that Ariadne was the woman who led Theseus through the labyrinth? I guess I knew that once upon a time, but I didn’t think it was important. Now I wonder who decided that that would be my middle name. Was it my mother, or Callan? And here’s something we seem to have overlooked—there’s a monster at the center of the labyrinth, the Minotaur. What am I going to discover if I do get there?

“The library is interesting, by the way, but more for what it doesn’t have than what it does. I didn’t find Callan’s diary, for example—did you ever get around to giving it back to Samuel? And it doesn’t have Dorothy’s pamphlet, or that book on the occult we read in England. All I saw were rows of classics, all of them bound in the same color—Shakespeare, Dickens, Homer. Nothing you couldn’t find at the Oakland Public Library.

“I’m writing this because, as I said, I have a lot of time to think here. And because so many people in this case have left written records, Emily and Callan and poor Dorothy with her crackpot theories. I don’t know if I’m going to send it, or even if I can—there doesn’t seem to be a mailbox anywhere nearby. I’m not telling you where I am because I want to do this alone.”

She folded the letter and looked through the drawers of the desk for stamps and envelopes. There was only more blank paper. She shrugged and put the letter in the bottom drawer.

She wondered where Peter was, what he was doing. Did he miss her? Should she have written to him instead of John? But she had been able to set everything down clearly, logically, in a letter to John, while a letter to Peter would be tangled up with all her feelings, all the things she wanted to say to him. It was too bad Callan didn’t have a telephone.

The next day the old woman came. Molly had gone downstairs, lured by the smell of the dinner Callan was cooking. The others were already there, talking and laughing.

Someone knocked on the front door. “It’s open!” Callan called, helping himself to thin slices of beef drowned in sauce.

The knock came again. Kate looked at Alex, one eyebrow raised. “Is this one of yours?” she asked softly.

Alex shook his head.

“Corrig’s, probably,” Matt said.

They heard the knock a third time. “Someone get that,” Callan said. “Molly, would you?”

Molly stood.
This is one of Corrig’s practical jokes,
she thought, and looked hard at him before she went to the front room. He grinned at her.

But when she opened the door she saw only a small old woman wrapped in a bulky shawl. The woman peered up at her from beneath her tangled, thick white hair. Despite her strange wild appearance she looked somehow familiar. “Can I help you?” Molly asked.

“I want to see Callan,” the woman said.

Probably not a relative, Molly thought; she didn’t have the gap between her teeth they all had. “We’re eating dinner now,” Molly said.

“No, it’s all right, Molly,” Callan said, coming up behind her. “What is it?”

“I want the book,” the woman said. For the first time Molly noticed that there were only the familiar cars parked behind the old woman on the narrow dirt road, her own and Samuel’s. How had the woman gotten here?

“The book?” Callan asked.

“You know which one. The book your sister Fentrice got in England.”

“Fentrice? I haven’t seen Fentrice in sixty years.”

“You have the book, though. I’m sure you do.”

“The scrapbook?” Molly asked.

The woman stared at her in disbelief. “No, not the scrapbook,” she said scornfully. “What possible use would that be to me? Anyway, she still has the scrapbook. I want the book she got in England.”

“I don’t have any of her books,” Callan said.

“Can I come in and look for it?”

“It’s not really convenient right now,” Callan said. “Some other day, perhaps.”

The woman pushed past him. She went through the front room and down the hallway to the library, as boldly confident as if she had been there before.

By the time Molly and Callan caught up with her she was studying the shelves in the library, the rows of identically bound books. Her arms were crossed; her eyes snapped from one shelf to another. There were twigs in her hair, Molly saw, and more caught in her voluminous blue shawl.

“Huh!” the woman said. She opened what Molly had thought was a grandfather clock. There were shelves in its body instead of the wires and gears Molly had expected, each holding more of the identically bound books. She turned toward them. “You’ve hidden it.”

“My life is an open book,” Callan said, spreading his arms wide. “You can search the entire house if you want. But you’ll have to do it without me—my dinner’s getting cold.”

He walked back to the dining room. Molly stood a moment, her head filled with a dozen questions. “Who are you?” she asked. “How do you know Fentrice?”

The woman said nothing. Finally she turned away from the shelves and headed to the door. “You tell him I’ll try again,” she said. “I know the book’s here somewhere.”

“What book?” Molly asked, following her, but the woman closed the front door behind her. Molly opened it quickly. The old woman had disappeared; Molly saw only the trees, the path, the cars. She returned to the dining room.

“That was one of yours, wasn’t it?” Matt was asking Corrig. “You sent her, didn’t you?”

Corrig shook his head, his face perfectly innocent.

“Well, then, whose was it?” Jeremy asked. “Who sent her? Alex?”

“No, why would I?” Alex said.

“I don’t think she had anything to do with your practical jokes,” Molly said slowly. “She came here wanting something. She knows who Fentrice is.…”

“I still think it’s Corrig,” Matt said. “Don’t grin at me like that, Corrig. I know you had something to do with all this.”

“Look,” Molly said, exasperated. “She wanted a book, a book Fentrice got in England.” She turned to Callan. “You were in England in—when was it? 1935? Did you ever tour there again?”

Callan shook his head. Now he was grinning too; the similarity to Corrig was very marked.

“Remember in the diary when you say Fentrice disappeared for a few days while you were in England and then came back?” Molly asked. Callan nodded. “That’s when she must have gotten the book. But what book? Was it—Oh, my God.”

“What, Molly?” Callan asked.

“Maybe it was the confession Emily wrote. Maybe Fentrice went up to the Westingates’ house, Tantilly, and looked in the library.”

“Emily?” Matt said. “Which one was she? Changed her name, didn’t she?”

“She was Neesa,” Molly said. “She wrote a confession to Dorothy Westingate, an account of her life. It’s in the library at Tantilly—I read some of it when I was in England.”

“But if you saw it in the library,” Callan said slowly, “then Fentrice couldn’t have taken it.”

“No, but she could have read it while she was there.”

“Was there anything important in it? Something this woman would interrupt our dinner for?”

“I don’t know. I only read part of it—some of the pages had been torn out,” Molly said. Everyone around the table was looking at her now. “But there were strange disappearances around both Fentrice and Emily. What if those pages were about Lydia, Emily confessing what she had done to Lydia? What if Fentrice wanted to know what Emily did, because she wanted to do the same thing to Thorne? What if Fentrice went up to Tantilly because she wanted a way to get rid of someone that would never be traced to her?”

“What do you mean, get rid of?” Samuel said. “Do you mean kill?”

“God, I don’t know,” Molly said. Without realizing it she had started to agree with John: Fentrice was a liar, Fentrice had lied about a great many things. Why had Fentrice told her Callan was dead? She thought of the woman who had raised her, the strict but kind aunt who smelled of soap and starch.