Face on the Wall (33 page)

… at the edge of the forest is a great lake. Behind it stands a tower, and in the tower sits a beautiful princess …

The Brothers Grimm, “The Skilful Huntsman”

“W
hy doesn't she come out?” said Tim Foley, button-holing Mary Kelly in the driveway. “She's your niece, right?”

“Why should she come out?” said Mary stoutly. Supporting a blueberry pie on the flat of one hand, she banged the knocker with the other. “She's fine in there: Just fine.”

The door opened a crack and Trudy Tuck looked out. Mary slipped past her, and the door closed, scraping the floor because everything was out of plumb.

Tim sighed with frustration. He was one of the small army of photographers who were trying to take a picture of the controversial Anna Swann and show her to the world, because everybody out there was taking more and more of an interest in her protest. The wire services transmitted the story far afield. The TV cameramen were there every day, waiting for something to happen.

Time was suspended. Bob and Roberta Gast came and went, poker-faced, hiding away in their side of the house, from which no living sound emerged. Annie and her friends camped in front of her painted wall, wondering when the protest would come to an end. Any day now a crowd of riot police would show up with an arrest warrant and drag Annie out. Then Gast would bring in his machines and obliterate Annie's wall. The time would certainly come. Her wall was doomed.

Around the house the green biomass of late spring burgeoned in the trees. On the topmost twig of a dead elm in the field a mockingbird hurled tunes at the sky—
come and get 'em, no two alike.
In the late afternoon a robin repeated his own cheerful song over and over. The two birds were behaving exactly like the humans in the disputed house, claiming some patch of field or hillside or wilderness as their own.

In the mad circumstances of life in a nearly demolished dwelling, Annie felt it, the sense of approaching disaster, as though the puffy clouds of summer were inscribed with exclamations of warning. Defying the clouds, she assembled her chalk, her brushes, and her colors, and got back to work.

The fifth and last section of her painted gallery was only half finished. Edward Lear occupied one side of the arched opening, a bearded man with round spectacles and a stovepipe hat. Robert Louis Stevenson stood jauntily erect on the other side, with a parrot on his shoulder. The space between them was blank.

It was the dangerous spot where the mysterious face had returned so often. It had been empty for over a month. The ugly face with its terrible teeth and horrible eyes had not come back. What if she painted something on purpose in that spot? The mysterious face might never show up again. Annie imagined a ghostly image drifting up to the wall and saying,
Whoops, sorry
, and fading away forever.

“Why don't we clear up this awful mess?” said Lily Coombs, poking her foot at the pile of wreckage mounded on the floor and all over the crushed grass outside—fallen timbers, shattered glass, mangled clapboards, chunks of plaster, and torn strips of asphalt roofing. On top of the heap, like a vulgar piece of sculpture, Annie's toilet lay on its back, gaping at the sky.

Homer was stubborn. “It's Gast's responsibility. He made the mess. Let him clear it up.”

“The wrecking company,” said Henry Coombs. “It must be part of their contract, to clean up the site.”

Homer glanced in Annie's direction and lowered his voice. “They haven't finished the job, that's the trouble. They're expecting to come back and knock down the rest.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn't wait,” said Lily, frowning at Homer. “Why don't we clear it out ourselves? Hire a Dumpster and carry stuff out in buckets through the front door? It'll give us something to do.”

It was a good idea. Soon everybody was scooping bits of wreckage into wastebaskets and paper bags. Slowly the pile of broken clapboards and chunks of plaster and fragments of glass diminished, but only slightly.

Annie ran a borrowed vacuum cleaner around the edges. It made a lot of noise, shrieking as it picked up plaster dust and slivers of glass. Within the shriek Annie heard human voices, high-pitched arguments and shouts.

There were no arguments among the guardians of Fortress Annie. Eight of them were taking turns with Annie, bringing food, bottled water, clean laundry, and news—Homer and Mary Kelly, Henry and Lily Coombs, Wally Feather, Henrietta Willsey, Trudy Tuck, and Minnie Peck.

Minnie was especially faithful. She was delighted to be prominently on hand. She loved bouncing out of her car beside the van from CBS and granting an interview. After all, she was ten times more telegenic than Annie, and as a fellow artist she had been close to the scene from the beginning. It was soon apparent to the assembled gatherers of information that Minnie was
au courant
with Annie's artistic
raison d'être,
and, more important, that she could answer questions about Annie's love life. Minnie conned one of the network people into interviewing her in her studio against a background of
Millennial Woman, Millennial Man,
and
Millennial Child.

“This guy who disappeared,” said the interviewer, “the handyman, who is he? Is he her lover?”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Minnie carelessly. “Once there was Swann, then Burgess, then Jack, and now it's O'Dougherty. She sort of goes from man to man.”

Then old lover Jack turned up in person. To Mary Kelly's astonishment, he appeared in the driveway one day, talking into a camera. She watched him expand with self-importance. He was eager to capitalize on his relationship with Annie. “She's a little unstable, I'm afraid. A wonderful woman, of course, but seriously unstable.”

Jack should have been more cautious. The interviewer had done his homework. “Is it true that the personal-liability insurance you sold to Anna Swann did not cover her liability, when the time came?”

“Well, you have to understand, these things are difficult. An insurance company has its limits. We can't exactly—”

“Is not the Paul Revere Mutual Insurance Company notorious for refusing compensation until the claimant brings suit?”

“Of course not,” blustered Jack.

The legal owners of the house, Roberta and Robert Gast, were less forthcoming. They dodged from house to car in the morning, and from car to house in the evening, without saying a word.

But at the offices of Pouch, Heaviside and Sprocket there were whispered conferences between Roberta and her boss, Dirk Sprocket, who was suggesting another lawsuit. This time the Swann woman would be sued for disturbing the peace of the neighborhood, for the severe emotional trauma endured by the Gast family, and for the mounting cost of the delay.

“Oh, God, I don't know,” said Roberta. Her face was drawn. She hadn't had a good night's sleep for weeks. “I'm just so sick of the whole thing.”

Only Charlene seemed strong in a crisis, buoyed by the vision of her indoor pool. She badgered her father. “Why don't the police get her out? Why don't you
do
something, Daddy?”

Then, without asking permission, she called up the swimming-pool company. Delighted, they sent out an eager salesman. Charlene ran to the door to greet him, but he was pale and shaking. A couple of cameramen had swarmed up around his van, with its big logo—

POOL AND PATIO

RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL

FREE DESIGN SERVICE

Too late, the salesman identified his potential customers as the notorious Gast family of television fame. And when he learned that he had been summoned by a ten-year-old girl, he had an excuse to back out.

“Get your father to call me,” he said, and hurried back to his van.

But Bob Gast was not yet ready to order a swimming pool for his daughter. The heavy machinery that was at this moment heaving its way across the ninety-nine-acre property belonging to Frederick and Pearl Small in Southtown was costing him an arm and a leg. In his head, night and day, he heard the clattering roar of the bulldozer, the grinding smash of the concrete pulverizer, the whine of the excavator, and worst of all a high keen ringing that pierced through all the rest, arising from no single source, an unbearable shrill scream in the same frequency range as the cry of herring gulls, the screeching of blue jays. But all the birds had vanished from Small's place in Southtown—except of course for the scavenging crows, ranging overhead, peering down, always on the lookout for something recently dead.

“I don't know, Charlene,” said Gast. “I just don't know.”

“But, Daddy,” complained Charlene, “you promised. And don't forget what I said!”

“Oh, God, Charlene,” groaned her father, sinking into a chair and putting his head in his hands, “you just don't understand.”

The tension of waiting for an end to the crisis was unbearable. Gast went to the chief of police, shoved his copy of the eviction order under his nose, and demanded, “Come on, get her out of there.”

The chief had been watching television and reading the paper. He had no intention of becoming the villain in this drama. “Okay, okay,” he said, “I hear you.”

“Well? Are you going to do something about it or not?”

The chief bristled. His hair-trigger irascibility came to his aid. “Listen, friend, kindly do not tell me how to run my department. I've got to consult counsel. I've got to know what the hell I'm doing. The media, they're savages. They'll roast me alive and serve me up on a platter. No, no, you heard what I said.” The chief stood up. “I've got to consult town counsel.”

As soon as Gast left, the chief did just that. Town counsel advised him to lie low.

Chapter 50

She told him that if he could reach the place where the end of the rainbow stands he would find there a golden key.

George MacDonald, “The Golden Key”

R
on was back. Homer had almost forgotten about the vacationing hardware-store clerk. But when he made another routine call to Biggy's in West Concord, the clerk on the line yelled, “Hey, Ron, guy wants to talk to you.”

“Hello?” said Ron.

Homer almost dropped the phone. “Oh, Ron, is it really you? Listen, hold it, I'll be right over.”

It turned out that Ron was not a tanned Lothario who had spent his vacation in St. Martin on a nude beach. He was tanned, all right, but he was a pudgy sixtyish man who had stayed with an old buddy and spent all his time fishing for tuna.

With trembling fingers Homer showed him Annie's snapshot of the grinning Gasts—Robert, Roberta, Eddy, and Charlene.

“Oh, sure,” said Ron, “I made keys for that guy. He wanted half a dozen of the same one. Didn't trust me. Said half the time they didn't work.”

Exultant, Homer showed him Annie's key. “Did the key you copied have a tag like this?”

“Yeah, that's right. That's the one. He wanted keys, bought some tools.”