Authors: Thomas Cater
“Are all the cookies gone?” I asked, hoping that might
be the case.
He opened a drawer and removed a decorated tin box.
“Where are you getting these things this time of
year?” I asked.
“There’s a little ‘mom and pop’ store around the
corner. They were having a sale…”
“A sale on year-old Christmas cookies?”
“Yeah, maybe two or three years old,” he said, nodding
and rubbing sleep from his eyes.
I selected a cookie and started nibbling on Santa’s red
cap.
“Do you mind if I use your hall bathroom, George? I’m
in need of a shower.”
He said it was all right and pointed a few doors down.
I am leery of public bathrooms and the assorted germs that mutate therein.
Janitors cannot be trusted. The industrious Rufa ants welcome the Xenodusa
beetle into their nest to clean the ant shit off the walls. The ants find
themselves addicted to the beetle’s aromatic secretions and feed their own
larvae to the beetle’s offspring, but not in my house.
“Have you got an extra towel?”
He gave me a towel and a tiny, nameless bar of hotel
soap. I thanked him and he crawled back into bed.
“By the way, George, do you still have the ring?”
“What ring?” he asked. I explained. “Not me,” he said.
“Don’t you have it?”
My lips compressed and I shook my head.
“No, I don’t have it. Virgil must have it.”
George vanished beneath the covers and I took a long,
hot, two-dollar shower. A half-hour later, I felt much better. George was still
sleeping when I finished, so I made a change of plans. I went down to the lobby
to pay Mrs. Abacas for the use of her bathroom.
She was polishing an oak bookcase that stood nine
feet high and must have weighed four hundred pounds.
“Very nice,” I commented.
She agreed with a smile.
“Has it been around long?” I asked.
“Since 1842,” she replied. “My great-grandfather made
it.”
I admired the cabinet in silence. The talents people develop
when moved by the spirit are inspiring. The
WATS
of Thailand, the temples of Cambodia and
India, they are an endless variety of designs that evolve on a curious Mobius
strip of creativity.
“I envy the time, patience and discipline, and
whatever else it takes to create that kind of enduring beauty,” I said.
She nourished the wood with polish, smiles, pride and
tender loving care.
“Are there any equally valid works of prose in there?”
I asked. There are things you will never know about a book by looking at aging covers.
“Just old ones,” she said. “I don’t know if they’re
good. I have never read them. I like mysteries. I’ve been writing one for
thirty years. Would you like to read it? It’s five hundred thousand words. It
may need some editing. They don’t usually run that long, do they?”
“I think not,” I said, “though I’ve read a few that
seemed so.”
I quickly reviewed the contents of the bookcase
through the woven copper screen over the door. Most of the bindings were
threatening to fall apart if anyone touched them. A few were unreadable. There
were several old grammar books, a book on Bee Keeping, and “The Basic
Principles of Math.”
“I’d like to do a little more browsing when I have the
time,” I said, “Maybe even read your novel.”
She seemed to approve, even though there was a worried
look in her eyes. I often thought of myself as a competent writer, but I have
not reached her astonishing level of productivity.
“I do so want it to be my very best effort,” she said.
“I’m sure it is,” I replied, though I could not
imagine the reception a script of one-half million words would have on the
reading public. It would have to be … I computed the size of her script: five
hundred pages were equal to about 150,000 words, or two inches. That would mean
her book was nearly a foot thick. I once bought a dictionary for fifty cents from
a junkshop that was more than a foot thick. I owned it for nearly five years
and set a goal of learning one new word a day.
“Where do you write?” I asked.
“I have an office in the back,” she said. “I do all my
composing there. I have a separate box for every 500 pages; 20 chapters to a
box, and six boxes so far. It works out perfectly.”
I wanted to know what theme could possibly have kept
her enthralled those past thirty years.
“It’s a wonderful story,” she said. “I call it ‘Meade
Street’. It is about a young man who rents an old house on Meade Street. You know
where that is, don’t you? It’s around the corner, not far from here. He reads a
newspaper and discovers the homeowner died mysteriously in the house he built.
“He becomes obsessed with learning why. Research takes
him into the lives of every Meade Street family. The history of the town unfolds
and the tragic fate of his life defined, as is the young man’s own inevitable demise.
Two men, a hundred years apart, destined to share a similar fate. I do hope you
can find the time to read it,” she said.
I nodded, feeling grave apprehensions, as if I were already
a chapter in her book.
“It might even help you understand more clearly your
own destiny,” she said, which seemed an appropriate statement.
“Your book is non-fiction?” I asked.
“It is based on the lives of three generations of
those who live on Meade Street.”
“Does it include the Ryders?” I asked.
She tilted her head in thought. “There is some mention
of them. They were influential in the lives of many people, but they are not
the main theme. It will not provide you with the kind of information you are
seeking. As I said, what is important is the destiny the two men shared, even
though they are removed from each other by one hundred years.”
She returned to nurturing her antiques, ignoring me as
if I had vanished. I left the hotel and walked rapidly up Main Street to Virgil’s
office. I had the distinct impression she knew what she was talking about, and
told me that my fate was sealed. Is that how it works? People write novels at
unconscious levels about others they can never consciously identify.
I tried to dismiss that kind of thinking from my mind.
I decided to focus on something more redundant, such as the ring’s fate. The
fact that it was missing caused me endless moments of discomfort. Not because
it was made of 24 carat gold, but for the remote possibility it resembled a
ring I saw somewhere once before.
The courthouse clock said it was 8:15. I was too early
and his office was vacant. I had another 45 minutes before life returned to
Vandalia. I returned to the van. It started easily enough, but there was an
unhealthy, rheumatic sound coming from the engine. I must have been out of my
mind to crash into the wall.
Chapter Thirty
I cruised down Main Street towards Virgil’s home. I
was not sure how or why I was going to
annoy
him today. He was into me for
six
percent of
thirty thousand dollars and that made me feel
as if I were entitled to some satisfaction
. His brown station wagon was sitting in the driveway.
Morning frost was slowly melting from the windows. A few desiccated leaves were
falling from the trees and settling on the hood. Fall was in full swing and it
made me think of Halloween, ghosts and goblins, and things that go ‘bump in the
night’. I wondered what it would be like at the Ryder house on All Hallow’s
Eve, with real critters trying to figure out how to
escape from
purgatory.
Within weeks, there would be nothing left but the
bleak intimation of winter’s cold. Until then, I was determined to do
everything I could to make the best of the balmy Indian summer. Like a bird, I
was already picturing myself winging my way along I-71, following the long
white line to Florida’s sunshine coast. I imagined myself walking in the sand,
courting youthful maidens in string bikinis. It was a delightful fantasy, but I
was not enjoying it much these
days
.
I tried to open the station wagon's back door, but it
was secure. I could see he had thrown a blanket over the skeleton. The imprint
was quite clear. Assured about its safety, I went to the back door and rang the
bell. It opened directly to stairs that led to the kitchen and basement. Violet
answered. She smelled of bacon and coffee, warm milk and toast. I could hear
the sizzle of bacon frying in the pan and saw signs of temporal gratification
in her eyes.
“Morning,” I said, “your hubby up?”
She invited me in. I squeezed through the door onto
the narrow landing. We were almost touching, but only for a second. She backed
away toward the kitchen and pointed down the basement stairs.
“He’s down there working out,” she said with pride.
“He
plays with his weights for
thirty minutes a day.”
I followed the stairs down. I could hear the sounds of
iron and steel weights
colliding with
the concrete floor. He wore shorts and a sleeveless sweat
suit soiled with perspiration. The number and size of the weights on the bar
were
impress
ive
.
“You do this every day?” I asked.
He rolled a barbell across the floor with his foot
toward a bench.
“Three times a week,” he said.
He began to breathe heavily in preparation for a lift.
I roughly computed about
1
75
pounds on the
bar. He lifted it without much of a struggle to his waist, snatched it up to
his shoulders and pressed it five times before returning it carefully to the
floor. I could see the blood racing through the veins in his neck to the
thirsty muscles in his arms and legs.
“Want to try?” he asked, sensing that I was too far out
of shape to accept.
He started toweling off his forehead, neck and arms.
“What brings you here so early?” he asked.
“You remember the ring we found on the monkey’s
finger?”
He nodded and continued to towel his neck and arms.
“I can’t find it and George says he doesn’t have it. I
was wondering if you’d seen it.”
“Follow me,” he said.
We climbed the basement stairs to the kitchen. Violet
was filling two cups with hot, fragrant coffee.
“Coffee’s ready,” she said, as we passed.
I nodded
agreeably
, but Virgil kept striding
through the kitchen and down the hall to the living room. He stopped at an
antique wooden secretary, opened the top drawer and fished the ring out. He
held it up to his eye in the light from the window.
“Take a look at the inscription,” he said.
I wasn’t aware of the inscription when we found the
ring, but upon closer examination, I could see why. It was in such small
letters, I could barely make it out.
“You got a magnifying glass?" I asked.
He pulled one from the drawer. “I had trouble, too,
and my vision is 20/20.”
I held the glass to the ring. Printed in small barely
legible letters were the words, “Love, Elinore; April 10, 1923.”
That was about
seven
y
ears before the stock market crashed,
and the year the great depression began. I wondered what it did to wreck Samuel’s
image of himself, or was the ring a gift to someone else? It also sounded like
a date memorializing something special: and how did it end up on a monkey’s
finger? I turned it over in my hand a few times. It was thick and heavy,
decorated with filigree; the finger size I realized was for a large man.
“What do you make of it?” I asked, hoping he might
suggest an amulet, a thought I silently entertained.
“It looks like a wedding band,” Virgil replied.
I turned it over a few more times and tried it on one
of my fingers. It fit
loosely
. “Definitely a man’s ring, but what was it doing on
that thing in the car?”
“Oh, yes, speaking of the primate, let’s take it out
of the car before Violet sees it. All I need now is for her to go ape over a
skeleton in the storage bay.”
We walked out the front door. I stuck the ring in my
pocket. Maybe Elinore had a boyfriend, or possibly a secret husband. Why was
there no further mention of it anywhere? Amy Taylor said she had many
boyfriends. Had one of them succeeded where others failed?
We wrapped the skeleton in a sheet and transferred it
to my van. Every time I looked at the thing, at its thick, heavy skull, the
long canine-like muzzle, and teeth like darning needles, I felt a little sick
and worried. It reminded me more of what Janie had transformed into the night
before.
I didn’t check to see if the creature I saw or
imagined was wearing a wedding band, or a ghostly image of one. It did wear
jewelry around its neck and in its hair. I also saw cameos and broaches, and a full-length
evening gown. Kids liked to dress their pets. Could it have been a pet?