Sister Wolf (21 page)

The fire alarm cut through the room, a noise that can paralyze the nervous system. Frozen in place for several moments, the children were docile when Fellowes reappeared and called them into drill formation. In a real fire drill they would have been led down the driveway to the gates. For this diversionary exercise she marched them out to the back lawn, where she left Conrad to run them through an hour of tiring calisthenics.

No one but Gabriel wanted to call the Sheriff. Mr. Dufton wavered. Miss Muskie was not consulted. She was lying on a cot in the infirmary with a wet tea bag covering each of her swollen eyes. The discussion raged around the issue of Muskie’s credibility. Muskie was both coquettish and fearful, a textbook hysteric. She saw rapists and perverts behind every bush. She wedged a chair under her bedroom door, and set empty bottles on her third-story windowsill which would crash to the floor and alert her in case of a break-in. When she was relieved of after-dinner switchboard duty, the number of breathers, and worse, had dwindled to zero. She hoarded food in her room, which attracted mice.

This sort of free-for-all character assassination, known in boarding schools—both blind and sighted—as a lemon-squeeze, usually takes place in the presence of the person who is under fire. Gabriel raised his voice and objected that Muskie was not on hand to defend herself. Fellowes remembered that Muskie had allowed Nannie to sleep with the school cat. Gabriel pushed the issue of Aimée’s disappearance front and center. Mr. Dufton appealed to the group. Her family were lovely people, related to the Bourbons. Miss Withus spoke up; she had been there a week, running the arts and crafts program. She believed in attitude probation for girls like Aimée. Aimée’s nightgowns had matching peignoirs. She had brought her own linen sheets. She was insolent in Braille tutorial. She moved her lips during morning meditation. At some point between the nightgowns and the tutorial, Gabriel went to the switchboard in the hallway and dialed Sheriff Stoeber.

Three people saw Marit’s white convertible Buick parked near the main gates of Meyerling: the Sheriff, answering the emergency call which had come through on his van radio; Gabriel, pacing up and down the road, waiting for the police; and Lola, who was driving to Niles on an errand for Mrs. Gilliam. The white convertible was parked at Yelping Hill overlook, a rest area equipped with a coin-operated telescope. The telescope was out of order, and trees had grown back so high that they blocked the view. If the Buick had been set neatly between the lines painted on the asphalt, it would have attracted no notice. It had been backed in at an angle, across four marked spaces. The top was raised part of the way, with a wide gap between the canvas and the window frame. The door on the driver’s side was ajar. The car looked abandoned.

Lola was carrying two lengths of silk from a wrong dye lot to return to Sarah Rippey. When she arrived, Rippey’s Yard Goods looked like the scene of a year-end sale. As she pushed her way through the crowd roosting and squawking on the porch, she could see that all the customers were outside. Only Sarah herself was inside the shop, stationed by an open window. Lola put her package on the counter and turned to Sarah, who waved a hand to silence her. Lola went over to the window.

The center of the commotion seemed to be Eleanor Stoeber. Eleanor had all her teeth in her head and was beaming satisfied smiles, like a person receiving congratulations. Lola wondered what happy news could collect such a swarm, all women except for a few male teenage hangabouts. If Anna Weebs had left the post office unattended, it must be the birth of a grandchild or a transfer for the Sheriff. Anna’s face was grim; but then, she did not have a hopeful temperament. She had an arm around her daughter’s shoulders; Rosie squirmed in her grasp. Everyone was talking at once. Lola’s view was a pool of open mouths and clacking teeth. She made another attempt to lure Sarah back to business. She was leaning toward Sarah to shout her request when one word floated up from the din and hung over the crowd like a caption in a comic-strip balloon. The word was “kidnapped.”

With a verbal clue to guide her, Lola’s brain came to the aid of her ears. After that, she could piece things together. A girl from the blind school was missing. The girl was rich. All those children were rich. That fancy school paid taxes to sneeze at, and they had made no exception to help out a local boy. Tick Brower, blinded cleaning his gun, had to go to the state school in Griggsville, that ugly place that was part of the mental hospital. The Sheriff had warned the principal at Meyerling that he was asking for trouble, with no guards and no fences, not even a pair of watchdogs. Eleanor did not like to say that the Sheriff had powers, but something had told him to put on an extra car the night three North Adams boys tried to hold up the filling station. When her husband said something was wrong up at the Deym estate, she would be the last person to doubt him. The Deym girl might be free with her money, like her Russian parents, but she kept apart. The father was some kind of royalty, no proof against dying with his mind gone. The Sheriff said the daughter had had her own way once too often, making her place into a private zoo—the same as having a prison right in town, with convicts getting loose and harming the neighbors.

Lola could no more have walked through the group on the porch again than work a hive on a cloudy day without a bee veil. Sarah was carried away, and sniping along with the rest of them. Lola let herself out by the rear door, which was hidden behind a paneled screen. As she slipped back to her car, the voices seemed to grow louder.

This was the part of life in a village that made her sweat, all these women thinking with one mind, gulping down bigger and bigger chunks of alarm and figment, competing like entrants in a pie-eating contest, except that an excess of rumor did not make them sick, but greedier.

There was no proof that a child had been kidnapped, only the Sheriff’s intuition. The Sheriff had intuitions in the way carcasses have maggots, from moldering too long in a backwater. The Sheriff went to police seminars in Boston to make his work lively, since race riots, espionage and book-making did not flourish in Niles. His conversation was a perpetual bid for omniscience, a habit that he had passed on to his bride. Lola recalled the little panic of ’56, when the Stoebers had predicted a national shortage of white candles. Stores laid in by Mrs. Gilliam alone would have been enough to start one.

But the Stoebers’ self-importance was not so humorous when it threatened Marit, whose showy car had been dumped near Meyerling, for no good reason, before nine in the morning; who was flaunting the law in secret, harboring wolves like marked cards in a crooked poker game; whose natural cunning was being sapped by a priggish schoolteacher named Gabriel Frankman. There had been swells of talk about the animal sanctuary from the beginning, talk about drafting a petition, about taking Marit to court, about sending in an inspector from the village—namely, the Sheriff. Like a deceived wife, Marit had heard little of these murmurs, even at their loudest. Lola never played the role of the well-intentioned friend, bringing loose talk back to Marit for her own good. Villages were fickle toward the objects of their malice; in another year they would brag about their wildlife preserve and take the credit for it.

At ten o’clock, Mrs. Gilliam expected Lola at her bedside to go over the mail and menus and to plan her wardrobe. After breakfast, there would be a session with the auction notices and the fall bulb catalogues. Then, Lola had promised to bake her mother’s Benne wafers for a formal tea. Between three and four Mrs. Gilliam took a nap, for the purpose of wearing her frown patches. During that free hour, Lola could try to get through to Marit, if only to relieve her fretful imagination, which kept flashing pictures of Marit’s white car still unclaimed by nightfall.

The rays of the sun woke Marit from a stony sleep. For a moment she thought she had gone to bed with all her clothes on, rank garments which made her nostrils wrinkle at their smell. She was very hot, as if there were too many blankets covering her. Her head ached and she resisted opening her eyes. She reached out to fumble for the clock on the bedside table, but her arm fell instead on a solid mass of fur. She raised her head and saw that Nikolai was pressed up against her. She saw a section of wire mesh fence and two metal bowls. She was not upstairs on the little cot in her childhood bedroom; she was lying on the concrete pavement inside Nikolai’s pen.

Marit buried her face in Nikolai’s coat and held him too tightly. He grunted in protest and struggled to roll away. As long as she held him she would not have to think or remember; she could pretend that she did not know the reason for the leaden weight around her heart. The dog, who was hungry and whining, broke out of her grasp, and began to push at his empty food dish with his nose. Marit got up on her knees and put her arms around his neck.

“Lola will take you,” she said, but Nikolai shook her off, “Lola will keep you if I can’t.”

Lola would take Nikolai and give him a loving home. She could not keep the wolves or the lynx or the two black bears. No one could keep them. Marit doubled over under the force of returning memory. She struck at her head with her fists, but the blows felt too light. She ran out of the pen and dashed her head against the side of the house. Pain blinded and staggered her, but not long enough; she could not numb her brain, or halt the deadly logic of her thoughts. She had left her white car on the road. Her car would condemn her. The Sheriff would come to get her and put her away. He would profit by her absence to enter the sanctuary and butcher the animals.

Marit paced up and down the terrace, taking quick frantic steps, almost skipping, back and forth across the length of the terrace, until she heard the malamute howling. Then she stopped in her tracks with a jerk, like a motor run down. She straightened her back and dropped her shoulders. She found her center of balance and placed her full weight on her feet. Now she was grounded, and her mind was free to calculate and plan. There were many small tasks to perform and time was against her: enough food for Nikolai; a letter to Lola; a knapsack to pack. … She stepped forward and looked up at her house. The gutters on the second story were choked by wisteria. She might not be back to give her gardener the order to tear the vine down.

If diagramed in time of emergency, Gabriel’s mind would be layered like the earth’s crust, with desire buried under successive levels of duty. If he relaxed his will, these layers might shift or splinter, under the impact, for example, of the sight of Marit’s car forced on his vision at a moment when he needed his attention whole. To bring himself back to the crisis at hand, he stopped pacing, turned his back to the car, and performed a simple exercise: he repeated the phrase “I am empty” until he was once more quiet and alert. Twenty-five repetitions restored him. If he had a divided mind, he could not be useful. He had no right to private thoughts until the girl was found.

He accused himself of indifference in the face of need. For the last four days, the girl had been begging for help, coming to his room each night after curfew, her feet naked, the straps of her thin nightdress hanging off her shoulders, so harassed and unhappy that she had not taken time to put on a robe. Sunday night the straps had slipped down to bare one of her breasts. This neglect of her person should have warned him that her nightmares were a sign of a deeper problem. Every one of his actions had been perfunctory. He gave her two aspirins with a cup of water. He tucked a blanket around her, since the night air was cool and had made her nipples hard. He sat with her for a long time, holding her hand, letting her talk herself out. He listened to what she said, but with half a mind. He heard enough to think that her trouble was beyond his scope, a motherless girl whose father took her into his bed when bad dreams woke her, who could only sleep through the night if the father stayed by her until her eyes closed.

While she talked the girl had pressed his hand, as if she sensed that he was thinking other thoughts, none to be proud of, the reasons that an old friend had given him for leaving medicine. Dick Ardery did not like to work with patients: “They don’t want you to have a life, Gabriel; why do you think they call you ‘my doctor’? They hate you to eat or take a break or treat someone else.” This urgent Dupuis girl did not want Gabriel to have a life. She wanted a robot helper that was never tired, or sick in love, or disillusioned with Meyerling; that would not notice the tyranny of sick people, or the pride with which they narrated their symptoms. His conscience worked out an equation that balanced perfectly: he had nurtured resentment toward her/she had run away. If she found herself in danger, it was on his head.

A black patrol wagon rounded the curve with a squeal of rubber. The Sheriff was grinning and waving as if he were the lead car in a parade. Gabriel thumbed him down and rode with him back to the house.

New England is full of ponds that are used as swimming holes. On a very blue day their surface reflects the sky, but their ordinary color is brown or yellowish-brown, from the quantity of leaves that drop into them autumn after autumn. People who have never swum in the ocean or who live far from lakes do not mind sharing a pond with tadpoles, water beetles, green scum, turtles, and catfish. They do not imagine the feelers of the catfish brushing their legs, or the slimy, whiskery plants that grow on the bottom. These swimmers hold their noses, and sink down to test the depth. When their toes reach the soft, sucking mud, they do not shoot to the surface in horror and paddle for shore. Instead they drift to the top and laze on their backs for hours, swatting off darning needles.

No one swims in Yoke Pond, because it is lost in the woods. It is as deep as a quarry and one side is scooped out of rock. Layers of rock jut under the water, which makes diving perilous. Since the water is cold, it breeds no green scum and no catfish. The color of the water is black; steely-gray in winter when the trees have lost their leaves.

Yoke Pond is the home of turtles, some as small as the kind that children keep in boxes, some that are six or seven inches across the carapace. Their shells are decorated with concentric hexagons, like coffering on a vault, or with a random pattern of white spots. These gentle swimmers, half deaf and voiceless, live and multiply undisturbed by man, though birds and raccoons make raids on their helpless young. Turtles have no teeth, but their jaws have sawlike edges. They tear their food into pieces and swallow the pieces whole. They will eat leaves, shoots, and berries, but they like meat better, snails, tadpoles, flies and gnats, and little fish.