Thing With Feathers (9781616634704) (29 page)

“Yeah. By the way, thanks a heap.” He paused. “They’re coming back for me, Tiny.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“I mean they told me if I don’t pay them the whole wad I owe ‘em in two days, they’re gonna kill me. They’re gonna nail my knees to the floor, pour gasoline over my head and light a match. Then they’re gonna feed my ashes to the fish. It’s what they said, I’m not kidding. You gotta help me, man.”

“Whoa. Victor, be serious, pal. I ain’t got no two hundred dollars.”

“I know, I know. But you gotta help me think of some way to get it by tomorrow.”

“I don’t even know anyone with that kind of money.”

“I do. But he turned me down flat. Couldn’t believe it. I called old man Marshall and told him I was in trouble bad, and the old coot hung up on me.”

“That’s low. You try the dad routine?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmm. Well, sometimes a man’s gotta take what he wants. I mean, look, you’re his only son, right? And he’s old and sick. So, all that money’s gonna be yours someday anyway. I say we go over there tonight and take what you need.”

“You mean, like, hustle him?”

“No! Heck, no. I mean steal it or beat him ‘til he coughs it up.”

Victor didn’t like the sounds of it.
“I ain’t beatin’ up anyone. Maybe we could break in and just, you know, take it. But we’d have to be quiet, ’cause he’s got a nurse and his brother’s there, too. I don’t wanna mess with Will Marshall.” He could feel someone watching him and turned around quickly. Sure enough, there was Nedra, Tiny’s younger sister, staring at him out a flap in the cordoned off area that sufficed as her bedroom. She smiled and then let the curtain fall back down.

Nedra was a weird girl. Victor called her the goat-girl, and pronounced her name as if he were a billy goat naying, “
Neeeeh
-dra”, because she was always with those filthy goats. Nedra’s mother was always stumbling around the place, bottle of swill in hand, but she didn’t seem to have a bone to pick over her daughter’s choice of bed partners. Sometimes Victor felt sorry for goat-girl.

Nedra never wore under-drawers. For one shiny quarter, she’d lift her dress and let Tiny’s friends look at her private for as long as they wanted. Victor had paid her money plenty of times for a look-see. Just lately, she’d grown a little hair down there, and that made it more interesting. Twice, she let Victor get so close that he could have reached out and touched it if he’d wanted. But then she’d have to pay him a quarter, as dirty as she was.

“My brat sister,” Tiny grumbled. Then he pulled Victor’s ear real close to his mouth. “Know what? She let me rut on her the other day.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Swear it to that God of yours, pal. She’d let you too if you asked. She likes it, man. Nedra likes you, too. I can tell.”

“How much does she want for it?”

“A quarter, man. She let me do it for that. Swear to God.” He crossed his chest. “Just lies right down and spreads ‘em wide. That’s why she keeps looking at you, Victor. She likes you, man. She wants it.”

“Maybe,” he said cautiously. “Anyhow, how am I gonna pay these guys off, Tiny? They’re gonna kill me! Then I ain’t gonna be ruttin’ on goat-girl or anybody else. I’m fish food.”

Tiny put his pudgy arm around his pal’s shoulder. “Like I told ya, pal. We go over there tonight and we jus’ take it. It’ll be your money soon enough anyway.”

“But is has to be tonight. And it’s two hundred and forty-six dollars—and twenty-five cents.” He stole a look back toward the flap.

“Sure thing, pal. Old dairy-farmin’ guys like them probably turn in when it gets dark, and it’s getting dark these days around ten. We’ll go around ten-thirty.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? Hey, man, I’m giving you the only way to save your butt.” He punched Victor’s upper arm and Victor howled. “Sorry. Sore, huh? Hey, you got a baseball bat?”

“I think so. Why?”

“Bring it with you, dodo. Geez. Do I gotta think of everything?”

Chapter 63

July, 1941

Chicago, Illinois

“B
lair?” Wendell’s hushed voice called.

“Come in.”

Wendell had a briefcase with him, which he carried protectively under his arm. He stepped from the foyer into the main room and saw her standing on the far side, in front of a bank of windows. She turned and flashed him a brilliant smile. Instantly Blair noticed the pained expression that fleeted across Wendell’s plainly honest face, before he could hide it from her. Blair’s heartstrings tweaked for her friend. But Wendell was adept at shrinking all of his sorrows into a single flash of dispiritedness, just before he squared his shoulders and returned her smile.

She’d broken his heart when she’d had to tell him the truth: Cindy was gone. She had never really existed at all, but inside Blair’s own head. Blair had been mentally ill for many years, her doctors told them. She had suffered some fracture of her psyche early on, from repeated abuses upon her as a child. The trauma she’d suffered at the hands of Chester Lasley had shocked so deeply, it managed to reach those dark malicious pockets of insanity and root them out. Her psyche had fused together again during her ten comatose months. Her psychologist at the sanitarium, where she’d been residing ever since her release from the hospital almost a year earlier, told her she was healed. Her prognosis was sanity restored. Blair thought her doctors were absolutely spot on about her diagnosis. She prayed they were right about her prognosis. She had not heard Cindy’s voice since she’d descended into a coma a year and ten months earlier.

Wendell had confessed his love for Blair when she was still in the hospital. He was crestfallen when he learned that Cindy, an alias for Blair, was married to another man and had a child with him. Until he’d learned that, Wendell admitted to her, he had harbored a secret hope that someday Cindy Marshall might consent to marry him.

In the intervening months since he’d discovered the inscription on the backside of Cindy’s Lady Racine timepiece, the only item she had taken with her on her attempted suicide, the item that was clutched frightfully tight in her fist, he had recited aloud the poem for her. He did this over and over, many times each visit, which he made at the end of every workday, and every Saturday and Sunday. He knew it by heart, of course. Inevitably, he had come to adopt the verse as his own mantra, and it had helped him to keep his own secret hope alive. It had taken the passage of twelve months, the time since ‘Cindy’ awoke to the world as Blair Bowman Marshall, to dull the sharp pain of Wendell’s new reality.

Blair watched as he swallowed a sigh and she knew what he was mourning; it was the death of hope. On his last visit, Wendell assured her he coping with his ‘disappointment’, that being the unfavorable recognizance that he would not be spending his remaining years with the only woman he had ever loved. He’d admitted to being heartbroken, but promised to have come to terms with the limits of his relationship with Cindy—now Blair. He professed to be and always remain her closest friend.

Blair used her crutches to meet him at an empty table in the middle of the room. “How’s the leg, Cin—I’m so sorry…Blair?” he asked.

“It’s getting stronger. I have walked all over this facility, for lack of something more entertaining to do. The doctor said this morning all the walking is indeed speeding my recovery. Tomorrow, I can begin walking Lake Shore Avenue to the Dock Street Navy Pier entrance, with my nurse and, of course, my very fashionable cane. If my leg can stand that distance, I may be able to leave here by summer’s end. That would be the best birthday gift I could possibly give to myself, Wendell. I’d almost lost hope of ever seeing my son again before I die.” She wrapped her fingers around her timepiece protectively.

“Does the leg still hurt bad?” Wendell worried.

“Oh my goodness, yes. But I have chosen to lie to myself and say it does not hurt too badly at all.”

“The easiest person in the world to lie to is oneself,” Wendell said absently as he rummaged through papers. He must have realized how morose he’d sounded and quickly looked up and winked at her. “Before I forget, I must give you these…” Wendell pulled two bars of soap from his briefcase pocket. “Of course, I have told my mother
all
about you—she did wonder where I went for an hour every day for the past two years and—” Crimson began to rise in Wendell’s cheeks as he realized he was babbling. “Uh, but, she insisted I give you these.” He nodded to the soap bars he held in his hands, his smile wide.

Blair looked baffled as she watched him place the soap on the table. “I, um, I’m not sure what—”

“Oh, goodness,” Wendell turned a darker shade of red, and he hastened to explain. “My mother was born a Hoosier. She told me to give these to you, because it’s, uh, an old Indiana healer’s secret. See, you wrap each bar in some thin fabric, or maybe place them inside of summer stockings, and then put them under your knee areas, beneath your bottom sheet. Don’t know why, but for ridding one of night cramps of the legs, nothing works better.”

She smiled and placed one hand gently, intimately, on his forearm. “Thank you, Wendell. Please thank your mother for me.”

The dear, sweet man had saved her life. When she’d been cast into darkness following her crash and fall, the only voice she could hear was her own. Even Cindy was silent. It was all so confusing. She had not known where she was or how she would find her way out of the darkness. Then Wendell’s voice had broken through. Murky, vaporous tendrils of sound had slinked into the deeper crevices of her subconscious, and beckoned to her dormant ears. She heard,
“Hope is the thing with feathers…”
, and suddenly there was a soft glowing light in the distance.

Wendell had sat with her in the hospital each day, sometimes holding her hand, while she lingered in a coma for many months. One day he’d noticed the timepiece Cindy had always worn around her neck, the one her fingers often rubbed and massaged, was laying on a bedside table. He picked it up, curious, and that was when he noticed the inscription she’d had engraved on the back. It was a poem he’d heard before but could not place, he’d since told her. Wendell had determined any poem meaningful enough to have inscribed on a piece of jewelry, must be fairly important to that person. So, he began reading the poem aloud for her each day. Blair had heard him each day, and it spurred her to find her way back from the darkness.

“How are you, Wendell?” she asked.

“I am very well, my dear. I have the paperwork from the court in Tillamook County, Oregon. I have furnished them proof you are alive, and used the Power of Attorney to have the papers drawn up to re-open the custody hearing for your son, Victor. These pages here challenge the preacher’s custody rights.” He placed them in front of her and pulled out her chair, so she could sit with the leg she had already had surgery on several times, stretched out in front. “These ones here, you need to sign where I marked. These ask for the new hearing. Once you sign and I file on your behalf, I am told we can ask for a date, possibly as early as the end of the year. I spoke with one of your doctors on my way in. He said he was immeasurably pleased with your leg’s healing. More importantly, he told me your ment—er, your brain injury is fit as a fiddle, and has agreed to provide the court his findings.”

He placed the papers in front of her, one at a time for signing, then stacked up all the pages and placed them in a portfolio for delivery to the courthouse. “I will have copies of everything delivered to your attorney.”

“They won’t contact the preacher, will they? I don’t want him to have any notice. I am certain he thinks me dead and I wish to keep it that way. Until I am ready. Otherwise there would be nothing to stop him from trying again to have me killed.”

“Yes, Cin—I am very sorry. Blair. Your secrets are safe with me.” Wendell’s cheeks were thoroughly scarlet. “New tricks are trying for this old dog, I fear. Forgive me, dear.”

“Of course, Wendell. Think nothing of it, it’s just a name. Oh, my! Can this be…?”

Wendell had placed before her several land contracts for the sale of some properties which Cindy had sagely purchased during the Depression, instead of more stocks and gold. The combined worth of the properties was over a million dollars! Blair had elected to divulge herself of Illinois property, with the exception of her printing house loft apartment. Although it had tripled in value since she purchased it, Blair had decided to hang on to the one place that made Cindy happy in the past nine years. If Victor wished to sell it when she was gone, it would be his choice to make.

Blair finished signing the real estate papers, and Wendell tucked them all back into his briefcase for the next day, when he would drop them off at the land attorney’s office for listing them for sale. There was already great interest in the properties, so Wendell had no worries about getting their full value for Blair.

“There. We have the whole afternoon now, Wendell. Stay, please, and have tea with me. Tell me all about the theatre and what’s new. Oh! What can you tell me about the moving picture, ‘Gone with the Wind’?”

Chapter 64

July, 1941

Cloverdale, Oregon

I
t
was probably just a bear or a deer
, Sean figured.
We don’t get much company here.
But as he looked out the darkened parlor’s picture window for the source of the noise, he thought he could make out two men running around the front of the house. “Will!” Sean whispered hoarsely up the stairwell. He received no answer, and did not want to risk calling for him any louder. He let the lights remain off as he reached into his bedroom armoire for the shotgun. He slipped in two cartridges and clicked off the safety. Then he sat in the parlor in the dark and waited.

“I didn’t say they’d be asleep by now, you did!” Victor retorted.

“Are you sure you saw someone at the window?”

“No. I’m not positive. I don’t know if there’s anybody home. Their car isn’t here.”

“Okay! That makes it easier. We’ll just break in. We got bats, and the front door is made of glass. Just do it fast, smash and grab.”