Ritual (15 page)

Charlie said,
‘I’m probably crazy. I feel like I’m crazy.’

‘Let me say it
for you,’ said Mrs Foss. ‘You think that the Celestines may have had something
to do with it, don’t you?
Those folks at
Le Reposoir
.’

Charlie
hesitated. He had already reached the stage where he didn’t quite trust
anybody. After all, if Velma and Arthur and the manager of the Windsor had all
been deliberately deceiving him, why shouldn’t Paula Foss
be
deceiving him too? It seemed quite possible that the moment he had walked into
the Iron Kettle, he had entered unwittingly into a conspiracy to take his son
away; and to make him believe that he was mad.

He decided to
put Paula Foss to the test. ‘Tell me about the Celestines,’ he said.
‘The truth about the Celestines.
I mean, what are they?
Because they have something to do with Martin’s disappearance, don’t they? Or
don’t they?’

‘The Celestines
are secret,’ said Mrs Foss, with considerable emphasis. ‘People used to pass on
all kinds of stories about them, down in New Orleans. The story goes that they
came from France, originally, but they were forced to emigrate during the
French Revolution. They were a dining society, that’s what I heard. But they
were something else besides. They were religious, too. Not religious in the way
that you or I might think of it, but mystical.’

Charlie said
nothing, but stood and listened with a face that couldn’t devise any kind of
expression.

Mrs Foss
continued. ‘They had a restaurant on St Charles Avenue, two doors down from
Kolb’s, but it wasn’t a restaurant in the regular sense. You couldn’t walk in
there straight off the street, the way you could with Kolb’s or the Pearl, or
the red beans and rice place that I used to run. They had blanked-out windows,
and a locked door, and nobody I knew ever got to eat there. They were select.
They were secret. People used to whisper about them, all kinds of stories: how
they were eating live monkey brains, how they were eating Pomeranian dogs. But
the story most people used to tell was that they were taking stray children off
the streets and fattening them up, so that they could eat them too.’

‘That,’ Charlie
said, ‘has got to be a fairy tale. I haven’t heard anything like it since
Hansel and Gretel.’

‘All right,
it’s a fairy tale,’ said Mrs Foss. ‘But people used to tell it, all the same.’

‘Why did you
call them the Celestines?’

‘Everybody did.
It means Heavenly People, in Cajun French. I don’t know where they first
acquired it, but that’s what they used to call themselves.
The
Heavenly People.
They was Cajun from centuries back, right from the time
that the Spanish granted them land in the bayous. Everybody called them the
Celestines. But it doesn’t just mean Heavenly People, it means something else
besides. It means this secret eating society; and whether it’s true or not, it
means anyone who eats something they are not supposed to.’

Mrs Foss
pronounced ‘supposed to’ in an unadulterated Deep
south
accent, like ‘sah postah’.

Charlie said,
‘I keep feeling that something’s going on here and everybody’s trying to
explain it to me, but I still can’t understand it. These Celestines – you’re
not seriously trying to tell me they eat children?’

‘One and one
makes two. Maybe one and one makes three.’ ‘And what does that mean?’

‘That means
every time the Celestines appear, children start to disappear. The Celestines
have peculiar eating habits, so one and one makes two, or maybe it doesn’t.
Nobody can prove it.’

‘Children are
disappearing all the time. It’s a national crisis.’ ‘Sure they do.’

Charlie said,
‘I’m sorry, I can’t believe any of this.’ ‘Can’t you?’ asked Mrs Foss. ‘In that
case, why did you come back here?’

Charlie covered
his eyes with his hand. He sat for a long time in silence, thinking about
Martin, and the very last moment when he walked out of the door of his room at
the Windsor Hotel.

Martin had
quoted Groucho Marx back at him. / do not wish to belong to the kind of club
that accepts people like me as members. How ironic that comment would
provo
to be if the Celestines really had taken him.

But the whole
idea of a secret society that ate children was preposterous. How could they get
away with it?
and
they would certainly have to be a whole
lot more careful about their secrecy than the Celestines had proved to be.
Velma had appeared almost to be recruiting him to join them, and that didn’t
seem like the way a private society of cannibals would behave.

Mrs Foss must
be prematurely senile, or suffering from overwork. ‘Is that waitress of yours
around anywhere?’ he asked. ‘What was her name?’

‘Harriet. No,
she hasn’t been in. She wasn’t in yesterday, either.’

‘Do you think
you could give me her address? There’s just a chance that she might be able to
tell me something helpful.’

‘She lives with
her parents on the Bethlehem Road, about three miles east of the Corners. You
can’t miss it. It’s a square white house with a red roof almost on the road.
A big maple growing right close to it.’

Charlie nodded.
Mrs Foss stood quite still. ‘Was that really what they say about the
Celestines?’

Charlie asked
her. ‘They ate children?’

‘Maybe it was
just a bogey story,’ said Mrs Foss.

‘I think maybe
it was,’ Charlie told her.

He left the
Iron Kettle and drove back to Alien’s Corners. The day was windy and the trees
waved at him frantically as he passed the sloping green. The two old men whom
Charlie and Martin had met yesterday were sitting on their customary bench,
Christopher Prescott and Oliver T. Burack. Charlie parked his car not far away
from them and walked across the green with the wind in his face.

‘Well, well,’
said Christopher Prescott, lifting his brown fedora hat.

‘Good morning.’
Charlie looked around. The green was deserted except for a stray brown-and-white
dog sniffing at one of the garbage baskets. ‘I was wondering if you might have
seen my son.’

‘We certainly
did,’ said Christopher Prescott.

Charlie’s chest
tightened. ‘You saw him? When?
This morning?’

‘Yesterday,
with you,’ Christopher Prescott said. ‘Fine-looking boy he is, too.”

Charlie tried
not to show his anger with Christopher Pres-cott’s imbecility. ‘He’s gone
missing,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if you might have seen him today.’

‘Missing, huh?
What’s he done, run off to make his fortune? You know, that’s what I did when I
was a boy. I ran off to make my fortune, didn’t come home for five years and
two months solid, and by that time I was old enough and wealthy enough to buy
my father’s house out from under him. Every boy should do that. If that’s what
your boy’s done, then good luck to him I say.’

Charlie said,
‘He’s only fifteen years old. He doesn’t know this part of the country at all.
And he left without any kind of warning. No note, no nothing.’

‘Doesn’t want you to find him, then.
That’s obvious.’

‘Will you do
me
a favour and keep a look out for him?’ Charlie asked
them.

‘Weather-eye
open,’ said Oliver T. Burack.

Charlie left
them with a wave and drove out on the Bethlehem Road until he reached the white
house with the red roof where Harriet lived with her parents. The house looked
badly in need of paint and repair. The shiplap boards were flaking, and most of
the windowsills were rotten. An avalanche of shingles had left one side of the
verandah roof exposed, like bones seen through decayed flesh. From one of the
overhanging branches of the big old maple tree, an old tyre swung from a
fraying rope. Chickens pecked around the back door.

Charlie parked
his car and climbed the creaking wooden steps to the porch. He pressed the
doorbell and waited, rubbing his hands to warm them up. Dust and chaff blew in
the wind; chicken feathers clung to the screen door.

After he had
pressed the bell a second time, Charlie called out, ‘Harriet! Are you there?
Harriet!’

Without
warning, the front door opened, and Charlie was confronted by a fiftyish man of
slight build with thinning hair. He was wearing a carpenter’s apron and he was
carrying a clamp in his hand. He frowned narrowly at Charlie, and said, ‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry to
trouble you, sir. I’m looking for a girl called Harriet. She works at the Iron
Kettle with Mrs Foss.’

‘Used to work there.
Not anymore.’

‘Oh? I didn’t
realize that. Mrs Foss didn’t tell me.’

‘That’s no
surprise. Mrs Foss doesn’t know yet.’

Charlie said, ‘My
name’s McLean, Charlie McLean. Is Harriet here? I’d like to talk to her, if I
could.’

‘I’m Harriet’s
father, Gil Greene,’ said the man. He wiped his hand on his apron and held it
out.

‘Been glueing a
chair.’

‘Is Harriet
here?’ asked Charlie.

‘Haven’t seen her since yesterday.
Come on in. Would you
care for some coffee? There’s a pot on the stove.’

‘No, thank you.
It’s important I talk to Harriet. Well, it could be important. Do you know
where she is?’

Gil Greene
shrugged, and twisted his clamp around. ‘Her mother lets her do what she likes.

Much against my
better judgement, believe me. Gone off to see those French people again, that’s
my guess.’

‘French people?’

‘Them Musettes, up at the restaurant.
She’s always talking
about
them,
you’d think they was crowned heads of
Europe or something like that. Every now and then, they call her and
she
goes up to the restaurant to help out with the serving,
or whatever they want her to do. Odd jobs, washing dishes, that kind of thing.
She never gives Mrs Foss
no
notice, she just goes.
She never gives us no notice neither.
Sometimes she’s gone
for two or three days at a time, no explanations, nothing. So what can you do?
Well, the point is you can’t do
nothing
.’ Gil Greene
cleared his throat, and then he added, ‘The last time she went, Mrs Foss said
she was going to sack her if she did it again. And you can see what’s
happened.’

‘Does Mrs Foss
know where she is?’ asked Charlie.

‘She probably
suspects. But Harriet made her mother and me promise not to tell, on account of
the fact that Mrs Foss was always dead set against the Musettes right from the
very beginning. I don’t know whether it was anything personal but there seemed
to be real bad blood between them.’

Charlie said,
‘Did Harriet ever tell you what goes on at that restaurant? What they do
there,
or what the place is like?’

Gil Greene
looked at Charlie and smiled wryly. ‘You don’t know Harriet. Sometimes she
could talk the rear wheel off of a forty-ton truck, other times you can’t get a
word out of her.’

Charlie checked
his watch. ‘Listen,’ he said,
Til
take a drive up to
the restaurant myself, see if I can get to see her. If I can’t, or if I miss
her, would you ask her to look me up? I’ll be staying at Mrs Kemp’s.’

‘Didn’t know Mrs Kemp was still in the boarding house business.’

‘She’s not. But
I have to stay somewhere.’

‘Rather you than me, pal.’

Charlie turned
his car around and drove straight back through Alien’s Corners and out on to
the Quassapaug Road. A few drops of rain
freckled
his
windshield, although it didn’t look as if it were going to come down heavily.
Cherub’s tears, Marjorie always used to call those light sporadic showers, an
occasional reminder that even the life hereafter could be unhappy, too.

The gates of
Le Reposoir
were locked. Charlie climbed
out of the car and pressed the intercom button. There was no reply, so he
pressed the button again, and kept his finger on it for almost half a minute.
At last, a detached, metallic voice said, ‘Please – we are closed. If you have
anything to deliver, leave it at the post office in Alien’s Corners. We will
collect it from there ourselves.’

Charlie said,
‘This is Charles McLean. I want to speak to M. Musette.’

‘M. Musette is
not here.’

‘What about Mme
Musette?’

‘I regret,
sir, that
Mme Musette is not here, either.’

‘Is there a
manager?
Somebody in charge?’

‘Only myself, sir.
I am the caretaker.’

‘I’m looking
for my son,’ Charlie insisted, trying not to let his voice tremble.

‘Your son?’
asked the disembodied voice. ‘I regret that I do not understand.’

‘My son, Martin
McLean, is missing and I have reason to believe that somebody at
Le Reposoir
may be able to help me
locate him.’

‘Sir – you must
be making some mistake. There is nobody here who could possibly help you with
such a matter. If your son is missing you would be advised to contact the
police.’

Charlie said,
‘Is Harriet Greene there?’

‘I beg your
pardon,
sir,
there is nobody of that name known to us.
You seem to be suffering from some kind of misapprehension.’

‘Can I come
inside and talk to you? It’s darned windy out here.’

‘I regretthatwouldservenoconstructivepurpose, sir.
Besides,
in M. Musette’s absence, I have been requested not to admit anybody at all.
There is much valuable property in the house, sir, and we have to be
exceptionally careful about security.’

Charlie rubbed
the back of his neck. He was feeling very stiff and very tired. ‘All right,’ he
conceded. ‘I’ll go talk to the police. But I would like to see M. Musette when
he comes back. Is it possible to make an appointment?’