Ritual (7 page)

‘It seems to me
that a lot of young people have gone missing from Alien’s Corners,’ Charlie
remarked.

‘The sheriff
said that it happens a lot in backwater places like this. The kids get bored,
that’s what he said, but they know that their parents won’t let them go, not
voluntarily. So they run away, and that’s the last that anybody ever sees of
them. Not just children of Caroline’s age, neither.

Some of them
are not much more than nine or ten years old. Well, you’ve seen their pictures
on the Knudsen’s milk cartons. I used to look at them and wonder how any parent
could possibly let their child disappear like that. But it happened to me, too,
and all I can tell you about it is that it hurts a good deal, and that you can
never get over it.’

They talked for
a while about Caroline. Mrs Kemp opened up her rolltop bureau and produced a
handful of the printed pictures that she had distributed to her guests. Charlie
and Martin dutifully examined them. They showed a pretty fair-haired girl with
a snub nose and a wide smile. She could have been a cheerleader or a
roller-skating waitress at a drive-in soda fountain.

Underneath the
picture, a short appeal said, ‘MISSING, Caroline Hey ward, 17 years old. Last
seen Alien’s Corners, CT, 11/18 last year.
5’ 4$’ tall, slim
build.
Wearing brown-and-white wool coat, brown wool
hat.
$500 reward for information.’

‘Pretty girl,’
said Charlie, offering the flysheet back.

‘Keep it,’ Mrs
Kemp told him. ‘You never
know,
the way you restaurant
inspectors travel around, one day you might just find her.’

Charlie folded
up the flysheet and tucked it into his wallet. ‘Would it be too much to ask you
to put us up for the night?’

‘Of course
not,’ said Mrs Kemp. ‘I’d be glad to. I can give you the big room right at the
back, that’s the room I always used to give to honeymooners. Well – they
weren’t all honey-mooners.

“Romantic
couples”, that’s what I used to call them.’

‘I tried to get
to eat at that French place,’ said Charlie.

Mrs Kemp lifted
her head. In the lamplight, the dark circles under her eyes looked like
bruises.

‘What French place?’
she inquired sharply. So sharply that she must have known exactly what he was
talking about.

‘
Le Reposoir
, up on Quassapaug,’ said
Charlie. ‘They seem to have quite a reputation around here.’

‘They’re not
the kind of people you’d choose to have as neighbours, if you had a choice,’
Mrs Kemp replied.

‘Oh?’ said
Charlie.

‘They keep
themselves to themselves, that’s all. They live here, but you couldn’t say
they’re part of the local community. They seem to do whatever they like,
though. They built a whole new wing on that house of theirs, up on Quassapaug,
and I never heard a whisper about zoning laws.

I talked to Mr
Haxalt about it – Mr Haxalt’s the chairman of our community association –’

‘Yes,’ Charlie
told her. ‘I had the pleasure of meeting Mr Haxalt this afternoon. I parked my
car in his sacred parking place.’

‘Well, then,
you’ll know what he’s like,’ said Mrs Kemp. ‘He’s an expert at giving folks the
brush-off. And that’s what he did when I tried to talk to him about
Le Reposoir
. “Don’t you worry, Mrs Kemp,
those people are here to bring more trade into Alien’s Corners.” But did they
bring in more trade? They certainly didn’t. I can tell you – lots of people
come and go, up on Quassapaug Road – lots of wealthy people, too, in limousines
– but none of them stop at Alien’s Corners, and even if they did, you can’t
imagine that they’d be the kind of people to buy cream or corn-dollies or
home-cured bacon. Let me tell you, Mr McLean –’

‘Charlie,
please.’

‘- well, let me
tell you, Charlie, that place is a curse on Alien’s Corners. It takes
everything and gives nothing. There’s people around here who won’t go near it
for money in the bank. And don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. But it has
the feeling about it. Alien’s Corners has never been the same since that place
opened, and until it closes down it never will. This used to be a happy town,
but you look at it now. Sad and lost and anxious, that’s what it is. Maybe
Le Reposoir
isn’t to blame. Who can say?
It could be the way that life is going everywhere, the recession and all. But I
believe that place is a curse on Alien’s Corners, and that the sun won’t shine
here until it’s gone.’

Martin said,
‘It’s only a restaurant.’

Charlie turned
around in his chair and looked at him. Martin repeated, ‘It’s only a
restaurant, that’s all.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said
Charlie. ‘And since when have you been the expert?’

Martin pouted,
but didn’t answer. Mrs Kemp glanced from Charlie to Martin and smiled, as if
she were trying to make peace between them.

Charlie said,
with a frankness that was unprecedented for him, ‘Martin and I haven’t seen too
much of each other -well, not for years. His mother and I were divorced. You
have to make allowances on both sides I guess.’

Martin looked at
his father with an expression that was a mixture of embarrassment and respect.

/ wish you
hadn’t said that. Dad, and anyway, who was it who never came home? But he held
his tongue. There are some feelings which are mutually understood between
father and son, but which are better left unspoken.

‘You must know
Mr Musette,’ Charlie said to Mrs Kemp.

‘I’ve seen him,
yes, but no more than twice.’

‘And?’

‘He’s charming.
Very foreign, of course.
He likes to be called
Monsieur Musette. A lot of the ladies around here think he’s tray charmong.
Only from a distance, of course.
He keeps himself to
himself. And then of course there’s Mrs Musette – Madame Musette – although
I’ve never seen her.’

Charlie waved
away the offer of another Jubilee. ‘Tell me something,’ he asked Mrs Kemp.
‘What is it about
Le Reposoir
that
can affect a whole community?’

Mrs Kemp said,
‘What can I tell you? Maybe it’s nothing at all. Your son’s quite right. It’s
only a restaurant. Why should anybody be frightened of a restaurant?’

The atmosphere
in the parlour was very strange. Charlie felt as if he had been asked to
complete a
sentence
to which there was no logical
conclusion – such as, ‘I like the shifting of the tides because...” He couldn’t
rid himself of the suspicion that Martin had been talking to somebody back in
the parking lot of the Iron Kettle, no matter how much Martin denied it, and he
also felt that his conversation with this unknown somebody had been connected
with
Le Reposoir
. After all, where
had Martin found that visiting card from
Le
Reposoir
? And why had he denied seeing that pale-faced child in the garden?

Mrs Kemp showed
them up to their room. It was stuffy, high-ceilinged, with maps of damp
disfiguring the plaster above their heads. The walls had been papered with huge
green flowers that were supposed to be roses but looked more like efflorescing
mould. In one corner loomed a gigantic wardrobe, with blistered veneer and
mottled mirrors. The bed was enormous, an aircraft carrier of a bed, built of
green-painted iron with brass decorations in the shape of seashells. Martin
tried to bounce on it, and complained, ‘Jesus, this mattress is as hard as a
rock.’

‘Hard beds are
good for your posture,’ said Charlie. ‘And don’t profane.’

‘Do we really
have to stay here?’

‘Maybe you can answer
that,’ Charlie replied, taking off his coat and hanging it up inside the
cavernous depths of the wardrobe. There were five wire hangers in there, and a
dried up clove and orange pomander that looked like a shrunken head.

‘I don’t know
what you mean,’ said Martin. He went over to the opposite side of the room and
stuck his head inside the carved wooden fireplace. ‘Halloo – halloo – any
skeletons up there?’

Charlie watched
him in the wardrobe mirror. ‘You still haven’t told me the truth about what
happened at the Iron Kettle.’ He tried not to sound too petulant.

‘Dad,’ said
Martin. ‘Nothing happened.’

Martin turned
away from the fireplace, and as he did so Charlie saw in the mirror that his
face had peculiarly altered. It seemed to have stretched out, so that it was
broad and distorted, and his eyes had the same blind look as the eyes of a dead
fox he had once found lying by the road.

Charlie jerked
in shock, and turned around, but Martin appeared quite normal when he
confronted him face-to-face. He looked back at the mirror. It must have been
the mottling, and the dirt. He remembered how old he had looked himself, in the
mens room mirror at the Iron Kettle.

‘Do you want to
go down to the car and get the bag?’ Charlie asked Martin.

Martin said,
‘Okay,’ but on the way out of the door he hesitated. ‘Do you really not believe
me?’ he asked.

Charlie said,
‘I believe you.’

‘You’re not
just saying that to stop us from having an argument?’

Charlie
unfastened his cufflinks. ‘Since when did boys talk to their fathers like
that?’

‘You said we
were supposed to be friends.’

‘Sure,’ said
Charlie, and felt a wave of guilt. He went over to Martin, and laid his hand on
his shoulder, and said, ‘I’ve been travelling around on my own for too darn
long, that’s my trouble. Too much talking to
myself
in
hotel mirrors. I guess it’s made me a little nutty.’

‘You can
believe me,’ Martin told him; although Charlie detected a strange hoarseness in
his voice that didn’t sound like Martin at all. ‘You can believe me.’ And it
wasn’t so much of an affirmation as a command. It wasn’t really,
You
can believe me. It was more like,
You
must believe me.

He sat on the
side of the bed and waited for Martin to return with the suitcase. He thought
about a quiet foggy afternoon in Milwaukee, parking his car and walking up the
concrete pathway to a small suburban duplex. Six or seven children had been
playing ball at the end of the street, and their cries had sounded just like
the cries of seagulls. He remembered pushing the bell, and then the front door
opening. And there she was, her brown hair tangled, staring at him in complete
surprise. ‘You came,’ she had whispered. ‘I never thought you would.’

Martin returned
with their zip-up overnight bag. He laid it down on the bed, and said to
Charlie,

‘Are you okay?
You look kind of logic.’

‘I’m okay.
Tired, I guess, like you.’

‘I’m not
tired.’

‘Well, then,
let’s freshen ourselves up, and get on down to Billy’s Beer & Bite.’

Martin looked
around. ‘There’s no television here. What are we going to do all evening?’

‘You know how
to play cards, don’t you? Let’s see how much of your allowance I can win back.’

Martin said,
‘Mega-thrill. If you really want it back that bad, I’ll give it to you.’
Charlie couldn’t even smile. He wondered what he was going to say to the boy
next – let alone how he was going to find something to talk about for ten more
days. His tiredness was mostly caused by the strain of keeping up a
long-running conversation. He wanted with all his heart to develop an easy
father-and-son relationship with Martin, but right now he would have given a
month’s salary to be alone.

They ate in a
corner booth at Billy’s. A jukebox played ‘Joleen’ and ‘Blanket on the Ground’
and

‘DIVORCE’ and
what with the rough wooden decor and the loud laughter and the red fluorescent
lights they could have been in Amarillo, TX, instead of Alien’s Corners, CT.
Martin seemed to have rediscovered his appetite, and wolfed down a king-sized
cheeseburger with mammoth fries. Charlie restricted himself to a New York steak
sandwich with onion rings.

Afterwards,
they walked around the windy deserted green for a while, with their hands in
their pockets, not talking, and then went back to Mrs Kemp’s to play cards.

Before he went to
bed, Charlie found Walter Haxalt’s telephone number in the local directory, and
called him up from the phone in Mrs Kemp’s parlour. The phone rang and rang but
there was no reply.

Mrs Kemp was
watching him through the partly open doorway. ‘Do you know anybody who goes to
Le Reposoir
to eat?’ Charlie asked her,
as he waited for somebody at Walter Haxalt’s number to pick up.

Mrs Kemp shook
her head. ‘You’d be better off keeping clear,’ she advised him. ‘I don’t know
what’s so bad about that place, but if I were you I wouldn’t want to find out.’

I
t was well past two o’clock in the morning when Charlie awoke. For
a moment he had that terrible vertiginous feeling of not knowing where he was,
or what city he was in. But after years of waking up unexpectedly in unfamiliar
rooms, he had developed a trick of closing his eyes again and logically
analysing where he must be.

Usually, his
sense of smell and his sense of touch were enough for him to be able to
re-orient himself. Howard Johnson’s all smelled like Howard Johnson’s and
TraveLodge beds all felt the same. This was somewhere private. This was
somewhere old. This, he thought, opening his eyes again, is Mrs Kemp’s boarding
house in Alien’s Corners, C T.

The bedroom was
intensely dark. Charlie felt as if black felt pads were being pressed against
his eyes. Either the moon had not yet risen, or it was obscured by
thunderclouds. The room was also very quiet, except for the intermittent
blowing of the wind down the chimney, and the soft ticking of Charlie’s watch
on the bedside table.

Charlie eased
himself up into a sitting position. Gradually, he found that he could make out
the slightly lighter squares of the windowpanes, and the gleam of reflected
street light on one of the brass knobs at the end of the bed, but that was
about all. He strained his ears to hear Martin breathing next to him, but from
the other side of the bed there was no sound at all.