The Girl in the Maze (6 page)

Martha took it to the counter, pulled the chain to turn on the light over the sink, and slid the orange bowl forward. Then she took a deep breath and lifted the textbook from the rim.

Martha saw that she was not mistaken. What she had found looked very much like the tip of a human finger. She removed the scrap of toilet paper to get a better look. The flesh was dark and shriveled. The digit was broad, like a thumb, or maybe a toe. It was severed at an angle, across the joint.

Martha pulled a pencil from the mug on the counter and used it to flip the thing over, to see if it could be a fake. It was solid, more fossil than flesh. She picked up the loupe and leaned forward. Through the glass, she could see the print, the raised whorls, curves within curves, the walls of a miniature maze. She followed the tracery of the lines, transfixed by the swirling pattern.

Then a dull thump and the muffled sound of a voice. Martha raised her head. She listened for a moment, and then it came again—a man speaking in sharp, violent tones.

“…Abigail…with him…that…won't do…” The man had a thick Southern accent, antique and lordly. Martha put down the loupe, went to the door, and pressed her ear against it.

“He can't…I don't know…” Another voice, this time a woman's.

“…won't do!”

She heard a muffled
pop,
a sound of flesh striking flesh. Then the woman was sobbing—wavering, desperate cascades of sorrow.

“Again? Only once—”

Martha opened the door, peered down the darkened corridor. The argument paused for a moment, but still she could hear low, convulsive sobs. A faint, silvery light flickered through a crack at the bottom of the door at the end of the hall. The Pritchetts' bedroom. She had seen this light before—they watched TV at this time of night.
Maybe that's what you're hearing, a TV program turned up too loud.

Then a louder sob, almost a wail, jolted Martha, and she realized it wasn't coming from the Pritchetts' room at all. It was coming from behind a different door, a narrow one just halfway down the hall. Enough racket to wake up the neighborhood, and hadn't anyone else noticed? Not the TV-watching Pritchetts, apparently. And not the tenant at the other end of the hall, the skinny young man she had glimpsed only once.

Martha heard a thump, like a body thrown against a wall. Broken glass, a shriek, and then quiet again. Something terrible was happening.

She stepped down the hallway. The floorboards squeaked, little questions under her bare feet, as she approached the narrow door.

“Whose child? Whose?”

“Nooooooo! NOOOOOO!” the woman wailed. The sorrow in her voice froze Martha's blood. There was a sound of struggle….She didn't know what was happening behind that door, except that it was violent, and she knew she had to intervene. Without thinking about it, she raised her fist and rapped on the door. She banged again, loud enough to be heard over the struggle.

The voices on the other side fell silent.
Good,
Martha thought, maybe whatever was happening would stop. She waited, a breath caught in her throat.

The door in front of Martha didn't move. Instead, another one swung open—the door to the Pritchetts' bedroom. A triangle of silver light spilled into the hall.

“Is something wrong?” Eileen clutched the edges of her robe with a bony hand. Martha glanced at the narrow door, then back at the old woman. Inside the bedroom, she could see Eileen's husband propped up on pillows, asleep, mouth gaping like a cavern. Light from the television flickered on his face.

“Did you hear the noise?”

“What noise? I heard a loud knock just now.”

“I meant the other noise, the—it sounded like—” Martha didn't bother to finish the sentence, because of the way Eileen was looking at her. Her eyes glared like frosted marbles, taking inventory. Martha was suddenly aware of her bare feet, her frayed kimono.

“Yes?” Eileen asked.

“I was just going to the bathroom, and I guess I turned the wrong way. I'm sorry to disturb you.”

“Hall light's down to the left. You ought to use the light. No use fumbling in the dark.” Eileen hitched at her bathrobe.

“Thank you.” Martha turned and walked back down the hall. She could feel the old woman's eyes on her back.
Welcome to Amberleen,
she thought.
Spacious Oaks, Friendly Folks.

Martha's teacup sat on the counter, cold. Her notebook was open, the orange bowl and loupe next to it. Real things. But what about the argument next door? How could it be that the Pritchetts didn't hear that ruckus?

Martha sat on her bed and stared at the framed picture on the wall. Her and her father. Lake Hartwell, 1998. The two of them struggling to hold on to that slimy, wiggling catfish. Laughing, carefree.

Journalists take notes, collect evidence.

Martha went to the counter, got on her knees, and opened the cabinet doors below the sink. Inside, a cracked mop bucket, a dried-out sponge, and farther back, two dusty jars. She took the shorter one, rinsed and dried it. She dumped the fingertip into the jar and screwed the metal lid down tight.

She opened the spiral notebook on the dining table and added two more entries to her log of “Curious Incidents Around Amberleen”:

Thursday, July 18, 8:30
A.M.:
Strange object (severed finger?) discovered in the
hallway of Pritchett House.

Friday, approx. 12:15
A.M.:
Violent domestic argument overheard in room across hall. (Apparently undetected by other residents.) Sound of broken glass.

She would document everything, and tell Vince about all of this during their scheduled phone call on Monday. And from her careful notes, he would understand that her mind was clear and focused. This wasn't like before, when her thoughts went skittering in a hundred directions at once. This was different. She wasn't hallucinating.

She was
sure
she'd heard something going on behind that door.

After a shower and a quick breakfast—microwaved Quaker Oats, half a banana—Martha felt alert and ready to face her first Saturday in Amberleen.

As she stepped through the screen door to the front porch of the Pritchett House, the air was already muggy. Movement registered in the periphery of her vision, and she turned to see Eileen Pritchett's straw hat, nodding behind the azaleas at the end of the porch. Martha sensed she had somehow gotten off on the wrong foot with the woman, but it wasn't too late to turn that around, was it?

She followed a path of octagonal flagstones around to the corner of the house, past white azaleas attended by honeybees. She stepped around a steel bowl containing a large lump of cat food, coagulating in the morning sun.

“Good morning,” Martha said.

Eileen looked up at her, rubbed a flabby forearm across her forehead. “Can I help you with something?”

“No, everything's fine. I just wanted to…I want to apologize for the other night. I didn't mean to disturb you.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Eileen said. She removed a gardening glove and used the corner of it to wipe sweat from her eye. “We usually stay up to watch Court TV on Wednesdays, anyway.”

Martha glanced at the plastic tray full of peat pots on the ground next to Eileen. “Vegetables, or flowers?”

“Zinnias. I plant some of these every summer.”

“How nice,” Martha said. “My mother had a green thumb. She liked to raise vegetables and herbs.”

“Yeah, been growing these for about ten years now, I reckon. If I treat them just right, they can turn out perfect blooms. I've won more awards than any other grower in the region. Don't know if you saw the certificates in the den?”

“I'll have to take a look.”

“Well, it's the soil that's the secret. Most people grow 'em in pots, but I start 'em right in the natural ground, so they get all the nutrients from the soil out here. Now, if you'll excuse me, I want to get these Miracle-Gro stakes in the ground before the sun gets around this side of the house.”

“Sure. There's just one thing I want to ask you….” Martha's throat tightened.
Should you?

“Yes?” Eileen held her trowel so its silver tip pierced the earth.

“I was wondering, have unusual things happened here? In the past?”

“Unusual?”

“Like accidents, maybe.”

“Accidents?” Eileen squinted at her.

“Maybe someone got hurt. It would probably have been a long time ago. I just wondered if someone may have gotten cut somehow. Or lost a finger, for example.”

Eileen laid the trowel down and stood, grunting, brushing dirt from the front of her apron. “Now, why on earth would a person ask a thing like that?”

Martha felt her stomach knotting. “I'm sorry. I just wondered….”

The woman glared at her, lips drawn. A pair of white suns glinted from her glasses. “What's this all about?”

“Nothing, it was a silly question. I'll let you get back to your work.”

“Is everything all right?” Droplets of perspiration clung to the fine hairs above Eileen's lip, like dew.

“Yes. Quite all right. I'm just going to the library today.”

“We don't want no problems.”

Martha turned and moved back across the flagstones, feeling dizzy. “Of course not.”

“This is a quiet, clean place, you know.” She heard Eileen calling after her. “We don't want no kind of trouble here.”

The path Martha followed into town shadowed the waterfront for a quarter mile, giving a far-reaching view of the wide river. As she rounded the corner that provided a first look of the bay and the marshland beyond, she saw that the landscape had changed since just three days ago. A cracked and weedy parking lot next to the waterfront park, previously vacant, was now full of activity—there were flatbed trucks loaded with heavy equipment, backhoes, bulldozers, chippers, pickup trucks. Workers in construction helmets milled about and there was a portable building at the end hung with a sign that said
HOSHIMA CORPORATION
. It looked like a staging area for a military offensive. A vision came to Martha—huge oak trees toppling, trunks splintering, ancient roots heaving into the air, rustic cabins collapsing under the tread of bulldozers—

She blinked and shuddered, then turned left onto Gaspard Road and quickened her pace, leaving the construction lot behind. A few blocks later, she reached a pockmarked cannon that marked the entrance of the Amberleen Public Library.

The interior was deserted, a hushed refuge from the July heat. She went to the front counter and filled out a form to get a library card and a pass code for the library computers.

She sat in front of one of the monitors and leaned her satchel next to the chair. The room was silent except for the faint hum of the air system and the soft
clop
of a library staffer reshelving books.

She pulled out the sheet of beige letterhead Lydia gave her on Wednesday and logged into the computer, and performed a search for the company name.
Heron Group
, she typed, exactly as it appeared on the letterhead.

After clicking past dozens of pages related to blue herons or people with the last name Heron, she reached the end of the search results. No investment group. She tried
Heron
and
Fort Lauderdale
. Still no luck. If they had a website, she thought, it certainly had a low profile.

She tried another tack, making a guess at the URL and typing it directly into the address bar.
www.herongroup.com
drew a broken link. Then she typed
www.heroninvestments.com
.

A beige page loaded with a simple banner and the words “Heron Investment Group” rendered in the same serif font as the letterhead, and below that a slogan:
Generating and Managing Wealth.
At the left was a line drawing of the bird that matched the image on the stationery.

Below the heading, blinking text read “Under Construction,” followed by a yellow icon of a construction worker holding a shovel. No contact info, no links. Martha clicked around the screen, but nothing happened.

She frowned and sent a copy of the page to the printer. Next she opened her reporter's notebook to the list of commissioners' names. Thanks to her research at the courthouse, she now had their full names, including middle names, except for one:

Wallace Elliot Bowden

Virgil Roland Culpepper

Eunice C. Shelby (maiden name: Wilson)

Larry Nathan Birch

James Harold Oglesby

She started down the list methodically, searching for connections to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. After a few hours of fruitless Web surfing, her concentration began to flag, her insomnia catching up. Still, she had a nagging sense that she had stumbled onto
something—
a connection she couldn't quite put her finger on. She took her stack of printouts to the front desk, paid the clerk, and got a receipt for later reimbursement from Lydia. She also checked out three books—a collection of essays by Joan Didion, a novel by T. C. Boyle, and a book called
The Lure and Lore of Georgia's Golden Isles.

Walking out across the front lawn of the library, Martha contemplated the remains of the day. It was her first weekend day alone since the illness. Independence Day. Hours to fill any way she pleased, but no money to spend.

She paused at the waterfront, took a seat on a shady bench, and watched a shrimp trawler navigate along the channel. Vince was gone, and so was Lenny. Perversely, she missed him, too—his rasping voice had been her constant companion through the months of the illness, always ready to reinforce her most paranoid thoughts. Now that Lenny was muzzled, the resulting silence felt like an ache.

She considered giving Vince a call from a pay phone, just to touch base. He'd given her his cell number and permission to do so any time. But she would have to tell him about the strange events of the past few days, wouldn't she? Martha reached into her satchel and pulled out the good fortune box, her parting gift from Vince. She ran her fingers along its silken surface.

In the shady lot adjacent to where she sat, a white van was parking. A man in a custodial uniform got out and began unloading cleaning supplies—rag mops, buckets, a jug of ammonia.
Ammonia.

Martha closed her eyes.

They told her it was five hours before anyone found her that day. Hours spent in the dark of the utility closet, inhaling chemical fumes, feeling the brush of imaginary vermin against her ankles. How she must have looked when the custodian finally swung open the closet door to find her there, huddled into the corner among the brooms and string mops. It was at least another hour before the orderlies came and dragged her out, screaming, fighting, flailing. The memory of it scalded her with shame.

Never again.

Martha put the pill-minder back in her satchel. Before calling Vince, she would investigate. She would gather proof that she was not hallucinating. She would deal with things independently, using the techniques he had taught her. He had confidence in her, and she'd prove that he was right.

Martha extended her walk, hoping to prep her body for sleep before returning to her room. Once there, she spent two hours poring over her notes and photocopies. But the flash she'd had at the library seemed elusive. By ten o'clock, she was exhausted. She put everything away, turned out the light, and lay down.
Please, just one good night's sleep.

It didn't come. She lay in bed, listening to the night sounds, her mind revolving like a washing machine full of laundry. Hours passed. Finally, she got out of bed, slipped on her kimono, went to the microwave, put in a cold cup of chamomile, and punched the timer. While the microwave ran, she toyed idly with the magnetic words stuck to the side of her cube refrigerator, a present Aunt Lucia had given her for her eighteenth birthday. She slid the words around to form an absurd little sentence:
Secrete our obsequious zeal
.

The flash came again.
The names.

Martha rushed to her notes and flipped to the page where the commissioners were listed. She removed a pair of scissors from the coffee mug on her desk, cut out each name, and arranged them on the table. She stared at the list, her heart racing.
Yes, that's it.

Then there was a thud, a sound of struggle from across the hall. “That won't do,” a male voice growled. A woman's voice responded by keening, pleading.

There was a sound of broken glass, followed by racking sobs. She looked at her watch: 12:14
A.M.
So much noise. Please, let someone else hear it this time.
She heard the voices again—barely controlled, molten rage.

“It won't do…Abigail…whose is it? It won't live…so help me, God,
I'll kill it.
”

The venom in the words jolted Martha, as if someone had jabbed her with an icicle.

“It's yours, Clyde, I swear it I swear it I swear to God….”

Martha heard a door open in the hall. She put an ear to her door and listened. A crashing, a pounding of footsteps, first along the corridor, then down the stairway, then receding. She went to the window and saw a shape trotting across the yard, running, dress billowing in the moonlight. The shape—the woman, Martha surmised—ran past the oak tree, toward the cement rectangle at the far end of the yard.

She tightened the sash on her kimono and went to her door, unlocked it, and peered out. The hallway was completely dark, not even the glow of the television from beneath the Pritchetts' door. Silence.

Test your reality.

Martha let her eyes adjust, then went down the hall and descended the darkened stairway. The house was still and quiet. At the bottom, she could see the foyer bathed in moonlight that shone through leaded glass above the front door. She unlocked the door, opened it. The night air was warm and damp, the crickets pulsing with metronome regularity.

Martha scanned the moonlit yard. No sign of the woman, but something else was there now, down by the river. The same thing she had observed last night from her bedroom window, only closer now.

The orange lights.

Martha considered going back upstairs for her shoes, but already the will-o'-the-wisp shapes were bobbing, receding.

She stepped into the yard. The grass felt cool and damp under her feet. She walked under the canopy of the big oak tree, shrouded in moon-shadows, and picked her way across the exposed roots, careful to keep the broad trunk between herself and the apparitions.

She could hear someone talking now, men's voices, hushed and urgent, near the shoreline. She could smell the mud and brine of the river. She stopped next to the trunk and peeked around and saw their dark shapes, hunched, moving, working among the reeds that lined the water's edge. Several of them stood in the shallows of the river, while one was waist-deep in the water, holding on to something. A boat? A canoe? She couldn't make it out through the tall grass.

The one standing in the river was bent over, still, and the others, the ones holding the orange lights—
torches
—stepped toward him. She heard splashing, and then she could see only the tips of the flames, lined up in a tight cluster. The cluster moved as a unit, drifting toward the center of the river. The torch flames slid above the edge of the marsh grass, winking behind skeins of grass and trees.

Martha stepped around the wide trunk, keeping her body close to it, trying to catch a better glimpse of the craft. She saw the ripple of water and a last glimmer of orange firelight as it disappeared through the tree branches.

She started to step slowly away from the tree, keeping her eyes focused on the river. The edge of her foot caught on one of the oak's gnarled roots and she stumbled sideways, planting her other foot behind to regain balance. Then she felt a dripping wetness on her shoulder. Something brushed the back of her head.