The Man in the Woods (13 page)

“Shush!” said Helen. “We’re on a crowded bus. In the historic district!”

“I
won’t
shush,” said Pinky. “You’re worse than most females. Boy! You’ll give a man a hard time someday, Miss Brillo-head!”

“Don’t you ever call me that again, Pinky Levy!” she snapped, biting off the end of every word.

“I’ll say what I like.”

“You apologize for that.”

“I’m staying on the bus,” said Pinky loftily. “You can go see them yourself, Miss Shiny Shoes.”

Helen stood up and grabbed hold of a strap. As she did, she heard a familiar voice.

“Ellen! There you are. What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you down at the
Whaler
in a week!”

Helen ground her teeth. Filled with guilt, she faced Barry, who’d been sitting behind them all the time listening to every word of their conversation and hearing Pinky call her Miss Brillo-head. “I’m researching a history paper for Mr. Bro,” she said weakly.

“Where are the Hummel drawings?” asked Barry.

“Not finished,” said Helen. “I’ve been working on them all week.”

“When do you expect to finish them?” Barry asked.

“Very soon!” said Helen. She hadn’t looked at them for days. Worst of all Aunt Stella had not been able to replace the chipped Hummel figurine yet. There were no more like it at Perry and Crowe. Aunt Stella had promised to drive to a store in Fall River to buy one.

“All right,” said Barry. “But don’t forget. Bring the figurine back when you finish the drawings.” Barry collected his books and swung himself down the steps of the bus. “Don’t forget!” he called out to her again. The bus lurched onward.

Pinky was grinning at her. “Aunt Stella get a new statue for you yet?” he asked.

“You know perfectly well she didn’t, Pinky Levy. I told you.”

“Come on,” said Pinky. “We’ve got better things to do than worry about that. This looks like the right stop.”

Helen banged the brass door knocker at the Fairchild house loudly but an eternity seemed to pass before the door was answered. Then Elizabeth Fairchild, her hair in a shining silver wave, was looking down at them with cold lapis lazuli eyes over a nose like a hatchet. She measured Pinky and Helen with some internal yardstick and asked them why it was they wanted to speak to Mr. Roche.

“It’s for a school assignment,” Helen answered brightly, dredging up the safe and familiar reason. Adults never argued with school assignments for fear of obstructing education. “New Bedford history,” Helen added.

“Mr. Roche is resting. He is not well,” said Mrs. Fairchild in a final sort of voice. She obviously did not care a fig for education.

“Lizzy!” yelled a scratchy voice from somewhere inside the house. “Lizzy? Who is it?”

Mrs. Fairchild turned. “It’s no one, Asa!” she shouted back. Then she stared severely at Helen’s plaintive face and at Pinky’s sneaker laces. “A few minutes only, then,” she said. “He tires easily.”

Mrs. Fairchild led them to an upstairs sitting room. Asa Roche looked extremely well to Pinky and Helen.

“Let’s have some tea, Lizzy,” he suggested when they had sat down on a hard sofa and Mrs. Fairchild had placed herself near the doorway like a sentinel. Reluctantly she agreed to tea.

“That’ll take her some time,” cackled Asa Roche with a grin. “Minute I heard the door knocker, I hid the tea.” He ambled over to the mantelpiece and removed one of the two Staffordshire spaniels that sat on either side of a Staffordshire clock. He smiled at the sound of distant cupboards being opened and slammed shut in the search for tea. He screwed off the head of the spaniel, drank deeply from it, and put it back. “I like young people,” he said with a contented sigh. Then he added, “The doctor keeps my bottle filled for me. It’s just vodka. She can’t smell it. The reason she’s such a crotchety old hoddy-doddy is she thinks I’m going to cut her out of my will,” said Asa with another impossible cackle.

“Asa!” Mrs. Fairchild’s angry voice floated upstairs from the kitchen. “Asa! Where did you put the tea?”

“In with the ice cubes, dear,” Asa Roche bellowed back. In his softly crinkled pink face was the wickedness of a puppy who had swallowed a stick of butter. “Lizzy’s got a surprise coming when I snuff out,” he went on. “I didn’t make a will.”

“Oh?” asked Helen politely.

“Nope! Nope! No will at all. Course she’ll get my money all the same from the state of Massachusetts since she’s my only living relative. I don’t want the old fossil to starve. All her husband’s family have died out. On the other hand, I do want the last laugh, that’s all. For years she’s been feeding me boiled beef and carrots with a puddle of water in the plate and depriving me of my one comfort.” He looked at the trick bottle on the mantel. “Now, what can I do for you folks?”

Helen glanced at Pinky and then back at Mr. Roche. “We came just on the chance that you might remember something from long, long ago,” she explained. “It goes back to Civil War times. A typewriter, or a writing machine, as it was called back then. It was made over in Worcester by a man named Thurber.”

“I’m not
that
old,” said Asa Roche.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Roche. I didn’t mean that. I just thought maybe your parents or grandparents might have told you about it.”

Asa Roche yanked on his earlobe and shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “Can’t say I ever heard of such a thing.”

Despite herself, Helen began to cry. It was hopeless.

Asa Roche frowned at her in alarm. “I’m so sorry I can’t help you,” he said. “Here, let me get you a handkerchief.”

“It’s all right,” said Helen. “It was just I was so hoping that ...

“I heard you tell Lizzy it was for a school paper. It must be a pretty important school paper to get you crying. Here!” he said kindly. “I’ll show you another trick. Look at this.” Asa Roche shuffled over to a desk that stood in the corner. It was an enormous mahogany secretary. The feet were gigantic lions’ paws, and snaking vines with bunches of grapes ran up the sides and inexplicably turned into lions’ heads at all four top corners. The lions’ mouths were open, lips curled in fearful wooden snarls. Beneath shaggy wooden brows the lions’ eyes were green glass.

Asa Roche pushed the left eye of the left rear lion. Immediately a whirring and popping sound began, and out of the lion’s head rose a small wooden box, beautifully shaped with a tiny brass door in it.

Pinky was entranced. Asa grinned at him. “The desk belonged to an old geezer called Lorenzo Fairchild,” he explained. He opened the little door. Out spilled about thirty buttons. He picked them up and put them back. Then he turned to Helen, who did not look a bit cheered up by the desk with the secret compartment. “Take one,” he said and handed a button to Helen. “It’s solid gold,” he added. “Don’t tell Lizzy, though. She’ll put me on bread and water for two weeks!”

“Thank you, Mr. Roche,” said Helen. She slipped the button into her purse. Asa Roche was so kind. At least she would have something to string on the empty chain that had held her locket.

“Yup,” Asa went on. “Solid gold. Came off old Lorenzo’s uniform. See him up there?” He pointed to a dark photograph of a portly, middle-aged man in a Civil War uniform. “Lorenzo was friends with Lincoln himself,” Asa went on. “Grandfather of my sister Lizzy’s husband, John Fairchild. Lincoln made him a general. If you ask me, he didn’t deserve it. He never spent a day in danger. If you ask me, he was a war profiteer. That’s all.”

“What’s that?” asked Pinky.

Asa Roche’s face was wreathed in smiles. “Lorenzo Fairchild found more ways to make money than six Rockefellers,” he answered. “Nobody like him before or since. Made a mint importing arms and munitions from Great Britain during the Civil War. He was in whaling first, of course. Then, when they discovered oil in Pennsylvania, why, he went and invented a way to refine Pennsylvania crude oil here in New Bedford before they found out how to do it in Pennsylvania. He was some fellow, believe me. Died many years before my time. Strong as an ox, smart as a whip, mean as a snake. Lorenzo was the first man in town to install indoor plumbing and gas lamps. He even had a private railway line run up to his house. Lorenzo Fairchild was the first man in New Bedford to wear long trousers ’stead of breeches. Did you know that?”

“No,” said Helen. “I didn’t.” Pinky was trying out the secret drawer and all the other lions’ eyes to see if anything else happened.

“You know, it’s funny,” said Asa. “A typewriter would have been a very newfangled item back then, wouldn’t it? I’d make a bet that if anybody in this town had a machine like that in those days, it would have been Lorenzo. He had every gadget and contrivance to come along. He or his poor benighted daughter, Lucy. She was just like him in that respect.”

“What happened to Lucy?” asked Pinky.

Asa shuffled over to the door and listened. “Thought she was on her way,” he said. “Lucy?” He laughed saucily. “Lucy was her dad’s favorite. She was a caution, so they say. A card. Dressed up like a boy. Once she went on one of his whaling ships, and the captain didn’t know till they’d rounded Cape Horn that he had a girl on board. My mother told me that story. Lucy threw harpoons with the best of them, she said.”

“But what happened to her?” asked Pinky.

There was a tinkling sound from the kitchen. Asa heard it. “Vanished,” he said. “Nobody ever knew. She was forgotten. Lorenzo had gotten himself elected mayor of New Bedford by that time. He erased every memory of his own flesh and blood. Every trace of her. There’s no record of her anywhere.”

“Why?” asked Helen.

Asa Roche shrugged. “Nobody knows,” he said. “Lorenzo tried to get the house he’d given her as a wedding present condemned as a public pestilence. Town wouldn’t go that far, of course, even if he was mayor, so he got a couple of convicts from the jail to burn it down one night. No one knows where the house—” Here there was a great clanking and squeaking. Mrs. Fairchild entered the room with a silver tea service that looked as if it weighed over seventy pounds. Helen and Pinky jumped up to help her but were stopped by a withering glance, and Mrs. Fairchild placed the heavy tray on the table as if it were as light as tin.

Elizabeth Fairchild had reached out a strong left arm to pour when Helen remarked earnestly, “What a wonderful thing to talk with your brother, Mrs. Fairchild. He was just telling us the story of Lucy Fairchild. She sounds like such a colorful ancestor.” The arm holding the teapot stopped in midair and then put it abruptly back on the tray. “Time for your medicine, Asa!” she announced. “Come, children!”

Helen and Pinky found themselves very quickly in the hallway and following Mrs. Fairchild’s starchy back down the echoing stairs. Asa could still be heard through the thick door to his room. “I told ’em, Lizzy!” he shrieked. “Dizzy Lizzy, kids! That’s what they called her when she was young!”

Helen expected more bile from Elizabeth Fairchild. Instead, in the foyer she addressed them with something closer to throaty kindness in her tone. Piously she clasped her hands in front of her and fluttered her head, as if she were bothered by a fly. “I apologize, children,” she said, “for my brother. As you can see, I had good reason not to want you to see him. His mind wanders dreadfully now, and he makes up things out of whole cloth. May I ask the subject of your history paper?”

“Oh, yes,” said Helen. “We really only wanted to ask him about a typewriter. A very old one.”

“A
typewriter
?” Elizabeth Fairchild sounded both relieved and astonished.

“Yes,” said Helen. “Mr. Roche told us that if anybody were to have such a thing back in Civil War times, it would have been Lorenzo Fairchild.”

“Well,” answered Mrs. Fairchild grudgingly, “he’s right there, of course. Lorenzo Fairchild was quite an inventor and an entrepreneur. He made the family fortune with his enterprising ideas.”

“Have you ever seen or heard of a typewriter being used back then?” Pinky asked.

Mrs. Fairchild studied the far end of the living room for a moment. She wasn’t bothered by this question, at least, Helen decided. Finally she shook her head decisively. “No. I very much doubt it, unless one of his companies had one. Lorenzo wrote a beautiful hand. He kept many diaries. They are all over at the Fairchild mansion down the street if you wish to see them.”

Helen cleared her throat.

“Mrs. Fairchild,” said Helen, “we must find this typewriter. Some nut, some maniac, is using it and he’s threatening me. Mr. Roche said that perhaps Lorenzo’s daughter, Lucy—”

But Mrs. Fairchild cut her off, this time with fire in her icy voice. “I thought you said this was for a school paper,” she said.

“Well, I did, but the real reason—”

“I don’t like people who change their stories in mid-stream,” snapped Mrs. Fairchild. “If somebody is threatening you, go to the police.” This settled, her tone turned patronizing.

“My brother, Asa, is a very old man, child. His memory is seriously impaired at times. He puts the tea in the freezer and the ice in the cupboards. He cannot find the daily newspaper when it is lying in his lap.” She paused for a sharp breath. “There were four Fairchild sisters,” she said, “as Asa well knows—Clara, Constance, Blanche, and Virginia. If you care to go to the Fairchild mansion, you will find all of their papers and a complete collection of family records and photographs. This Lucy is a figment of Asa’s imagination.” And quite primly and as if Helen had suggested Jesus Christ had a twin sister, she added, “No such person ever existed.”

The day had turned cold when Pinky and Helen left the house and began their long walk down Orchard Street to the bus stop. No bus was in sight, but they both hurried to the small, ugly metal-sided shelter on the corner. Helen drew her sweater around herself closely. The shelters were supposed to deflect the winter’s blast and the summer’s baking sun. In reality, of course, they turned into either wind tunnels or ovens, depending on the season.

The side of the bus shelter was solid sheet metal. The only window was low down, at foot level. “Look at the dumb way they design these things,” said Pinky. “Are you supposed to get down on your hands and knees to see if a bus is coming?”

Helen didn’t answer. She had glanced through the bottom window of the bus shelter, and now she reached for Pinky’s sleeve and pulled him back against her before he could go in. Through the window she had seen a pair of legs, bare and crossed at the ankles. On the side of the left sneaker was the word
Nike
in blue. The
e
was missing.