The Man in the Woods Read online

  “You’re tired,” said Pinky tolerantly. “Better knock off before the knife slips again and cuts off one of your enormous boobs.” He caught Helen by both wrists as she dived off the drafting stool at him.

  “I’ll get you, Pinky Levy!” she yelled. The knife dropped and landed, point first, on the linoleum floor.

  “Hey, you’re strong for a girl!” he said, laughing and avoiding a kick from Helen’s sneakered foot. “Think you can beat up Mr. Monster with the shiv?”

  Helen’s arms relaxed as her anger subsided. “I’m sorry, Pinky,” she said. “I keep forgetting. You’re the only one who believes me and who’s helping me.” She sat back down and began remaking one of the masking-tape bandages. From the doorway came a delighted chuckle.

  “Have to report you for unseemly physical contact!” said Mr. Bro. Pinky and Helen laughed with him. “I’ve missed you,” he said to Helen. “You promised to report to me, and I haven’t seen hide or hair of you in a week. Except during class, and then you run like a rabbit the minute the bell rings. And by the way, Miss Curragh,” he added, “I would like to be included among the select few who believe you!”

  Helen yanked the knife out of the floor. The blade broke in half. “I’m afraid there’s nothing left to believe,” she growled, tossing the knife onto the table in disgust. “All paths lead nowhere. I’m fed up with files. Now I have to call Aunt Stella before she thinks I’ve fallen into a black hole in space.”

  When she returned, she found Pinky and Mr. Bro deep in conversation, happy as two boys trading baseball cards. “So!” said Mr. Bro. “You’ve learned quite a lot in your travels this week. Pinky’s filled me in on the Fairchilds and Asa Roche and old Dizzy Lizzy. That the button he gave you?”

  “Yes,” said Helen. “It came off Lorenzo Fairchild’s Civil War uniform. It’s solid gold.” The button hung now against her breastbone on her locket chain. Despite the fact that it had belonged to awful old Lorenzo, she liked the feel of it there—mostly because Asa Roche had given it to her.

  “And you found nothing at the mansion, I take it,” said Mr. Brzostoski. “No Thurbers? No missing sisters?”

  “Nothing,” said Helen. “Zero. And what I’m going to do, Mr. Bro, starting tomorrow, is to sneak my way into every old warehouse and building in this town and find the Thurber by myself. With Pinky,” she added.

  “Take it easy,” said Mr. Bro. “You do that, and I’ll have to call your folks. I can’t let you take such a risk.”

  “Mr. Bro!” said Helen. “Calling my folks and stopping me isn’t going to let me sleep at night. How would you like to be fourteen years old and jump every time you see a shadow or hear someone whistling because you think they’ll pull a knife or an ice pick on you. Don’t you understand—”

  “Wait a minute,” said Mr. Bro. “Just wait a minute. Maybe it’s the end of the line, and I’ll have to go myself to Sergeant Reynolds, but I don’t think he can help us much now. I don’t think the police will do a house-to-house search for this machine. I want you to tell me everything you saw in the Fairchild mansion. I smell a rat in this business about the missing Lucy. Tell me.”

  Helen did.

  “Photographs,” said Mr. Bro. “That many and some taken outdoors? In boats? On lawns?”

  “Yes,” said Helen wearily. “And nothing in them but a bunch of people dead for more than a hundred years.”

  “It’s very unusual,” Mr. Bro went on. “People had portraits taken in those days, sure. Lots of them. But outdoor shots? As far as I know, only Matthew Brady, the great Civil War photographer, was taking action shots or outdoor shots. That means Lorenzo was very much a lover of inventions and gadgets. Privately owned cameras were as rare as typewriters in those days. Wait a minute! Did you say that button on your chain is solid gold?”

  “Yes,” said Helen. She slipped it over her head. “My dad says it’s gold. He bit into it. It says Third Light Horse on it and something else worn off. I haven’t really looked closely.”

  Mr. Bro bit into the button as well and nodded. He held it under the light. “The only solid gold buttons ever made for any American uniform were for southern officers,” he said, “at the beginning of the Civil War.”

  “Southern?” asked Pinky. “Asa said it came off Lorenzo’s Union uniform.”

  Mr. Bro shook his head. “Confederate officers had their uniforms tailored by hand, like their suits,” he explained. “Northern officers, even generals and admirals, had their uniforms issued by the government in Washington, and believe me, the government never issued solid gold buttons. Third Light Horse,” he read off the button. “That would have been a mounted infantry unit. Not the sort of thing for your Lorenzo Fairchild. Now, what is this worn-off word? Starts with a V.” He brought a pair of glasses out from his pocket and stared at it. “Valdosta,” he said after turning the button around many times. “Valdosta Third Light Horse. Valdosta is in Georgia.”

  The silence in the drafting room was neither comfortable or uncomfortable but was charged with electricity as pungent as the smell of the furnace down the hall.

  “Could it have been Lucy’s husband’s button?” said Helen at last. “Could he have been a Southerner? The other sisters never got married until the war was over. But Lucy—if Asa Roche isn’t making her up—was married. He said her father gave her a house for a wedding present.”

  “Go back and talk to Asa Roche,” Mr. Bro said, “and ask him—”

  “But Mr. Bro,” said Helen, “you don’t understand. Mrs. Fairchild will never let us talk to him if she thinks we want to know about Lucy. She was angry. She said Lucy never existed.”

  “Be reasonable with her. Tell her why you need to find the Thurber. These Yankee blue bloods are law-abiding community-minded types. She’ll help you if—”

  Pinky interrupted this time. “She’ll send us right back to the cops,” he snorted. “She hates us. She talked to us as if we just crawled out from under the sink.”

  “Then go back to the Fairchild mansion,” said Mr. Bro softly. “Don’t look for Lucy. They’ve hidden her carefully. Don’t look for the Thurber again because that’s hidden with her. Look for other people who were alive in her time. Try to find the name of a family doctor. You may find his papers in another place. Lorenzo may have used a doctor to try and get Lucy’s house quarantined before he burned it.”

  “That’s easy,” said Helen. “There’s heaps of letters from the other Fairchild sisters. They sent medical supplies down South during the Civil War because the southerners had no supplies at all. Kind of a good will charity called the Bedford Ladies’ Aide Society. They had several letters to a doctor…. I forget his name.”

  “Find him,” said Mr. Bro. “On a hunch I’m going to write to the Valdosta, Georgia, historical society and ask if they have something on an officer who was connected with a Yankee family called Fairchild. You find the doctor, and maybe through him we’ll find Lucy’s house, because I’m betting that’s where your guy with the ice pick and the Thurber is.”

  Helen looked slantwise at Pinky, and then at Mr. Bro. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “This Fairchild family was so big, so well known and important … Lorenzo knew Abraham Lincoln personally. There are letters from Lincoln to Lorenzo in glass cases in the mansion. A family like that, so famous, couldn’t just make a daughter disappear with no trace or birth certificate or record of any kind.”

  Mr. Bro leaned back and laughed. “You ever hear of Prince Albert?” he asked. “Duke of Clarence, grandson of Queen Victoria of England? He was next in line to become king one day, and if he had been king, he would have wrecked the Royal Family and the British Empire and scandalized the whole world. Look it up in the library someday.”

  “What happened to him?” asked Pinky.

  “They got rid of him,” said Mr. Bro. “Of course no one outside the family knew at the time. There was only one person who did.”

  “Who?” asked Helen.

  “The doctor,” Mr. Bro answered.


  “Eat your peas, Helen,” said Aunt Stella. “They’re full of vitamins.”

  Helen pushed the peas around on her plate. Her father had not eaten one pea. All the vitamins are cooked out anyway, she thought, but she didn’t say this, as Aunt Stella always tried so hard. She did say, “I take vitamins every morning.”

  “Peas have natural vitamins,” countered Aunt Stella. “They absorb into the system instantly.”

  Helen stared glumly at the gray peas. “Daddy hasn’t eaten one,” she said.

  “Your father would add years to his life if he would change certain of his habits,” trilled Aunt Stella, “but I’m not in charge of your father. You are my responsibility!” She took a dignified forkful of the peas and ate them with a benign smile.

  “Daddy,” said Helen, “could you save me a trip to the library?”

  “Glad to if I can,” said her father, pouring beer into his glass and catching Aunt Stella’s disapproving eye. “You’ve been spending so much time in libraries and preservation societies lately, I’ve hardly seen you for half a minute.”

  “How’s your history paper, dear?” asked Aunt Stella brightly.

  “Fine, Aunt Stella,” Helen answered. “But it’s not just a history paper. I’ve decided to do a new story for the Whaler’s contest.” While Aunt Stella’s attention had been glued on her father’s beer glass, Helen had managed to get most of the peas on her plate into the napkin on her lap. Her father had seen this but had said nothing as he hated vegetables. “I wanted to ask you something about the British Royal Family,” she began.

  Her father grunted and uttered a mild swear word, as he always did when anything British was mentioned.

  “Don’t let the peat bog show through your toes, Paddy,” said Aunt Stella, as she always did when she defended the English against the Irish. Aunt Stella was a great fan of the Royal Family. She kept a scrapbook on Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding, and on the mantel were two little mugs commemorating the birth of the new Prince William. She would not allow Helen’s father to touch them, although he had brushed uncomfortably close a couple of times.

  “Will you please not argue?” Helen asked.

  “An argument is an Irishman’s meat and potatoes,” said her father, winking wickedly at Aunt Stella.

  “For lack of anything else to eat in that Godforsaken country,” Aunt Stella shot right back.

  “Daddy,” interrupted Helen, “what happened to Queen Victoria’s oldest grandson?”

  “Ho ho!” said her father, and his face turned serious under his beetling brows. “He would have been the king,” he whispered conspiratorially, “but they bumped him off!”

  Her father gazed happily at the chandelier above the dining room table. “He was a mental basket case, you might put it,” he went on, “with the smile of a fool and eyes as light as a tiger’s. Prince Albert was his name, and when the queen was very old and near to dying, and his father, Edward, was also old and very sick, for all they knew Albert was going to be the king of England someday fairly soon. His family knew he couldn’t read or write more than a child. He also had terrible habits, which I’ll tell you about when you’re older. The family believed he was sick with a disease that he’d pass down to all his descendants. They knew that having a crazy sick man on the throne of England would ruin the Royal Family forever and destroy the British Empire. Albert had a very nice, sane younger brother. They wanted that younger brother, George, to be king and to carry on the line, but of course Albert, who was older, stood in George’s way, and as the only thing that could keep Albert from being crowned king of England was death, they rubbed him out, very quietly. No one knows exactly how it was done, but they think the doctors doped him to death on the sly. After he died, there was a big funeral with everyone tearing their hair out and then a big wedding, where George married the girl Albert had been engaged to, and everyone was happy. They became King George V and Queen Mary, and now we have commemorative jugs on the mantelpiece and a nice comfortable family on the throne of England, headed by a woman who wears a babushka when she rides horseback with the President of the United States.”

  “Don’t criticize the queen,” said Aunt Stella fiercely. “And I don’t know where you get all this palaver about murdering their own flesh and blood.”

  “A convenient accident,” said Helen’s father with a grin as he took out a cigar. “A little too convenient. They paid off every doctor and servant and nurse who had any knowledge of it.”

  Aunt Stella had removed herself to the living room, away from the cigar, but she yelled back, “Just like your Ted Kennedy and the girl he did in!”

  “Lay off Ted Kennedy,” said Helen’s father. “He’s the only hope this country has!”

  “He can explain till he’s blue in the face but it won’t bring back that family’s beautiful daughter,” answered Aunt Stella.

  “Please!” said Helen. “Don’t have another Ted Kennedy fight.”

  “Okay,” said her father. “Now, tell me why you’re writing a paper on Prince Albert of England when you’re taking American history.”

  “It isn’t on Prince Albert,” said Helen. “It’s on another cover-up, a hundred and twenty years ago, here in New Bedford. I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Lorenzo Fairchild,” Helen began, but her father interrupted.

  “That old slave-driving robber baron,” he said. “Importing innocent children and girls from Ireland and working them to death in his mills. The little ones were forced to work twelve hours a day for twenty cents. Half of them lost their fingers in his bloody Slater machines. Half of them died.”

  “The Fairchilds were one of New Bedford’s finest families!” said Aunt Stella from the living room.

  “Dad,” said Helen, paying no attention to Aunt Stella, “if I can find out that Lorenzo Fairchild somehow either killed or got rid of his youngest daughter, Lucy, if I can get to the bottom of this, I’ll win a gold medal for the Whaler’s best story of the year. No freshman’s ever won it. But I will!”

  For a moment Helen wanted to tell him everything. How she never wanted to walk alone anymore. How she avoided all places with only one exit. How she peered into the bushes from her bedroom window every night looking for someone moving, looking for the glint of a knife. If she told him she was really after the Thurber machine, he would first be angry that she’d broken her promise not to cause trouble. Then tears would come to the rims of his eyes, and he would hold her close and reassure her with all the words and reasons he could find, and they would not do a particle of good. So Helen swallowed hard what was in her heart, keeping it in, keeping it down, and asked him only what was in her mind.

  “Dad,” she said, “if it was such a well-kept paid-off secret about the prince being … bumped off, how come you know about it?”

  “Ah,” said her father and blew five perfect smoke rings into the air, “because there were people who whispered, then and afterward. A servant’s diary here, a doctor’s paper there. Nearly a hundred years later it all came out, and people say the prince might have been Jack the Ripper. You see, babe, no matter how careful someone is, no matter how thorough, there’s always something that leaks out because we are only human creatures, all of us, and the most prudent plotter in the world will still make mistakes.”

  Helen kissed her father and squeezed his hand tightly for a long moment, a little too long. She wondered that he didn’t seem to wonder why. Then she went upstairs to face two pages of algebra equations.

  The numbers and signs all blurred before her eyes. She looked out the window. Staring at her from the branch of a maple tree were the phosphorescent eyes of a cat.

  Mistakes, she thought as she relaxed. She closed her eyes. You out there, with the Thurber and the needle or the ice pick, she whispered to herself. Have you made a mistake yet?

  And Lorenzo, careful, thorough Lorenzo with the precise handwriting, labeling every picture like an accountant. Every picture but one!
/>   “Because,” she said aloud, her eyes closed with the little tintype of Lorenzo and his daughter clearly pictured in her mind, because you couldn’t label it. It was Lucy. And you couldn’t throw it away either because you still loved her too much.

  Under the grainy cinnamon fog the trust and tenderness in Lucy’s eyes, the care and gentleness in Lorenzo’s arm laid across her shoulders were so pure and powerful that they broke out of the settlement of ghosts and into a September evening a hundred and thirty years later.

  Outside the cat in the tree blinked and disappeared as quickly as a magician’s trick coin, as if in fear.

  Chapter 9

  HELEN SAT COMFORTABLY IN one of the Fairchild library’s leather padded chairs. It’s my lucky day, she told herself firmly, for once and at last it’s my lucky day. To begin with, she had passed her algebra test with an A, an amazing happening because she’d hardly studied the night before. The second thing was that Barry de Wolf had finally approved her Hummel drawings, but the lucky thing about that was that he was on the Whaler telephone when he nodded his smiling, serious approval and had not had a chance to ask her for the Hummel statue back. Aunt Stella had still not found a replacement for the chipped one that stood on her desk. After that, Jerry Rosen, with some embarrassment, had asked her for new football booster tag drawings. Apparently the principal had hit the roof at Beverly’s altered faces and had demanded that they be done by one person, the person who’d drawn the bodies in the first place. And then there was Dr. Wilberforce. She had found his name two minutes after she’d opened the Fairchild sisters’ file. She had checked it in several other files. Apparently the Fairchilds only consulted this one doctor. Apparently he was the family doctor.

  She had time on her hands. Aunt Stella was to pick her up wherever she called from at five-thirty. It was only ten of four. She looked at the sweetly smiling sun above the face of the grandfather clock and smiled back. She looked also at the grim painting of Lorenzo and, when the custodian’s back was turned, stuck out her tongue at him.