The Man in the Woods Read online

  “May I see the photographs again, please?” Helen asked.

  “Well of course, miss,” came the answer. “Mrs. Fairchild herself has come by. She asked that you be given every help I can extend.”

  Houses. The photograph collection abounded with houses. One of them had to be Lucy’s. There were ten or eleven different houses pictured. Among them were Elizabeth Fairchild’s own house on Orchard Street and the mansion. The custodian knew them all.

  He brought out a large map of New Bedford drawn up by the town fathers just before the Civil War in 1860. Helen held her breath. Somewhere among the crisscrossing of old roads and farmlands that no longer existed Lucy’s house had to be. But the custodian pointed to every photograph and then to a tiny square or oblong on the map and identified every house that had belonged to a Fairchild. With the exception of the mansion itself and Mrs. Fairchild’s house they had all been replaced by parking lots or urban renewal housing projects, or they had fallen into the sea during landslides and storms. The custodian was not lying. Helen had lived in New Bedford all her life. The streets, the squares, the farmlands where all the other old houses had been no longer existed. Even the coastline of the shore was different.

  The day was beginning to turn unlucky. She could feel that. Still, she had the doctor’s name. She would call Pinky, and he would try to find the doctor’s papers in the Preservation Society while she went to the public library, but the house, the house that was the key to where the Thurber lay, was hidden. The house was not on any map. She looked at three other maps of later dates. It didn’t exist.

  Before she put the photographs away, she looked for the little tintype, the unlabeled one, that she knew was Lucy.

  It was gone.

  “Everything that was in the collection is there still,” said the custodian.

  “But I saw it with my own eyes!” Helen said. “I can describe every detail of it.”

  “I’m sorry, miss. There are so many pictures. You must have made a mistake.”

  “It was the only one that was unmarked.” Helen’s temper began to flare. “It was there Sunday. It was.”

  “No one has been near the photo collection,” said the custodian.

  “That’s a lie!” said Helen. “Elizabeth Fairchild’s been here. She took it, didn’t she?”

  “No, miss. She only came in the parlor. Not the library.”

  Helen stood up. “That is a lie!” she repeated. “A lie. You are hiding Lucy Fairchild. It was her picture.”

  “No such person ever existed,” said the custodian sadly.

  “All right,” said Helen, warning herself to shut up, “but I’ll tell you something, and you can tell Mrs. Fairchild. I’m going to find Lucy. I’m going to find what Lorenzo did to her, and I’m going to write it up in the school paper, and the following week it’ll be in the Post-Dispatch. I’m going to expose every lousy thing Lorenzo Fairchild did, including torturing innocent little Irish children who came over to work his mills and lost their fingers in the machinery!”

  Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! she told herself. She didn’t dare ask the custodian if she could use the telephone, and now she’d have to find another—heaven knows where.

  Out on Orchard Street there were no telephone booths. Nor on Hancock Street, as if the presence of a phone booth in the historic district might attract the riffraff. Helen walked twelve blocks in the now chilling and swirling wind until she came to Dock Street. There she found a telephone booth. It was filled with dirty paper cups and newspaper, but at least the phone worked.

  She dropped in a dime and waited patiently for the telephone down the hall from the Whaler pressroom to be picked up. Pinky would probably be alone. It would take ten rings before he ran up the stairway and answered it.

  She watched the legs of a man who was lying half on the pavement and half under the jacked-up rear end of a car.

  The man pulled himself out from under the car. He banged his wrench against the pavement. A nut, stuck in the wrench’s claw, would not come loose. He reached into a toolbox and began working at the nut with a long pointed awl. A breathless Pinky answered the telephone. Helen kept her eyes on the man. He had now sauntered up to the telephone booth and was leaning against its side with his full weight on his arms. The awl was in his right hand. He wore a navy blue ski mask that hid all his face but the eyes, and they were covered by a pair of yellow-tinted welder’s goggles. He began to whistle.

  “Pinky, I have the doctor’s name,” she said, trying to keep the trembling out of her voice. It would do no good to worry Pinky. He was too far away to help. On the other hand …

  “Great,” said Pinky. “Spell it.”

  “W-i-l-b-e-r-f-o-r-c-e,” said Helen. The man outside was impatient. She could see nothing of his face behind the mask. He gestured with his awl for her to hurry. The awl was a steel spike with a wooden handle. His teeth when he grinned were large and as yellow as his welder’s goggles.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Pinky. “Your voice doesn’t sound right.”

  “Pinky,” said Helen as quietly as she could, “I’m in a phone booth. Corner of Dock and”—she looked up between the swaying telephone wires—“Wharf. Get a police car here as quick as you can.”

  Pinky hung up the phone. Helen pretended to keep talking. She prayed the man outside hadn’t heard her, as she could not hear his whistling from behind the thick glass of the telephone booth door. The wind howled around the street corner. Dock Street, lined with old tenement buildings, was entirely empty. No child came out with a yo-yo. No woman walked a dog. The man was staring at her. He kept whistling. Once he tapped on the door with the awl. The door of the telephone booth opened inward. If he wanted to, he could push it in with his enormous strength. She would not be able to hold him back.

  She jabbered into the empty telephone line for five minutes. He hung, shifting his weight from foot to foot, like a gorilla waiting to be fed.

  The squad car pulled up with a screech. Helen put back the phone and ran to it.

  “Thank you,” she heard the man say sarcastically, and as he dialed his number, she heard the whistling, for he did not bother to close the door. He whistled nasally, off-key, the shrill commercial jingle for Narragansett beer.

  “What’s the trouble?” asked the policeman.

  Too stunned and shaking to answer, Helen leaned against the open window on the passenger side of the police car. “I couldn’t … couldn’t get the phone booth door open. I was trapped. The door stuck,” she lied.

  “Uh,” said the policeman, “why didn’t you ask him to help you?”

  “He … he looked so scary,” said Helen.

  “I suppose so,” said the policeman. “With the ski mask. He always wears it when he’s under a car. Keeps the oil drips off his face. He’s just a pussycat, though. Off-duty cop. Moonlights as a mechanic. Name’s Sandy Reynolds.”

  The policeman offered to have Pinky, who was waiting at the public phone at school, called and reassured via the dispatcher. He then volunteered to drive Helen across town and drop her at the public library, as it was on his way. Slowly, as they drove, she stopped shaking and the color came back into her cheeks.

  “Say,” said the policeman, “weren’t you that girl who was out on the hill after the rock thrower?”

  Helen nodded.

  “I’d say you have a bad case of nerves,” he observed.

  Helen nodded again.

  “You shouldn’t worry,” said the policeman kindly. “Stubby Atlas is in the maximum security facility in Pittsfield. That’s two hundred miles away. He won’t bother you or anyone else for ten years.”

  “Did you ever find the little red book?” asked Helen.

  The policeman shook his head. “We weren’t that lucky,” he answered.

  “Did you ever find out the real reason why Stubby was throwing those rocks at the trucks?” asked Helen.

  The policeman looked at her curiously. “He was a loony,” he said. “A medically certified one hundre
d percent criminal. Some of them are born that way, you know. It’s in the blood. In the genes.”

  The public library had all sorts of files on New Bedford history but Helen found no doctor’s records of any kind dating before the First World War.

  Pinky called right in the middle of dinner, to Aunt Stella’s annoyance. The Preservation Society had nothing on doctors at all.

  After dinner Helen summoned all her will. She hated, more than anything in the world, calling strangers on the telephone, but she called every Wilberforce in New Bedford. There were five. None of them had lived there for more than fifty years. None had had an ancestor who was a doctor.

  Helen took a bath. She made it hot and poured half of Aunt Stella’s French bath-oil beads into it. One by one she popped open the brightly colored gelatinous beads. They were like small oil-filled eggs. She kept the water running hard to cover the sound of her crying. She cried for the stolen picture of Lucy, for the unfindable doctor, for her own terror in the telephone booth, for the hours spent searching, all for nothing. There was no Thurber. There was no Lucy’s house. The maps showed nothing, and if Lorenzo, as mayor, had had the maps redrawn to hide the house, he’d done well. He’d made only one mistake in not labeling the little picture, and that mistake was too long ago and it was not enough.

  All of this went through Helen’s mind. All the pieces that did not quite fit, like dappled bits of separate jigsaw puzzles. Then she let everything fall from her mind and cried still harder into her washcloth. This time it was not out of terror that someone was after her with a weapon. This time it was because ever since she’d been little, she’d been raised to be intelligent, to follow things through and not drop them in the middle, to use her eyes and ears and good brain and good heart, and she had failed. Was everything in the real world a lie or a trick?

  Aunt Stella knocked on the door timidly. “Aren’t you using a lot of water?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” said Helen. She shut off the tap.

  “May I come in?” asked Aunt Stella. “I have something for you.”

  “Yes,” said Helen. She wiped her face with the washcloth and wiggled her big toe around inside the faucet.

  “You’ve been crying,” said Aunt Stella, sitting on the edge of the tub. “Is it your gold medal article on the Fairchilds?”

  Helen nodded.

  “We must never count our chickens before they hatch,” Aunt Stella stated. “But don’t worry, dear. This will cheer you up. Here’s a letter for you from Jenny down in Texas. And another thing. I found a little Hummel boy just like the one you broke.”

  Helen dried her hands and opened the letter. Aunt Stella opened the cardboard box. The Hummel figurine was identical to the chipped one, except the little boy held a shepherd’s crook instead of a staff in his hand. “Thank you, Aunt Stella,” said Helen. She did feel slightly cheered. She’d run into Barry in the library that afternoon, and he had asked her for the statue again. Otherwise she’d have to pay for it. She’d promised him she would bring it in the next morning, having no idea how she was going to keep the promise. She guessed she’d have to tell him the truth and pay for it with her hair-straightening money.

  Perhaps things were not all as bad as she thought. She put failure out of her mind and looked closely at the two photographs Jenny had sent in the letter. One was of her new house with a swimming pool, and one was of herself on a horse.

  “Cheer up, dear,” said Aunt Stella, holding out a big, soft blue bath towel for her. “You’ll write another paper. Something easier.” She wound up the little Hummel music box. It was in perfect order. It played “Edelweiss,” a song that Helen hated and one that her father had said was a Hitler youth anthem.

  “Isn’t it pretty?” asked Aunt Stella.

  “Aunt Stella!” said Helen. “You know I hate those things!” But she felt better.

  In bed she let her thoughts pile up pleasantly. She began to convince herself that maybe after all she had lost the locket at school. In the Whaler office? In the gym? While she was looking for the janitor? And maybe someone at school did have a grudge against her. A jealous freshman who thought she had gotten more than she deserved with her cushy junior’s job on the Whaler? A jealous junior who’d wanted to do the paste-ups and the Perry and Crowe ads? She had more Perry and Crowe ads to do. Barry had given her a brochure full of Royal Doulton mice and rabbits. They would be easy to draw.

  Time to get back to normal, she told herself. Jenny, down in Texas, was making new friends. She was on the school swimming team, and every day after school she got to ride horseback. Jenny missed her, but not as much as she missed Jenny.

  More than anything else, now that Jenny was gone, Sister Ignatius reminded Helen of normal life. She decided she would pay Sister a visit the following afternoon. She pictured her pouring tea for them both in the spare, elegant common room of the convent. Sister’s great green eyes would flash with secret jokes.

  Sleep began to weigh heavily on Helen’s eyelids. Faintly the image of her mother, eyeless, came to her, and faintly, as well, the image of the gold medal for Lucy’s story. For an instant she pictured Stubby off somewhere in a terrible cell. He deserves to be there, her sensible self announced. Yes, but so does somebody else, a tiny faraway voice answered instantly. Stubby is only half a story. There’s another part to the crime, and I saw just a split second of it.

  Successfully Helen squeezed these thoughts and voices from her mind, because there was no hope of finding the Thurber, Lucy, the house, or the doctor. In place of these thoughts she squarely put Sister Ignatius. Sister would tell Helen all about her silliest students this year. She would say what a thing it would be if they could send their tea tray back to the kitchen on the patients’ old dinner trolley from the days when the Sisters of Mercy Convent had been New Bedford’s first hospital. And she would tell Helen how she’d found all this out by rummaging in the basement through papers and plans from that time.

  Nothing in the night stirred, save a church bell in the middle of town. It was followed by another church bell somewhere else, as if it had waited for the first one to finish. Helen thanked God for not letting her get into trouble so far. Gratefully she promised Him and her poor dead mother, whom she imagined to be frantically worried about her up in heaven, that she wouldn’t go an inch further in her spiraling search for the man in the woods. Blissfully she melted into sleep, thinking of nothing more serious than the dinner trolley high up on the walls of the convent. She counted with the tolling bells. One. Two. Three. Four…. Sisters of Mercy Convent. New Bedford’s first hospital. Papers in the basement. Doctor’s papers. From over a hundred years ago. In the basement.

  Sister Ignatius sat in one spindle-backed chair, Helen in another. As Helen accounted for all that had happened since her last visit, Sister gazed dreamily through the window and rocked back on the chair’s hind legs, ever so slightly, just the way she told her students not to do. At last, stirring the sugar out of the bottom of her teacup, she said, “I don’t think I am any different from the other adults who love you, Helen. I worry about where this may lead. You may run into somebody very nasty at the end of your search. I’m frightened. I do beg of you to write your splendid story about Lucy Fairchild if you can, but don’t pursue this Thurber typewriter. Be satisfied with the gold medal you will surely get for original historical research—a pretty fish on your hook. Leave the Thurber machine and the thug behind it to the police.”

  Helen nodded, not agreeing or disagreeing with this warning, but Sister Ignatius’s eyes were sharp, and her knowledge of Helen was shrewd. “I will help you, of course,” she said. “I would do anything in the world for you, Helen.”

  The convent’s basement lay many steps below the first floor. Vast, mildewed chambers bounded by low Gothic arches, the granite green with slime and mold, led in four directions. The room directly at the bottom of the stairway held dishes stacked untidily on wooden shelves. There were countless plates of all sizes, cups and soup tureens of different se
ts. They all looked as if they’d once belonged to a star-crossed diner. They were chunky, coarse china with colored stripes on the pitted rims. Sister Ignatius paused to tinker with this collection before they went on.

  Nearly an hour later they came to the vault they were looking for and the papers from St. Joseph’s Hospital. Helen’s hopes plummeted. The hospital had been built in 1873, eight years after the Civil War had ended. Probably about ten years after Lorenzo had asked that Lucy’s house be condemned. Ten years too late. She shoved the pile of papers she was about to look through disgustedly back in a moldering box.

  Sister Ignatius looked up at her over her spectacles. “I know you think we’re ten years too late,” she said, “but I’m not going to give up the ship. Not yet.” And the reflection from her hurricane lamp, placed on an upturned sea chest, glinted like phosphorus on the gold rims of her glasses.

  “See!” said Sister Ignatius. “Some of these papers go way, way back. Here’s one from 1832. It’s my guess that the doctors who worked here when the hospital was built left all their previous records in this basement. Here’s a Dr. Pettigrew who treated a Mrs. McCarver for vapors five times in the year 1840. Wilberforce? No Wilberforce.”

  Helen waited for Sister Ignatius to finish off the box. The light was too dim to see more than one paper at a time, and she waited at Sister’s elbow, peering over her arm at the crabbed old writing. The papers were nothing like those at the Fairchild mansion. They had putrefied over the years, suppurating filth into the decomposing boxes. Helen hoped against reason that in one of them would be Lorenzo’s second mistake.

  It came at the end of the very last box. Sister Ignatius was about to close it because she’d seen nothing of interest in it. What Helen saw, on a decaying sheet of paper, the middle of it literally soaking into the bottom of the box, was the word Valdosta. She grabbed the box.

  “Wait!” said Sister Ignatius, just as excited. “Don’t touch it. It’s so old one touch will destroy it. Put those other papers over there, and let’s bring it out into the light.”