Faerie Tale

  Mark smiled and spoke softly. “No, I don’t think so. Look, Gabbie. There may have been a blacksmith. I don’t know much about the Amish, but I could check it out for you. Did he tell you his name?”

  She wrinkled her brow, then her eyes widened. “Smith. That was it. His name was Wayland Smith.”

  The only change of expression on Mark’s face was a slight tightening around the eyes. “Wayland Smith,” he repeated in flat tones.

  “Yes.” She seemed to be struggling to remember some thing. “He said he was from someplace called White Horse. I guess it’s his hometown. That’s about all, except.…” She lowered her eyes.

  After a long silence, Mark softly said, “What?”

  “Well, he sort of … got me turned on, you know.”

  Mark was silent, absently tapping a pencil against his cheek. Then he said, “Did this disturb you?”

  Gabbie’s eyes met his, and she looked embarrassed. “Yes, sort of. It’s like there’s two different people, see”—she tapped her chest with a finger—“inside.” Gabbie paused, fighting for words. “Me, the real me is, you know, normal.” Her voice lowered, showing discomfort. “I’ve got urges, you know. I get … excited, by Jack, you know.”

  Mark smiled. It was reassuring and warm, not mocking. “Yes, I know.”

  Gabbie grinned self-consciously. “I do that when I get nervous. You know, you know, you know.” She shook her head. “Grandmother used to really get on my case about ending every sentence with ‘you know.’” The mood seemed to lighten, and Gabbie began to relax. “Look, when I’m with Jack, I get pretty turned on, but it’s sort of a normal thing.…” She began to say something, then halted and changed it to, “See?”

  The both laughed. Mark said, “I do.”

  “But with this blacksmith.… Well, he was nice and all, but while he was working, all I thought of was his body.” She sighed loudly. “I mean, he was something else, but.…” She thought for a long time and finally said, “… but I don’t normally think a lot about a guy’s body. I mean, Jack’s got a terrific body, and I’d have trouble with somebody who repulsed me, but what a guy says and thinks, how he feels, those are the things, I guess, that make me take notice.” She seemed again to be fighting for words.

  “And this Wayland was different?”

  Gabbie said, “God, yes!” She fell silent once more while she remembered. “I watched him work, and I was sweating all over, and all I could think of was getting my hands on his body.” She laughed self-consciously as she made a grasping gesture, and shook her head in amazement. “He lifted me to the saddle, after he’d finished the shoeing, and when he put his hands on me, I just about came in my jeans.” Gabbie’s tone shifted from embarrassment to distress. “Mark, it scares me. I’d have balled his brains out right there on the ground. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about love or loyalty to Jack or my virginity or anything. I just wanted to pull his pants off and screw.” Her voice lowered. “It was like he had this power over me. Am I crazy, or what?”

  Mark smiled. “My guess is you’re a little more ‘or what’ than crazy.” Gabbie smiled back. “Sex is a pretty heavy experience in any case.” He studied her for a moment. “Especially if you’re kind of new at it. You may get a little better at dealing with sexual attraction as you get more experienced, but it’s still something that can badly shake you. Every once in a while we’ll meet someone who just makes us go batty without our knowing the first thing about him or her. Most times, we need some sharing, trust building, and time together to build a relationship, you know?” They both smiled at that. “But this other thing, chemistry, love at first sight, lightning striking, whatever you call it, is pretty scary stuff. Even old guys like me have it from time to time. Just a year ago, I met someone at a writer’s convention.… Well, without details, when we shook hands to say good-bye, it was like an electric shock. Damn near knocked my socks off.”

  Gabbie became animated. “That’s it! I nearly jumped out of my clothes when he touched me.” She lowered her eyes. “It was almost an orgasm.”

  “It’s a powerful and basic thing. And it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s the reason people get so deeply involved with partners who are no damn good for them.”

  Gabbie nodded. “Like my mom and dad?”

  “I never met your mom, but from what little your dad has said, it might have been like that. I’ve seen pictures of your mom, and she’s a killer.” He winked at her. “And so’s her kid.” Gabbie smiled at the compliment without embarrassment. “And your dad was pretty young when they met. By all accounts, it was a whirlwind courtship. Even now they might not be able to tell you what they saw in each other back then.” He paused. “So what I’m telling you is that when we run up against this chemistry thing, it’s overwhelming and it doesn’t make sense. And you get scared. Also, it gives you the feeling someone else has power over you, and that’s usually not pleasant. We often come to resent those we love, just for that power they hold over us.” Gabbie still appeared worried. “Look, you said you had the flu, right?” She indicated yes. “Well, when we’re feverish, we can act in some strange ways. I’m not an M.D., but I do read the journals, and I know fevers do weird things to hormones and other things in your biochemistry. Maybe this fellow’s effect on you was due in part to the fever. Or at least you responded more strongly than normal because your body chemistry was a little messed up and your normal inhibitions were dampened. Or something like that.”

  Gabbie sighed. “I hope so. I … hope it isn’t something … you know, like something I really wanted … secretly or something.” She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “Like maybe this guy in the woods … saw something in me.…”

  Softly Mark said, “Gabbie, getting excited by a good-looking, strong young man isn’t the mark of a slut. It doesn’t put a neon sign on your forehead inviting every passing man to jump on you. And even if you were into sports sex, even if you’d had a dozen lovers by now, rape’s a different thing. Very different.”

  Mark studied Gabbie for a moment without speaking. His expression was serious, but his tone remained reassuring as he said, “It’s not uncommon for victims to get confused and lose sight of what’s reasonable and what isn’t. You can get pretty messed up, feel somehow responsible for being victimized. Understand?” Her expression showed she still had some doubts. “Look, you can find yourself saying, ‘I should have prevented this somehow,’ or ‘I must have secretly wanted to be raped,’ or ‘God must have had it in for me,’ or some other such thing, and the guilt comes pouring out.”

  She raised her eyes a little. “I sort of thought things like that. I thought maybe he … you know, that I invited him … that it was my fault.”

  “It’s not. But you can get scared and confused and think it was.” He looked hard at her. “And sometimes those around us also get confused and reinforce those feelings. Like boyfriends or fathers. Any problems like that?”

  “No, Dad and Jack have both been perfect.” Her eyes seemed to light up at that, and she smiled. “Ya, they’ve been great.”

  Mark smiled again. “Remember, it wasn’t your fault. Okay?” She nodded. “Now, any improvement in remembering what happened in the barn?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I can remember that smith better than what happened in the barn. The guy in the barn? Just he was young, like maybe younger than me. And he was … cute, but sort of spooky, too, even crazy. Charismatic maybe. He talked to me, but it’s like I can see his lips move but can’t hear the words, like watching a movie with the sound off. Then suddenly he was all over me. I don’t remember much, really. I don’t even remember how we got into the woods.” She leaned back. “So I’m not nuts?”

  He laughed. “No.… Well, maybe just a little.” She smiled. “There is no ‘right’ way to feel about this sort of thing, Gabbie. Anger, regret, hostility, depression, even euphoria, all of them are possible at different times. Just make sure you’re straight with yourself about how you do feel at t
he moment, and if things get rough, don’t be shy about giving me a holler, okay?”

  Gabbie nodded. “I’ve been pretty good about staying in touch with my feelings. I had to deal with a lot growing up.”

  “So I’ve been led to understand.” He paused. “If I were you, I’d just get on with living. Not try to forget, but just let whatever comes out of your memory come out, and not worry about the blank spaces for a while. It will come to you when it does.”

  She stood and said, “Well, that makes sense.” She bit her lower lip as she thought. “I think that smell was … somehow part of the whole sex thing.” She sighed. “Well, if I remember anything else, can I talk to you?”

  “Sure, anytime.”

  She moved toward the door. “I’ve got to check out the horses. Jack might have messed things up, you know,” she said lightly.

  “You okay with the barn?”

  She smiled. “I don’t think he’s still lurking there, do you?”

  “If you want, I’ll go out there with you.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’m a big girl.” She started to leave, then stopped and said, “Thanks, Mark.”

  “You’re welcome, Gabbie.” He watched her leave. She was a lovely youngster. He smiled as he remembered Gary’s remark about putting a hit on Jack. If she’d been ten years older he might have thought the same thing. Hearing her slam the back door, he sighed and added to himself, Or if I were fifteen years younger. Chuckling, he amended that to twenty years. He passed off the thought with amusement and picked up the phone. It was answered after the second ring. “Gary? Do me a favor. Go to the file and look up the name Wayland Smith. See what we’ve got on him. Don’t call back. Keep it until I get home.” He listened. “No, I’ll be here until about eleven, I guess. Phil and Gloria should be back by then. You and Ellen enjoy yourselves at the movies.” He hung up. Sitting back, he thought for a long time on what Gabbie had told him. Finally, resigning himself to waiting upon this newest mystery, he turned back to the computer, which waited patiently for his next input.

  4

  Gary was waiting up for Mark when he got home, in the room they used as an office. Blackman put down the printout he’d dumped from Phil’s computer and said, “You’re back earlier than I expected.”

  “Ellen’s got to work, remember. Unlike some of us, she can’t beg an extra hour of sleep in the morning. Want a brandy?” Gary indicated his own glass. Mark shook his head no.

  Gary said, “I looked up Wayland Smith in the files.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “He’s a character of folklore, who appeared in the Old English poem ‘Deor’s Complaint’ and later in Scott’s Kenilworth. He’s seen as a cognate of Volund; in that form there’s a long story about him in the Elder Edda. He’s supposed to be some sort of supersmith, like what Paul Bunyan was to lumberjacks. All of which I expect you already knew. Now, want to tell me why?”

  Mark said, “Did you notice where he was supposed to live?”

  Gary grumbled as he stood up and went to the heavily littered desk. He pulled out a stack of cards and flipped through them. Finding one, he put the rest down. “All it says is White Horse.”

  “Look up White Horse in my place file.”

  Gary did as he was bid and soon was reading from another card. “White Horse. Uffington, near Wantage, southwest of Abingdon on the Berkshire Downs. The White Horse is a monument of unknown origin, possibly predruidic, formed by cutting away the top layer of turf, exposing the chalk substratum of the hillside. Others are found in Wiltshire, Yorkshire, and elsewhere, but Uffington is the most famous.” Gary put down the cards. “All right. So now are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Gabbie said she met Wayland Smith on the Fourth of July.”

  Gary sat down. Quietly he said, “Shit.”

  “Well put, as usual.”

  “No, I mean, maybe the name is coincidence.”

  “An itinerant smith, with an ancient portable forge in the back of a wagon, whom she took to be Amish because of his old style of clothing and speech? Who says he lived at White Horse?” He went on, explaining in detail what Gabbie had told him. “And remember, this is a consult, almost-a-doctor, for I’ve promised confidentiality.”

  “Since when do candidates in historical linguistics do psychological consulting?” Gary waved away the question. “Joking. I won’t tell Gabbie you’ve been gossiping about her sex life.” He sat back, tapping his fingers on the chair arm. “It just doesn’t make any sense, Mark. It’s like paddling down the river and meeting Huck Finn on a raft. Someone’s got to be putting her on.”

  Mark was silent for a long time. “It’s just possible that there’s a series of coincidences here. Perhaps Gabbie’s right and it is an Amish smith from over in Cattaraugus, who’s named Wayland and who comes from a town called White Horse. Though I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell we’re going to find any Amish carrying an English name.”

  Gary was up again, pulling an atlas from a shelf and thumbing through the index. “Here. There are two towns called White Horse. One is one word, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada—”

  “I think we can rule that one out.”

  Gary frowned at the interruption. “The other is”—he smiled as if vindicated—“in William Pitt County, New York.” He flipped to the indicated map page. “It’s about spitting distance from the Cattaraugus county line, halfway between here and Pearlingtown, so it may have Amish living nearby.”

  “Do me a favor.”

  “I know, go there and check out if there’s a blacksmith named Wayland Smith working in the area.”

  “Yes. He won’t be in the phone book if he is Amish.” Mark sighed. “I don’t think you’ll find him, but we should be thorough.

  “This one’s got me bugged. Either the gods of coincidence are having a field day or Gabbie’s had the most outrageous paranormal experience we’ve ever encountered.”

  “Or someone’s running a pretty wild scam,” offered Gary.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Gary looked at Mark over the rim of his brandy glass. “Maybe somebody’s got the kid marked for a major league con job.”

  “Why?”

  Gary leaned back against the desk. “Millions of reasons.”

  Mark said, “Her inheritance?”

  Gary nodded. “I did some checking at the library in town, in some back issues of Fortune and The Wall Street Journal. Phil wasn’t kidding about millions and millions. I doubt even Gabbie has a notion of how far-reaching her grandmother’s holdings were. Eldon Larker, Gabbie’s great-grandfather, was a regular robber baron, a minor leaguer compared to the Vanderbilts and Mellons of the world, but still pretty good at finding ways to make money. And her grandfather built upon that with major success. We’re talking Middle Eastern oil, South African gold and diamonds, high-tech companies in California, a shirt factory in Taiwan, a perfume concern in Paris, a percentage of a small but profitable nationwide car rental company, a dog food plant, a chain of Christian bookstores in the Bible Belt … dozens of other things. And unless Gabbie’s mom finds a way to break the will—which appears unlikely; Helen Larker’s lawyers are too damn good—the kid’s rich with a capital letter R.”

  “How big an R?”

  “Quick cash? Three, four million maybe. But if she divested herself of holdings, who knows? Her net worth would be, I figure, over eighty million.”

  “Why your interest?”

  Gary shrugged. “Curiosity.” Then he grinned. “And maybe I’ll drop Ellen and give Jack a run for his money—make that her money.”

  “That’ll be the day.” Mark lapsed into silence.

  After a while Gary said, “This is really bugging you.”

  “It makes no kind of sense.” He sat back. “I’ll take that brandy, please.”

  Gary fetched him one. Mark said, “If someone was after Gabbie’s money, there’d be a thousand more likely ploys. I’d be a lot more suspicious of a smarmy young ten
nis pro with Hollywood good looks, a Latin accent, and a marathon runner’s endurance in bed than a rural blacksmith. I don’t know. But I think a scam to get her money is the long shot.”

  “If that’s the long shot, what’d you call meeting a walking, talking folk myth?”

  Mark closed his eyes, suddenly tired. “I don’t know. But I’ll bet you a dinner in town that you’ll find no Wayland Smith in White Horse, New York.”

  Gary said, “No bet. I’ve learned not to argue with your hunches.” He sipped his drink. “Okay, so I go there and turn up empty. Then what?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” After another long silence he said, “When’s Aggie getting back?”

  “I think in another two days. Jack went back to New York to help her lug all her stuff home. Why?”

  “Give her a day, then stop by and see her. Be as circumspect as you can, but I’d like you to feel her out about something that’s starting to come together in my head.”

  Gary put down his drink and got pencil and paper. When things began crystallizing in Mark’s head, it usually led to a new project or a breakthrough on a current one. “Aggie will know more than most about the folk myths of the British Isles and their relationship to historical events. See what she knows about the druidic priesthood…”. Mark instructed Gary to inquire after a long series of seemingly unrelated topics. He finished by saying, “See if she knows the Smith legends.”

  Gary ended his note-taking. “That’s going to be something to dress up in cocktail talk.”

  Mark smiled. “You’ll find a way.”

  “Yes, sahib.” Gary rose. “Now I’m for bed. Between an athletic girlfriend who beat me straight sets, then laughed about it all through the movie, and a strange boss, I’m grumpy and bushed. And it looks like a long day tomorrow.”

  Mark waved good night and sat for a long time staring into his brandy. His mind turned things over and he kept coming back to the feeling that the answer that was the least probable, even apparently impossible, was somehow going to prove to be the right one. And that certainty filled him with arrange and exhilarating dread. For if he was correct, then whatever mysterious thing had rocked Germany at the turn of the century was occurring again, in William Pitt County, New York.