She grimaced in apology. “Sorry, still no, not yet.”
I drew a calming breath to quell the panic that threatened to rise in me every time I drew that negative response from her. Or from the postman, or from anybody else delivering mail to us. Damnation! When would it arrive? I called them every day, the people in Portsmouth, every day! And they swore, “Tomorrow, Ms. Cain.” Forget the mail, I pleaded desperately with them, “just fax it. Please.” And still our fax machine refused to burp up the all-important document from Portsmouth.
Without the packet from Portsmouth, no festival.
That was a thought so painful it put my physical complaints clean out of my mind. Or maybe the pills were starting to work.
“It’s another shipment from the Dime Store,” Cleo announced, setting it down with a soft thump and a sigh. “It’s got a spiderweb stenciled on the return address.” She put a gloved hand to the small of her back and smiled at me. “You guys get the most interesting mail of anybody on my route.”
I wasn’t really listening. Partly, I was distracted by my worries about the missing package. But mostly, I was distracted by the simple fact of being in the house again. Even then, several months after its opening, I could hardly believe it was real. We’d done it. I’d done it. Started a private foundation of our own. Renovated a rundown property to call our office. And with our festival, we’d splashed onto the philanthropic scene like kids doing cannonballs off the high dive.
At the moment, happy chaos reigned inside. At least, I hoped it was happy. I heard female laughter from upstairs. Good sign. We like to keep our volunteers happy, we do.
Cleo and I were standing in the entryway.
“I’ll bet,” I surmised from her description of the spiderweb, “that these are the plastic spiders for the bag toss.”
“I won’t even ask what that means,” Cleo said with a laugh.
“Prizes for the kids,” I told her. Carefully, leery especially of my right knee, I bent down to where she had placed the box on the floor, squatted there, and started to rip into it, to check. Immediately, I slowed down, because a shaft of pain in my left wrist let me know of yet another place I had thrown my weight down in the street. Moving ever more carefully, I said, “Let’s see if it is.”
“Want a knife?” She pulled a utility blade out of a scabbard on her belt and offered it to me, handle first. I took it and used it to slice wrapping tape and to pry staples loose.
I didn’t know her last name, even though I probably saw her more often, at least by a strictly numerical tally of encounters, than I saw my own husband. As she hovered there above me as I knelt in the foyer, I was aware of her odd presence: an unusual combination of youth and maturity, of fey and physical. Kinky, flyaway light brown hair sprang from her head like a soft halo, and she had pale skin, a ready smile, and a high, light voice, but she also boasted pretty damned impressive biceps, and her thighs strained at her uniform shorts in warmer months. She had large, rather melancholy-looking blue eyes. With those eyes that sometimes didn’t seem as if they belonged in the same face with that quick smile—and in her utilitarian brown uniform of pants and shirt—Cleo looked like a sweet-faced fairy who happened to have stumbled into a temporary job driving trucks. I guessed she was only in her late twenties, maybe early thirties at most, but I didn’t know anything personal about her.
I flipped back the last flap, hurrying now because it hurt to squat.
Started pulling out wads of crumpled newspaper.
And then screamed and jerked back up, adding a bit more noise to my scream because of what the sudden movement did to my body.
“Holy shit!” I said, and again and again.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Cleo was screeching, as both of us jumped back from the package, she with more alacrity than I. “Is it alive? Is it alive?”
When nothing inside the package moved, I braved a closer look.
The massive black hairy creature—a tarantula—that had scared me to death when I unveiled it, hadn’t moved a single evil-looking hair.
It couldn’t.
I started to laugh, nervously.
“Look, Cleo.”
It was enclosed in glass, one of those paperweights.
She edged slightly nearer to it, until she could see it, too. In a disbelieving, shocked voice, she said, “You’re giving those away to little kids as prizes?”
“No!” I really did laugh then. “I was expecting those little black plastic spider rings, you know? This is a mistake. Somebody just sent the wrong thing.”
“I’ve been driving around with that?”
“Some people love spiders,” I said, in fairness.
“Yeah, but we don’t have to know them.”
I laughed again and felt the cementing of a stronger connection with her than we’d had before. Accidents will do that. And shared laughter. Suddenly, for no reason, my aches and pains felt a little eased.
Our shocked and petrified screeches had drawn an audience: Volunteers from upstairs were thundering down the stairs wondering what was the matter. Several of them repeated our screams when they glimpsed the contents of the package. But there was one woman volunteer who said in disgust—at us, not at the spider—“Oh, you guys. You’ll give girls a bad name. It’s dead, for heaven’s sake. And it was gorgeous when it was alive. Back off, you sissies, I’ll take the poor baby away before you hurt his feelings.”
“Send him back, will you?” I asked her.
But when she picked up the paperweight—ugh—and then the box it came in, she looked at it and said, “Can’t. No return address.”
I glanced at Cleo. “I thought—”
“Just this spiderweb that looks stenciled.” The volunteer looked all over the box, then rummaged through the wadded newspaper, even turned the paperweight over to examine the bottom of it, saying humorously as she did so, “Let’s ask Mr. Tarantula.” But she shook her head. “Nothing here, either.”
“Didn’t you say he came from the Dime Store?” I asked Cleo.
“Yeah, but sometimes they don’t unpack what comes in for you from the wholesalers, if the whole shipment’s for you. They just forward it on here.”
I knew that; it was one of the economies that allowed Nellie to charge us so little. I didn’t ask her to check shipments against invoices; we assumed that load of labor and time, and we did the work of sending back anything that required returning, as well. She was our contact for availability and price, that was all, and it was generously more than enough. There wasn’t any other local firm that handled so much of the merchandise we needed and that was willing to work as hard for us as Nellie was. I was adamant about spending our money locally, so I couldn’t go out of town to approach wholesalers on my own. But I also really did have to pinch every penny until it snarled at me. The Dime Store was the perfect answer, and at the end of it all, Nellie knew she would still have enough profit for her store to make it all worthwhile. Not to mention the fact that she’d made customers for life out of every one of our volunteers, which sometimes seemed like half the town.
The volunteer holding the paperweight asked me, “What should I do with this handsome fellow?”
I thought I saw a hopeful look in her eyes.
“You want it?”
“Really?” She actually looked eager; I couldn’t believe it.
“He’s yours, unless somebody claims him.” I said wryly, “Give him a good home.”
With a great deal of laughter and pretend shivers, the volunteers began to wander back upstairs. I turned to Cleo, whose blue eyes looked even wider than usual, and said, “I hope that’s not what’s in all of the other boxes.”
“You and me both,” she said passionately. “I’ll check for that stencil on every damned one of them.” She visibly shivered. “I told you, you get the most interesting mail.” She glanced at her big-faced wristwatch. “Geez, I’ve got to get moving, or I’ll never make our guaranteed deadline. Some of our customers, if they don’t get their
packages by noon, they hang the nearest delivery person.” Her gaze was direct and efficient now. “Where do you want me to put all the rest of the boxes, Jen?”
“How many?”
“Fifty. Well, forty-nine, minus the spider.”
“Please stack them here in the hall for now, Cleo. We’ll figure out what to do with them after we inventory them.”
“Jenny?”
“Hmm?”
“Where does all this stuff go that I bring you?”
“The heads of our committees fetch most of it,” I explained, “and disburse it to their members. By now, we’ve got supplies stashed all over this town. Next Friday, we’ll all converge on the common like locusts on a wheat field.”
“And set it all up?”
“A miracle will occur from dawn to dusk,” I said, nodding. I’d thought she was in a rush to leave, but since she asked … “We won’t do it all that day. Our construction volunteers will start building the temporary structures this weekend.”
“I’d be scared of so much responsibility.”
“Not me,” I confessed. Tarantulas notwithstanding, I knew I had to appear steady as a schooner captain to my crew, but I wasn’t acting when I said to the delivery woman, “I eat it up. Give me something to run, and I’m happy as a witch on a broomstick.”
What I didn’t add was there were a few people in town, like Pete Falwell, who would dearly love to see me tumble off that broomstick and fall ingloriously on my bum. In their opinion, the women in charge of Judy’s House and the Port Frederick Autumn Festival were uppity witches who had challenged the patriarchal status quo, and burning was too good for us. Call me paranoid, but I figuratively and frequently sniffed the air, to see if I smelled the sulfur of matches being lit.
As Cleo trotted off to her van, I called out to her, “Thank you!”
She turned around and made both of her hands into five-legged spiders, spreading her fingers wide, and then she grinned. Taken aback, it took me a second to catch her grin and lob it back. Trotting backward, she called to me, “You know what spiders mean in mythology, don’t you? Fate!”
“What? Fade?”
“Fate!” she repeated, and wiggled spiderly fingers at me again.
What a surprising sort of delivery person you are, Cleo, I thought, as she turned away, the sun lighting her halo of hair. Was she the sort whose idea of a joke for All Hallow’s Eve was to deliver tarantulas-under-glass? Nah, surely not. She’d jumped back as far as I had, on first sight, and squealed just as loud. No, I would call Nellie, myself, to track the provenance of our anonymous arachnid. She would either know—or want to know—about it.
Experience suggested that we would see Cleo again that day, on her late-afternoon round of deliveries. Maybe she’d show up, at last, with the precious postmark from Portsmouth.
I crossed my fingers, out of sight of my volunteers.
4
LIMPING THROUGH THE DOORWAY INTO MY OFFICE CUM LIVING ROOM, I looked to the right and saw my desk with a pink pile of telephone messages awaiting me, looked to my left toward the front window and got a second surprise.
A visitor, a woman, on one of my facing red loveseats.
So quiet, she’d been invisible during the earlier commotion.
So preoccupied with gazing out the window through her very dark sunglasses that it seemed my own entrance was invisible to her. For a moment, while getting my surprise under control, I stared at her. I thought she must have slipped in from the back parking lot, through the back door, while I’d been in the bathroom. A few years younger than my own thirty-seven years, I guessed, a beautiful woman with red hair cropped short as a boy’s and a delicate profile atop a long, lean dancer’s body. She wore plain leather sandals without socks, even on this cool day, and rumpled baggy black jeans with a black belt and a black T-shirt, tucked in. All of that black, which looked as if it had been selected for function and only accidently looked like fashion on her, set off her red hair gorgeously. Her hands—with long, thin, elegant fingers—were clasped tightly in her lap. Her skin had that pinkish tone some redheads get instead of freckles; even from where I stood I could see how white her knuckles looked in contrast. Only at the sound of my approaching footsteps on the bare wood plank floor did she finally turn her head. There was a tense whiteness around the corners of her mouth, as well.
“I’m Jenny Cain, are you waiting for me?”
She removed her sunglasses, and I nearly exclaimed in dismay.
The skin around her eyes was dark and bruised. She didn’t look as if she’d been struck, so much as if she were haunted. Instantly, I knew who she was, before she even said her name.
“I’m Melissa. Nellie said to come. She said you’d help me.”
Melissa Barney, widow. Her voice was low, strained. She spoke in bulletins, as if the only way she could manage to say anything at all was to keep all of her words to the bare minimum: subject, verb, object. It got the job done.
As if to excuse her unexpectedly quick appearance—it had been only an hour since I’d left the Dime Store—she added, “I thought we could make an appointment, if this isn’t a good time for you.” Obviously, she hoped it was a good time, or she would have telephoned rather than shown up in person.
“No, this is good, this is fine.”
I switched the telephone to the answering machine and closed the door to my office all but a crack. I’d know if anyone called or came in, but they wouldn’t interrupt us. Then I sat down—carefully testing my knee first before I tried bending it again—on the love seat opposite her, a captain’s table between us. The knee seemed okay. I leaned forward, feeling sympathetic. She looked so wounded. I sensed in that moment of stillness—broken only by the muffled noises of talking and movement upstairs and of Cleo coming in the front door—that small talk would torture her.
‘Tell me about it,” I suggested gently.
She covered her bruised eyes with her sunglasses again and turned her face back to the window, keeping it there even as she spoke to me. I leaned back and neutralized my expression, realizing it was hard for her to face the sympathy in other people’s eyes. Maybe we were the ones who ought to wear the sunglasses.
“You know God’s Highway?” she asked me, her thin lips barely moving, her profile delicate and stern in the sunlight.
“Where it is and what it is, yes.”
“Ben.” She stopped, compressed her lips, then opened them to speak again. “My husband.” Again she stopped, then started again. Her loss was very, very fresh, Nellie had said, three weeks ago, at most. And if he was anywhere near Melissa’s age, he was very, very young to die. “Ben and I loved it. We’re both—we were—heavy-duty hikers. We’ve been using it for years, we supported the idea of it. Signed petitions for it. Voted for anybody who backed it. Gave money to the cause. We were just married, he was twenty-three and I was twenty-four, and it gave us something exciting to do together, to have in common.”
She sighed and suddenly her posture softened. Her chest caved in, her shoulders came down, her head bowed forward.
“I wish we hadn’t,” she said, softly, bitterly. “I wish we’d been on the side of those property owners who opposed it. I wish we’d helped them block it and picket it and fight it in court. I wish it had never been created at all. And Ben—” This time, it was a good thirty seconds before she spoke again, straightening her posture to pull the words up out of her. “And Ben would never have been able to go hiking on that goddamned trail, and he wouldn’t have been killed by that stupid woman …”
She whipped her sunglasses off. When she faced me this time, her eyes were blazing in their bruised sockets. “God’s Highway.” She spat out the words in furious sarcasm. “God’s Highway to Hell, is what it is. It was cursed from the beginning, if we’d only realized it. Did you know it was the track of an old railroad line?” I knew all of what she proceeded to tell me, but I sat still and absorbed her version of it, anyway. “Oh, I can tell you all about it, I was so gung-ho for it t
hen, it makes me sick to think about it now. It was built in the late 1800s. The railroad leased the right-of-ways from the various property owners, and the land was supposed to revert to them—or to whoever owned the property after them—if the trains ever abandoned it.
“But nature lovers … like me … wanted to have a nature trail. We saw the old railroad track and realized it would be perfect, and so we found a legal loophole in the old contracts, so the property owners all along the trail lost their rights to their land. We were so convincing, it wasn’t just the state, but the feds who took it over.”
That was all true; it was U.S. Park Service land now, which made it subject to federal laws.
“We were jubilant,” she said bitterly, “Ben and I. We all thought we’d really pulled a coup, because the feds didn’t even have to pay the property owners for the land they lost. The property owners were incensed, of course, that their government would do that to them, just ignore perfectly legal documents as if they didn’t have any meaning at all. But we couldn’t be bothered with thinking about their rights or their feelings, oh, no. Not righteous us. We had better things on our minds. Hiking. Wildlife. Flora. Fauna. The property owners were also frightened of what the trail could bring to their backyards … vandalism, trash, an increase in crime, maybe burglaries, or worse.”
She stopped to take a deep, emotional breath.
“Now two people are dead because of that trail, and who knows how many other bad things have happened on it, and now I’m on the other side of the issue, but I’m scared to death it’s too late to do anything about it. That trail has to be closed. I know that, Nellie Kennedy knows that, the people who opposed it have always known it. It’s got to be shut down, before somebody else gets murdered, like Ben.”
I ignored the “murdered,” as the hyperbole of grief.