Carol O’Connell - Stone Angel

She scrutinized his business card. “Charles Butler, consultant.” A line of academic credentials trailed after his name, like boxcars on a train.

Could any man be that overeducated?

And now she learned that Mr. Butler had carelessly misplaced a very good friend. “Perhaps you’ve seen her.” With his free hand, he pulled the folded page of a newspaper from his inside pocket and handed it to her.

Augusta opened the sheet and looked down at a large, grainy photograph of a stone angel. She recognized the page from last Sunday’s edition of the Louisiana Herald, which had featured famous plantation gardens along the River Road. The caption gave a credit line to the sculptor, Dayborn’s own Henry Roth.

“That statue was commissioned five months ago,” he said. “It looks so much like my friend, I think she must have posed for it.” Now he produced a wallet photograph of a young woman with blond hair and green eyes. Both the carved angel and the glossy portrait of a living woman were good likenesses of an unforgettable face.

“She was here. I knew her.” Augusta refolded the sheet of newspaper and handed it back to him. “She’s gone now. It was a sudden death.”

During the long silence, she watched questions welling behind the man’s eyes, crowding up against his lips, mad to find an exit. But she had just wounded him, deliberately and severely; he was incapable of speech. His head tilted to one side, as though to empty out her words and cure himself this way.

Well, obviously, he was not good at death.

“You can leave your car here.” She turned back to the road and motioned him to come along with her. “My house is only a short walk through the cemetery.”

He was slow to follow her, moving mechanically as he carried her groceries along the path leading into a broad circle of trees and a city of small whitewashed houses, each one home to a corpse. The roofs of the tombs were topped by crosses of stone and crucifixes of wrought iron. Less impressive graves were slabs made of concrete to prevent the dead from rising in the buoyancy of sodden ground.

Many a grave was spotted with the colors of dying blooms. The wilted bouquets were remnants of All Saints’ Day, when the local people had left flowers for dead relations – the very day the young stranger had arrived, and Babe Laurie had violently departed from the world, leaving a nasty red stain by the side of the road.

The crunch of shoes on the gravel path was masked by the incessant music of birds as Augusta’s tall companion walked beside her, still speechless. And all the while, she was measuring his state of shock as a sign of good character. Evidently, he had been telling the truth. He was merely a man in search of a friend, and that friend was certainly beloved. Ah, but one could never be too sure of anything, she cautioned herself as she guided him toward a statue with the same face as the one in his newspaper clipping. But this one held a different pose, and she didn’t carry a sword.

“Now this is her monument,” said Augusta as they approached the back of an angel poised for flight, stone wings spread on the air. “There isn’t a corpse, though.”

The sheriff had never found her body.

The young woman had not gone into sacred ground, but certainly to her death. Her lost blood had grown to the dimensions of a river in the talk of townspeople. And a child had also vanished, gone to that famed place of Only God Knew Where.

As they rounded the monument, Augusta pointed to the angel’s face. “Now that’s a real good likeness of her. Is that your friend?”

She looked up at the stranger beside her. His face was a waffling confusion of anguish and relief as he read the date of death, seventeen years in the past.

Yet it was undeniably Mallory’s face.

Charles Butler stared up at the delicately sculpted features, the long slants of her eyes, the high cheekbones and full lips. The wings were unfurled in the disturbing and masterful illusion of levitating stone. In her arms, the angel carried a smaller version of herself, a child.

He felt a tug at his sleeve and looked down into the old woman’s dispassionate blue eyes. “Is that your missing friend?”

“No. My friend would have been a little girl when this woman died.”

The old woman pointed to the stone child in the angel’s arms. “Well now, that’s Cass’s daughter. The girl ran away, or was carried off – we don’t know which.”

The carved child was perhaps six or seven years old. The age was right. Yes, the child was Mallory; he was certain of it now. So, after all the months of searching for her, he had stumbled onto the beginning of the road and not the end of it. “You have no idea what happened to the little girl?”

“No,” she said. “Those seventeen years between the day the child disappeared and the day she came back to town – well, that’s a total mystery to everyone.”

“She came back?”

“Three days ago.”

“And she’s alive ?”

“Oh, yes. By all accounts, she’s very healthy.”

He looked into the old woman’s cunning eyes, only now realizing what a cruel joke she had spun out for him. He glared at her in silent accusation, and her foxy smile offered no denial whatever.

The agony she had put him through, knowing all the while that Mallory was alive.

“Perhaps that was a nasty trick,” she said. “But I’m old. I have to get my fun where I can.” Her smile slowly spread into a glorious grin.

She was at least thirty years his senior, but he was not entirely immune to what beauty survived in her. His mind’s eye worked backward in time, undoing her wrinkles and restoring the dark glory of her waist-long gray hair. In his imagined reconstruction, she astonished him.

The woman pointed to the roof and round window of a house, all that was visible over the trees beyond the rim of the cemetery. “That’s my place, up there on the hill.”

“What hill?” In his travels along the west bank of the Mississippi River, he had yet to see a hillock or even a bump on the Louisiana landscape.

“According to the surveyor’s report, my house sits ten feet above sea level.” Her tone bordered on combative. “In these parts, that qualifies as a damn mountain.”

She threaded her arm into his, and they walked along the path leading out of the graveyard and toward the imperceptible hill, which he was taking purely on faith. “Where can I find my friend? Do you know where she’s staying?”

“Oh, yes. The whole town knows where she’s staying. I hear she’s called Mallory, but I don’t recall if that’s her last name or her first.”

“Her first name is Kathy, but Mallory is the only name she answers to.” He glanced back to the angel and her child. So Mallory had finally found her way home.

“That cinches it,” said the old woman in the spirit of eureka. “Kathy is the name of Cass Shelley’s daughter. But Sheriff Jessop only knows your friend as Mallory. He found that name inside an old pocket watch she was carrying. When you see the sheriff, don’t you tell him any different.”

“Why not?” And what did a sheriff have to do with -

“Don’t help him. He’s no friend of hers. So, don’t give him anything useful. Oh, perhaps I should have mentioned that a local man was found murdered, and your friend was put in jail shortly thereafter.”

Charles stopped dead on the path, and his eyes rolled up to the sky. What next? What new torture might this woman be fashioning for him? He looked down at her and caught the smile that was just stealing off.

“All right, let’s have it – all of it.” It was a fight to keep civility in his voice. “I assume the murder and her jailing are connected, but I don’t want to take anything for granted – not with you. What happened?”