Carol O’Connell - Stone Angel

Alma sat very still, but her body was hard at work, a damned factory of emotions, slopping great dollops of tears through her eyes, pouring acid into her stomach and churning up the bile. A scream was rising in her throat, and a heavy weight of guilt was resting on her breast, like a lump of something cancerous, inciting fear and daring her to look at it. And so, though she sat in the blackness of a closet, she shut her eyes.

But fear would not be deterred, and it flooded her brain with ugly pictures. There was no place to hide.

In the town square of Dayborn, in the house next to the bed and breakfast, Darlene Wooley listened to her son screaming in the next room. It was not the pain in his broken hands; he had taken pills for that.

Kathy’s dog ceased to wail, and Ira’s screaming stopped. Her son had moved on to a hiding place in some other dream.

That was a small mercy, for whenever she had to wake him from a nightmare, to put her hands on him and shake him out of the dream, the fear in his eyes destroyed her. He would always push her away, batting at her hands, repulsed by every demonstration of mother love. And that was the worst of it, because she loved him so.

She stood by her bedroom window, sending silent prayers to the dog, asking him not to howl anymore, please, not tonight.

Let him be. Let my child alone.

There was no way to comfort Ira without knowing what had happened to him all those years ago. He could never tell her. From the age of six, her child’s communication had been mostly musical – ripples of piano keys and snatches of sung songs. But she was not a musical woman, and all of Ira’s conversations remained one-sided.

So many questions had gone unanswered, and they continued to nag at her. Sometimes Darlene half expected the vanished Cass Shelley to come back, to knock on her door, to sit down with her over a cup of coffee and explain away each dark shadow on Darlene’s life and the content of Ira’s dreams.

Her son screamed again. She could hear the thrashing in the next room. Oh, he was awake now and beating his head against the bedstead.

Darlene ran into Ira’s room. As she came toward him, he stopped his frantic motions and stared at her with big eyes, the child’s unconscious signal to be held and hugged out of his fears. This was perversity that drove her crazy, for if she tried to hold him, he would scream again, as though she had stabbed him.

He was full-grown now, but his body was small and slender. His face was thin, making his eyes seem larger, more vulnerable in their plea for comfort. She longed to cradle him in her arms, but instead, she clasped her hands behind her back to reassure him that she would not. She only stood by his bed until he felt safe again, until he drifted back to sleep and escaped from Kathy’s dog.

Long after Darlene had returned to her own bed, she lay awake.

The other woman, on the floor of the closet in Owltown, was also awake. Her fists were grinding into her eye sockets, madly at work erasing the pictures in her mind. Alma Furgueson only wanted to forget. She had been there; she had seen it all from beginning to end; but she had understood it no better than Darlene Wooley, who had seen nothing at all.

Lilith Beaudare said good night and left Augusta to her chronic insomnia.

Running down the covered lane of oaks and into the woods, her feet pounded on the hard dirt until she entered the cemetery. She sprinted across the sacred ground, keeping to the soft grass, crunching gravel when she crossed a path. She was running on packed dirt again as she sped along the road by Henry Roth’s cottage and climbed up to the top of the levee. Her long legs were flowing across the high road as she looked down at Dayborn. The glowing streetlamps mapped out the town beyond the trees.

Running was her passion, always chasing the wolf – not an old, half-blind dog, but something sleek and powerful. She had evolved a personal mythology around this animal: He was the metaphor for a moment just ahead of her in time, ‘the powerful, the uncommon’ – Rilke’s ‘awakening of stones.’

Tonight, Augusta had voiced Lilith’s greatest fear. When she did catch up to the wolf, what then? If she failed to recognize the moment, it would be just another tick of the clock, and she would be condemned to an ordinary life.

In successive scenarios, she plotted out her strategy: The wolf is slowly turning round. What now?

Lilith was deep in the euphoria of the runner’s high, and in the bizarre contradiction of a devout atheist, she believed she could reach out and touch the face of God and His gleaming white fangs. While in this state of grace, the strain and effort fell away from her body. She lost the awareness of feet lighting to ground; the earth itself fell away, and she was flying down the side of the levee.

The dog cried out again, and Lilith’s epiphany was shattered.

Her feet touched down on the hard-packed dirt of level ground. She looked into the blackness of the trees ahead and shivered when a breeze slipped up behind her in the dark to lick the sweat off her skin.

The prisoner lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Golden rectangles floated there, a play of shadows and the yellow light of a streetlamp bouncing off an alley wall to shine on the window bars.

Mallory was listening to her dog howling, reminding her that she had not yet made it all the way home.

At eight o’clock in the morning, Lilith Beaudare was officially sworn in as a deputy of St. Jude Parish, but her new job title was “girl.” This was what Sheriff Tom Jessop called her, sometimes using the variation “Hey, girl.”

At half past the hour, a gray-haired, beefy woman named Jane, of Jane’s Cafe, had expanded on this theme, saying, “Hey, little girl, I guess I can find the cell by myself. I don’t need no escort.” Jane had then brushed by Lilith to trundle the prisoner’s breakfast tray up the stairs to the holding cells, leaving the brand-new deputy with no way to stop the woman – short of a bullet in the back.

Oh, hadn’t that been a temptation.

And there were other disappointments. Lilith glared at an antique telephone, which predated push buttons by fifty years. This toy-size police department was a damn museum. Not one stick of furniture belonged to the current century, and there were only a few pieces of semimodern equipment.

Like everything else on her desk, the early-model computer was covered with a film of dust. The fax had scrolled out a dozen pages, and by their dates, she knew the machine had gone ignored since Deputy Travis’s heart attack. Apparently, the computer and the fax had been Travis’s domain, and now it was hers.

She had yet to see the famous prisoner. Sheriff Jessop was still upstairs in the small cell block, while Lilith was tied to a telephone that never rang.

Her desk faced the open door to the sheriff’s private office. The St. Jude Parish Historical Society had not spared this room either. The ornate mahogany desk was handcrafted. Antique guns of the early 1800s hung in glass display cases. The yellowed map on the back wall was made long before the levee was built; the winding Mississippi flowed on a different course, and the land was free of the chemical plants in the column of pollution that marched up the River Road to Baton Rouge. And every building framed in the office window was antebellum, offering a view on the past, when cotton was king and the unforgiven Civil War had yet to be waged and lost.

Lilith decided that Dayborn was definitely a town in denial – bad losers on a grand scale.

Beyond the sheriff’s cluttered desk was a credenza piled high with papers, books, and a black leather duffel bag which threatened to slide to the floor at any moment. She recognized the bright orange identification tag which marked the bag as evidence. This must be the prisoner’s property, surrendered by the hotelkeeper, Betty Hale, on the day of Babe Laurie’s murder.