Scott Spencer - A Ship Made of Paper

Finally, he feels a tug at his back pocket.It’s Ruby.

”Can I have Ginkie?”she asks.

It takes him a moment to understand she wants her doll, and another moment to realize he no longer has it in hand.And then he remembers: when he felt Iris’s finger on his spine, his hands instinctively opened and the doll slipped from his grasp.

“Oh, you know what, Ruby?”he says, scooping her up.“I think I accidentally left her downstairs.”

“Where?”

“Just wait here.Find Mommy, and I’ll find Ginkie.”

He sets Ruby down and waits there for a moment while she hurries offto find Kate.When she has disappeared into the crowd, Daniel walks out ofthe ballroom and makes his way through the dining room, the kitchen, and the summer kitchen, where he finds Ferguson and Derek huddled together in intense conversation.Ferguson’s shoes are covered with fresh, wet dirt;there is a muddy patch on his right knee.

“Daniel,”Ferguson says,“Marie’s gone missing.”

“Have you seen her?”Derek asks.

”I saw her leave,”Daniel says.“Maybe halfan hour ago.”He has his hand on the door leading down to the cellar.He can barely even form this thought in his own mind, but the fact is that he hasn’t seen Iris for a while and he cannot help but wonder ifshe is still somehow in the cellar.

“Well, you know what I think,”Derek says to Ferguson.“She’s blind.

I don’t care how well she knows the property, things are torn up out there and where there used to be paths there’s nothing but fallen trees.

And those boys from the juvey home are still at large and for all we know they could be out there right now.”

“My God,”says Daniel.“You and Kate are really focused on thosekids.”

“You would be, too, ifit happened to you,”Derek says sharply.

”What do you think I should do?”Ferguson asks.

”You want me to call it in?”

Ferguson sighs, looks away, and Derek presses him.

”I appreciate your wanting to be discreet…”

Ferguson sighs.“Call it in,”he says.

”I’ll be right back,”Daniel says, opening the cellar door.

”Where are you going?”Ferguson asks.

”My kid left her doll down there,”Daniel says.He waits for a moment and then quickly heads down the stairs, holding on to the banister, his legs trembling.

A few lights have been left burning and he easily makes his way past the Richmond family’s cast-offpossessions.The sliding door to the secret room is still halfopen, and by the time he pulls it all the way to the side his heart is pounding violently.

“Hello,”Iris says.She has been sitting on a small, rough-hewn bench and she rises as Daniel walks in.She is holding Ruby’s doll.She and Daniel stand there facing each other for a moment, and then she hands the doll to him.“Here.”

“Thank you,”he says.The two painted mannequins seem to be staring at him.He looks at Ruby’s doll for a moment and then lets it drop from his hands.He puts his arms around Iris.

“I was waiting for you,”she whispers.

Daniel and Iris rearrange their clothes.They are reeling.Their legs are weak.Desire summoned but unresolved leaves them nervous yet vague, like people awakened while dreaming.

“Wait here,”Iris whispers, her lips an inch from his mouth.She turns to leave but he catches her, stops her, just to show that he can.She slips away from him and hurries out ofthe cellar, he hears the heels ofher shoes clacking against the wooden stairs, bang bang, it’s like being buried alive and listening to the hammer driving the nails into the coffin.

He waits, and when he finally comes back upstairs, he is still trembling, but no one pays attention to his arrival, no one asks where he’s been, or what the matter is.They are gathered in front ofFerguson, who is addressing them all.

“All right, then,”he’s saying,“here’s what we’re going to do.First, I want to thank you all for your help.My family appreciates it and I ap-preciate it, and I think ifwe go out there, and just do this in an orderly way, we’ll find Marie before she hurts herself.The police have been in-formed, but there’s not a hell ofa lot they can do right now.I don’t know what we’re paying our taxes for, but it’s not for helicopters.So it’ll be up to us.”

Nine men and five women volunteer to form a search party to find poor Marie.Everything capable and charismatic in Ferguson is on display as he addresses the volunteers.His voice is powerful, confident;he has even produced a topographical map ofhis holdings, and he stands before it now and taps at it with his blunt, oil-stained forefinger.

“This is where we are right now.The house is right in the center of the property, plus or minus three degrees.We can radiate out from the house, and since we’ll have seven teams, each team can cover roughly a forty-five-degree slice ofthe pie.”

Susan has come up close beside him.Her expression is at once proprietary and serene, like a cat about to stretch out next to something it has killed.She is holding a large wicker basket with both hands;it is filled with what appear to be thick, red cigars, with pictures ofmedieval lions printed on them.

Gathered in the entrance hall, beneath the stained and sagging grandeur ofthe painted ceiling, the volunteers choose their partners.

Daniel doesn’t care whom he is paired with, as long as it’s not Hampton, but luck would have it otherwise.Hampton may not like Daniel but at least he knows him, however uneasily, and without actually saying any-thing he stands next to Daniel, as iftheir searching for Marie together is a foregone conclusion.

“We need a way ofsignaling when we find her,”Susan is saying.“I’ve got Roman candles and everyone should take one.Ifyou find her, light the fuse, and the rest ofthe search party will know.”

“Where did you get those?”asks Ferguson.

”Remember when we had that Burmese purification ceremony two Septembers ago?”Susan says, dropping the basket onto the floor.She cannot help reflecting upon how Ferguson had mocked the ritual, as he mocked all rituals, or anything new—except the ritual ofinfidelity and the novelty ofa new young body.“Help yourselves,”she says.She figures that everyone here knows that Ferguson is screwing Marie, and probably they assume that Marie has fled the house because Susan finally told that little whore what she thinks ofher—and they are essentially correct in that assumption, though“finally”might not be the right word, since Marie has known ofSusan’s enmity all along, and why she picked today ofall days to overreact is anybody’s guess.Ofone thing, however, Susan is certain:Marie will try to find a way ofturning this irritating little drama to her own advantage.

“Be careful,”Susan announces, as the guests take the Roman candles out ofthe basket.“They pack quite a wallop.”

The search party files out ofthe foyer, onto the porch.Daniel and Hampton head south-southwest, across a ruined expanse ofwild grass that soon leads to a dense wood ofpine, locust, maple, and oak.

Once they are in the woods, the remains ofthe afternoon light seem to shrink away.The shadows ofthe trees—a shocking number ofwhich have fallen to the ground from the weight ofOctober’s sudden snow-storm—seem to pile on top ofeach other, one shadow over the next, building a wall ofdarkness.There had always been paths through the woods, made by the herds ofdeer that traversed these acres, or left over from the old days when there had been enough money to maintain and even manicure the Richmond holdings.But the October storm had dropped thousands oftrees, and the paths are somewhere beneath them, invisible now.Daniel and Hampton can’t take two steps without having to scramble over the canopy ofa fallen tree, or climb over a trunk, or a crisscross oftrunks, slippery with rot.And where there aren’t fallen trees there are thorny blackberry vines that furl out across the forest floor like a sharp, punishing fog.