Of course, at this point, Cadence didn’t get to ask them any more questions.
She let the movie roll to the next scene. Every time it played, it was shocking. Her mother reaching out with shrunken, bird-claw hands. Sitting bedside, Cadence could feel the hot malignancy, loose and raving, burning through the last timbers of her mother’s life. A conflagration so extravagant, so unconscionable, as to be beyond reckoning.
And it wasn’t the first fire to scorch Cadence’s psyche. The truth was, deep down, Cadence hated fire. As surely and profoundly as Ahab abhorred his whale.
She combed her hair back with her fingers. It was a new habit, impatient as if trying to sweep away the mental haze that intruded on her since returning to Los Angeles. A brume with a faint tang of burning, like the acrid tinge of smoke from an over-the-horizon inferno. She knew exactly when her inner nose first detected it.
She let the last real of her movie play.
Scene Six. Cadence, the orphan, arrives in Los Angeles. She is filled with hope. She finds a big surprise. Her grandfather Jess, her last known family member, is inexplicably gone. It isn’t the shock, or the guilty moment of bitterness. It is the empty feeling. No, a chasm. Hell, it is the Marianas Trench, the Challenger Deep, the Valles Marineris of empty feelings. Maybe melodramatic, but when she looks over that straight-falling edge into the abyss it eats up everything. Just at the moment she found a reason, a foothold, in her grandfather’s urgent telegram, the ground beneath her had fallen away. The owner of so many answers to so many unanswered questions … vanished. Only that tinge of mental smoke hanging in the air.
Oh Baloney! Cut the drama and get a grip!
Thank God for the inner voice of her mother’s mops-and-brooms wisdom. That would carry her past all this. She took a deep breath and looked at the table.
Before her lay her folio sketchbook, along with something new in her life: a pile of fifth graders’ papers. This was good. She relaxed into a smile, thinking of the quirky innocence of her students.
She picked up her green marking pen (red was so last century and so, well, inflammatory). She wrote a gentle correction in the margin: “Abominable Snowman, not Abdominal Snowman.” Some of her girl students were taller than she was. Cadence was barely five feet, but her stature disguised much. Men and boys liked her, always deferring to her and sensing a coiled strength in her movements.
She graded papers for a solid hour, but her thoughts kept flowing to the fate of the Forest. The shop, just up the road, was shuttered. It looked neglected from the accumulating roadway detritus of dust, beer cans, and fast-food wrappings. Twice a week she dutifully raked and swept it up, but the road never quit spewing its debris.
Tomorrow she would be back there again. It was like tending a misbegotten memorial for a lost seaman, a place of vigil with no capstone to a life gone without a trace. Her vigil for Jess had elongated without clear reason, one month following another. She wasn’t going back home to Indiana. Her mother’s ghost, newly-formed and restive, was too close back there. Her grandfather — wherever he was — sure as hell wasn’t coming back here. She sensed that, finally, the waiting part was over.
“Missing person, consistent with prior history,” was the way the police report had put it. She knew better but couldn’t prove it because the very essence of her grandfather had been a magician’s coin trick. Now you see him, now you don’t. Mostly don’t. Like the same venerable coin, marked and dated, that the illusionist gives to one audience participant and pulls from the ear of another selected at random so that there could be no trick. But the trick, as the magician tells the audience, is the coin; it chooses its destination; the magician is only the emcee.
She frowned as she recalled the detective talking to her amid the yellow police tape and the fingerprint techs cluttering up the Forest.
“This is the only picture of him you have?” The detective was holding up a curled and faded little Polaroid, brittle and ancient specimen from a vanished technology. The man in the picture was blurred and distant, tall with a Fedora hat and beard. His face was shadowed. He was standing next to a road.
“Would you recognize him if you saw him?” he asked.
“I’m … I’m not sure.”
The detective stared hard at her.
“Not really. OK, no.”
“So you came here right after you got this?” The detective reached over and picked up the sender’s flimsy copy of a telegram. “We found this beneath a chair.”
“Yes. Three days.”
“Uh humm.”
“But what about the blood? Prints? DNA? This!” She walked over and put her hand on a three-inch deep cleft in the doorframe.
“That could’ve been something he did. Sometimes these old loners wig out. I’ve seen it before. Man goes ape and lights out. Anyway, we didn’t find any weapon.”
She stopped and just looked at him.
“Look … uh, Ms. Grande, sure there are matching prints and some blood drops down the hall, but then they just stop. It could just mean he cut his finger. There are maybe a hundred different fingerprints in here. Retail scenes are tough.”
She walked over and crossed her arms, standing next to the now-open trap door in the floor. It opened into a four-foot drop down to the creek side.
“Look, Miss, a door’s a door. It doesn’t matter which one he chose to leave by. This was closed when we got here. Ms. Grande, let me be candid with you. I’ve seen these cases before. Sometimes a, well, hobo-type never gets it out of his blood. Roadsong. White-line fever. Call it what you want. This man has absolutely no driver’s license history. No fingerprint record. Anywhere. There’s not much for us to work with”
He paused, thinking, and then went on. “You know the next step on a missing person investigation? When all the leads come up cold?”
“No.”
“You call in a psychic…. Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing because it’s funny,” she said, but she was. Only in California. “Not at all. It’s just … Is that it? That’s your plan?”
“Pretty much.”
“I don’t believe in psychics.”
“Well, there’s one other strategy. It’s usually the most effective.”
“Yes?”
“Go home and wait.”
So, that was what she had done. It had been like riding a slow glacier until two weeks ago, when she found a hidden room in the attic. Suddenly, like a roused animal of great size, the world moved with unexpected speed.
For starters, the sheriff’s foreclosure sale was coming up fast. Twenty-eight days to go. You couldn’t miss the big date stamped in red on the foreclosure notice. Every day a huge legal clock slipped another cog, ratcheting a spear-like hand toward the moment of a final outcry sale on the doorstep of the Forest.
On top of that, the anniversary of her grandfather’s disappearance loomed a couple of weeks away. Topanga got into its holidays and gave her plenty of reminders. Pumpkins were piled up and cornstalks arranged at the entrance to the town’s shops, even the Post Office. Next to her, one gnarly, old, leaning streamside oak was robed in outlandishly oversized fake spider webs. It looked like the outlier of some treacherous mythical forest now home to creatures unseen by day, hideous and partial to laying man-snares. No, she didn’t need props to remind her that the season of ghosts and goblins was here. She kept telling herself that none of it meant anything real. So bring it on, she mused, just don’t give me that old black magic voodoo malarkey about strange things happening on the a-n-n-n-i-v-v-v-ersary! Give me facts and proofs. And some money to keep this place afloat. I’m tired of this vigil.