Dr, Cherubino was silent for a moment. He looked troubled.
“I will ask you once more. Are you acquainted with the Woodbines?” he said.
“Um…no?”
He looked at her.
“They’re a local family, I guess?” said O’Brien. “Important? Wealthy?”
“Yes, important and wealthy and powerful, and they do not appreciate the story I am telling you now.”
“Got it,” she said.
“The Crowns, to which my own Julia was related, are the true old family of Ordain, as regal as their name. A Woodbine won’t deign to hear of them. The Woodbines began as pretenders and, some would say, continue along that line. Crown is still a first or middle name hereabouts, but for two generations now no descendent of a Crown has given birth to a male heir. That is the Curse of the Crowns, well known. Though the remaining Crown sisters strongly identify themselves as such, the actual surname has evaporated — a wisp, a whisper, a ghost — whereas the Woodbines remain hearty and pervasive as weeds. Though his fellows be mowed down like blades of grass, a Woodbine sprouts his head from any tragedy, as my story will attest. For you see, the shiftless young grocer was Cullen Woodbine, or so he fashioned himself, who just showed up in town one day, supposedly the son of the elder Woodbine from a previous marriage. Some say that Cullen Woodbine was in reality a no-account bastard from God knows where, if you will forgive me.
“Young Cullen Woodbine maintained sleeping quarters at the house in addition to his little business. The source of the fire appears to have been a twenty-gallon can of kerosene belonging to him. How it came to be ignited is a mystery, if not much of one. Woodbine gave his account to the local paper, preemptively and rapidly, it strikes me. He had a theatrical engagement and asked his mysterious friend Sidney to watch the store in his absence. A theatrical engagement! Even in those more cultured times a curious alibi for this part of the state. Upon Cullen’s return, around midnight, he convinced the fellow Sidney, about whom not much is known, to stay over. They lay awake for the space of a half hour, talking amiably before succumbing to slumber. And now I will quote Cullen Woodbine’s public statement: ‘While we were talking we heard Miss Marcella overhead running her sewing machine. She generally sewed until a late hour, as she was to be married on February sixteenth, and was making her trousseau.’”
“Sewing,” said O’Brien.
“Indeed,” said Dr. Cherubino. “I have contemplated that very recurrence and considered the mythologies linking needlework to the raveling or unraveling of fate.”
Dr. Cherubino told O’Brien all about how Cullen Woodbine and his friend Sidney had drifted to sleep. The next thing Cullen knew, he told the newspaper, “I was startled from my sleep and found the bed on which I was sleeping enveloped by flames. I sprang from my bed and met my father in my room. I said, ‘My God, where is Miss Marcella?’”
In his accounting, Cullen Woodbine made himself out to be quite the hero, braving the flaming staircase in vain, assisting in various rescues of other tenants, at last fainting from the heat and smoke. The town constable, however, passed on a different story to the same reporter, having spoken with this Sidney, who had seen Cullen Woodbine earlier that evening, putting away a large box of matches. Cullen had asked him if he were hard to wake, and Sidney answered that he was. The next thing he recollected was Cullen whispering in his ear, asking him if he didn’t think something was the matter.
Dr. Cherubino, who had been telling his story with his eyes closed for some time, opened them.
“Whispering in his ear,” he said. “Didn’t he think something was the matter. Is he hard to wake. What was Cullen’s true relationship with Miss Marcella, by every normal societal measure his sister? But I go too far. Most prosaically, and with an old-fashioned good sense that may prove our best ally here, a final note in the paper informs us that Cullen Woodbine’s stock of groceries was insured at the princely sum of four hundred and fifty dollars.
“‘Notwithstanding the promptness of the firemen, the building was consumed, and at the same time, two persons.’ Ah. An elegance lacking in the tabloids of today. Mrs. Woodbine, having broken her thigh in a fall some weeks before the tragedy, was helpless, and perished. Likewise our Marcella. And here is where our story begins.”
“Wow,” said O’Brien. “Seems like it began a lot already, but okay.”
“We must forgive our ancestors. They were bereft of entertainment. Have you ever witnessed a person playing the spoons?”
“There was a Soundgarden video my brother loved,” said O’Brien.
“I have no idea what that means, nor do I wish to,” said Dr. Cherubino. “But I will ask you to imagine a world in which playing the spoons — slapping a pair of spoons on one’s knee or thereabouts — was the pinnacle of artistic achievement, as it certainly was in Ordain. For all I know, that may have been the nature of Woodbine’s theatrical engagement. We cannot fault the morbid turn that the curiosity of our own citizens took in the days after the fire. A certain Miss Isobel Hayes received a sealed letter from her beau, asking her to meet him at the site of the terrible fire well after curfew. There was to be a bright moon and I suppose the fellow had some Byronic pretensions, in love with the beauty of decay and ruin, or perhaps he fancied himself a Mississippi Baudelaire. In any case, Miss Hayes was properly titillated. She arrived as requested at the still-smoldering remains of the once-great house. Somewhere, a fox cried — the cry of the vixen, like a woman’s shrieking. Miss Hayes drew her shawl about her and called out to her beau. There came no answer. She had a mind to run back home, but as she turned to go the glint of the moon fell on some treasure. Thrilling to a wicked shock of avarice and taboo, Isobel Hayes stepped into the wreckage.
“Waiting for her was a curious object like a long bone, lying in a rapturous fan of what she took to be the most exquisite lace, blackened by flame. It was, she thought, the remnant of a fine lady’s parasol, a worthy souvenir. Imbedded in the handle of the black parasol was what seemed to be large, glittering red jewel. When she went to retrieve her prize, the lovely lacework fell away and disintegrated. Now her wonderful parasol was no better than a black stick, gritty to the touch and giving off an odor of smoky rot. She dropped it, repelled. Yet still the great gem winked at her. No matter how she tried, she could not pry it from the stalk that clasped it tight. And how she tried. Squatting there like a madwoman or an animal, this prim specimen, this beloved Sunday school teacher, growled and salivated with the effort. A domestic sound — the glassy congress of two milk bottles, say, or the mewling of a hungry infant; why not the crowing of a cock, dazzled by the burning moon? — restored her to her senses. She perceived her ashy crinoline. Miss Hayes hopped up and ran home, as you may imagine, suddenly no more than a scared little girl.
“You may imagine as well her horror when she arrived at her little room to strip away her dirty garments and cleanse her tainted soul, only to discover what she had carried with her, gripped in her fist, the entire way home unawares. Of course, it was the handle of the terrible black parasol. With a scream stifled by the dainty heel of her palm so as not to wake her parents, she banished the dreaded thing at once to the backmost part of her chifforobe, intending to return it to its proper resting place, the remains of the Woodbine boarding house, come the morning. She latched the door of the chifforobe and leaned a chair against it as a superstitious precaution. A few bitter drops of her mother’s laudanum helped Miss Hayes at last to sleep, until the softest sound awakened her: the gentle creak-creak-creaking of the chifforobe door.