The Cabin on Souder Hill Page 23

  “I have a strange story for you, Mrs. Stage,” Mattie said. “One you may find difficult to believe.

  Chapter 34

  More titty bars and strip joints. That’s what the country needed. Pink followed Paula down a corridor to a red curtain. When she parted the material, Pink walked through. In front of a mirrored wall sat three men in chairs, spaced about five feet apart, each man with his own writhing and nearly naked woman grinding her butt into his lap. Paula walked up beside Pink and took his hand. “This way,” she said, cooing. “Paula has her own private boudoir.”

  The room was no bigger than a walk-in closet, all the walls mirrored except for the one behind the single chair, everything cast in red, though Pink could not discern the source of the light. Paula motioned for him to sit. He reached out for Paula’s plump little fanny.

  “Paula will take care of those hands for you.”

  “Long as you give them back when you’re done,” Pink said.

  It was the first time he’d seen a smile from her that hadn’t looked faked. She pulled two red scarves from a shelf behind the chair and tied his hands to the back.

  Pink wished he’d rearranged his compass needle before Paula bound his hands. Now he’d have to suffer a southeast pointer instead of a more comfortable northern one. Paula turned her back to Pink and slowly slid the G-string down her thighs, letting it fall to the floor at her feet. She turned to face him, then bent down to check the knots in the scarves. “This way you won’t be a naughty little pumpkin, will you?”

  Paula eyed him, dropping her gaze to the lump in his trousers. “Paula can fix that.” She gently maneuvered him upright, toggling him with the deft of a safe cracker. She lowered herself down onto his lap and swayed to the music. Pink leaned his face closer to her breasts and she met him halfway, arching her back. It was Paula who noticed the vibration in his pants.

  “Do you need to get that?”

  “Get what?” Pink said, burrowing into the swells of her bosom.

  “Isn’t that your phone?”

  “It’s nothing.” Pink knew it was Isabelle. She would keep calling and leaving messages until the phone exploded in his pants.

  “Paula likes,” she said, straddling the device in Pink’s pocket. Each time it vibrated, Paula cooed. Pink hoped Isabelle would stay true to form and keep calling every few minutes.

  When it stopped, Paula grasped her breasts and mashed them into Pink’s jowls.

  Pink hated having Paula in his lap and Isabelle in his head. What was so goddamn important she had to keep calling? The calls were wrecking his concentration. The phone vibrated again. Paula warbled and Pink sighed. “Hells bells on wheels! Reach in my pocket and grab that dang phone for me, will you?” Pink asked Paula.

  She slipped it out slowly, flipped it open. She pressed the talk button and held the phone to Pink’s ear, leaning in close enough for Pink to smell her breasts—funnel cakes, he thought, or cotton candy. “Okay, Isabelle,” Pink said, stretching his tongue toward the tender brown flesh of Paula’s nipple. She arched her back slightly, pulling the prize out of Pink’s reach. “What is so hell-fired important?” he said.

  *****

  The words strange and difficult to believe from Mattie’s lips gave Michelle a surprising jolt of relief. Since the night she’d gone down the mountain looking for Cliff, her entire life had been strange and difficult to believe. Mattie poured tea and set the cup in front of Michelle. For one fleeting second Michelle felt a peculiar caution, as if she should not drink or eat anything this woman had to offer. Michelle pushed away her concern and raised the cup to her lips

  “I’m sorry about your husband,” Mrs. Souder said. “Such a tragedy. He must have been young like you.”

  Michelle nodded, unwilling at the moment to grapple with the reality of Cliff’s suicide. She needed to know what Mrs. Souder was going to tell her.

  “The day after your husband’s death, my Pink went to your cabin with Sheriff Fisk. Pink said he saw a pendant that belonged to you but looked a lot like one I had given his wife, Isabelle, when she was a young girl. That alone wouldn’t have mattered much to me. After all, Pink’s not much on details, and there are probably millions of pendants most people would mistake for Isabelle’s. But it was something he told me, something you said to him, that started me wondering.”

  Michelle sipped her tea.

  “He said you accused him of killing Isabelle. That seemed an odd thing to say given that Isabelle isn’t dead. Did you know that Isabelle isn’t dead?”

  Michelle nodded, feeling like she was on trial and was about to be lectured instead of enlightened. She didn’t appreciate the edge in Mrs. Souder’s voice. For whatever reason—maybe Mattie’s visit to the hospital or the concern on her face the day her friend Lulu died or just intuition—Michelle had hoped to find an ally in this peculiar woman.

  “The thing that’s troubled me most about all that was how you got here,” Mrs. Souder said.

  Michelle didn’t know what she was talking about. Mrs. Souder was hard to read, her expression unflinching, unchanging, like a bird, or an animal. Michelle couldn’t even tell the color of her eyes, as if her features were vulcanized against detection, a shape shifter.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Michelle said. “I came down the hill like—”

  “We’ll get to that in a moment. As I was saying, when Pink told me about the pendant, I started pulling things together.” Mrs. Souder got up from the table and went to the living room, bringing her purse back. She dug down in the bag, looking over at Michelle, obviously intent on finding something. “I lied about why I came to your room that night,” Mrs. Souder said, glancing back. “I didn’t know your roommate, not until I saw the name on the board. Sometimes I have visions, impulses. I knew the name was wrong, so I wrote the correct one. But that wasn’t why I was there.”

  Mrs. Souder emptied her purse one item at a time on the counter next to her. She was shaking her head now, as if frustrated, or anxious. The contents of the old woman’s bag were sampled across the counter, plain, ordinary things no different than Michelle would carry in her own purse. When Mrs. Souder turned to face Michelle, her features tightened. She seemed confused.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Stage,” she said. “There’s something I must confess. It’s shameful.” Mrs. Souder’s eyes reddened, but she never moved from the counter. “I came to your room the other night to see the pendant. I took it from your handbag.”

  Michelle couldn’t respond. She strangely didn’t care the old woman had gone through her things. She felt too dazed by the uneven tumble of the evening. And she knew the old woman was wrong about the pendant. Michelle leaned to the side and wiggled her hand into the pocket of her jeans, withdrawing it. “This one?” Michelle asked.

  “How did you . . . ? I took that from your locker.”

  “I don’t know.” Michelle felt sorry for the woman; she looked frightened. “It was in my jeans when I left the hospital,” Michelle said.

  Mrs. Souder came over and sat across from Michelle. “Lulu said these kinds of things could happen.” Mrs. Souder brought her hands to her face, and it seemed she was crying. After a moment, she sniffed then wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “You mentioned something earlier,” Michelle said, “something about not knowing how I got here. I don’t understand what you mean.”

  The old woman looked over, hurt coloring her eyes, a new severity drawing all the life from her features. She stared at Michelle as if constructing words into sentences, thoughts into tangible bits of conversation.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” the old woman said.

  “I only know that when I went down the mountain to look for Cliff, my entire world changed and I don’t know how to put it back. And so far, you’re the only person who doesn’t look at me like I’m from Mars when I say that.”

  Mrs. Souder wo
und the string around her tea bag and squeezed it against the spoon. “I’m a midwife,” the old woman said, turning toward Michelle. “Years ago, I delivered my cousin Ida’s child, a baby boy. She didn’t want it. That’s not exactly true. Her husband, Ruther didn’t want children at the time. Of course, he wasn’t her husband yet, and was embarrassed she was pregnant. He even blamed her, like it was her fault she’d gotten pregnant. So Ida left the child with me. I was barren, so I took the baby without hesitation. I didn’t even ask my husband, Buck. He was away on a project for the Corps of Engineers. I told him over the phone, and he was less than thrilled, but I didn’t care. By the time he came home I had already named the child. Pink.”

  Mrs. Souder paused a moment. “A few years later, when Ida and Ruther married, he decided he wanted to start a family. They had two girls. Isabelle and Claire.”

  “Isabelle?” Michelle said. “Pink’s wife, Isabelle?”

  “Yes,” the old woman said, her fingers tugging at the skin of her jaw. “Pink’s wife, Isabelle. Isabelle is Pink’s sister. But he doesn’t know that.”

  Michelle had no words, only questions spinning in her head, so many it was hard to verbalize even one of them. She waited for the old woman to speak, watching her lower lip tremble.

  “Pink and Isabelle grew up believing they were second cousins. Ida and I had no idea how close they were growing.”

  Michelle remembered the path through the treetops, the old boards twisting and rickety now, strung together with rusty nails. But there was a time when the wood had been new and strong. She envisioned how it must have looked when Pink hauled it up the hill, how excited he must have been. She pictured Pink, a boy of seventeen, carrying the tools, climbing the trees, hammering the boards, building the miraculous trail without Isabelle’s knowledge. Michelle could almost imagine Isabelle’s surprise when Pink took Isabelle to the trail, helped her up the ladder, guided her between enormous pines, oaks, and poplars. Was it spring when Isabelle first saw the path? Were the dogwoods in bloom?

  “They loved each other by then,” Mrs. Souder said. “Pink and Isabelle decided to get married. But Ida wouldn’t have it. She told the preacher that Pink and Isabelle were second cousins, but the preacher didn’t see how that mattered—second cousins were hardly blood relatives, he’d told her. At that point, I couldn’t talk to Isabelle anymore. She hated me.”

  “She hated you?” Michelle said. “Why?”

  “Not just me. She hated Ida too. She hated both of us for our deception.”

  “Did Isabelle know Pink was her brother?” Michelle asked.

  “When Isabelle was fifteen, same age as your daughter, Cassie, I told her. She never talked to me after that. I think that’s why she was so set on it,” Mrs. Souder continued, “like it would be a way to punish Ida and me for what we’d done. And it worked. Ida was so distraught . . . she killed herself.”

  The strangeness of the evening cloaked itself around Michelle, a queer tingle running through her blood. “What about your husband?” Michelle asked.

  “Buck? Buck didn’t hold with Pink and Isabelle being married. The shame overtook him. One night he called from Kentucky, where he was consulting on a project, and said he couldn’t live with the dishonesty anymore. He didn’t come home, and I never saw him again.”

  “And Pink? Does he know Isabelle is his sister?”

  Mrs. Souder shifted her gaze toward Michelle and for a moment it seemed like a strange light came from the old woman’s eyes, as if they glowed from within. Michelle had to look away for a moment to reset herself. When she looked back, Mrs. Souder was staring across the kitchen, her fingers absently wiping the tears from her cheek.

  “That’s why he killed her.”

  Michelle wasn’t sure she heard right. “What?”

  Mrs. Souder turned to Michelle. “That’s why Pink killed her.”

  “But . . . I thought she was alive.”

  “Yes, she is, here,” Mrs. Souder said, “but she wasn’t before. I know Pink killed her.”

  Michelle didn’t want to keep asking Mrs. Souder to explain, but she was having a difficult time following. Even so, Michelle felt a peculiar calm being with the old woman.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Souder. I . . . I don’t understand.”

  “How could you dear,” the old woman said, as if returning from somewhere else. She looked over at Michelle.

  “Pink went crazy when Isabelle told him.”

  “Isabelle told Pink?” Michelle asked. “Why?”

  “Because Claire, Isabelle’s sister, was having an affair with Pink. Claire didn’t know she was Pink’s sister. We only told Isabelle. Anyway, Isabelle got tired of it, especially when the affair became public. Isabelle didn’t care what people thought of her, but the idea of town-folks knowing about Pink and Claire’s affair was too much of an embarrassment and Isabelle wanted to punish him, the same way she wanted to punish Ida and me. The strange thing was, Pink never really believed Isabelle, but he couldn’t understand why she’d say something so vicious.”

  Mrs. Souder folded her hands on the table.

  “I finally told him the truth,” Mrs. Souder said. “That’s when he blew up, knocking things over, swearing, calling Isabelle a bitch, asking me how I could do such a thing. When he left here, I knew there would be trouble. I tried to make him stay, calm him down. It was the first time in my life he was deaf to me.

  “After that night, I didn’t hear from Pink for over three weeks. I called, went to their house. He hadn’t been to the office. Clarence, Pink’s friend, hadn’t seen him either. Clarence was the one who found him.” Mrs. Souder looked over at Michelle. “Pink was up there working on his cabin . . . your cabin. He was drunk, putting shingles on the roof wearing nothing but his BVDs, cowboy boots, and a tool belt. No one saw Isabelle again after that. Pink and Isabelle’s neighbors had heard them arguing, and Claire reported Isabelle missing. Everyone was sure Pink had killed her because Isabelle would never have left Ardenwood. She would never have moved away. They called the police. Everyone searched for her. I asked Pink what happened. He wouldn’t even talk to me.”

  “Why didn’t they arrest Pink?” Michelle asked.

  “They never found her body. They couldn’t arrest him for murder without a body. Louden questioned him for days, but Pink would never own up to it. Finally, Louden had to just let him go. There was no proof a crime had even been committed.” Mrs. Souder got up from the table and went to the kettle. “More tea?”

  “No. Thank you,” Michelle said.

  Mrs. Souder filled her cup, adding milk and honey. She came back and smoothed the tablecloth with the flat of her hand. “Nearly a year went by, I had lost almost everything. Buck was gone. And Pink hadn’t talked to me that whole time. I couldn’t stand it anymore. That’s when I asked Lulu for help.

  “Lulu was a powerful witch, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter—the most powerful. I asked her to make things right again. I couldn’t stand losing Pink. I couldn’t stand the thought he had killed Isabelle. I couldn’t live if he cut me out of his life. He was all I had. Can you understand that, Mrs. Stage?”

  Michelle understood perfectly.

  “Lulu didn’t want to do it,” Mrs. Souder said. “She was afraid of the consequences. But I begged and begged, so she agreed. She always regretted it.”

  “What did she do?” Michelle asked.

  Chapter 35

  Michelle found it difficult parsing the story Mrs. Souder was sharing—infinite, fluid realities, portals to multiple existences, shapeshifting, immortality. Mrs. Souder brought out a book, a worn, leather-bound text that appeared to be handwritten. Michelle was reluctant to touch it for fear the pages would crumble. The Philosophia Visita was scribed on the cover. Mrs. Souder told Michelle about a man, an alchemist and sorcerer, who taught Lulu everything about the subtle body, spirit, traversing the gateways. “He was born in
1605,” Mrs. Souder told Michelle.

  “But . . . I don’t understand how . . . how could he have taught your friend?”

  “He knew how to cheat death.” The statement was resolute, sending a chill through Michelle. “So did Lulu,” Mrs. Souder added.

  She must have read the skepticism in Michelle’s eyes.

  “Lulu is dead because she wanted to be. She was over 130 years old.”

  Michelle’s rational mind was trying to piece this all together. For the first time since all of this started, Michelle could finally understand how perplexing it must have been for Cliff and Darcy listening to her own queer ramblings and rants. But the most disconcerting aspect of Mrs. Souder’s story, the part not easily written off as the discourse of a mad woman, was the absolute certainty with which she related it. Her words were not freighted with doubt. This was not myth, or speculation, in the old woman’s mind, but fact, which made Michelle squirm.

  “Lulu explained to me that life was like a book, each page a different possibility, a different reality,” Mrs. Souder said. “One must only know how to turn the page, Lulu had told me . . . but there could be consequences.”

  Mrs. Souder looked over at Michelle, tears brimming the bottom of the old woman’s eyes. She cleared her throat. “Lulu opened up a gateway to another reality, one where Pink had not killed Isabelle. Then Pink and I came through it. To here. To now . . .”

  A vortex spun through Michelle. Questions overlapped questions, coming with such speed as to cancel each other out. She could not grasp one thought and hold it long enough to give it form.

  Mrs. Souder stood and took her cup to the sink, while Michelle sat staring at the curious book in front of her, its pages scribbled with Latin, drawings, formulas, and permutations, symbols not only foreign but unearthly.