Ritual Page 11

  He was aware, however, how unwise it would be tell them that. The best course of action would be for him to apologize for being hasty; to make out that he was confused by everything that had happened; and to leave the Windsor with an idiot smile on his face. He knew that Martin had been with him. He knew just as distinctly that he had slept with Velma Farloe. The only possible reason why the manager and the bell captain and the maitre d’ and these Laurel-and-Hardy deputies were pretending that he was deluded was because they knew where Martin had gone, and why.

  And the only possible reason why they were keeping up the pretence was because they had been ordered to; or paid to; or because they were in fear of their lives if they told him what had really happened.

  Charlie found it completely unreal that he was thinking this way. Yet his instinct for survival had always been strong. It had enabled him to travel around the continental United States year after year, testing and tasting, sleeping in unfamiliar beds, and to endure the long-drawn-out agonies of his divorce from Marjorie and everything that had happened in Milwaukee.

  Stiffly, he raised his hand, and said, ‘I’ll leave it to you, then, deputy. If anybody calls and says they’ve seen my son – well, I hope that you’ll let me know. I’ll leave a forwarding number at the desk here, and I’ll call you regularly so that you know where I am.’

  The lean deputy nodded, and said, ‘That’s a real sensible way of going about it, Mr McLean. Come on – I know you’re upset. Maybe disoriented, too. But we’ll do everything we can to clear this little problem up pronto. You won’t have to worry about a thing. Believe me, your son is probably home with his mother right now, watching television and eating popcorn and totally oblivious to all of your worries. We’ll check into it. The very worst that could have happened is that he’s decided to light out for a day or two. So many kids do it these days.’

  Charlie reached into his coat and took out his wallet, and said to the manager, ‘How much do I owe you?’

  The manager shook his head. ‘Let’s call this one a gimme, shall we? You’ve had a bad time at the Windsor. I don’t want anybody to drive away from here with a sour taste in his mouth, for whatever reason.’

  Charlie wasn’t in the mood to argue. It made no difference to him, after all. MARIA picked up all of his tabs. And he had the feeling that he wouldn’t be filing a report on the Windsor Hotel; nor on any of the restaurants he had visited on this trip. In fact, he had the feeling that his time at MARIA was already over; that his career had vanished overnight, like the mist over the Connecticut River.

  ‘This won’t adversely affect your report, I hope?’ the manager asked him, taking hold of his elbow and smiling at him from close quarters.

  ‘I can’t think why it should, can you?’ Charlie replied. The manager’s smile gradually faded, and he turned toward the bell captain and said, ‘Bring the gentleman’s bags, would you?’

  Charlie stood by the door and waited while a black bellboy was sent to find his suitcase. The two deputies made themselves comfortable up against the reception desk and discussed football with the bell captain. When Charlie’s suitcase eventually arrived, the lean deputy said, ‘Don’t you worry, sir, we’ll make sure we keep in touch. Remember that ninety-nine per cent of all those kids reported missing return to their parents within seventy-two hours.’

  Charlie said, ‘What about the other one per cent?’

  The lean deputy made a face. ‘You want better chances than ninety-nine out of a hundred?’

  Charlie stowed his case in the trunk of his car and then climbed behind the steering wheel. For a moment he regarded his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Goddamn it, Charlie McLean, sometimes you’re hopeless, he told himself. Then he started up his engine, drove out of the parking lot, and headed towards Allen’s Corners.

  He was going right back to the moment when things had started going off at a tangent. Back to the Iron Kettle, back to Mrs Kemp’s boarding house, and back to the place which seemed to be exerting a dark and ever-increasing influence over him: Le Reposoir.

  8

  He reached the Iron Kettle shortly after ten o’ clock. The front door was locked, so he walked around the house on the wet stone pathway until he reached the kitchen. The door was open and Charlie could hear the brisk, sharp sound of scrubbing. He knocked on the door frame and stepped inside.

  The kitchen was small but professionally equipped with stainless steel Jenn-Air hobs and Amana ovens. Mrs Foss, wearing a large floral pinafore, was down on her hands and knees scrubbing the brown quarry-tiled floor.

  ‘Mrs Foss?’ asked Charlie.

  Mrs Foss raised her head like a penitent who had been interrupted in her prayers. She didn’t recognize him at first, but then she said, ‘Ah, you. Yes, well, hello there. I’m afraid we’re not open until twelve-thirty.’

  ‘Mrs Foss, I need to ask you some questions,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Questions? What kind of questions?’

  ‘You remember I came here with my son? He went missing this morning.’

  Mrs Foss grasped the edge of the kitchen table to help herself up. She reached for a towel and dried her hands, keeping her eyes on Charlie all the time. ‘How did it happen?’ she wanted to know. Charlie, briefly, told her–omitting the fact that he had spent the night with Velma. Mrs Foss listened, and nodded, and then said, ‘Come through to the parlour.’

  The parlour was a small gloomy room smelling of potpourri and damp. Mrs Foss obviously used it partly as an office and partly as a sitting room. There was a desk with invoices and bills arranged neatly on top of it, and two wheelback chairs with tapestry seat cushions. The window gave a view of the garden in which Martin had first seen the small, hooded dwarf-person; or claimed he had.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Mrs Foss. ‘Would you care for a cup of coffee?’

  Charlie shook his head. ‘I want to track down my son, that’s all.’

  ‘So why did you come here?’ Mrs Foss looked at Charlie directly and he could see the curved reflection of his own face in her upswept spectacles. Two desperate moon-faced Charlies searching for the same son.

  ‘We had lunch here, during that electric storm – remember? – and Martin said he saw somebody in the garden. Well – I thought I saw somebody, too. I don’t know what it was, maybe it was one of the neighbourhood children. Maybe it was nothing at all, just two tired imaginations playing tricks on each other. But from that moment on, things began to go wrong between Martin and me, and this morning he’s gone.’

  ‘You’ve talked to the police?’

  ‘I talked to two deputies at West Hartford. They weren’t exactly the Brains Brothers. They said that most runaway kids returned to their parents after seventy-two hours.’

  Mrs Foss took off her spectacles and studiously polished them on the bodice of her pinafore. ‘You have some suspicions, don’t you?’

  Charlie said, ‘I’m probably crazy. I feel like I’m crazy.’

  ‘Let me say it for you,’ said Mrs Foss. ‘You think that the Célèstines may have had something to do with it, don’t you? Those folks at Le Reposoir.’

  Charlie hesitated. He had already reached the stage where he didn’t quite trust anybody. After all, if Velma and Arthur and the manager of the Windsor had all been deliberately deceiving him, why shouldn’t Paula Foss be deceiving him too? It seemed quite possible that the moment he had walked into the Iron Kettle, he had entered unwittingly into a conspiracy to take his son away; and to make him believe that he was mad.

  He decided to put Paula Foss to the test. ‘Tell me about the Célèstines,’ he said. The truth about the Célèstines. I mean, what are they? Because they have something to do with Martin’s disappearance, don’t they? Or don’t they?’

  ‘The Célèstines are secret,’ said Mrs Foss, with considerable emphasis. ‘People used to pass on all kinds of stories about them, down in New Orleans. The story goes that they came from France, originally, but they were forced to emigrate during the French Revolution. They were
a dining society, that’s what I heard. But they were something else besides. They were religious, too. Not religious in the way that you or I might think of it, but mystical.’

  Charlie said nothing, but stood and listened with a face that couldn’t devise any kind of expression.

  Mrs Foss continued. ‘They had a restaurant on St Charles Avenue, two doors down from Kolb’s, but it wasn’t a restaurant in the regular sense. You couldn’t walk in there straight off the street, the way you could with Kolb’s or the Pearl, or the red beans and rice place that I used to run. They had blanked-out windows, and a locked door, and nobody I knew ever got to eat there. They were select. They were secret. People used to whisper about them, all kinds of stories: how they were eating live monkey brains, how they were eating Pomeranian dogs. But the story most people used to tell was that they were taking stray children off the streets and fattening them up, so that they could eat them too.’

  ‘That,’ Charlie said, ‘has got to be a fairy tale. I haven’t heard anything like it since Hansel and Gretel.’

  ‘All right, it’s a fairy tale,’ said Mrs Foss. ‘But people used to tell it, all the same.’

  ‘Why did you call them the Célèstines?’

  ‘Everybody did. It means Heavenly People, in Cajun French. I don’t know where they first acquired it, but that’s what they used to call themselves. The Heavenly People. They was Cajun from centuries back, right from the time that the Spanish granted them land in the bayous. Everybody called them the Célèstines. But it doesn’t just mean Heavenly People, it means something else besides. It means this secret eating society; and whether it’s true or not, it means anyone who eats something they are not supposed to.’

  Mrs Foss pronounced ‘supposed to’ in an unadulterated Deep South accent, like ‘sah postah’.

  Charlie said, ‘I keep feeling that something’s going on here and everybody’s trying to explain it to me, but I still can’t understand it. These Célèstines – you’re not seriously trying to tell me they eat children?’

  ‘One and one makes two. Maybe one and one makes three.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘That means every time the Célèstines appear, children start to disappear. The Célèstines have peculiar eating habits, so one and one makes two, or maybe it doesn’t. Nobody can prove it.’

  ‘Children are disappearing all the time. It’s a national crisis.’

  ‘Sure they do.’

  Charlie said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t believe any of this.’

  ‘Can’t you?’ asked Mrs Foss. ‘In that case, why did you come back here?’

  Charlie covered his eyes with his hand. He sat for a long time in silence, thinking about Martin, and the very last moment when he walked out of the door of his room at the Windsor Hotel. Martin had quoted Groucho Marx back at him. I do not wish to belong to the kind of club that accepts people like me as members. How ironic that comment would prove to be if the Célèstines really had taken him.

  But the whole idea of a secret society that ate children was preposterous. How could they get away with it? and they would certainly have to be a whole lot more careful about their secrecy than the Célèstines had proved to be. Velma had appeared almost to be recruiting him to join them, and that didn’t seem like the way a private society of cannibals would behave.

  Mrs Foss must be prematurely senile, or suffering from overwork. ‘Is that waitress of yours around anywhere?’ he asked. ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Harriet. No, she hasn’t been in. She wasn’t in yesterday, either.’

  ‘Do you think you could give me her address? There’s just a chance that she might be able to tell me something helpful.’

  ‘She lives with her parents on the Bethlehem Road, about three miles east of the Corners. You can’t miss it. It’s a square white house with a red roof almost on the road. A big maple growing right close to it.’

  Charlie nodded. Mrs Foss stood quite still. ‘Was that really what they say about the Célèstines?’ Charlie asked her. ‘They ate children?’

  ‘Maybe it was just a bogey story,’ said Mrs Foss.

  ‘I think maybe it was,’ Charlie told her.

  He left the Iron Kettle and drove back to Allen’s Corners. The day was windy and the trees waved at him frantically as he passed the sloping green. The two old men whom Charlie and Martin had met yesterday were sitting on their customary bench, Christopher Prescott and Oliver T. Burack. Charlie parked his car not far away from them and walked across the green with the wind in his face.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Christopher Prescott, lifting his brown fedora hat.

  ‘Good morning.’ Charlie looked around. The green was deserted except for a stray brown-and-white dog sniffing at one of the garbage baskets. ‘I was wondering if you might have seen my son.’

  ‘We certainly did,’ said Christopher Prescott.

  Charlie’s chest tightened. ‘You saw him? When? This morning?’

  ‘Yesterday, with you,’ Christopher Prescott said. ‘Fine-looking boy he is, too.’

  Charlie tried not to show his anger with Christopher Prescott’s imbecility. ‘He’s gone missing,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if you might have seen him today.’

  ‘Missing, huh? What’s he done, run off to make his fortune? You know, that’s what I did when I was a boy. I ran off to make my fortune, didn’t come home for five years and two months solid, and by that time I was old enough and wealthy enough to buy my father’s house out from under him. Every boy should do that. If that’s what your boy’s done, then good luck to him I say.’

  Charlie said, ‘He’s only fifteen years old. He doesn’t know this part of the country at all. And he left without any kind of warning. No note, no nothing.’

  ‘Doesn’t want you to find him, then. That’s obvious.’

  ‘Will you do me a favour and keep a look out for him?’ Charlie asked them.

  ‘Weather-eye open,’ said Oliver T. Burack.

  Charlie left them with a wave and drove out on the Bethlehem Road until he reached the white house with the red roof where Harriet lived with her parents. The house looked badly in need of paint and repair. The shiplap boards were flaking, and most of the windowsills were rotten. An avalanche of shingles had left one side of the verandah roof exposed, like bones seen through decayed flesh. From one of the overhanging branches of the big old maple tree, an old tyre swung from a fraying rope. Chickens pecked around the back door.

  Charlie parked his car and climbed the creaking wooden steps to the porch. He pressed the doorbell and waited, rubbing his hands to warm them up. Dust and chaff blew in the wind; chicken feathers clung to the screen door.

  After he had pressed the bell a second time, Charlie called out, ‘Harriet! Are you there? Harriet!’

  Without warning, the front door opened, and Charlie was confronted by a fiftyish man of slight build with thinning hair. He was wearing a carpenter’s apron and he was carrying a clamp in his hand. He frowned narrowly at Charlie, and said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, sir. I’m looking for a girl called Harriet. She works at the Iron Kettle with Mrs Foss.’

  ‘Used to work there. Not anymore.’

  ‘Oh? I didn’t realize that. Mrs Foss didn’t tell me.’

  ‘That’s no surprise. Mrs Foss doesn’t know yet.’

  Charlie said, ‘My name’s McLean, Charlie McLean. Is Harriet here? I’d like to talk to her, if I could.’

  ‘I’m Harriet’s father, Gil Greene,’ said the man. He wiped his hand on his apron and held it out. ‘Been glueing a chair.’

  ‘Is Harriet here?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Haven’t seen her since yesterday. Come on in. Would you care for some coffee? There’s a pot on the stove.’

  ‘No, thank you. It’s important I talk to Harriet. Well, it could be important. Do you know where she is?’

  Gil Greene shrugged, and twisted his clamp around. ‘Her mother lets her do what she likes. Much against my
better judgement, believe me. Gone off to see those French people again, that’s my guess.’

  ‘French people?’

  ‘Them Musettes, up at the restaurant. She’s always talking about them, you’d think they was crowned heads of Europe or something like that. Every now and then, they call her and she goes up to the restaurant to help out with the serving, or whatever they want her to do. Odd jobs, washing dishes, that kind of thing. She never gives Mrs Foss no notice, she just goes. She never gives us no notice neither. Sometimes she’s gone for two or three days at a time, no explanations, nothing. So what can you do? Well, the point is you can’t do nothing.’ Gil Greene cleared his throat, and then he added, ‘The last time she went, Mrs Foss said she was going to sack her if she did it again. And you can see what’s happened.’

  ‘Does Mrs Foss know where she is?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘She probably suspects. But Harriet made her mother and me promise not to tell, on account of the fact that Mrs Foss was always dead set against the Musettes right from the very beginning. I don’t know whether it was anything personal but there seemed to be real bad blood between them.’

  Charlie said, ‘Did Harriet ever tell you what goes on at that restaurant? What they do there, or what the place is like?’

  Gil Greene looked at Charlie and smiled wryly. ‘You don’t know Harriet. Sometimes she could talk the rear wheel off of a forty-ton truck, other times you can’t get a word out of her.’

  Charlie checked his watch. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ll take a drive up to the restaurant myself, see if I can get to see her. If I can’t, or if I miss her, would you ask her to look me up? I’ll be staying at Mrs Kemp’s.’

  ‘Didn’t know Mrs Kemp was still in the boarding house business.’