Then Annie turned around and looked at her long blank wall.
Chapter 4
There was to be a picture on Annie’s wall, stretching from one end to the other, thirty-five feet long. Annie had never painted a wall before. It didn’t matter. She would figure out how to do it.
She had worked on the sketch for months while the foundation was poured, the walls were raised and roofed over, the inside was plastered, and the tile floor laid. Now that the house was complete at last, the plan for the framework of her painting was finished too. She had blocked it out in measured squares on a long piece of paper. There was to be an architectural fantasy on the wall, a painted gallery with five round arches resting on six painted columns.
Early in the morning after Annie’s first night in the new house, her Aunt Mary Kelly came over to help her lay it out. “Thirty-five feet divided by five is seven feet,” she said, looking up at the long expanse of blank plaster. “Is that right? Seven feet between centers? Good. Here goes.” Mary stretched her tape along the wainscot and made a pencil mark.
Annie spread sheets of newspaper over her library table and set out her jars of paint. There were dozens of them. Cheerfully, her heart beating with excitement, she picked them up one by one and arranged them on the newspaper. There were seven shades of red, six of blue, eight different greens, and two dozen soft colors without names, dun purplish browns and olive-grays.
When Mary finished marking off seven-foot intervals and came back to the table, her attention was caught at once by a scrap of newspaper stuck to the bottom of one of the jars of paint. It was a torn fragment with a dim photograph. She picked up the jar, peeled off the piece of newsprint, and looked at the picture. “Don’t I know this woman?”
Annie looked too, and read the line of print under the photograph. “Her name’s Pearl Small. She seems to have disappeared.”
Mary slapped the scrap of newspaper down on the table. “Pearl Small! Of course I know her. She was a student of mine. It was a seminar, a graduate seminar. Nobody called her Pearl, they called her Princess, because of her long yellow hair. It was a joke. She was Princess Pearl.” Mary’s glasses were on a string around her neck. She put them on and bent over the fragment of newspaper.
Annie snorted. “She doesn’t look like a princess to me.”
“Oh, but she is. Last time I saw her she was still as lovely as ever, except—” Mary peered at the newsprint and read the broken sentences aloud.
S. PEARL SMALL
VANISHED
uliar circumstances.
are allegations of
omestic violence.
wice-widowed
ederick Small
es not answer
hone calls.
umored that
large parcel
There was no more. The rest of the page was gone.
“Except what?” said Annie.
“Except for the bruise on her cheek and a black eye. Oh my God, poor Princess! The bruises must have been his doing. Look, that’s what it says right here. ‘Allegations of domestic violence.’”
Annie didn’t believe it. “She was a battered wife? From Harvard?”
“Well, why not? Annie, when was this? Where’s the rest of the papert”?
Annie fumbled with the sheets of newspaper under her jars of paint. “These are all from the Boston Globe. That one must be from another paper. The type is different.”
“Have you got the rest of it around somewhere?”
“No. I cleared everything out when I moved. All the old newspapers went to the dump. Except these. I wrapped dishes in these.”
Mary looked again at the pink dots that were the printed face of Pearl Small. “Poor Princess, I wonder what could have happened? Tell you what.” Mary snatched up her coat. “I’m going to show this to Homer. Maybe he can do something.”
Annie laughed. “Oh, poor Uncle Homer. I’ll bet he’s got enough to do. Every time I see him he looks more harassed. So long, Aunt Mary.”
She stood in the doorway and watched Mary Kelly zoom away down the drive. Then she went back inside and gazed up at the emptiness of her wall. For a moment she thought about the battered wife, the princess with long golden hair. Maybe she was like the wife of that wicked monster Bluebeard, who killed wife after wife and stored their bodies in a forbidden room. Was Princess Pearl another victim? Was she stowed away in a dark chamber with the bloated remains of his earlier wives, that long succession of slaughtered women?
Annie dragged a ladder to the far end of the room and told herself she had folktales on her mind. “Bluebeard” was just another story to put on her wall, along with “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” There were evil creatures in all those stories—wicked queens, wicked ogres, wicked fairies, wicked stepmothers, ravening wolves. Their common wickedness was dark and mythological, but surely it mimicked real life, in which ravening wolves abounded. Annie picked up her straightedge, put a pencil in her teeth, and got to work.