The Face on the Wall(8)

Where was the old Chevy now, with its pitted chromium and missing hubcaps, its cracked windshield and dented side?

Then Annie forgot about the Gasts and climbed her shaky ladder with a jar of thin ocher paint in one hand. Clinging to the ladder with toes and shins, she leaned forward and began washing color on the wall, relieving the awful whiteness of the bare plaster. The ladder wobbled. Soon the background color was done and she scrambled down, picked up a narrow brush and climbed up again. Carefully, with her hand moving surely and slowly, she began tracing the hull of a vessel over the light pencil marks beneath the ocher paint. With beating heart Ulysses spreads his sails. Quickly the craft took shape, floating on the horizon, which in this part of the wall was the Adriatic Sea. Farther to the right it would become the Mississippi River, and then Lake Windemere, and the coast of Coromandel.

There was a noise behind her. Looking over her shoulder, Annie saw Flimnap working on the latch of the French door. “Kind of loose,” he said, holding up a screwdriver.

“Well, good,” said Annie, smiling, turning back to the wall. She had known Flimnap for less than two days, but already she could see two distinct sides to his character. On the one hand he was skillful with tools and handy with a paintbrush, on the other there was a gossamer insubstantiality about him, a sort of comic playfulness. Beside the solidity of Robert Gast he seemed a flimsier order of being. He was clever, anybody could see that, and yet oddly dyslexic at the same time. Yesterday, when she had asked him to design a simple cupboard, he had not been able to handle a pencil.

Annie came down from the ladder and found him examining the sketches lying on the table. One was her drawing of an old Greek bard. He was supposed to be telling the story of Odysseus. His mouth was open, his arms were flung out, his whiskers were wild.

“Santa Claus emerging from the bath?” said Flimnap, and Annie laughed. She watched as he turned to look up at the wall and sweep his pale eyes across it from left to right, taking in the five-part arcade and the ship on the horizon and her pencil sketch of Aesop with the tortoise lumbering along at his feet and the hare sleeping under a bush.



Flimnap made no comment. Instead he pointed at the far end of the wall. “Who’s that supposed to be?”

“What?” Annie looked. On the pure white plaster there were two small green blotches superimposed on an orange blob.

It looked like a face. “It’s nothing,” said Annie, “just some sort of stain. Mildew or something.”

“I’ll take care of it.” Flimnap went out to his truck and came back with a can of shellac.

Annie watched him coat the stain with a few strokes of his brush. She wanted to ask what he thought of her great project. Surely he could see how marvelous it was going to be But Flimnap O’Dougherty said nothing at all. Annie told herself she was not disappointed. He was one of those people without any interest in artistic things. Well, that was okay. Half the world was like that.

But the truth was, she could have used a little praise.





Chapter 7



One of the stars fell, making a long fiery trail across the sky. “Now someone is dying,” said the little girl, for her old dead grandmother … had told her that when a star falls, a soul goes up to God.

Hans Christian Andersen, “The Little Match Girl”




Homer Kelly had been Mary’s husband for a long time. He was a big man with a coarse gray beard and a rough head of hair like the thick fur of a dog. His impulsive enthusiasms had often led him into absurdities in the past, but half a lifetime with a sensible wife had mellowed him a little. So had his experience with violent criminals. At one time or another Homer had been half drowned, knocked senseless, threatened with edge tools, firearms, oncoming trucks, burning buildings, and explosive devices. Did danger build character? Who could tell? In middle age Homer Kelly was a more rational and sympathetic human being than he had been in his youth. One thing, however, was still an unchanging part of his makeup. Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately), his chromosomes still sported a mutant gene prompting unpredictable behavior, occasional silliness, and sometimes—rarely, erratically—a stroke of genius.

Today Homer’s genius was out to lunch. “You must be out of your mind,” he said, staring at the dim photograph of Mary’s former student, the missing princess with the long golden hair. “She just walked out on her husband, I’ll bet, that’s all. High time, if he’s been beating her up. What’s this about a parcel? ‘It is rumored that a large parcel’—of what? A leg of lamb? A side of beef?”

“No, no, Homer. It’s only the British who use the word ‘parcel’ like that. In this country it means a piece of land.”