CHAPTER 3

The hour was late, but Lilith Beaudare remained with her elder cousin until they were caught up on family stories to fill in all the years since the last visit.

The old woman’s face glowed in the flame of a match. She lit a cheroot and exhaled blue smoke into the night air.

“You know,” said Lilith, in the lecture mode, “you shouldn’t smoke. You want to be wheezing with emphysema in the golden years of your life?”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Augusta. “I would quit this minute if I had any sense.” Smoke swirled around her as she spoke. “I should practice discipline and self-denial.”

Lilith nodded.

Augusta continued. “Then, when I’m ninety years old and blind with cataracts, when I’m crippled with arthritis and my breasts have been hacked off for tumors – I’ll be able to say, well thank God I don’t have emphysema.” Augusta threw back her head and laughed. Her bubbling voice had a wicked young character.

All the wrinkles, the deep lines, every detail of Augusta’s age was lost in the dark. Here was the lean, unbowed body and long, flowing hair of the famed beauty who, shot for shot, had drunk many a young man under the table – the better to take advantage of them in the love affair and the equally bloody war of a business transaction.

Augusta had also been a legendary horsewoman. As a small child, Lilith had been enthralled by the sight of her elder cousin riding bare-back along the top of the levee. And best of all was that moment when Augusta had turned her horse down the steep slope of the dike, riding home to earth. The horse’s massive body had obscured the action of its legs and the animal appeared to fly down from the road in the sky. Whenever Lilith thought back on that day, she remembered the horse with wings.

Now Augusta’s laughter subsided.

“I saw the angel when I passed through the cemetery,” said the younger woman, casually, as though this might be idle conversation. It was not.

“There are sixteen angels in that cemetery.” Augusta tipped back the last of her coffee and reached for the pot on the small wicker table by her chair.

Lilith repressed an urge to caution her cousin on the dangers of caffeine. “I mean the angel. I forgot how beautiful Cass Shelley was. So the prisoner is really Kathy?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need Mr. Butler’s help, would I?” Augusta was betraying a trace of temper, and Lilith knew she was onto something. “But you’ve heard talk in town. You think it – ”

“Don’t insult me,” said Augusta, and the subtext of her sarcasm was clear – Idle conversation my ass.

“I’m just curious is all,” Lilith lied.

“Fine. We’ll just pretend I am the addled old woman you take me for.” Augusta settled back in her chair, but the tension between them was strung tight. “Let’s say the prisoner is Kathy. Remember, she was born in Louisiana, and I do believe the strategy of a woman comes with the mother’s milk. But I’m told she talks like a northerner. Must have been up there all this time. So now the southern woman and the northern woman meet in one brain and one body.” She turned to Lilith and smiled with no intention of kindness. “Now there’s a hellish piece of work. Does that scare you, Lilith? It should.”

The younger woman pressed her lips together in a hard line to stifle the remark that would put her on Augusta’s bad side.

The old woman went on. “Oh, I know what you’re up to. But if I had to bet on the outcome, I wouldn’t give even money for your chances.”

Lilith began to hum a tune as she pushed off with her feet to rock on the back legs of her chair, working off the angry energy. She watched her cousin out of the corner of one eye, and then she smiled to see Augusta looking back in the same way. She sought out safer ground for conversation. “You still ride your horse along the top of the levee?”

“No, I never ride anymore.” Augusta said this with the rare tone of defeat. “I had a bad fall one year. Broke my leg, and it took forever to mend. I don’t have time to be laid up with another injury. Time is precious.”

The sudden howl of an animal made Lilith tuck in a breath and sit up a little straighter. “That was the wolf.”

“Oh, stop, Lilith.” The red coal of the cheroot made an impatient streak in the dark as Augusta waved her hand. “You’re too old for that game.”

“I know that howl.” Indeed, this was the strongest memory of her early childhood in Dayborn. “That was Daddy’s wolf.”

“It was nothing of the kind – only an old dog.” There was a tired smile in Augusta’s voice. “Your father was pulling your leg when he told you that story. You know that.”

Yes, she did. In one pragmatic room of Lilith’s mind, she knew her father had created the wolf for her. But there was another room where she kept her father’s gifts: his poetic blind faith in things unseen, and the power of that faith.

“There has never been a wolf in these parts – not ever,” said Augusta.

And Lilith knew this was fact. But in that room, her father’s gentle voice was saying, “Lil, if you can only catch that wolf, he will infinitely increase your life.”

As though Augusta were arguing against this inner voice, she said, “He only told you that tall tale when he had it in mind to raise him a little track star.”

“When you catch him, when that moment comes, your life will be changed.”

“Oh Lord, how you did run to see that wolf.”

“Hear him howl, Lil? Isn’t he magnificent?”

“But all the time, it was only Kathy’s dog,” said Augusta. “And that’s him wailing now.”

And it did sound more like a wail for the dead, tapering off to mournful crooning, ending with a whimper. The animal was crying.

“But he can’t be alive. No way. He’d be more than twenty years old.”

Lilith had kept faith with a winged horse and a wolf she had yet to see, but she could not believe that a common dog had lived well past the century mark in the canine’s translation to human years.

“It is an indecent age for a dog.” Augusta exhaled a perfect smoke ring. “Every time I leased out Cass’s house, I always told the old story of the murder and how the dog missed little Kathy. All the renters were good sports. They even fed him. And I might’ve kept that house occupied. But after a while, the renters began to realize that the dog was insane.”

Lilith turned away, preferring her father’s wolf to the half-dead dog haunting the yard of the old Shelley house.

Augusta’s voice droned on in the background of her thoughts.

“In any case, you never want to chase down a wolf, Lilith. Ever think of what you’d do when you caught up with it?”

The old black dog’s hind leg was working as he ran through his dream, pacing himself to the towheaded child with green eyes. It was toward the violent end of the dream that he moaned and rolled over in the dirt to expose all his old scars to the moon, every wound that was not concealed by his pelt. The pain of old injuries woke him again, and he felt the real and solid world all around him.

He was alone.

His head dropped low as he did the dog’s version of bitter tears. Then came a fresh spate of howling. It was one of those rare phases of weather when the wind carried his night music everywhere, even into Owltown.

At the edge of Dayborn was its unacknowledged spawn, a crescent cluster of shacks and mobile homes on blocks, a main street of neon lights that glowed all night, and drunks who did not fall down until the first light of dawn. Though it was a legal partition of Dayborn, the older residents pretended it was not. When they had occasion to refer to the sprawling blight on the lower bayou, they called it Owltown.

Alma Furgueson, who lived in this place, rose in her bed and listened to the dog’s voice. She wished someone would put that demented creature out of his misery and hers. She would do it herself, but she could not bear to go back to the Shelley house again.

She gripped the edge of her blanket and drew it up over her face. Though she was past fifty, she reacted to her fears with the solutions of a child. She left her bed and went to the closet, hiding herself away at the back and pulling the door shut.

Alma sat very still, but her body was hard at work, a damned factory of emotions, slopping great dollops of tears through her eyes, pouring acid into her stomach and churning up the bile. A scream was rising in her throat, and a heavy weight of guilt was resting on her breast, like a lump of something cancerous, inciting fear and daring her to look at it. And so, though she sat in the blackness of a closet, she shut her eyes.

But fear would not be deterred, and it flooded her brain with ugly pictures. There was no place to hide.

In the town square of Dayborn, in the house next to the bed and breakfast, Darlene Wooley listened to her son screaming in the next room. It was not the pain in his broken hands; he had taken pills for that.

Kathy’s dog ceased to wail, and Ira’s screaming stopped. Her son had moved on to a hiding place in some other dream.

That was a small mercy, for whenever she had to wake him from a nightmare, to put her hands on him and shake him out of the dream, the fear in his eyes destroyed her. He would always push her away, batting at her hands, repulsed by every demonstration of mother love. And that was the worst of it, because she loved him so.

She stood by her bedroom window, sending silent prayers to the dog, asking him not to howl anymore, please, not tonight.

Let him be. Let my child alone.

There was no way to comfort Ira without knowing what had happened to him all those years ago. He could never tell her. From the age of six, her child’s communication had been mostly musical – ripples of piano keys and snatches of sung songs. But she was not a musical woman, and all of Ira’s conversations remained one-sided.

So many questions had gone unanswered, and they continued to nag at her. Sometimes Darlene half expected the vanished Cass Shelley to come back, to knock on her door, to sit down with her over a cup of coffee and explain away each dark shadow on Darlene’s life and the content of Ira’s dreams.

Her son screamed again. She could hear the thrashing in the next room. Oh, he was awake now and beating his head against the bedstead.

Darlene ran into Ira’s room. As she came toward him, he stopped his frantic motions and stared at her with big eyes, the child’s unconscious signal to be held and hugged out of his fears. This was perversity that drove her crazy, for if she tried to hold him, he would scream again, as though she had stabbed him.

He was full-grown now, but his body was small and slender. His face was thin, making his eyes seem larger, more vulnerable in their plea for comfort. She longed to cradle him in her arms, but instead, she clasped her hands behind her back to reassure him that she would not. She only stood by his bed until he felt safe again, until he drifted back to sleep and escaped from Kathy’s dog.

Long after Darlene had returned to her own bed, she lay awake.

The other woman, on the floor of the closet in Owltown, was also awake. Her fists were grinding into her eye sockets, madly at work erasing the pictures in her mind. Alma Furgueson only wanted to forget. She had been there; she had seen it all from beginning to end; but she had understood it no better than Darlene Wooley, who had seen nothing at all.

Lilith Beaudare said good night and left Augusta to her chronic insomnia.

Running down the covered lane of oaks and into the woods, her feet pounded on the hard dirt until she entered the cemetery. She sprinted across the sacred ground, keeping to the soft grass, crunching gravel when she crossed a path. She was running on packed dirt again as she sped along the road by Henry Roth’s cottage and climbed up to the top of the levee. Her long legs were flowing across the high road as she looked down at Dayborn. The glowing streetlamps mapped out the town beyond the trees.

Running was her passion, always chasing the wolf – not an old, half-blind dog, but something sleek and powerful. She had evolved a personal mythology around this animal: He was the metaphor for a moment just ahead of her in time, ‘the powerful, the uncommon’ – Rilke’s ‘awakening of stones.’

Tonight, Augusta had voiced Lilith’s greatest fear. When she did catch up to the wolf, what then? If she failed to recognize the moment, it would be just another tick of the clock, and she would be condemned to an ordinary life.

In successive scenarios, she plotted out her strategy: The wolf is slowly turning round. What now?

Lilith was deep in the euphoria of the runner’s high, and in the bizarre contradiction of a devout atheist, she believed she could reach out and touch the face of God and His gleaming white fangs. While in this state of grace, the strain and effort fell away from her body. She lost the awareness of feet lighting to ground; the earth itself fell away, and she was flying down the side of the levee.

The dog cried out again, and Lilith’s epiphany was shattered.

Her feet touched down on the hard-packed dirt of level ground. She looked into the blackness of the trees ahead and shivered when a breeze slipped up behind her in the dark to lick the sweat off her skin.

The prisoner lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Golden rectangles floated there, a play of shadows and the yellow light of a streetlamp bouncing off an alley wall to shine on the window bars.

Mallory was listening to her dog howling, reminding her that she had not yet made it all the way home.