I stepped through the doorway onto a plush black carpet. The expansive room resembled an art gallery: framed photos, shadowboxes on the walls, display cases, shelves, track lighting.
“Over here, Mr Ransburg. Let’s start with the photographs.”
She gathered me by my forearm as though we were a beachwalking couple, escorting me to a wall of framed photos. They were exclusively male - a clown-suited man blowing out candles on a cake; a man sitting naked on a dirty bed, surrounded by rifles; a man glaring from an old truck. I saw a gilt-framed photograph of a grinning, heavily tattooed man with jumper cables clamped to his nipples. I saw pinched faces, eerie smiles, drooping lids, Methadrine eyeballs…
Marcella Baines’s smile was so wide it seemed the only thing above her neck. “They’re my fellas, Mr Ransburg.”
“You certainly have a lot of them, Mrs Baines - fellas.”
She pointed to a black-and-white photo of a man with porcine eyes and dried spittle in the corners of his mouth.
“Charles Osland,” she said.
Osland was an infamous murderer of the fifties who dispatched five women through ligature strangulation. Tina Caralla was his most famous victim, a TV reporter working in Memphis.
While I studied the photo, Baines walked to a display case, removed something, returned. She offered me a zip-bagged length of rope.
“The clothesline Charles used to confine Tina to her bed,” she said. “Go ahead. Open it.”
“It’s not neces-” I had no need to touch the ghastly thing.
“It’s all right,” she said, patting me on the shoulder as if encouraging a child. “It’s part of your new world.”
I lifted the bag. It’s just ordinary rope, I told myself, woven strands of fiber. I opened it.
“Now sniff,” she said.
I held the bag to my nose and whiffed. Nothing. Marcella leaned her head over the bag and took a long draught. She leaned back, a drowsy smile on her face. “Spins your head, doesn’t it? Chanel Number 5, the perfume Tina wore. She dabbed her neck with it, her sweet, swan-like neck.”
“It’s…lovely,” I said, starting to close the bag.
“Take one more,” she urged. “Please, I insist.”
I closed my eyes, feigning a deep intake of breath. For a moment I sensed the dark scent; not perfume, but the odor of violent death. She said, “Two of the strongest moments in a pair of lives, captured forever on thirty inches of cotton rope.”
“How much?” I asked, closing the bag.
She patted my hand. “It’s not for sale. It’s a personal amulet, one I use for fortification.”
“But if it was?”
“Let’s not prattle over concerns of the marketplace, Mr Ransburg. We’re here to enjoy.”
For the next half-hour I attended a reliquary of savagery - scarves used for bondage, tools employed in obscene fashion, more lengths of electrical cord than I wish to remember. At one point she handed me a small plastic box with simple thumbtacks rattling within. When she told me how the tacks had been deployed, I wanted to flush them down the toilet, keep flushing all afternoon. Instead, I shook the box, raised a discerning eyebrow and said, “Quaint.”
After I’d been shown all the visible objects, she said, “What did you collect previously? Everyone who comes to me has collected something before this.”
“The usual, I suspect. Stamps. Coins.”
A sympathetic smile. “I tried stamps; they were too distant for me, though I collected coins for several years. Not mint, used. I wanted to see the wear, feel the hands jingling the coins in a pocket, judging their weight. It made me a laughing-stock in the coin world, my insistence on grubby, used coins. But then I came into a collection of coins from Merle Banton. You know of him?”
“A bit.” Banton was a brief horror in the thirties. A railroad bull, he savaged a dozen rail-riding depression wanderers, leaving them strewn beside tracks from St Louis to Santa Fe.
“Suddenly the coins came alive, Mr Ransburg. I discovered Mr Banton often put his coins in his mouth, swooshing them from cheek to cheek. I wondered, had he coins in his mouth when he felt the need to…”
She seemed lost in thought for several seconds. “What started you collecting?” she finally said. “What was the first?”
I searched my past: third or fourth grade, running through a meadow with a homemade net, cheesecloth pinned around a wire clothes hanger.
“Butterflies,” I answered.
She smiled. “So many of us do. Start with Lepidoptera, that is. I loved the Monarchs best. When I was a girl I found a chrysalis hanging in a bush. It was like a small ornament, precious and vulnerable. I plucked it from the branch and brought it home. As the days passed I watched how it seemed to sense the events ahead, its tiny heart beating against the green casing. Then, of course, the inevitable, the tearing from confines, wings unfolding. Flight. That very day I decided to preserve that moment forever, collect others. I still have that collection, Mr Ransburg. Would you care to see it?”
“I would be honored.”
She stooped low to open a drawer in the credenza and removed a glass-covered display box. She pursed her lips and blew dust from its surface.
“They took several years to acquire,” she said, handing me the box. “But each one is perfect. It’s the timing, you know.”
I looked down. In three rows of four, a dozen green chrysalides, green-brown wrappers as delicate as parchment, sides rent. From each tear, a butterfly was half emerged, wings beginning to unfold.
“Beautiful,” I murmured.
She looked away to allow me a personal moment with the collection, then returned it to the vault. She again took my arm, walked me back toward the residence.
“I have collected far and wide, Mr Ransburg. I have some beautiful things, some improbable and magical things. I can be your mentor, if you let me.”
I let my mouth drop open, mock-astonished at her generosity. “That would be incredible, Mrs Baines. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“We’ll improve each other - you will learn, and I will enjoy watching you, as though starting the journey again.”
Marcella Baines turned and pressed her lips to mine, her kiss light and chaste. She drew back, looked at her watch and smiled sadly. “We have much time to learn from one another, Mr Ransburg. But now I’m late for my bridge club. Boring old ladies with lives as gray as their hair, but one must keep up appearances. Shall we meet again soon - say Friday?”
“That would be wonderful.”
“There’s so much for you to learn. And this is an incredible time in collecting, a golden age. Have you heard of a man named Marsden Hexcamp?”
“I, uh, just a little. Rumors.”
She smiled a thousand watts in my direction. “Here’s something to add to your rumor chest, Mr Ransburg: Marsden Hexcamp is almost alive again. How about that?”