nine

 

 

BY THE TIME Mr. Mars was sutured, bandaged and snoring to bring down the walls of Jericho, the morning’s drizzle had turned to a moderate snowfall. With a biting wind snapping its jaws into any who dared venture outdoors, most of the carnies had the good sense to stay in their homes.

So, of course, Crash insisted we snoop around Miss Proust’s wagon sleuthing for clues. “Before the snow has a chance to cover it,” he’d said. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and turned my nose to the ground, searching for any hint of a reason to be upright.

“Artemesia said she didn’t hear anything,” Crash informed me. “That Jonathan roused her sometime after three-thirty or so.”

“Did she say if they came in through the door?”

Haus nodded. “The dress was hanging just inside the door and to the left.”

We loomed over the stairs, gazing at the muddy shapes on the steps. “Crash,” I said heavily, “any prints we might’ve been able to find have been spoiled a hundred times over. You and Artemesia popped up and back a time or two. Jonny, too. God knows who else.”

“The paths aren’t much better,” he confirmed darkly. “We’ve been up and down them all day, we’d never find a clear set that we could tie to our vandal.”

He leaped up into Miss Proust’s wagon and eyed the doorknob, the floorboards.

“What’s the door frame look like, Crash?”

Haus ran a hand down the wood. “Clean. No splintering. Don’t think they took the trouble to bust it open with brute force.”

“Lock picker?”

“There are some scratches on the plate,” he said. “Just as easily made by a set of tools as by a key held by a drunk. But there’s no sign that someone hunched before the lock and took the time to fiddle it. Most likely, Dandy, that Miss Proust simply left the door unlocked for her fiancé’s convenience.”

“I’d ask her, but I think she’d bite the head off of anyone who intruded on her right now.”

Crash eyed Mars’s tent, clearly debating if he should take the chance of disturbing a woman who’d just had her dress ruined the day before the wedding, and her fiancé knifed in the process.

“Don’t do it,” I warned.

He blew out a cloudy sigh. Then he shut the door behind him and skipped down the stairs with nimble ease.

“Dammit, Dandy,” he cursed. We shuffled toward our wagon. “Do you ever tire of being right?”

“Why do you think I so enjoy your company, Crash?”

He smirked. “We didn’t get to chat yesterday about your venture into town. You left the party rather early. And abruptly. With company.”

I shook my head. “Not like that, Crash.”

“Wouldn’t mind if it was, you know.”

I didn’t want to get into a rehash of my less-than-stellar evening with ghosts. “Did you talk to Maeve and the Professor any more while I was hauling my ass along the tracks?”

“I did. What did you think, I’d just sit on my thumbs?”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“Damn shame you think so little of me.”

Crash retrieved the key from around his neck and unlocked our vardo. “Shall we trade information, then?”

“I reckon. And maybe you can tell me what you think about those stick figures dancing on Miss Proust’s dress.”

“Excellent!” The door slammed behind him. “Let’s chat.”

I sank into my hammock and let it sway a moment. Crash stoked a small fire in the stove and soon the wagon was warm enough to thaw my thoughts.

“I met with a roadman at the boarding house who was kind enough to tell me that two of them signs have meaning to his folk.”

Crash danced in place and plucked at the strings of his fiddle. “Oh, do tell.”

“One of ’em, the one carved into the floor of the Professor’s wagon? Means ‘orphan,’ if this one is to be believed.”

“Fascinating. And the other?”

“‘Murder.’”

“Spectacular!”

Crash whirled about and put the violin in its case.

“How is that spectacular, Crash?”

“Well it’s more fun, obviously. More interesting than any of the alternatives, really.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You don’t honestly find this whole ordeal more fun for the hope of murder and death, do you?”

“What else were we going to do with the time?”

I closed my eyes and sighed, weary. “What did you find out?”

“Ah-ha! That’s another bit of fun, you see. It turns out that there is more to the Professor’s story than he’d care to tell us.”

“No shit?”

“Surely you can contain your sarcasm for a moment or two more, Dandy. It is rather unbecoming. Anyway, McGann did find his ward trying to rob his vardo. That much is true. But he failed to tell us that the girl suffers from acute amnesia.”

“How so?”

“When I spoke with her, she confided that she had been living rough for the better part of a year prior to her run-in with the Professor some six months ago. So that’s eighteen months of her life that she can remember vividly and with ease. Anything before her time on the road? Lost.”

“Lost?”

Crash nodded cheerfully. “She has always been Maeve—the street urchin. She can’t remember a home, a family. Where did she come from? Was she born full-fledged on the street like some hobo Athena? It’s delicious, Dandy!”

“You realize you’re taking delight in the fact that a girl can’t remember her kin?”

“Yes! It’s a puzzle! A glorious puzzle!”

“Is that all you found, Crash?”

“Well, for the time being. I am going to write to Adele and see if she’ll do me a favor.”

“I’m sure that’s all you’re going to ask,” I grumbled.

He smoothed his eyebrows and looked smug. “A man can always hope.”

I rolled on my side, putting my back to him and his lecherous glee. I spent the day drowsing, sleeping off the surges of adrenaline and ignoring my roommate’s clatter. By the time nightfall rolled around, the snow was coming down hard, with a wind howling to the moon.

 

 

THE PROUST/MARS union had to be postponed on account of the ground being whiter than the most pristine virgin’s wedding dress. A blizzard came through and coated our little camp with more snow than I’d seen in all my days of living. The paths connecting the tents and wagons filled with fresh powder and treacherous ice. Anyone with a lick of sense hunkered down and kept to the warmth of their home.

After the first day of being snowed in, we’d run through what little food we kept in the wagon, but it was genial enough. Our windows iced over, but we stuck our heads out from time to time for fresh air. Like groundhogs, the carnies poked up from their dens to check on the weather, on one another. Since the wedding had been diverted into 1936, we spent the last hours of 1935 listening to the others in the camp. Music, discordant but lively, came from around the grounds. Cheering, laughing. Sounds of joy. Crash and I held our own celebration with some reefer, sharing secrets men daren’t speak among civilized folk whilst simultaneously attempting to solve the problems of the mad, spinning world.

On the second day, Haus seemed intent on playing his fiddle in a terrible harmony with the braying wind. Though the gale shook our vardo to the point I thought the hodgepodge wagon would disintegrate to flinders, we survived with the roof still over our heads.

However, come sundown, Crash and I were like a couple of bears sharing a cave—and neither of us was too particularly keen on being awake in the dead of winter. I was content reading a stack of tattered pulps, but a toasty fire in Crash’s brainpan led to trembling hands that even a drag off a spliff wouldn’t quiet.

Instead of smoking his mind to peace as was his nature, Haus took up most of the floor dissecting some contraption that looked like a cross between a frying pan and a child’s guitar. What little body there was on the thing was swamped by a rectangular metallic plate across the lowest curve, covering the strings. A neck longer than a giraffe’s stretched up to a head with six tuning knobs and a plaque declaring the thing a Rickenbacker Electro. The strings should’ve been taut down that neck, but Crash had surgically spread them apart so they stretched off in all directions.

“Do you mind?” he snapped at me.

I stared at him quizzically. “Do I mind what exactly?”

He didn’t bother to look up at me, just kept his eyes on the Electro and sneered. “That incessant scratching. It’s like having my ears scoured with a steel bottlebrush.”

“It’s pencil and paper, Crash,” I sighed.

“It’s distracting. We’ve been trapped in this wagon for a month—”

“It’s been three days.”

“—and my mind is a flowering garden of possibilities. Ideas. Work. Never a stagnant moment. And yet you insist on introducing thorns. They snag my attention, pry me away from my work, tear at my very sanity. Briars you’ve wrought with the lead of your damnable pencil.”

I blinked at him in utter amazement—a sight lost on him on account of him still studying his unusable frying pan. “You might be the most dramatic sonofabitch I’ve ever laid eyes on. You know this about yourself, right?”

“Bothersome fiend,” he spat.

I grinned and went back to my scribbling.

“What the devil are you doing anyway, Dandy?”

“It’s called writing, Crash.”

“Writing?”

“Yes. A form of communication where one uses drawn letters to spell out words and phrases, and generally have a conversation with a person not directly present at the time of composition. You might want to try it sometime,” I added. “I’m sure Moira would be pleased to hear from her wayward uncle.”

Silence. Sweet, glorious silence from Haus.

I peeked to see if he’d keeled over dead. No such luck. He stared at the wiry guts of his project. “What are you writing?”

“A letter. Or a journal entry. The two aren’t all that dissimilar for me,” I admitted.

“Explain.”

I tucked my pencil into the small sheaf of papers I’d put together, rolled it up and stashed it into my bag. “Back in my Army days a lot of the guys wrote home to their sweethearts. Or their mamas. I didn’t have either, but it was dreadful to try to keep all of those stories in my head. I needed to tell someone about the trip into Château-Thierry, about the first time I killed a man, or lost one in the medic tent. Or how our unit single-handedly introduced jazz to the British boys.”

“So you wrote letters to who?”

“No one in particular. Myself, mayhaps.”

“Does it help?”

“Sometimes. It’s like they say, confession being good for a soul. Mine won’t ever be pristine, but I might be able to scrub off some of the dirtiest spots with a little bit of lead or charcoal from time to time.”

Crash nodded humbly. “Scribble on, my friend.”

I regarded the roll of papers. I’d been writing about my time with the circus. Specifically my time with Crash as a friend. Thinking about it, I decided I didn’t need to dwell there when I had a living specimen of Sanford Haus before me.

“What’s that contraption?” I asked.

“An electrified guitar,” he said proudly.

“Where’d you pick that up?”

“Found it in storage a few days ago when we went to dig out the carousel. Glad we didn’t try putting that thing together. This snow would’ve been frightful on the gearwork. You have no idea the things that are in that shed, Dandy!”

“What good’s an electrified guitar?”

Crash studied the frying pan. “Well, I’m not sure. But the mechanisms are simple and intriguing. I don’t care so much for the guitar itself, but what else could I do with the concept? Would my violin take a similar wiring and give off the same distorted sound? Can I create illusions of sound using a few magnets and wires?”

I shook my head. “Your mind does strange things, Crash. Strange, but fascinating things indeed.”