Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories Read online

  Laurie’s silence was ominous. His arm around her, he brought her into the living room. The overstuffed velour furniture that used to welcome his body when he settled in with a book was still in place but, like the wallpaper, seemed soiled and shabby.

  Mike’s forehead furrowed into a troubled frown. “Honey, I’m sorry. Coming here was a lousy idea. Do you want to go to a motel? We passed a couple that looked pretty decent.”

  Laurie smiled up at him. “Mike, I want to stay here. I want you to share with me all those wonderful summers you spent in this place. I want to pretend your grandmother was mine. Then maybe I’ll get over whatever is happening to me.”

  Laurie’s grandmother had raised her. A fear-ridden neurotic, she had tried to instill in Laurie fear of the dark, fear of strangers, fear of planes and cars, fear of animals. When Laurie and Mike met two years ago, she’d shocked and amused him by reciting some of the litany of hair-raising stories that her grandmother had fed her on a daily basis.

  “How did you turn out so normal, so much fun?” Mike used to ask her.

  “I was damned if I’d let her turn me into a certified nut.” But the last four months had proved that Laurie had not escaped after all, that there was psychological damage that needed repairing.

  Now Mike smiled down at her, loving the vivid sea-green eyes, the thick dark lashes that threw shadows on her porcelain skin, the way tendrils of chestnut hair framed her oval face.

  “You’re so darn pretty,” he said, “and sure I’ll tell you all about Grandma. You only knew her when she was an invalid. I’ll tell you about fishing with her in a storm, about jogging around the lake and her yelling for me to keep up the pace, about finally managing to outswim her when she was sixty.”

  Laurie took his face in her hands. “Help me to be like her.”

  Together they brought in their suitcases and the groceries they had purchased along the way. Mike went down to the basement. He grimaced when he glanced at the coalbin. It was fairly large, a four-feet-wide by six-feet-long plankboard enclosure situated next to the furnace and directly under the window that served as an opening for the chute from the delivery truck. Mike remembered how when he was eight he’d helped his grandmother replace some of the boards on the bin. Now they all looked rotted.

  “Nights get cold even in the summer but we’ll always be plenty warm, Mike,” his grandmother would say cheerily as she let him shovel coal into the old blackened furnace.

  Mike remembered the bin as always heaped with shiny black nuggets. Now it was nearly empty. There was barely enough coal for two or three days. He reached for the shovel.

  The furnace was still serviceable. Its rumbling sound quickly echoed throughout the house. The ducts thumped and rattled as hot air wheezed through them.

  In the kitchen Laurie had unpacked the groceries and begun to make a salad. Mike grilled a steak. They opened a bottle of Bordeaux and sat side by side at the old enamel table, their shoulders companionably touching.

  They were on their way up the staircase to bed when Mike spotted the note from the real estate agent on the foyer table: “Hope you find everything in order. Sorry about the weather. Coal delivery on Friday.”

  • • •

  They decided to use his grandmother’s room. “She loved that metal-frame bed,” Mike said. “Always claimed that there wasn’t a night she didn’t sleep like a baby in it.”

  “Let’s hope it works that way for me.” Laurie sighed. There were clean sheets in the linen closet but they felt damp and clammy. The boxspring and mattress smelled musty.

  “Warm me up,” Laurie whispered, shivering as they pulled the covers over them.

  “My pleasure.”

  They fell asleep in each other’s arms. At three o’clock Laurie began to shriek, a piercing, wailing scream that filled the house. “Go away. Go away. I won’t. I won’t.”

  It was dawn before she stopped sobbing. “They’re getting closer,” she told Mike. “They’re getting closer.”

  • • •

  The rain persisted throughout the day. The outside thermometer registered thirty-eight degrees. They read all morning curled up on the velour couches. Mike watched as Laurie began to unwind. When she fell into a deep sleep after lunch, he went into the kitchen and called the psychiatrist.

  “Her sense that they’re getting closer may be a good sign,” the doctor told him. “Possibly she’s on the verge of a breakthrough. I’m convinced the root of these nightmares is in all the old wives’ tales her grandmother told Laurie. If we can isolate exactly which one caused this fear, we’ll be able to exorcise it and all the others. Watch her carefully, but remember. She’s a strong girl and she wants to get well. That’s half the battle.”

  When Laurie woke up, they decided to inventory the house. “Dad said we can have anything we want,” Mike reminded her. “A couple of the tables are antiques and that clock on the mantel is a gem.” There was a storage closet in the foyer. They began dragging its contents into the living room. Laurie, looking about eighteen in jeans and a sweater, her hair tied loosely in a chignon, became animated as she went through them. “The local artists were pretty lousy,” she laughed, “but the frames are great. Can’t you just see them on our walls?”

  Last year as a wedding present, Mike’s family had bought them a loft in Greenwich Village. Until four months ago, they’d spent their spare time going to garage sales and auctions looking for bargains. Since the nightmares began, Laurie had lost interest in furnishing the apartment. Mike crossed his fingers. Maybe she was starting to get better.

  On the top shelf buried behind patchwork quilts he discovered a Victrola. “Oh, my God, I’d forgotten about that,” he said. “What a find! Look. Here are a bunch of old records.”

  He did not notice Laurie’s sudden silence as he brushed the layers of dust from the Victrola and lifted the lid. The Edison trademark, a dog listening to a tube and the caption His Master’s Voice was on the inside of the lid. “It even has a needle in it,” Mike said. Quickly he placed a record on the turntable, cranked the handle, slid the starter to “On” and watched as the disk began to revolve. Carefully he placed the arm with its thin, delicate needle in the first groove.

  The record was scratched. The singers’ voices were male but high-pitched, almost to the point of falsetto. The effect was out of synch, music being played too rapidly. “I can’t make out the words,” Mike said. “Do you recognize it?”

  “It’s ‘Chinatown,’ ” Laurie said. “Listen.” She began to sing with the record, her lovely soprano voice leading the chorus. Hearts that know no other world, drifting to and fro. Her voice broke. Gasping, she screamed, “Turn it off, Mike. Turn it off now! ” She covered her ears with her hands and sank onto her knees, her face deathly white.

  Mike yanked the needle away from the record. “Honey, what is it?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  • • •

  That night the nightmare took a different form. This time the approaching figures were singing “Chinatown” and in falsetto voices demanding Laurie come sing with them.

  • • •

  At dawn they sat in the kitchen sipping coffee. “Mike, it’s coming back to me,” Laurie told him. “When I was little. My grandmother had one of those Victrolas. She had that same record. I asked her where the people were who were singing. I thought they had to be hiding in the house somewhere. She took me down to the basement and pointed to the coalbin. She said the voices were coming from there. She swore to me that the people who were singing were in the coalbin.”

  Mike put down his coffee cup. “Good God!”

  “I never went down to the basement after that. I was afraid. Then we moved to an apartment and she gave the Victrola away. I guess that’s why I forgot.” Laurie’s eyes began to blaze with hope. “Mike, maybe that old fear caught up with me for some reason. I was so exhausted by the time the show closed. Right after that the nightmares started. Mike, that record was made years an
d years ago. The singers are probably all dead by now. And I certainly have learned how sound is reproduced. Maybe it’s going to be all right.”

  “You bet it’s going to be all right.” Mike stood up and reached for her hand. “You game for something? There’s a coalbin downstairs. I want you to come down with me and look at it.”

  Laurie’s eyes filled with panic, then she bit her lip. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Mike studied Laurie’s face as her eyes darted around the basement. Through her eyes he realized how dingy it was. The single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. The cinder-block walls glistening with dampness. The cement dust from the floor that clung to their bedroom slippers. The concrete steps that led to the set of metal doors that opened to a backyard. The rusty bolt that secured them looked as though it had not been opened in years.

  The coalbin was adjacent to the furnace at the front end of the house. Mike felt Laurie’s nails dig into his palm as they walked over to it.

  “We’re practically out of coal,” he told her. “It’s a good thing they’re supposed to deliver today. Tell me, honey, what do you see here?”

  “A bin. About ten shovelfuls of coal at best. A window. I remember when the delivery truck came how they put the chute through the window and the coal roared down. I used to wonder if it hurt the singers when it fell on them.” Laurie tried to laugh. “No visible sign of anyone in residence here. Nightmares at rest, please God.”

  Hand in hand they went back upstairs. Laurie yawned. “I’m so tired, Mike. And you, poor guy, haven’t had a decent night’s rest in months because of me. Why don’t we just go back to bed and sleep the day away. I bet anything I won’t wake up with a dream.”

  They drifted off to sleep, her hand on his chest, his arms encircling her. “Sweet dreams, love,” he whispered.

  “I promise they will be. I love you, Mike. Thank you for everything.”

  • • •

  The sound of coal rushing down the chute awakened Mike. He blinked. Behind the shades, light was streaming in. Automatically he glanced at his watch. Nearly three o’clock. God, he really must have been bushed. Laurie was already up. He pulled khaki slacks on, stuffed his feet into sneakers, listened for sounds from the bathroom. There were none. Laurie’s robe and slippers were on the chair. She must be already dressed. With sudden unreasoning dread, Mike yanked a sweatshirt over his head.

  The living room. The dining room. The kitchen. Their coffee cups were still on the table, the chairs pushed back as they left them. Mike’s throat closed. The hurtling sound of the coal was lessening. The coal. Maybe. He took the cellar stairs two at a time. Coal dust was billowing through the basement. Shiny black nuggets of coal were heaped high in the bin. He heard the snap of the window being closed. He stared down at the footsteps on the floor. The imprints of his sneakers. The side-by-side impressions left when he and Laurie had come down this morning in their slippers.

  And then he saw the step-by-step imprints of Laurie’s bare feet, the lovely high-arched impressions of her slender, fine-boned feet. The impressions stopped at the coalbin. There was no sign of them returning to the stairs.

  The bell rang, the shrill, high-pitched, insistent gong-like sound that had always annoyed him and amused his grandmother. Mike raced up the stairs. Laurie. Let it be Laurie.

  The truck driver had a bill in his hand. “Sign for the delivery, sir.”

  The delivery. Mike grabbed the man’s arm. “When you started the coal down the chute, did you look into the bin?”

  Puzzled faded blue eyes in a pleasant weather-beaten face looked squarely at him. “Yeah, sure, I glanced in to make sure how much you needed. You were just about out. You didn’t have enough for the day. The rain’s over but it’s gonna stay real cold.”

  Mike tried to sound calm. “Would you have seen if someone was in the coalbin? I mean, it’s dark in the basement. Would you have noticed if a slim young woman had maybe fainted in there?” He could read the deliveryman’s mind. He thinks I’m drunk or on drugs. “Don’t you get it?” Mike shouted. “My wife is missing. My wife is missing.”

  • • •

  For days they searched for Laurie. Feverishly, Mike searched with them. He walked every inch of the heavily wooded areas around the cottage. He sat, hunched and shivering on the deck as they dragged the lake. He stood unbelieving as the newly delivered coal was shoveled from the bin and heaped onto the basement floor.

  Surrounded by policemen, all of whose names and faces made no impression on him, he spoke with Laurie’s doctor. In a flat, disbelieving tone he told the doctor about Laurie’s fear of the voices in the coalbin. When he was finished, the police chief spoke to the doctor. When he hung up, he gripped Mike’s shoulder. “We’ll keep looking.”

  Four days later a diver found Laurie’s body tangled in weeds in the lake. Death by drowning. She was wearing her nightgown. Bits of coal dust were still clinging to her skin and hair. The police chief tried and could not soften the stark tragedy of her death. “That was why her footsteps stopped at the bin. She must have gotten into it and climbed out of the window. It’s pretty wide, you know, and she was a slender girl. I’ve talked again to her doctor. She probably would have committed suicide before this if you hadn’t been there for her. Terrible the way people screw up their children. Her doctor said that her grandmother petrified her with crazy superstitions before the poor kid was old enough to toddle.”

  “She talked to me. She was getting there.” Mike heard his protests, heard himself making arrangements for Laurie’s body to be cremated.

  The next morning as he was packing, the real estate agent came over, a sensibly dressed, white-haired, thin-faced woman whose brisk air did not conceal the sympathy in her eyes. “We have a buyer for the house,” she said. “I’ll arrange to have anything you want to keep shipped.”

  The clock. The antique tables. The pictures that Laurie had laughed over in their beautiful frames. Mike tried to picture going into the Greenwich Village loft alone and could not.

  “How about the Victrola?” the real estate agent asked. “It’s a real treasure.”

  Mike had placed it back in the storage closet. Now he took it out, seeing Laurie’s terror, hearing her begin to sing “Chinatown,” her voice blending with the falsetto voices on the old record. “I don’t know if I want it,” he said.

  The real estate agent looked disapproving. “It’s a collector’s item. I have to be off. Just let me know about it.”

  Mike watched as her car disappeared around the winding driveway. Laurie, I want you. He lifted the lid of the Victrola as he had five days ago, an eon ago. He cranked the handle, found the “Chinatown” record, placed it on the turntable, turned the switch to the “On” position. He watched as the record picked up speed, then released the arm and placed the needle in the starting groove.

  “Chinatown, my Chinatown . . .”

  Mike felt his body go cold. No! No! Unable to move, unable to breathe, he stared at the spinning record.

  “. . . hearts that know no other world drifting to and fro . . .”

  Over the scratchy, falsetto voices of the long-ago singers, Laurie’s exquisite soprano was filling the room with its heart-stopping, plaintive beauty.

  The Cape Cod Masquerade

  It was on an August afternoon shortly after they arrived at their rented cottage in the village of Dennis on Cape Cod that Alvirah Meehan noticed that there was something very odd about their next-door neighbor, a painfully thin young woman who appeared to be in her late twenties.

  After Alvirah and Willy looked around their cottage a bit, remarking favorably about the four-poster maple bed, the hooked rugs, the cheery kitchen and the fresh, sea-scented breeze, they unpacked their expensive new clothes from their matching Vuitton luggage. Willy then poured an ice-cold beer for each to enjoy on the deck of the house, which overlooked Cape Cod Bay.

  Willy, his rotund body eased onto a padded wicker chaise lounge, remarked that it was going to be one heck of a sun
set, and thank God for a little peace. Ever since they had won forty million dollars in the New York State lottery, it seemed to Willy, Alvirah had been a walking lightning rod. First she went to the famous Cypress Point Spa in California and nearly got murdered. Then they had gone on a cruise together and—wouldn’t you know—the man who sat next to them at the community table in the dining room ended up dead as a mackerel. Still, with the accumulated wisdom of his years, Willy was sure that in Cape Cod, at least, they’d have the quiet he’d been searching for. If Alvirah wrote an article for the New York Globe about this vacation, it would have to do with the weather and the fishing.

  During his narration, Alvirah was sitting at the picnic table, a companionable few feet away from Willy’s stretched-out form. She wished she’d remembered to put on a sun hat. The beautician at Sassoon’s had warned her against getting sun on her hair. “It’s such a lovely rust shade now, Mrs. Meehan. We don’t want it to get those nasty yellow streaks, do we?”

  Since recovering from the attempt on her life at the spa, Alvirah had regained all the weight she’d paid three thousand dollars to lose and was again a comfortable size somewhere between a 14 and a 16. But Willy constantly observed that when he put his arms around her, he knew he was holding a woman—not one of those half-starved zombies you see in the fashion ads Alvirah was so fond of studying.

  Forty years of affectionately listening to Willy’s observations had left Alvirah with the ability to hear him with one ear and close him out with the other. Now as she gazed at the tranquil cottages perched atop the grass-and-sand embankment that served as a seawall, then down below at the sparkling blue-green water and the stretch of rock-strewn beach, she had the troubled feeling that maybe Willy was right. Beautiful as the Cape was, and even though it was a place she had always longed to visit, she might not find a newsworthy story here for her editor, Charley Evans.

  Two years ago Charley had sent a New York Globe reporter to interview the Meehans on how it felt to win forty million dollars. What would they do with it? Alvirah was a cleaning woman. Willy was a plumber. Would they continue in their jobs?