“A broken window in the back door. Kids making mischief. Nothing taken, as far as I can tell. Just the inconvenience of it all. Vaughn’s been after me to get a security system installed, but I just hate the idea of it, not to even mention the expense. But I have to admit it’s a bit worrisome. Things like this didn’t used to happen in town.”
Was that true? Or did things like that happen and people just forgot? Had most of the townspeople already started the blurring of memory required to forget about Lucy, recollections faded as surely as the green ribbons tied around trees now limp and nearly white while my own memory haunted me daily? The memories plagued me mostly at night, but they never evaporated, even with dawn. I unfastened the straps of my backpack and took out my camera.
Elaine limped to the riser, her Birkenstocks scuffling along the floor as she went.
“If you’d like, you can sit,” I offered. “I can get you a chair.”
“Oh, this is fine.” She tossed her paper on the chair. “It’s walking that gives me problems. Standing’s fine. By the way, did Valentina Walsh get hold of you?”
“Valentina? No. Why?”
“I ran into her yesterday, and she said she was coming to see you. Well, be prepared. Forewarned is forearmed.”
I had to smile. Sophie used to say that with the wind at her back, Valentina could give a nor’easter a run for its money. I wondered what she could want with me.
“She has an idea,” Elaine said, as if I had spoken. “I hate to spoil her surprise, but like I said, forewarned and all. Well, you know how she fancies herself a poet?”
“Yes.” I recalled the sentimental, rhymed couplets that appeared on occasion in the Port Fortune Sun Times, leading Sophie to suggest once that the editor must be a close relative or accepting bribes.
“She wants to write a poem to go with each of the people you paint. She sees them as sort of companion pieces to the project.”
“Oh Lord,” I murmured.
“Exactly,” Elaine said. Then, after a minute, “I suppose you know her story.”
“Old Glory?” I said.
“Her story. No? That’s right, you moved into town after that. Sometime in the early nineties, correct?”
“Ninety-two.”
“Yes. Well, it all happened long before that. Still, I’m surprised you haven’t heard. You know how this town is for gossip, and she gave them grist for the mill for quite some time.” She looked up toward the skylights, lost momentarily in thought.
“What happened?”
“She always has been a little—well, not exactly strange—but unique.”
My curiosity was awakened. I set the camera on the worktable.
“People put it down to her being a change-of-life baby. I think her mother was in her late forties when she was pregnant, and even as a girl Valentina was different. Eccentric, you know? For instance, she didn’t start talking until she was almost four. And when she was about sixteen she started to dress completely in white. Summer. Winter. Didn’t matter. All in white. Shoes and everything. Pretending to be Emily Dickinson or something. And she’d talk all whispery, so soft you could barely hear her, like a mouse she was.”
I tried and failed to imagine the bold and bossy Valentina as subdued and mouselike.
“Naturally, right after the accident people were worried about her, afraid she’d disappear completely, have a total come-apart, but the funny thing is that just the opposite happened, a complete U-turn. She was nineteen at the time and started wearing so much jewelry she looked like a Christmas tree shot up with steroids. And scarves enough to give Isadora Duncan a run for her money. Then she started ordering people around, acting like she’d been elected mayor.”
“She was in an accident?”
“Not her. Her fiancé. Drowned. The day before they were supposed to marry.” Again Elaine paused in thought before continuing. “There was gossip, people being people and all. Some talk that it wasn’t an accident. That he—James Wells was his name, the youngest son of Ellie and Peter Wells. You must know them. They own the gallery on West Main. Well, the talk was that James committed suicide. The strange thing was that his passing seemed to let something loose inside of Valentina. She was like a creature set free.” She grinned and added, “Not that that improved her poetry a whit.”
I tried to wrap my mind around the whole story: the quiet girl in white, the boy who drowned, the wild woman who now wrote drivel verse.
“Well, there’s nothing for it,” Elaine said, sweeping her cane like a golf club in an arc an inch from the surface of the riser. “There’ll be no stopping her with this new poetry idea. Once she gets a hold of something it’s best to just take yourself out of her path.”
“Yes.” I pictured Valentina’s face and pondered the idea of asking her to pose. She was a little old for Saint Joan, but perhaps some other saint of a fierce and fiery nature. Or maybe, it occurred to me, maybe I could capture her as a mature Joan, the woman the real Joan hadn’t lived to become. I wondered if she would be open to the idea. When I’d begun the project, I’d wondered how the people of Port Fortune would respond to my request to pose, but their reception had been more positive than I’d foreseen, and several people had even called to volunteer. Thus far, only one person had refused. The teenager in the park. I replayed the scene. How I had introduced myself to the boy and explained about the project, although most everyone in town had heard of it because of Cardinal Kneeland’s publicity campaign and the stories that had appeared in both the local and Boston papers. When I’d asked the boy if he would be willing to pose, the request had clearly disturbed him. He had shaken his head violently. No, he’d said, and then had left the playground so quickly it seemed more an escape than a departure. I wondered if I should track him down and approach him again. There was something haunting about the teen. And his age would be a plus. So far Rose of Lima was the only one under twenty to be represented on the panels.
The boy would make a perfect Saint Sebastian.
I pondered the idea while I focused on Elaine’s hands, her swollen and arthritic knuckles clasped in prayer.