An older man answered the door, and one of the policemen introduced himself and Dr. Mitchell and explained the reason for their visit. When they shook hands, Mitchell felt the tensile strength in his grip, the rough calluses in his palm. The fellow spoke with a Quebecois accent and seemed put out by the intrusion on his privacy. “You mean to say that your friends actually broke into the barn to see the puppets? Whatever for? You can come by anytime and have a look around for yourself.”
“Did you notice anything unusual last night?” the policeman asked. “Any signs of disturbance?”
A booming bark came from the back of the house. “Tais-toi! Quiet! That dog, he sees and hears everything,” the Québec man said. “If your friends were here, he would have howled his fool head off.”
The policeman looked anxiously around the edge of the door for the dog. “And you were here all alone last night?”
“My wife, just the two of us. She is out shopping at the moment.”
Mitchell asked, “Not a blond-haired boy and a tall redheaded girl?”
“Ah, we have some help in the summer, but we are closed for the season. I can show you around if you like, but it is dead as can be.”
The man fetched his coat, and they walked toward the puppet museum. He asked Mitchell, “So, you are a doctor?”
“A Ph.D. in the classics. I teach Latin and Greek.”
“The great myths,” the Quebecois said. “I have a treat in store for you.”
They went into the barn and turned left, past the stalls, and went room by room with the quiet and uncanny dolls, neat and undiminished. Some looked as if they had been positioned and forgotten about for years. Dust covered their paper heads and gathered in the seams and wrinkles of their painted faces and hands. He led them past exhibits from children’s shows, Japanese bunraku, and fairy tales to a short flight of stairs into the barn’s great loft. Puppets crowded every available space, standing shoulder to shoulder and arranged to the rafters, great giant effigies intermixed with tiny marionettes. The puppeteer led Mitchell to the wall adjoining the silo where two new boards had been nailed in place next to the weathered gray wood.
“Ah, here is what I wanted to show you, Dr. Mitchell.” With a showman’s flourish, he pulled back a purple scrim. Stacked in two rows were a half-dozen goat-footed men and six women girded for battle.
“Satyrs and maenads,” Mitchell said.
“We used to do a spring bacchanal in my younger days. Not so often anymore. Sic transit gloria mundi.”
“And that must be old Silenus.” Mitchell pointed to the fat philosopher, silent as a stoic. A little black donkey looked like it was sleeping at his feet.
A worn and ancient puppet stood beneath a bell jar on a pedestal. The puppeteer lifted the glass. “I call him the Original. He taught me everything I know.”
Mitchell stared at the primitive puppet, wondering how the girl could be afraid of a mere toy, a little god whose time had long since passed.
From the loft, they traveled down two flights to the sheepcote at the back of the barn to see the beautiful Chinese dragon ready for the New Year, and they finished their tour by walking through the stalls. They found no trace of a break-in, no sign at all that anyone had been there the night before. “Everything in order, gentlemen?” the puppeteer asked.
Mitchell recognized the Quatre Mains puppets from the video, the giant queen, the roly-poly man with the walrus mustache. He asked the policeman to take a photograph on his phone of the puppet who looked like Kay. The one who had reminded Theo and Egon and Dolores of the missing woman. He dared to touch her once, lightly, on her cheek, but she was only paper. She was as beautiful as Theo had described.
The terrors began that night for Mitchell, the twisted nightmares and delirium. Just before he checked himself into the hospital, he received an e-mail from an Inspector Thompson from Québec. “Thank you for the photograph of the puppet. Sgt. Foucault says he cannot see the resemblance, but I find it looks very much like Kay Harper, and I have included it in her file. There was another puppet in the background. A juggler? Reminded me of my brother. Funny how our sorrows play such tricks on our memories.”
Files and forms. Mitchell put Theo’s notebook on top of the manuscript in the box. The department had long ago closed the files from his classes, the materials related to his employment. All that remained fit in a simple cardboard box, a few personal effects, a dog-eared manuscript of his Muybridge translation, a photograph from their wedding day, and from Québec, a fleur-de-lis paperweight etched with the motto Je me souviens. He thought of the woman who had nursed him through the worst nightmares. When they discharged him from long-term care, Mitchell was too distraught to tell her how he felt. Perhaps he could try to find her. How difficult would it be? Maybe she could tell him what happened to Theo and Egon. Outside the snow covered the grounds, gathered in the branches of the trees, making everything new again. “I am better,” Mitchell told himself. “I will forget all this in time and start again.”