“Don’t just thank me,” she said, suddenly turning so serious that Sayers found himself reacting as if she’d unexpectedly shown him a glimpse of a knife. She glanced in the direction they both knew her husband to be, and said, “If anything happens to him, I’ll hold you responsible. You don’t really think I believe that this is all about two Irish boys? I don’t know what’s going on between the two of you. But if anything happens to cause him harm, may the Lord help you.”
It was probably the Buffalo Bill dime novel handshake that had ensured Sayers’ extended welcome. The Beckers worried about their son, there was no doubting that. Robert’s intelligence was undeniable, his emotions profound; but he rarely showed one or expressed the other, and so was misunderstood by almost everyone outside of the family.
There was a new doctor at Friends’ Asylum up in Oxford Township, some five miles to the north of Philadelphia. He’d been recommended to them as a reputable specialist in emotional disturbance. Elisabeth had waited over a month for an appointment to see him, and it fell that afternoon.
Sebastian took them to the station. Less than half an hour after the family had departed, a two-horse wagon drew up in the alley outside the Becker house. It was a carnival wagon, but the elaborate decoration on its side panels had so faded that the paint was almost indistinguishable from the dust that covered it. The team was driven by a boy of about fifteen years old. Beside him sat a much older man, wiry and with a walrus mustache that gave him a look of permanent melancholy. He had a telegram in his hand, against which he’d been checking the street names as they passed.
The boy kept hold of the reins and the man climbed down as Sayers went out to meet them. Sebastian had gone to the station to see his family onto the train, while Sayers had stayed behind to sit on the front stoop and wait for his possessions to arrive.
The man was named Axel Hansen, and he and his brother owned the boxing booth. His brother was the barker. The boy at the reins of the wagon was his grandson.
Together, Axel Hansen and Tom Sayers lifted the steamer trunk from the rear of the wagon and carried it to the house, and then returned for the suitcase. With the Willow Grove engagement cut short and no others lined up, the brothers had tried to find another pitch elsewhere in the city. That hadn’t worked out, and so the show was moving on.
When they’d managed all the baggage and set it down by the stoop, Axel Hansen said, “Well, Tom, it’s been a time, and no mistake.”
“It has,” agreed Tom.
Axel reached deep into the leg pocket of his voluminous trousers and brought out a bottle of Green River whiskey, unopened and with its seal intact. Holding it up, he said, “I do believe you forgot to pack this before you left us.”
“You know I didn’t forget it, Axel,” Sayers said. “And I appreciate the thought behind the gift. But hard liquor’s not the best thing to have in front of me right now. Why don’t you and the boys open it tonight and raise a glass to me?”
Axel’s watery blue eyes studied him. Some blue eyes are cold, and make their owner seem hard. With Axel’s, it was always as if he was on the verge of tears.
He said, “You cleanin’ up?”
“I think I might.”
Unoffended, Axel returned the bottle to its hiding place and said, “Then God bless you, Tom, and all who travel with you. I hope the day comes when you find who you’re lookin’ for.”
The two men embraced there in the middle of the sidewalk, and then Axel returned to his wagon.
“Always a place for you,” he called down from the seat.
“I know it,” Sayers replied, and raised his hand in farewell as the wagon set off to rejoin the rest of the show on its way out of town. When they’d turned the corner, Sayers went and sat on his trunk to await the family’s return.
The doctor had spent no more than ten minutes with Robert, and had then turned him over to his assistants for tests and observations that would take up the rest of the afternoon. Elisabeth wouldn’t leave him, so she and Frances stayed while Sebastian returned.
When he arrived back from the hospital, the sight of Sayers and his luggage by the doorstep made him feel like a mean-spirited host. But Sayers was a stranger to his family and hardly less of a stranger to Sebastian himself, and it had hardly seemed proper to give him the run of the house.
He unlocked the front door, and they carried the trunk inside and up the stairs into Frances’ room, which had been emptied of her more personal possessions to make it into guest quarters.
“We’ve a woman who collects the washing twice a week,” Sebastian told him. “If there’s anything you need to get clean, here’s your chance.”
“I may have been living in wagons and sleeping in my underwear,” Sayers said, “but one of the many things I’ve learned along the way is how to wash through a shirt.”
Sebastian watched as he opened up the trunk and, in the space of a couple of minutes, set out the few items that would make a corner of any place his own. A hairbrush, a few souvenirs, a picture for the mirror—the picture was a theatrical
“I take it that you don’t have another suit to wear?” he said.
“This one’s my best,” Sayers told him, and a look inside the trunk was proof he did not lie.
Sebastian said, “Don’t take offense at this, Sayers, but if you’re going to chase Louise through high society we need to make you a little more respectable.”
Sayers said, “First things first. I need a bathhouse and a barber.” He looked at his battered hands. “In my experience, the first step toward looking human is to start feeling like it.”
There was a barber within two blocks’ walk, and a public bathhouse just a couple of streetcar stops away. Sebastian began to offer Sayers money, but Sayers stopped him. He had a stash of bills in a secret pocket of the trunk. His emergency fund.
So Sebastian sent him on his way, waited ten minutes or so, and then went upstairs and performed a thorough search of the fighter’s trunk and suitcase, taking care to note how everything lay and to replace all as he found it.
In the trunk were two stolen Bibles that Sayers had been using to keep newspaper cuttings from all over the country, slipping them between the pages to keep them flat. All of the San Francisco cuttings could be found in Ecclesiastes. The first book of Kings told the story of a cold trail that he’d followed all the way up to Washington State. In the book of Job was a list of all the soup kitchens in Denver.
He would not throw in his lot with Sayers, but he would offer such support as would send him on his way with a goal to pursue. The prizefighter’s reappearance in his life had awakened all of the detective’s turbulent feelings over scenes he’d once witnessed. A rational man by inclination, he’d seen his world upturned by the seemingly supernatural. He wanted his world to make sense again. And if there was a slim chance that the search for truth might turn up some final proof of the occult…well, no man was an atheist except for want of a more convincing alternative.
But an old painting in a museum basement proved nothing. One thing he had learned from the church was that the credulous would co-opt anything to support a belief.
Edmund Whitlock had been mortal. Louise Porter was no more than human. All else, Sebastian concluded, was human psychology, preserved for the ages in tales of wonder.
In the Acts of the Apostles, Sebastian found two yellowing slips of folded newsprint, each with a marginal note that identified their source as the
MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF A CHILD
The first clipping told of a child’s disappearance in the British coastal town of Great Yarmouth, and of the
