“See?” she crowed. “My brain’s falling out, but Lit’s catching it!”
“Lucky for you,” said Hillary with a touch of bitterness. “I’m hungry. You guys want to eat?”
Ali was up like a shot. “Deer Park.”
“Okay with me. Lit?”
“No…” I shifted, trying to get comfortable. “Damn it, Ali, move
“But aren’t you hungry?”
“Hey, suit yourself—”
The car scraped against gravel as we passed the courthouse museum. And suddenly I knew where I wanted to be.
“Listen—drop me off here, okay?”
Ali grimaced. “I’m
“Me neither. I’m going to see Mrs. Langford.”
“Mrs. Langford?
“I just feel like dropping by. Plus I ate about five hundred pieces of French toast, so I’m
I shoved the shopping bag with my new dress into her lap. Ali made a face. “How’re you gonna get there?”
“I’ll hitch or something. See you—”
She waved as I bounced from the car, but Hillary said nothing; only pulled slowly back into the street. I waited to see if he’d look back. He didn’t, and I turned away.
The courthouse was older than anything in the village save Bolerium. When Bloodjack Warrenton burned the town, his men had inexplicably left it standing—Acherley Darnell in his
By the early 1900s, all cases were tried in county court fifty miles to the south. The Kamensic courthouse fell into disrepair, its cupola home to hundreds of little brown bats and its doleful bronze bell silent.
All that changed when Mrs. Langford arrived. Stage name Theda Austin, nee Hopiah Lee Magillicuddy, known as Hoppy to her friends—Mrs. Langford had been a celebrated stage actress, and the original Stella Dallas back in radio days. She and her husband, the actor Lawrence Langford, retired to Kamensic in 1931. Lawrence continued to work intermittently until his death in 1972 at the age of 101, but Hoppy took her retirement seriously. She devoted herself to reviving the courthouse, first getting its name on the Register of Historic Places, then raising the money to have it restored and turned into a museum. As such, it attracted perhaps a dozen visitors a year, who would push open the decaying screen door and be immediately absorbed by a zenlike torpor. I walked in now, the door wheezing shut behind me, and shaded my eyes against the steely light that spilled down from the clerestory windows.
The scrubbed pine floors and rows of wooden benches gave the place an air of prim sanctity, as did the portraits of gimlet-eyed magistrates on the whitewashed walls. This was offset somewhat by the very elderly woman in black velvet tam o’shanter and lime-green houndstooth tweeds who sat in the judge’s dock, peering through heavily bandaged spectacles at a newspaper. Beside her perched a voluminous carpetbag that in happier days had carried Mrs. Langford’s beloved toy poodle, Tinker. At her elbow a transistor radio leaned against a thermos. I could just make out the carnival strains of “C’mona My House” segueing into the Bossanova.
“Hello, Mrs. Langford? It’s Lit—”
“Is that Charlotte?” Mrs. Langford lifted her head, blinking. “Hello, hello…” She waved vaguely in my direction, then swatted at the radio, which gave a faint shriek and fell over. “I
I picked up the radio—like her glasses, thickly swathed with masking tape—and switched it off. “How are you today, Mrs. Langford? Any customers?”
“Oh, fine, I’m just fine. I don’t think we’ll see anyone today. Didn’t you hear? Axel Kern is coming back tonight—” Her vibrato rose thrillingly and she gave me a look of utmost rapture; then slumped back into her seat, shaking her head. “I just don’t know what will come of it, after all this time.”
“What do you mean?”
She gave me an inscrutable look, lifted a hand clattering with costume jewelry and draped it suggestively upon a cashbox with a neatly-lettered index card taped to its lid.
“I think you’re over twelve now?” she said hopefully.
I laughed. “I’ll be eighteen in March—” and put a dollar into her palm. Her hands shook slightly, and I had to stop myself from helping her as she fumbled with the cashbox.
“Eighteen.” Mrs. Langford was eighty-six. “When I was eighteen I was playing Maria in
With a sigh she shut the cashbox, and tapped her thermos with a gnarled finger.
“Darling, would you mind opening that for me? My hands are bad today, the arthritis you know, I
“Sure.” I unscrewed the thermos. A wisp of steam emerged, fragrant with the scent of black-currant tea and sloe gin. I watched as she poured a hefty shot into the plastic lid.
“Thank you, darling—”
She sipped, eyes closed so that I could see where the kohl bled into the violet labyrinth of broken capillaries. Then they opened once more: brilliant green eyes, the whites unclouded, lashes still thick and black as a girl’s.
“Now. What brings you here? How is your mother?”
“She’s fine. I guess she’ll be there tonight. I—I just wanted to check something, that’s all.”
Mrs. Langford nodded and took another sip from her thermos. “Good, good. You go ahead and walk around, take your time, it’s not going to get very busy…”
She clicked the radio back on. I went upstairs, trying to keep from breaking into a run. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, and there didn’t seem much chance I’d find it even if I did. The second floor was even colder and darker than downstairs. I felt a surge of genuine fear, stepping between unlit curiosity cases and assiduously avoiding corners, and hoped Mrs. Langford was right about there not being any other visitors.
The museum’s collection was an ill-sorted mass of Tankiteke Indian amulets, woven oyster baskets, old shoes, and arrowheads, as well as hundreds of tattered books and scripts used by actors renowned in their times and now utterly forgotten.
