The Stone Girl Read online

  THE

  STONE

  GIRL

  A NOVEL

  DIRK WITTENBORN

  W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  For

  Kirsten and Lilo

  PART I

  POWERS THAT BE

  At the end of the summer of 2018, high atop a nearly inaccessible gorge deep in the Adirondack forest of New York State’s North Country, three women had an unusual monument set in place. Elegantly tapered, nearly ten feet tall, a hand-chiseled obelisk of native bluestone inscribed with brass capitals caught the light of the sun. Weighing in excess of two thousand pounds, it had the solemn presence of a memorial to war dead. A marker worthy of a state courthouse or a city square made no sense in the middle of nowhere. And yet it did.

  To the others, Evie Quimby referred to it as a calling lure—an old-fashioned expression, commonly used by trappers. A calling lure draws a beast out of its lair and tempts it into a snare. Usually such lures are scents: barkstone, civet, skunk, blood, and the like. They’re messages carried on the wind; beckonings so potent and pungent and closely related in the animal’s mind to sex and/or prey that they trigger urges the creature cannot resist. That obelisk’s inscription had no smell, but the words spelled out in brass were guaranteed to get inside the head of one man. Its message was simple: We know what you are.

  But the truth was when those three women first put up that stone none of them knew the true nature of what they were after or up against.

  A month after the stone was put in place, Evie Quimby, her mother Flo, and Lulu Mannheim convened in the vegetable garden behind Flo’s cabin. Misfortune had galvanized the bond between them by then into something that went beyond the categories of daughter, mother, friend. The women were finding out the truth about themselves. How far were they willing to go? How much were they ready to risk, when there was no making things right, just a remote chance of making them a little less wrong? Their troika was a democracy; the particulars of the damage that had been to done to each made them equals. All three were in agreement, but each saw the necessary reckoning in a different light.

  Flo told her daughter and Lulu straight out, “All you’re doing by this is asking to get yourselves killed.” She was outvoted.

  The garden lay neatly fenced behind a cabin built of logs squared by a double-bladed ax at the end of the Spanish-American War. Silvered by weather and time, it perched precariously halfway up a mountain steeply conifered in fragrant shades of green: spruce, balsam, and pine. Six miles north of the village of Rangeley, New York, pop.: 438, it sat back up in the woods at the end of a rocky dirt switchback with a 30-degree incline at an elevation of over two thousand feet.

  The true purpose of their meeting, like that of the stone, was not discussed outside the three. The women told themselves if anyone was watching (a remote but real possibility), or the sheriff stopped by unannounced to see what they were up to (he did so regularly since Evie had come back to Townsend County), it would appear as if they were doing nothing more suspicious at that cabin than conspiring to harvest pumpkins a week early. The women had reason to be both cautious and paranoid.

  Evie was the first to arrive. Wearing the uniform of her youth, work-worn Carhartt coveralls and steel-toed boots, she could’ve passed for a local, but she wasn’t . . . not anymore. Getting out of the rental car, walking through the wet grass and puddled mud, she saw more rain in the distance blowing in across the Sister Lakes: Lucille and Constance to the west, and Millicent, the largest and most homely, just to the south. Each was its own shade of blue. A family of half-feral cats, collared by Flo with tiny bells to give the songbirds a chance, tinkled as they slunk out from under the skinning shed to see what Evie was up to.

  The Quimby homestead, like the Adirondacks, was wilder and more primitive than simply rural. The stump she used to stand on as a girl to dazzle a pet crow with the shine of a dime was still there, but the tilted meadow was now littered with rusting machine parts, outboard motors beyond repair, and the remains of a ’62 Willys Jeep that had died because there was no one in residence to rebuild its crank case. Buddy Quimby, her father, had been better at taking things apart than figuring out how to make them work again. Puzzling out how the pieces of what was broken fit together had always been Evie’s job. At thirty-four, Evie was no longer the girl that had grown up in that weathered gray cabin, the one who had once told herself she would never come back to Townsend County.

  Flo had told her more than once over the years that she was not responsible for what happened to Buddy, but Evie knew that was not entirely true. Pausing to scratch the back of a cat who had lost its tail to a fox, Evie headed up to what was left of the skinning shed and searched among the cobwebs for a pickax and spade. If there had been no hunting accident, if she had never run from the Sister Lakes, the Willys would still be on the road, the outboards repaired, and her father would have been there next to her. It was Buddy who had taught her about calling lures and the setting of traps.

  Lulu’s Range Rover spun its wheels up the dirt track to the Quimby cabin. Windows down, stereo on max, the Grateful Dead’s anthem “Box of Rain” echoed up the mountainside. Evie could hear them coming. It was her father’s favorite tune. He’d often croon the lyrics as a warning, just before someone started a fight he would feel obliged to finish. Her mother only played it when she was feeling more hopeless than sad.

  Lulu came in fast with Flo riding shotgun. Braking too hard and too late, the Range Rover skidded across the soggy meadow and came to a full stop just before colliding with the remains of the Willys. As Lulu got out the car, Evie reminded her, “The idea is we’re trying to be discreet.”

  “Your mother wouldn’t get in the car unless I played the song. I’ve been listening to it on repeat for almost an hour.”

  Evie called out, “You coming, Mama?” But Flo just sat in the front seat, staring straight ahead, grimly puffing on one of her nasty cigarillos. She used to hate the smell when Buddy lit up, but now inhaled deeply to remind her of the man that was gone. Flo insisted on listening until the last of his sad song played out.

  Lulu, at fifty, was small, girlish, and had a sashay in her step. Except for hair hennaed a shade of cherry red that a twenty-five-year-old would have thought too youthful, she looked like what she was: a very rich woman who exercised too much, believed in Botox, and had more important things on her mind to worry about than the brand-new pair of $1,800 green crocodile loafers she ruined as her feet slopped through the mud.

  “I told my lawyer the legal parts of what we’re doing.” Having made a fortune on top of the one she inherited by buying and selling big-city commercial real estate, Lulu had lots of lawyers.

  “What’d he say?”

  “We’re insane.” Lulu said it with a laugh to let Evie know she hadn’t changed her mind.

  Flo was out of the Range Rover now but she still hadn’t said hello. She looked older than seventy-four. Part Mohawk, she was dark-eyed, her face wrinkled as a raisin. Flo had blue jay feathers woven into her bone-white braids that day. Head capped by a red bandanna tied close to her skull, knee-high black boots, ankle-length skirt pulled up and cinched under a man’s belt. To ease the tension, Evie volunteered, “You look like a pirate, Mama.” Evie was blond, blue-eyed, and pale as skim milk. The total lack of physical resemblance between mother and daughter was puzzling to anyone who didn’t know Evie had been adopted by Flo and Buddy on the third day of her life.

  Flo ignored the comment and growled, “Let’s get this over with.”

  The gate to the vegetable garden was secured by a rusty padlock. It began to drizzle as Flo searched through the keys strung on the lanyard around her neck. Gate opened, Ev
ie shouldered the pickax and Lulu picked up a spade. When Evie offered her mother a shovel, all Flo had to say was, “I’m not going to help you two dig yourselves into a hole you can’t get out of.”

  Faded seed packets tacked to stakes, neatly demarked rows of carrots, sweet peas, tomatoes—both cherry and heirloom—sweet peppers, Brussels sprouts, potatoes, and butter beans; all but the pumpkins had already been harvested. As they followed Flo back through the garden, Evie found it comforting to think there was still a sliver of the universe so tidy and well ordered.

  Her mother pointed to a furrow where sweet potatoes had already been taken from the ground. Lulu put a crocodile loafer to the shoulder of the spade and Evie brought down her pick. The drizzle turned into cold, pelting rain.

  Four feet down they found what they came for. It took all three of them to pry a five-foot-long duffel bag out of the earth. Wrapped in polyurethane, duct-taped watertight long ago, it clinked as Evie hoisted its weight onto her shoulder and staggered back to the cabin through fading light.

  Flo kindled a fire in the Franklin stove with pinecones. Evie dropped the duffel on the kitchen table and Lulu began to cut away the plastic with a paring knife. Evie was just about to unzip it when Flo suddenly slammed her fist down on the kitchen table so hard the salt and pepper shakers jumped, and shouted, “This is a mistake!”

  Lulu reminded her gently, “We voted.”

  “I know we voted. I’m old, not senile!” Evie reached out to take her mother’s hand, but Flo wasn’t interested in gestures. “If you go up on that mountain, he’s not going to come for you by himself.”

  “That’s what I’m counting on.”

  Flo muttered an obscenity as Evie unzipped the bag and took out parts of what would soon be a trombone-action 12-gauge shotgun, sawed off at twenty inches. The serial numbers on it and the rest of the weapons in the bag had been removed with a file by her father long ago. The guns were lovingly packed in Cosmoline to prevent rust. Evie wiped off the grease, worked the action, and dry-fired at a lightbulb. Flo looked at her daughter as if she were handling snakes.

  Buddy had buried the guns in the garden the night before they came for him. Guns were another thing her father had taught her about. Evie reached back into the bag and began to assemble a second gun, attaching barrel to action, action to stock. Flo didn’t give up. “You kill him, and you’ll spend your life in jail.”

  “I’m not going to shoot anybody, and neither is Lulu.” Lulu was relieved to hear that, but Flo wasn’t worried about Lulu pulling the trigger.

  “What are the guns for, then?”

  Evie wasn’t trying to be funny when she answered, “They’re a conversation starter.”

  “Bullshit.” Lulu backed away from the argument and turned on the TV. It was hooked up to the satellite dish on top of the skinning shed. CNN was replaying the president mocking a woman who had recently testified on national television about the terror of being pushed into a darkened room by a pair of young men she thought were her friends. Held down on a bed, she heard them laugh as a hand was clamped over her mouth to smother her screams for help. There were more guns in the bag waiting to be assembled.

  Flo grabbed Lulu’s arm. “You know important people, Lulu! You have money and lawyers. You can go to the FBI. You don’t have to do it this way.”

  The news cut to sound bites of outraged and indignant US senators challenging the veracity of the woman’s sworn statement, questioning her memory and motives for waiting so long to name her assailants. What right did a woman have to sully the reputation of a man whose success proved he was beyond suspicion? Lulu turned off the TV.

  “Flo, if they don’t believe that woman, why the hell would you think they’re going to believe us?” Evie stopped oiling the guns and waited for her mother’s answer.

  Flo turned her back and opened the refrigerator. Evie wasn’t expecting her mother to hand her the .22 semiautomatic pistol her father used to stash in the crisper under the celery no one ever ate. It was strangely romantic that after all these years her mother still kept the gun in her husband’s favorite hidey-hole. “You might as well take the Ruger.”

  Evie took the pistol from her mother, pulled out the clip, saw that it was loaded, and handed it back. “Keep it, you might need it before we’re through with this.”

  PART II

  PARTS BUT LITTLE KNOWN

  CHAPTER 1

  When I was little I believed my mother could fix anything. My faith in her ability to make all things right had to do with her profession. Evie Quimby was a “restaurateur artistique”—a woman whose hands were trusted enough to repair statues for the Louvre. She could reassemble the pieces of a dropped figurine I knew I shouldn’t have touched with an artistry that bordered on witchcraft; make the cracks in precious things that had been mistreated disappear so completely it was easy to pretend no permanent harm had ever been done. Of course, being the one that hid the cracks, my mother knew better.

  Her studio was in Paris, on Rue Daguerre in a converted garage on the edge of Montparnasse. We lived above in a gabled attic. When the bell rang downstairs, a pale yellow pit bull, Clovis, and I would run to the window and look down and watch museum curators and antiquity dealers nervously unload the broken remains of goddesses, demons, saints, and forgotten statesmen, all swaddled in bubble wrap. Her specialty was repairing sculpture, ancient mostly, but once I remember seeing a man in a convertible Bentley accompanied by the singed remains of a sculpture of Michael Jackson that had been struck by lightning.

  Sometimes, when the bell rang in the middle of the night, Clovis growled and we’d spy from the shadows. In the morning, I’d discover a wooden box the length of a coffin with something beautiful but broken inside that, depending on your point of view, had either been looted or rescued from a war zone. Whether the damaged statue was made of marble, bronze, limestone, diorite, granite, ivory, or unfired clay, my mother always began by laying out the different broken parts of the figure on a steel table as if it were a person who had just suffered great bodily harm. A pair of lips frozen in the promise of a smile cleaved from a face, legs torn from a torso, a nymph’s breast smashed to shards—I would sit in the corner with Clovis and watch her pick up the pieces one by one, memorizing the edges with her fingertips as she puzzled out how to make them whole.

  Perhaps because she kept so many other parts of her life secret, she was transparent about her work and installed a glass window in the door so I could always see what she was doing. The epoxies and polymers she used were toxic; when it came time to assemble the broken pieces, she shooed the dog and me out of her studio. Turning on the exhaust fans, she’d pump up the volume on Dorothy Dandridge or Amy Winehouse, then pull on black rubber gloves that came up above her elbows and don a rubber gas mask with canisters sticking out from her cheeks. She looked like an alien.

  Through that small window into her solitary pursuit, I would watch her slowly add one part epoxy to two parts hardener. If she got the mix wrong, smoke rose as if from a cauldron. If the damage to a piece was severe, she installed the same kind of titanium rods a surgeon uses to pin broken bones. It didn’t occur to me until much later that the thing she was really trying to fix was herself.

  When asked how she became a restorer, she gave different answers depending on her mood. Once I heard her say, “When I was young I worked for a very rich woman who liked to break beautiful things.” Which sounded like the opening line of a scary fairy tale.

  My mother was similarly elusive when pressed for specifics about anything having to do with her life before she came to Paris. I knew only that she was adopted as a baby by a couple named Buddy and Flo and grew up in the woods outside what she referred to as a “flyspeck of a village” called Rangeley. Not knowing flyspeck meant fly shit, I asked her if it was “nice.” She answered with a smile and a hug and told me stories about the Adirondacks: lakes and waterfalls with Indian names, forests carpeted with wild orchids called lady’s slippers, black bears with a taste fo
r blueberries, and a pet crow named Jimmy.

  I pestered her to tell me more about this remote paradise I pronounced “Rang-e-lee”; demanded to know why Buddy and Flo never came to visit like my friends’ grandparents. And why, on those rare occasions when my grandmother Flo called, was Grandpa Buddy never with her? And why did my grandfather always ring up on a pay phone? I can still hear the clatter and clink of quarters going into the box every three minutes. My mother told me her parents didn’t have much money.

  When I volunteered to forgo my allowance and all my Christmas presents so we could buy them tickets to come see us, my mother added that her parents didn’t like cities. When I refused to let it go, she grew exasperated and told me that even though they’d never been to France, my grandparents didn’t like French people.

  Unable to stifle my enthusiasm for the Rangeley of my imagination, she finally gave up and bought me an old water-stained map of the Adirondacks she found in a flea market and we hung it on my bedroom wall. It was printed in 1757 during the French and Indian War, and what I liked most about it was that it was all out of proportion and full of inaccuracies. Lakes and rivers and towns were in the wrong latitudes. Mohawks was spelled “Mohoks.” And there were villages and forts that had vanished so completely they could not be found on Wikipedia.

  I have a faint memory of her tucking me into bed one night and seeing her point to a blank spot on the map labeled “Parts but little known,” and hearing her say, “That’s me, Chloé.” But perhaps she only said that in a dream.

  I lost interest in meeting my grandparents or Jimmy the crow or ever setting foot in the Parts but little known when my mother let it slip that my grandparents trapped and skinned animals for a living. But by then, Buddy and Flo had stopped calling.

  When it came to questions I had about her life after she arrived in Paris, my mother was more forthcoming. She came to France in November 2001 to work for an art restorer named Jacques Clément. At the end of a dinner party in the Adirondacks three months earlier, Jacques had written his name and telephone number on the back of a matchbook and had offered her a job in Paris. All she knew about the man was that he was renowned for being able to salvage beautiful things others thought were beyond repair.