Ah now; the mysteries of this house and place began to seem more soluble. Was this beauty the owner of this once-great house; remembered here by some obsessive fan? Was this shrine made out of devotion for a woman who’d walked in these gardens, once upon a time?
Tammy took another step towards the altar, and saw that besides the life-mask there were a number of other, smaller items set there. A scrap of red silk, one edge of it hemmed; a cameo brooch, with the same woman’s face carved in creamy stone; a little wooden box, scarcely larger than a matchbox, which presumably held some other treasure; and lying flat beneath all of these a cut-out paper doll, about twelve inches tall of a woman dressed in the frilly underwear of a bygone era. The paper from which the doll was made had yellowed, the colors of the printing faded. It was something from the twenties, Tammy guessed. Her knowledge of that era of cinema was sketchy, but the three faces, one of cardboard, one of plaster, one of stone, teased her: she knew the woman whose image was thricefold copied here. She’d seen her flickering black and white picture on some late-night movie channel. She tried to put a name to the face, but nothing came.
Despairing of the puzzle, she took a step back from the altar, and as she did so she felt a rush of cool air against the back of her neck. She turned, completely unprepared for what met her gaze. A man had come into the cage behind her, entering so silently he was literally a foot from her and she hadn’t heard his approach. There were places in the leafed and barred roof where the sun broke through, and it fell in bright patches upon him. One of them fell irregularly upon his face, catching both his eyes, and part of his nose, and the corner of his mouth. She saw immediately that it wasn’t Caputo. It was a much older man, his eyes, despite the sun that illuminated them, gray, cold and weary, his hair, what was left of it, grown out to shoulder length and quite white. He was gaunt, but the lack of flesh on his skull flattered him; he looked, she thought, like a saint in her grandmother’s old Bible, which had been illustrated with pictures by the Old Masters. This was a man capable of devotion; indeed addicted to it.
He raised his hand and put a homemade cigarette to his lips. Then, with a kind of old-fashioned style, he flicked open his lighter, lit the cigarette and drew deeply on it.
“And who might you be?” he said. His voice was the color of his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Tammy said. “I shouldn’t be here.”
“Please,” he said gently, “Let me be the judge of that.” He drew on the cigarette again. The tobacco smelled more pungent than any cigarette she’d ever inhaled. “I’d still like your name.”
“Tammy Lauper. Like I said — ”
“You’re sorry.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t mean to be here.”
“No.”
“You got lost, I daresay. It’s so easy, in the garden.”
“I was looking for Todd.”
“Ah,” the stranger said, glancing away at the roof for a moment. The cigarette smoke was blue as it rose through the slivers of sun. “So you’re with Mr. Pickett’s entourage.”
“Well no. Not exactly.”
“Meaning?”
“I just … well, he knows me … ”
“But he doesn’t know you’re here.”
“That’s right.”
The man’s gaze returned to Tammy, and he assessed her, his gaze, though insistent, oddly polite. “What are you to our Mr. Pickett?” he said. “A mistress of his, once?”
Tammy couldn’t help but smile at this. First, the very thought of it; then, the word itself. Mistress. Like the flick of his lighter, it was pleasantly old-fashioned. And rather flattering.
“I don’t think Todd Pickett would look twice at me,” she said, feeling the need to be honest with this sad, grey man.
“Then that would be his loss,” the man replied, the compliment offered so lightly that even if it wasn’t meant it was still beguiling. Out of nowhere she remembered a phrase her mother had used, to describe Jimmy MacKintosh, the man she’d eventually divorced Tammy’s father to pursue. “He could charm the birds of the trees, that one.” She’d never met a man with that kind of charisma before, in the flesh. But this man had it. Though their exchange so far had been brief and shallow, she knew a bird-charmer when she met one.