Face on the Wall Read Free

after Annie’s first night in the new house, her Aunt Mary Kelly came over to help her lay it out. “Thirty-five feet divided by five is seven feet,” she said, looking up at the long expanse of blank plaster. “Is that right? Seven feet between centers? Good. Here goes.” Mary stretched her tape along the wainscot and made a pencil mark.
    Annie spread sheets of newspaper over her library table and set out her jars of paint. There were dozens of them. Cheerfully, her heart beating with excitement, she picked them up one by one and arranged them on the newspaper. There were seven shades of red, six of blue, eight different greens, and two dozen soft colors without names, dun purplish browns and olive-grays.
    When Mary finished marking off seven-foot intervals and came back to the table, her attention was caught at once by a scrap of newspaper stuck to the bottom of one of the jars of paint. It was a torn fragment with a dim photograph. She picked up the jar, peeled off the piece of newsprint, and looked at the picture. “Don’t I know this woman?”
    Annie looked too, and read the line of print under the photograph. “Her name’s Pearl Small. She seems to have disappeared.”
    Mary slapped the scrap of newspaper down on the table. “Pearl Small! Of course I know her. She was a student of mine. It was a seminar, a graduate seminar. Nobody called her Pearl, they called her Princess, because of her long yellow hair. It was a joke. She was Princess Pearl.” Mary’s glasses were on a string around her neck. She put them on and bent over the fragment of newspaper.
    Annie snorted. “She doesn’t look like a princess to me.”
    â€œOh, but she is. Last time I saw her she was still as lovely as ever, except—” Mary peered at the newsprint and read the broken sentences aloud.

    S. PEARL SMALL
    VANISHED
    uliar circumstances.
    are allegations of
    omestic violence.
    wice-widowed
    ederick Small
    es not answer
    hone calls.
    umored that
    large parcel

    There was no more. The rest of the page was gone.
    â€œExcept what?” said Annie.
    â€œExcept for the bruise on her cheek and a black eye. Oh my God, poor Princess! The bruises must have been his doing. Look, that’s what it says right here. ‘Allegations of domestic violence.’”
    Annie didn’t believe it. “She was a battered wife? From Harvard ?”
    â€œWell, why not? Annie, when was this? Where’s the rest of the papert”?
    Annie fumbled with the sheets of newspaper under her jars of paint. “These are all from the Boston Globe. That one must be from another paper. The type is different.”
    â€œHave you got the rest of it around somewhere?”
    â€œNo. I cleared everything out when I moved. All the old newspapers went to the dump. Except these. I wrapped dishes in these.”
    Mary looked again at the pink dots that were the printed face of Pearl Small. “Poor Princess, I wonder what could have happened? Tell you what.” Mary snatched up her coat. “I’m going to show this to Homer. Maybe he can do something.”
    Annie laughed. “Oh, poor Uncle Homer. I’ll bet he’s got enough to do. Every time I see him he looks more harassed. So long, Aunt Mary.”
    She stood in the doorway and watched Mary Kelly zoom away down the drive. Then she went back inside and gazed up at the emptiness of her wall. For a moment she thought about the battered wife, the princess with long golden hair. Maybe she was like the wife of that wicked monster Bluebeard, who killed wife after wife and stored their bodies in a forbidden room. Was Princess Pearl another victim? Was she stowed away in a dark chamber with the bloated remains of his earlier wives, that long succession of slaughtered women?
    Annie dragged a ladder to the far end of the room and told herself she had folktales on her mind. “Bluebeard” was just another story to put on her