Walking the Labyrinth Read Free

strings—dancers, actors, athletes, animals. I felt a kinship with these figures; I had been manipulated as thoroughly by Callan, Thorne, and Fentrice Allalie. The difference was that I had enjoyed myself throughout.’”
    There was a picture along with the article. It had not reproduced well; there were whole sections of shiny black where the Xerox machine had apparently given up in confusion. But Molly could make out a man standing at the front of the stage, two women somewhat behind him, a number of statues along the side, and what looked like a tiger at the back. Funny the reporter hadn’t mentioned the tiger.
    “Thorne could have been someone who joined them along the way,” Molly said. “Maybe they called themselves a family because it sounded better.”
    “The article says they all looked alike.”
    She peered closer at the photograph. Did the three performers resemble each other? She couldn’t tell. The man wore a top hat and tails, the women long fringed dresses and beads. More to the point, did they look like her? She was short, with a wide face, curly light-brown hair, and blue eyes. Could it be she had a whole group of relatives she had never met?
    Her heart began to pound. “I don’t know,” she said. “I never heard anything about these people.”
    “Maybe she had a falling-out with them.” Stow squinted at the article.
    Maybe. It was true that Fentrice rarely spoke of Callan. But she couldn’t see why that should matter to Stow and his mysterious client. And there was something a little shifty about the investigator, with his shabby coat and his talk of inheritances. Would he look as sinister if his eyes weren’t so close together?
    She pushed the Xerox toward him. “No, no, keep it,” Stow said. “I have another copy.” He bit into his sandwich. There was a spot of mustard on his collar. “Did your aunt ever keep a scrapbook? Newspaper articles, things like that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Could you ask her?”
    “I guess so,” Molly said slowly. “How did you find me?”
    “Paper trail. Colleges, taxes, that sort of thing. I nearly lost you in Oregon—you were calling yourself Ariadne Travers then.”
    “That’s my middle name.”
    “I know.”
    “I thought that stuff was confidential.”
    “It is.” She waited for him to go on, but all he said was, “What do you do in that office building, anyway?”
    “Temporary work.”
    “Do you like it?”
    “Not really.”
    “Why do you do it, then?”
    “I don’t like being tied down. Do you like being a private investigator?”
    “Keeps me busy.”
    That wasn’t really an answer. Stow must have thought so too, because he added, “It’s the only thing I’ve ever done.”
    They spent the rest of the lunch in silence. “Here’s my card,” the investigator said when they had finished. “Give me a call if you remember anything.”
    Molly took the card, put it in her purse. She had no intention of ever talking to him again.
    But all that afternoon, as she sat at her desk and worked at her word processor, she thought about John Stow, about her aunt and this person who claimed to be related to her grandfather. And in the evening, after she had gone to her small apartment and cooked and eaten dinner, she wondered if she should call Fentrice.
    It would be an extraordinary step, she knew. They wrote to each other at least once a week, Fentrice with her chubby black fountain pen, Molly on the computer at work. Fentrice talked about her garden, the friends with whom she played bridge, the small midwestern town where she lived. Molly told Fentrice about her succession of jobs, though she was never sure how much her aunt understood. Fentrice seemed to live in an older, slower world.
    But she had been a magician, a part of the Allalie Family. She had toured the country, hopping trains, staying in boardinghouses, carrying her trunk from town to town. Molly remembered the scuffed and battered trunk from her childhood; it was dark blue,