8. Sam Amanuensis
Sam: Amanuensis
The reader who is tempted to contemplate other uses of bone should remember that the advisor to Philip II of Spain, a man who famously used bone to make minotaurs, was exhuming a cadaver a day at the end of his life simply to sustain himself.
Bone erodes with use, and creatures transformed by bone decompose quickly.
—Joaquín Rubio Villasenor, Encanto avanzado
It is true that being confined to the realm of the dead presented a significant obstacle to the pursuit of my murderer. But I wasn’t entirely alone in my quest for justice. During the summer, I’d recruited an assistant. His name was Constable Roy Maxwell.
It happened in this way.
You will not be surprised to hear that the Cisneros Society was capable of committing multiple outrageous offenses simultaneously.
Constable Roy Maxwell had been assigned to investigate one of them.
It was a mysterious death by stoning that had taken place in the very center of Gloucester, in broad daylight, and before a crowd.
There could be no question that enchantment had driven the stones, which flew through the air by the dozens until their quarry lay senseless.
Maxwell had been unable to identify the victim.
How could he, when, unbeknownst to him, the victim had been lured several miles from home?
The Cisneros Society had left no clues for him to follow.
After pursuing many fruitless leads, he began knocking on doors at random in the vicinity of the crime, an approach I knew would lead him exactly nowhere.
The neighborhood he chose, which you may be familiar with, is called “the Lobby” after the lobster fishermen who live there.
And while most of its inhabitants are peaceable, a few have claws much sharper than those of their prey.
The houses are crammed up against one another on crooked streets, much like lobster traps thrown together on the ocean floor, and the air has a tang of crustacean to it even in the dead of winter.
Now it was summer, and in the wilting heat the place smelled of rotting seaweed.
Maxwell’s deputy, tall and skinny, with a shock of reddish hair, sagged in the fetid air; he took off his hat and fanned himself to no effect.
Maxwell ignored the heat. Though he was sweating through his shirt, he wore his coat buttoned.
He was of average height and average build, with a careful and considered way of walking.
He didn’t waste his movements. He carried a thin, pewter truncheon—both the badge and defense instrument of the officers of criminal enchantment.
A band of gold on his left forefinger was his only token; it concealed something about his appearance.
He seemed to have no vanities apart from this concealment.
His skin, heavy eyebrows, and close-trimmed beard gave him a Grecian aspect.
Though he looked about twenty-five years of age, his face conveyed a stillness and reserve more typical of older men.
With a patient, untroubled air, he repeated the same tiresome steps over and over: he knocked on a door, explained his query, showed the victim’s necklace, asked several minutes’ worth of questions, received a few unhelpful morsels, said his thanks, and walked on to the next door.
It was maddening. While I hadn’t intended to meddle, I found I couldn’t help myself.
For Maxwell had come to the door of a white house with peeling paint.
The sole window was boarded up with planks of soggy wood, and a crude insult had been scrawled onto the door with charcoal.
Maxwell and the deputy couldn’t know that inside the crooked walls of the dilapidated house, three men were pasting rum labels onto bottles of seawater.
They sat around a table, shirtless in the stale air, their hands rough with paste, silently brushing and slapping, brushing and slapping.
Four knives and two revolvers rested amidst the bottles.
I could imagine what would come next. Maxwell would be insistent in his questioning; the men would be reckless in their self-defense. It would not end well.
With a weary hopelessness, certain that my gesture would prove futile, I urged caution, sending Maxwell a sense of foreboding just as he raised his hand to knock. To my astonishment, he paused.
He put his hand down. He raised it again to knock, and again I sent him a surge of foreboding. “Hm,” Maxwell said quietly. He put his hand down. To his deputy, he said, “Not this one, Ben.”
Ben, mopping his face with his sleeve, nodded without any resistance or curiosity whatsoever. He only wanted to be done with the Lobby as soon as possible. But I was curious. Who was this unusual man who heeded the warnings of spirits?
On that first occasion, I’d been too startled by his response to press any other suggestion upon him.
But afterward I considered that a man who listened to my subtle pressure could be persuaded to listen again—and more closely.
I visited him a few days later in the surprisingly appealing rooms he rented near the Salem Athenaeum: light-filled, sparsely furnished, and dotted with curiosities from around the globe.
Every wall featured two or three botanical illustrations, eloquently executed, and I realized from the traveling easel nestled by the front door that these were Maxwell’s own.
He was repairing a window, setting a new rectangle of glass into the mullioned frame.
I sent him a slight suggestion of disquiet, a sense that something needed his attention.
Almost at once, he put the glass down and looked up attentively, searching the room.
Then he astonished me further. “I’m listening,” he said quietly.
In those early days, I had a limited vocabulary of influence; I hesitated, wondering how to get him out the door.
But he was a careful listener, and he was patient.
When the impulses I sent him were confused, he paused and waited for clarification.
That morning in June, it took me nearly three hours to lead him to a farmhouse in Ipswich surrounded by apple trees that had lost their blooms. Maxwell knocked on the door without knowing why he was there; he’d trusted me every step of the way.
An old woman with a white cap opened the door, holding a handful of asparagus.
She looked at Maxwell desperately. “Have you found her?” she demanded.
“Excuse me,” Maxwell said politely. “I’m Constable Roy Maxwell. Whom should I have found?”
“Elizabeth Baines. She goes by Beth. She’s in service at the Morton house in Beverly, and they said last week that she’d run away. They came looking for her here, but I haven’t seen her since she came back on her day off in May.”
“Ah…” Maxwell said, nodding thoughtfully.
He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and withdrew the necklace that he’d shown to the inhabitants of the Lobby.
It was a small, brass locket in the shape of a heart.
The faceted crystal held a swirl of brown hair, and a skull was engraved onto the brass back.
Maxwell handed it to the old woman, who dropped the asparagus.
“That’s Beth’s!” she exclaimed, seizing the locket. “Where did you find it?”
Maxwell’s face grew grave. “Are you Mrs. Baines?”
“No—her mother’s passed away. That’s her hair here, my daughter’s. Beth has one and I have one.” She fumbled eagerly at her neck and withdrew another locket identical to the one in her hand, as if desperate to prove the similarity. “I’m Beth’s grandmother.”
Maxwell nodded gently at the locket. “I see. I’m very sorry. I have bad news for you about Beth.”
I watched him convey the news with sober delicacy.
Then I watched him spend much longer than necessary sitting with the young woman’s grandmother as she wept, and railed against the Morton family, and described how their son had been hounding Beth for months, and lamented that she hadn’t brought her home before it was too late.
I had no reason to hope that Maxwell would understand Morton’s culpability, much less his connection to the Cisneros Society.
And yet, he had listened to me, and now he was listening to a mourning grandmother, and that in itself was something.
By the time he left, it was almost dark; he had spent the better part of the afternoon with her.
It was most unusual conduct for a constable.
But Maxwell, as I would soon learn, was a very unusual constable.
After my assistance in identifying Beth Baines, Maxwell trusted my guidance implicitly.
Sometimes I guided him to the answers he sought in mysteries that had nothing to do with mine; sometimes the mysteries I helped him solve were entwined with mine invisibly; and sometimes I left him breadcrumbs to discoveries that seemed to have no evident meaning but would, I hoped, reveal themselves to have significance in the fullness of time.
With this last variety he showed a remarkable patience, seeming to accept them for what they were: indecipherable, but somehow still important.
On the first of September the air lightened, as if summer had suddenly tired of its bad humor.
After a night of cooling rain, the sun shone but did not glower; the streets looked clean and refreshed.
Maxwell was waiting for me, as he always did now on Saturday mornings.
If the weather was poor, he sat upstairs in his reading chair by the window; if it was fine, he waited on the stoop.
Today he was sitting on the stoop with a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
As I nudged him, he put the small book into his jacket pocket with a smile.
Poor man—he didn’t know how long the journey would be; there was something Maxwell needed urgently to see. Ovid would have to wait.