Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,75

dog. Black and round, a mutt with stubby legs and floppy ears, it’s not the kind of dog you’d expect to discover a corpse, at least not in any official capacity. The dog holds itself rigid, something like pride in its stance, snout aimed at the body.

Not just at the body, but at the exposed right forearm which, upon closer inspection, reveals a tattoo along the length of its inner side. The flowing, ornamental script is impossible to decipher at this angle. A clue? Yes, this could be a clue.

The dog’s paw prints are visible in the sand. Hours ago, there may have been other prints to read—the victim’s, the killer’s—but if they were here, the sea has washed them away.

2.

The Untoward Specter, cloaked all in black crepe, sits weeping in the gazebo. “Is it time for a game of pies?” it asks.

The Three Widows of North Varnish clutch their bosoms. “But we do not know how to play,” they cry.

Lord Lumpish leans from the balcony and heaves a great sigh. “I do not permit games to be played upon the greensward,” he says.

From a distance comes the squeak and shuffle of a handcar. The Three Widows of North Varnish put their hands over their ears, but the Untoward Specter looks up and stops weeping. It sways from side to side, as though mesmerized by the sound. “I should like very much to teach you how to play a game of pies,” it says.

3.

I should like very much to knock that woman over the head, thinks Carl. He’s playing the part of all three widows, a thin rustling dress on each hand and one draped over his face. But this woman Alex—loud, hysterical Alex from no-one-seems-toknow-where—is upstaging all three of him. And she the newcomer, her first show with the troupe, her first time onstage anywhere, as far as he knows. Correction: she’s the kind of woman who has been onstage her whole life.

The widows aren’t easy to operate. A lot of string-pulling to move their little arms, to make them titter and swoon. In his best elderly treble, Carl says, “That terrible sound! Is it the handcar of the Hands of the Orphans?”

But before the line is fully out of Carl’s mouth, before he can even get Widow Number Three to point to the horizon, Alex calls from the gazebo, “I am certain the Hands of the Orphans will want to play a game of pies!”

Carl is about to throw the damned widows off his hands, but then he hears Ted cooing his approval from the front row. Ted, whose mess this whole thing is. Ted, who spends maybe five percent of his time in the real world.

“Everyone!” cries the Untoward Specter, louder than before. “Everyone must play or no one at all!”

Now Ted is clapping with quiet glee. Yes, thinks Carl, right over the head, with something blunt and very heavy.

4.

Aggie’s hands hurt. Not from the hour spent pulling bent nails out of a broken panel of the set (gray sky, black clouds, a distant tower), but from the role she has landed without meaning to. Ted had stopped her on the first day of rehearsals, while she was carrying lumber into the theater. “Your hands,” he’d said. “Those are the hands of the Hands of the Orphans.”

His own fingers were decked with enormous iron rings, weird totems that clacked and gleamed when he gestured. The rings, and the beard, and the ratty tennis shoes: for a moment she mistook him for a crazy person who’d wandered into the theater. Then he showed her the puppets he’d made for the play he’d written, the play she was building sets for. Onto her hands he slipped a pair of black felt gloves. At the end of each finger was a grasping, desperate little child’s hand.

At first Aggie thought they were terrible. All those sprouting pale nubs, like an animal they’d keep in a tank at the science aquarium. But now she feels, somehow, that the hands need her, and she can’t go anywhere without them. On break from rehearsal, while the others go to a sandwich shop, she takes her bagged lunch to a bench by the shore and sets the Hands of the Orphans beside her.

“Do you think Carl likes me?” she asks the hands. She sips coffee from her thermos and nods. “Mmm, yes, he does have very nice eyes.”

5.

Lord Lumpish stands with hands clasped behind his back, admiring the tapestries. The Untoward Specter appears at dusk.