Before Ellie sat down, she unzipped her parka, but kept it on, making it plain that she didn’t expect to stay long. She glanced at her host. Wood gave no indication that she’d noticed, or understood, what was implied by Ellie’s keeping her coat on, and busied herself at the woodstove. Pouring hot water from a kettle into a brown betty tea pot, she brought it and a pair of mugs over to the table where Ellie sat waiting.
“Milk? Sugar?” Wood asked.
“Both, please.”
“Now then,” Wood said, returning from the small old-fashioned refrigerator that hunched, murmuring to itself, beside the sleeker wooden kitchen hutch. “Where shall we start?”
She placed a sugar bowl and a carton of milk between them on the table and sat down across from Ellie, giving her an expectant look. Ellie was still holding the business card she’d found in the van the other night. Smoothing out its creases, she dropped the card onto the table beside the brown betty.
“Outside,” she said. “When I asked you if this was your name, you were… evasive.”
Wood nodded. “Yes, I was. I’m sorry. It’s a bad habit.”
“So is it? Your name, I mean.”
“Why is it so important?”
Ellie shrugged. “I just like to know who I’m dealing with.”
And what, she added to herself. She was sure, now, that Wood was a woman. A very mannish woman, though a woman nevertheless. But there was still something odd about her that had nothing to do with the blurring of genders.
Wood tapped the business card with a long finger and smiled. “I do answer to this,” she said, “though it’s not the name I was born to. It’s a bit of a joke, really. Do you know what ‘musgrave’ means?”
Ellie shook her head.
“ ‘Grove full of mice.’ ”
All Ellie could do was give her a blank look.
“When I was a child,” Wood explained, “the Kickaha lived closer to the lake than they do now. I used to be haunted by the ghosts of the dead mice that we had to kill—to keep them out of our dry goods, you understand. So the Indian children that I played with took to calling me Many Mice Wood—‘Wood’ is my actual surname. I related this story to a philologist friend of mine some time later and he promptly christened me Musgrave. Wood/grove—do you see? Full of mice.”
“And all of this relates to… ?” Ellie asked.
“You wanted to know my name.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I was born Sarah,” Wood went on, “which was also my best friend’s name in college. To lessen the confusion, I decided to rename myself.” She tapped the card again. “To this. Of course Sarah—my friend Sarah—is long gone now and I’ve since reclaimed the name.” Her gaze rose from the card. “Though Musgrave, I’ll admit, still has a certain resonance for me that Sarah will never have, and I can’t quite seem to let it go.”
Since sitting at the table, Wood’s manner had regained that Old World charm that Ellie remembered from the other night. The woman’s moodiness was something else Wood shared with Donal, she realized. When the fancy struck him, he could switch as readily as Wood had between being cranky and wonderfully likable. Still, while that was true, and interesting on some level, it brought her no closer to understanding why Wood had left the card in the van than she’d been before coming up here to Kellygnow.
Opening the lid of the brown betty and peering inside, Wood pronounced the tea steeped and poured them each a cup. She drank hers black, pushing the sugar and milk over to Ellie’s side of the table.
“So you used to see the ghosts of mice,” Ellie found herself saying.
That was the sort of thing she expected from Jilly or Donal, not this rather formidable woman sitting across from her. Whimsical was not a word Ellie would have used to describe her.
“I still do,” Wood informed her. “Mousy ghost,... and others, too.”
I’m not going there, Ellie thought.
She stirred her tea and took a sip. Setting her mug down, she regarded her host.
“Why am I here, Ms. Wood?” she said. “Why did you leave your business card in our van the other night? And what did you mean with ‘you’ve finally come’ when you opened the door?”
“I have a proposition for you,” Wood said. “A commission.”
Don’t let it have anything to do with ghosts, Ellie thought, of mice or otherwise.
“A commission,” she repeated.
Wood nodded. “I would like you to cast a mask for me. You still do masks, don’t you?”
“I haven’t for years, but I can still do them.” She paused, and gave her host a sharp look. “But how would you even know that? Actually, when it comes down to it, how did you know to approach me on the street the other night? And why didn’t you ask me then?”
“My, you are full of questions, aren’t you?”
“I think they’re reasonable.”
“Yes, well. Shall we take them one at a time then? I know your work because I make it my business to keep informed of such endeavors.”
“But I haven’t done masks in ages—and never to sell. The last ones I did were for a friend’s play. And they weren’t cast, either. They were papier-mache.”
“Nevertheless, masks you have cast.” She smiled. “That rhymes, doesn’t it?”
Ellie dutifully returned her smile.
“Now,” Wood went on. “I hadn’t planned to approach you on the street as I did—that was merely happy circumstance—though I certainly recognized you immediately. You have a—shall we say—quality that is unmistakable.”
“What sort of quality?”
Wood regarded her for a long moment, then waved a hand dismissively. “And lastly, I didn’t ask you then as you seemed somewhat otherwise occupied.”
Ellie wanted to pursue this quality business, but realized that there probably wasn’t much point. She remembered how earlier Wood had told her that evasiveness was a habit she had. Obviously she hadn’t been lying about that.
“But you could have given me the card yourself,” she said, “instead of leaving it on the dash like you did. You could have given me your phone number, or called me.”
“Look around. I have no telephone.”
“But…”
Ellie sighed. There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained by pointing out that there were such things as payphones, or that the main house at Kellygnow had a phone. She knew that, since it was listed in the phone book.
“Okay,” she said. “Never mind about the phone. What kind of a mask did you want to commission?”
And I hope I’m not going to regret getting involved in this, she added to herself.
“Perhaps it would be easier if I simply showed you,” Wood said.
She rose from her chair and went to the chest at the foot of the bed where she took out a cloth bundle. When she brought it back to the table, Ellie saw that the soft cotton was merely being used as wrapping. Wood undid the leather thongs holding the pieces of cloth in place and folded them back to reveal two halves of a carved wooden Green Man mask.
Ellie had seen Green Men in numerous churches while traveling through England a few years ago—strange carved or stone faces that peered out from an entangling nest of twigs and leaves. She hadn’t been much interested in the folklore behind them, but she’d loved the images themselves. This one was gorgeous. The wood was dark and polished—what sort, she couldn’t say, but it had a beautiful grain. The carved leaves were life-size and remarkably lifelike. The odd face they half-revealed was a strange cross between a gargoyle and a cherub, a fascinating mix that repelled Ellie as much as it appealed to her. The openings for the eyes were the most disturbing, she decided, though she couldn’t say why.