by Jane Godman
“You’re Elise and Roger’s daughter. I’ve helped your mother with her garden from time to time since I moved here last year,” Maddy said. Her mossy green eyes narrowed slightly. Only slightly, but Trinity had to fight the urge to launch into an explanation for her long absence. There was just a hint of Boston brogue in Maddy’s voice. Trinity wondered what had brought the woman to Scarlet Falls. She obviously knew her business. The gardens here and at Hillhaven were as stunning as her face.
“Well, let’s see about this,” Maddy said. She turned and knelt to extricate the mat from under the ladder. “I couldn’t get it to do this again if I tried,” she continued.
“Be careful,” Trinity said again, powerless to make anyone careful enough.
Maddy stood, and while she rolled the mat into a neat bundle and moved to store it in a nearby cart with large, nubby wheels, she looked at Trinity once more.
“I usually am,” she said. Her smile was still soft and easy, but her forehead had crinkled. And that’s when Trinity realized what was so striking about Maddy Clark. She was as natural as she was beautiful, completely easy with her looks and her world even when something puzzled her in it. It was the kind of ease that came with believing there was a logical explanation for everything.
Trinity nodded. There was no way of explaining without sounding crazy. Since gardening was primarily a daytime job, the other woman might never have to worry about becoming accident prone in Scarlet Falls.
It was always worse after dark.
Trinity moved to step back over the hedge and climb the porch steps.
“It was nice to meet you,” she called over her shoulder. She left the obviously talented gardener with her horrifying ladder outside as the beveled glass front door opened with the heavy whoosh of well-oiled hinges.
The fresh scent of lemon polish mingled with older, mustier scents as she stepped inside—books, ink, mothballs. Her boots made her steps seem loud across the pine floors. She walked on the faded Persian carpet rugs wherever she could.
A vaguely familiar woman sat on a stool behind a cluttered welcome desk. Her perch, her black dress and faded chignon and the gleam of her eyes reminded Trinity uncomfortably of Creed’s beady-eyed crow. Trinity had seen her before, but the helpful volunteer badge she wore above her slightly concave chest supplied her name when Trinity’s memory failed to dredge it up from the past.
Violet Jesham.
“Can I help you?” she said in a rusty, but rushed voice as if she rarely got to offer but anticipated the opportunity to such a degree that the wait was worth it.
Trinity pulled Clara Chadwick’s picture from her pocket.
“I was hoping to find out more about this little girl,” she said.
Mrs. Jesham dropped something she was knitting and came forward with several quick steps, so like a bird ruffling its feathers to hop, hop, hop toward bread crumbs in the park. The low heels of her sensible shoes giving off a muffled swish, swish, swish.
Trinity handed her the photograph and the older woman looked at it long and hard with the aid of reading glasses she lifted from her breast with a jet beaded chain.
“Ah, yes, I see. ‘Chadwick,’” Mrs. Jesham said. “Welcome home, Trinity. I thought I recognized you. Your mother and I are in the Garden Club together.”
Trinity forced a smile. Retired or not, she couldn’t imagine her outdoorsy mother socializing with Violet Jesham. In fact, she couldn’t imagine Violet Jesham outside of these almost forgotten walls. Around them, a myriad of old photographs were framed and hung in an eclectic mix of frames—some gilded, some carved—and in every shape and size. Violet Jesham looked very like some of the women in the photographs from centuries ago as if she’d stepped down from one of the frames when she’d heard the door whoosh and it waited for her—silent and empty—to return.
“I would assume this is from the 1930s or ‘40s based on the ‘Shirley Temple’ style of her dress and hair,” Mrs. Jesham said.
Trinity privately thought “Shirley Temple” by way of “Alfred Hitchcock,” but she continued to smile. She was grateful for the help even if Violet Jesham seemed eerily out of her own time.
“The original courthouse burned in 1972, but we have quite a few of those old records here,” Mrs. Jesham said.
She handed the photograph back to Trinity and motioned for her to follow, pausing only to pick up a knitting basket from the desk she’d been perched near when Trinity came in. Trinity followed, trying to silence the echoing of her steps through several rooms until they came into an old parlor lined with filing cabinets and incongruously lit by an elaborate dusty chandelier.
A large, yellow tabby cat was curled on an embroidered pillow near the fireplace, but Violet Jesham paid no attention to the cat or the room. She went, instead, to a heavy door and turned the skeleton key that was protruding from a curly cued iron panel below its knob.
“Down these stairs,” she explained.
Mrs. Jesham reached up and pulled a chain dangling from the ceiling of the stairwell and a lone bulb flared to life with an electric pop. Cool, slightly dank air rushed up from below.
Trinity stepped toward the opening, but she paused when her glance was caught by one of the framed photographs hung by the door. It was an 8 × 10 of a group of Edwardian women with serious expressions frozen stiff for posterity. A small gold label on the frame identified the group as the Ladies of the Scarlet Falls Historical Society, 1922. They were an intimidating bunch. Dressed all in black with hats as impressive as their crinoline-covered hips and not a single smile among them.
Their eyes seemed to track Trinity’s movements as she passed by.
Both her steps and Mrs. Jesham’s echoed and squeaked as they squeezed themselves down the narrow flight of centuries-old stairs that led to the basement rooms.
At least there weren’t any cobwebs. Or did their absence indicate that the basement wasn’t even a place creepy creatures cared to tread?
Trinity was glad she’d kept her coat on when she’d come inside out of the mist. Even with the coat, she shivered as the air grew progressively colder the deeper they stepped into the earth.
They came into a dark room that wasn’t touched by the glow from the ceiling bulb above because of the curve in the stairs.
Trinity braced herself against the dark and against the utter ignorance of what was in it. She couldn’t catalog or survey to check for anything out of place or dangerous. She could only stand in darkness waiting.
The black seemed to envelop her in a cool press of thick atmosphere. She instinctively held her breath against it. Her healing lungs loathed to accept the dark dankness into her body.
Violet Jesham was silent.
In the absence of light, Trinity could no longer see her guide. She detected a shift of movement. Nothing more. Perhaps Mrs. Jesham had climbed back into her frame to leave Trinity alone in this tomb-like basement?
Fluorescent ceiling lights buzzed into life above their heads. Trinity released the breath she’d been holding in a soft sigh. Mrs. Jesham had flicked on a wall switch nearby. She stood with her hand still on the switch looking at Trinity’s relief with knowing eyes.
But the other woman didn’t mention Trinity’s unease.
“Feel free to go through these,” Mrs. Jesham offered.
She gestured toward more filing cabinets around the room with one arm while she cradled her basket in the other. The cabinets were raised up off the packed earth floor by stacks of bricks presumably to keep them dry when wet weather caused the basement to become even damper. Mrs. Jesham took up another perch on another stool, this one placed so that she would be looking down on a nearby table where Trinity would work.
She placed her basket at her feet and took out a long black scarf and a skein of wool yarn. She placed the roll of yarn in her lap and allowed the scarf to fall to the floor as she began to ply two long ivory knitting needles that were yellowed with age.
“That’s a nice scarf,” Trinity said, trying to warm
the air with friendly commentary. She moved toward the nearest cabinets somehow, not liking the feel of the hard-packed dirt beneath her feet.
“It’s for the man who paid for the Historical Society’s renovation. A thank you gift,” Jesham said. “He won’t let us thank him publically. He wanted to remain anonymous.”
So, the society had received a donation to renovate the house and grounds. No wonder it looked much more well-kept than the last time she had been in town.
The click-click-clickity-click of Mrs. Jesham’s needles set Trinity’s teeth on age, but she braced herself against the constant clicking so she could get to work.
It took several musty hours before Trinity finally found records for a Clara Chadwick’s birth and death. Mrs. Jesham had watched her like a hawk…instead of like the beady-eyed crow in Creed’s collection. The older woman had hardly moved beyond the busy click of her needles, sitting on her stool, hour after hour, while Trinity dug and shuffled and sorted.
Born 1935—Died 1944. Clara had died when she was only eight years old.
“There was a fever that year,” Mrs. Jesham said over her shoulder. Trinity started and looked up into Mrs. Jesham’s uncommonly bright eyes. The woman still held her knitting needles and the scarf, but she had quieted the project in her fist to speak. “If she was a Chadwick buried before 1945, you’ll find her at the Old Stone Church,” Mrs. Jesham continued. “Many children died that winter.” Her sudden interest and animation after hours of silent, motionless observation except for her busy needles gave Trinity chills.
“The story was that a traveling salesman came into town with a cough. His car broke down and he ended up spending a cold night by High Lake before someone found him delirious with fever the next day. Every house he’d visited that week with his suitcase of whatever it was he was selling fell ill. Many didn’t recover. Especially the children,” Mrs. Jesham said. Trinity wondered how many historical stories the woman had memorized over her lifetime and how many involved tragedy. No wonder she wore black and jet beads. There was a sense of mourning about her. Perpetual mourning. Did it lighten her load to share the stories once in a while? Or was she steeped in darkness, each and every tale she held in her head heavy on her soul?
Trinity didn’t argue that she could have found Clara anywhere in town, not just the Old Stone Church. The Girl in Blue didn’t seem to be content to stay in her grave. Instead, Trinity thanked the woman and helped her put away the faded resources. A part of her wanted to rush away, but even in the oppressive atmosphere, she fought against it. Violet Jesham deserved her gratitude. That she made Trinity uneasy didn’t signify.
* * *
When the Chadwick girl finally left, Violet continued her knitting, completely unaware that she stood in a corner of the room where the light was bad. It didn’t matter. Her fingers clicked the needles automatically. She stared into a photograph filled with long-dead eyes.
The Ladies of the Scarlet Falls Historical Society, 1922.
None of them truly gone.
* * *
Once she was outside, Trinity breathed deep cleansing breaths to clear the dust and must from her lungs.
“I know how you feel,” Maddy said, coming around the corner of the house. She held trimming shears in her re-gloved hands.
“That basement needs some ventilation,” Trinity said. She didn’t want to talk about Violet Jesham’s odd effect on her nerves.
“It’s the cat that bothers me,” Maddy replied, moving to place the shears in her cart.
“The yellow tabby that sleeps by the fireplace in the parlor?” Trinity asked. She couldn’t imagine why a sleeping cat would bother the busy gardener.
“That cat isn’t sleeping. It hasn’t been awake since 1985 according to Violet Jesham,” Maddy said.
Trinity gaped. She couldn’t help it. First a stuffed crow and now a stuffed…
“His name was Gibbons and Mrs. Jesham swears he had nine lives. She swears he lived here fifty years before he died,” Maddy shared.
“I almost went over to scratch his head,” Trinity said, glad that she’d avoided that awkward moment.
“I did. Walked right over and crooned to him. That’s when Mrs. Jesham told me…after,” Maddy said, her eyes wide with a remembered macabre surprise.
They stood a few moments in companionable silence. Trinity had put her hands back in her pockets and Maddy had crossed her arms. The other woman worried her bottom lip in thoughtful consideration of…something. Deceased tabby cats or something else, Trinity couldn’t be sure.
“The place needs these flowers. You’ve done wonders,” she said. She preferred to change the subject rather than dwell on darkness she couldn’t explain away to a stranger who hadn’t grown up in the town where a beloved pet might be seen as comfort even after its death.
“It keeps me busy,” Maddy replied. She faced the plantings, but her green eyes had gone distant and vague. She stood beside Trinity, but her mind was elsewhere. Then, after only a second or two, her whole body seemed to shake itself out of reverie to get back to work.
* * *
The Old Stone Church had probably been called a meeting house at one time. It was almost as old as Hillhaven, having been built by the original settlement on the river. It was kept up by the Historical Society and the Presbyterians who had used the building back in the fifties and sixties before they built a new church across town.
Trinity had long since become accustomed to walking everywhere she went at college in Boston, but the hike down to town from Hillhaven and then from the library up to the Old Stone Church reminded her of how uneven everything was in the town. Scarlet Falls had been built in and around an ancient twisting riverbed where water had once flowed before it had settled on its current course. Sidewalks pitched and rolled. Roads snaked and curved and wound around trees and hills. In fact, several roads in town had historic trees that grew right in the middle of them with forks to accommodate this oak where a speech was given or that maple where a criminal was hung. Maybe some passersby found it charming and eclectic, but if they lingered for a little while they’d realize it was off kilter and strange even as it was beautiful.
When she approached the church, Trinity noted the picturesque worn stone blushing pink in the misty air and the black slate roof gone to green where lichen had taken hold. But she also noted the sag and slump toward the graveyard as if one too many holes had been dug near its foundation, and as the bodies wasted away so had the ground’s support for the church’s heavy walls.
The hillside of the cemetery was pitted and pockmarked, and rather than the neat orderly rows of graves a visitor would normally find elsewhere, the stones and crypts were staggered and crooked. It had probably been caused by geography and geology, the lay of the land and the hard rock found here and there beneath, but the affect was far from natural and peaceful.
Rather than a place where souls went to rest, Trinity could far too easily imagine restlessness beneath her feet. Yet, still, she strolled. From stone to stone. From crypt to cross. The matron at the Historical Society had explained that some of the cemeteries in town had been mapped, but that no one had attempted this one because of its age and the wear on the stones of its oldest inhabitants.
Trinity didn’t bother with the plain stones that no longer showed a trace of what might have been carved into their surfaces for a posterity that had been overcome by wind and rain.
Instead, she walked and scanned the names of the headstones and raised marble crypts that seemed more likely. She found a section in the far south corner sheltered from the foggy breeze by a steeply pitched hill that seemed to hold many Chadwicks. It gave her a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach to see her own name repeated again and again on stone after stone.
The fog had thickened and the afternoon sun hung low when Trinity finally found her.
So far that day, she’d heard no laughter. She’d only seen a hint of blue in the hallway and that had probably been nothing but her imagination. Her who
le body went numb then icy when she walked across the grave.
Clara Chadwick.
The Girl in Blue.
Her arm throbbed although the dressings she’d used that morning were light and her skin was healing, pink and new.
Someone had trimmed the weeds back not too long ago. Trinity knelt to dust dried grass and dead daisies from the base of the head stone.
Why didn’t she rest? And why was it Trinity she followed and menaced and threatened with matches after years of silent haunting?
“Do you often borrow things without asking?” a familiar voice interrupted the silence.
Trinity rose to turn and face him. Had he followed her? Or had he seen her interest in the photograph and remembered it in spite of the mind-numbing kiss?
“You weren’t home. I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said. The photograph was still in her pocket. She tried to tell herself that the flush on her cheeks was nothing but wind burn and not embarrassment because Samuel Creed had caught her ghost hunting.
“Mrs. Jesham mentioned you’d been doing some research. I recognized the photograph when she described it. Why the sudden interest in Scarlet Falls’ history?” he asked.
He wore the black scarf Violet Jesham had been knitting wound around his neck.
Trinity refused to tell him she’d seen Clara Chadwick before. She wouldn’t tell him about her fears concerning the fire in Boston, not when his interest in history seemed macabre, sparked by that dark day by the lake when he had died.
Creed must have donated a sizeable amount of money to the Historical Society for their renovations.
Of course, the scarf looked perfect against his angular face and the slight dark stubble on his jaw. His double breasted wool pea coat was open. She could see a glimpse of white oxford beneath, filled out far too nicely by his muscled chest.
Any story she might have made up died on her lips when he reached to pull dried grass from the fringe of her scarf. She immediately remembered his hand wound into the same fabric to pull her to his lips.