The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel

by Holly Messinger

  “And how many days have you worked for Herschel?”

  “The last five, excepting Saturday and Sunday.”

  “Anybody else who can vouch for that? Any other folks around here you’ve worked for? How’d you get this job?”

  So Trace explained, yet again, how John Jameson allowed folks who frequented his store to post bills for labor, and how they occasionally bartered work with him in exchange for keeping their horses at his livery, and on and on. The only thing Trace couldn’t describe was how they’d gotten the job with Herschel, because Boz had arranged that on his own.

  “Detective?” one of the patrolmen called to Whistler, and the latter excused himself, but not before telling Trace to stick around.

  Trace was not likely to go anywhere for a while, since Boz had been press-ganged into helping with the winch over the well. He went out into the yard again, noticing as he went that two more wagons had joined the circus: glossy black hearses with tasteful gold letters that read ROTH FUNERAL HOME. He had the morbid thought that Judd Herschel was going to be one of the first inhabitants of that new cemetery he’d sold to the city.

  He rounded the corner of the house in time to see Mrs. Herschel hauled up out of the well, dripping wet and dangling from the hook that had caught under her arm and neck. Her head was thrown back, her stringing hair partially covering the gaping wound at her throat. There was so little blood left in her that the flesh was white as a trout’s, though her hair and skirts were stained from the saturated water.

  “Get her down!” one of the men snapped, and two of them reached to catch the body and the line from which it hung. Together they wrestled the sodden corpse over the lip of the well and lowered her to the ground. The small crowd of spectators shuffled and clucked amongst themselves.

  Trace looked away. His gaze lit on Herschel’s corpse, now laid out on a stretcher and covered with a sheet. The sight of those black boots protruding from beneath the shroud called to mind other visions, equally awful: rows of uniformed boys waiting for burial; his own father’s boots, extending across the threshold of the house, where the cholera had dropped him.

  Trace gave himself a shake. He dropped to one knee in the grass, crossed himself, and peeled the sheet back.

  The wound to Herschel’s face was clean from the water, and though Trace saw more than he wanted to of the bones in the man’s head, it didn’t look deep enough to have killed him. Knocked him senseless, maybe, and then he’d drowned. The angle of the wound was odd—near-horizontal, suggesting the ax had been swung at waist-level. Which meant Herschel had been kneeling, or maybe clinging to the edge of the well, trying to claw his way out … which would explain why his fingers were chopped off.

  Trace glanced over his shoulder. Nobody was paying him the slightest attention, so he reached out and pressed on the chest of the corpse. Water surged out of the mouth and the nose wounds, along with a swarm of black, tadpole-looking animalcules.

  “Shit!” Trace startled back, then leaned closer. They weren’t tadpoles. They evaporated as he watched. He wiped one of the oily-looking black things from Herschel’s cheek.

  A ghastly sensation washed over him, the instant paralysis of nightmare. For a second his vision was gray, cloudy, and then he was looking out through an unfamiliar pair of eyes, feeling strange hands grasping a cudgel, beating something red and mewling—voices of women screaming and strange, maniacal laughter heaving his own chest—then the tables were turned and someone was beating him, the laughter had left him and he was only terrified—bloody hands scrabbled for purchase on slick stone, and the ax swung at his face—

  A hand landed on his shoulder. Trace fell backwards on his butt in the grass, his throat raw, and realized he had been screaming. Boz was gripping him by both shoulders and people were staring.

  “You’re all right,” Boz was saying, his voice tight with anxiety. “You’re all right, Trace, it ain’t real—”

  “I’m all right.” Trace repeated hoarsely. His heart was hammering, but the vision was as fragile as a dream and receding quickly. “It’s over, it’s done.”

  “Cripes, you scared me,” Boz muttered, and hauled him to his feet. Trace clung to Boz’s arm a moment longer, head bowed as if he were overcome with grief. Better to be thought unmanly than crazed.

  “What’d you see there, friend?” said a nasal voice from a few feet away. “Was it the killer?” A dapper redheaded dude in a plaid suit stood just out of reach, pencil and notepad in hand, peering at Trace with a keen and knowing air.

  “What’s it to you?” Boz said.

  The dude glanced at Boz and touched his hat with the stub of pencil. “Rex Reynolds, St. Louis Times. I heard the new chief of detectives had a medium on his payroll—are you it?”

  “No,” Trace said, brushing off his pants.

  “You’re Jacob Tracy, right? This your partner?” Reynolds jerked his chin at Boz. “You friends with the whole family or just the old man?”

  “We just worked for them,” Trace said, yet again. “We came up here to cut timber.”

  “I gotcha, I understand. How well did you know Miss Anna? You hear of any trouble between her and her folks, might prompt her to take after ’em with an ax?”

  “Are you kiddin me?” Trace said, and rounded on Detective Whistler, who was striding toward them. “You ain’t sayin Miss Anna did this?”

  “That’s none of your concern,” said Whistler, and turned his dead-eye gaze on Reynolds. “I told you I didn’t want you at my crime scenes anymore.”

  “Didn’t know it was your crime scene, did I?” Reynolds said. “But since I’m here, Detective, can you confirm you’re holding Miss Anna Herschel at Four Courts? And you don’t have any other suspects at this time?”

  “Get off this property before I have you removed,” Whistler said. He cast a ruminating eye over Trace and Boz. “You two can go, too. Stay in town where I can find you.”

  Reynolds sucked his teeth as Whistler walked away. “Always makes you feel welcome.” He turned back to Trace. “So how long you been communing with the Spirits?”

  “I ain’t no Spiritualist!”

  “Hey, fella, neither am I, but I’ve attended a séance or two, and I don’t mind saying I saw some things I won’t forget my whole life long. And just now I saw you lay hands on that corpse before you started hollering.” Trace stared at him, caught, and Reynolds half-shrugged, as if to say he couldn’t help being right all the time. “You oughtta let me do a story on you. Whistler might give your opinion more weight if he thought you had some, er, insight on the matter.”

  “Why’n hell would he do that?”

  “You’d be surprised who-all believes in Spiritualism,” Reynolds said dryly.

  “They really got Miss Anna locked up?” Boz interrupted.

  “They really do,” Reynolds said. “I hear they brought in one of the bailiffs’ wives to sit with her, but make no mistake—they ain’t likely to let her out except to the gallows.”

  “What in hell’s the matter with you?” Trace demanded. “That young girl didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Hey, I don’t decide whether she’s guilty or not. But you might wanna keep in mind, the court of public opinion has a lot of … swing.” Reynolds looked back and forth between the two of them, making sure the pun sank in. “Fact is, I’m the best advocate Miss Herschel could have right now, and you could do worse than tell the public you sensed evil spirits about the place. People’d rather believe that than admit their own precious daughters could turn on Mama and Papa with an ax.”

  The reporter nodded at Trace’s incredulous look. “Think about it. Reynolds. Times. Leave word. I’ll find you.” He nudged the brim of his hat with the stub of his pencil, and made for the road.

  “Damn vulture,” Trace said to his retreating back.

  Boz shot him a worried look, but before he could start clucking like a mother hen, the young man with the camera barged into their midst.

  “Excuse me, fellas. Sorry bout tha
t.” They backed away as the photographer parked the tripod by the corpse’s feet. He was a very young man, maybe eighteen, but very intent and businesslike with his equipment. His hair was black and so were his fingernails. He glanced up and saw Trace watching him. “You oughtta stay away from that reporter, mister.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” Trace said tartly.

  The kid looked embarrassed. “I don’t mean to tell you your business. It’s just I know the guy. He’s the dirtiest ink-slinger in town.”

  “Ain’t you one?” Boz said.

  “Um … not really. I’m just the printer’s devil, but I was the only one in the office this morning, and I figured my boss’d crown me if I didn’t check out this murder. Will you pull that sheet down for me?”

  Boz exchanged a disgusted look with Trace and bent to pull the shroud back from the body. Trace touched the crucifix around his neck, muttered a quick benediction for the dead.

  The photographer glanced around again. “You friends of the Herschels?”

  “We knew him,” Trace said. “Why?”

  “Didn’t figure you were from the neighborhood,” the young man said. “But I meant to say, the Roths are progressive—they’ll let Gentiles attend memorial services, if you wanted to pay your respects.”

  “Thanks,” Trace said. It was about the nicest thing anyone had said to him all day.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “So what’d you see,” Boz said, as they were finally riding away from the Herschel farm, “made you holler like that? You have some kind of vision?”

  “Guess you could call it that. First I saw these … black things comin out of the body, kinda like when McGillicuddy died—”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You probably couldn’t see it. But to me it looked like somethin nasty beatin a retreat. And when I touched one of ’em, I saw—it was like I got pulled into Herschel’s skull, and I saw him beatin down the girls like I was doin it with my own hands. And laughin while he did it.”

  Boz looked shocked, but not incredulous. “You think somethin got into him and made him take after the girls with an ax?”

  “You said it, not me.”

  “Makes as much sense as Miss Anna doin for ’em.”

  “Amen.”

  Boz chewed on that for a while. “You notice the living room, how neat it was?”

  “Aside from the blood, you mean?”

  “If they were fightin in there, whalin on each other with axes and pokers, they shoulda been staggerin about, knockin into things. None of the chairs was knocked over—the rug wasn’t even out of place.”

  It was true. Trace remembered Whistler’s blunt fingers gliding over the checkerboard, the undisturbed bowls of popcorn and cider mugs beside the game. Mrs. Herschel’s needle woven through the fabric of her embroidery, the way a woman would if she had to get up for a moment. It was as if, at some prearranged signal, the family had set aside their peaceful evening activities in order to murder one another.

  Trace shivered and passed a hand over his face.

  “You all right?”

  “I’m tired,” he complained. “Seein them all dead like that, and then standin around for hours gettin worked over by that detective, tryin to make out whether we’d been involved in it somehow, and then havin that vision on top of it—”

  “Was their spirits in there?”

  “No,” Trace said, which was surprising, now he thought about it. Usually people who had died bad tended to haunt their deathplace, screaming and clawing at him as soon as he got near. “No, they seemed to have gone on, at least.”

  “So how was it you saw what Herschel saw?”

  “I don’t know. I never had that happen before.” This questioning was making him acutely uncomfortable. He’d always had the sense of his curse being a private thing, not only because of the nasty events connected to it, but also because it was so tightly tied to his faith. Boz was not in the habit of respecting the unseen, and so tended to go at the subject like he was killing snakes. “Everything’s been so quiet, the last couple weeks…”

  “You mean you ain’t been seein things?”

  “I always see them,” he said, though that was half the truth. The spirits were always there, but for the past fortnight or so they had been less inclined to come near and demand his attention. It was as if the misadventure in Sikeston had burnt out a pocket of bad air in his brain, and left him feeling clear and relatively unburdened.

  Boz was quiet for a moment. “You reckon that Fairweather woman knows anything about this business?”

  Trace turned his head so abruptly that Blackjack snorted and sidestepped in the road. “You ain’t sayin she did for them—?”

  “Naw, I didn’t mean that, but you said she knows about spirits and such. She’s still sendin you notes, right?”

  Trace grunted. She had sent him three notes in the past two weeks. The first two had been brief and high-handed: she had another job for him and looked forward to discussing it at his earliest convenience, et cetera. Trace had burnt them both, railing to Boz about the sheer gall of the woman.

  But yesterday there had been a third message, a single line in elegant copperplate script:

  Have the spirits been less troublesome, since last we spoke?

  He wondered how she could know that. And what else she knew. And what it would cost him to find out.

  “You think I should go see her?” Trace asked, half-hoping Boz would advise against it.

  “I dunno,” his partner said, after a moment’s contemplation. “I was thinkin maybe if she could tell you somethin—if there was some way you could prove Miss Anna didn’t do it … but I don’t know what. And I don’t reckon you want to be beholden to her at all.”

  “No,” Trace agreed.

  * * *

  “THERE YOU ARE!” Jameson bellowed, as Trace walked in from the back of the store. “Lawd a’mighty, boys, I was starting to think you’d been copped.”

  “Whyn’t you announce that a little louder?” Trace said, glancing around to see the place was empty but for Miss Fairweather’s pet Chinese, keeping company with the wooden Indian in the corner. “What the hell is he—?”

  “Been here an hour or so,” Jameson said, lowering his voice. “I told him you were out working all day and he insisted you’d be back soon. Then I saw this and I started to wonder if you were coming back at all.”

  Jameson reached for the stack of newspapers on the end of the counter, snagged a Carondelet Citizen, and thrust it at Trace. For a second Trace wondered why he was being handed a page of want ads. Then the print in the third column brightened from black to crimson and began to ooze down the page.

  Trace smothered a grunt of revulsion and dropped the paper on the counter. The text instantly reverted to orderly black rows. THREE MURDERED AT LOCAL HOMESTEAD, proclaimed the headline.

  “Is that true?” Jameson asked.

  “Yeah, it’s true.” Trace rubbed his hand on his shirt. “We just came from there.”

  “Jeezly Crow,” Jameson swore. “I mean I hardly knew Miss Anna, but Herschel’s a good sort, and he doted on those two girls…”

  “What’s it say?” Boz asked.

  “‘A trio of grisly murders occurred in the late hours of Monday evening,’” Trace read, “‘at the small but prosperous farm of landowner Judd Herschel, who with his wife and eldest daughter were hacked to pieces and their bodies thrown into the family well by an unknown assailant.’”

  The piece went on to describe, in lurid detail, the scene at the house and yard, lingering over the image of Herschel’s mangled face gazing up from the waters of the well. It also gave a lengthy recounting of Anna Herschel’s story to the police:

  … Miss Herschel claims an argument between her father and sister, Leah, escalated to bludgeoning each other with a stick of wood and a fireplace poker. Anna and Mrs. Herschel attempted to intervene, and the mother was struck down in defense of her child. Mr. Herschel then vented his rage upon Leah, and
battered his elder daughter about the head until she fell senseless.

  Then, seeing what he had done, Mr. Herschel sought to dispose of the bodies by tipping them into the family well. Anna, believing her father to be “possessed or mad,” tried to dissuade him, but he swore he would kill her, too, and Miss Herschel ran for help. She claims her father was still alive when she left him, though “not in his right mind” and can offer no explanation for how he was killed or ended up in the well.

  Anna Herschel is being held at Four Courts jail pending further questioning.

  “I can’t believe it.” Jameson shook his head. “I’d hate to think any child could turn on her parents like that.”

  “You can’t think Miss Anna did it?” Boz said.

  Jameson looked uncomfortable. “Well, you gotta admit it looks funny—her being the only survivor, and blaming her old man when he ended up dead like the rest of ’em. Herschel was worth some tin, you know. It wouldn’t be the first time the heirs thought to inherit early.”

  “It wasn’t Anna,” Trace said, folding the paper. He looked at Boz, inclining his head slightly in the direction of the waiting Chinaman. “I’m gonna…”

  “Yeah,” Boz said. “I’ll see you at home.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Miss Fairweather’s neighborhood was genteel but aging, built by well-to-do German families before the war. It was not a street where roughnecks typically rode up in work clothes and left their shaggy quarterhorses on the curb. But Trace had not been raised in a barn, either; he touched his hat to the two young ladies who dawdled on the sidewalk, looking him over with a mixture of terror and fascination. Their mother gave him a well-bred eyeballing herself, before hastening her charges along.

  The Chinese, who had trotted the whole way uptown like a hound at Trace’s stirrup, let him into the house. He took Trace’s coat and hat, said, “Miss Fairweather will see you in the laboratory,” and set off across the foyer.

  Trace followed the man up the grand staircase, past the quiet and richly carpeted second-floor landing, to the narrow and dimly lit third-floor hallway. The place was eerily quiet—not even the muted bustle of servants at work. The silence made him uneasy, as if the house were holding its breath, listening back at him.