She gave my hand a squeeze. “Me too. Come on. We can be scared together.”
As I bent over to go through the doorway into the hidden room, the smell of burning was strong. Much stronger than the other times I’d been in there, when there had only been a faint trace of it.
“Ruby,” I said. She was already on the floor by the trunk, pulling things out. “Ruby, have you ever smelled a burning smell in here?” She looked over at me, her face half-lit by the flashlight she’d placed on the floor. She sniffed.
“Burning? No. Why? Do you?”
“Yes. More now than before.”
She shook her head. “The Sight,” she said, predictably.
“More like The Smell,” I grumbled, and sat down beside her. I couldn’t shake the image of those two women in the bed with fire all around them. I took the envelope from her and opened it, extracting a couple of sheets of brittle, yellowed paper covered with a flowery handwriting. Ruby helpfully shone the flashlight on it.
“What is it?”
“It’s some kind of letter. From Shelagh Duggan. Who was she?”
“She was Vince Duggan’s wife. The one who adopted Fenella and Fiona, the twins who were found in the root cellar.”
“Right.”
We read it together. At the top it read, “Deed of Gift.” It was dated February 20, 1910.
I am writing this deed of gift while of sound mind and body. On January 1, 1910, my adopted daughters, Fiona Mary Finn Whalen and Fenella Margaret Finn Brennan died tragically on account of a chimney fire that burned up the room they were sleeping in after a New Year’s party. Fiona and Fenella were daughters of my husband’s brother, Boyd, and these two children at age two were the only survivors of the Slippers Cove Flood of 1879.
Vince and I raised them as if they were our own daughters. Now that they are gone, Fiona leaves behind two daughters, Lucy Alice Finn Whalen and Lily Mary Finn Whalen. It is my wish, and the wish of my husband, that this house is deeded over to them and their heirs thereafter. Our own children have their own houses and families, and these two little girls and their father have moved in with us. The Finns have such a sad history. Vince and I want to do our part to provide for these two that are left, and any that may come after. We particularly want the house to go to the girl children, not the boys, since girls have a harder time in the world making their way.
This house was left to me by my father, Thomas Walsh, for the same reason. He wanted me to have something of my own that was not my husband’s, and Vince and I are in perfect agreement that it should go to Lily and Lucy.
There are those who looked down on Fiona and Fenella because they were Finns, and from Slippers Cove. There has been a lot of talk that the family was no good, but it’s just talk. The Finns of Slippers Cove were hardworking people who made a life there for their families and the terrible flood that took them away was not a judgment on them, as some people say, but an Act of God we can none of us understand. They were good people and none of them deserved to lose their lives like that. And Fiona and Fenella were dear daughters to us. We want the Finns to go into the future with something they can call their own. We have discussed this with our other children, and they have all agreed to give up any claim they or their heirs may have on the house, and that it should go to the Finns. We would like them to always keep the name “Finn” to remember who they are and where they came from.
Dated this 20th day of February 1910.
It was signed by Shelagh Mary Duggan and Vince Albert Duggan, and all eight of their children.
“Wow,” said Ruby. “That explains a lot. Poor Fiona and Fenella. It must have been them you saw in the fire.”
I nodded.
“And that’s why this room was all shut off. Shelagh and Vince couldn’t bear the memory of it.”
I nodded again.
“It’s the curse,” I whispered. “They died because of the curse. And Shelagh knew that. That’s why she left the house to the Finns. She wanted to give them a chance of something, something beyond the curse.”
“But it didn’t work,” said Ruby. “Lily and Lucy still died young, and Daphne.”
“And Meg and Molly.”
We stared at each other.
“We’re next,” whispered Ruby.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
OFF WITH THE FAIRIES
Eldred turned the wooden box this way and that.
“What a beauty,” he said softly, tracing the lines of the design with the tip of a finger. “Do you know what these are?”
Ruby and I peered at them and shook our heads.
“Celtic knots,” he said. “It’s an Irish design, goes way back.”
“What do they mean?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. But it’s a fine puzzle, trying to figure them out.”
He spoke slowly, as if he wasn’t quite awake yet. We were standing with him at his workbench in the barn, where we’d tracked him down after breakfast.
“Can you open it?” said Ruby.
He turned the box over several more times, inspecting each side carefully. Then he picked up a magnifying glass.
“Look, here’s the keyhole,” he said, pointing to a slit that was worked into one of the silver knots on the side of the box, almost completely hidden.
“Can you open it?” repeated Ruby.
He found a thin wire and inserted it into the keyhole, twisting it this way and that. Nothing happened.
“I’d hate to damage it,” he said. “This is old. And valuable, no doubt. Where did you say you found it?” He spoke absently, and his eyes had that faraway look I’d noticed once or twice before.
We exchanged glances.
“Um…” said Ruby. “In Pop’s room.”
“We think it’s connected to the Finns,” I said. “And the curse.”
I wasn’t sure he heard me. He was running his fingers over the silver knots on the box again, looking thoughtful. “Slippers Cove,” he said softly. “It all goes back to Slippers Cove. But you know I can’t be telling you more. I promised Doll never to tell Meg and Molly. No matter what.” He looked more distracted than ever.
Ruby grabbed his arm and gave it a gentle shake.
“Look at us, Eldred. We’re not Meg and Molly. I’m Ruby and she’s Ruth. You never promised Doll you wouldn’t tell us!”
“Ruth and Ruby, Meg and Molly, Eva and Eileen,” he said in a lilting voice. “All you twins look the same. As if you were all the same two girls, born again and again, stuck inside the curse and never to escape.” His voice faded away.
“Eldred?” I said.
Ruby put her hand on my arm and shook her head. She stood up and gently took the box from his fingers.
“We’ll see you later, Eldred,” she said, and we left him there, staring into space.
“What was that about?” I asked once we were clear of the barn.
“He gets like that sometimes,” said Ruby. “Aunt Doll says he’s off with the fairies. I don’t know. He just…goes somewhere else.”
I shivered. The sun was trying to break through a dense bank of clouds over the ocean, but there was a chill wind blowing in.
“Did you notice he said Eva and Eileen? As if he knew them, just as he knew Meg and Molly? And you and me?” I said.
Ruby nodded. “He knows something more about the old days, that’s for sure. It may have been a story his mother told him, one that her mother told her, and her mother before that. His family have all been storytellers since I don’t know when. But he won’t tell us. Not if he promised.”
We went into the house and I pulled Ruby into the living room.
“What he said about all the twins being the same?”
“What about it?”
“I…I had a kind of dream last night, or an image or something—”
“A vision?”
“I don’t know! It was when I was falling asleep, and there was a line of all the twins, all of them, back to Eva and Eileen, and they were holding han
ds and walking two by two, along the Ghost Road, up over the hill. And they all looked the same. They looked like you and me. They were you and me.”
Ruby stared at me. “You think…you think…we are them? Like when your mother called you Moira in the dream about the shipwreck, like you were Moira and Meg was Eileen? We’re all really the same people, and it’s happening to us over and over again in different lifetimes? Like Eldred said?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said slowly. “I don’t think we’re the same people. But I think they’re all inside us, our mothers, our aunts, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. They’re in there, living on in us. And they’re carrying the curse with them. So we’re carrying it. And we have to fix it. For all of them. Not just us.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
THE EAVESDROPPERS
“For all of them,” murmured Ruby. “You’re right. So they can rest. So they can all rest.”
There was a brightening in the room, as if the sun had finally broken through. Ruby walked over to the window and looked out.
“I think it’s clearing up,” she said. She turned back to me. “Let’s go to Slippers Cove today, Rue,” she said suddenly. “We may not get this good a day for another week.”
I went to the window and looked out. There were still dark clouds over the western hills.
“I don’t know,” I said, stalling. “It doesn’t look that great to me. What if it rains?”
“We’ll take raincoats,” she replied, coming up beside me. I turned to her.
She smiled. “Ruth, I know you’re scared,” she said. She’d read my mind again. I wasn’t sure how much I liked this twin thing. How would I ever keep a secret from her?
“Yes,” I said in a shaky voice. “I’m scared.”
She put her arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. “I’ll be with you. And I think Meg will be too. And Molly. And all the rest of them. It’s come down to us, Ruth. You know we have to do it.”
I felt her strength coming into me, and I found comfort in her calm, matter-of-fact way of talking about Meg and Molly and the others as if they were not very far away.
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
“Right,” said Ruby, grinning. “Let’s go, then.”
She disappeared into the kitchen to tell Aunt Doll we were going for a long hike, and while they put a lunch together, I went up to our room and fished out my knapsack from inside my suitcase in the closet. I put in a couple of pairs of dry socks and my sketchbook and pencils, and then I sat down on the bed, holding the wooden box in my hands.
The pattern of Celtic knots was intricate and mysterious. The lines kept crossing and crisscrossing, and it was almost impossible to follow one line all the way through. It reminded me of a maze in a coloring book, where you had to run your pencil along to find your way out. The silver pattern was tarnished and black in places. I tried rubbing at a bit of it with my handkerchief, and the black gradually disappeared. Now the twisting lines had a soft, silvery sheen. I wondered how old it was. If it came from Ireland, as Eldred said, it must date back to at least 1832, when the Finns came over in the ship. I turned to look at the painting of the ship on the wall.
And then it happened. It was so swift this time, with no warning, just a seamless transition from my present into the past.
Two girls were sitting on the floor beside the dresser, heads bent together. One of them suppressed a giggle and the other one smacked at her shoulder to get her to be quiet.
Molly and Meg, when they were just a couple of years older than Ruby and me. Molly was the giggler and Meg was the smacker. Even though they were identical, it was easy for me to tell them apart. I knew Meg, through and through. Not just because I’d seen her ghost, but because she was my mother. Or at least, she was the mother I remembered and dreamed about, though Molly was my birth mother.
Molly was still trying to stifle her giggles. She looked like she was always laughing, a bit like Ruby, with a lively grin. My mother. They were both my mother.
This was weird. I felt a catch in my throat.
Molly’s shoulders were shaking with the giggles and Meg pinched her arm, hard.
“Stop it!” she mouthed. Molly subsided.
Their blonde hair was caught up in two high, identical ponytails, Molly’s tied with a pink ribbon and Meg’s with a green. They were wearing baggy jeans with plaid turned-up cuffs and bulky, home-knit sweaters.
They seemed to be listening to something. I could hear a faint murmur of voices from the room below. I got to my feet and tiptoed over, but I needn’t have bothered trying to be quiet. They paid no attention to me.
They were bent over an iron grille, some kind of air vent, on the floor between the dresser and the closet door. Evidently it went straight through to the room below, because the voices were clearer now.
A woman was speaking in a high, angry tone. A voice that was familiar, if only I could place it.
“You can pray all you like, Clarence Duggan, but God punishes sinners and all the Finns have to live with the sins of their mothers. And you can keep those girls away from my George or you’ll have me to reckon with!”
The witch.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
GEORGE
Molly began to sputter and Meg pulled her away from the iron grille.
“Honestly, Molly,” she said softly as she tugged her sister over to the bed and sat beside her. “You’re going to get us into worse trouble if Pop finds out we were eavesdropping up here.”
“What are we in trouble for?” protested Molly. “Hanging around with her precious George? Last time I checked it wasn’t a crime for a Duggan to be friends with a Peddle.”
“You know very well that Mrs. Peddle thinks it is,” said Meg. “And especially the Finn twins. You heard her.”
“George told me yesterday she was on the warpath about us spending so much time with him, but I didn’t think she’d come and complain to Pop.” Molly laughed. “She was some crooked, wasn’t she? She was sputtering like a kettle on the boil. I thought she was going to explode.”
“She said some awful things about us,” said Meg quietly. “And our family. How a woman like that could give birth to someone as sweet as George is more than I’ll ever understand.”
“Doll says he takes after his father,” said Molly. Then she sighed. “George is sweet, isn’t he?”
Meg laughed. “And so cute. Admit it, Molly, you have a big crush on him.”
“Me? What about you? You get all giggly whenever he’s around.”
“Do not!” said Meg, giving her a push. Then they both laughed.
“But what about that old Bible Pop took out of the wall?” said Meg. “We gotta get our hands on that, Molly. He said it showed all the Finns going back to Ireland.”
“We’ll have to wait till the next time he goes to visit Father Doyle and sneak in there,” said Molly.
“Yes. I want to see that Bible. There might be something there that would help us.”
“I can’t get over that old witch coming over here to see Pop to complain about us,” said Molly, lying back on the bed and kicking her feet up in the air. “She has her nerve. Aunt Doll told me last week she hasn’t ever stepped inside this house because she’s a Barrett, and the Barretts have always hated the Finns. And the Duggans, because they adopted the Finn twins.”
“I wonder,” said Meg slowly. “I wonder about that. I wonder if the Barretts were involved somehow in the curse? They all came from Ireland around the same time. Maybe the Bible will tell us something. Do you think…do you think if we could put an end to that feud we could put an end to the curse?”
Molly shook her head. “How can we put an end to the feud? Mrs. Peddle hates us.”
“But George doesn’t.”
Molly stared at her sister. “What do you mean?”
“Look, if one of us married George, then the two families would be brought together.”
Molly gave a hoot of laughter. “Meg, you’re awful.”<
br />
“Why? We both like him. He’s a great guy. I’d marry him.”
“I would too,” said Molly. “But how would we decide who gets him, if we both like him?”
The two girls looked at each other.
“Share?” said Meg, and they dissolved into giggles.
“Mrs. Peddle won’t like it much,” said Molly.
“No, she certainly won’t,” said Meg, and then they started laughing again.
“Don’t worry, Molly,” said Meg when their laughter started to die down. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you. I know it’s you he wants.”
“Do you really think he likes me?” said Molly, with an uncertainty in her voice that surprised me.
“Of course he does,” said Meg. “He’s crazy about you.”
Molly laughed. “That would be hard to take, wouldn’t it, Meg, if I get a boyfriend before you do? Never mind, there’s always Joe Dunphy. You can have him.”
“Ha!” said Meg, grabbing a pillow and walloping her sister over the head with it. “Fat chance!”
I heard a clatter of footsteps coming up the stairs and along the hall. Ruby burst into the room.
“Ruth?” she said.
I looked back at the bed. They were gone.
“Aunt Doll’s making us a lunch and—” Ruby broke off when she saw my face. “What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t speak for a moment. I went and sat down on the bed where Meg and Molly had been lying a minute before. I shook my head.
“Was it bad?” said Ruby, coming and sitting beside me. “Like the fire?”
“No,” I said. “Not scary.”
“Then what?” said Ruby.
My eyes were swimming with tears.
“I saw them,” I said. “Meg and Molly. Right here. Talking about the witch and the Bible and Uncle George. They were so…so alive.” And then I started to cry.
Ruby put her arms around me and gave me a hug. I couldn’t stop crying. I felt bereft. I wanted Meg and Molly back—laughing, alive. All their efforts to break the curse had failed. They’d joined the two families, but it wasn’t enough. They’d separated Ruby and me, but that wasn’t enough either. The curse had caught up with them, the way it would catch up with Ruby and me, and our children. There didn’t seem to be a way out.
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