“Maybe it’s okay that she’s both,” Annabelle offered, gently rubbing her hands up and down the outsides of Debbie’s arms. “You can hate someone for some of the things they do and be grateful to them for others, can’t you?”
“I guess we’ll see,” Debbie said. “What happened to your first love? I’m sure it’s not the crazy jazz mine was.”
“Actually, there are some similarities,” Annabelle said with a wry smirk. “You’re my first love, but things seem to be going pretty well so far.”
Debbie laughed despite the lingering remnants of her crying. She leaned in and kissed Annabelle gently with her tears flavoring the kiss with a salty edge. They walked into Debbie’s reading room to begin their search with what little time remained before closing.
9.
The week wore on with little headway being made in discovering anything new about Maggie or the woods. The ghostly sightings of Maggie’s angry spirit within the town stopped being relegated to just Annabelle and Debbie as more and more anecdotes began surfacing throughout the town.
The research was further slowed by Annabelle’s new work schedule. She faked a note from a doctor, which Debbie thought was downright amazing, by lifting a clinic’s letterhead from their website and then writing the note with her left hand. It stated that Annabelle suffered from solar urticaria and could not work during daylight hours. Debbie asked how Annabelle even knew about the disease to which she replied, “I searched for ‘sunlight allergy’ on WebMD and picked the worst sounding one.” The new work schedule, as provided by the American’s With Disabilities Act, again something that amazed Debbie but was a simple Google search for Annabelle, meant they would spend half their evenings in Baskin Robbins, closing the store after hours.
They’d fallen into such a domestic routine, that Annabelle almost didn’t notice how much time Debbie was spending with her mother. The two were getting along famously as Debbie was more than happy to help with housework that Annabelle always flatly refused to do, and Debbie seemed perfectly happy to sit for hours on end simply listening to gossip—Annabelle’s mother’s favorite topic. Annabelle wanted to object in her petulant teenage way, but she saw how happy it made both Debbie and her mother and decided to leave it alone.
The week before Thanksgiving, they were back in the library on Annabelle’s night off. They were in a silly mood, canoodling a little in the empty hallway, passing their increasingly obscure inside jokes back and forth as they walked. Annabelle kissed two fingertips and placed them to the lips of Debbie’s old picture as they strolled by the memorial into the Deborah Poole Reading Room.
“You were a hottie then and a hottie now,” Annabelle said with a giggle.
Someone behind them dropped a stack of books on the floor with a slap and a clatter. Annabelle and Debbie both snapped their heads around at once to find they weren’t alone in the hallway.
“Hey, Ms. Jensen,” Annabelle said. “Are you okay?”
“Um…fine,” Ms. Jensen said, quickly bending down to pick up her dropped books.
Annabelle and Debbie rushed over to help her. The entire time, when Ms. Jensen should have been focusing on the stack of books, she was watching Debbie with unblinking eyes.
“Ms. Jensen is my old PE teacher,” Annabelle explained to Debbie.
“And who is your friend?” Ms. Jensen asked.
“She’s my girlfriend Debbie, from...” Annabelle said.
“New Haven,” Debbie offered.
“Yep, New Haven. We met on the internet…we’re dating now…living together even,” Annabelle said, not really sure why she felt so nervous telling all of that to Ms. Jensen. She was proud of dating Debbie and she had a sneaking suspicion Ms. Jensen’s tastes angled the same direction.
“Debbie…what?” Ms. Jensen asked.
It occurred to Annabelle a few moments too late that she probably shouldn’t have used Debbie’s real name, especially in light of the fact that they were holding their discussion beneath the Deborah Poole Memorial Reading Room arch with a picture of Debbie not five feet to their left. “Just Debbie,” Annabelle said quickly. “You know, like Nelly, or Cher, or…Jesus?”
“Ah, I see, well, it’s a pleasure to meet you Just Debbie,” Ms. Jensen said. “What brings you two to the archive section?”
“We’re researching the town history for college application essays,” Debbie offered without missing a beat.
Annabelle was a little surprised at the ease of response. She was so flummoxed when lying most of the time that polished subterfuge tended to amaze her. “Yep, um…what brings you down here?” Annabelle asked.
“My sister Ruth is the research librarian,” Ms. Jensen explained.
Annabelle couldn’t reconcile the two women as related. Mrs. Daggett was a prematurely old woman with a permanent scowl and frumpy clothes while Ms. Jensen was tall, athletic, aging beautifully, and even effervescent at times. “For real? Mrs. Daggett?” Annabelle asked bluntly.
“Daggett is her married name,” Ms. Jensen explained. “I’ll talk to her for you if you’d like. See if I can’t get her to help you a little or at least give you some more time with your research.”
“We would appreciate that so much,” Debbie said sweetly. “Thank you.”
Ms. Jensen walked ahead of them, her armful of books recollected. Annabelle and Debbie fell in step behind her, linking arms as they walked. Something about the lovely woman in the jeans and sweatshirt with short fire-red hair seemed strangely familiar to Debbie although she couldn’t put her finger on why.
10.
With the added time and help from the remarkably adept historian Ruth Daggett, information they hadn’t found or had missed entirely began to come to light. Before the weekend, they had a pile of journals, old newspapers, and town records collected on a library cart that Mrs. Daggett set aside for them. More surprisingly, the research librarian began adding her own information to the cart when Debbie and Annabelle weren’t even there. They would show up every few evenings to discover Mrs. Daggett had found and included new information pertinent to their search, which was obviously not about college application essays.
On the Monday night before Thanksgiving, Mrs. Daggett came over to their alcove with a strange old book in hand. She wordlessly set it on the table between Annabelle and Debbie and walked away.
With reverent, delicate fingers, they both opened the book, one to each side, and found inside Maggie’s old journal.
Part 8: The Twisted Root
Autumn 1849 – Margaret
1.
Margaret Mayhew, daughter of Vigil’s Rest’s only blacksmith, awoke before the sunrise whenever she could. It was a habit her mother had instilled in her before she’d died of smallpox, although the reason changed when her mother died. She’d formerly awoken with her mother to start a cooking fire in the stove, stoke the fireplace, and begin preparing breakfast, but now she awoke before her father and brother because this was the only time of day her father had the energy to crawl into her bed. If she was not in her bed, he would simply have to go to work.
A daughter’s duty is what the men of Vigil’s Rest called her work. Margaret should have been long married by age eighteen, but her eighteenth birthday had come and gone and she was still acting as housewife to her widower father and mother to her younger brother. The few suitable men in town who had shown interest in her recoiled when they discovered they would be stealing the female lifeblood of the only blacksmith’s household. Father Virgil, the town’s puritan minister and devoted Calvinist, said it was the godliest thing Margaret could do to sacrifice her future happiness for her father and brother’s continued wellbeing, to say nothing of how it helped the town for their blacksmith to remain happy and productive.
Margaret could accept the duties of cooking, cleaning, and keeping a home for her father and brother. She didn’t even mind her chance at being married slipping away as she never really had much interest in boys or the men they grew up to be. But she couldn’t abide
warming her father’s bed or the harsh slaps she received whenever she told him his actions were against God’s law. This was why she awoke before dawn and why she vacated the cabin attached to the blacksmith’s forge before her father or brother awoke.
The rustic little village was quiet as she slipped through the streets in her warmest shawl. The only other people stirring were the other women who were busy about starting their days as well. Margaret passed her oldest friend’s home on her way to the woods. Sarah had married in the summer two years prior. She had already born one child for her husband, a woodsman, and was well on her way to a second. Sarah’s first baby, a boy, had died of a fever earlier that autumn, and Sarah was still in mourning. Margaret resolved to stop by on her way back to perhaps share a few apples she planned on picking. Sarah was once a lively little sprite of a girl, but now, having lost her looks to two hard pregnancies and the spark in her eyes to the death of one of her children, she was gaining the hard, Protestant edge of most of the other women in the town. Margaret wondered how long it would be before she shared that fate.
Margaret loved the forest. The quiet rustle of life and nature around her calmed her from the grime and toil of the town. She’d brought a sack with her to pick apples from a few of the trees that had escaped the old orchards to grow wild within the woods, but she would wait until after she’d visited Esther for that chore. The path out to the old Hessian homestead wasn’t well-trodden and wound its way through the woods like a gnarled root with plenty of offshoots and twists to prevent easy passage unless a person knew which way to go when it forked. Margaret was such a person as she’d walked the path many times.
The stone cabin Esther lived in on a low rise in the oldest heart of the forest had no door but thatching, no chimney as the only fire pit was on the back with a simple hole letting out the smoke, and looked more like a carefully stacked pile of rocks than any true cabin. Esther said it was built by her husband’s own two hands when he was a young man. Esther didn’t like talking much about her dead husband, only to say he was a Hessian, one of the mercenaries captured by Washington during the War of Independence. Margaret counted the years on this and surmised Esther must be more than eighty for this to be true. The withered, hunched old woman who dressed in piles of rags tied loosely around her frail form certainly looked like she could be that old. The oldest man in town, Grandfather Jeremiah, was only sixty-two and in increasingly poor health. When Margaret brought this fact to Esther, her old friend laughed in a wheezy, racked way and said, “I’m older than eighty but not quite a hundred. Tell me when this Grandfather Jeremiah can say the same.”
Margaret walked through the tiny fields of corn that grew tall to either side of the path leading up to the stone cabin. The stalks were left as they stood, browned and tan as they had already been plucked clean of their ears and were left to dry with the coming winter. Esther was in front of her cabin, hauling a bucket of water over from the well to pour into the cooking pot set on the stone fire ring she used for laundry and cooking.
“Fair morning to you, Miss Mayhew,” Esther said upon Margaret’s approach.
“To you as well,” Margaret replied.
They had their routine, one of quiet industriousness, where Margaret would sit and make cornhusk dolls as Esther had taught her, stacking them neatly in a basket to sell them in town upon her return, while Esther cooked breakfast by pouring cornmeal mixed with water on heated stones to create Johnny cakes. That morning, while they waited for the cakes to cook, Esther took her usual seat across the basket of dried cornhusks from Margaret and began bending sticks into odd shapes, tying them into place with straps of dried animal sinew. She added feathers, tiny rodent skulls, and sprigs of plants here and there as decoration on the webbed hoops and filled in crosses.
“I don’t think I could sell those,” Margaret said, noting how gruesome most of items looked when Esther was done.
“They’re not for selling,” Esther replied, her old, gnarled hands never leaving their work. “I want you to watch what I do, learn to make them yourself, and then hang them back along the trail when you leave and maybe down by the creek crossing away from the road.”
“Why?”
“Those accursed urchins have been stealing my corn again,” Esther replied cryptically.
Margaret took the answer as if she knew what it meant. Their food was ready and the work of creating dolls nearly done. They ate in silence as always, finished their dual tasks after, and Esther ushered Margaret on her way with a repeating of the instructions: hang them along the way, but out of sight from the trail.
2.
Margaret did as she was told, walking back along the trail with the basket of cornhusk dolls to sell on one arm and a basket of what Esther had called dream catchers, god’s eyes, and wind chimes in the other. She hung them as she was told, cleverly disguising them among the bare branches of oaks or the thick greenery of the fir trees. It slowed her return to town, but gave her a longer reprieve in the woods she loved.
The sun was nearly at mid height when she neared town again, too late for her to pick apples, and so she decided to stop off at Sarah’s to gift her one of the dolls. Perhaps she would have a girl this time. Margaret stopped outside the decrepit cabin that was the woodsman’s home before he’d married Sarah and hadn’t improved much after despite his promises to build her a grand home with logs he cut himself. There was shouting inside, and rattling of metal items against wooden furniture. Margaret secreted herself away along the side of the cabin where firewood was stacked beneath a crumbling awning with a thatched roof. She could hear Sarah’s husband inside, hollering at her about the state of the cabin, about her fading looks, and her wasteful ways. Margaret heard him strike her, not the open palmed slaps Margaret’s fathered delivered on her, but a closed fist—Sarah’s husband always struck her with a closed hand.
Margaret waited awhile, long until after the sounds of shouting died down. Sarah’s husband emerged from the cabin shortly after, took up his ax, and tromped down the road with an angry slope to his shoulders. Her avoidance of marriage seemed more and more like a blessing whenever she visited Sarah. Margaret emerged from her hiding spot when she was certain Sarah’s husband would not return, and knocked on the cabin door.
Sarah’s enshrouded face peeked through the front window to see who it was, and the door opened shortly after. Margaret was let in without a word. She righted an overturned wooden stool with three legs, and guided her increasingly pregnant friend to sit upon it while she cleaned up. The first few times Margaret had done such cleaning for her friend there had been pottery, glass, and ceramic shards in the mix, but more and more, Sarah’s husband was running out of breakables to shatter. The metal cookware and wooden furniture had started showing signs of ruin from the abuse, but were far more resistant to his rages. It didn’t take long for Margaret to clean up the mess as it was a small cabin and the items to hurl around were becoming fewer and fewer.
Sarah investigated the basket of cornhusk dolls and removed one of the best Margaret had made to inspect it closer. Margaret smiled to her friend with the swollen eye and bleeding nose. She couldn’t clean Sarah up. She wanted to, wanted to help her feel better, but the one time she’d tried, Sarah had chased her out of the house.
“You should keep that one,” Margaret said. “You might have a girl who would like it.”
Sarah hurled the doll back into the basket. “Drown me and the girl if I’m unfortunate enough to have a daughter,” Sarah said. “Jacob wants another son or nothing.”
There were kind platitudes Margaret knew she was supposed to offer about the joys of having a daughter and the goodness of husbands to know what is best, but she didn’t believe any of it and she knew she couldn’t make Sarah believe any of it, not with her nose bleeding the way it was. Margaret knelt before Sarah and smiled up into her marred face. She plucked the doll Sarah had been admiring from the basket and offered it to her again.
The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow Page 18