by Sarra Cannon
“I’m sorry,” Hallie said. “I don’t quite understand what you mean.”
“You ain’t never heard of witchcraft?” she said, her voice rising. “Witchcraft’s what happened up in that house. The lady of the house sold her soul to the devil so she could write her stories, and then he dragged her off!”
“All right,” Matthew growled. “I’ve had enough of this. Hallie, let’s go.” He started up the hill and Hallie hesitated, then hurried after him.
“I didn’t realize the extent of their superstitions about this place,” she said, panting as she tried to catch up to him. “I thought they just believed the house was haunted, not that there was anything bad about Christine.”
Matthew slowed, realizing that in his anger he’d been almost running away.
“Are you surprised? I wouldn’t expect anything less from this town of backwoods, hillbilly racists—”
“Hey, hey. It’s not fair to judge them all like that. I’m surprised by you. You grew up here… I thought you’d be more understanding.”
“More understanding of what? Of that?” He gestured behind them, where the old woman was still watching.
“Christine Belleyre made it possible for these peoples’ families to make a good living, to build homes and lives for themselves here. Black and white. That’s the legacy of this place. That’s what they’re trying to protect.”
Matthew snorted.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just… I don’t think it’s that simple. That woman wasn’t protecting anything. I think people like to smooth over the ugly parts of their history.”
“Is that why you’re here, to find the ugly parts? To expose this place for what you think it really is?”
Matthew stopped, and she did too. “No. I’m here for answers.”
“Answers about Christine Belleyre?” Her voice was hard, challenging, as though she didn’t believe for a second that he would tell her the truth.
“Yes.” It was a partial truth, and for now, that would have to be enough.
They continued on in silence, their shoes crunching in the gravel road.
Chapter 10
The Belleyre house rose over the final crest of the hill, looming stately and decrepit out of the woods. Slowly, the trees along the walk began to straighten and even, sprouting in a pattern made by man, not nature. The road narrowed as they neared the house, and the path was overgrown and littered with dried leaves, twigs, and tall wiry tufts of grass that brushed their calves as they walked. She felt self-conscious as they approached the ancient wraparound porch, which seemed to creak and peel all on its own as they stood there, looking up at the house.
“Should we just…?” Hallie started to ask, but Matthew was already bounding up the steps and twisting the large doorknob.
“If you stop for a minute,” Hallie said, annoyed, “I can probably pick the lock.” Matthew hung back, looking a little sheepish.
The front door was enormous - as stately as the rest of the house. As she approached it, she felt a quiver of misgiving. Hallie knew how to pick a lock, but she’d never picked one so old. She hoped she wasn’t about to make a fool of herself. Brushing stray hairs out of her face, she reached in her bag and pulled out the kit she’d taken from the Westie, which held a handful of different sized screwdrivers and an assortment of bobby pins and paper clips. She set the kit on the ground and came up with two larger pins, which she thought would be enough to do the job.
She could feel Matthew’s eyes on her as she knelt at eye level with the lock and wiggled the pin inside, trying to get a feel for how its parts fit together. It was rusty and stiff inside, but she managed to slide the latches back one by one, slowly.
“You know, I bet there’s a smaller door around back. Or maybe even an unlocked window. Or a broken one. We could get in that way,” he said, shifting impatiently, and she glared.
“Give me a minute. Just cool it—I can do this.”
Just then, she felt the last piece of the latch click, but as she went to turn the door, it slipped back.
“Damn.” She took the other, smaller pin, bent it open and wiggled it in alongside the first.
“Okay, I need your help—I need you to just twist the doorknob while I lift—”
Matthew twisted, she wiggled the pins, and the door clicked open. He beamed at her, and she grinned as she stood up, stowing away her makeshift lock kit.
“See? Was that so hard, just to—” But just then, Matthew pushed open the door and tugged her inside.
“Oh, wow.”
Her spine tingled. The atmosphere inside the entry hall was oddly alive, humming with energy, as though the gust of outside air had sent ripples throughout the house. Despite the dry chill outside, the air they breathed was cool and damp, sweet with the smell of rotting wood, the humidity making everything feel dewy and dark, so that when they stepped further into the room, they didn’t kick up clouds of dirt. Instead, the thick layer of dust that coated the mahogany floors and walls clung and stuck to them, cushioning their feet and softened their footsteps.
Matthew crept forward, and he fumbled in his bag for a flashlight. The daylight was barely enough to penetrate the foggy grimy windows and thick velvet curtains, which hung in the drawing and dining rooms on either side of the entrance hall. As he darted the flashlight around, it illuminated a grand arching staircase that seemed to invite them upward, opening to a large landing that featured an enormous wall engraving of what looked like faeries in a wood. Above them, a broken chandelier hung precariously, devoid of its glass bulbs. Tendrils of dust and cobwebs drizzled down from the empty sockets. At some point, someone had tried to update pieces of this old place; a few of the mahogany planks looked newer, less weathered, and of course the house was wired for electricity, but that was the extent of the renovations.
Then, as Hallie stepped forward to inspect a portrait hanging on the wall to her left, a horrible feeling seized her, and she froze, her hands growing cold and clammy. She fought the impulse to run - to turn and march straight out the door, out of the damp living darkness and back into the biting warmth of the sun. Instead, she looked over at the portrait and instantly recognized the clear, penetrating eyes of Christine Belleyre. Everything about the woman was dark and striking, from her deep-set eyes to her high cheekbones, full lips and and sun-browned skin. This was no Southern belle: nothing about her was porcelain or delicate. But as Hallie took another step towards the portrait, she cried out.
Pain, a deep, unrelenting, stabbing pain was burning through her side, just below her rib cage. She clutched at the invisible wound, groaning, and instantly Matthew was at her side, propping her up. The pain radiated through her chest and she rubbed at it, trying to breathe.
“What’s wrong? Hallie? Talk to me.”
“My side—” She gritted her teeth and tried to straighten up. “Damn, it hurts. Maybe I overdid it, walking up the hill…”
She hobbled toward the staircase and he hovered, anxiously, as she lowered herself onto one of the lower steps, which creaked as she tried to sit. She tried not to think of the termites that were probably nibbling away at the floor beneath her. But then, as quickly as it had come, the pain eased and vanished.
“I’m okay,” she said, once it had gone. “Wow. I—what the hell was that?”
Matthew was giving her a strange look. “Where did it hurt you?”
She gestured to her side and her chest, and Matthew frowned. He leaned in to inspect her side, pressing tenderly over the spot where she’d felt the stabbing. Now, all she felt was the clinical way he touched her, which only made her want to shove him away.
“And it doesn’t hurt now?”
She shook her head, pulling her water bottle from her bag and taking a drink.
“I’m fine. Let’s go. We’ve already busted in, so let’s make this quick.”
Matthew nodded, then led the way up the stairs, Hallie at his heels.
“Okay,” he said, pausing at the landing, in
front of the creepy old wooden engraving. “We’ve got to hit three places first: the library, the master bedroom, and the attic. The attic will be the biggest task, but the most likely place we will find things. Where do you want to start?”
They started with the library, which Hallie had hoped would be more fruitful, in order to get the smaller rooms out of the way. Together they rummaged through a regal old writing desk, but came up empty, with only bits of old stationary, broken quill pens, and perfectly preserved bottles of indigo ink.
“This was the only thing she ever wrote in,” Matthew said, shaking his head. “And it was ridiculously expensive. But that was just like her—she had expensive tastes, Christine.”
Hallie liked the way he talked about her, as though he’d known her personally. She found it endearingly dorky. How many guys got this into history? Louisa had always said that everyone needed a passion… and it seemed like, with this project, with the focused way he sifted through the contents of the desk, he had found his.
The master bedroom was stranger to search through - Hallie couldn’t help feeling like they were crossing a line with their snooping when they rummaged through the old dresser drawers. She kept expecting to find Civil War-era underwear, or something. Still, they came up empty. Most of the contents of the drawers were long gone, leaving nothing but slow-crawling spiders and their cobwebs inside.
“Don’t the owners realize how valuable this old furniture is? It should be polished and preserved, not left here as bug food,” Hallie said, sliding another drawer closed. Matthew simply shook his head.
“After the house went on auction, I think it became a sore spot for the family, to sell any part of this place.”
She glanced over at him and watched him chewing his lip. He was starting to get frustrated again. An hour had passed and still, they had nothing to show for their break-in. No clues as to where Christine Belleyre had fled, or where she’d sent her manuscripts. No letters, no photographs, nothing written at all. Just that old peeling portrait in the entry hall, that stern defiant glare that said I know why you’re here, and you won’t find what you came for. A ghostly stab in her side that said Get out, leave, you’re not wanted.
She felt more determined than ever to find something. She began tapping on the walls, rubbing her fingers on the raised wallpaper pattern, listening for hollow spots.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t these old houses have secret passageways, and stuff?”
Matthew looked amused. “Not there, they don’t.”
“How do you know? Maybe this house was a part of the underground railroad.”
He laughed. “It wasn’t.”
She huffed and stopped her tapping on the walls. “All right, fine. Then let’s go to the attic. I don’t think there’s anything for us to find down here.”
Again, he led the way—this time back across the landing and into a short corridor, hidden like a room behind a door. They took just three steps before the floor jutted upward in a narrow rickety staircase, and Hallie bumped into Matthew as he drew up short.
“Sorry,” she whispered, unsure why the dark enclosed space made her feel the need to whisper. He pulled out the flashlight again, illuminating a hanging spider much larger than the ones that had set up camp in the dresser drawers, and Hallie shrieked, clutching at Matthew’s bag.
He swatted at the web and the spider skittered away. Then he pried Hallie’s fingers off of his bag and tapped her on the nose, which hovered somewhere near his ear.
“Relax. You’re making me jumpy.”
He led the way with the flashlight, and Hallie, unashamed to admit that the darkness and the claustrophobic staircase, coupled with the feeling she had that the walls were breathing, were definitely freaking her out.
“Hurry up,” she said, prodding him along. “I keep thinking that if we suffocate and die in here, no one will know to come look for us.”
He laughed breathlessly. “You’re crazy.”
After another few agonizing minutes, they ran up against another door, and Matthew had to jiggle the handle a bit before forcing it open. Together, they stepped into the most incredible, vast, expansive attic Hallie had ever seen.
She guessed that the room covered the complete floor plan of the house, because it was a direct parallel to the first floor—minus all the walls. Everywhere, stacked haphazardly in random piles, were stacks of boxes, of old chairs, of books and old globes, hat racks, broken lamps, and other old knickknacks.
Hallie’s stomach sank. Where were they going to begin? It was already getting late; night would set in soon and then they’d be searching by flashlight—not to mention wandering back to the Westie by it, too.
A chill wrapped around her. Up here, she no longer felt the warm, living, breathing energy of the house on all sides; rather, it seethed beneath her, which was no less comforting. She felt precariously balanced, like she had perched on the back of a large whale that was set to dive at any minute.
“So…” she said, “Where should we start?”
They dug. Matthew, for the first time that day, looked invigorated. He began by doing a large sweep, marking with a stack of post-its every box that looked promising, which was basically any box that held documents or photographs. He color coded for correspondence, business contracts, and photographs. Hallie trailed after him, opening each tagged box and sorting through the contents as quickly as possible. When she saw something she didn’t understand, she beckoned him back and he helped her to read the old handwriting.
“That’s a labor contract,” he said. “She drew these up with everyone who worked for her. Even the slaves she inherited. Though obviously, these contracts weren’t legal with them.”
“Is there a reason she didn’t free them?”
Matthew hesitated. “I think she thought it was better. Safer. For everyone involved.”
“How?”
“Well, for one, she couldn’t buy more slaves if she had a reputation for freeing them. But also, the town was pretty hostile at the time to free, employed blacks. Abingford was enclosed, tight-knit, and there was the sentiment, at the time, that wage-earning blacks posed a threat to white economic security. Don’t ask me how, there’s not much logic in bigotry.”
“For someone who isn’t in school, you sure know an awful lot.”
His ears reddened. “It’s nothing.”
Hallie turned back to sifting through the box at hand, and Matthew returned to his spot, having made it almost halfway across the room. The work was slow-going, since the old papers were fragile, stained, and moth-eaten, with faded ink and delicate folds. She had to smooth stacks of tri-folded paper as she went, which slowed her pace.
Finally, she came across a box full of little square rectangles of paper—folded, she realized, into little envelopes. With an excited gasp, she opened one to reveal the letter written on the inside.
Dear Mr. Longsmith, it began, It was with great sadness that I read your last letter. My hope is to make perfectly clear that my intention in leaving is not to leave you or to reject, without explanation, the great and lasting happiness you have promised…
The signature was faded and rushed, but it was there, plain as day: Christine J. Belleyre.
“Matthew! I got something!”
He stumbled over boxes trying to hasten back to her, but she was too excited to laugh. His hands shook as he took the letter from her, scanned it, then looked back up at her, his eyes bright. “This is it!” He let the letter fall back into the box and pulled her up off her knees. “Hallie, you found something. These are her letters—old letters, maybe drafts or just unsent letters, collected, somehow… Do you know what this could tell us?”
He was looking at her like she’d just told him she’d won the Nobel prize. As though she’d had something to do with those letters being there. His excitement was contagious, and she couldn’t help but laugh as he tugged her into a tight hug. When he pulled back, she reveled in the happiness on his face, which w
as so pure that she couldn’t help herself - she tugged him down and kissed him.
When she pulled back, they were both flushed, breathing hard from the feverish kiss and the rush of excitement. He was about to kiss her again, had slid his hands up to cradle her face, when she smelled something strange, and put her fingers to his lips to stop him.
“Do you smell that?”
“Huh?”
“I smell something… like something’s burning.”
His nostrils flared as he sniffed the air, but Hallie was sure of it— something that smelled undeniably like burning wood wafted between them. She looked down at their feet.
“You don’t think….?” They hadn’t lit any lamps or candles for light while searching, though she had tried one or two light switches, more out of habit than anything.
Matthew rushed to the door, and Hallie chased after him. They bounded down the rickety attic staircase two steps at a time, and Matthew flung open the door. They emerged on the second floor landing, and what they saw, what they smelled, what they tasted in the singed air, made Hallie’s heart stop.
Flames engulfed the lower floor, crawling steadily up the enormous draperies that surrounded the bay windows. Fire devoured the bookshelves, the old broken pianoforte, the sitting room furniture, even the dust itself crackled as it was eaten up by the flames.
There was little time to react, to wonder how the hell the entire house had managed to go up in flames while they quietly sifted through documents in the attic. Matthew grabbed her hand and dragged her back to the master bedroom, where he pushed hard against the four poster bed. Hallie tried to help him, unsure of his purpose. Was he trying to push it against the door? Trying to block the flames from getting in? It was hard to think rationally. She wondered if they’d be able to climb out the window. It was a long drop; this was a big house.
“Are you sure the only way out is up here?” she asked, but he ignored her. He was on his hands and knees, rapping at the worn hardwood with his knuckles. “Matthew, what are you doing? We have to get out of here!”
But just then, his fingers found purchase between one of the floor planks and he pried it up. As he did, the surrounding planks lifted too—revealing a small hole, just large enough for one person to drop into.