The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

In the library Jess was still sleeping. I sat down in the chair by the fire and listened to the house, but the creaks and groans had ceased as the wind had died down. I heard a murmuring noise, but that was coming from below me, from Monty’s apartment. It was a woman’s voice and I guessed that Sunny had decided to spend the night to watch over Monty. She must have really been worried about him to stay in the house.

  I opened Elizabeth Foley’s diary and it fell open automatically to the pages that had lain in the mud and blood. The entry was dated January 12, 1930.

  Mary died last night. It happened in the ice storm. I wanted to go to her because I had one of my “feelings” that something was wrong, but Father forbade me to because the storm was so bad. I lay awake listening to branches breaking in the orchard and I knew something was wrong. Sometime in the middle of the night I just knew I had to look out my window. The storm had passed and the moon had come out, lighting up the ice-covered trees so that they looked like the Christmas decorations in the Woolworth’s windows. I knew I shouldn’t find it pretty because we’d likely lost a lot of trees, but I couldn’t help it.

  “It looks like an enchanted fairy land,” Mary would say when she took me to see the Christmas windows in Kingston. I hoped that if Mary was looking out her window she would see how pretty it was and it would take away the black cloud she’d lived under all this winter. I looked toward the Jackson farm to see if I could make out a light in her window, but instead I saw someone walking through the orchard. I thought for a moment I was seeing a ghost because the woman walking between the trees wasn’t dressed for a night like this. She was wearing a long flowered nightdress with only a shawl over her head. Then I knew that it was Mary.

  I still thought it might have been a ghost. Mary used to read to me from a book about people who saw visions of their loved ones at the moment of their deaths even if they were thousands of miles apart. Mary only lived across the orchards at the next farm. If she had died having her baby she’d come to say good-bye. But then I saw her trip on the ice and knew a ghost wouldn’t trip. I ran downstairs as quietly as I could and pulled on boots and a coat and held my breath as I lifted the latch and tried to keep the door from creaking. I wonder now why I didn’t wake Father, but I think I already knew that if Mary was out wandering in her nightdress something had come unhinged inside her head and seeing Father wouldn’t help any. She hadn’t spoken to him since he fetched her back from River House and told her she’d be marrying Ernst Jackson just as they’d planned. She hadn’t spoken much to anyone, even me. All winter she’d grown quieter and heavier until it seemed like my sister had been swallowed up by the baby growing inside her. “She’ll feel different when the baby comes,” Mother said, but now I thought she might be like these apple trees that had grown so heavy with ice through the night that the weight broke them in two. Something had broken inside my sister.

  I couldn’t see her in the orchard now but I guessed where she was heading—to River House. I crossed River Road and went through the gap in the wall near the gate where Mary and I had snuck through when we were little to go skating on the pond. I caught a glimpse of Mary on the drive and called her name but if she heard me she gave no sign. She had taken the lower fork in the drive, the one that led to the gardens and the pond—

  Which is when I knew what she meant to do. I tried to run, but the drive was slick with ice and I fell twice so I had to settle for walking fast. The branches of the tall sycamores that lined the drive were cracking under the weight of the ice. It sounded like gunshots. Twice a branch fell almost right on top of me. It’s a wonder one didn’t hit Mary or me. I was glad when I came out into the open. I could see Mary at the edge of the pond. She was walking around it, heading to the wooden walkway that went over the weir. I thought maybe it would be all right then. Maybe she was meeting Mr. Montague here. Maybe she’d just come to say good-bye to him. I saw she was carrying something in her arms. I knew it had to be the baby and I wondered if it had been born dead and that’s what had unhinged her mind, but then I heard it crying, a thin piteous wail. Poor thing, I thought, he must be cold. I ran faster then, calling Mary’s name. She must have heard me because she turned around and waited. I was so out of breath when I reached her that I couldn’t speak.

  “Lizzie,” she said, as if she wasn’t surprised at all to see me there, “I should have known you’d come. Remember how we used to skate on this pond?”

  She didn’t speak as if she were out in an ice storm in her nightdress. Something had broken in her mind. I tried to talk to her the way Father would talk to a spooked mare.

  “I do, Mary. We’ll take your little one skating when it’s old enough. Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “A boy,” she said, looking down at the bundle in her arms. “That’s why Ernst’s mother wanted to drown it. ‘A bastard girl would have been all right, but we can’t have a bastard inheriting the farm.’ ”

  Mary always had been good at voices, but it gave me a chill to hear Mary saying such awful things in Mrs. Jackson’s voice.

  “She’s a spiteful old shrew,” I said. “Working at those big houses has made her think she’s better than everyone else. Ernst won’t let her hurt the baby.”

  “Ernst is weak,” Mary said. “And Mildred is crafty. She’ll bide her time and find a way to do him harm.”

  “Then you’ll come back and live with us,” I said, but Mary shook her head.

  “You know Father would never have me back. No, you have to take him for me, Lizzie, and bring him to Bayard. He won’t let his son die. Those Montagues care too much about their own precious blood.”

  She handed the bundle over to me. I was surprised at how warm it was—no wonder Mary hadn’t minded the cold walking here.

  “Maybe that’s for the best,” I said. “At least for now. Are you sure Bayard will take good care of him?”

  I looked up at Mary, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the house. All the windows were lit up by the moonlight. The house looked like it was made of ice—beautiful but fragile too.

  “He had better or I’ll make them sorry,” I heard her say and then I heard a loud crack. I almost thought it was the house itself breaking in two at the force of Mary’s curse, but then I looked back at Mary. She wasn’t on the bridge. A crack had opened up in the ice below the bridge. She had stepped onto the pond in just the spot near the weir where the ice is weakest. I screamed and reached for her but I was holding the baby. Could I put him down safely? And if I did what would I do? Dive into the water myself? Run for help?

  I know that I will always blame myself for not saving Mary. I knelt on the bridge above the weir crying her name but when I knew she was gone for good I walked up to the house. Mary had entrusted her child to me and if I couldn’t save her at least I could save him. I would give him to Bayard Montague and I’d tell him what Mary had said. That if he didn’t take care of the child he’d answer to Mary—and to me. I was prepared to pound on the front doors but when I came to the top of the hill I saw there was a light in the room at the back of the house. It was a room lined with books and glowing with firelight. Bayard Montague was sitting there beside the fire drinking a glass of something that looked like liquid gold. As he lifted his hand I noticed that his shirt cuffs were pink and I marveled at a man who would wear a pink shirt. When I knocked on the glass he startled and looked up and his face turned as white as though I were a ghost.

  Good, I thought, let him feel haunted from this day on.

  He opened the glass doors and tried to draw me inside but I wouldn’t step over the threshold. I handed him the baby. As he took him I noticed that his shirt wasn’t pink, it was just that his cuffs were damp and stained with something pink, as if he’d been peeling beets, although I knew that was pretty unlikely. When I told him what had happened to Mary he cried out and said he would go down to the pond, but I told him it was too late. Then he asked me how he should explain how the baby came to him and I told him he should tell everyone that he’d found it
on his doorstep. Everyone would think Mary had left it there for him to find. Then I turned and left before he could ask me any more questions or I could change my mind about leaving the baby—my nephew!—in that house. I could feel that there was something wrong with it, just standing on the threshold, but it was what Mary had wanted me to do.

  I have waited all morning to hear news from the Jackson farm and River House but the roads are still covered with ice and Father has spent the morning counting broken tree branches. If only he knew that wasn’t all that was lost in the storm. But now I see old Mrs. Jackson coming up the drive from River Road in her halting gait like a beetle scuttling across the floor. She has come to tell us the bad news—I can see her eagerness. I’ll go down and see if I can hear it without spitting in her face—

  Later—I don’t know how to write this. Mrs. Jackson says that Mary laid her baby on the steps of River House and then drowned herself in the pond. All that I knew of course, but then she said that the baby had frozen to death before it was found. Did Bayard leave that poor baby on the steps to freeze to death? I will never forgive myself—or him—if that’s what he’s done

  I turned the page, but found that the next few pages had been torn out and the rest of the diary was blank.

  I closed the book and sat looking into the fire. As sad as the original story had been, this was worse. To have entrusted the baby to Bayard Montague only to have him betray her . . . no wonder the ghost of Mary Foley haunted this house! Had she wreaked her vengeance by driving Minnie to shoot her husband and then, months later, kill herself? Feeling weary, I laid the book aside on the armrest . . . and a slip of paper fell out from between the pages. It fluttered in a draft and nearly flew into the fire, but I caught it before it did. It was a newspaper clipping, yellow and brittle as a butterfly’s wing. I carefully unfolded it and read it. It was the notice of Minerva’s death. “Widow of River House drowns herself in blood bath . . .” it read. This must have come from a racier paper than the account I had read. Then I noticed a faint note penciled below the printed line, written in the same handwriting as the diary.

  The second bloody bath, it read.

  What on earth did that mean? I wondered. I was staring at the bit of newsprint, hoping for some detail to make clear what Elizabeth meant, when a drop of water splashed onto it. I startled, convinced I’d summoned the blood bath of the story, and then looked up. On the ceiling was a jagged line extending from the pocket doors on the south end of the room to just above my head. As I watched the crooked line swelled and grew and another drop landed in my lap. A broken pipe? I wondered, getting slowly to my feet. I looked up at the ceiling with dread, expecting at any moment that it would split open . . .

  Unleashing a tide of blood.

  I rubbed the paper. It left a red smear on my finger. But then, I still had blood on my hands from Dale. I hadn’t had a chance to take a bath yet . . .

  The bath. The spot where the line started was not far from the bathroom in our room. I had wanted to turn the bath on but I hadn’t. Or had I? Had someone—or something—turned it on? Had I forgotten that I had?

  I wasn’t sure which I was more afraid of: that I had turned on the bath and forgotten or that something had turned it on for me. I ran out of the library into the rotunda and up the marble stairs. The moonlight was still casting leaf shadows on the steps, but now they looked like splatters of blood. I imagined the whole house dripping with blood. I could hear it, hear the drip drip drip . . .

  I ran into our bedroom but paused in front of the bathroom door. The closed bathroom door. I didn’t remember closing it. But then I didn’t remember leaving the water on either and there was water seeping under the door. Red water.

  What would be in the bathtub when I opened the door? Minnie with her wrists slit? If that was what was behind the door I wasn’t sure that my mind wouldn’t crack in two at the sight. But I had to know.

  I opened the door.

  Water lapped over the rim of the tub. Red water. It pooled under my feet as I stepped into the room and looked over the edge of the tub . . .

  Something was floating in the water. Something white and streaked with blood.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I reached into the water and lifted out my own shirt. The one soaked with Dale’s blood. Had I put it in the tub to soak and forgotten about it?

  Whether I’d forgotten turning on the tub and leaving Dale’s bloodstained shirt in it or someone—or something—else had done it, I knew I wasn’t going to sleep that night. I mopped up all the water with towels and then washed and bleached the towels in Monty’s ancient washing machine. I was doing the last load when Sunny came up to the kitchen. I noticed that she looked oddly rested and happy. She was wearing one of Monty’s beautiful old monogrammed shirts over leggings, her frizzy white hair billowing around her face like a halo. She was smiling to herself and humming as she put the coffee on. Then she turned and saw me standing by the washing machine and her smile vanished.

  “Clare, darling! You look like death! Have you been up all night? Is Jess very bad?”

  “Jess is fine,” I said. “Still sleeping. But I . . .” I hesitated. Would she think I was crazy if I told her about the tub? But I had to tell someone. “I think you were right about the house. It is haunted.”

  I told her about the figure on the weir and the book and the bath. I showed her the diary and the newspaper clipping with the penciled note from Elizabeth.

  “And then I went upstairs and found the bathtub full of blood.”

  She turned as white as Monty’s shirt and looked like she wanted to run as far away as she could from me and from the house, but she firmed her jaw and asked me to take her upstairs to show her the bathroom. I almost wished then that I hadn’t cleaned up the blood so she could see it as I had seen it, but even though I had scrubbed the whole room with bleach, it still smelled like blood and it still felt . . .

  “Bad,” Sunny said, standing in the doorway as if she were afraid of entering the room. “This is a bad place.”

  “I suppose I could have forgotten I left the bath on—” I began.

  “No,” she said, “don’t start doubting yourself. That’s what she wants. To drive you crazy. She was here. I can feel her—” She shuddered so violently I thought she might be having a seizure.

  I didn’t have to ask her whom she meant.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  We went back down to the kitchen where we were greeted by the comforting smell of freshly brewed coffee. I poured us two cups and was surprised when Sunny added two teaspoons of sugar to hers. She struck me as a sugar-is-white-death-I-only-use-organic-honey sort of person.

  “For shock,” she explained. “You should have some too.”

  Without waiting for me to agree, she spooned two teaspoons of sugar into my cup and sat down at the kitchen table, motioning me to join her.

  “I told you that I lived in the house with Monty when I first came to Riven House, yes?”

  I nodded, grimacing at the taste of the coffee.

  “What I didn’t tell you was that I had a child—a little girl. She wasn’t Monty’s; he had made it very clear that he didn’t want any children. To tell you the truth, I was never sure who the father was. It was back in the sixties, the time of ‘free love’ as we called it then . . .” She laughed, the sound coming out like a hoarse bark. “. . . as if love ever came without a price. We were all high most of the time. Living here, we didn’t have to work at regular jobs. Monty supported us in exchange for chores around the place or just for our company or . . . well, I knew I wasn’t the only one sharing his bed and I didn’t mind—or I pretended not to mind because it wasn’t cool to be jealous or possessive in those days and I liked living here. I had Anya in the bedroom where you and Jess are staying, with a midwife and a doula. She was a beautiful baby and a beautiful little girl—an angel . . .” Sunny’s voice trailed off, her face soft and unfocused. She wrapped her fingers around her coffee mug and
looked into it as though looking into her daughter’s face. “When she was five we had a big party at the barn. It was my first ‘opening’ for the puppets. There was music, food, dancing . . . and of course drinking and pot and someone brought peyote. I remember Anya dancing like a little firefly, darting in and out of the crowds . . . and then it was morning and I was waking up on the barn floor in a tangle of bodies. I didn’t even realize Anya was gone for a few hours. I figured she had gone up to the big house to go to bed—and she had. Only she had also decided to give herself a bath . . .” Sunny laughed again, but this time the sound was like something breaking. “Imagine the five-year-old who would give herself a bath. Imagine how much she had to take care of herself! When I found her clothes on the floor I saw someone must have spilled beer on her. That’s why she had taken a bath, because she hated the smell of beer. The medical examiner said she must have fallen asleep . . .”

  “Oh, Sunny,” I said, reaching across the table to take her hand. “I’m so sorry.”

  “But now,” Sunny said, squeezing my hand, “I wonder if the ghost drowned my little girl because she was jealous of her.”

  I looked into Sunny’s eyes. I’d never seen them before without the protective circles of kohl and mascara. She looked both older and younger without them.

  “Because her own baby died?” I asked.

  Sunny shook her head and released my hand. She picked up the newspaper clipping and held it out to me, her hand trembling. “Maybe not. Elizabeth wrote on this ‘the second bloody bath.’ And remember how Elizabeth described Bayard as he took the baby from her—his shirt cuffs were pink and damp. I think he must have found Minnie in the bathtub earlier that night . . . Maybe she tried to kill herself that night . . . or she had a miscarriage . . . don’t you see? It wasn’t Mary’s baby who died that night; it was Minnie’s. And when Elizabeth handed Bayard a healthy baby boy—”

  “He claimed it for his own,” I said. “And put Minnie’s baby on the doorstep.” I shuddered. Even if the baby was already dead it was a horrible picture. “But then that means that Monty is—”