The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

  “Not even with one of the witnesses hoping to profit from my inheritance by killing me?” I asked.

  “No,” he answered my facetious question bluntly. “Ms. Vanderberg’s criminal intentions are immaterial here. Clearly it was Monty’s wish for you to inherit Riven House and the police have cleared you in any wrongdoing with respect to his death. And”—he opened his briefcase—“as it turns out, you are his biological daughter.”

  He took a sheet of paper out of his briefcase and handed it to me. I recognized the letterhead of the genetics lab Monty and I had gone to at the hospital. Remembering that day—Monty’s flirting with the young lab technician, the discovery that we were both “difficult sticks” due to our narrow veins, my eyes filled up.

  “I wish he had lived long enough to know,” I said.

  “I don’t think it would have mattered to Uncle Monty. He told me he considered you his daughter and heir no matter what the blood tests showed. He never cared about all that ‘blue blood nonsense’ as he called it. Which might explain why he was so unconcerned at the idea that he was Mary Foley’s child and not Minnie’s.”

  I looked up from the page at Cortland, but he had leaned back in the deep wing-backed chair and his face was in shadow so I couldn’t read his expression. “Should he have been . . . concerned?”

  “Yes,” Cortland answered. “If he was the illegitimate son of Alden Bayard Montague he would not have been entitled to inherit River House.”

  “Who would have inherited it?” I asked.

  “My grandfather.” Cortland’s teeth gleamed in the shadows.

  “I see,” I said, feeling the first prickling of unease. My bravado at taking on the costs of the repairs had been a bluff. And now Cortland had called me on it. “But there’s no real proof—” My hand strayed to Minnie’s diary. “Only the belief of a deranged woman.” I felt a pang of guilt consigning Minnie once again to the nut house, but if that’s what it took—

  “No, Minnie’s testimony that her baby was snatched by fairies and replaced by an illegitimate changeling would not hold up in court. But a DNA test would.” He took out a folder from the briefcase, the same genetics lab insignia on it.

  “But you’d have to have Minnie’s DNA,” I said, my voice rising so high in the still room that I thought I heard the glass in the new doors chiming. “You’d have to—”

  “Have Minnie’s body exhumed from the family crypt? Easy enough since my family has been paying the fees on the plot for the last thirty years. Just another one of those boring family details Monty didn’t care to bother with. Too busy writing, I suppose, better to leave those details to the unimaginative lawyers in the family.” He laid the pale blue folder on the desk, right on top of Minnie’s scrapbook, his blunt, carefully manicured fingernails gently drumming over the folder as if he were typing a secret code out on it. As if he were rewriting the family history.

  None of it was real.

  For a moment my vision swam, the room in the fitful silvery light seeming to run like liquid mercury. What would be left when it was gone? Would I melt along with it? Or was I just a construct of Monty’s fantasies?

  “. . . another of Monty’s fantasies,” Cortland was saying, his voice coming to me as though under water. “Really, what you writers come up with! Babies swapped at birth! Ghosts of girls coming back to reinstate their long lost children! A good story, but alas, just that—a story.”

  Cortland smiled ruefully and shook his head. “You had me going there. But facts are facts.” He knocked his knuckles against the folder, the sound blunted by Minnie’s scrapbook beneath it. “According to DNA testing Alden Montague was the son of Minerva Noyes Montague.”

  “But what happened to Mary’s baby?” I cried.

  Cortland shrugged. “I suppose it died and Bayard put it on the steps to be discovered by the maid or . . .” Here he met my eye. “I’d hate to think he killed it himself. That he worried that his legitimate son’s position might be compromised by the product of a youthful dalliance. At any rate, there’s no way to prove it one way or the other. If I were you I wouldn’t dwell on it. Not here alone in this big old house . . .” He looked around and shuddered. “. . . which does belong to you—or will in a matter of weeks. I wish you luck with it.”

  He slapped his knees—much as Monty had when he was finished with a story—and got to his feet. “I hope you’ll make a better go of it here than Monty did. You can use the money from your books to fix up the place. You seem like a practical girl. That’s what Katrine said about you that day when we were walking down to the weir—”

  “Walking down to the weir?” I repeated, more interested in this detail than in what Katrine had thought of me.

  “Yes. Jess wanted to show us the work he’d done on it. He was particularly proud of the stonework. He showed us how you could actually walk under the stone steps—”

  “Did you?”

  “What? Not me. I didn’t want to ruin my shoes. But Katrine went in to have a look. I had the feeling she was humoring Jess, although I didn’t know then—” He had the grace to look embarrassed then at what he must think was further proof of my husband’s affair with Katrine Vanderberg. “At any rate, when I expressed concern about your ‘ghost sightings’ Katrine said, ‘Don’t worry about Clare; she always lands on her feet.’ And so you have.” He held out his hand for me to shake. I put my hand in his but I barely felt his grip. “But for God’s sake, invest in a new furnace. Your hands are like ice.”

  He turned and let himself out the terrace doors, letting in a chill draft that ruffled the pages on the desk. None of it was real, they whispered silkily. Except—

  I opened Minnie’s scrapbook and reread the description of waking up in the night. The sound was coming from the dumbwaiter in the closet. She’d thought it was her own baby crying but what if it was Mary’s baby crying . . . But no, she’d gone downstairs after and seen Elizabeth delivering the baby to Bayard so it couldn’t have been Mary’s baby crying in the dumbwaiter and besides, Bayard had carried her up the stairs when she fainted—

  But only after he had handed over a bundle wrapped in pink to the housekeeper. The bundle wrapped in pink was Mary’s baby. And the housekeeper—

  I grabbed one of the scrapbooks I had stacked on the desk, flipping through the pages. There was the stern figure of the housekeeper in a high-necked black dress and white apron, always with an apple pasted over her face because Minnie thought her face looked like a wrinkled old apple. A little joke at her servant’s expense. I stared at the figure and noticed for the first time the cant of her shoulders, the left higher than the right, and remembered a line from Elizabeth’s diary. She’s a spiteful old shrew. Working in those big houses has made her think she’s better than everyone else.

  And then I remembered my mother saying that working in the big river mansions had made my father’s grandmother a bitter old woman.

  The housekeeper at Riven House was Mildred Jackson—Great-Granny Jackson who had haunted my childhood because I was an intruder.

  But the real intruder was Mary’s baby, who she would have foisted on her son Ernst. What had she thought when Bayard put the baby in her hands? When she recognized the pink blanket her daughter-in-law had knitted? Did she think Bayard would raise the baby as his own? Or give him back to Mary and Ernst to raise? A bastard child growing up to inherit her farm. Great-Granny Jackson wouldn’t have liked that. She would rather lay the child on the doorstep to freeze to death—

  No, she couldn’t take the chance that Bayard would hear the baby’s cries. She would have taken him someplace quiet. To her kitchen where she laid him inside the dumbwaiter—the silent core of the house—so no one would hear his cries while she smothered him in the blanket his mother had made for him.

  Only Minnie had heard his cries and they drove her mad. Not that she’d had that far to go.

  I turned to the page I had been reading when Cortland interrupted me, fingering the pink ribbon—the one remnant of the pink bl
anket—that marked my place.

  When I told them I saw the girl’s ghost standing on the terrace they thought I was crazy just as Mama had when I told her about the things I saw and heard. Nanny had always believed me, though. She said I had what they called back in Ireland “the sight,” which was why I knew when Mama’s train was going to be late and what letters would say before they were open, and how I saw old Grandpa Noyes on the day he died even though he was in Hyde Park when it happened and I saw him in the house in the city. I could even sometimes make things happen, like the time I wanted a new dress and the parlor maid spilled tea all over my wretched old one or when I wanted Bayard Montague to be my escort at the Ogilvies’ ball and Louisa Marsden, whom he was supposed to escort, came down with the measles. It wasn’t that I wanted the parlor maid to be let go or poor Louisa Marsden’s face to be ruined for the rest of her life, but I knew that my wanting something very badly could have unintended consequences so I should have known when I wanted not to be pregnant anymore—only so Bay would look at me again and put his hands around my slim waist again—that it would make the baby come early. And if I thought in the throes of pain “Oh, I wish this baby would die!” I didn’t really mean it. I didn’t mean for him to put it in the dumbwaiter to die.

  But the baby doesn’t know that. It cries and cries and cries—it won’t ever let me forget that it’s my fault it’s dead until I make things right. That’s why I had to shoot Bayard. He had to die for killing our baby. I thought the baby would stop crying then, but it never has, even when they took the other woman’s baby from me. I still hear my baby crying. It wants me to come to him. And I will. It’s only right because, after all, it was all my fault.

  I sat staring at Minnie’s last words for so long they grew faint as the room grew dim.

  I could even sometimes make things happen.

  These were the words that had struck a chill in my heart the first time I’d read them because I might have written them myself. It didn’t make me feel any better now to tell myself that they were part of Minnie’s delusion, because didn’t that mean I’d inherited the same delusion myself?

  I was Minnie’s granddaughter.

  But I wasn’t crazy. The ghosts had all been tricks played by Jess and Katrine to make me think I was crazy. And I wasn’t paranoid. My husband and his girlfriend had plotted against me. So what did it matter that Great-Granny Jackson had killed Mary’s baby and haunted my childhood or that I was Minnie’s granddaughter and not Mary’s. I hadn’t inherited her insanity—

  Only her ability to make things happen.

  Like Ryan Moser falling on the playground after he called me a name and Charity Jane’s pencil snapping during her English final.

  It didn’t mean I’d driven Jess into another woman’s arms—even though I’d envisioned it so many times—or made him stop loving me—even though I’d imagined that he didn’t love me anymore. Even if that was what he had written in the novel he’d been working on.

  How tempting to play the part she’s cast for me—the Byronic villain plotting to put his wife away, I’d read that night in the dumbwaiter. Only later had I finished the passage. Sometimes I feel as if I’m being used by her imagination, that I’ve become a character in a plot she’s cooked up. But I won’t let myself become what she imagines me. I won’t be a stock character out of some silly Victorian melodrama. I will remain myself—a man who loves his wife precisely because she has the power to make real what she imagines.

  I could only assume that Katrine had convinced him otherwise. I certainly hadn’t made him try to kill me. Even I hadn’t imagined that. And all those ghost sightings (I pictured Katrine going under the weir that day, her scarf snagging on the rocks, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been there before), Katrine had made those happen—

  Except of course for the last one. The figure that had appeared out of the fog behind Jess on the pond, the one that dragged him down under the ice—that hadn’t been Katrine. Katrine had already been dead.

  That one came out of my imagination.

  You have a powerful imagination, Jess always said. If you don’t use it—

  I would not use it to imagine that I had made Jess fall out of love with me, that I had made up the story of him trying to kill me, that it hadn’t been a gun in his hand that night, only a flashlight, because if I began to imagine those things, I truly would go mad.

  I closed Minnie’s scrapbook and rubbed my arms to banish the gooseflesh that had risen on my skin. Cortland was right. I should invest in a new furnace. For now, though, I’d make a fire. Dunstan (who wasn’t my cousin after all!) was coming over later. I’d go upstairs and take a bath and put on the new burgundy velvet dress I’d bought in town last week. It would look beautiful in the firelight.

  As I got up I saw someone standing on the terrace, a girl in white, the cold wind whipping her dress as she stood looking in at the warm, bright room. I could feel her longing through the panes of glass, her cold and loneliness and, most of all, her terrible, aching anger—and then she was gone. There was only a gust of snow beating against the glass as though it wanted to come in. I bolted the doors, drew the drapes against the cold, and then turned away from the night into the warmth of my house.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my inestimable agent, Robin Rue, for finding the perfect home for this book, and to Beth Miller and Genevieve Gagne-Hawes at Writers House for working on its early drafts with me. I am grateful to have found an editor as gracious and insightful as Margaux Weisman.

  I am forever grateful to my circle of first readers: Wendy Gold Rossi, Lauren Lipton, Scott Silverman, Lee Slonimsky, and Nora Slonimsky.

  I owe a special debt of gratitude to Purcell Palmer and The Catwalk Foundation for providing me with the space and time to work on a revision of the present book.

  And as always, I am thankful to my family, Lee, Maggie and Nora, for their love and support.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the author

  * * *

  Meet Carol Goodman

  About the book

  * * *

  A Field Guide to Haunted Houses

  Reading Group Guide

  About the author

  Meet Carol Goodman

  CAROL GOODMAN grew up on Long Island, attended public school, and started writing at age nine, when her fourth-grade teacher introduced the topic of “Creative Writing.” She wrote a ninety-page, crayon-illustrated epic entitled “The Adventures of the Magical Herd” in which a girl named Carol lives with a herd of magical horses. She knew from that moment that she wanted to be a writer.

  During her teens Goodman wrote poetry and was named Young Poet of Long Island by Long Island University at the age of seventeen. She took a break from writing to major in Latin at Vassar College, never realizing that her first published novel would be about a Latin teacher. After college, she worked in publishing and then in a series of less demanding office jobs while writing short stories at night. Then she went back to school (to the University of Texas at Austin) to become a high school teacher, rediscovered Latin, and wrote a master’s report on young adult fantasy literature. She taught Latin for three years in the Austin Independent School District until her daughter, Maggie, was born.

  A few years (and two unpublished novels) later, Goodman came back to Long Island. She started writing poetry and short stories again and completed her MFA at the New School. She published poems and short stories in literary journals, including The Greensboro Review, Literal Latte, The Midwest Quarterly, The New York Quarterly, and Other Voices. A year after she finished her MFA, Goodman picked up a short story she had written about a Latin teacher at a boarding school in upstate New York (called “Girl, Declined”) and started to write her bestselling and critically acclaimed debut novel, The Lake of Dead Languages.

  Since its publication, Goodman has been writing full time (The Seduction of Water, The Drowning Tree, The Ghost Orchid) and teaching at the New Schoo
l and SUNY New Paltz. Goodman’s books have been nominated for the IMPAC award twice, the Simon & Schuster/Mary Higgins Clark Award, and the Nero Award; The Seduction of Water won the Hammett Prize in 2003. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family.

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  About the book

  A Field Guide to Haunted Houses

  When I moved to the Hudson Valley I found myself driving down country roads and village streets gazing covetously at stately Victorians and riverfront mansions. My house-buying budget ran closer to the Red Hook faux Colonial that Jess turns his nose up at, but I could still dream about living in one of those grand old houses. It seemed to me that if I could just find the right angle, the right moment at dusk, I might catch a glimpse of those long-gone inhabitants, just as Clare thinks she might hear “the sound of glasses clinking and laughter from a long-ago summer party” in the wind chimes hanging from the gatehouse of Riven House. It wasn’t long before I began to imagine a ghost story and the house it might take place in. I’ve long been a fan of ghost stories and haunted house tales, whether the ghosts were real or imagined, whether the houses were haunted by the living or the dead. After all, what’s a ghost without a house to haunt and what’s a house without a whiff of the past to breathe life into its empty frame? Here are a few of my favorite haunted houses that I hope you will enjoy visiting—just don’t expect a good night’s sleep in any of them.

  Although not strictly a haunted house, Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë is where I fell in love with the gothic. Someone or something is up in the attic, setting fire to bed curtains and rending bridal veils, and whether the madwoman in the attic is flesh or represents Governess Jane’s secret desires and alter ego, you won’t look at your attic steps in quite the same way ever again.