Darkling

by R. B. Chesterton

  THE DARKLING

  R. B. CHESTERTON

  PEGASUS CRIME

  NEW YORK LONDON

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  For Debby Porter Pruett, DeWitt Lobrano, David Haines, Boris Karloff, and my crazy, ghost-hunting family.

  Prologue

  In the 1940s, Coden, Alabama was a hideaway for movie stars—an isolated playground tucked among live oaks and the placid bay waters where pleasure and vice could be indulged. When Veronica Lake or Errol Flynn came to play, bedazzled lawmen turned a blind eye to the excesses that ride the coattails of fame. Coden was a backwater with incredible natural beauty, the old Paradise Inn, fitted out for royalty, and silence that could be bought.

  No one asked questions.

  In the summer of 1974, the hotel was abandoned and the stars had found other, more exotic backwaters. The poor were poorer and the rich were gone.

  Like most of the rest of the kids around Coden, I’d grown up on tales of glamour lost. While the past intrigued me, I had a more practical bent. “Mature beyond her years” was the description most often attached to me. Not exactly the attributes of a popular young woman. I didn’t care. I was the live-in tutor for the Henderson family, a job I’d held for three months. Only twenty-one and fresh out of college, I found myself in residence in the grandest house in south Mobile County with a family that looked like it stepped out of House Beautiful. Berta, the mother, kept the kitchen filled with the scent of home cooking. The children were bright and willing to learn. And Bob, oh, he was a handsome man accomplished as an architect, but also a man who loved his wife and children and never failed to show it. The Hendersons were everything I’d been denied—a perfect family. They brought hope that new prosperity had come to Coden.

  My grandmother, Cora Eubanks, and most of the residents, pinned their dreams on Bob and Berta Henderson and the belief that they could bring back what had once been lost.

  Coden was a dying community, a left-behind fishing village on the small and placid Portersfield Bay of the Mississippi Sound. Like all towns built around water and a fishing industry, it was remote. Much different from Mobile or even the coastal towns of Mississippi. The families of Coden had been there for generations, a mixture of old French and Spanish with a smattering of Irish and Scot thrown in.

  In the summer of 1974, Vietnamese families had begun to move in, a point of controversy amongst the “natives.” The Vietnam War was too fresh, the losses of young men from the area too bitter. Still, whether old line stock or newly arrived Asians, these were fishing families that shared a way of life, a relationship with the water and a sunup-to-sunset work ethic.

  Not so with the Hendersons, a family of golden blond Californians, as exotic as any of the strange blooms in the garden of Belle Fleur, the showcase home they bought and renovated at the water’s edge. They were outlanders. Outsiders. They had wealth, looks, education, and, most telling, different expectations. While they were viewed with suspicion by many, it couldn’t be denied that the family brought the promise of better times to come. Bob Henderson’s renovation of Belle Fleur was the first step in his master plan. Seeing the old house restored on the rise of land that led down to the Sound made everyone in Coden feel that better times were coming. Bob’s dream of bringing the Paradise Inn back to life was the hottest topic of talk in town that summer.

  Even I, working in the bosom of the family, believed that the Hendersons would change the luck of Coden. The old stories, the tales of big bands, rollicking parties, movie stars water-skiing—somehow by bringing the Paradise back to life, Bob would bring back the flush times. Instead, the Hendersons opened a door to the past that should never have been unsealed. Their arrival initiated a tragic chain of events and unbearable suffering.

  I’d thought never to tell this story. I vowed never to think of it again. I changed my name and left, for who would hire a tutor who’d been on the scene of five grisly murders and continued to claim she saw … what? An evil child? A murdering child? An imposter who moved into the heart of a family with only the goal of murder?

  So I refused to talk. Not to reporters or therapists. Not to anyone. At last they left me alone. I found another post with a family in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and I saw their children through to college and then found another family in Biloxi, and another in Gulfport. My duties moved me farther along the Gulf Coast rim until I hit a little town south of Corpus Christi, Texas, where I baked in the full glare of the Gulf Coast sun.

  At night, I drank. Vodka couldn’t keep the memories at bay, but it did dull them to the point that I could sleep. Aside from the brutal murders that haunted my dreams, I worried a point of guilt. What role had I played in the destruction of the Henderson family? What role had my grandmother, Cora Eubanks, enacted?

  Such dark thoughts are less terrifying in the heat of the late summer sun. So it is now, in the August of a new decade, the second of a new century, that I’ve taken on the burden of putting my story on paper. The written word has tremendous power. I hope that by writing this I can … I’m not certain what I hope to accomplish. Put my demons to rest? Warn others? Leave a written legacy that might carry more weight than my spoken words? Or perhaps I’m following in the footsteps of Cora, who once left me a document that was the key to the past.

  I only know that the long summer days offer me some comfort from the terrors of the dark. I must write fast. Time is running against me. When I’m tempted to back away from this story, as I often am, I remember that I have seen her. Only last week. As young and innocent as the first day she stepped off the bus at Beauchamp’s Grocery in Coden in 1974.

  As long as the August sunlight heats the woods and fields of southern Mobile County, I force myself to the task of recounting the events of nearly forty years ago. In the darkness of the night, I drink. When the sun is gone, I dare not call forth the images of my past for fear she will sniff me out. She has the acute senses and cunning of a wild animal. And she has no mercy, not for a child or me.

  How did she manage to get back to Coden? That’s a question I pursue even as I chronicle her story. Annie. Such a simple and beautiful name. There is no word in the English language that can strike such fear in me.

  To properly tell her story, I must go back in time. The memories of youth in the 1970s would be wonderful, were it not for the events I must remember. My grandmother was the fulcrum that set it all in motion.

  1

  JULY 7, 1974

  A whipping summer gust blasted off the water, sending a paper bag skittering across the parking lot of Beauchamp’s Grocery. I couldn’t see the water from the parke
d car where I waited with my grandmother, but I could smell it. That tang of salt and fish and a wildness from the marsh grass that made me long to get out and stretch my legs in a brisk walk.

  “It won’t be long,” Cora said, patting my leg. “Don’t fidget.”

  My grandmother was a social worker for the Department of Pensions and Security, later renamed Human Resources. Annie had come to her attention when she was picked up on the streets of downtown Mobile. At first it was thought she was a teen prostitute, but Cora claimed she was an amnesiac, a girl with a big imagination, a talent for storytelling, and no one to love her, no memory of where she’d come from or what she was meant to be doing. Cora had a soft touch for mistreated children, but she wasn’t in the habit of dragging them home. Annie was different, though. Something about her had tugged at Cora’s heartstrings.

  I was already working as a tutor for the three Henderson children—a job I’d held since the previous May. In the short weeks of my employment, I had found my place in the family. I taught lessons, but more than that; I was valued and respected as part of the family.

  I went to work the day after my college graduation, eager yet also unsure. Now I’d gained my footing, but the addition of another teen gave me concern. Cora would hear none of my worries.

  “She’s a teenager with no place to turn. Give her a chance, Mimi,” Cora said. “You may discover you have things in common.”

  The things I’d have in common with her would be that I would have another charge to educate. My life with the Hendersons was nearly perfect—I didn’t see the need to include another child.

  Shifting on the car seat to better see my grandmother, I asked, “Why did the Hendersons agree to take her in?” Most families I knew would never consider harboring a strange child, especially a sixteen-year-old girl who had no memory of who she was or where she’d come from. Annie was the only name she’d give.

  Grandma, who I’d grown up calling Cora, believed in the power of love. All of my life, she’d told me how love could heal any wound, patch any hole in a person’s soul. Love was her miracle drug.

  “The Hendersons have room and plenty of love. Once Annie feels secure, her memory will return. I suspect she’s been through a terrible trauma. The doctors believe her amnesia comes from some shocking event or accident. The Hendersons are the perfect family to help her heal. Belle Fleur is the place for her. You’ll be a part of her healing, Mimi. Perhaps you, too, will find the experience curative.”

  I wasn’t certain that was true. Even after thirty years as a social worker, Cora wanted to believe the best of people. I was only twenty-one, just out of college, and I knew better. But I said nothing. Cora was a figure beloved in the Coden community. She’d asked the Hendersons to foster Annie, and so they would.

  Cora had gotten me the tutoring job, a full-time position that required me to use my education degree from the University of South Alabama to its maximum potential. I was the compromise between Bob and Berta Henderson. Bob loved old Belle Fleur, the house of his dreams and the perfect project to show his architectural and renovation abilities. He’d bought the property against Berta’s wishes. He’d completed the renovation before she’d consider moving here. Bob wanted the slower pace—and perceived safety—of a small, rural Alabama town to raise his children.

  Berta, a California girl through and through, refused to send her children to the Alabama public schools. She was more than a bit horrified by the curriculum, not to mention the prevalence of “portable” classrooms, essentially trailers. Before she’d move from the heavenon-earth of Cambria, California, to Alabama, she negotiated a live-in tutor, four week-long trips to “cities with culture,” an in-home movie theater, and piano and violin lessons for all the children. I was young, unattached, and credentialed in teaching. Though I’d been living with Cora, I also longed for a family, something I found nestled in the brood of blond Hendersons. I felt as if the job had been created especially for me.

  The three children, Donald, nine, Erin, twelve, and Margo, sixteen, were not spoiled, but they were willful. Donald quickly became my favorite. Erin charmed me with her energy, and Margo challenged me. How would this new child, this orphan, fit into the mix? I wasn’t sure this was a good idea.

  “The bus is late.” Cora frowned. “When I was a young woman like yourself, the bus was the only way to get into Mobile. Folks didn’t have cars like today. We relied on the bus, and it was on time. I know I sound like a fuddy-duddy, but this whole country is going to hell in a handbasket.”

  We were only six years past the terrible murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, a man my grandmother revered. His death shook her faith in her fellow countrymen and the basic goodness of America, but she didn’t stop trying or believing. Girls like Annie—the abandoned, the thrown away, the damaged goods—this was where she made her mark. America might have lost its way, but Cora knew the steep and rocky path she was meant to trod.

  The bus pulled in front of the grocery store on a belch of black smoke. It looked as old and worn as the setting. I was about to step out of the car when a gust of wind caught the heavy Pontiac door and slammed it with vicious force, almost catching my hand.

  When I looked up, Annie was standing beside the car. Dark curls batted about her small, pinched face. She was beautiful, elfin almost, and she looked so lost. The word that came to mind was “stray.” Like a dog or cat hungry for love and attention. I opened the car door, pushing against the wind that tried to keep me safe inside. She simply stood there, as if she didn’t know how to help. At last I got the door open and got out.

  I extended my hand. “I’m Marie Bosarge. You can call me Mimi,” I told her. “I’m Cora’s granddaughter. I’m the tutor at the Hendersons.”

  She shivered in a gust of hot air, and I realized she was nervous. Her too-short dress exposed long legs, lean but shapely. She was sixteen, and she looked starved. She came with only one suitcase, a battered brown thing that had once tried to pass itself off as leather before the surface had been scraped and the cardboard beneath revealed. I picked it up and put it in the spacious trunk.

  “Climb in,” Grandma ordered. “The Hendersons are waiting.”

  Annie clambered into the back seat, teeth chattering. Cora turned off the air conditioner and away we went, racing down Shore Road ahead of the storm that brewed to the south. The squall had blown in quickly, as marine gales are wont to do. In the summer, we worried about hurricanes, but the Gulf was empty of the whirling tempests that could wreck a coastal town and kill hundreds with high winds and water.

  With the air conditioner off, the car was like an oven, and I rolled down my window for a moment of fresh air. Seagulls cried and cawed, circling the marshy shore. The wind seemed to have confused them because they swooped at the car as if they meant to attack. They were curious birds, but not stupid. The erratic behavior puzzled me.

  “What’s wrong with the gulls?” Cora asked.

  “It’s almost as if they’re disoriented. Maybe something to do with the storm.” I’d spent a bit of time bird-watching, and I’d never seen gulls pursue a car. “Or maybe … blind.” They acted as if they’d lost their ability to see.

  “Maybe it’s the car,” Annie said from the backseat. “They’re following us.”

  It was true. The birds moved down the road with us. To my complete horror, a gull came straight at the car like a missile. I reached over and honked the horn as Cora applied the brakes.

  “Good lord!” she jerked the wheel, sending my head banging into the passenger window. In the backseat, Annie slammed against the door. The bird hit the windshield with a bloody smack as Cora brought the car under control and stopped.

  I got out quickly and checked the bird, but it was hopeless. The impact had killed it instantly. The other birds wheeled and cried, circling above me and the car, but they made no attempt to get closer. I moved the carcass to the side of the road. When I got back inside, Cora’s hands shook on the steering wheel.

  “I can’t beli
eve that happened,” Cora said. “I’ve driven this road my entire life. I’ve never hit a gull.”

  “Something was wrong with it,” I said. In my family, the death of any creature was cause for grief. I was partial to birds and I’d trained as an amateur ornithologist. I wasn’t an expert, but I knew gulls didn’t deliberately dive into the windshields of cars traveling fifty miles an hour.

  Cora was shaken but tried not to show it. “It had to have been sick. I’m sorry, Annie. I don’t want that to spoil your arrival here in Coden.”

  “I don’t believe in omens. At least it was a quick death,” Annie said. “It didn’t suffer.”

  I hated it when people mouthed platitudes. A quick death. What did that mean? Annie had no clue what she was talking about, but I wisely kept quiet. Cora was struggling to regain her composure, and I didn’t want to do anything that would make it harder for her.

  She put the car in DRIVE and we started along Shore Road at a more sedate pace. When I glanced back in the side mirror, I saw a dozen other gulls pecking the corpse. They tore at it with a savage frenzy. Gulls were scavengers, but I’d never seen them feast on a freshly dead comrade. My gaze connected with Annie’s in the rearview mirror. She watched me with cool calculation.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. She was so calm, I could only imagine what hardships she’d endured to gain such composure.

  “Nothing.” I had no desire to spoil her arrival at Belle Fleur. The Henderson family was waiting, a happy occasion. Cora had planned this for days. The bird’s death was unfortunate, but there was no reason to mar the remainder of the day.

  “Wild creatures are unpredictable, don’t you think?” she asked.

  “Seagulls are hardly wild creatures.”

  Annie broke her gaze from mine. “Will the Hendersons like me?” she asked Cora.

  “I’m certain they will. This is a big day for them, too. I’ve told them all about you.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I watched Cora put aside her shock and assume her professional demeanor. “All we know,” I added. “There wasn’t a lot to tell since you can’t remember anything about your past.”