The Juliet

by Laura Ellen Scott

  Oliver slipped into his sleeves and asked, “Do you mean to tell me that the spirits can leave the premises?”

  “Only Lily Joy,” said Rebekah. “She seems to have the run of all Centenary. Isn’t that remarkable?”

  “I’ll say. I’ve never heard of such liberty.”

  “Neither had we. But, as you have already witnessed, our Lily is no run of the mill emanation.”

  “And the other?”

  “Poor Mollina is bound to place. She can never leave the hall.”

  At the threshold, Hobart Oliver felt the uncanny desert chill. The outlines of Centenary’s ruins were discernable, wrecked and glowing under a wedge of autumn moon.

  The light from the foyer spilled yellow across the graveled street and onto the broken façade of a public house. The Skinners used this illumination to venture out. Oliver looked back, and for a moment the silhouette of the servant girl standing in front of the open door looked too much like Mollina, stalwart from the waist down, shoulders canted with warning. The girl closed the door and the light was gone. Mr. Skinner’s offer to find a lantern was rebuffed.

  “There is plenty of moonlight,” his wife said. She peered down into the basin. “There she is.” She pointed past the foundations of what used to be the Patch General Store. Her gesture seemed to organize the shapes and shadows ahead.

  Oliver’s eyes adjusted. There was a pale stripe of old road, and down it, a tiny throb of light. Lily Joy was at the bottom of town. He said, “Well, she’s gone far. I don’t recall what’s down there.”

  Skinner shouted out for the servant girl. “Sarah!” The door opened immediately. “Sarah, keep a lamp ready.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And brandy for our return.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Rebekah said to her husband, “Leave her alone, Marcus.”

  “She likes it. She thinks she’s living inside a dime novel. Sarah!”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I need my stick.”

  After a moment of fumbling the girl ran out to the party. She carried with her the Mayor’s tall walking stick—the practical one for moving rocks and encouraging snakes. She also brought a small skater’s lantern, more pretty than useful. She’d lit the wick, and its tiny kerosene-fueled flame was semitransparent.

  The girl was excited. Skinner was right. In her heart she was on some sort of adventure. Her hair was pulled back to make her look older than she was, but her eyes gave her away. She was only fourteen or fifteen at the most. Oliver wondered if she had been sold to the Skinners by her parents. There were worse fates these days.

  “Sarah,” said the Mayor, in direct defiance of his wife. “Would you care to accompany us? You can manage the lamp.”

  The girl said, “Yes sir,” as if she knew no other words.

  Rebekah was silent on the subject except to say, “Well, now we’ve lost her in all this fuss.” It was true. Lily Joy’s flicker was no longer visible. Rebekah cast a critical glance at the girl.

  “Nonsense. We’ll find her again.” Skinner gestured towards the cleared, pale path between structures. “This was Penance Road. It leads down to certain districts where privacy was a concern twenty years ago. It also leads to the Sherriff’s building and the cells behind it. I had offices down there when I still practiced.” Skinner tapped his stick into the dirt for emphasis. “It will be a steep ascent on our return, I warn you.”

  Skinner led his party into the shadow world of Centenary, moving slowly not because of his advanced years, but to preserve the relative silence.

  Oliver could take or leave silence. He was modern; no thing was precious until a man shaped it. He asked, “How did Miss Joy meet her end?” The light of the skater’s lamp tilted in young Sarah’s hand.

  “Her end?” said the Mayor. “Well, she was shot to death. That doesn’t sound unusual for a mining town, but Lily Joy was a vivacious creature, a force in our community.”

  “You knew her?”

  “We both did.”

  “Who killed her?”

  “No one knows for sure. Her body was discovered at the town’s entrance, propped up against a wooden post sign that has since been dismantled. It used to say Welcome to Centenary. She was shot in the chest.”

  Sarah piped up, even though she knew she shouldn’t. “She was in her blooms.”

  “Hush.”

  Oliver was impressed by the blunt tale. He wanted to whisper to the chastened girl, “They always are.”

  A steady incline led to the bottom of the basin, and where the terrain leveled out, more ruins lined both sides of Penance Lane. Skinner paused to scan the area, ostensibly looking for Lily Joy’s bouncing light to guide them further.

  Rebekah Skinner, whose quietness was perceived as propriety, chose this moment to finish the story. “Lily Joy’s patrons thought of themselves as more than customers. They were her paramours, and so a dozen men, including bankers and merchants and lawmen, marched down to where her body had been abandoned. She looked like a lost doll, sitting in the dust, her head down over her blasted chest, her bare legs splayed. They placed her on a bier, and carried her towards the deadhouse to be examined and prepared for burial.”

  Rebekah wrapped her arms around herself against the chill of the night and the recollection. “The next day those same men, dressed in their finest Sunday clothes, retrieved Lily’s body to deliver to the Apollo-Centenary Cemetery. As they carried her away in a pine box paid for by the judge himself, they began to sing funeral hymns. Songs sung by men alone are unbearably sad. And a funeral attended by men alone is an especially grim event. Without women to cry for them, the men themselves wept. It was horrible to hear and see.”

  Oliver asked, “Did the women stay in their homes?”

  “No,” said Rebekah, a sickness coating the word. “They met their husbands at the gates of the cemetery. They refused to allow them entry. The Good Women of Centenary turned them back.”

  “What happened to Lily Joy?”

  Mr. Skinner answered, “She was buried somewhere secret. Unmarked. Unconsecrated, of course.”

  “Hence her need to haunt Centenary,” Rebekah said. “Not only was her murder unsolved, but her final resting place is unknown.”

  Oliver felt the hairs on his neck rise, and he almost laughed at his response. Here he was in the middle of a ghost town, in the dark of night, listening to a well-practiced and expertly performed ghost story. He was beginning to suspect that Sarah’s presence was part of the plan. The Innocent amongst the Cynics. The Agent of Faith. What did the Skinners have prepared as a finale?

  An owl called out, and Sarah dropped the lantern.

  The girl began to heave as if the breath were being pulled from her. Oliver reached out, but she spit at him, and Skinner called her name sharply, “Sarah!”

  Sarah dropped to the ground on her hand and knees, he back arching.

  “She’s having a fit.” Rebekah attempted to kneel beside Sarah, collecting her within the expanse of the blue gown, arms around her torso. Sarah began to shudder.

  “We need a stick. To place in her mouth.”

  Oliver grabbed the skater’s lantern. Its flame was almost drowned, but once righted it flared back to life. He used it to scan the ground. Mr. Skinner joined his wife as they both attempted to restrain Sarah with their weight and their words.

  It didn’t work. She knocked her employers aside, and stood again, now panting like a dog. Her face was streaming with sweat that shined in the cool night air.

  “That is no epileptic fit.” Rebekah Skinner cowered under the girl, while her husband tried to catch his breath.

  “Sarah, stop!” Skinner sounded betrayed. The girl bounced up and down on her toes, poised for flight.

  Oliver ceased his search for a suitable stick.

  The girl bolted, disappearing in the dark. The Skinners picked themselves up slowly, knocking the dirt from their clothes and checking each other for sig
ns of damage. Oliver waited on them, not sure what to do next.

  It was impossible to see beyond their small, dimly lit circle, but they could hear the girl scrabbling in the darkness. Her boots crunched in the dry soil, and when she paused, her panting breath gave her position away. She seemed to be circling the party, like a predator.

  “Sarah!” Skinner shouted in his deepest, most resonant tone.

  Circling, circling. Oliver gave a nervous giggle. “We’re being terrorized by a child playing ghostie.”

  Rebekah said, “Perhaps.”

  Skinner had a thought. He called out again, “Lily? Lily Joy!”

  Sarah stopped. She panted.

  Encouraged, Rebekah said to the night, “Are you Lily Joy? Lily, show us where you are.”

  The light of skater’s lantern flickered out.

  “Damn,” said Oliver.

  In that moment of darkness the girl’s footsteps made deliberate progress towards the group. Skinner tried a gentler, less commanding tone. “Lily Joy. We’ve been looking for you.”

  The girl came close enough to make herself visible but not close enough to be caught. She whispered, “Follow.” Her arms pointed straight down, and her hands were balled into fists. Slowly she turned and began walking further down Penance Lane.

  “What’s down there, Skinner?”

  “Nothing good. Broken glass. Rusted bedsprings and horse bones. The trash of Centenary rolls downhill as it does everywhere.”

  The girl disappeared again, past the jail cells connected to the rear of the Sheriff’s office.

  “Can’t you get that lantern lit, Oliver?”

  “Didn’t bring the spark. Look, what if she’s got a crew back there ready to roll us?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Sarah has the sweetest heart.”

  “It’s not your sweet Sarah I’m worried about.”

  They slowed as they reached the end of the jail wall. At first it seemed that the possessed girl had scampered off, but then there was a dark, huddled void throbbing low to the ground, just a few yards behind the foundation line of the jailhouse.

  “Before you ask, that’s no rooting burro.” Skinner led the way, picking through brush and stones, pushing away what he could with his stick. Oliver assisted Rebekah, holding her hand as she used her other to keep her skirts above the rubble.

  The girl was on her knees again, this time in an unusually detritus-free patch of dirt, cleared of the usual weeds. Sarah was scratching away in the center, her hair free of the bun and hanging down in sweaty strands to cover her expression. She threw handfuls of dirt behind her.

  “My child, what have you found?” Rebekah dropped Oliver’s hand and approached the girl. Sarah paused, panting over her work.

  She spoke to the dirt beneath her. “It is me.”

  Skinner stepped forward. “Your grave.”

  The girl turned her face quickly, letting her hair part over one wild eye to glare at the old man. She seemed angry but calm, as if she’d reached a plateau of meaning. Skinner walked forward and helped the child dig, scraping at the dirt with his walking stick.

  “Oliver!” he bellowed. “Go back to the house and fetch a spade. And spark for the lantern, damn it!”

  Rebekah added, “And do not tell the house staff. They’ll flee in the night if they knew what we were up to.”

  Without question, Oliver obeyed. His rube heart was beating, taking over. Though every moment of the evening had been staged, adrenalin coursed through him.

  The finale was coming.

  When he reached the hotel, the night man didn’t ask questions. He brought a cold beer and disappeared to find the matches and spade. Oliver recovered in the lounge, drinking his draught in the mercy of man-made light, recalling with fondness a fairground attraction called Norman’s Ghost Show. It was one of the old Orton & Spooner trailers made up to look like a house of bones that promised mysteries and wonders within. Too young to enter, he stood outside staring while all of his friends whooped it up at the arcade tents.

  Lovers would go into Norman’s Ghost Show holding hands, lovers would come out, sweaty and clinging. Almost drunk. It was a genuine mystery.

  The Skinners thought they were in control. They had never forgiven him. There were no bygones. Perhaps even their financial need had been fabricated. It was all part of a story.

  The night man returned with the matches and the spade. It was a small shovel, less than three feet long and designed for use by a woman gardener, not a gravedigger. It would have to do.

  Oliver said to the night man, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  The night man nodded politely.

  * * *

  Oliver found the Skinners standing on either side of Sarah, who now sat on the ground she’d been scraping up. She seemed exhausted and meditative, with dirt streaks on her face. Oliver relit the small lantern and carried it over, placing it on the ground. As the youngest and most fit male in the party, he assumed the digging work would fall to him.

  “I don’t relish digging up bones, Mr. Mayor.”

  “We need to know, son. She needs to know. Would you have her disinter her own remains?”

  Oliver barely suppressed his smirk. The Ghost Show must go on. “Excuse me,” he said to Sarah, coaxing her away from the gouged dirt. She made a little hiss and scrambled backward, sitting at the edge of the inadequate light cast by the skater’s lantern. The soil, such as it was, was friable, with the grains caving in as he lifted out the first shovel-full. He deposited it to the side just beyond what he estimated would be the width of Lily Joy’s coffin.

  Soon the chill of the night was just a memory for Oliver, sweating in his coat as he cleared away layers. He limited his digging to where it was softest, assuming that was where the soil was most recently turned. He had only gone two feet down when he hit a surface that chimed when he struck it. It could have been a large piece of quartz, but Oliver suspected otherwise.

  Sarah crawled forward, signaling her confirmation of his discovery with a grisly smile. Skinner nodded in the shadows. The boy had done his job.

  “It’s too shallow,” Oliver said.

  Skinner held out his hands. “And yet.”

  “Go on,” said Rebekah.

  Oliver continued to clear away the dirt. The spade tip scraped a smooth surface like a glass or ceramic. They said Lily Joy was buried in pine. They said a lot of things, didn’t they? Rebekah was especially keen, standing near Sarah. Both women seemed to share the same hunger.

  What he unearthed was a box made out of brown and cream streaked alabaster. It was only ten inches long and half as wide. Had he not been so specifically directed in his digging, he would have missed it.

  Sarah clapped like a feeble minded child when he raised it up.

  Oliver asked, “Is this it, then?” A question for the age.

  Oliver placed the box on clean, level ground near the lantern. There were stains at certain places on the lid that indicated the presence of a decorative inset that had disintegrated long ago.

  He brushed away the dirt. As the digger, it was his privilege to open the box. The piece had been well-crafted, and the lid was seated tightly onto the lip. Oliver grasped the sides and pushed upward with his thumbs. The lid released with a soft pop.

  There was a pile of black cloth inside the box. It was stiff from age, but Oliver was able to pluck open the top fold.

  Sarah fainted. Rebekah gasped. Skinner was a statue.

  Oliver laughed.

  Two orbs of green glowed on the cloth. There was no setting, but he knew what he was looking at.

  “The Juliet.” Oliver tried to sound surprised.

  * * *

  Oliver was beginning to resent the strenuousness of the evening. He’d come to Centenary expecting an evening of drinks, stories, and parlor tricks, all enjoyed from a comfortable chair. Now he found himself making a second arduous ascent up Penance Lane in the dead of night, this time carryin
g Sarah, the serving girl, in his arms.

  She had regained consciousness as herself, with the spirit Lily Joy somehow satisfied by the discovery of The Juliet. Joy had fled after releasing her hold on the girl and the night, and the party was left with more questions than when they began. Sarah remembered little of what had occurred while she was possessed, but she was so weakened by the experience she could barely walk. And of course the only one strong enough, virile enough, to carry her back was Hobart Oliver.

  The Skinners were trying to break him.

  Rebekah walked ahead, carrying the alabaster casket with The Juliet inside. The old man brought up the rear. Oliver imagined they resembled a ceremonial procession carved on the wall inside a Pharaoh’s tomb.

  Rebekah led them back to Communion Hall where she placed the box next to her cards on the center of the black-draped table. Oliver lowered Sarah onto the first sofa he encountered and instructed the night man to bring her water and a cold cloth. “She’s had a fright,” was all he said.

  The night man looked suspicious. He was not accustomed to ministering to teenaged maids, but he did as he was told. Sarah grinned with satisfaction at being served.

  The Mayor and his wife stood side by side at the table, staring at the famous stones as if they were beholding their own impossible child. They spoke excitedly to one another in that soft, verb-less language known only to spouses.

  Oliver asked, “Well? How do you explain all this?”

  Rebekah felt she had pieced it together. “Mr. Oliver, I believe we have found Lily Joy’s final resting spot. I also believe that whoever killed her was in possession of The Juliet. It has been missing for so many years…perhaps this villain stole it. Perhaps Lily knew he had it.”

  Oliver sat, feigning fascination. He nodded for his hostess to go on with her deduction.

  “Or, it was one of the men who loved her and helped to bury her. However he came to have The Juliet, I suppose it matters little. If he hoped to sell the jewel, he may have found that its fame was inconvenient.” She glanced at her husband for confirmation. “So he held on to the stones as is.”