The Fifth Petal

by Brunonia Barry

  “No, that wasn’t the case with the Goddesses. But make no mistake, they were definitely in control.” He paused. “At least they were for a while.”

  “Did you know any of the other men they were involved with?”

  He shook his head. “They were actually pretty discreet about their conquests.”

  Rafferty thanked him, and the two men shook hands. The lawyer started toward the door, then turned back, remembering something. “There was one guy who was at the house quite a bit,” he said. “I only know this because I heard them talking about him. He was the one who painted their portrait, the one on the wall. That one might have been a stalker.”

  “Who was that?”

  “H. L. Barnes.”

  “Any relation to Helen?”

  “Her husband.”

  Rafferty did a double take. H. L. Barnes was Helen’s husband? He’d never imagined Helen had ever been married. Everything about the woman said spinster.

  “But you won’t be able to talk to him.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Rafferty had never been inside Helen’s Chestnut Street house. It seemed more museum than home, with chinoiserie and Federal-style pieces crowding every available space. The architecture featured the understated elegance of the Loyalists, in particular Samuel McIntire, whose woodworking defined the entire eponymous historic district. From what Rafferty could tell, nothing but the reproduction rotary phone in the front hall was less than two centuries old. Definitely old money, he thought.

  He had been directed to wait for her in the parlor and had been sitting for twenty minutes on a chair that was far too delicate for his large frame, trying not to move for fear of breaking the damned thing.

  “It’s four o’clock. May I offer you some tea?” she asked, arriving at last, her springer spaniel at her heels. The tray arrived as she spoke.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  She directed her housekeeper to leave the silver service and poured the tea herself, asking how he took it, then handing it to him. He could not get his fingers to grip the delicate flowered cup, and so he held it with two hands, sipping as she did, putting it down on the side table carefully so as not to rattle the saucer.

  He had the childish urge to brag to her that he and Towner lived in a more elegant mansion than this one, down on Washington Square, that it was in the Jeffersonian style, had twin marble fireplaces and a hanging spiral staircase, and that if and when he took tea at all, it was at the tearoom, where they brewed a better cup. Nothing she could do to intimidate him would work.

  “Your message said you wanted to talk about my husband,” she said, her expression pinched.

  “H. L. Barnes,” Rafferty said. “Until recently, I had no idea you had a husband.”

  “I suppose you also learned of his demise?”

  “I did.”

  “Then you should know that poor Henry wasn’t well. He is the last person I want to speak ill of.”

  “I would never expect you to speak ill of anyone,” Rafferty said. Yet somehow it seems to happen with regularity.

  “You have questions for me?”

  “I have several,” Rafferty said, handing her the photograph of the portrait Henry had painted on Rose’s wall. Underneath the portrait, he had signed his initials: H. L. B. She looked it over briefly, a pained but not surprised expression on her face. She’d seen the photo before, he realized. She handed it back to him and walked to her desk. “There are different kinds of bewitchment,” she said, her tone implying that he, of all people, should understand what she meant.

  Rifling through papers in a hidden compartment, she returned with an envelope, stamped and hand lettered. Rafferty could see from the condition of the paper that it had been reread many times. She handed the letter to him. “Keep it,” she said. “I’ve seen quite enough of it for one lifetime.”

  My Dearest Helen,

  I cannot go on.

  Forgive me…Henry

  Rafferty sat for a long moment. “Why in the world did you insist on the exhumation? You must have known it would bring attention back to Henry and yourself—”

  “Henry didn’t kill those girls.”

  “I haven’t suggested he did. But by insisting we reopen this investigation, you identified yourself and your husband as prime suspects.”

  “Not my husband, certainly.”

  “Why not?”

  She handed him the envelope. “Look at the date.”

  The letter was dated October 13, 1989, a few weeks before the murders.

  “My husband was a very sick man, Detective Rafferty.”

  He was surprised by the empathy he heard in her voice.

  “That letter was sent from a hotel in Boston. He was kind enough not to take his life here, knowing I would never have been able to stay in the house with the memory.”

  “I still don’t understand your motivation, Helen,” Rafferty said. “Why did you call attention to yourself this way? Why cause yourself trouble? As well as a probable scandal—”

  “She killed my grandnephew.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “She confessed to the crime!”

  “There was no crime.” Rafferty took a deep breath before continuing. “You know as well as I do, Helen, that your nephew died from a cerebral hemorrhage as a result of narcotics.”

  Helen sat for a long moment before she replied. “The girls she took in and protected, those so-called Goddesses, killed my husband. Rose may not have done it directly, but make no mistake: Rose Whelan was responsible. My husband had AIDS, Detective.”

  Rafferty stared at her.

  “Given to him by those girls at the brothel Rose Whelan was running over on Daniels Street.”

  The turning is almost imperceptible. One day you watch yourself perform a tiny act of revenge. Or you notice an excitement at the horrors of the evening news. You will be shocked to find yourself picking up the blade. You will be far less surprised on the day you finally use it.

  —ROSE’S Book of Trees

  “They’ve stolen our thunder,” Paul said.

  The invitation to celebrate Finn and Marta’s elopement arrived as Paul and Callie were composing the announcement of their own engagement. Paul had proposed more formally after his first awkward approach, producing soft music and champagne, and then kneeling, silhouetted by the moonrise over Salem Sound. They would live in Matera as planned. “Happily ever after,” Paul had said as he put the ring on her finger. It was a perfect fit.

  It had been a magical few days. Then the invitation to celebrate Finn and Marta’s elopement arrived.

  Paul pretended to shrug it off. “They got married. What a surprise.”

  It had been less than eight weeks since Emily’s passing.

  Callie had not been raised with the kind of social protocol that dictated prescribed periods of mourning; still, even she understood that this was scandalous. She could just imagine what people were thinking. Finn and Marta hadn’t said a word to them about their intentions. “I just—I don’t know why they couldn’t have waited,” she told him, grasping for something reasonable to say.

  “Perhaps she’s pregnant,” Paul scoffed.

  His attempt at humor fell flat.

  Callie looked at the invitation again:

  Mr. and Mrs. Paul Finnian Whiting

  request the pleasure of your company at Pride’s Heart

  on July 18, 2015, at one P.M.

  in celebration of their recent marriage

  The accompanying note said that they had left Pride’s Crossing several days earlier and that they would be traveling in Europe for the next month.

  “Here’s the thing,” Paul said. “All the land that our family wrested away from the Hathornes in 1692? With one ‘I do,’ Marta just managed to erase that land grab.”

  “Paul—”

  “You don’t understand. All the property is in a trust. All the houses, all the outbuildings. My whole inheritan
ce.”

  “How can she erase a trust?”

  “With my mother gone, my father’s now the only trustee—Marta can convince him to dissolve it. People dissolve trusts every day. Or he can sell everything out of it.”

  Callie shook her head, horrified. “He wouldn’t.”

  “I’m not so sure. At the reading of my mother’s will I asked the lawyer a question about the trust. My father said—and I’m quoting him—‘You’d better simmer down or I’ll dissolve the damned thing.’ ”

  Paul hadn’t told her that.

  “It’s been a difficult time,” Callie said, trying to hide her shock. “No one is quite themselves…”

  Paul made a disgusted sound.

  “Why don’t we skip the wedding celebration? We don’t have to stay here until July. Or we could come back for it. Why don’t we just go back to Italy now?”

  “And make things easier for Marta?” He was quiet for a long moment. “My mother was getting better, wasn’t she?” he asked. “You told me you thought she was getting better.”

  Callie took a moment to absorb the implication. “She seemed better, yes,” she answered carefully. But sometimes a surge of life happened just before the end. She’d seen it at the nursing home many times, only to end up grief stricken. “But sometimes—”

  “So maybe Dad and Marta just got tired of waiting, and decided to hurry things along,” he said, interrupting her.

  She stared at him. “You don’t mean that.”

  They looked at each other in silence.

  “I guess not. But I have to tell you, Callie. I want to kill them both right now.”

  The song of the banshee varies with the listener. The dying hear the music of the spheres. Those left behind hear something else entirely.

  —ROSE’S Book of Trees

  “You’re drinking too much,” Callie accused. “You need to slow it down.”

  “You refuse to understand how serious this is,” Paul shouted. “How far back it goes!”

  “Paul, I’ve heard enough.”

  In the month and a half since they received the wedding announcement, Paul had become obsessed, determined to trace his mother’s death to the land the Whitings had taken from Marta’s family so many generations back.

  There had been no talk of returning to Matera.

  “You don’t get it. Sarah Hathorne’s accusation of my ancestor was cruel and murderous religious intolerance! If the witch trials hadn’t ended, my relative would have hanged.”

  “I get it! I do. But Sarah would also have been hanged. Your Whiting ancestor made a counteraccusation against Sarah Hathorne, remember?” Callie recalled what she’d heard the tour guide explaining in Marta’s house months earlier. “For the crime of using a love potion to bewitch her husband. They’d have hanged her as well.”

  He took a sip of his brandy. “Okay, they might have,” he conceded. “But here’s the point I’m trying to make you understand.” He tilted his crystal tumbler in Callie’s direction, not even noticing as a bit spilled over the rim. “Sarah Hathorne was related to one of the hanging judges. As a Puritan, things would have gone far easier for her than for my Catholic relative.”

  Callie stopped short of stating the obvious: History had already proven that Sarah Hathorne had suffered the most. She had gone to jail and, having no means to pay for her jail time, been rendered penniless, losing her land to the Whitings. “It all happened so long ago,” she said, to end the conversation. “Who knows what would have happened? Let’s move on.”

  “Move on?” Paul snapped. “I know Marta pretty well, and I guarantee you she’ll have us ‘moved on’ out of the boathouse and off her property by Christmas.”

  “So what? So we’ll go back to Italy. It’s what we both want. It’s what I want anyway.”

  He didn’t comment.

  “I’m not sure I know what you want anymore.”

  Paul still didn’t comment. He was too obsessed with his “inheritance” to think about anything else.

  Callie hummed the calming tone and counted to ten. Paul wasn’t amused, and she hadn’t meant for him to be. The tone was as much to calm her fraying nerves as his.

  He shot her a look and walked out of the room, slamming the door.

  It was difficult to reconcile the changes Callie had seen in Paul in the short time they’d been back. Certainly the loss of Emily had taken its toll. Her absence was felt in every corner of the empty mansion on the other side of the woods, a house Paul had taken to spending time in while his father and Marta were away. Callie could sometimes see him sitting alone in the orangerie, Emily’s favorite room.

  He looked different, too. No longer was he Indiana Jones. Nor had he returned to the earlier GQ image she’d once found so amusing. His jaw was set in a way she’d never noticed; at night, while sleeping, he ground his teeth. He was drinking a lot more than ever before and a lot earlier in the day. The anger she saw building in him with the announcement of his father’s recent remarriage was alarming.

  She had to admit that Paul was right about one thing, though: Marta was taking over. While she was still in Europe, she ordered her kitchen garden to be transplanted from behind her house to the back of Pride’s Heart. The new garden was three times as large as the old, and it wiped out a part of the side yard where the dogs liked to play. This enraged Paul. His wild speculation about his mother’s death continued.

  But Paul wasn’t the only one speculating about Emily’s demise. Towner had told Callie that when the two met for tea. “There are others who think Finn might have given Emily a little push.”

  “You and Rafferty don’t believe that, do you?” Callie asked.

  “No,” Towner said. “It would have been a pretty stupid thing to do when Emily was already dying.”

  It was the first time Callie had heard the words from Towner. With the exception of Emily herself, no one had ever wanted to acknowledge the fact of her impending death.

  Finn and the new Mrs. Whiting had returned at the end of June. They arrived at the mansion with huge fanfare. In the days that followed, the packages began to arrive, purchases Marta had made in France and Italy: Florentine gold candlesticks and thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton bed linens from Rome, a Parisian silver tea service that reportedly had belonged to Louis XIV. Marta had spared no expense when it came to spending Emily’s money. Indeed, both Marta and Finn were dressed better than Callie had ever seen them, thanks to a stylist who’d accompanied the couple from Paris to Milan.

  Callie had to admit that they seemed happy. Finn looked more relaxed and younger. It took Callie a moment to realize the reason. Happiness certainly played its part. But the greying hair she’d noticed when she first met him had disappeared, replaced by blond highlights. She wondered which one of them had suggested the highlighting, Finn or Marta. Neither would have surprised her.

  Marta’s shopping had not been limited to the newlyweds. Presents also began to arrive for both Callie and Paul. Callie received a long black cashmere coat from Milan and a set of golden bangles from Florence. She’d thanked both Marta and Finn. Paul’s gifts sat unopened on the farmer’s table.

  Marta scheduled a family dinner a few days before the reception was to occur, and, when the evening arrived, Callie got to Pride’s Heart first. As she was coming in, the electricians were just leaving, carrying the sterling chandelier that had been in the dining room since the house was built, replaced by a much larger and more ornate crystal and gold one the couple had purchased in Spain. It wasn’t ugly by anyone’s standards, but it changed the look of the place in a way you noticed the moment you walked in, which, no doubt, was Marta’s intention.

  When Paul came into the house and saw the new lighting fixture for the first time, he made a beeline for the bar and mixed himself a strong drink. His unsteady gait seemed to indicate he’d already had a few.

  The dinner was not illuminated by the huge chandelier but by candlelight, and, by then, Paul seemed a bit more relaxed, intentionally no
t looking up at the offensive fixture, but keeping his eyes low. Once or twice, Callie saw him glance at the empty chair his mother had so recently occupied. Marta sat right next to Finn rather than at the opposite end of the table, as had been Emily’s custom.

  Dinner went smoothly, a simple cold avocado and crab soup, followed by a beef tenderloin roast, one of Paul’s favorites, though he barely picked at it, which Marta noticed immediately.

  “You don’t like the beef?”

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “It’s delicious,” Callie said, trying to make up for Paul’s rudeness.

  Conversation was pleasant enough, with Finn doing most of the talking, mostly about their travels.

  Callie had to admit that Finn looked good in his new wardrobe. His demeanor was relaxed in a way she hadn’t seen during Emily’s extended illness. Every once in a while he would pause and smile at his new bride. Well, at least no one could claim she wasn’t making him happy.

  All went well through dessert until Paul stood and headed for the library.

  “Where are you going?” Finn asked.

  “I thought I’d go down to the speakeasy and get us some port,” Paul answered.

  “Not tonight,” Marta said.

  Finn smiled at his son. “Marta holds the key to the speakeasy,” he said. “She’s using it as her office.”

  Paul looked surprised. “Since when?”

  “Since we got home,” Finn said. “Sit back down. There’s something I want to ask you.”

  Paul stumbled slightly as he lowered himself into the chair.

  Marta frowned but said nothing. Finn didn’t seem to notice, and he continued, “I wanted to ask you if you’d make the toast at our wedding celebration.” He was beaming at his son, as if proud he’d come up with the idea. Marta was watching both of them carefully.

  Paul stared at him for a long time before answering. “I think that would be inappropriate.”

  “What do you mean? It is perfectly—”