The Fifth Petal

by Brunonia Barry

  Sadly, she realized that Paul would never leave this place. He would choose his birthright over his own happiness. It was the family curse, the curse of both the Hathornes and the Whitings, and it went back generations. He wasn’t free of it, and he never would be. It was more important to him than the happily ever after that he’d promised her. Marta was right. He would betray her.

  She walked out of the library and went to the boathouse. Climbing to the top of the lighthouse, she looked out at Norman’s Woe in the bright summer sunlight and sensed the presence of something far darker than she’d once imagined.

  Clutching Rose’s book to her breast and taking Rose’s ashes, Callie descended the stairs.

  Through the forest that separated the boathouse from Pride’s Heart, Callie could hear music as the orchestra started up in the ballroom. She loaded her car quickly. Her fingers had swollen from the day’s heat, and she had to run her hand under cold water and slick her finger with soap to remove the emerald ring Paul had given her. When it finally loosened, it flew across the room and rolled under the couch. She crawled on hands and knees to retrieve it and carefully placed it on the table where he would see it.

  She took the back roads, past the barn and the outbuildings, past the beach, turning left as she came to Route 127. She crossed the bridge, careful not to look in her rearview mirror. She didn’t have the strength to make it back to Amherst, so she drove to the Hawthorne Hotel and booked herself a room. She got all the way to the sixth floor before she broke down and sobbed.

  Rafferty stood in the doorway of the ballroom talking to Ann and Towner while they waited for Mickey, who had gone in search of a bathroom. Helen Barnes approached them and stood for a long moment looking at the threesome. “Well, isn’t this a day of firsts?” she said. “Men and their mistresses! Have you ladies taken inspiration from Emily and Marta? How very European of you all!”

  Rafferty stared, dumbstruck, at Helen and then at Towner. Mickey rejoined the group as Helen walked away.

  “What’s going on?” he said, when he saw the looks on their faces.

  “Come on,” Ann said to Mickey. “You promised me a waltz.”

  In the realm between life and death, time, as we know it, does not exist.

  —ROSE’S Book of Trees

  Towner and Rafferty didn’t speak during the drive back to Salem. They climbed the stairs to the coach house in silence, the distance between them growing.

  “I’m going to bed,” she finally said. “Are you coming?”

  “We have to talk,” he said.

  “We’ll talk after. Come to bed.”

  “We need to talk now,” he said, following her upstairs to the bedroom. He knew what would come after, had always known what would happen when he confessed. He knew too well what “after” looked like. It looked like the void, the place he feared most. After meant when she left and he was without her. He’d been there once before, and it had almost killed him. He wasn’t certain he would survive it again.

  “About what Helen said…Ann and I…” he started.

  She held up her hand. “Never happened.” She was removing her dress as he spoke, kicking off her shoes and putting on her robe.

  It was just what Ann had said when he’d tried to talk to her about what had happened between them that night. Had the two women talked about this? Feelings of betrayal and shame settled on him, creating an odd blend.

  “It did, though,” he said. “I was there.”

  “Stop,” she said, putting a finger to his lips.

  When she took it away, he spoke again.

  “I went to Ann.”

  “I know.”

  “I thought you had left me.”

  “I had.”

  He sat on the edge of their bed, tears of frustration and grief streaking his face. “I went to Ann,” he said again, waiting for the full impact of it to hit her.

  “I know,” she said again. “And Ann brought you back to me.”

  He remembered her then, sitting on his porch in the early morning. “How?”

  “I don’t know.” She held his face, wiping his tears with the sleeve of her robe. “But she did.”

  For the first time he noticed that Towner was wearing a black kimono, the same kimono he’d noticed Ann wearing that night. In fact, everything about Towner was the same as it had been that evening: the curve of her neck, the way the black kimono hung off her shoulders. “It was you.”

  She nodded, holding his stare.

  “How?” he whispered.

  “Time isn’t linear.”

  She opened the robe and stepped toward him, exactly the same way she had done that night.

  The banshee manifests as either a beautiful young maiden capable of luring her victim toward death or an aging crone, two aspects of the triple goddess. No human is able to glimpse the third and most prevalent aspect, the mother, yet she has been there all along.

  —ROSE’S Book of Trees

  “I’m so sorry,” Paul said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. We can go back to Matera. I want to go. I need you. Just come back.” His voice sounded strange, as if he were talking from a tunnel.

  “Where are you?” Callie asked. She regretted answering her cell.

  “The boathouse.” He coughed once, then again. “I came looking for you, and I found the ring on the table.” He sounded as if he were crying: ragged sobs that broke into a deep, gagging choke.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No,” he said. “My heart—it’s beating strangely. And there’s a weird green halo around the moon.”

  She looked out her hotel room window, toward the west, where the sliver of waxing moon was just setting. There was no halo.

  She could hear the sound of him retching.

  “I’m sick,” he said. “Oh, damn.”

  “What?”

  “There’s blood in it. A lot of blood.”

  She drove as fast as she could, pulling into the back driveway, the one nearest the boathouse. “Paul?” She rushed from living room to bedroom to kitchen to bath before climbing the stairs to the lighthouse.

  He wasn’t there, but a patch of bloody vomit was on the floor next to the phone. A scribbled note from him was on the table: Meet me in the spa. Finn sick, too. Marta needs help getting him upstairs. Doctor meeting us there.

  She grabbed the note and sprinted through the woods to the main house, the huge pine trees spiking, pointing their shadows skyward, conjuring memories of fairy-tale forests and doomed children. The front door was locked, so she entered through the pantry. She called their names. No answer. There weren’t any staff members around; there was no sign of Marta or Finn. They must still be down in the spa. Callie felt fear rising as she ran through the library to the elevator. She pushed the button, and as the lift crawled and clanked upward, she wondered what could be happening. Food poisoning from the risotto? Something worse?

  She stepped in, her panic growing as the elevator descended slowly to the spa. The door opened to a dimly lit but empty room. They’d already gone. She had started to get back into the elevator when she spotted a dark figure on the floor, in the back corner near the sea well.

  “Paul!” she shouted, rushing to his side.

  There was no response. The only sound came from the oak sea well as the water lapped its walls, surging with the high tide.

  Paul was passed out, facedown in his own bloody vomit. “Paul,” she said again, shaking him to wake him up. She felt for his pulse; it was pounding wildly and skipping beats.

  She tried her cell. No reception. She rushed to the house phone, picked up the receiver, and heard a busy signal. She hung up and tried again. When did you ever hear a busy signal? Someone must have left an extension off the hook somewhere. Damn.

  She turned Paul onto his side, so that he would not choke if he vomited again, then tried the phone one more time…still busy. She got into the elevator, pulling the heavy glass door shut behind her. Just as she pushed the up button, the lights wen
t out, leaving the room in total darkness. The elevator didn’t move.

  She felt her way back to him in the blackness.

  Rafferty was sleeping, the sheets tangled around him, when the phone rang. “What time is it?” he said as he picked up. The clock read 3:00 A.M. Then, hearing the voice on the other end, he dragged himself to a sitting position. “What’s wrong?” He listened carefully. “You tried the boathouse, and Pride’s Heart, and both their cell phones? Okay.” He hung up.

  “What’s happened?” Towner asked.

  “That was Mickey and Ann,” Rafferty said, pulling on his pants and shoes. “I have to go to Pride’s Heart right now.”

  “Ann had a vision?” Towner asked, and Rafferty nodded.

  “What did she see?”

  Rafferty hesitated before he spoke. “She says she saw the badb,” he said.

  Towner stared at him. “The what?”

  “The banshee.”

  “She saw the banshee?”

  “She heard it wailing. And there’s something else,” he said, starting for the door. It was something Mickey had said, but there wasn’t time to elaborate. After the night they’d just spent together, leaving Towner alone was the last thing Rafferty wanted to do. But if he was right…

  “Oh, God,” Towner cried. “Hurry. I hear it, too. Callie’s in trouble.”

  “Hail Mary, full of grace…”

  The tide had pulled away, taking the water from the sea well. The lapping against the oak well had gone silent, and Callie’s world had become the essence of nothingness. In the hours she’d been sitting with him, Paul had not come to, not even briefly.

  She could no longer hear the sound of his breathing.

  She comforted herself that he still had a pulse, though it was now so slow and weak she could barely feel it.

  She’d yelled for help so many times that her throat was raw. She had even vomited herself, probably from fear. She’d tried the house phone again and again, hoping that someone had discovered the line off the hook, but she only got the busy signal. Finally, she prayed. She said every prayer she’d ever been taught, and then she began fingering the rosary and reciting her Hail Marys until she realized she’d been clutching the oak rose so hard her palm had started to bleed. She had likely created a new scar, a smaller rose inside the larger one.

  Now, as if in answer to her prayers, she saw the elevator come to life and begin to rise. She could hear whoever it was as he or she climbed in and started to descend.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said, jumping dizzily to her feet as the door opened and the lights snapped on. “Where the hell were you? Did you bring the doctor?” Why was Marta’s head haloed green? It was an odd vision. “We need to get him to the hospital right away. Help me move him.”

  “I don’t think so,” Marta said. In one hand she held a carafe of the magenta port and a long-stemmed glass, and, in the other, a knife. She looked at the bloody vomit. “Interesting. I wasn’t expecting blood. The first phase of foxglove poisoning is marked by nausea and an irregular heartbeat. Then the muscles go slack. The final phase slows the heart, ultimately stopping it. I do regret that the little girls are going to be blamed for choosing the wrong flowers.” She shoved the glass into Callie’s hands. “You didn’t drink the port at dinner, and you didn’t toast our future as enthusiastically as etiquette requires. So now mind your manners and drink up.”

  Transgressors, may more quickly here, than else where become a prey to the Vengeance of Him, Who ha’s Eyes like a Flame of Fire, and, who walks in the midst of the Golden Candlesticks.

  —COTTON MATHER, The Wonders of the Invisible World

  Rafferty banged on the front door of the boathouse. Inside, every light was blazing, but no one answered. He crossed to the other entrance, slipping on what he thought was seagull guano and then realized was vomit. Alarmed, he looked in the windows but didn’t see anyone. He opened the door and walked in.

  “Callie? Paul?”

  He saw her ring on the farmer’s table. On the floor next to it, he discovered more vomit, bloody this time. He searched the rooms quickly, making the climb to the lighthouse; then, finding nothing, he rushed back down and outside, cutting through the woods to Pride’s Heart.

  He tried the front door. Locked. The house was completely dark. He rang the bell and pounded hard on the door. He hurried around to the side of the house, trying each entrance as he moved. All locked. The French doors of the ballroom were locked, too, but easier to break. He hip-checked one of them, popping its latch.

  The room was pristine. It was hard to believe a huge reception had been hosted in here only hours earlier. He rushed from ballroom to hall, flipping on lights as he went.

  “Marta?” he called, announcing his presence. “Finn?”

  There was no answer. No sound at all except the wind off the ocean.

  He tried the kitchen first, then the library. Both were empty. He ran to the parlor, then the orangerie, calling their names before taking the stairs two at a time. “Finn?” he called, louder this time.

  Nothing. Had they gone away for a few nights, like traditional honeymooners? He opened the bedroom door. Empty.

  Rafferty moved down the hallway, knocking on doors, then opening them, calling fruitlessly to each of the Whitings as he moved. He made his way to the third floor, to the servants’ wing, and knocked on the long row of white doors.

  There was no one there. All of the servants had been dismissed.

  The only place he hadn’t looked was the wine cellar. He went back to the empty library, turning on more lights. The bar, normally hidden behind the bookcase, was turned at a right angle into the room, and he could see light below. Either they’d neglected to lock things up after the party, or someone was down there.

  He walked behind the bar to the elevator and pushed the call button. Nothing. He could see down the shaft to the elevator at the bottom. He pressed the call button again and, once again, nothing happened.

  There was a house phone in the speakeasy. He’d seen Finn use it on Thanksgiving, calling the kitchen for more glasses. There was probably one in the spa as well.

  He walked to the partners desk and found the house phone off the hook. He replaced it on the cradle, then picked it up and pressed the button marked SPA. It rang, but no one answered. He stepped forward, and his foot stubbed something soft.

  Finn’s face was blue, and there was a trail of bloody vomit on the rug next to him leading to the couch. He must have tried to crawl toward the phone before collapsing on the floor. Rafferty knelt, trying to rouse him, but Finn’s body resisted. Already rigor mortis had begun to set in.

  Rafferty used his cell to dial 911. Then he unlocked the front door and left it open for the Beverly police. Back outside, the air was cold and moist as he moved toward the cliff. If someone was really in the wine cellar, he had to find a way down there. Rafferty had no light save the flashlight app on his phone, but the stars were bright, and the sky was clear enough to see the approximate location of the opening that Mickey had pointed out on the rocky, narrow beach below. The tide was dead low and just beginning to turn. He was going to have to climb down.

  The cliffs were steep, falling at least fifty feet into the ocean below. He stood on the granite ledge, looking down at the crumbling staircase that was behind a padlocked iron gate. The last fifteen feet of stairs were completely missing. If he got down there, he might not be able to get back up. Still, he knew what he had to do. This was the only other entrance to the cellar.

  Adrenaline pumping, he climbed up and swung himself over the iron gate, stepping off the edge of the cliff and lowering himself onto the crumbling staircase carved into the badly eroding ledge.

  The uneven steps sloped steeply as he moved down toward the ocean. With each step, the stairway dropped bits of rocky granite that bounced off the beach below.

  It was a longer drop from the last step to the beach than it had appeared from above. Rafferty lowered himself off the final step, holding on for
a long moment before he let himself fall. He landed hard on hands and knees, scraping skin. Slowly, he stood, then looked up at the sheer cliff and the house above.

  He might have just made a really stupid mistake.

  “Drink,” Marta demanded.

  Callie stared at her in disbelief. “Why are you doing this?”

  Marta smiled. “Do you really have to ask?”

  Callie hadn’t sipped much of the foxglove-laced port at the reception the way Finn and Paul had, but she had joined the toast, drinking just enough, she now realized, to have slowly begun to feel its poisonous effects, first with the vomiting, then the green-haloed vision of Marta she’d seen earlier, and now the muscle weakness Marta had just described. Unwilling and unable to grip properly, she dropped the glass, shattering it into a thousand little shards.

  Marta tsked, flashing the blade in front of her; its silver appeared to strobe. Marta’s dark hair seemed to strobe, too, turning colors as she moved. Where had Callie seen that before? Callie’s knees buckled, and she slid down into the pile of glass, drawing blood.

  “Be polite, for God’s sake.” Marta held the carafe of purple port up to Callie’s lips. “Protocol demands it. Look, I’ll even give you the toast. To marital bliss,” she said. “Too little and far too late.”

  Callie turned her head.

  “So contrary,” Marta said. “So ready to refuse the libations. You’ve turned into your mother.”

  Callie stared at her.

  I have another name.

  The scent of licorice.

  She’s five years old, for God’s sake!

  The stone floor. The blood dripping down the walls and pooling at Callie’s feet.

  “It was you.”

  I have another name. Can you guess it?

  “It was you,” Callie repeated. “At the party with all of us.”

  “It was me in a few places,” Marta said. “Though you might not have known me, I knew you.”