Shattered Echoes

by B. A. Shapiro

  May 7, 1887

  For the sake of my sweet Mary, today I went to Chilton Club lecture and lunch. Cousin Josephine was my constant companion from the first uplifting word to the last drop of peaches and cream. She was so very pleased to see me there once again.

  I watched all the whisperers. Cousin Josephine says now that I have rejoined society, all shall soon be silenced and all shall soon be well. I am far from sure that I wish all to be well.

  May 15, 1887

  I did not think it possible, but the truth is, dear journal, I do detest Montague more now that he is dead than I ever did when he was alive. His death has freed us from the presence of his living self, but he haunts us with his hatred.

  It is his fault Mary must bear the snubs of society. It is his fault I must make macrame lace.

  October 9, 1887

  Each morning I do my note writing, meal planning, and card leaving. The rest of the day I perform my inherited obligations. I chat with old Mrs. Samuel Bache and aid the poor orphans and attend endless dinners. I choose clothes. I wear clothes. I choose jewelry. I wear jewelry. I smile. I nod. I nod and I smile.

  I think Mary’s burden is being lightened. I know mine is heavier.

  October 20, 1887

  When I was a wife, I existed only as a reflection of him. He never understood how I could like walking when he hated it so.

  I thought if he were gone, this, too, would be gone and I would be a reflection of none save myself. But now I find the mirror is empty and the way of Belle and Katherine is not for me.

  October 29, 1887

  I feel blinders have been pulled from my eyes. I finally see what is to be seen. I see that the life of a woman forms a circle of meaningless pursuits. Is this what I wish for myself? Is this what I wish for my Mary?

  I do not wish this for either of us. I would happily end my circle of meaningless pursuits, but to do so would hurt the chances of Mary. She does so dearly love her pretty lace dresses and the companionship of her small friends. It may be for me to choose my own life, but Mary must also choose hers. I cannot exclude her opportunities. I shall do what I must.

  Katherine and Belle have no daughters.

  November 2, 1887

  I see now I shall never be free. I shall be caught in Montague’s web for all of eternity. I fear that even in death I shall never find peace.

  December 25, 1887

  This night was the worst I have ever had to endure. Mary and I were snubbed at the Lowells’ Christmas night party. I do not care for myself, but George Harrington Lowell refused to allow Mary to play with the children. She cried and she cried as I led her away, away from the bright lights and the music and all of her little friends. I am despondent.

  I see now that all that I do shall never be enough for society to forgive me my innocence.

  December 28, 1887

  My sweet Mary is gone. She has gone to live with Cousin Josephine, who shall care for her well and allow her all opportunities.

  I tried to be strong for her sake, but the tears slipped from my eyes as I watched her walk down the stair, her small hand resting in Cousin Josephine’s glove. She does not understand the enormity of the occasion. She waved and she smiled as she skipped to the carriage. She does love Cousin Josephine so.

  I am in the same gloom, the same despair and blackness that surrounded me when I lost my sweet babies. I am weak and I am lost and I slip into my dark place.

  December 30, 1887

  I lie in my bed and stare at the walls. It is only my hatred that keeps me alive. My greatest wish is for Montague to rise from the dead. Then I would have the pleasure of ensuring he die one more time.

  18

  I called in sick and sat at the dining room table drinking coffee and rereading Isabel’s journal. I finished the final entry and flipped through the empty pages that filled the last half of the book. I closed the journal and rested my hand on the dark leather cover; I fingered the rusted lock that I’d had to pry open with a knife.

  I looked out the window into the iron gray sky. Watching the slivers of frozen rain tapping on the panes, I had a fleeting sense of déjà vu. I’d been here before. I’d done this before. Or perhaps someone else had done it before me. I shivered.

  I watched a toddler slip and fall on the icy sidewalk; his mother scooped him up and comforted him. He wrapped his arms around her neck and buried his face in her hair. She kissed his hat. I could never give up my child—even if it was for her own good. And I could never seek revenge the way Isabel had.

  But were we really so different? Perhaps I hadn’t broken my mother-in-law’s cherished china, but I had refused to vacation with them at Schroon Lake three summers running. And I had lost their thirtieth wedding anniversary picture. Perhaps I hadn’t broken Clay’s walking stick, but I had run over his “good luck” basketball the night of his tournament, and accidentally dropped the engraved beer mug he had won in a fraternity chugging contest.

  I had been questioned after Clay’s death. Questioned a lot. I remembered my horror at the police’s implications, the mistrust, the sense of violation, the fear. Isabel must have felt all of that too. But in my case they had found nothing: no evidence and no motive. So the Lexington police had soon turned their attention to more pressing matters, like drivers who don’t stop for pedestrians in crosswalks and kids who skateboard on sidewalks.

  But Isabel’s police hadn’t given up. They must have had evidence. There must have been something concrete that made them believe she did it, that made them believe they could win a conviction. I couldn’t bear the thought that my Isabel might be a murderer. I knew that she wasn’t. But I had to find out for sure.

  I grabbed the journal and my coat and stepped out onto sidewalks full of surly-looking people, their heads held like charging rams as they plowed toward their destinations. There were no signs that we were almost two weeks into spring, only lumps of dirty slush pushed up against curbs littered with the debris of winter: a solitary red mitten, a cardboard Dunkin’ Donuts cup, a mutilated flyer advertising the February sale at Filene’s Basement. I pulled my collar around my ears and headed up Dartmouth Street.

  The Boston Public Library was overheated and smelled of wet sweaters and rubber boots. I stripped off my coat as I walked to the information desk. A skinny, effeminate man waved me toward the librarian in charge of microfilm. She was busy with a serious-faced college student who was alternately wringing his hands and tapping a pile of books. I waited impatiently, leaning against the edge of her overloaded desk, trying not to drop my bulky winter coat on the damp floor.

  I didn’t know whether the drops of sweat beginning to gather on the back of my neck were from heat or excitement. But it wasn’t the heat making my nerves feel like overtuned guitar strings.

  I hadn’t slept much the night before, having read the journal until well past midnight. The little sleep I did get had been filled with troubled dreams: I could still hear my hollow-sounding footfalls as I ran a road race through an empty public building; I could still feel the fear of my fruitless search for Clay amongst bright and noisy square dancers—the fear made more terrifying by my certainty that Clay wouldn’t be caught dead in this barn full of farmers whose faces all looked like Isabel’s and Montague’s. I had lain in bed, heart pounding, watching the light slowly reach around the top and bottom edges of my curtains.

  I tapped my foot and wiped my forehead. Why didn’t that kid hurry up? Finally, with a last wring of his hands and a worried furrow in his brow, the student carried his books to a long table.

  “Oh yes, we have at least a half dozen newspapers from the late nineteenth century.” The resource librarian beamed. “Follow me and I’ll show you where they are.” She bounced between the stacks to her right. She looked miscast with her rosy cheeks and blond cheerleader good looks. “There were so many more newspapers in Boston then.” She waved her arm at rows and rows of oversize file cabinets. “The Traveller, The Boston Courier, The Daily Advertiser, The Morning Journal,
The Boston Herald, The Transcript …” She stopped and pulled open a drawer about midway down one row. “Did you say eighty six?”

  “Both 1886 and eighty seven.”

  “Well, The Globe didn’t start until 1887, but we have all these others for eighty six. And down here we have The New York Times from 1850 on up.” She just about skipped to the other side of the room.

  “I doubt the things I’m looking for made it to The Times.” My coat was dragging on the carpet as I tried to keep up with her.

  “That’s too bad,” she said cheerfully, “because The Times is the only paper that’s indexed—you can look up a subject and find all the relevant articles, including their date, page, and column numbers.” She waved at a row of books to her left. “But to find something in the Boston papers, you’re going to have to go through page by page.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m pretty sure of the dates.”

  “Well, that’ll save you some time, and fortunately, the papers were much shorter in those days.” She beamed again and patted a chair in a cubicle that held a large microfilm machine. “Here, I’ll show you how to use this, and then you can get on with your research.”

  At no time during my unenthusiastic, underachieving years at BU had I had any reason to use microfilm. Nor, for that matter, had I at Conard High, where I do remember the Merit Scholars hovering around the library’s one machine. But I was a quick study, and soon I was whizzing through the news of April 1, 1886, like an old pro.

  There was nothing about Montague in The Boston Traveller, but I did find a small article on an inside page of The Herald, squeezed between advertisements for Fine Ladies’ Hats and Huntington’s Elixir.

  Montague Cabot Davenport, age 41, president of the Fort Point Bank, died last evening in an unfortunate household accident. According to a statement by Chief Inspector Charles Waits, Mr. Davenport slipped at the top of the stairway of his residence, 240 Beacon Street, and fell to his death.

  My skin crawled. There was something spooky about reading these words, about seeing concrete proof of Isabel’s journals, about knowing for certain that these people—Isabel, Montague, Mother Davenport—that these people, and their lives and their troubles, had really happened. That they had all lived—and died—in my house, in my space. Only they were in a different time, a different dimension. I shivered in the overheated room. Was Edgar right after all? Was Isabel caught in the wrong dimension by her frustrated desire for revenge?

  I shook my head and quickly put a coin in the machine to copy the page. I reversed the tape and removed the film cartridge from its housing and got up to get the next paper. I had to lean against the table for a moment, dizzy from excitement and from trying to read the pages as I fed them across the screen. Did houses retain the echoes of their past troubles? Could these echos create more?

  I pushed myself away from the table and strode purposely toward the file cabinets. I returned with a few more tapes, but neither The Daily Advertiser nor The Morning Journal had a word about the accident. Reading the moving pages on the screen was analogous to reading in a moving car, maybe even worse; I was beyond dizzy and well into full-scale nausea by the time I was finished with the second tape.

  I found the cartridge of The Evening Transcript for January through April of 1886 and loaded it into the machine. The early April papers contained nothing about the accident, but a prominent obituary appeared on April 4. I smiled, remembering how Mother Davenport had loved to read in The Transcript to find out “who was nice who had died.” According to this, Montague was indeed quite “nice.”

  Montague Cabot Davenport

  A memorial service for Montague Cabot Davenport, president of the Fort Point Bank, will be held at noon tomorrow in Memorial Church, Harvard College.

  Mr. Davenport died the evening of March 31 in his home. He was forty one years old and lived at 240 Beacon Street in the Back Bay.

  A native of Milton, Mr. Davenport was the son of the late Lyman Adams Davenport, III, and the late Wilhelmina Appleton Cabot Davenport. He was graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and from Harvard College, class of 1876.

  He was a member of The Harvard Club of Boston, The Porcellian Club of Harvard, the Myopia Hunt Club of the North Shore, and the Somerset Club of Boston. He served on the Board of Directors of Harvard College from 1880 through 1884 and was secretary of The Country Club since 1882.

  He leaves his wife, Isabel Lyman Jessel Davenport, and his daughter, Mary Wilhelmina Davenport.

  Frustrated, I copied the obituary. None of this was getting me anywhere. All I was getting for my efforts was a terrible headache and a seasick stomach. I threaded another tape into the machine, promising myself it would be the last.

  Finally my persistence was rewarded: Montague had made the front page of The Boston Courier.

  FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED IN DEATH

  OF PROMINENT BANKER

  BOSTON. The body of Montague Cabot Davenport, age 41, was found at the bottom of the main stairway of his home, 240 Beacon Street, at approximately 10:30 o’clock last evening. He suffered severe lacerations to the face and torso as well as fractures to several of his extremities. The coroner decreed death to be due to a crushed skull and caused by a fall from the second-story landing.

  The circumstances surrounding the death of the eminent Mr. Davenport remain vague. The police are currently investigating the possibility of foul play, although household members maintain accident to be the cause. “The Mister just slipped down the stair,” William Prest, Mr. Davenport’s valet, was overheard telling Chief Inspector Waits.

  It appears there were no witnesses to the actual event. Chief Inspector Waits stated that Mrs. Davenport, her maid, the cook, and the valet were at home at the time, and were all gathered around the twisted and bloody body when he arrived upon the scene. Statements of all those involved are currently being taken.

  Persons with information as to any parties who might have wished Mr. Davenport ill are instructed to contact The Boston Courier. All leads will be thoroughly investigated.

  Staring at the screen, I could see Montague, the panic and the hatred in his eyes as he fell. I could see Isabel bent over his crumpled body, her fingers wet and covered with blood. How awful for her. How awful it must have been. Suddenly I felt numb and tingly at the same time; my dizziness intensified, and my cubicle became a rapidly descending elevator filled with the thick, sweet smell of lavender. “Oh, Isabel,” I gasped as a cloud of inky blackness flowed inward, slowly obscuring my view of the microfilm screen and its horrible images.

  I looked up into the upside-down brown eyes of the bouncy librarian, who wasn’t so bouncy anymore. My chair had fallen over, and I was lying on the floor.

  “Are you, are you all right?” she asked, fear—almost revulsion—on her face and in her voice.

  I wiped the saliva from the corner of my mouth and took a few quick breaths. I was disoriented, but somehow, struggling awkwardly, I managed to get to my feet. The fluorescent overhead lights were stabbing ice picks of pain through my head, and I was afraid I was going to vomit, but I swallowed hard and tried to smile. “F-f-fine,” I stammered. “I’m, I’m fine—must just be the heat. It’s stuffy, very stuffy, stuffy in here.”

  “You were choking, gagging,” she said, backing away from me as she spoke. “Should I call a doctor? An ambulance?”

  I picked up my coat and purse from the floor and smoothed my sweater. Nothing seemed quite real, not the nubbly wool of my sweater, not the pale face of the librarian, not the innocent words that now filled the microfilm machine’s screen. “I, I told you—it was just the heat. I’m fine, just fine. I’ll get back to my research now.”

  “If you say so.” She practically ran from the room.

  Keeping my eyes averted from the screen, I forced my numb hand to copy the display, and I slipped the copy into my purse with the other articles. Then I gathered up my things and bolted from the overheated room as fast as the librarian had.

  I stood on th
e steps of the library, watching three cars and a taxi speed through a red light; the next car stopped, and the car behind him honked. A class of schoolchildren rushed down the stairs, splitting and coming together in front of me. Despite the weather, the sidewalks were full. I couldn’t handle this alone anymore. I needed to talk to someone.

  Babs’s schedule was erratic, and she was home when I rang her buzzer. “Come on up, kiddo!” she sang into the intercom. Her building had an elevator with beveled glass set into gold filigree doors. Noiselessly it took me to the top floor.

  “And to what do I owe this unexpected honor?” Babs asked as she ushered me into a room with so many windows that even today it seemed bright. “No work and no string-bean lawyer?”

  I shook my head. “We’ve got to talk.”

  She raised her eyebrows and waved me to a chair. “Shoot.”

  And I did. I told her everything. I told her about the daymares and the nightmares and about how Isabel’s mother taught her to put lavender sachet in her pockets. I told her about Kisha and about skiing and about the Gardner Museum. I told her about Monty and Gideon and all about Mary. I told her about Montague’s death and the trial.

  Babs narrowed her eyes when I finished and looked at me in silence for a minute. “Have you told anyone else this story? Showed the diaries to anyone?” I shook my head. “Not even Richard?”

  “Yeah, right—he’d have me committed in two seconds flat. You were the only one I thought I could trust.”

  “Well, kiddo, this is one bizarre tale …”

  “You don’t believe me? You with your dog whistles and five-dimensional apples and jumping up and down over ‘ghostly antics’?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t believe you …” Babs inspected the plaster cornice on the wall well above my head.

  “But you don’t.”

  “It’s just hard to take it in all at once.”

  “Read the journal.” I dropped the book in her lap. “Read it and you’ll believe.”