Shattered Echoes

by B. A. Shapiro

  She opened the journal and began to read. I paced the room and looked out the windows; I watched the gray sky turn grayer and darker and the rain come down heavier. Could Isabel have done it? Edgar had said she was here because she was trapped by her own guilt. I pressed my forehead to the window and watched the scurrying raincoats below. There was a crack of thunder, and again I had a fleeting wisp of déjà vu.

  Babs tapped the book that lay on her knees, and I looked up. “I believe the journal, all right,” she said, flipping through the pages. “I believe Isabel Davenport wrote it, and I believe she lived in your house.” She laughed. “I’ve got to love the part about my stuck-up great-grandmother ‘averting her head’ and snubbing Isabel at Symphony. But …” She patted the couch for me to sit down next to her.

  I sat. “But what?”

  “But do I believe Isabel Davenport’s haunting you? And going to museums with you? And giving you hallucinations? Kiddo, diaries are one thing—this ghost business is another whole kettle of fish.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing you—you, of all people—saying this.” I grabbed the journal from her lap. “How do you explain it all then?”

  “What about your logical explanations?”

  “Logic doesn’t explain how I had daymares about Isabel before I read her journals!” I jumped up and began pacing the room. “And what about seeing Isabel and Montague dancing before I even knew there was an Isabel or a Montague? And what about serving tea when I didn’t know anything about afternoon teas?”

  “What was the deal with the shrink who thought you had that weird thing?” Babs asked. “What was it—TPE?”

  “TLE. Temporal lobe epilepsy—and I don’t have it.”

  Babs grabbed my hands and forced me to sit again. “What about drugs? Ever do any acid in college?”

  “Damn it, Babs, give it up! That stuff was way before my time.” I yanked my hands back. “And anyway, this isn’t flashbacks—this is ghosts.” I picked up the journal and hugged it to my chest. “And Isabel Davenport is the ghost.”

  “What if I told you that I did everything?”

  “What everything?”

  “Everything, everything. That it was all me.”

  “That what was all you? Are you telling me that you’re a ghost? Je-sus, Babs!” I dropped the journal to the table with a bang. “I’m pouring my guts out here, and you’re making jokes. Fine, just fine, you want to joke about it—”

  “Listen to me for a second, Lindsey. What if I told you it was all a joke—that this whole thing has been an elaborate hoax I cooked way before I even met you? Before I even knew who would buy this apartment? What if I told you it was me who rearranged your books, and took your forks, and moved Edgar’s furniture?”

  “And made that horrendous earthquake noise? And turned on all the lights in my apartment when you were in a restaurant with me?” I jumped up again and stood facing her with my hands on hips.

  “Maybe I had an accomplice.”

  “And I suppose it was your accomplice who led me to my lost folder? Set my alarm clock? Screwed up Richard’s binding?” I dropped back down on the couch. “And even if I thought you did do it—why the hell would you?”

  “Because I’m an incurable practical joker?” Babs looked down at her feet. “Because I always go overboard?” she said so softly, I had to strain to hear her. “Because I never know when to stop?”

  “Babs, face it—you didn’t do it. You couldn’t have made the pickles fall or scare Mirepoix. And you can’t possibly have anything to do with my daymares.”

  Babs was pale. “This whole thing gives me the creeps. I don’t know, Lindsey—ghosts?”

  “Not ‘ghosts’ plural, a single ghost. Isabel Lyman Jessel Davenport. Born: August 28, 1863, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Beatrice Lyman Jessel and Gideon Draper Jessel. Died: never!”

  “That’s enough, Lindsey,” Babs snapped.

  “I can’t believe this reversal.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know anymore.” Babs began biting the cuticle on her forefinger.

  “Well, listen, forget about the ghost stuff—”

  “First I’m supposed to believe in ghosts, and now I’m supposed to forget all about them?”

  “The reason I told you this whole thing is because I need your help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Don’t look so suspicious.” I laughed. “I just have to know the truth about Isabel and Montague—I’ve got to know what really happened.”

  “Really happened?” Her face was puzzled.

  I leaned toward her. “I’ve got to know the truth. I’ve got to know if she killed him or not.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course she killed him.”

  “She says she didn’t.”

  Babs looked at me in disgust. “You must be joking.”

  “It just doesn’t fit. A person caring enough to give Mary up? And tough enough to get through those deaths and the trial?” I swallowed. “She just isn’t that evil. She can’t be.” I picked the journal up and touched its soft cover. “She just can’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s not a murderer.” I hugged the journal to my chest.

  Babs squinted at me. “Is there something else? Some reason why this is so all-fired important to you?”

  I shook my head, then rested my chin on the journal’s binding.

  “Some deep-down repressed reason why it’s so critical that she be innocent?” Babs persisted.

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Think harder,” she ordered.

  “Only if you figure not wanting to live with a murderer is repressed.” We stared at each other for a moment.

  Babs looked scared, and I probably did too. She started to say something, then stopped and turned it into a cough.

  “But don’t you think it sounds like there’s a good chance Montague was just drunk?” I asked. “That he just accidentally fell?”

  She shook her head and looked at me for a moment without speaking. “If she’s so innocent, how come she was arrested?”

  “If she’s so guilty, how come she wasn’t convicted?” We sat in silence for a while. “I went to the BPL,” I finally said, fishing through my purse. I handed her the newspaper articles.

  Babs reluctantly took the papers from me; she wasn’t smiling. “No moss growing under your feet.”

  “They don’t say much,” I continued. “I’m hoping the stuff about the trial will be better. I’m sure there’ll be plenty—but I’m guessing there’ll be a lot of contradictory stories.”

  Babs skimmed the articles and then looked up. “So where do I fit in to this little scheme?”

  “Well,” I said slowly, “I was thinking that talking to your grandmother might be the best way to get the true story.”

  “I don’t know, Lins. Remember how she didn’t want to talk about it? And when Gram doesn’t want to talk about something …”

  “If you get us invited to dinner, I’ll figure out a way to get her to talk.”

  “You won’t mention any of this ghost business?”

  I held up my hands. “After your reaction?”

  “All right.” Babs sighed. “I guess I could wrangle a dinner invitation.”

  “Great!” I grinned. “Great! How about sometime this week?”

  19

  “It’s all right, Lindsey,” Richard said, his hazel eyes sad and serious behind his glasses. “I’m a big boy—I can take the truth. Look, it’s obvious there’s something wrong here. It isn’t really working is it? You’re going cold on me, aren’t you?”

  We were seated across from each other at a tiny table in a noisy bistro on Boylston Street, chosen because its location allowed me to meet him for dinner and get back to the office in less than an hour. That’s how jammed I was. My adventures in nineteenth-century detective work were eating into my job time. Much to old man Farnham’s—and a few of my smaller clients’—dissatisfaction.
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  “There’s nothing to confess,” I said. “It really is work.” I touched his cheek and grinned. “And anyway, how could I go cold on such a hot guy?”

  Unsmiling, he leaned toward me. “I can see the signs, Lindsey. You’ve become enormously unavailable over the past couple of weeks. You’re pushing me away.”

  “I’m not pushing—”

  He held his hands up. “Yes, you are. Ever since we came back from the Cape, you’ve been different—more removed, somehow distracted …” He took my hands in his. “I thought we had such a great time that week. I thought that maybe, that maybe—well, what I thought is irrelevant. What’s important here is what you think.”

  “I think you’re reading signposts that aren’t there. I think that I’m the owner of a fledgling business, that I’m under a lot of pressure, and that TWTTR has to be my first priority right now. I’ve sunk a lot of money—not to mention time and ego—into this, and I’ve got to see it through.” I gently rubbed the soft skin between his knuckles. “We did have a great time at the Cape, and we’ll have more great times—but now just can’t be one of them. It’s all I can do to work and sleep.”

  “Then how come you’re going to Babs’s grandmother’s tomorrow night?”

  “Richard!” I yanked my hands from his. “Don’t do this to me. Don’t try to box me in. If I want to spend an evening with a friend, that’s my business—and frankly, it’s also none of yours.”

  He put on his “lawyer face” and sat back in his chair. “Please accept my apologies,” he said formally. “You are one hundred percent correct. I’m sorry, I had no right to question you like that.”

  “Oh, Richard, let’s not do this.” I sighed. “Believe me, this isn’t about us. This is about work and about, about …”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s about how I took on more with this business than I thought. Maybe it’s about fear of failing, and losing my dream, and all that kind of shit. Maybe I’m just scared I’m not going to be able to pull it off.”

  Richard’s dimples appeared for the first time that evening. “I really have been way out of line here, Lindsey, and I’m sorry. You do what you have to do, and we’ll see each other when we can. I suppose I could benefit from a little overtime myself.” He picked up the menu. “I heard a rumor that this very restaurant has spaghetti with the chubbiest clams in town.”

  “That’s what I’ll have,” I said with relief.

  Our dinner was warm and pleasant, but as soon as I kissed him good-bye and turned in the direction of my office, he was gone from my thoughts, along with the plans we’d made for next weekend, the button I’d noticed missing from my coat, and the call I had to make to Hilary. Everything was wiped out by my concern with the mysteriously disappearing text whose absence had inverted the page composition of a manual due for release in less than a week. Everything except Isabel, that is.

  Both Peter and Pam were still at the office when I got back. I combed the galleys for the missing text, Pam fixed the incorrect fonts and all the broken characters I’d found earlier, while Peter worked on my best-and-final presentation for Target Tech, a start-up company poised to make it big—and hopefully take us with them.

  The pressure was intense, but my mind kept skipping to Isabel, to whether she had done it, to why a single newspaper was carrying on a crusade against her. I looked out my window and watched a young man with a shaved head standing alone on the corner. He tried to hand pamphlets to the people who passed by, but almost all of them ignored him. Undaunted, he continued. He’d been there since lunchtime.

  Finally, despite my preoccupation, I found the missing text. But it was a Pyrrhic victory—everything was screwed up. The page layouts had to be reconfigured, the pasteups redone, and the entire manual repaginated. And it was already almost eleven o’clock. I dropped my head to my desk and remained in that position for a few minutes. Then I pushed myself up and looked at the galleys spread out in front of me. I gathered the pages together and aligned them neatly, like a deck of cards; then I put the pile down in the middle of my blotter.

  Why was The Courier so obsessed with Montague’s death? Why were they working so hard to nail Isabel as the murderer? I had been to the library a few times and had copies of practically every word written about Isabel. It was all very confusing.

  Some papers had been mute on her trial; others gave it a passing paragraph buried on an inside page. Both The Globe and The Herald carried daily reports of the proceedings—although without any editorializing about Isabel’s possible guilt or innocence. The Boston Courier, on the other hand, ran sensational front-page stories every day during the trial, and for weeks after the verdict was rendered. There was no question as to The Courier’s judgment: guilty as charged.

  Isabel’s arrest had been covered the same way. In the months following Montague’s death, The Courier demanded that Chief Inspector Waits uncover the evidence needed to “bring the perpetrator of this foul crime” to justice. In the face of the inspector’s failure, the paper hired its own private detective and sent reporters to “the scene of this misdeed” to badger the household, and then bragged of its vigilance.

  Courier reporters have been investigating every person who might have reason to wish ill of the eminent Montague Davenport, and many members of the highest echelons of Boston society have come under our dedicated and determined scrutiny. Our reporters will work twenty-four hours a day, without sleep, without sustenance, if necessary, to amass the evidence needed to change the cause of death from accident to homicide.

  It just didn’t make any sense. Why would they bother? I sighed and looked down at the board layouts for the macro command key module; but instead of graphics and text, I saw Isabel pushing a long-haired child, in a blue and white pinafore, higher and higher on an old-fashioned wooden swing. Mother and daughter were laughing, and rows of daffodils waved softly in the breeze.

  * * *

  The last time I’d been to Mrs. Putnam’s, I hadn’t seen the dining room. It was behind the entry, hidden by two huge, quartered-oak sliding doors that had been closed on my first visit. Tonight the doors were pushed wide open and I saw the majestic room, as well as its imposing view of the Charles, as soon as I’d handed my coat to Henry.

  The dining room was enough to intimidate even the most secure: it was oval and ran the entire width of the house, with its cove ceiling, dark mahogany wainscot, and tile fireplace that rose at least twenty feet. I tried to be cool, not to look like Alice lost in Wonderland, but I’m sure I failed. The frieze above the bay windows was gold-plated, and the fireplace tiles contained delicate illustrations of nursery rhymes about food: Georgie Porgie, Jack Sprat, and Little Miss Muffet. Mrs. Putnam said her grandfather had them made in the Orient; their voyage to Boston had taken two years.

  Henry seated us at one end of a long ebony table, Mrs. Putnam at the head, Babs and I at her sides. The maid served food that arrived via a dumbwaiter, hidden in one of the ornately carved niches that filled three of the four corners left by the oval.

  The lamb was disappointing, but Mrs. Putnam was not. She told us of the misdeeds of her famous grandfather, Charles Homans Winslow, Sr.—how he’d made a fortune in silver through the “misplacement” of another man’s title papers, and of the questionable dealings of his.marine insurance business, the one from which the family fortune derived. She told us that the gold chandelier hanging above our heads had once used candles and whale oil, and that the holes in the plaster ceiling medallion were to carry away the fumes from the lamp. And she told us the sad tale of her cousin, Katherine Hunnewell Winslow Gore, a well-respected poetess in her day, who lost her love in a torrential ocean storm.

  When the tea was poured and the maid dismissed, Mrs. Putnam turned to me. “Lindsey, Barbara tells me that your visit here is not entirely social, that you are hoping I might tell you of Isabel Davenport.”

  “Well, I guess that’s sort of true …” I shot a glance at Babs; she grinned a
nd shrugged.

  Mrs. Putnam laughed. “I should hope that you have been friends with Barbara long enough to know the child is incapable of keeping a secret.”

  “I guess I’ll know that now.” I tried to kick Babs under the table, but the table was too wide.

  “When Barbara first mentioned your interest in poor old Mrs. Davenport, it seemed that prudence forbade my discussing her with you.” She took a sip of tea. “But after much thought, I have decided it would be ungenerous of me to refuse a friend of Barbara’s, and that time enough has passed.”

  “Great,” I said quickly, not wanting to delve too deeply into her change of heart, lest she change again. I reached into my purse and pulled out my newspaper articles. “Here.” I thrust them toward her.

  She shook her head slightly. “Let’s finish our tea and cake before we place papers upon the table.”

  I promptly withdrew the offensive papers and took a gulp of tea. “I’ve gotten very interested in Isa—Mrs. Davenport’s—story,” I stuttered.

  “That’s quite understandable, child,” Mrs. Putnam said kindly. “It was all quite shocking at the time, and, I daresay, is equally shocking and fascinating now—” she smiled “—to someone living right under her roof.”

  “It was the diaries,” Babs said. “Isabel Davenport’s diaries that we found in the boxes in your basement. That’s how Lindsey got hooked.”

  “It was.” I nodded. “I read the journals and got to know Isabel Davenport and what she was like, and what happened to her. I got curious about it all, and that’s why I read the old newspaper accounts.” I began to raise the copies again, but put them back on my lap before they cleared the table’s edge. “And, well, well, the pieces don’t quite fit—they don’t really make sense …”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Putnam nodded solemnly. “It surely is enough to make one wonder.”

  “So I thought that maybe you knew what actually happened. That maybe you could tell us the real story?”

  “I’m sorry, child, but I don’t know the ‘real story.’ And I’m quite certain there are more true facts in your newspapers than there are in this old head.” Mrs. Putnam shook her old head. “No, no, I doubt there ever was a soul—excepting, perhaps, for poor Mr. and Mrs. Davenport—who ever knew the real story”