The Tale of Halcyon Crane

by Webb, Wendy

  “Will! I’m at the stairs! Follow the sound of my voice!” I just kept shouting until he collided with me. Thank God. We stood there for a moment, holding each other.

  “Iris is out there,” I said to him. “We’ve got to look for her.”

  “Hallie, I’m getting you back up to the house. Right now. You’re freezing.”

  He led me up the rest of the stairs, one by one. I nearly died of joy when we reached the back door. I opened it and fell into the kitchen, shivering. Will ran to the living room and got me an afghan, which he immediately wrapped around me.

  “My God, how long have you been out there?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, though chattering teeth. It was then I noticed a pot of stew on the stove and smelled the bread in the oven. “Did you make that?” I asked him, knowing he hadn’t. He shook his head. It must have been Iris. Who else would’ve done it?

  Much later, after we had showered and eaten and thoroughly warmed up, I told Will the tale of Halcyon Crane. He kept shaking his head, muttering things like Unbelievable and Wow. I don’t know whether he took what I said at face value—especially the part about the girls saving me—or if he believed Iris was embellishing my story the same way she embellished the others.

  I wasn’t sure either, but at that moment I didn’t much care. I was back in my house with the man I loved, and we were both safe from the storm. Iris had made it, too, as evidenced by the fine dinner she had prepared. I took Will up to bed that night with the distinct feeling that everything was going to be all right.

  · 32

  I had it out with Mira after the storm passed. She had been planning to come to the house the night of the storm to help me exorcise the triplets—”Phase Two,” she called it—but there was no way she could get through the snow. So she came by a couple of days later when the island had begun to dig out.

  “Thanks for the offer, but I think I can get the girls to leave on my own,” I told her.

  “On your own? Are you sure?”

  “No, I’m not,” I admitted. “I still might need your help. But the way I’m seeing it now, the girls aren’t the only demons of the past that my coming here has stirred up. Other things need to be exorcised, too.”

  Mira seemed worried. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  So I confronted her with what I knew. She tried to deny it, sputtering and posturing and pretending that she was the wronged one—how could I possibly think such a thing?—but I stood firm and she basically collapsed under the weight of the truth.

  “I’m sorry, Hallie,” she said finally, after pulling out a chair from the kitchen table and sitting down hard. “I looked for you and your father for years. The man who I put him in touch with for new identity papers disappeared around the same time, so I couldn’t get your location or new name from him. It was impossible to find you, and then I realized Noah didn’t want me to. It’s true that I was furious when your father left me. I’ve been holding that grudge ever since. But I really felt as though I was helping him back then. He needed to get you out of here.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She made a face. “I’m not exactly excited about anyone else finding out. I don’t know the statute of limitations, but I might be charged as an accessory to murder. Or whatever they charge people with for helping murderers.”

  Oddly enough, I felt for her. I don’t know if it was pity or empathy or something else, but seeing the way she was so resigned, I just couldn’t hate Mira. She was right. She had helped my dad, her selfish motives notwithstanding, and in doing so she had probably saved my life. Right then and there, I forgave her.

  “But what about the child, Mira? Did you have my father’s child?”

  At this, Mira’s face went white. “Who told you that?”

  “The source is not important,” I said to her. “I just want to know if it’s true. No more lies, Mira. I’ve lived half a lifetime based on lies. I want the truth now, once and for all.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve kept this secret for thirty years, Hallie. Nobody on this island knows who his father is.”

  “His? So you do have a child. A son, then?”

  Mira looked at me and smiled. “I thought you knew I had a son. Everyone here on the island knows him. He runs the coffee shop.”

  I sat there, open-mouthed. Finally, I managed to say, “Jonah? Are you kidding me? Jonah is your son? My dad’s son?”

  She nodded in confirmation. I could hardly believe what she was saying. My thoughts were racing. Jonah was my half brother? That would explain why he felt so familiar, so like my dad in so many ways.

  “He has known who his father was for some time,” Mira told me. “In fact, what he’s been going through the past couple of weeks isn’t so different from what you went through. He thought his father was dead all these years—that’s what I had told him—and now he finds out that he was alive and living just north of Seattle until just before you arrived. When you think about it, it’s exactly what you went through after learning about your mother.”

  “Not exactly,” I said to her. “He had you to come to for answers.”

  “And when he did, I told him the truth. I looked for your—and his—father for years. I tried everything I knew to find him. But he had disappeared into thin air. Jonah was angry with me at first, sure. But I think he realizes I was just as much a victim as he was.”

  A painful thought occurred to me. “Mira,” I said carefully, “did my dad know about the pregnancy before he left here with me? Did he leave you, knowing you were carrying his child?”

  She shook her head. “Even I didn’t know it then. If I had, you can be sure I would’ve told him. I loved your dad, Hallie. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.”

  My mind continued to swim. So this is what Jonah had wanted to tell me. I thought back to our evening at the wine bar, and now it made perfect sense that he had asked so many questions about my growing-up years. He was trying to learn about the life that might have been his and about the man who was his father.

  I sighed and looked at Mira, feeling a mixture of confusion, defeat, and regret. “What a tangled web this is,” I said to her.

  She smiled a weak smile. “Do you have anything to drink? Stronger than tea, I mean?”

  And so we opened up a bottle of wine and sat together drinking it, talking about what was and what might have been. We both saw that nobody, not my mother, not my father, not Mira, not me—and certainly not Jonah—was to blame for any of it. The affair notwithstanding, everyone had acted with the best of intentions, and this was simply how it had turned out. All our lives had been thrown into turmoil as a result of the epic tale of my family, and now, after thirty years, several deaths, and more than a few otherworldly occurrences, the circle was closed and we were back where it all began.

  Much to Mira’s relief, Jonah wasn’t ready to tell the whole island who his father was. Neither was I. It would be between us for a while. But the fact that we were siblings was not lost on either of us. We saw more and more of each other, becoming good friends. We even decided that one day when I stopped reeling from the tales I had heard from Iris about my mother’s family, we’d look together for our father’s family on the mainland. Other stories about other ancestors were swirling out there in the wind, waiting to be learned.

  One day not long after this, I ran into the Suttons downtown. I took a deep breath, walked over to them, and told them I had gone to the police to request the file on the case. “I wanted to find out for myself what the evidence against my father was, and I can see how it looked suspicious,” I said to Julie’s parents. “But all I can tell you is that I don’t believe my father would have ever intentionally hurt your daughter. I’m sorry that I can’t give you a better explanation of the accident that day. I know you want it as much as I do.”

  They accepted my apology—what else could they do?—and we went our separate ways. I assumed word got around that I tried to dig into the case and uncover th
e truth, because not long after my meeting with the Suttons, I noticed a great thawing in island opinion about me. People stopped staring and whispering, and I became a prodigal daughter of sorts, one of their own who had left and returned. Some of that goodwill, I believe, came from what I decided to do with my days during tourist season.

  One snowy afternoon while Will was at work, I found myself at the front door of my mother’s art gallery downtown. It hadn’t been opened since her death. According to Will and Jonah, it was one of the more bustling and popular shops on the island during the summer months, selling not only my mother’s photographs but other pieces crafted by local artisans: jewelry, pottery, watercolors, the occasional sculpture. The thought of it sitting there, unused, had begun to nag at me. The moment I turned the key and stepped inside the dusty building, I knew I had found what I would be doing with my summers.

  “I’m going to open the Manitou Gallery in the spring,” I announced to Will that night over dinner.

  “That’s fantastic!” He smiled and lifted his glass. “I know people have been wondering about the fate of the shop. To a new chapter!”

  A few days later I was at the shop, taking care of the many details that needed to be completed before spring came—dusting and cleaning and calling the artists whose work was displayed there, many of whom lived elsewhere during the winter, to let them know the shop would be open before the first tourist ferry arrived.

  In the back room where my mother had her studio, I noticed several boxes labeled mosaic materials. I found them filled with old cracked pottery, tiles, and pieces of what seemed to be foggy antique mirrors. I picked up one of the larger mirror bits, and it seemed to me I could see the hint of a face within it, as though it had captured the reflected image of the mirror’s previous owner when he or she gazed into it long ago. Could that be true? Could they be reflecting an image of the past? I remembered what I had seen that first day in my mother’s house—her image reflected in the mirror in her bedroom. A jolt of possibility traveled up my spine.

  I began to work with the shards, arranging them on a small table, and before I knew it, day had passed intonight and I was staring at a colorful mosaic I had created. In the coming weeks, I created many more, becoming immersed in crafting them, positioning the mirrors just so. Will commented how beautiful and haunting he thought the pieces were, although he didn’t understand what I meant by reflected images of the past. Perhaps I was the only one who could see them. Was it my particular family gift? I wasn’t sure. But I was beginning to think a new Crane woman would have artwork to sell in the shop when it opened in the spring.

  I was turning off the lights before bed one evening in Hill House when I found the girls standing before me in their white dresses, white ribbons in their hair. They looked so pretty and sweet, not at all like the ghouls I had been seeing. They were just little children.

  “Come play with us, Halcyon,” Persephone said, extending her small hand to me. I noticed slight smiles creeping as one across their faces, their eyes hesitantly anxious.

  I folded a stray afghan and set it on the chaise. “Playtime is over now, girls,” I told them.

  “You never play with us anymore.” Penelope pouted; the others narrowed their eyes.

  The force of their gaze gave me a chill. My voice wavering just a bit, I said, “That’s because it’s time for you to go.”

  “Who says so?” Patience wanted to know, her chin jutting defiantly forward.

  I put my hands on my hips and faced them. “I say so. It’s time for you to go home.”

  The girls smiled then, eerie ice-cold smiles. “But we are home.” Patience grinned, as the three of them dissipated into the air like wisps of smoke swirling around me.

  And then I felt it, the poking and prodding and pinching of unseen fingers, on my face, my arms, my legs, my hair. Three pairs of hands on the small of my back, pushing me forward. I stumbled to my knees.

  “Stop it!” I screamed into the empty room, covering my face with my hands. And just like that, their assault ended. The air in the room began to seem lighter and fresher, as it is after a spring rain. I stood up. Could they be gone, as easily as that? I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, thinking it was over.

  It wasn’t. They were there again, in the doorway leading to the living room. But instead of the innocent little girls in white dresses who had been with me moments before, I saw a macabre vision of the moment of their deaths, three children frozen together, silent screams of terror coming out of their gaping mouths. I quickly turned away, only to hear their giggles echoing throughout the room.

  Now they were walking slowly toward me, the flesh hanging on their worm-eaten, eyeless faces, the skin on their arms rotting and falling away with every step, their white dresses now black and tattered with dirt and decay. It was as though they had risen from their graves.

  “You don’t frighten me!” I shouted at them with conviction, but my trembling legs told me otherwise. What would they do when they reached me? What would I do? I tried to run from the room but found I could not move. Was it fear or something else holding me firmly in place?

  My mind was swimming. Iris had said I could get the girls to leave, but how? I thought of the stories she had told me. I thought about Hannah and Simeon, about the old witch Martine, and about Iris’s doomed cousin Jane, driven over the cliff by these demons. I thought of Charles, whose animals protected him, and of Amelia and the unborn children she lost when she was pushed and fell. I thought of my mother and my father, driven apart because she couldn’t accept his fear of the girls, and finally I thought of poor Julie, who spent her last moments on earth in terror, battling these unseen enemies. I’m not sure where it came from, but I had an idea. I recited the names of my relatives out loud, over and over—”Hannah, Simeon, Charles, Amelia, Madlyn, Noah!”—as though the names themselves were incantations. Or prayers.

  Then I whirled around to face the girls, their ghoulish faces dancing ever closer to my own. “This is going to end now,” I growled at them, with every ounce of strength inside of me.

  And then I saw them, my ancestors, hovering and shimmering near me as though I were seeing their reflections on a glassy lake or in one of the antique mirrors at the shop: Hannah and Simeon, Charles and Amelia, and—my breath caught in my throat—my own mother and father. The girls must’ve seen them, too, because they dropped their horrible façades and in an instant were the sweet-looking little girls they had once been.

  “You’re leaving now,” I told them. “You have been very naughty for a very long time and caused this family untold grief.”

  “But Halcyon—” Penelope started.

  “But nothing,” I told her, pointing toward our ancestors. “Look. Your parents are waiting for you.”

  As I spoke, Hannah and Simeon had their arms outstretched. “Come, girls!” Hannah called to her daughters. “It’s time to come inside! It’s getting cold out there!”

  “Mama!” Penelope cried, as the three girls ran to their parents. “Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you for so long!”

  And then all of them were gone, dissipated into the air like fog when the sun shines. It was truly over.

  · 33

  When spring came, I found myself wandering with the dogs on the other side of the island, ending up at the old cemetery. I decided to tidy the graves of my relatives, pulling weeds, dusting off headstones, talking to all of them. Visiting. Telling them my news: Will and I were happily in love. Maybe there would soon be a new generation of the family whose stories would intertwine with theirs.

  Later that night, I had the strangest dream. I was back in the cemetery, among the graves of my Hill ancestors. I noticed the gravestone of Iris’s cousin, Jane Malone. As I bent down to pull some weeds near her grave, I felt a chill wind rush through me.

  “Grave tending, miss?”

  I wheeled around and my eyes couldn’t quite take in what I saw.

  “Iris? My God! Where have—”


  I was going to ask her where she’d been; I hadn’t seen her since the storm. But my words trailed off, because just then Iris’s face began to change. Before I knew it, I was looking at a woman I didn’t recognize.

  “I thought you deserved to know the truth,” she said, her speech now heavy with a French-Canadian accent.

  I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. “Iris, I—” I started, but she cut me off.

  “Not Iris, chérie. It’s time we dispensed with that ruse. My name is Martine.” She smiled, and as she did the age seemed to evaporate from her face, her deep wrinkles replaced by rosy, smooth skin. She reached up and ran a delicate hand through her hair, shaking out the gray. It was now long and flowing and auburn. She moved at the waist, and her dress, now a vibrant green, swayed this way and that. “It feels wonderful to finally shed that skin.”

  Martine? I leaned against a tombstone, afraid my quaking legs wouldn’t support me. I tried to speak but couldn’t formulate any words. I wanted nothing more than to run away from this woman, as fast as my legs could carry me. But where would I go? I couldn’t get away, not really.

  “When Iris went over the cliff that day along with her poor cousin, I saw my opportunity.” Martine smiled.

  “Opportunity?” I croaked.

  Martine smoothed the folds of her dress and sniffed. “Hannah had done a pitiful job raising my three children. That was my mistake, giving the spell to someone so weak.”

  My skin went cold. “Your children?”

  “Oh, chérie, you are so naïve. Of course they were part of me. I gave them to her. They were as much my children as they were hers. But when I saw what she did to the girls—my three babies—I had to step in before she could hurt the others who would come later.”

  I shook my head. “What do you mean, step in?”

  “I mean just that. I stepped in. I had been planning to leave the island. I had had enough of these wealthy people who would scorn me outwardly, only to come creeping to my back door when they needed something. But then I saw how incapable Hannah was of raising children—the girls died because of her!—and I knew the herbs I gave her would allow her to conceive again and again. Something had to be done. Someone had to protect future children. So when poor Iris went over the cliff—”