I dragged myself into the house, and for the first time since I discovered the bracelet coiled in Trina’s book, I thought about the ghost and wondered if he had found the charm bag. But I was almost too tired to care, too worn down by the day’s events to be concerned with something so amorphous. I thought about Michael and my spirits lightened a bit, but not enough to alleviate the pain of Trina’s defection or the pounding in my head.
I called out for Beth, and when she didn’t answer, I made a beeline for the kitchen cabinet where Gram kept the medicine and vitamin pills. There was no aspirin, no Tylenol, no Advil. Just as I had suspected, nothing for my headache. I yelled Beth’s name again. Still no answer, but her purse lay on the table. Beth was about as open a person as you could find anywhere—she never bothered to close the bathroom door, and once, when a younger cousin had thrown up on me, she had literally given me the shirt off her back—so I didn’t hesitate to rummage through her purse. I found a small bottle of aspirin and was so agitated as I pulled it out from the bottom of the bag that Beth’s comb, lipstick and a letter from BankBoston fell to the floor. I swallowed the pills with a large gulp of water, then kneeled down to scoop up Beth’s scattered possessions.
As I returned the lipstick and comb to the purse, the letter fell open. A sociology professor had once told my class that if you were a naturally nosy person you had a good chance of becoming a top-notch sociologist. I don’t know about top-notch, but I do have a master’s degree. I read the letter. It didn’t make any sense, so I read it again. I double-checked the addressee: Russ and Beth Conyers, holders of mortgage #354-985-2 on property at 17 Patriot’s Way, Wellesley, Massachusetts. It was a foreclosure notice from a vice president at the bank. He apologized for the inconvenience—inconvenience?—but declared June 15 to be the last possible date by which the balance due could be paid, an amount totaling $362,893.37. If said balance was not received by that date, the house would become the possession of the bank and all occupants and their personal effects were to be vacated from the premises at that time.
I dropped into a kitchen chair and stared at the letter in my hand. Slowly, as if out of a thick fog, I became aware of sounds coming from the cellar. The scrape of metal against stone. Of dirt falling to the earth. The sound of digging. The sound of my nightmare. The sound of Gram’s final efforts. I leapt from the chair, the letter still clutched in my damp palm. The sound of Beth. Why would Beth be digging?
I looked down at the BankBoston letterhead. A ghost in the cellar was more plausible than Beth and Russ’s mortgage being foreclosed, than Beth digging. Tales of spirits and phantoms had long been part of the human narrative, but Russ had all that Microsoft stock and a thriving second career as a dentist, for God’s sake. Beth had twenty-seven stitches in her arm. It was clear I didn’t know what was plausible and what was not. Both. Neither. One of each.
I stuffed the letter back into Beth’s purse, unable to process its meaning, unable to process the meaning of anything that was happening around me. When I turned toward the cellar entrance, the sounds ceased, and I approached the open door slowly, listening, hearing nothing. Then, stepping carefully around the broken tread, I went down into the shadowy darkness.
The musty odor threw me back into my first nightmare, the first time I had seen the man, and I pressed my hands to the damp fieldstones for support. I imagined I smelled his sweat, saw once again the fury and hatred in his movements. Then I remembered my dream from last night: he was barely a man, on the cusp of adulthood; he just wanted to find Sarah, to find himself. I continued down and crossed slowly to the rough-cut opening that led to the old cellar. He had not been happy when I had told him he would never find her.
But it wasn’t him. It was Beth. Her back was to me, and she was kneeling in front of a thick trunk of electrical wires that hung from a metal box in the far corner of the room. I was filled with a blinding relief tinged with a touch of disappointment. Beth was holding wire cutters in her right hand; her left hand was bandaged from wrist to elbow. A shovel lay off to the side.
“Hey,” I called, puzzled.
Beth whirled around, her eyes wild and her color high. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “I thought you were at work.”
For a moment, I couldn’t remember why I was there, what had happened at SafeHaven or what had brought me down the stairs. When I did remember, I didn’t want to tell Beth about Trina or how the sound of digging had scared me, so I shrugged and said, “Left early.”
“You told me this morning you’d be there all day.”
“I lied,” I joked.
But Beth wasn’t laughing. “Why? What’d you think you’d catch me doing?”
This conversation didn’t make any more sense than ghosts or foreclosure notices. “What are you doing?”
Her eyes narrowed and her voice was coated with disdain. “As if you didn’t know,” she spat at me.
“I don’t.”
“The sump pump,” Beth explained calmly, but sweat broke out above her upper lip. “I wanted to make sure it worked in case it rained.”
“Sump pump,” I repeated. Beth had often helped Gram during electrical emergencies—she had even come over to Richie’s and my apartment in Brookline late one night and rewired the fuse box—but it was late May. Heavy rains came in April.
“I heard a forecast.”
The sun was out.
“They said there was a threat of thunderstorms,” she insisted, although I hadn’t contradicted her. “I heard it on NPR.”
I looked at the long coils of wire snaking from the electrical box, across the dirt floor, and into a large puddle in front of the tunnel opening. If she was installing the sump pump, why were the wires leading to the water instead of to the pump? It was dangerous. Anyone who accidentally stepped in the puddle would get electrocuted …
I looked back at Beth, and there was a gleam in her eye that reminded me of the mean little girl she had been, of how she had reveled in frightening me into tears. There had been no forecast of thunderstorms today.
“You …?” I started, but was unable to finish my thought, my accusation. “You …?”
Beth picked up the shovel. “I had no choice,” she said. “You’ve got to believe me. I didn’t mean to do it, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
I backed slowly away, not wanting to startle her. What was she saying? What did she mean? I caught sight of a wooden spool that had once held electrical wire on the ground to my right. There was a hammer and a couple of screwdrivers on a sawhorse to my left. I could trip her with the spool, smash her head with the hammer, drive the screwdriver into her neck.
What was I thinking? This was Beth, my dearest cousin, the sister I had never had. Beth, who right at this moment was standing before me, a shovel held menacingly in her hands. The muscles in her biceps bulged, and I knew even with twenty-seven stitches that she was capable of doing me serious injury with a single, strategically placed blow of that shovel. And I believed that she might. This wasn’t happening.
Except that it was happening. “They’re going to take my house,” Beth cried. “Don’t you see? Don’t you understand? That would destroy us. Me, Russ, Zach. All of us!”
Beth’s pathetic justifications were an admission of guilt. Nothing was as I believed it to be; no one was who I believed they were. I didn’t understand. I did understand.
“It was Russ and his God damn precious stock market. And now it’s all gone—every last penny of it. The son of a bitch thought he was so smart with his high-tech options and his short selling, but he was stupid, and he lost it all!” Beth clutched the shovel as if it were a lifeline; her knuckles were white on the handle. “Someone had to save the family. I just did what I had to do. You understand, don’t you, Lee? You see how it happened? How I had no choice?”
Russ with his eyes glued to his computer, his cell phone in his pocket, the Wall Street Journal by his side. It had never occurred to me that there was any chance he might lose. Nor had it occu
rred to me that Beth was capable of such madness, such self-delusion. It was obvious I didn’t know Beth at all, that I didn’t know much of anything. I had been played the fool for the second time in as many hours. “I understand,” I tried to assure her, but I could hear the waver in my voice. I took a deep breath, striving to make my tone smooth, sympathetic. “It must have been awful,” I added. “Just terrible.”
“It was. It is.” Beth loosened her grip on the shovel and allowed it to hang at her side. “Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?”
I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat. Forgive her for murdering our grandmother? It wasn’t likely. I nodded. “Sure,” I lied. “Sure I can.” But even as I was trying to grasp Beth’s revelations, trying to devise a plan to get out of the cellar alive, it dawned on me that Trina hadn’t made a fool of me—I had made a fool of myself. Beth had somehow set Trina up, planted the bracelet, implicated her in more than just theft. Trina had done nothing but been on the receiving end, just as she had said—and I hadn’t believed her.
A flicker of my understanding must have flashed across my face, because Beth let out an inhuman roar and raised the shovel. “I have to have Harden House!” she bellowed. “I need the money. You have no right to it! It was always mine! Always!”
I ducked and kicked the wooden spool at her. It shot out from my foot and whacked Beth in the legs. She stumbled forward, and as she fell the shovel clattered to the ground. I turned and ran.
I started up the stairs, not knowing what I was going to do, where I was going to go, how I was going to get away. Beth was in far better shape than I, faster and stronger, and I knew from the way she had fallen that she hadn’t been hurt by the spool, just startled and slowed for a moment. I leapt over the broken tread and launched myself across the kitchen and toward the back door. I could hear Beth yelling as she came up the stairs.
She’d be on me in seconds. I swung my head in a wild arc. There was no way I could make it to my car and drive away. Nowhere to hide out there in the bright sunlight. Nowhere to run. Her feet pounded up the steps. My only hope was to outsmart her.
Instead of going outside as Beth would expect, I pushed the back door open, allowed the screen door to slam, then turned back inside and sped toward the front of the house, hoping Beth would assume I had run out into the yard. Without conscious awareness of where I was going, I slid into the entryway and slowly, softly, approached the main stairway. I climbed to the first landing and stood as quietly as I could before the hidden door of the safe room.
I willed my ragged breath silent, my body completely still, and listened intently, not breathing, as Beth roared from the cellar, across the kitchen and out the back door. I pressed my fingers to the hinges hidden by the stairway’s carved panels and waited. When I heard her circle to the rear of the house, I pushed the fake panel and jumped into the safe room. My ankle twisted under me as I fell to the rotting floor, which was farther below the opening than I had remembered. Ignoring the pain, I stood on my toes and pulled the panel shut. It was dark and hot and horribly close, but I was hidden. I was safe. For the moment.
The room was just ten feet by four feet, perhaps less, the claustrophobic crush of its walls only slightly eased by its height, which rose through the attic. I crouched in the east corner, which seemed to have the greatest number of intact floorboards, shivering in the sweltering heat. I had always wondered what it felt like to be a runaway slave, hidden in the safe room, terrified and without recourse, without the ability to act, just waiting, waiting, only waiting, as the hunters prowled overhead.
Now I knew.
I could see whole families crowded together in this tiny space, hear the mothers soothing their fretting babies, feel the men straining to be strong, smell the sweat and the fear. Theirs and my own. It seemed not only possible, but probable, that the souls of these men and women still hovered nearby. I felt the weight of their history, of all that pointless hatred, all the hope and all the suffering, wrap around me. As close as the walls.
And I hadn’t believed Trina. She who doesn’t learn from history is doomed to repeat it.
As I sat there, berating myself and waiting for Beth to come or to go, to find me or to give up the search, waiting to discover if I was going to live or die, it occurred to me that Beth could have set up the ghost the same way she set up Trina. Did her revelations mean that my ghost was no more real than my assumptions about her? Michael had speculated that Beth could have stabbed herself, but at the time neither one of us considered it plausible. I was discovering that plausibility was much more complicated than I had ever imagined.
I heard her reenter the house, screaming my name. I heard her pound up the stairs, not more than an inch from where I cowered. I heard her circling the upstairs bedrooms, racing down the back stairs. Then there was silence. Nothing. I held my breath. Had she gone outside again? Had she given up?
Suddenly I was rocked by a powerful smash to the stud just above my shoulder. I cringed and pulled my legs tighter to my chest. The wall of the east parlor was violently pounded again. The next crash came at the level of my head. Beth had not been fooled.
“You think I’m stupid?” Beth thundered. “You think I couldn’t guess where you’d hide? You with your tedious Harden family obsession, always sucking up to Gram. ‘The Colonel, the Congressman,’” she intoned with a sing-songy whine. “Always thinking you were so smart and ed-u-ca-ted. The fair-haired girl.” Another blast to the wall shook my entire body. “Well, who’s the smart one now?”
I jumped to a stand and looked around. There was nowhere to go. Beth was right: I was trapped. Stupidly, stupidly trapped. What had I been thinking?
Then Beth began to laugh, and the sound was so clear, so close, it was as if she were in the room with me. She continued to laugh as she crossed through the entryway and climbed the stairs. “Ally-ally in free,” she called out cheerfully, in imitation of our childhood games. “Loser gets fed to the woman with the iron teeth!”
I smashed my foot hard into one of the rotted floorboards, and it broke under my shoe. I hit the one next to it, and it did the same. Just as Beth yanked open the fake panel and leered down at me, I kicked another board out of the way and jumped down into the cellar.
I landed hard again, on the same ankle I had twisted in the safe room, and I crumpled atop a pile of dirt. For a moment I couldn’t catch my breath, and when I did, I began to cough. I grabbed my foot, rocking in pain, choking as I expelled the dirt in my lungs, not at all certain I was going to be able to walk.
Again the fiendish snicker. This time from above. “Perfect,” she screeched. “Just perfect!”
I stared up at Beth, barely able to recognize the twisted face that flashed its teeth at me. She held the shovel and was looking down at me from the same position I had looked down on the dying man in my dream. Did this mean I had been seeing into the future, not into the past? That Harden House wasn’t haunted? That I was foreseeing my own death?
I tried to stand, but my ankle resisted the weight, and I collapsed to the ground again. I was lying beneath the mouth of the tunnel, on the same spot where the man had been digging, the same spot where Gram had died.
Beth’s footfalls were buoyant and joyful as she came down the stairs toward me. But suddenly it wasn’t Beth who I feared the most. From somewhere behind my head, I heard the sound of metal scraping against metal, manacle against stone. The sound of digging.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I lay motionless on the dirt, my eyes squeezed shut, my fists clenched, the pain in my ankle dwarfed by my fear. He was back and she was coming. I needed a plan, a way out, but my mind refused to cooperate. The synapses wouldn’t fire; they were anesthetized, numb. He was back and she was coming. A single word scratched at the skin of my terror. Escape. If I did not escape, I would surely die.
There were three exits: the safe room, the cellar stairs and the tunnel. I opened my eyes and stared up at the shattered remnants of the safe room, at the splintere
d floorboards swinging precariously over my head, ominous and threatening. No exit. Beth was advancing down the stairs toward me; I could hear her footfalls coming closer and closer, feel her insanity obstructing my way. No exit. And the tunnel was collapsed in on itself, filled with one-hundred-fifty years of dirt and roots and leaves. No exit.
Adrenaline pumped its way through the mush of my mind, and I thrust myself up on my hands and frantically scanned the shadowy room. A weapon. A tool. A technique. Something. Anything. There had to be another answer. I was not going to die here. Not in the lair of the woman with the iron teeth. Not in the place I feared more than any other.
The empty electrical spool lay where I had pushed it. A screwdriver and hammer lay on the sawhorse. Cobwebs, fieldstone, dirt—and the sound of digging. Had someone lain inside the tunnel for all these years? Had he now emerged?
Then the scraping noise stopped. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to know. Ghosts weren’t real. There was no such thing. Ghosts didn’t exist. They were infeasible, unworkable, impossible. I twisted my head to the east wall. To my great relief, no one was there. Just the tunnel’s gaping mouth, dirt dripping from its lower lip. Mocking me.
Beth’s feet hit the floor. I heard her cross to the opening between the cellars and threw myself at the sawhorse. I grabbed the screwdriver just as she stepped over the threshold and into the room; she had the shovel jauntily cocked under her good arm. Using every bit of strength I possessed, I pulled myself to a stand, hiding the screwdriver behind my back. I tried not to wince as I put weight on both feet. I didn’t want Beth to know I was injured. To think she possessed an additional advantage.
“Hurt your foot?” Her voice was coated with concern, but the menacing casualness with which she held the shovel said all there was to say. “Perhaps it’s my turn to drive you to the emergency room.”
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