The Vanishing

by Wendy Webb

  “Good morning, children!” It was Mrs. Sinclair, dressed in her familiar dark green jogging suit. “How are you both on this fine day? Thank goodness it stopped snowing!” She floated over to the sideboard to pour herself a cup of coffee, and I turned to Drew, shaking my head and mouthing: “What is this?”

  He gave a swift shake of his head and scowled at me. I got the message. Obviously, I wasn’t to bring up what had happened the night before. Obviously, this was just the way things were around here. I took another sip of my coffee.

  Adrian came through the door next.

  “Hello, all!” he said, pulling out his chair and sliding gently onto it. “I understand our power has been restored. Excellent!”

  I didn’t hear much of the conversation after that, or rather, it didn’t register with me. All I could think about was the monstrous thing I had witnessed the previous night, and how nobody was talking about it now. Breakfast was going on as it usually did, with small talk about the weather and the day’s events. Nobody mentioned the strange occurrence in the library, nobody mentioned the fact that Mrs. Sinclair was covered in blood, nobody mentioned Marion floating around like a specter. It was like it never happened.

  Or—I asked myself as I looked at these people around the table nibbling at their omelets and scones, sipping their coffees with cream, casual, unconcerned expressions on their faces—was it that the previous night was an altogether ordinary occurrence here at Havenwood?

  I held my fork aloft and looked from one to the next. Only Drew seemed to sense my growing unease, an almost hidden look of alarm creeping across his face, betrayed solely in his eyes. He shook his head so slightly that I almost didn’t catch it, his eyes pleading.

  It was all too much for me, suddenly and completely.

  “Adrian,” I said, my fork clattering on the side of my plate. “May I see you out in the hallway? For a word?”

  I pushed my chair back from the table and stood up, depositing my napkin as I did so.

  He didn’t say anything in response. The three of them just sat there, staring at me.

  “Please?” I said, and walked out of the room, the door swinging shut behind me. I stood waiting for him in the hallway for a moment, not quite knowing what I’d do if he didn’t follow me. Thankfully, he did.

  “What is it, Julia?” he said, still carrying his napkin from the table, his brow furrowed. “This is rather unusual.”

  “I know,” I said, my voice wavering. “But when I came to Havenwood, you said you’d help me when it was time to leave. A new identity, money, things like that.”

  He nodded. “Of course.”

  “Well,” I said, taking a deep breath in, “I think it’s time. I want to leave.”

  He stood there, blinking at me, shaking his head slightly. “But you’ve only just arrived!”

  “I know that,” I said, running a hand through my hair and pacing back and forth in the hallway.

  “Aren’t you happy here, Julia?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “I am happy here.”

  “So, whyever would you want to leave?”

  I stopped pacing and looked him square in the eyes. “Isn’t it obvious, Adrian?” I let out a slight chuckle. “Do you really expect me to stay after what happened last night? I run into some kind of monster in the library, covered in blood no less, and then today, here at breakfast, you’re all acting like it’s nothing! I don’t have any idea what I’ve walked into, but whatever it is, I don’t like it. I don’t feel safe here anymore. I feel—”

  He put his hands up, the same as Drew had done. “Stop, Julia. Please listen.”

  “You keep saying that!” I cried, a bit too loudly. “Drew keeps saying that! I’m listening, Adrian, I’ve been listening. I’m just not hearing anything.”

  He took a few steps toward me and grasped my arms with both hands. “Julia,” he said, his voice soft and soothing. “Please calm down.”

  “But…” I looked into his eyes. They were pleading with me, just as Drew’s had been.

  “Let’s go back and finish our meals. That way Mother will toddle off to her room for her ‘meditation time’ and we can retreat somewhere and have a chat. Hear me out, Julia, before you make any decisions about leaving Havenwood. You owe me that much.”

  He was right. I did.

  “I know it feels like you’ve walked into a nightmare,” he said, his voice gentle. “But when you hear the whole story, it will make sense to you. As much sense as a story like this can make. And then, after you’ve heard it all, if you still want to leave us, I will arrange for you to do so with everything you’ll need to start over. A new name, driver’s license, passport, and money. Agreed?”

  That sounded reasonable to me. The first reasonable thing I’d heard in a while. I took a deep breath. “Agreed.”

  Adrian pushed the breakfast room door open and held it as we walked through. We found Drew staring into his coffee cup and Mrs. Sinclair absorbed in watching a scene unfold outside the window: two cardinals flitting back and forth from one snowy pine branch to another. She turned to us as we each pulled out our chairs and slid back into our places.

  “The children have returned.” She smiled, holding her coffee cup aloft. “And what was this crisis about? Are you all right, Julia, dear?” She and Adrian exchanged a concerned look.

  I opened my mouth to respond to her, but then closed it again.

  “Julia is a bit homesick; that’s all,” Adrian said, clearing his throat before taking a sip of his coffee.

  Mrs. Sinclair turned to me with such a look of compassion on her face that I could feel my heart squeezing with remorse. She laid one gnarled hand on mine. “Of course you are, my dear,” she said. “We tend to forget you’re a newcomer, because it feels to me—to all of us—as though you’ve been here at Havenwood with us forever. You’re such a part of this place already that it’s hard for us to remember you’ve only just arrived.”

  She looked from Adrian to Drew and back to me again. “Isn’t that right, boys?”

  “It’s true, it’s true,” Drew said, his voice husky and rough.

  “And what may we do for you, Julia, to help?” Mrs. Sinclair asked me.

  Now it was my turn to look to Drew and Adrian, my eyes pleading with either of them to jump in and save me. But neither did, not right then.

  “Well…” I began, grasping for ideas, but Mrs. Sinclair squeezed my hand, stopping me.

  “I know!” she said, her green eyes dancing with delight. “I’ll have Marion cook your favorite dish for dinner! Something you loved having at home in Chicago.” She rapped the table with her hand. “That’s settled, then! You have a think about it, and let Marion know what you’d like her to make. She may have to do some improvising with what she has in the pantry, so let her know early.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. This woman wasn’t anything like that creature in the library. She was her same, quirky, dynamic self. I couldn’t imagine what had made her so changed, so horrible, so monstrous. I didn’t want to imagine.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Sinclair,” I said, twisting my napkin in my lap.

  “Chicago is known for its pizza, is it not?” Drew’s eyes smiled at me over the rim of his coffee cup.

  I raised my eyebrows. “That it is. Deep dish. The cheesier, the better.”

  Mrs. Sinclair let out a guffaw. “Marion just might walk out of here for good if we ask her to whip that up,” she said. “A meat pie, yes. A pizza pie? I’m not sure!”

  The conversation turned to other things, then. I watched as the three people around the table talked and laughed, but I couldn’t take part in it, not really. I felt as though I were detached, separate, not really even there.

  THIRTY-THREE

  As Marion was clearing the breakfast dishes, she put a hand on Adrian’s shoulder. “Mr. Tucker’s wanting a word with you, Mr. Sinclair,” she said, and then glanced over at Drew. “With the both of you.”

  My stomach dropped.

  “Do you th
ink he’s corralled our visitor?” Mrs. Sinclair asked.

  “I don’t know,” Adrian said, using his napkin to wipe the corners of his mouth before laying it on his plate and pushing his chair away from the table. “But we’ll find out, now, won’t we?”

  He turned to Mrs. Sinclair. “Shall I escort you up to your suite, Mother?”

  “No need, my darling.” She laid a hand gently on his arm. “I plan to meditate and do some yoga to recharge for the rest of the day.” She turned to me. “Later, Julia, I thought we might go down to the stables and visit the horses. I know it’s still cold but maybe we could have a short ride, just around the property at least. How does that sound?”

  “Wonderful,” I said, taking a deep breath and trying to make my body feel what my words were describing. It wasn’t working.

  Adrian shot me a look and scowled at his mother. “You know I don’t want you riding.”

  She laughed and squeezed his arm. “There’s two feet of new snow! If I fall off, it’ll be like falling into a pillow.”

  As Adrian steered his mother out the door, he looked back at me and winked. And then they were gone.

  “We’ll reconvene in Adrian’s office after we’re done with Mr. Tucker,” Drew said, taking a last sip of his coffee and pushing his chair away from the table. “Where will you be until then?”

  “Can I come with you?” I asked him. “If Mr. Tucker did find somebody, and if that somebody is here for me…”

  Drew shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Okay.” I sighed, not having the strength for yet another fight. “But you’ll tell me what he’s found, if anything?”

  “Of course we will,” Drew said.

  “I guess I’ll just go back up to my room, then.”

  He put a hand on my back and steered me toward the door, my whole body tingling. “Would you like me to take you upstairs?”

  I looked around for the dogs, and only then did I realize they weren’t in the room with us. I wondered if they had gone with Mrs. Sinclair. Quite a change from the night before, when they might have ripped her throat out.

  “Well, since my posse seems to have abandoned me…” I smiled at him and shrugged, and we walked through the door together.

  We made our way through the empty rooms toward the grand staircase. Neither of us said anything. I was just enjoying being so close to him, smelling the fresh scent of soap mixed with the muskiness of the stable, hay and feed and fire.

  We reached my room and stood outside the door. I leaned back against it.

  “This is getting to be somewhat of a routine, isn’t it?” he asked, his voice low and deep, moving in so close to me that I could feel his breath on my neck. “The dead last thing I want to do right now is go away from you to talk to Mr. bloody Tucker.” Drew smiled.

  “But we want to know what, if anything, he found, don’t we?” I said.

  “Right,” he said, clearing his throat. “I will come back to get you, after we’re finished with him.”

  I watched him walk down the hall away from me until he had turned the corner to the stairs. After he had gone and I was inside my room, I prayed that Adrian would clear up all of my fears and concerns. I was getting frustrated with these delays. It seemed as though they were forever starting a story but never finishing it. Always putting off really telling the truth about what was going on. Still, I had no choice but to wait until Drew and Adrian came back.

  But what to do until then? Look out the window? Sit in front of the fire? Then I remembered the reason I had first gone into the library the previous day. The biography! In all the excitement, I had completely forgotten about it.

  I found my cardigan in the closet, and sure enough, the slim volume about Seraphina was still in the pocket. Just the thing to pass the hours on a cold winter’s morning. I settled into the armchair by the window, opened the book, and began to read.

  At the Winter Palace, Seraphina warns the Romanovs… During a reading in the south of France for Victor Hugo, Seraphina channels his daughter Léopoldine… Onstage in London, Seraphina helps a wife confront the specter of her dead husband…

  It was mostly a collection of accounts of her readings. Interesting, yes, but it didn’t tell me much of anything I didn’t already know. She was a famous Spiritualist psychic who rose to great acclaim and traveled worldwide to help people communicate with their dearly departed loved ones, bringing messages of hope and of sorrow, warnings of impending doom and predictions of triumphs, or simply the knowledge that those on the “other side” were okay, happy, and, above all, still there.

  Then I came to the chapter titled “Early Life.” I held my breath and took in the words on the page.

  The most famous psychic of the Spiritualist Age didn’t materialize onto the stage like one of the specters with which she communicated. Seraphina began life in a remote Finnish village.

  My stomach flipped. She was Finnish, just like my ancestors. I read on. But the further I read, the more disappointed I became. The biography really didn’t tell me much, beyond her having the gift of “sight” from a very early age. It also told of how she married a traveling merchant who came through her village. He was the one who exploited her gift and got her onto a world stage, or so it said. Interesting, sure, but not what I was looking for. I wanted some sort of proof that she was or wasn’t my great-great-grandmother, and, of course, I wasn’t going to find it here. I sighed, wondering how Mrs. Sinclair came up with this fantasy in the first place.

  I scanned the rest of the pages until I got to the back of the book, and a word caught my eye. “Havenwood.”

  Seraphina traveled often to Havenwood, the remote estate of fur and lumber baron Andrew McCullough, who reproduced his family’s ancient Scottish manor house in the Minnesota wilderness. McCullough was reportedly obsessed with Spiritualism, his parents having been tragically killed in a stagecoach accident while he was in America tending to his father’s fur business. He took every opportunity to invite the young psychic to his home in an effort to receive messages from his mother and father.

  It is after one of these visits that Seraphina vanished from history. She was last seen arriving at the Havenwood estate in one of McCullough’s carriages that he famously had pulled by a team of eight horses. As was his habit whenever Seraphina visited, McCullough had invited several prominent people to the estate for a séance. The psychic likely had no idea it was to be her last.

  Rumors circulated for years about exactly what went on inside the Havenwood estate that evening, but accounts from servants hinted at danger, bodily harm, and even death. Medical records from the doctor’s office in the nearby town reflect that two people were transported from the estate in need of medical attention—one man received treatment for a heart ailment and another for burns on his arm, but both men insisted that nothing untoward had happened. The heart ailment was something that flared up from time to time and the burns were simply from carelessness with a candle, so the matter was dropped and police did not investigate further. As to the death, it could not be confirmed.

  That was wrong. Or, at least, not complete. I thought of the Devil’s Toy Box that Adrian had mentioned and noticed that there was no reference to it in the book I was holding.

  Seraphina disappeared after that night. She never again performed on the stage, nor is there any record of her conducting any private séances. Local police, becoming suspicious after repeated inquiries from her husband, investigated the possibility that Seraphina had died on the estate that night, until receiving a letter, postmarked from Chicago, stating that she was alive and well and wished to be left alone. That ended the matter, and it was the last anyone ever heard from Seraphina, whose disappearance was as mysterious as her séances.

  As I sat there gazing out the window, the closed volume sitting in my lap, something was nagging at me and wouldn’t let up until I realized what it was. Nowhere in this book, the only one about Seraphina in Havenwood’s library, did it say her
real name. Yet Mrs. Sinclair had tried to convince me that Seraphina’s real name was a “historical fact,” and furthermore, that it was my great-great-grandmother’s name. Juuli Herrala. How could she possibly have come to this conclusion if history itself was in the dark about Seraphina’s real identity?

  Then I remembered the letter I had stashed in the back of the book. I had nearly forgotten about it in all the excitement. I flipped to the last page, and there it was, right where I had left it.

  It was addressed to Andrew McCullough at Havenwood, the handwriting delicate and precise. I turned the envelope over and over in my hands, my stomach seemingly turning with it, at the thought of what it might contain.

  Finally I pulled the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it, smoothing the pages with great care. I took a breath in and began to read.

  My dearest Andrew,

  I do not know how I can possibly begin to apologize for the horror that was unleashed at your beautiful Havenwood at my hands. How does one make amends for waking the dead? How does one atone for taking a life? It simply cannot be done. There are no amends, there is no atonement for an act as heinous as mine. I shall carry the guilt and remorse, born on that night, throughout the rest of my life and longer than that, I fear.

  My only defense, and it is really no defense at all, is ignorance. I fervently hope you know I would never intentionally have released such evil in your home, or anywhere.

  I have had this “gift”—although I would not call it that now—for as long as I can remember, and I truly did not know that anything as monstrous as what we encountered at Havenwood existed in this world or any other. It has crumbled the very foundations of my life. When I was a child, I spoke of this gift to no one, fearing it would be branded witchcraft. But the man who would become my husband told me this was not true, that I could use my peculiar gift to help the bereaved by communicating with their departed loved ones.

  But what we all endured at Havenwood has convinced me of two undeniable facts: those who feared this gift were correct, that it is not a gift at all but a curse, and my husband was, as you tried so valiantly to convince me, in league with evil. It is he who gave me the box. That I took money for this… I’m so ashamed.