Legacy

by Cochran, Molly

  My arms felt suddenly too heavy to hold up. Peter dropped them with a look of disgust, as if my skin had dirtied his hands.

  “And by the way, your dear old mom was right about the fire coming for her. She set it herself. Burned down your house while she was inside.”

  He walked back to the cutting table, picked up his knife, and began attacking a bunch of onions as if he wanted to destroy them. Then he gathered up the skins and roots and dumped them in the garbage, on top of my mother’s wall hanging.

  The cool October air was a shock to my system as I burst out of Hattie’s back kitchen door. Between the wisps of coming fog and the tears streaming down my face I could barely see in front of me, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t ever going back to the restaurant. Or to school, for that matter.

  I had to pull my hair to stop myself from screaming. I coughed for a while, sobbing. And then I started to run. I ran until I could hardly breathe, and after that I walked. If I could have walked off the face of the earth, I would have, but I only made it as far as Old Town.

  There was just too much to sort out all at once. My house? Peter had said that my mother had set fire to my house. Had I lived here once? Here in Whitfield?

  I realized then that I’d been circling the library for an hour. There was no point in putting it off. I knew I wouldn’t get a moment of peace until I knew if the terrible things Peter had told me were true.

  I didn’t know where to start looking in the microfilm files, because I had no idea when everything was supposed to have happened. Peter had said that Eric had been a baby, so I went back ten years in the local paper. While I was going through the headlines for each issue, I tried to remember my own life. It’s funny, how little you remember when there’s no one to remind you. My father had never spoken a word about my mother. It occurred to me now that maybe he hadn’t just forgotten all about our time with her. Maybe he had made a point of keeping that part of our lives carefully blank.

  Who was my mother? I didn’t remember. That is, I remembered having a mother. I remembered missing my mother, crying over her every night until I had no more tears left. I imagined her constantly, as an angel, or a movie star, or a pixie on my shoulder, whispering in my ear. But I really had no inkling of what she looked like until I found the photograph that Dad had thrown away. And even though I’d only been a little kid when she died, I’d always felt ashamed that I didn’t remember her.

  For me, she was just a space, a hole in my heart that was never filled.

  After a half hour I found the first story. “Local Woman Attacks Infant, Sets Fire.” A bizarre headline. And on the following day, an even stranger one: “Wonderland Scene of Attempted Baby Slaying.” Apparently, the “crazed woman who may have been under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs” had tried to kill Eric Shaw in the Home Improvements section of the biggest discount department store in Whitfield. And the third: “Witchcraft May Figure in Ainsworth Infanticide.”

  By the fourth day permutations of the story were appearing not only in the local press, but also in the Boston and New York papers. By week’s end, Time, Newsweek, and every other national magazine were running pictures of Whitfield (“A New Salem?”); the house on Summer Street that my mother had burned down with herself in it; the desecrated interior of the Wonderland store where the incident had taken place (an amateur photo for which the publication had paid an enormous price showed a stack of two-by-fours stained with Eric’s blood); a police mug shot of Hattie Scott, who had been arrested as a possible co-conspirator, but later released; and my mother. There were so many pictures of her: yearbook photos from high school, snapshots from picnics and Christmases and meetings in rooms with flags in the corners. Where had they all come from? I wondered. There were no other people in the pictures. Some of the photographs looked as if other figures had once been included, but had been removed. No one had wanted to be associated with her, I guessed.

  Then came the secondary stories, many of them clearly public relations pieces about how the Wonderland Corporation had generously assumed all of Eric’s medical expenses, even though Wonderland and its subsidiaries were in no way involved in the tragedy.

  “Our customers are like our family,” announced someone who I imagined was Madam Mim’s mentor, “and Wonderland takes care of family.” I wondered how long it had taken their Executive Committee to come up with that spontaneous outpouring of concern. Wonderland had gone to great lengths to eradicate the psychological mark left by those bloodstains on its lumber. It had built a $130 million children’s neurology center named “Planet Wonderland” alongside Whitfield Memorial Hospital. It was a state-of-the-art medical facility that looked like a theme park decorated in cartoon colors, with play areas on every floor and a toddler-size train in the lobby. Now, ten years after the incident that prompted this corporate altruism, the company was taking the last step in distancing itself from the horror by replacing the current building with another, bigger, brighter Wonderland Megastore on the other side of Whitfield.

  The other news sidebar—fortunately, one that didn’t amount to much in the press—was about my mother’s alleged association with the occult. (“Is Witchcraft Making A Comeback?”) None of these stories had any facts in them, and probably wouldn’t even have been conceived if Whitfield hadn’t been in the heart of Witch Hunt country back in colonial times. The only “evidence” that my mother had been a witch was the word of some New Age store merchant who’d once sold her something called a “scrying mirror.”

  And yet, in my vision—or whatever that experience I’d had was—she had called herself a witch. She had inscribed magic symbols on the wall hanging, and had witnessed her own future death by fire.

  Had my father known? That was the part that sent ice water shooting through my veins. All the stories included the fact that Agatha Ainsworth had had a husband and a six-year-old daughter. The daughter’s name was never mentioned, but the husband’s was.

  It was Harold Ainsworth.

  My eyes were burning and my head felt as if it were going to explode. I left the microfilm room, logged onto one of the library’s computers, and sent an email to my father, asking a single question:

  When did you change your name?

  I didn’t expect him to answer me, because that was how Dad handled every situation he didn’t like. He pretended it didn’t exist. But I knew it was true. It explained why everyone thought my name was Ainsworth. Because it was. Or had been. And then, after my mother went insane and tried to kill . . . Eric . . .

  Oh, God, I thought, trying to keep my heart from bursting out of my chest. Peter was right. My mother was a psychopath.

  And my father, who had changed his name to hers, following an age-old tradition, had changed it again—from Harold to Harrison, from Ainsworth to Jessevar, which is probably what it had been originally—to protect me. He had kept me ignorant all these years because he knew that the truth would have been too hard.

  I was the offspring of a monster.

  CHAPTER

  •

  NINE

  SAMHAIN EVE

  Outside, it was already getting dark. I was nauseated. Maybe if I sat on the library steps for a while I might get to feeling well enough to . . . What? Set myself on fire?

  I buried my face in my hands. It was true, it was all true. That was why no one at school wanted to be my friend. That was why Peter was so disgusted when I’d picked up on my mother’s thoughts. And why he wanted me to stay away from Eric. There was no place for me to go anymore. No place at all.

  “Get up, Katy. We have to go to Hattie’s.” I looked up in surprise.

  It was Peter. “You left over four hours ago,” he said, consulting his watch.

  I tried to dry my eyes on my sleeve, but I just couldn’t stop crying. After a few minutes, I stopped making the effort.

  “That’s okay,” he said after a while, and sat down beside me. “Here.” He handed me a handkerchief. A real handkerchief, not a tissue or a paper napkin from the
dining room. I hesitated for a moment, and he offered it to me again. “You can blow your nose in it,” he said.

  I took it from him. I guess it was clear that I wasn’t going to start any conversations. There was nothing more to say. I just wanted him to leave.

  He cleared his throat. “Hattie sent me to find you,” he said.

  Well, you found me, Sherlock, I thought. So you can buzz off now.

  “It’s the busiest night of the year, and Eric’s sick. There’s a lot to do.”

  I tried to move away from him, but I was pressed against the railing as it was.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, so quietly that I could hardly hear him, even though he was six inches away. “About today.” He looked at the darkening sky, then down at his feet again. “Look, I understand if you don’t want to come back to the restaurant. We’ll get by. But I was wrong to tell you those things.”

  I blew my nose into his handkerchief. “They were true.”

  “The truth can mean different things to different people,” he said.

  I stood up. “Whatever,” I rasped, and walked away.

  I’d gone twelve blocks before realizing I was heading toward Hattie’s, but I kept going. However I felt about Peter, or myself, he’d been right about it being the busiest night of the year. There were going to be a zillion people there vying for sixteen tables, Eric was sick, and I’d left a lot of things undone. I owed it to Hattie to go back, if only for this one shift.

  The fog was up in the Meadow. It must have come in all at once, while I was in town. Walking into it was like falling into a cloud, dense and moist and so thick that I couldn’t see anything at all, and the only thing I could hear was the sound of my own breathing. About halfway to Hattie’s, judging from how far I’d walked, I encountered—of all people—Mr. Haversall, the old man who ate lunch every day with his dog. He was wearing a neon pink shirt. The dog wore an illuminated collar.

  “Hey, there!” he called to me, waving broadly. “Are ye lost in this pea soup?”

  “Hi, Mr. Haversall,” I said, hoping I didn’t look too teary. “Hi, Dingo.”

  “Ah, it’s one of our own,” he said, tipping his cap. “Couldn’t see you at first.”

  “Well, I can sure see you.” I gave Dingo a scratch behind his ears.

  The old man chuckled. “Ayuh, these here’re my docent clothes.”

  “Docent?” I asked.

  “A guide,” he said.

  “Oh. You’re directing people to the party.”

  He laughed so hard his knee twitched. “No, you goose of a girl! Them as wants to go to the party just has to follow their feet.” He raised his eyebrows and spoke in a whisper. “I’m directing them out of the Meadow. You know . . .” His rheumy eyes scanned the horizon suspiciously from left to right. “. . . the cowen.”

  “Cows?” I asked.

  He screeched with laughter. “Off with you, Miss Ainsworth! Cows, indeed!” Dingo jumped up and down, barking joyfully. “Tell Miss Hattie to save us a seat!”

  “Okay,” I said doubtfully, although he had already disappeared in the fog. For a while I heard Dingo barking in the distance, but before long that, too, fell into silence.

  “Follow your feet,” I muttered. “What’s that supposed to mean? For all I know, I could be walking in a gigantic . . .”

  And suddenly there it was. Light and laughter and music, and people everywhere.

  “Gracious, girl,” Hattie said, grabbing my arm and hauling me into the kitchen. “We need fifteen salads in the next half hour. Start with the crab.”

  I nodded. “Uh, is Peter—”

  “Yes, yes. He beat you by five minutes, and I have a piece of my mind to give both of you,” she said, handing me a wooden spoon. “But right now, we all have to get to work.”

  Somehow we got all the food made. Hattie gave me a black bistro apron to serve in. I guess Peter got one too. I couldn’t look at him.

  There must have been ten dishes, all different, all for specific guests, on the tray that Hattie helped me hoist onto my shoulder. “Go clockwise, starting with the table in front of the band,” she said.

  “What band?”

  “Just go.” She pushed me through the swinging doors.

  When I saw the place, it took all of my self-control not to drop the tray. Hattie’s postage stamp-sized dining room had somehow transformed into a vast reception hall with nearly a hundred tables illuminated by tall candles and occasional fountains glowing with unearthly light. The view from the windows was of the Meadow, where deer grazed beneath a full moon. Beyond it was the fog, rising like a luminous blue-white hedge.

  “How did you do it?” I asked when I came back into the kitchen.

  “Glamour,” Hattie said, immediately starting to fill the tray with new dishes.

  “But the place actually is bigger,” I went on doggedly. “It’s not just an illusion.”

  “Everything is an illusion, m’dear,” Hattie said. “Good and bad, right and wrong. Life itself. And death. Illusion, all of it.”

  I swallowed.

  “Then again, the dining room would have to be bigger, wouldn’t it?” She shrugged as she shook the water out of a bunch of leaf lettuce. “How else would it fit all those people?”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. It was the sort of logic only people like Miss P could follow. “Er . . . right,” I said. I forced myself to think about nothing except which table was getting which dishes. Anything deeper than that would be dangerous, I knew. Concentrate on the food. Just concentrate on the food, I told myself.

  Just then, Peter swooshed through the doors. The band’s version of “Witch Queen of New Orleans” momentarily swelled. Peter and I avoided each other’s eyes as the three of us filled our trays with both hands.

  “All the twenty-seven families are here,” Hattie said. “Some of them came thousands of miles for this party.”

  Peter laughed. “Some people will do anything for a free drink.”

  “Who are the—” I started to ask, but the walls were shaking. Eric was kicking. Even through the din of the music, the kitchen, and the guests’ conversation, we could hear him crying.

  “Gracious,” Hattie said, exasperated. “I was hoping he would stay asleep. I’ll have to bring him down here now. Mercy!” She shook her head. “You two go. Hurry, before the food gets cold.” She sent us on our way and took off in the other direction, upstairs.

  In the dining room, Mr. Haversall waved to me as I passed. He had changed into a tuxedo. Dingo wore a bandana with a skull-and-crossbones motif. There were people of all ages there, from small children to ancient crones towing oxygen tanks. It was like a big wedding, where everybody knows everybody else. There were even some kids from school who were there with their families. They all made a point of joking and talking with Peter. Naturally, none of them spoke to me.

  Most of the guests were in costume, some of them very elaborate. There were Elizabethans in ruffs and codpieces, Victorians wearing heavy jewelry over their velvet gowns, a number of medieval Guineveres and Merlins, and a few that were pure fantasy. Verity Lloyd was made up to look like Pippi Longstocking. That wasn’t much of a stretch. Cheswick was tricked out in a velvet smoking jacket. I think he was trying for Edward Cullen, although with Cheswick’s finger-in-a-light-socket hair, I don’t think he quite pulled it off.

  When I got back to the kitchen, Hattie was carrying Eric in her arms.

  “Kaaaay . . .” He rubbed his eyes and looked as if he were about to burst into tears again.

  “Hey, guy,” I said, going over to him.

  “Don’t,” Hattie said.

  It seemed that Hattie had finally come around to Peter’s thinking. “Fine,” I said and went back to loading my tray. We all understood why I couldn’t be trusted with Eric, but he didn’t, and started wailing.

  “Take him into the dining room,” Hattie told Peter. “The activity will distract him.”

  Peter looked nervous. “Are you sure?” he asked. He
glanced over at me. “I mean, he’s sick.”

  “It’ll be all right. He’s coming out of it,” Hattie said. “He’ll sleep.”

  While Peter was gone, Hattie and I filled his tray. Her hands worked with tremendous speed and ease, arranging each dish so that it looked as good as it tasted, all the while chatting or singing along with the band’s music.

  “So this is a family party?” I asked, remembering what she’d said earlier. There was no point in being sullen, and small talk didn’t hurt anyone.

  “That’s right. Everyone in the dining room is a descendent of one of the twenty-seven families who originally settled here,” she said while arranging a platter of brie en croute with fresh figs. “They were . . . special people. Most of those descendents still live in Old Town.”

  “Special?”

  “Like your mother. Like me.”

  My skin prickled, as if a cold wind had suddenly blown through the room.

  “Like you, Katy,” she added.

  I swallowed. I think Hattie knew there were a thousand questions I wanted to ask, because she held a finger to my lips.

  “Plenty of time for that,” she said. “Anyway, those people”—she nodded toward the doors leading to the dining room—“are the only ones who can get into the Meadow in the fog, when it comes. Everyone else is cowen.”

  “That’s the word Mr. Haversall used. He said he was guiding them out of the Meadow.”

  “That’s one of his jobs.”

  “But why aren’t they welcome? The . . . the cowen?”

  “What?” Hattie looked irritated. “What a question. Cowen can’t stay because they’re . . .” She exhaled, searching for the word.

  “Not special,” I offered.

  She smiled. “Just so.”

  “But what about the school lunch? Wasn’t everyone invited?”

  “We make an exception on that day,” she said. “That was why Mr. Haversall wasn’t working then.”

  “So he’s . . . special, too.”

  Hattie nodded. “The Haversalls are among the twenty-seven families,” she said.