by Libby Howard
I choked back a sob, tears in my eyes as I put the journal down, needing a break. Actually, I needed a glass of wine and a good cry.
“What? What happened?” Judge Beck’s brows came together in worry. “I swear I’m getting attached to these people of yours. I’m far more interested in what’s going on with Evie, Mabel, and Lucille than this vandalism case.”
“Lucille is dead. Facedown in the Hostenfelder pond the day before Mabel’s wedding,” I told him, feeling a bit foolish, like I was about to cry over a fictional soap opera character or something. These people were all long dead, but over the last few days, I’d become so invested in their lives that reading the shocking announcement in Evie’s journal gutted me.
Swimming accidents did happen, but I could tell from the expression on Judge Beck’s face that he was thinking the same thing that I was.
“That’s horrible,” he said in a hushed tone. “Kicked out of her father’s house, probably spurned by her married lover and denied help from those who had been her friends and family.”
“She takes her own life,” I completed the thought. “And the timing of it can’t be a coincidence. Did Mabel turn her away a few days before her wedding, fearing that Harlen might call things off if she helped her scandalous sister?”
“Mabel was pregnant. She had to marry someone, and Harlen was probably in a better position to provide for her than any other man. Plus, if he called the wedding off, she wouldn’t have time to get engaged and marry another man before she started showing.”
“And if a three-month-early baby was a tough story to pull off, then a six month one, or even a bride nine months pregnant would have been impossible. She would have had to sneak out of state, have the baby in secret and give it away, then come back as if it never happened.”
“Which wouldn’t have been an option. If the father kicked Lucille out for being involved with a married man, then he would have done the same to Mabel for getting pregnant out of wedlock. There would have been no sneaking away to the country and secret adoption for her. She would have found herself out in the street just like her sister, only pregnant.”
“So, she turned her sister away to save herself,” I mused. “Although, to be fair, maybe she intended on helping her sister later, after everything was settled with Harlen and she’d had the baby.”
“Maybe Lucille didn’t have the time to wait,” the judge suggested. “Suppose she was pregnant as well, maybe even three months further along. A six-month pregnant woman would need help now. Although I’m not sure how Mabel could have helped her. It wasn’t like she had money of her own.”
“No, but she probably had a spending account for the wedding. How hard would it have been to divert some money for her sister? Just enough for her to rent a cheap apartment in Milford and eat.”
“I’ll bet both her father and Harlen had a tight grip on the money, though. Her father had to have suspected that Lucille might come to her twin for help. And a businessman like Harlen might want to keep an eye on the wedding expenditures as well.”
“Poor Lucille.” And poor Mabel. Two girls in trouble. One takes her life, the other condemns herself to a loveless marriage to ensure her baby has the best life possible. If only Lucille hadn’t been caught. If only that stupid police chief had kept his mouth shut. Then maybe Lucille could have found a way out of her problems that didn’t involve drowning herself in a pond.
“There’s your guilt. Mabel felt responsible for her sister’s suicide. That must have been hanging over her for her entire life.” Judge Beck shook his head. “I kind of wish Madison was here right now, because I feel the urge to hug her tight and tell her that I love her, tell her that no matter how hopeless things seem, I’m always here to help. I might yell at her first, but I’ll always help.”
I thought back on the Caryn Swanson murder, when I’d found out that Madison had attended a party with older kids, drinking and unwittingly hanging with girls who had been involved in a prostitution ring. Judge Beck had been furious at his daughter, but even then, I’d known that anger came from fear for her wellbeing and from love.
“I can tell you’re thinking of saying ‘no’ to her proposed movie date with Austin Meadows,” I told him, trying to lighten the mood a bit.
“I want to, but I won’t. I’d rather she come to her mother and me than sneak around behind our backs. Besides, this way I can have a little chat with Austin Meadows before their date.”
No doubt putting the fear of God into the poor boy. After that talk, I was willing to bet Austin Meadows wouldn’t try to so much as hold Madison’s hand.
Or not. Teenage hormones were truly a force of nature.
If only Lucille and Mabel had a father like Judge Beck, I thought as I went back to reading.
The next journal entry, the one on the day of Mabel and Harlen’s wedding, started with this:
People I love have made decisions that I cannot understand, choices that hurt my soul. Here I sit, deliriously happy with my beloved H, yet feeling heartsick over what has happened. LS is gone, her soul forever damned, and I wonder if I should have opened my eyes, stomped on the ugly envy in my own heart, and perhaps tried to love her too. Could I have made a difference? Only our Lord knows. It is too late to help LS. All I can do is pray for her soul, and put aside my shock and revulsion to extend my hand in loving friendship to the one person who desperately needs me now.
I see storms on the horizon, and I fear the destruction they will inevitably bring.
The journal entry closed with an extremely detailed and almost clinical recounting of the Stevens-Hansen wedding. Then at the very end, almost as an afterthought, she’d written in an unusually messy hand, the page smudged with blotches that looked like they might have been from tears:
I told all to my beloved H. I have never loved him more than I do tonight.
Chapter 14
I took a moment to make a pot of tea and calm my aching heart. Then I returned to the dining room to put aside the journal and went back to the newspaper archives, noting cynically that the Stevens-Hansen wedding took up far more valuable real estate in the paper than the brief note concerning Lucille’s suicide. As Evie had said, she’d been found floating in the Hostenfelder pond by a very young Joshua Hostenfelder who was awake early collecting duck and goose eggs.
Joshua Hostenfelder. The name brought a smile to my lips, and I reached out to caress the journal beside my laptop. Evie and Howard’s daughter Sarah was to marry him. They were the grandparents that Suzette spoke of. Imagining little Josh searching for eggs was so at odds with what I’d heard of the grumpy old man who regularly chased neighborhood kids out of his pond. It made me smile.
But the smile faded. The pond. The same pond that still sat behind Suzette’s house on the two acres that remained of what had once been a huge farm. The same pond Daisy and her friends had secretly swum in. The pond where Lucille Stevens had ended her life. No wonder an elderly Josh had chased the local kids away from the pond. Each time he saw them, it must have called up the memory of a beautiful young woman, her skin ashen as she floated in the murky water.
The body had been quickly identified as Lucille Stevens, then taken off to the morgue after the family had been notified. I bookmarked the archived date to come back later and read about the wedding in the society pages, then scrolled ahead to see if there was some mention of where Lucille had been interred.
The notice was so tiny I would have missed it had I not been searching so diligently. I hadn’t expected her to be buried in the family plot next to her mother since Lucille’s father had kicked her out of the house and disowned her, but I hadn’t quite expected what the paper told me. Due to her cause of death, Lucille was unable to be buried in the churchyard at all. She was interred in a pauper’s grave in the little non-denominational cemetery at the edge of town where the city put the vagrants.
This was too much heartache to handle for a Thursday night. I went back to read about Mabel’s wedding, taking in the exte
nsive guest list, the detailed description of the ten-course reception dinner, the stately orchestral music. It had been formal, elegant, and ostentatious, and the bride had been described as stunningly beautiful, her somber mien attributed to the shadow her sister’s suicide had cast over the event. I couldn’t imagine having to go through with my wedding the day after my sister had been found dead, but I supposed a huge event like that would have been difficult to postpone. Plus, it was unlikely that either Mabel’s father or Harlen would have wanted to hold off the wedding out of respect for a sister who had been kicked out of her home, cut off from her family, and who had committed suicide. But Mabel clearly grieved. Was this what had driven her to haunt the furniture? I looked up at the ghost in the corner, wondering if I had Lucille’s remains moved to the churchyard, would her sister finally be at peace? Although I had no idea how I was to do that. Relocating remains would cost thousands that I didn’t have, and I wasn’t sure the churchyard would be any more open to accepting a suicide now than they were ninety years ago.
If this was Mabel’s guilt, there might be nothing I could do to help her. I could direct Matt to Lucille’s grave and hope he would occasionally go to pay his respects, but I wasn’t sure that would be enough. I wasn’t sure anything would be enough. There were some things that went so deep they couldn’t be healed. It could be that I’d be stuck with Mabel’s ghost as long as I owned the sideboard. And as much as I didn’t like the idea of having another ghost in the house, I was reluctant to get rid of the piece of furniture. Not only did I truly love it, but I knew this ghost. I couldn’t shuffle her off to someone who didn’t know her story, who didn’t tear up thinking about her sister, who couldn’t even see her.
I closed the lid on the laptop and stacked the journals back on the chair, giving Judge Beck a quick smile as I headed into the kitchen. I’d reached the end of my emotional well for the evening. It was time to turn my attention to the living, and start preparations for this weekend’s neighborhood barbeque.
The lights and decorations sat in a big plastic tub by the back door, ready to be put out tomorrow. There were glass fish bowls and colored cabochons for floating candles, sturdy paper plates and utensils as well as plastic wine glasses. I’d brought up a huge copper tub that I planned on filling with ice and a variety of beers and sodas, and another smaller tub for the bottles of wine.
I had burgers in the fridge along with bratwurst soaking in beer. The Larses were bringing three bean and corn salsa with chips. The Steadmans were bringing a marinated carrot salad. The Wilsons were making strawberry rhubarb muffins. There would be Mexican eggplant, Cajun cabbage, green tomato pie, fried soft shell crabs, and even Bob Simmons’ squirrel gumbo. Suzette had told me that she was bringing homemade polenta and figs with prosciutto. Daisy was supplying the wine—of course—along with a special bottle of something-something for later. There would be enough food to feed pretty much everyone in the entire town, but I still felt the urge to contribute something of my own.
Plus, baking soothed me. I hoped someday I’d get the same sense of calm and peace from knitting, but right now that hobby was still somewhat frustrating and sadly involved tearing out just as many rows as I’d knitted some nights. Baking was different. As I combined ingredients, I couldn’t help but envision my mother and grandmother doing the same. And as the smells filled the house, I imagined all the generations who’d baked for their friends and families right here in this very kitchen. So, it was with that sense of nostalgia that I pulled out my mother’s collection of Pillsbury Bake-Off Cookbooks from the fifties.
When she’d passed away, I’d lovingly brought these into my own home, thrilled with the little surprise hand-typed recipes that I occasionally found nestled between the pages. I might not have had any desire to recreate her salmon loaf or savory meat-and-vegetable gelatins, but nothing sent me back to my childhood like Jim Dandies, and Pitty-Pat Pies.
Madison was in charge of making her father’s birthday cake when they came back on Sunday, but I wanted to do something festive, so I pulled out all the books and marked down cakes that I thought would appeal to both Judge Beck and my neighbors. Lemon Tea Cake? Strawberry Alaska? Or a Double Devil’s Food?
Madison was leaning toward chocolate, so I decided to do the lemon cake instead, figuring it would be a refreshing finish to the variety of meat and side dishes. The recipe made a nine-inch square cake, so I doubled it to end up with two—hopefully enough for all the neighbors. Pulling out my bowls and pans, I gathered the ingredients together, grating the lemon rind and brewing the strong black tea which served to soak the chopped golden raisins.
Sifting the dry ingredients, I cut the shortening into the sugar and beat in two eggs, then alternated folding in the dry ingredients with the liquid reserved from soaking the raisins. Incorporating the raisins, I turned it all into my greased and floured baking dishes and slid them into the oven. This recipe, as well as many of the other ones I had, including the family red velvet cake one, used baking soda as a rising agent. It gave a less uniform rise to the cake, but I loved the moist airiness that these old recipes had compared to the modern store-bought-in-a-box cakes.
While the cakes were cooking, I made the icing, which was a simple buttercream with egg yolk, lemon juice, and lemon zest. I’d wait to ice the cakes until just before the party, but it felt good to have everything prepared and ready to go.
Soothed by my evening baking, I pulled the cakes out of the oven to cool, secured away from a very interested Taco, then went upstairs with my knitting. I was determined to find out all I could about Lucille, but that would wait for tomorrow. Tonight, I planned on relaxing in bed with my cat and my ghost, and attempt to finish off the blue and white striped baby hat that I’d been working on the past few days. The sad story of Mabel and Lucille Stevens had waited for ninety years to be told. It could certainly wait one more night.
.
Chapter 15
The next morning, I headed out a bit early, right after my morning yoga with Daisy. On the way to work, I made a detour to a tiny cemetery at the edge of town.
Actually, Merciful Mother Cemetery was no longer on the edge of town as it had been decades ago. Locust Point had grown up and around the small patch of weeds and rain-pitted headstones, and what had once been rural roads and fields were a WaWa and a townhouse subdivision.
I waved to a caretaker who was busy with a very overdue weed whacking and made my way around the rows of tiny, nearly indecipherable headstones. Many graves only had metal markers, the deceased’s family unable to scrounge up enough for a headstone over the years. The cemetery wasn’t as large as the one behind St. Peter’s, but I quickly realized that small was a relative term. There were hundreds of graves here, not just vagrants and the poor, but those who for various reasons had not been buried in the churchyard or the huge newer cemetery with the mausoleum over by the carnival grounds. Deciding that I needed help if I was to find Lucille’s grave and get to work on time, I went back to the man trimming grass and caught his attention.
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” I told him. “I’m looking for Lucille Stevens’ grave. She died and was buried here in June of 1926.”
He grinned, wiping a sweaty hand across his forehead and smearing a line of dirt on his brow. The guy looked in his late sixties. I wondered if he did landscaping for a living and this was a contract job, or if he had loved ones buried here and was trying to keep the place tidy on his own time.
“Oh, that’s an easy one. See that big stone there? That’s her.”
I stared, flabbergasted. “That’s Lucille Stevens’ marker? Her father threw her out of the house over a scandal. She committed suicide and was buried in a pauper’s grave.”
He nodded. “My family does groundskeeping here, and I remember Dad telling me when the woman had the stone put in. Always thought it looked weird with all the town-provided metal plaques and the modest stones to have that big thing smack in the middle of it all. Dad said she must have held a whole
lot of grief in her heart to spend all that money on a marker for a woman that had been dead nearly twenty years when she had it installed.”
I fell in beside the man as we walked to the stone. Mabel. It had to have been Mabel. And twenty years would have put the marker placement at roughly 1946. Harlen Hansen had died in 1945. Either Mabel or her daughter had put the stone in right after Harlen had died, and I was betting it was Mabel.
Had it helped her feelings of guilt? Judging from her pleading for forgiveness, I guessed the answer was ‘no’.
“No one visits anymore,” the man told me. “I keep all the stones neat and the grass trimmed, although with all the rain it’s gotten a bit out of hand lately. I haven’t seen anyone visiting this grave since I started caretaking here over thirty years ago.”
Mabel passed away in 1980. I wondered if Eleonore had even known about her aunt. Certainly Matt hadn’t.
Lucille Stevens – December 18, 1907 – June 1, 1926. Beloved Sister.
It brought tears to my eyes, and I leaned down to rub my hand across the lettering. I didn’t have to lean down far because the black granite stone was pretty tall.
Brushing the dirt off the base of the stone, I put the flowers I’d brought down, securing the biodegradable pot with little metal stakes. Once more, I felt the sting of tears in my eyes. Lucille had gone through so much in her short life. Young and free spirited, she’d ended so tragically. And to be buried here…. It seemed like a nice cemetery, but the rest of her family was behind St. Peter’s, and here she was, surrounded by strangers, once again the outcast even with the fancy headstone.
Lucille needed visitors. And I needed to talk to Matt and his father. It might be a bit deceptive on my part to continue to lead the man on, but I needed to get Matt and his father here, to reunite them with their family. Maybe then poor Mabel could finally rest in peace.