by Wendy Webb
She batted her eyelashes at me. “We’ll see,” she said, kissing my cheek. And then she took her leave of me, closing the door behind her.
Later, I happened to walk into the garden where Flynn and Lily were talking in low tones, their heads together.
“Oh!” Flynn said a little too loudly. “Mickey boy! I didn’t see you there.”
Lily’s eyes were brimming with tears. She tried to brush them away with her sleeve, but I took her hand in mine.
“This is the second time I’ve seen you crying today,” I said to her, glancing at Flynn. “Something’s going on. Please take me into your confidence, both of you. Maybe I can help.”
Flynn sighed. “It’s Pru,” he said, turning Lily. “I think he should know.” She nodded quickly in response. “She hasn’t been herself for days.”
“I noticed at breakfast she was rather snappish,” I offered. “Is that what you mean?”
“That and more,” Lily said. “It’s as though she has developed a kind of hatred for us, all of us, overnight.”
“I had an unusual encounter with her earlier,” I confessed, but I wasn’t about to let on what it was.
I locked eyes with Flynn, and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing. This had something to do with the girl in white. Just then, I heard giggling from behind us, and we turned to find Prudence there, holding a croquet mallet and smiling.
“Anyone up for a game?” she asked, slowly swinging the mallet. “I’m dying to have some fun.”
“A little bedtime reading?” It was Matthew, poking his head around the door. “I couldn’t sleep and was about to head downstairs to get something to read when I saw the light under your door.”
“I couldn’t sleep, either.” I smiled.
He eyed the manuscript in my lap. “You’re looking for answers.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Guilty as charged. What Carter said earlier was really nagging at me. ‘Something much, much worse.’ I couldn’t sleep until I knew what it was.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked, yawning and running a hand through his hair. He looked exhausted.
I put the manuscript down and kissed his cheek. “You bet I did.” I turned off the light and led him back into his bedroom. The answers to this mystery could wait.
CHAPTER 40
The next week went by in a blur. Jane came home from the hospital, moving more slowly than I’d ever seen her move, but on the mend and doing fine, her husband hovering around her like a mother bear. I had to wrestle her apron from her hands more than once and tell her in no uncertain terms that Amity and I were going to be waiting on her for the next few weeks until she was fully back on her feet, and finally, she grudgingly accepted our help.
After talking it over with Amity, we agreed to put the house on Whidbey up for sale and move back to Alban House permanently. We’d travel back there later in the summer to box up our things and let a realtor deal with the rest. I think Heather’s friendship sealed the deal for my daughter, and for that, I was grateful, even though Matthew’s description rang in my ears—the girl from down the lane and the girl from the manor house. It sounded chillingly like my mother and Fate, and that’s one bit of history I didn’t want to repeat.
The decision to stay in town led me to call the university and make an appointment to start preparations for the David Coleville Retreat for Writers and Artists. If we hurried with a call for applications, we could have the retreat up and running by the following June. It felt like the right thing to do, fulfilling my mother’s vision. I knew she’d be happy about it, and likely was. But there was one more stone I needed to turn, one more piece of the puzzle I needed to solve, before I could dive into that project headfirst.
And that was how I came to be sitting at the patio table one balmy July evening with Jane, Mr. Jameson, Carter, and Matthew. Amity had helped me prepare dinner for everyone—chicken on the grill; red potatoes roasted with rosemary and onions; a crisp salad with goat cheese and balsamic vinaigrette dressing; and warm French bread, right out of the oven. But then I sent her out for a pizza with Heather. My daughter had heard about and seen enough of Mercy for several lifetimes.
When Heather’s parents had pulled out of the driveway with Amity waving to us from the backseat, I filled everyone’s wineglasses and cleared my throat.
“This dinner is to thank all of you for your service to my family over the years and to celebrate your continued service now that I’m coming back to live at Alban House,” I said, raising my glass and nodding to Jane, Mr. Jameson, and Carter. “You have helped this family through both everyday life and unimaginable trials. One thing from you, among many, that we’ve always counted on is your discretion. And that’s not going to change. Except for tonight.”
I saw Jane eye her husband, and he squeezed her hand. “Before I go ahead with the retreat, I need to know what happened here at Alban House the night David Coleville died. If we’re going to be honoring this man’s memory, I want to do him the justice of at least knowing how he died. I think all of you know more than you’re saying.” I looked from each person to the next. “Now is the time to tell this story, just as my mother was going to do on the day she died.”
I thought about Harris, and part of me wished he were here with us tonight, but I didn’t quite know how to explain the Mercy part of the puzzle to him. My daughter and I had fought this monstrous woman for our lives, and I wasn’t about to tell him the full extent of what had happened. He might be family, but he was still a stranger who had stirred up all of this, and he was going to speak to my mother the day she died. I still didn’t completely trust him.
“Carter,” I went on, “something you said the other night stuck with me. You said that despite all the strange and terrible things Mercy did as a child, there was something even worse that you hadn’t told us. You said it happened the summer before Coleville died. That’s when Mercy burst into the room, laughing and agreeing with you. She said it was all in the manuscript and asked if I’d read it. Now I have, and I’ve got a theory about what the ‘something much, much worse’ might be. But I’d like to hear from you all, who were here at the time, before I tell you what I think it is.”
Turning to Jane and her husband, Carter nodded and cleared his throat. “She’s right,” he said to them. “It’s time this comes out. We’ve lived with it for far too long. Frankly, I just don’t want to carry the burden of it anymore.”
Jane locked eyes with me. In them, I saw resignation mixed with loyalty. “All right,” she said, her voice wavering. “Your mother was indeed going to speak of this to the journalist the day she died. As a way of honoring her memory, I’ll speak of it now.”
A sip of wine cooled my throat as I slipped my hand into Matthew’s and settled back to hear Jane’s tale. With the candles flickering, the lake lapping softly on the shoreline, and the sunset bathing the patio in a purplish hue, she began.
“It was the first year the writer was here,” she said. “I had initially been afraid to have someone outside of the family come and stay for the whole summer, but Charity convinced me that young Adele was here often enough and none the wiser about Mercy. I had been worried that a writer’s imagination would be sparked, that he’d discover her, but as it turned out, he was much too interested in Adele to see anything beyond her beauty and charm.” Jane chuckled, remembering. “We could have been hiding an elephant between the walls and he wouldn’t have noticed.”
I stole a glance at Matthew—we both knew that wasn’t quite the case. His imagination had indeed been sparked by what he saw and heard at Alban House that summer.
“But midway through the season …” Jane hesitated and twisted the napkin in her lap.
“Go on, dear,” Mr. Jameson said to her. “It all right now. She’s full and truly dead and gone.”
“She went missing,” Jane said finally. “Mercy. It was Charity who discovered her gone. She rallied the staff and called her husband and children in, too, and t
old us what she knew—Mercy was gone.”
She closed her eyes for a moment before continuing. “Remember, now, the world outside of this household thought Mercy was dead and had been for years. And we had the writer in our midst, so your grandfather couldn’t call the police or conduct a massive search. We had to pretend like nothing was wrong. But he had people, shall we say. And those people searched for Mercy for the rest of the summer—the house, the grounds, the lake, even the town. They checked the airline’s logs, train logs. But they turned up nothing.
“We all believed—the family and all the staff—that Mercy had fled her confinement, so to speak; that she tired of living like a prisoner here in Alban House and decided to strike out on her own. Until—”
She shot a look at her husband. Taking a sip of the whiskey I had poured for him, he finished her thought. “Until I discovered the bones.”
Matthew put an arm around my shoulder as we waited for Mr. Jameson to go on. “It was during the late spring of the next year, once the ground had thawed. I was digging up a new section of earth near the cemetery—Mrs. Charity had wanted a garden planted there to honor the Alban dead—when I came upon the skeleton. Someone had dug a shallow grave and covered it with not only dirt but driftwood and other debris.”
He dabbed at his eyes with his napkin. “Of course, the body was completely decomposed. Mercy had gone missing almost a year before. But the white dress she wore was still intact. There was no doubting who it was.”
Jane put a hand on her husband’s shoulder and took up where he left off. “Mrs. Charity was inconsolable, as you might imagine. But in a way, deep down, I think she was also relieved. Mr. Alban certainly was. The staff definitely was. Mercy was gone, that evil was gone from our household. We didn’t ask any questions about who might have put her into that grave—I always suspected Mr. Alban but I never said a word about it. We had a private family funeral, laid the bones to rest in the crypt, and were just glad that the horrible time in this family’s history was over.
“By that time, Mrs. Charity had learned her lesson about black magic, and there was no talk of a repeat performance of what had happened ten years prior,” Jane went on. “I never heard her ever speak of witchcraft again. It was over. And finally, thankfully, everything returned to normal in this household. But as you know, that wasn’t the end of it.”
Jane swallowed hard and went on. “You can’t blame us for not seeing it. We wanted so to believe that the evil had gone, we wanted so to go back to the way things used to be.”
“What didn’t you see, Jane?” Matthew asked, giving me a look. “I’m not following.”
“You didn’t read the rest of the manuscript with me,” I jumped in. “I think I know. Coleville saw it, too, the first summer he was here. It wasn’t Mercy in that grave.” I turned to Jane. “Isn’t that right?”
Jane’s face went ashen. “I had a hunch. But when the doctor told us Mercy Alban had been in his facility for the past fifty years, I put two and two together,” she said, nodding. “But that’s the first time.”
“Coleville was writing about what really went on here at Alban House that summer, and he described how worried everyone was about ‘Prudence’s’ behavior,” I explained. Turning to Jane, I went on, “Coleville changed the names of the family, but his cast of characters was clearly my dad, Fate, my mother, himself, and my grandparents. He wrote about how Fate—Prudence, he calls her in the book—suddenly didn’t seem herself. Her actions were strange and unlike her.”
I paused to catch my breath a moment. “I think that’s because it wasn’t her. I think Mercy killed Fate and took her place because she was tired of being shuttered up on the third floor. She had been watching everyone for so long and wanted to join in. So she did. That’s the ‘something much, much worse’ you were talking about that night, Carter, isn’t it?”
Everyone stared at me. Nobody spoke. Finally, Carter said: “That’s exactly the conclusion I came to, my dear, when I learned it was Mercy who had come back to us and not her sister.” He sighed. “You must understand. Back then, we wanted to believe all was well. We took it on face value and didn’t question anything. But your writer was absolutely right about Fate’s behavior. It was off, strange, unlike her. All the staff remarked on it and whispered about it. But we came to the conclusion that it was the result of losing her sister, that was the reason she wasn’t quite herself.”
“In the manuscript, Coleville talks about losing four days after having an encounter with the girl in white on the lakeshore,” I prodded. “When he came out of it, that’s when he noticed ‘Prudence’s’ behavior as being different. Did that really happen? Was he down with a fever?”
Jane nodded. “That he was. But I noticed …” She looked at her husband, who reached over and patted her hand.
“It’s all right, dear,” he said. “It’s time the truth came out.”
“What did you notice, Jane?” I asked her.
“Down on the lakeshore,” she said, shaking her head and shuddering. “One night, the night before he went down with a fever, he was dancing and chanting around the fire ring with a girl who I presumed was Fate. Wild, they were. It seemed evil and wrong, what they were doing. I can’t explain why, but it made me afraid, watching them. I closed my window and pulled the drapes shut. But later on …”
My stomach tightened into a knot. “What happened then?”
“Later on, I looked again. I had a ghastly feeling that it was Mercy out there, not her sister. I wanted to make sure. The fire was out, there was no more dancing, but I could have sworn I saw someone in the garden. I was just a girl myself, so I didn’t say anything to anybody. And then when Mercy went missing the next day, I felt that was the end of it. We could rest easy.”
“And you didn’t check on Mercy that night?” I asked.
Jane shook her head. “That was not my place. It was Mrs. Charity who took care of Mercy.”
I shivered, deep inside, as I looked from Jane to Carter to Mr. Jameson. “Do you think that Mercy had Coleville under some sort of, I don’t know, spell or something, and together they killed Fate?”
Jane returned my gaze, and I saw her squeeze her husband’s hand. She nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Aye,” she whispered. “I think we finally know the truth. Considering all that has gone on within the past few weeks, I think that’s exactly what happened.”
After a moment, I continued. “And the next summer?” I asked, looking at Jane.
“Mr. Coleville was coming back to marry Adele, that was no secret,” Jane began. “As I’ve already told you, Adele and Charity were buzzing for months about it. Miss Fate, though, she didn’t really join in. She was not a part of this happiness. In fact, she was not a part of much of anything during that time. We on the staff suspected she might be in love with Mr. Coleville herself.”
“If the manuscript is any indication, she certainly was,” I said.
“He arrived shortly before the summer solstice party,” Jane said, “and apparently it all came to a head that night, although, as I have told you, I was up in the house helping my mother, so I did not see the turn of events. What I’m fairly sure of, however, is that his death was not a suicide.”
Carter cleared his throat. “It wasn’t. I saw the whole thing from the carriage house.”
I stared at him. “You witnessed what happened?”
“I did, indeed,” he said, dabbing at his brow. “I saw Mr. Coleville and your mother sitting on the bench in the garden. They were kissing and cooing, like any couple would be on the eve of their wedding, when she appeared. Miss Fate—although we all know that it wasn’t Fate at all. It was Mercy. She was shouting and yelling and shoved Adele away from Coleville, and that’s when I saw the gun in her hand. She aimed it at your mother and fired, as quickly as that, but Coleville had moved between them. He took the bullet for her and fell. It all happened in an instant. Your mother began screaming and dropped to the ground, and Mercy aimed again at her, and I opened my door an
d ran toward them both, but that’s when Johnny and Mr. Alban wrestled Mercy to the ground and got the gun out of her hand.
“Things happened very quickly after that,” he continued. “I saw Mr. Alban hurrying his daughter out of there, through the gardens, and into the tunnels that lead to the house. I never saw her again until she showed up the day of your mother’s funeral. Johnny and I led your mother into the carriage house—she was completely distraught—and he stayed with her there all night long. Never left her side. He loved her, even then.”
Jane nodded. “That was our Johnny,” she said, smiling at me. “About that time, I was instructed to usher everyone else out of the house. The party was over and it was time to go. Only when everyone was gone did your grandfather call the police and tell them about the suicide. That was the official line, and that’s what we were told to believe.
“And that night, straightaway, your grandfather left Alban House with his daughter,” she said.
And that was it. The mystery of David Coleville’s death solved. He died saving my mother and his unborn child. Now, perhaps, both of them could rest in peace.
We finished our dinner and lingered over dessert and coffee, and were talking of the past, when Harris Peters walked up onto the patio, carrying a bouquet of flowers.
“Hello, everyone,” he said, smiling shyly. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
I held my hands out for the flowers but he passed me by and instead handed them to Jane. “I do hope you’re feeling better, Mrs. Jameson.”
“That I am, lad.” She smiled up at him. “That I am.”
Matthew looked just as confused as I felt. Something was clearly going on between Jane and Harris, but I had no idea what it was.
She took a long sniff of the flowers. “The lad came to visit me in hospital.”
“We had quite a nice chat,” Harris said as he pulled out a chair and sank into it.