“No problem. I’ll call you.”
Bad enough to lose a child, Rachael thought, as Iris went to call her a cab. But to have one murdered… Incredible what the human heart can endure and still go on beating.
Forty miles away, in Silverglade Nursing Home, an elderly woman in a navy print dress and pink fuzzy mules sat rocking in her rocking chair, and watching an old rerun of Bewitched. She’d been upset when they took it off the air, but it was back on now, these many years later, along with some others she’d enjoyed. Programs you could watch without all the swearing and nastiness.
James had left a fair bit of insurance, enough to allow her to have her own private room in this place, with her very own TV set. He’d been an accountant and had a good head for the markets, did James. A quiet man, he never once crossed her in all the days of their marriage. A Saint. Though she had never quite forgiven him for leaving that boy so amply provided for. It was his own forgiving nature, she supposed grudgingly, that mislead him.
Most of the residents at Silverglade shared a room and watched television in the common room down the hall. Occasionally, Ruth joined them just to be sociable, but mostly she preferred being on her own. That way she could watch what she wanted to with no one grumbling at her or changing channels. Besides, with her heart problems, she couldn’t go too far anymore. Just walking down the hall could set her heart to scrabbling in her chest like some terrified little animal trying to escape.
During a commercial, Ruth’s faded old eyes strayed to the nighttable, the windowsill, then to the dresser, surfaces on which were displayed evidence that she’d once had a real life. Personal belongings she’d been permitted to take with her when ill health forced her to sell the house and move in here.
The little ballerina regarded her from the windowsill. In her pink tutu, hands positioned over her head, she was frozen in time. Once, she had pirouetted to the tinkling of something by Mozart, but the innards had long since seized up.
The porcelain Japanese doll in her red silk kimono that James brought back from the war stood elegantly on the dresser beside the ebony jewelry box. Inside the box were the two medals he’d received for bravery, along with a few pieces of jewelry he had given her over the years. Sometimes people came to the home to entertain the residents, playing their accordions and such. Ruth would wear one of her nicer pieces on these occasions.
Eight framed photographs were also arranged on three surfaces, six black and whites she’d taken herself with her little Brownie, of her daughter at various stages in her short life. This one taken the day Marie was leaving for summer camp, a blue plaid canvas bookbag slung over her shoulder. Squinting into the camera, her sweet smile revealed a space where her two front teeth had been.
Ruth remembered the day like it was yesterdaythe way the warm afternoon air had smelled, softly scented with lilacs. She'd been beside herself at the thought of her little princess going off on her own for a whole week.
The most recent photograph was an eight by ten, color. Ruth had snapped it just before Marie left for the prom that night with that nice Johnson boy, whose father was a dentist. It was the last time she saw her daughter alive.
There’d been mud on her white prom dress. Stop! Don’t think about it. The flowers in the corsage on her small wrist were crushed. Don’t! You know how your heart gets when you start thinking about it.
I should have seen it coming. The way he was always looking at her, thinking I didn’t know. I did hear something that night. Why didn’t I go downstairs? A question that would haunt her right into the grave.
Tears spilled down her parched cheeks. Feeling her heart beginning to fret, she deliberately turned her gaze to the photograph on her bedside tableher wedding picture. Her trembly finger traced her husband’s young, serious face. So handsome he was back then. Their child’s murder did to him what the war could not. It killed him.
Unconsciously, she began turning her wedding ring round and round on her finger as the old hatred welled within her breast.
No pictures of him. She’d torn them all up. The boy was dead to her.
Fumbling for the wad of tissue in her dress pocket, Ruth dabbed at her eyes, sniffed, refocused her attention on the television screen.
Samantha was twitching her nose at Darren, and the old woman cackled as a horrified Darren shrunk to frog-size. Samantha, towering above him, gave one of her sheepish ‘oops’. Ruth’s chair creaked rhythmically on its rockers.
He was such a fool, that man. She loved Samantha. So pretty. Didn’t care too much for the cousin, thoughSabrina. No, not that one. Didn’t care for her at all. Always up to no good.
“Afternoon, sweetie,” said an irritating voice from her doorway. “Guess what? You have a visitor.”
Ruth ceased her rocking, sure she heard wrong. Who would be coming to visit her?
“A man,” the attendant sang, her gleeful mocking tone an insult. “Says he’s an old friend from out of town. “Not keeping something from us, are you, dear?”
Mamie Greerson weight well over 200 pounds, had a hairy mole above her upper lip and always smelled of garlic and the bags of peppermints she chewed, trying to cover it.
Ruth thought she was a disgusting thing, but she smiled her ‘sweet little old woman’ smile anyway. You were at their mercy in here. Wouldn’t do to let them know how you really felt.
Nonetheless, her curiosity was aroused. Who could it be? The few friends who came to mind had long since gone to their own reward. Still, she couldn’t deny a stirring of excitement at the thought of a visitor. She could think of a few around her whose noses would be out of joint at her popularity.
Minutes after the attendant left, she heard footsteps out in the corridor. As they approached her room, faces of old schoolmates passed through her mind like photos in a rogue’s gallery. One, more vivid than the rest, belonged to a young man she’d been smitten with long before she met Jamesa school crush. But oh, wasn’t he just the cat’s meow. Aaron Walsh, his name was. He had curly dark hair and a grin that made her heart beat faster. Rumor had it he left school to marry a young woman he’d gotten in the family way. Perhaps Aaron’s wife, like James, had gone on to meet her maker and…
Nonsense. She was behaving like the old fool Mamie Greerson took her to be. Still…
But it was a man of the cloth that stood in her doorway, a collared gentleman. Wasn’t it just like that silly creature to leave out that little detail. Come to save my soul, she thought, a shaky, coquettish hand fluttering to her sparse, white hair. She was suddenly glad of the cross she’d brought from home and had the attendant hang above her bed.
The man entered her room and closed the door behind him.
Why doesn’t he say something? she wondered, with just the smallest stirrings of unease. Then he smiled at her and her heart skittered wildly in her chest. She couldn’t breathe.
“Hello, mother,” he said.
Twenty-One
The phone was ringing when Rachael got home. She picked up the receiver, sensing it was Jeff. She wasn’t wrong. As she knew he would, he immediately took her side and, perhaps to her shame, she garnered some comfort in that. He was angry with his father, but she managed to talk him out of driving to Deering and confronting him. “He’s your father, Jeff,” she said. As it was, the relationship was strained. Father and son were very different.
“I hate him, Mom, for what he did to you.”
“Don’t. Please, don’t. It was no one’s fault, Jeff. Whatever happened is between us. People grow apart. Your father loves you.”
“Mom, why are you always defending him? Do you think she’s the first bimbo he’s cheated on you with?”
She didn’t let herself feel the blow fully. Yet neither was she entirely surprised. She didn’t ask how he knew. Kids always know far more than we give them credit for. Sometimes wives do, too. The signs had been there. She just hadn’t wanted to see them. If you knew, you had to do something about it. She hated her cowardice.
&n
bsp; “Mom, are you still there? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”
“I know. It’s okay. But I want to talk about your life. How is Nancy?”
Nancy was pregnant. She could sense Jeff’s reluctance to show his joy when his mother was not exactly at a high point in her own life. She made it okay. How would Greg would take the news that he was about to become a grandfather? She took pleasure in thinking about it.
She’d no more than hung up when the phone rang again. Must have forgotten something he wanted to tell me.
“Hello.”
No one answered. But someone was on the line; she could hear breathing. Probably kids messing with the phone, she told herself, hanging up.
She started from the room, stopped, noticing that the candleholders were on the coffee table instead of on the mantle where she’d put them. Had she set them there to dust the mantle and forgot to put them back? She must have. What other explanation could there be? She could think of one. The Bates’ nephew.
She returned the candleholders to the mantle.
Then she called the locksmith to have the locks changed.
Iris led the pale, drawn woman into the livingroom. “Can I get you something Helen? Perhaps a nice cup of Chamomile tea. Chamomile is very calming.”
“No, nothing, thank you, Iris. I’m sorry about showing up like this, not calling or anything. I chased your friend away. I didn’t mean to be rude. She seemed very nice.”
“She is very nice. And you weren’t rude. Anyway, Rachael’s a very understanding person, so you mustn’t concern yourself.” Motioning Helen to the stuffed chair, she sat across from her on the sofa, her eye moving involuntarily to the Emily Warren seascape.
Sky and sea still today, as they should be.
The calm before the storm?
Helen’s hands were tightly clasped together in her lap, as if it might be the only thing keeping her from coming apart.
“Bob’s out of town picking up some parts,” she said. “I don’t expect him home until late tonight.” Her voice was as frail as her appearance. Iris nodded, waited.
“I know you have a gift, Iris.”
“A gift,” Iris repeated, getting a hint of where this was leading, wanting to stop it in mid-stride. “Helen, you…”
“No, please, hear me out.”
Iris sighed resignedly. “All right.” She supposed it couldn’t hurt to listen. She didn’t have to act on anything, and she wouldn’t. “Please, go on.”
After a pause, Helen said, “I want you to contact Heather.”
Well, there it was. Looking into those haunted eyes, Iris saw something savage, primal in their depths. This wasn’t going to be easy. “Helen, I can’t…”
“I believe you can. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. I need to talk to my child, Iris. I know you can make that possible. I need her to tell me who murdered her.”
Iris cast about in her mind for the right words to diffuse this obsession of Helen’s, that could convince her that what she was asking was impossible, even dangerous.
“Helen, my dear, I can’t even begin to imagine how devastating this has been for you and Bob. If there was anything I could do to ease…”
“But there is. I just told you. You have only to agree to do it.”
“Helen, you’re wrong about me. I have no special powers. Please, believe me.”
“Everyone knows you’re psychic, Iris,” she cut in. “Even if you don’t like to admit it. Remember that time you directed the searchers right to the exact spot near Brown’s Creek where little Billy Trenton was found after being missing for two days? He would have died but for you. He very nearly did. You saved his life, Iris. And Ethel told me how you showed up on her doorstep just minutes after Jimmy Ray beat poor old George senseless. Just as if she’d called you on the phone, she said. It was like you knew she was in trouble.”
Iris was surprised to learn that Ethel had confided the incident to Helen, considering that she herself had been sworn to secrecy. You just never know about people. Iris left her own chair to sit down beside Helen, took both hands in her own. Helen’s were like ice. “That was mere coincidence,” Iris said quietly. “That’s all, Helen. Coincidence.”
“Why do you keep denying your powers? It’s not all that strange, you know. Some people are born knowing how to play Mozart, or do long division in their heads, or paint like the masters.” She hesitated, then said, “Like Heather was a talented actress. I knew from the time she was a little girl she was going to be famous. Remember how wonderful she was in the role of Annie in the musical last year, Iris?”
Iris smiled sadly. “She brought the house down. A standing ovation every night.”
Tears shimmered in Helen’s eyes. “She could have made it, Iris. I need to know who killed my baby. I want him punished.”
“Then you don’t believe that Tommy…”
“I don’t know what to believe. Though Bob is convinced he did it. If he’s right, then it’s my fault our child is dead, because I’m the one who gave him her room number. If it’s Bob who’s wrong, then Tommy…”
She fondled the small gold locket nestled in the vee of her blouse, the same locket Iris had seen Heather wearing the few times she’d been in the store.
“Bob doesn’t know I gave him her room number, Iris,” she said, tears spilling down her gaunt cheeks.
Iris could only wonder at all the tears she must have shed in the past few weeks, and felt her resolve began to weaken.
“I don’t know what he’d do if he found out. So you see, one way or the other, I have to know. Will you help me? I’m just asking you to try, that’s all. As my friend.”
Peter had told Iris about the confrontation in Kathy’s, so she knew that Iris wasn’t exaggerating Bob’s hatred of Tommy.
Taking Iris’ silence for consent, Helen slid the Ouija board from the canvas bag at her feet, held it out to Iris with almost an air of reverence. “I brought candles too,” she said, those hollowed eyes now emitting a feverish glitter as her words began to tumble over themselves. “You have to have candleswhite ones to keep away the dark entities. I bought them yesterday in that little candle shop on Bay Avenue. They have every sort of candle in there, you know.”
Leaving Iris holding the Ouija board, Helen rushed about the room arranging white tapered candleseight in all—strategically about them. She set Heather’s portrait in its pewter frame, which Helen had also brought with her, on the mantle, flanked by two of the candles. Backtracking, she lit them one by one.
Iris watched each pale yellow flame flare up, signifying the ancient, religious ritual they’d already begun, and wondered what in hell she was doing.
Now the two women sat facing one another, the Ouija board balanced between them, on their laps. The scene was set. Candlelight flickered over the black letters, highlighting numbers and symbols painted on the light, varnished wood.
The tension in the air was almost real enough to touch. Iris supposed much of it was coming from herself, stemming from her unease at this dark activity they were about to engage in. She also felt more than a little ridiculous at having allowed herself to be cast in the role of medium. I’m about to conduct a séance, for Heaven’s sake. Or perhaps ‘Heaven’ was not the best choice of words here. She had never approved of this sort of dabbling into the unknown. Never. And now, against her better judgement, against all that was holy, she was flying in the face of her own beliefs.
She was about to call up the dead.
The press conference was held on the steps of the courthouse, a two-story red brick building. Peter stood at the edge of the crowd watching Captain Elton Sorrel field questions from clamoring reporters. Heather’s murder had gained national attention mainly because of where it occurred. Pressure from high places was apparently being brought to bear.
Chill Waters Page 14