With that comment, Morgan’s face then contorted into something dreadful, and quite accusatory. I don't know what Morgana assumed it was that old Mrs. Prosper and I were talking about, but I could see in Morgana’s eyes that she wasn’t happy.
I took Morgana’s response as a cue to exit the company of our newly acquired friend. “Well, it was a pleasure talking with you, Mrs. Prosper,” I said, putting down my cup and getting up from my chair. “But Morgana has a meeting with the fund raising committee from Stark Monument College today. And we really wouldn’t want to be late.”
“Richard, where are you going?” asked Morgana.
“Yes, where are you going?” echoed Mrs. Prosper.
“You have a meeting, dear.” I anxiously scanned the room again and saw only three middle age fellows in business suits entering the room. They were quickly escorted by our waitress to the far side of the room. Besides their table and ours, there were no other patrons about.
“It’s odd,” I said, “but shouldn’t the committee members be here by now?”
“Well, maybe because of the inclement weather, everyone is running late. I hate to think that Morgana and I will be the only committee members attending today’s meeting,” quietly said Mrs. Prosper as she looked at her small rhinestone wristwatch. “But there is still a half hour before we officially start.”
It was my turn to be caught short. “Morgana and you? Excuse me, but didn’t you tell me that you were on — ”
“The executive board of The Heroic Daughters of Molly Stark,” Prosper answered. “‘The Daughters,’ as we like to call ourselves, is Stark Monument College’s retired women’s alumni association, and we have the honor of being the college’s major fund raising organization. I’m always on call for my old alma mater — class of ‘52,’” said Mrs. Prosper, her voice ringing with pride.
“I mentioned this to you, Richard, last night,” chimed in my wife. “Mrs. Prosper is my co-chairperson on the fund raising committee.”
“Ah . . . yes. . . . yeah, now I understand. The executive board of The Heroic Daughters of Molly Stark . . . IS . . . the name of the fundraising committee that you were to meet with. I got it now.”
“That’s right,” said Morgana with her eyes giving me that, ‘you never pay attention to what I tell you,’ look of hers.
“You see, I knew about the meeting,” I pleaded my case, “but the particulars I . . . eh, I didn’t know. It was late. It was a difficult drive getting here last night with the wind and the rain and all. I was tired. I forgot.”
Let’s say now that my short term memory is not what it was. I had retired from teaching high school, just a few years ago, and my mind has already gone to mush. There was a time that I could tell you all my student names and their grades faster than anyone else in my department and do it without looking at all at my grade book. But now, I can barely recall where I leave my car keys from day to day. I also have a sneaking suspicion that Morgana is making my condition worse. My wife tells me so many things during a day, many of which I haven’t the slightest interest in or care about. I just can’t keep track of them all, or, worse, I totally forget them. Her solution to my problem was that I should write what she tells me down so I won’t forget. A better solution, I thought, was that she should write down the things that I ought to know, and then mail the list to me. My plan works on several levels. She enjoys writing — she’s a published author of several books. I have a fleeting interest in getting real mail every day — I’m not fond of email. And Morgana wants me to exercise more — the walk to our roadside mailbox could do me good. I figured that my idea had a win-win quality about it. As of this date, however, neither of our solutions have been enacted.
Anyway, when I figured out the fundraising meeting mechanizations to my satisfaction, I thought that I would make the best of the situation. “Well, then I'll go and leave the two of you to your meeting.”
“There’s no point for a committee meeting if Morgana and I are the only ones present, I dare say,” said Mrs. Prosper. “We won’t have a quorum.”
Morgana nodded in agreement.
Mrs. Prosper then suggested, “Why don’t we all have breakfast together? I assume neither of you has eaten.”
Morgana quickly answered for both of us without my advisement or counsel. “That is an excellent idea.” Her declaration made it clear to me that my wife was completely ignorant of whom she was sitting next to.
“The first thing scheduled for our committee meeting was to have breakfast anyway, why not?” said Prosper. “If anyone comes in late, why he can just pull up a chair and join us.”
I had hoped to extract myself, as politely and quickly as possible, from Mrs. Prosper's company. But my loving wife crushed that dream, like a mother telling her son that he can’t be a cowboy or an astronaut because he is prone to nose bleeds.
Though to be fair, misery does love company, and Morgana didn’t really have a choice in the matter; she had to stay. The honorable thing, for me to do, was at least to sit with her for a little while. My wife had just been made the temporary chairwoman of Stark Monument College’s English department, and with her appointment, she inherited the prestigious duty to serve on the school’s fundraising committees. So the possibility for her to duck out on Mrs. Prosper, whom, I later learned from Morgana, was also a very generous contributor to the school fund, was not a card that Morgana could play.
“Sounds like a plan,” concluded my wife.
“Sounds . . . eh, good to me,” I said. What else could I do? I hadn’t the nerve to abandon Morgana. Madame Fate beat me again. I was stuck with Mrs. Prosper for a few more hours. And besides, I was getting hungry.
Breakfast, to my surprise, turned out to be almost pleasant. All through the meal, the table banter was naturally carried by Mrs. Prosper with Morgana acting as her primary audience. My job was to give the occasional obligatory, “Ah, ha,” or, “Absolutely, Dear,” where my input was appropriately required. Otherwise, the old woman’s non-stop chattering became white noise to my ears, much like the sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower down the block. The monotonous drone was substantial enough to hear if one wanted to listen, but was also dull enough and insignificant in its content that it was easy to ignore. The result was that I ate my breakfast in relative peace.
We all ordered some variation of eggs, which, to Morgana’s dismay, became Mrs. Prosper’s primary topic of discussion for the next fifteen minutes with only a few diversions or interruptions. My eggs turned out to be one of those rare finds, that roving food critics write about. My perfectly prepared western omelette — accompanied by two slices of buttered rye toast and crispy home fried potatoes — had a little extra something in it. As I puzzled over what that little extra something was, Morgana briefly usurped the control of the conversation when Mrs. Prosper took a sip of water. Taking advantage of Prosper’s silence, my talented wife retold the tale of how she became the temporary English Chairperson of Stark Monument College.
Morgana spun the details of the story of her appointment into a tapestry worthy of an epic. Her saga included such features as the two mysterious deaths in the English department, a forgotten manuscript, and her being kidnapped at gunpoint ( see The Third Murderer.) As I ate my exquisite tasting eggs, I began to wonder if my wife's elaborate, but factual account, was a private amusement for my benefit or some gossipy fluff for Mrs. Prosper’s to digest.
In Morgana’s description of the college’s offering the English chairpersonship to her, my wife borrowed elements from the Cincinnatus legend. Though Morgana wasn’t plowing a field as the great Roman hero was when he got his calling from the Senate, she was, however, raking the leaves from the front lawn at our Long Island home when she got the telephone call from the search committee. Morgana explained that she was reluctant at first to take the position, but feeling some obligation and loyalty to the school, she was persuaded to say yes to the offer. She accepted the position on the condition that she would serve not one day longer than
needed. As she had put it, “When the committee finds a satisfactory candidate for a permanent department head, I am out.”
And I do believe her. But her embellishing the saga with the fact that she had exchanged her taupe colored garden coat for a wine red cashmere sweater as she took the fateful call was a pretentious detail, however, true. To my mind, it was a poor substituted for Cincinnatus changing into his toga, and it put her story over-the-top. Or as the kids say today, ‘It jumped the shark.’
But it wasn’t long when I became less engaged in the breakfast banter across the table and more with my omelette. With each bite, I found my eggy repast profoundly different from any other western that I have had before. All the essential ingredients were there . . . diced ham, sweet green pepper, and onion. Naturally, it had the appropriate amount of salt and pepper. It wasn’t loaded down or overpowered with any sort of cheese. As far as I could tell, my omelette had none, but there was a suggestion of something familiar and, at the same time, something exotic.
“Richard,” Morgana hailed me from across our communal basket of sweet rolls.
“Yes, Dear,” was my immediate, conditioned response — abandoning for the moment my pursuit to determine the secret of my eggs.
“Would you be so kind and go to the lobby to see if any of the missing committee members had left any messages at the front desk? The cell phone service is appalling here.”
“But the phones are out.”
“Well, go find out if they were fixed and if we got any phone calls before the phones went down.”
“Oh, that is a good idea,” said Mrs. Prosper, “and would you ask Simon, for me, to have housekeeping come to my room before ten.”
“Simon?” I asked, paying half attention.
“Simon Hograve, the owner of the hotel, I told you that I saw him working at the check-in desk when I came down this morning. Poor man, he must have had a terrible time getting his staff together today because of the weather.”
Receiving my marching orders, I popped the last of my wickedly delicious western into my mouth, excused myself from the table, and gratefully made my escape in an easy stroll to the main desk.
Traveling in the narrow corridor connecting the dining area with the lobby, I heard the torrents of rain slam against the slate roof and the aged clapboards of the building. The sound of a thousand of dimes falling on a wooden table came to mind. I stopped and looked through the partially fogged hallway windows and saw down the hill, about seventy yards away, the tumultuous flow of the nearby river crashing high over its rocky banks. I squinted and looked to my left through the clouded glass, and discovered that a large splinted tree branch had fallen onto one of the cars parked in the lot beside the main entrance to the inn. The massive timber had crushed the roof of the small vehicle and had forced the driver's side door to burst open.
I thanked my lucky stars that I didn’t listen to Morgana when we arrived last night. She wanted me to park our car in that very spot. Instead, I chose the parking place that was the easiest to pull into and out of. Walking an extra twenty feet in the rain wasn’t any big deal for me, but Morgana argued that the weather wasn’t good for her hair. The immediate upshot of my action earned me a flurry of heated complaints during our short trot to the inn about my inability to see another's point of view. But ultimately, as it turned out, I made the correct choice. Score one point for the home team and zero for Morgana . . . and, of course, a big fat zero for the poor slob, who owned the crushed car.
The gales started to howl again, but with more gusto than before, giving me the impression that the weather was definitely worsening. Then quite suddenly a sense of foreboding crept into me, and I began to feel sort of detached, or maybe even depressed. I tried to cheer myself up with the thought that I could still be at the table with Mrs. Prosper. I sighed and resumed my trek to the lobby. Just before I reached the main desk, the wind whined, whistled, and bellowed through the inn’s eaves. With some self-satisfaction, I said to myself, “There’s your seven-year-old ghost, Mrs. Prosper.” And as fate would have it — the lights went out.
When I got to the lobby, I noticed the scent of spiced apple cider filling the air. On a long table, in the middle of the room, a bowl of welcoming elixir was kept warm by a brass alcohol burner. Not far from the table, behind the lobby desk, stood a tall, lean fellow with a receding hairline and a small graying mustache. He was intensely fiddling with a computer along with its assortment of cables, wires, and black boxes. The frustrated fellow looked up and greeted me in a flat, clipped manner before I had a chance to speak.
“May I help you?”
In the dim light, I read ‘Simon’ on the gold colored name tag that was pinned above his left breast pocket of his red and black lumberjack shirt. “Yes . . . I’m Richard MacKenzie from room 214.”
The fellow blankly stared at me as if I spoke in a foreign language.
“My wife, you see, had booked a meeting for the Stark Monument College fund raising committee.”
Still no reaction.
“The Heroic Daughters of Molly Stark committee . . . for eight o’clock. And by the recently stopped clock on the wall behind you, it is at least twenty minutes after the hour, and no one is here yet, except for Mrs. Prosper and — ”
“Oh . . . right, yes, you must be Dr. Mackenzie’s husband,” interrupted my new friend with a newly acquired spark of life in his voice. “I am so sorry about not giving your room a wake-up call this morning — ”
Interesting. Were we to get a wake-up call? Morgana must have made arrangements, I concluded. The idea of Morgana mailing that list to me started to sound even more appealing.
“The in-house phone system is not working,” Hograve continued to apologize. “The cable is down, the computer system is offline, and, as you can see, or I should say since you can’t see, the electricity has gone out, again. It’s all storm related.”
The poor guy sighed and dropped several cable ends that he was holding, onto the desk. “And now, I have a guest who checked in about two hours ago, gets her car destroyed by a fallen tree. She’s out there now, in that horrible weather assessing the damage. It hasn’t been a good morning.”
“Ah, right . . . without a doubt.” Remembering my assignment, I asked, “Would you know if there were any calls or messages that were left here at the desk? . . . I mean before the phone lines went out, for Mrs. . . . Dr. Mackenzie or Mrs. Prosper, or for the Daughters of Molly Stark.”
The fellow did a slow-about face, explored the designated message boxes behind him, turned around to me again, “I’m sorry, there are no messages here. The phones have been down since four o’clock this morning. If anyone tried to call, he or she would have to have called very early.”
“At least we have a good idea what is plaguing the communications system here,” I offhandedly remarked.
“What do you mean?”
“The storm is the cause of the outages,” I said and added, “not some prepubescent spirit on a pre-Halloween spree of vandalism.”
“Oh, you mean Ariel. No, this time the trouble is definitely natural and not supernatural.”
The gentleman’s straightforward, matter-of-fact response caught my attention like a sticker bush would snare a woolen sweater. “This time? Do mean that your . . . ghost has actually done . . . things around here?”
“Ayuh. Ariel has been visiting the place and moving things around . . . tables, chairs, place settings, books, and such, well . . . ever since I’ve been here, and that is over fifty years. My parents had owned this place before I took it over, and I know that they had plenty of visitations from Ariel. You might say that I grew up with her. . . . Ayuh, in some ways, I think of her as the sister that I never had.”
“I don’t suppose that you have ever met her? . . . I mean seen her?” I couldn’t restrain myself to ask.
“Many times. . . . While just last week, I was in the cellar, to stow away our Adirondack furniture for the winter, when she came up from behind me and gave m
e such a start.”
“You actually saw her?”
“Absolutely. She was as close to me as you are right now. Of course, I only saw her but for a split second or so. She has a habit disappearing before most people can get a good look at her. But over the years, I have seen Ariel so many times that I have a detailed picture of what she looks like.”
“Really,” I said, “even though you’ve only seen her for a moment at a time.”
“Well, it’s not that hard really, once you recover from the fact that you have actually seen a ghost. Remember, spirits don’t age, and they don’t change their clothes, no need to I suppose. So seeing Ariel on and off, for over fifty years, I have gotten to know what she looks like quite well.”
Accepting the conditions of Hograve’s argument, I couldn’t disagree. “But who is . . . eh, was Ariel,” I asked, “and why do you think she’s . . . ah . . . sticking around here for? I would think that she would move on or go to the light, as people like to say.”
Simon leaned over the desk and motioned to me with his eyes to have me move closer to him as if he were going to reveal the combination to the establishment’s safe. “It is hard to say. Ariel Eddy was the only child of Harriet Whyte and Wilbur Eddy, the original owners of the place. Now, Wilbur dies in some logging accident, a tree falls on him or something. Soon after, Harriet remarries to a fellow named Gilbert Brown.”
Hograve lowered his voice again, just a little above the volume of a whisper. To hear him, I had lean over the electronic spaghetti on the desk.
“The story goes that Ariel and her mother were very close. Her stepfather, Gilbert, was, according to the rumors of the day, very possessive. Some people say that he was a jealous man when it came to his wife. Others say he just didn’t like children. The truth, if it were to be found after all these years, is probably somewhere in the middle. Anyway, sometime in the fall, way back in 1889, Harriet dies from the fever.”
“What fever would that be?”
FATED TO THE PURPOSE (Richard and Morgana MacKenzie Mysteries Book 2) Page 2