Curse of Black Tor

by Toombs, Jane

  “You don't know,” Josephine sobbed. “No one knows.”

  “My—my husband died,” Martha told her softly. “I can understand.” She handed tissues to Josephine.

  Josephine mopped at her face and sat up straighter. Martha dropped her arm but continued to sit next to her.

  “I didn't know you'd been married.”

  “Now you have a secret to keep,” Martha said. “I didn't tell your brother. I use my maiden name now, so I didn't think it mattered.”

  “I only knew Diego three days,” Josephine said.

  “Here in Victoria?”

  “Oh, no. Aunt Natalie was too strict. I—there was a friend from school whose family moved to Seattle, and she invited three of her girlfriends from Victoria to a weekend birthday party. I was one of the girls. We went over on the evening ferry and were to come back by plane. Her parents were meeting us at the dock.” Josephine smiled faintly. “I was very excited, because I had so many restrictions that a trip unchaperoned was an event. Not alone, really, but girls my age didn't count.”

  “This was when you were sixteen? ”

  Josephine nodded. “The other two girls were what we called best friends, and I was the third wheel, rather. So I went onto the deck even though it was foggy and cold. Wanting to savor my freedom, I imagine. And—he was there. Diego.”

  “Was he Spanish?”

  “I don't know. We met in the fog and we didn't talk about who we were. I found out he worked the salmon boats out of Seattle and had been to the island for a day of sightseeing. He liked Victoria. He found out I was going to visit a friend in Seattle. I lied and said I was through school because I thought he might think I was just a kid otherwise. We knew there was something between us and he kissed me, and nothing like that had ever happened to me before.” Josephine gently touched the note that lay beside her on the bed. “Nothing has since.”

  “You never saw him again?”

  “Only twice more. His boat was in because of the nets— something wrong with the nets. He was from San Diego. He'd worked on the tuna seiners down there. I remember every word he ever said to me. ”

  “He met me in a park near the house where I was staying. He told me what time he'd be there, and I sneaked out and met him. We fell in love. He said he'd come and see me in Victoria, but I wouldn't tell him who I was—I couldn't. He'd find out I was sixteen, and anyway, Aunt Natalie would never let us be together. He was older—he said he was twenty-one—and he worked on the boats. She'd have been horrified.”

  Josephine looked at Martha. “I didn't know what to do and I couldn't stand it. So that night I—I waited until everyone was asleep and I crept out of the house and took a bus to the docks. I knew Diego was staying on the boat, so I went to find him. But other men were there with him, and they were having a party and drinking wine, and they laughed when I came by and they teased Diego, and I had some of the wine because it was foggy and cold—” Josephine looked away from Martha and gripped her hands in her lap.

  “Did your friend's parents find you were missing?”

  “No. But the next morning I was too sick to fly home and a doctor had to come to their house and give me shots for three days. Then he said maybe I should take the ferry back with a stateroom to rest instead of flying, because of the danger of middle-ear infection.

  “So I managed to get to the dock once more, and that's when I heard about Diego's boat sinking. I ran away from the—from my friend's parents—and I found where I'd been the night with Diego, and one of the men from the party was there working on another boat, and when he saw me he came down and told me Diego had been drowned. I guess he must've taken me back to the ferry, only I don't remember. Because I did get back to Victoria, but I had a relapse and had to go to St. Joe's with pneumonia. I know I came home from the hospital, but after that things go dimmer and dimmer until I don't remember anything.”

  “And you never told anyone about Diego?”

  “No.”

  “Not even Dr. Marston?”

  “It wasn't his business. He wouldn't understand.”

  Martha looked at Josephine's bent head. She felt an ache in her throat for the teenage romance that had somehow led the girl into a mental breakdown. Had she been unstable prior to meeting Diego? Diego, who evidently wasn't dead. Why had it taken him so long to get in touch?

  “Is the note in his handwriting?” she asked Josephine.

  “I—I don't know. I never saw his handwriting. But who else would know?”

  “If the letter's from Diego, obviously he's alive, Josephine. The dead don't write notes.”

  “I know, but I'm afraid.” Josephine glanced wildly around the room, and Martha thought of a caged bird suddenly offered a way out but too frightened to leave the well-known cage.

  “If this isn't a hoax, he'll get in touch with you again. You were right to share the note with me.”

  “You won't tell. You promised me.”

  “Well, for now, no. But we don't know enough yet, not even if this really is from Diego.” Or what he wants after all these years if it is, Martha finished, but she didn't say it aloud. Another thought crept in: could Josephine have written the note to herself? I'll have to talk to Sarah, Martha decided, and this Bill Wong.

  Later, in her own bed, Martha went over what Josephine had told her. The note seemed quite odd. If this was the long-lost Diego who had finally found his love, why wouldn't he march up to the door and ask for Josephine?

  Martha drifted into sleep, her mind a confused jumble of thoughts. She awakened with a start, opening her eyes to darkness. Had someone called her name? Did Josephine need her?

  She had started to swing her legs over the edge of the bed when someone sat down next to her. “Josephine?” she asked.

  To her horror, a hand slid across her breast, caught at her shoulder and pushed her back down on the bed. She struggled to free herself, knowing this was a man, for she felt a man's strength in the hands.

  “Let me go!” she managed, before a mouth came down on hers, stopping her words, her breath.

  She moaned in fright and desperation.

  Chapter Five

  “I know who you are, Marty Collier. Don't fight, no use to fight.” The man spoke in a husky whisper directly into her ear. “Don't pretend with me,” he said.

  Martha froze. Then, as his hand slid the length of her body, she jerked her head away and screamed. His grip loosened, and she sat upright to reach for the bedside lamp, but even as she did so her door opened and closed so swiftly she barely saw a dark outline. She switched on the light. Her room was empty.

  She stared at the closed door. She hadn’t imagined it. There’d been a man in her room who’d called her Marty Collier and tried to--expected her to--

  The doorknob turned and Martha gasped, shrinking back on the bed. The door opened slowly and Josephine's face appeared. “Did you call me?”

  “Oh, Josephine, someone was in here!”

  Josephine came into the room and shut the door. “Who?”

  Belatedly Martha wondered at the wisdom of telling her.

  “Who was in your room?” Josephine repeated.

  “I—I don't know. A man. He—threatened me.”

  “What did he do?”

  Was Josephine's glance too knowing, her eyes too bright?

  “Did he try to rape you?” Josephine demanded. “Is that why you screamed? I heard you, but I wasn't sure. I thought maybe I'd been the one to call out, like I do when I have nightmares, but it didn't seem as if I had.”

  “I screamed,” Martha acknowledged. “He—frightened me.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I told you—I don't know. A man.”

  Josephine came over and sat on the edge of the bed. “Well, then it was either Charn or Jules. Unless it was one of the servants. But I can't see Henry or Francis — ” She giggled. “And Simon stays with daddy all the time.”

  “Could some stranger have gotten into the house?” Martha asked, remembering the
whisper that told her he knew she was Marty... no use to pretend. Who knew of her past?

  Josephine shrugged. “I don't know who you might have following you around,” she said. “In fact, I don't know anything about you.” Her tone was accusing. “I told you all about me, but you hardly said one word about yourself.”

  “No one's following me,” Martha said. But would Charn or Jules come into her room as the man had?

  “Have you been a nurse all your life?” Josephine asked. “You're pretty....”

  Martha had no intention of talking about her past. “It's late,” she said. “Thanks for coming in. I was frightened, but I'll lock the door now. I should have before, but I didn't think....”

  “I always do,” Josephine said. “You'd better too, in this house.”

  Martha locked the door after letting Josephine out. She lay awake afterward, thinking of Johann Collier. There'd been headlines in the California papers. After all, Johann was famous in his way. He'd written the script for and then directed The Unmasking of Hell, which had turned out to be the most controversial film of that year. “Genius or madman?” the papers had asked afterward. Neither, she thought sadly. A man driven beyond his own limits by circumstance and by his own frightening urges. Marty Collier. She'd been in the headlines at the end. Who in Victoria knew that Martha Jamison was Marty Collier?

  She wasn't the woman Johann had pictured so vividly in the movie script and who had been played so sensuously by Maria Canyon, unknown before her starring role as Nida in The Unmasking of Hell. Johann had come to confuse Maria with his creation, and Maria was anything but a woman driven to sexual excess by her own neuroses. Maria was, instead, a capable actress.

  Poor Johann. For she, his wife, hadn't been Nida, either. No woman could have been. After he'd seen his creation take flesh, so to speak, in the movie, he'd been forced past his limits into the trackless realm that lies beyond. Not really insanity—just uncharted space that frightened him into destruction.

  Latent schizophrenia, the doctor had said. She remembered Johann laughing when he told her. The psychiatrist, Dr. Towers, the very eminent Frederic Towers. Shrink, Johann had called him. Headshrinker—no better than a witch doctor, Johann had insisted. Was it because Johann was afraid of discovering what dwelt in his own mind? Of course the newspapers quoted Dr. Towers at great length afterward.

  If only there'd been a way to buy time for Johann. A place where there was no pressure. Her love had shifted from passion to fierce protectiveness. She'd tried to mother him and he'd hated it. But she'd felt responsible; no one else seemed to understand his fragility. Until the end she hadn't really understood that no one can take responsibility for another adult.

  And now someone at Black Tor knew her as the Marty Collier the papers had pictured—a Nida, insatiable, hopelessly neurotic. She wasn't--she never had been. Any more than Maria Canyon was Nida.

  “I don't know how you managed,” Maria told her the one time they'd met after Johann's death. “He was a man obsessed. I could hide from him when I had to. But you—” Maria paused and stared hard at Marty. “You were forced to play Nida.”

  Marty shook her head. “No. Never that.”

  “Forced to be Nida, then, if only in his mind,” Maria had insisted. “Johann was mad, of course. Quite mad.”

  Marty couldn't answer, recalling the last ugly scene. She'd fled from Johann by locking herself in the bathroom, where there was an inner bolt, put there at Johann's order to protect himself from anyone entering while he was caring for his body. At the last, the bolt had protected her from Johann. Would he have killed her as he'd threatened?

  She'd seen him use the knife hundreds of times to open letters—a Thai dagger, actually, with an alien god carved into the handle. But this time he'd used it on her, cutting her arm and breast before she gained the sanctuary of the bathroom. She'd huddled naked inside the bathroom, blood dripping on the pink tile, too distraught to do more than listen to Johann screaming curses in the bedroom. He'd splintered the bottom of the door by repeated kicking, before the phone distracted him. Ringing on and on, a shrill accompaniment to his ravings.

  Finally he answered the phone—she knew because that's where she found him when the long silence gave her courage to wrap a towel around herself and venture out of the bathroom. Johann lay sprawled by the bed, phone still clutched in his hand, the dagger plunged into his chest.

  The papers had played up the death for all it was worth, drawing parallels between Johann's death and The Unmasking of Hell with its overtones of the occult. Even the phone call was referred to as “mysterious,” since no one admitted to having called Johann. Dr. Towers was quoted out of context to bolster the articles. Only Dr. Towers’ testimony had kept her from being accused of murder. The papers had liked that, too. Nida was a woman who drove men mad—drove them to destruction.

  But she wasn't Nida.

  And she was no longer Marty Collier, either. She was Martha Jamison, just as if Johann had never existed.

  Despite the locked door, she slept fitfully, waking to dawn and an insistent tapping. Who was at the door?

  Martha wrapped herself in her robe and padded over to ask.

  “It's me. You locked me out.” A child's voice. Sarah.

  “Are you going to be like Jo, always locking your door?” Sarah demanded when Martha let her in. “I thought you'd be different.”

  “Why are you up so early?” Martha asked.

  “Because I'm going to spend my money. If you and Jo ask Henry to take you into town, I can go, too. Will you?”

  “You'll have to talk to Josephine.”

  “Oh, she'll go if you want to. She likes you. I want to go today. I don't ever get any money to spend.”

  “But you have money now?”

  “The man gave money to Bill and he gave me some. Bill's nice. He can sound like all different kinds of birds, and he's Jimmy's grandfather and—”

  “What man?” Martha broke in, remembering Josephine's note.

  “I don't know—just a man. I saw him talking to Bill. Jo told me not to tell about the paper, but she showed you, I bet.”

  Martha watched the girl as she wandered about the bedroom, picking up a traveling clock here, a lipstick there. The white wing of hair that looked so natural on Jules seemed out of place on this child, somehow shadowing the innocence of her face. “Will you ask Henry?”

  Martha thought of her phone call the day before during dinner. She'd rather not be in the house when Bran came to talk to Jules. She wasn't sure if she wanted to see him again, for there had been nothing between them as far as she was concerned. He was pleasant enough, but —

  “I'll talk to Josephine,” Martha told Sarah. “Maybe she'd like an outing.”

  After the girl left, Martha relocked the door and showered, dressing in a casual outfit of brown pants with a pale orange shirt. The sun was high enough that she felt she could knock on Josephine's door.

  Josephine was reading in bed. Martha glanced at the book title. Growing Pains, by Emily Carr.

  “She was persecuted by this town, actually persecuted,” Josephine said angrily. She gestured at the book. “I'm reading her autobiography. They said her paintings were ridiculous and she was crazy. They drove her away even though she loved the island. Why are people like that?”

  “I'm afraid I don't know who Emily Carr is,” Martha said.

  “Oh, that's right. You're not Canadian. She was a painter, and now everyone knows how good she really was. But then, when she was alive...” Josephine shook her head. “I understand how helpless she felt. They thought she was mad because she liked Indians and even lived with Indian families and shared their way of life and painted them and the forests and what was wild and natural. Women didn't do that in Emily's time. She stayed free, though. They wounded her, but they never captured her and put her in a cage.”

  “She sounds interesting. I'd like to see her paintings.”

  “Oh, would you really? There're some prints in her old famil
y house in town, and the art gallery on Moss Street has originals. I'll ask Henry if he'll take us there. Of course he’ll have to ask Jules if it's all right, but I pretend not to know that. I hate to be dependent on Jules! When daddy dies—” She broke off. “You think I'm awful. But my father didn't want me in the first place. He married my mother because she was young and pretty. He wanted her—not me. She wasn't well after I was born, and she died when I was three. Aunt Natalie moved into Black Tor after that.”

  “Was your aunt married then?”

  “No. Uncle Matthew was an after thought. He's—” Josephine stopped. “Well, he doesn't count.”

  “Your father's quite ill?”

  “He's dying. And when he does, I'll have my own money.” Josephine frowned and was silent a moment. Then she kicked the covers aside and got out of bed. “Jules and Aunt Natalie will find a way to keep me from getting the money. That's why they want everyone to think I'm crazy.” She glared at Martha.

  “Well, I haven't even seen your doctor yet, much less talk to him,” Martha said. “No one's told me you're—”

  “They don't say it,” Josephine broke in. “They hint. 'She tried to kill herself,' they say. I've never tried to do such a thing.”

  “Are you telling me you think someone else was responsible for your so-called suicide attempts?”

  Josephine nodded impatiently. “Yes, of course. I don't know if they really wanted me to die or just to seem crazy. But I lock my door now. I'm careful.”

  Martha's thoughts jumbled together in a kaleidoscope of speculation. Paranoid ideation? Or could Josephine possibly be right? What did her doctor think? How did this man from her past, the man called “Diego,” fit in?

  “Did you sleep all right after what happened last night?” Josephine asked.

  Martha nodded, reluctant to think about it. “I can't imagine who the man was,” Josephine said. “Although Jules has been different since Cynthia was killed six years ago. I don't think there's been any women who've interested him since then.”

  “Cynthia?”