Rose handed circular straps made of leather and buckles to the doctor. He went to work over the patient he had restrained in a chair. It was Effie. The woman’s back arched with her head bent backward, her mouth open. He strapped the bands around her ankles.
Effie choked, and her feet raised in the air, then dropped to the floor.
“Blast it, woman!” Dr. Ackerman shouted. He held her down while waggling his fingers at Rose. She hurried toward him. He buckled the woman’s right hand in a strap that was attached to the chair, and the chair was bolted to the floor. The patient struggled for her freedom, her one free arm clawing at the doctor’s face. Clawing or slapping, Thea wasn’t sure. In fact, she wasn’t sure Effie was even aware of what she was doing. She wasn’t fighting so much as thrashing uncontrollably.
“Restrain her!”
Rose followed the doctor’s orders, strapping down Effie’s left hand now.
The woman’s head jerked forward, then slammed back against the chair. Her eyes rolled toward the ceiling. Spittle trailed from the corner of her mouth.
“Thea!”
Rose’s surprised reaction broke through Thea’s shock. She stood frozen in the doorway, fixated on the mental patient whose moans became muffled as Dr. Ackerman attached a leather muff over her mouth.
“What are you doing to her?” Thea couldn’t weep. She couldn’t be indignant. She was so taken aback by the sight that she had no compulsion to react either in distaste or in understanding.
“Get her out of here!” Dr. Ackerman commanded.
Rose hurried toward Thea, taking her by the arm. Thea caught a glimpse of the nurse in the corner, one of her patients having lain on the cold, wood floor, curled into a ball like a baby in a crib. The nurse gave her a cold glare that communicated well and good that Thea should not be here.
Rose guided Thea back down the stairs. As they neared Thea’s office, she ushered her in and closed the door gently behind them. Her black hair was stuck out in wisps and strands from the struggle with the patient. She seemed to note her disarray, and Rose took a moment to untie her white apron, soiled by the day’s work, and retie its bow.
“H-How could you?” Thea finally breathed, grasping for the chair by the desk and allowing her legs to collapse beneath her. She stared incredulously at Rose. “You harnessed a human being as one would a horse!”
Rose palmed the air in an effort to get Thea to lower her voice. “Sometimes—it is necessary.”
“Necessary?” All Thea could see in her mind’s eye was the blurred image of her mother. Had her mother lived here? Been restrained like the woman upstairs? Had she undergone being silenced by a leather muff forced over her mouth?
Rose knelt on the floor by Thea, resting her hands on Thea’s knees. Her eyes were large and earnest. “Effie was having a spell. She was out of control, so we called for Dr. Ackerman. Sometimes, Thea, the patients leave us little choice but to restrain them.”
Thea searched Rose’s face. There was honesty in her countenance, but also sadness. Rose didn’t enjoy it, she found no cold satisfaction in it. In fact, it seemed to pain her greatly. Rose bit her bottom lip.
“Not all patients are like her, Thea. Some are docile and sad. They stare for hours into the corners. But others . . .” Her voice waned.
Thea attempted to compose her shock that had quickly turned to outrage. Rose was correct. Thea didn’t understand, but then, if she did, would she agree with their course of action?
“How long will she be restrained?”
Rose glanced up at the ceiling as though she could see through the floorboards and assess the patient above. “It depends. For as long as she needs to be until we can calm her. Sometimes an hour. Sometimes much longer than that.”
“Isn’t there medicine? Something to help her—”
“We do what we can, Thea.” Something changed in Rose’s expression. A desperation, some irritation, mingled with an edge of defensiveness. “You have to understand, if you’re going to work here and assist Dr. Ackerman with the files and—photography when possible—that you will hear and maybe see things you don’t understand. I know it’s frightening. Horrific. All of it. It’s why I hate this place, and why I keep coming back. The patients are not normal, Thea. They need help. They are—” Rose clipped her words as her tone had grown higher and more upset.
Thea could see her working hard to control it.
Rose took a deep breath and let it out through her lips. She blinked and regained her composure. “Mary was—she suffered greatly from melancholy. Dr. Ackerman suggested many times that she be committed here. To be nursed and cared for, as her frame of mind was not a pleasant one.” Rose swiped at the corner of her eye.
Thea waited, unsure where Rose was taking her in the conversation. Afraid to follow but feeling it necessary to do so.
Rose ran her fingers on either side of her nose, over her mouth, and then dropped them to her sides. “There are so many people who should be committed here but aren’t. Like Mary. My, how I miss my sister.”
Thea winced at the grief in Rose’s voice and the resignation in her eyes.
“But,” Rose continued as she pushed to her feet, “God help them if they are. Hell cannot be much worse than being banished to a place such as this.”
Thea stumbled into the sunlight that struggled to breach the canopy of trees. She’d combed through papers all day, putting them into smaller piles. Finding nothing on her mother, P. A. Reed, and nothing on the asylum that would support Mr. Fritz’s suspicions of abuse—at least on paper. She tilted her head back, willing the sun to warm her face, begging the trees to pull back their branches and let its rays through. There was no solace here. Not inside or outside. As she brought her eyes back toward the woods beyond the small yard, she noted the trail to the asylum’s graveyard. Its narrow path, cluttered with rock half buried in the earth and tripped with roots rising from the ground as if to snare someone. It beckoned her. She had no desire to follow, to go blindly into the woods where only hours before the taunting voice and melody had sent her catapulting into the asylum. Perhaps she understood now. What Simeon had meant the night before by the river.The siren’s song that beckoned, deceptively beautiful and intriguing, but in the end baring its fangs and pulling the wayfaring soul into ruin.
That was how it seemed to Thea as her feet navigated the rough trail. She had no choice but to follow the instinct that pulled her toward the little graveyard. Perhaps it was what Misty Wayfair wanted, when all was said and done. A willingness to walk to one’s end. So, she didn’t have to cajole, tempt, or deceive. Just a simple path into the forest where, eventually, one would disappear, and the world would continue knowing that Misty Wayfair’s curse had claimed yet another. Her keening song the only vague remembrance.
Thea shook off the unwelcome dark feelings. Oddly, the sun had indeed broken through the thick treetops, and its warmth cast over the gravestones, their flat faces lifted to beg of it to stay. To lift them from the darkness of the grave and into an eternal hereafter. She paused, staring down at them, crossing her arms over her chest. Her shirt was bloused over the narrow waist of her skirt and was cotton thin. Thea should embrace the warmth of the sun as the markers did, and yet she couldn’t.
She took a step forward, browsing the crowded plots with a wary eye. Thea knew she shouldn’t be afraid of a cemetery. It held no threat, no ghosts that would push skeletal hands through the ground to grab at her feet. Still, Thea sidestepped so she didn’t plant her feet directly atop where these souls had been laid to rest. Out of respect, but also out of fear.
In the far corner, the four-sided white stone rose alone. The keeper over all the others. Its sides were worn smooth by the weather and the passage of time. Green lichen and moss grew in crevices, around the lettering carved in the face. Thea walked toward it, tiptoeing around a stone that stared up at her, an unfamiliar name with a rock Simeon had left, bearing the declaration Free on it.
Free.
Thea had never st
opped to consider that she felt imprisoned. But perhaps it was as true for her as the patients in the asylum or for Simeon and Rose. Trapped by the legacies left them by their parents and grandparents. Unsolved stories, and in Thea’s case, a wandering that kept her from being rooted. She didn’t know who she was. Not really. Reed was a surname left to her by a nameless mother. Mendelsohn was a name never adopted but with memories attached to it that wrote scarring tales and conflicting theology on her heart. She was just . . . Thea. More lost now than before coming to Pleasant Valley.
She fingered the letters on the front of the four-sided pillar. The name was difficult to read. The years scrolled a date from long ago. Robert. Robert something. Thea drew in a deep breath. The years had not been kind to the memory of this man. Even the birds had defecated on his name, leaving stains and markings behind.
Thea moved to the side farthest from the woods. It struck Thea as strange that with as much care as Simeon had given the cemetery, this stone would be so marred from animals, weather, and lack of care. She ran her palm over the lettering, chipping away at the stiff lichen that had built up over the name.
Maybe the action of cleaning the name soothed her, but Thea lost track of time. This side of the stone was particularly worn. The letters so weathered that some of the etching had melded into the face.
Thea’s fingernail caught on the lichen, pulling it away from the first few letters of the surname.
She halted.
Narrowing her eyes, Thea wiped her hand over the letters.
Way . . .
She knew what it would say before she finished clearing the name.
Misty Wayfair’s name stared back at her. So real, so definitive, that for a moment Thea could only stare back.
Misty Wayfair
Died April 1851
Nothing more. No birth date. No epitaph. Not even a middle name.
It was stark.
So lonely.
So . . .
“You found her.”
Simeon’s voice made Thea jump. She cast startled eyes toward him, then swallowed her initial fear and turned back to the marker.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Simeon moved around the marker to the other side. He began to clear off whatever name was there, as if, now discovered, there was no reason to keep it hidden.
“Why did you keep it secret?” Thea insisted, running her index finger over the M in Misty’s name.
“It wasn’t a secret,” Simeon said.
Thea noted how his mouth jerked, as though being pulled up into a tight smile and then released. He focused on the stone.
“She’s truly buried here?”
“She was the first,” he affirmed.
“I didn’t think the asylum has been here that long. And Mrs. Brummel said she was—murdered. Not a ward of the asylum.”
“All of it is true. She was buried before the asylum was built.”
Thea could sense her frustration growing. Simeon seemed so vulnerable at times, yet now he was standoffish and tight-lipped. Certainly his family history was none of her business, although it was no secret that the Coyles were intertwined in scandal with Misty Wayfair. It was like a murky river where, at first, things seemed clear, and then when one approached, you couldn’t see to the bottom for the silt that clouded its clarity.
“Simeon.” Her voice was firm, demanding that he look at her.
He did. His hair askew, his eyes guarded, his face shadowed by whiskers and secrets.
“Is it true, what they say? That Misty Wayfair had—a relationship with your grandfather?”
Simeon’s face contorted. He was aggravated. Thea could almost feel his irritation at his malady as he tried to control it.
“N-No.” The facial tic made him stutter. He drew in a deep breath and then let it out, slow and controlled, through his nose. “My grandfather was faithful.”
Thea had nothing to lose. Misty Wayfair’s legendary hauntings were affecting her too now, as evidenced by the dance with dark melody in the woods that morning. “Who killed Misty Wayfair?”
Simeon blinked. There was honesty in his eyes. “No one knows.”
“Why does she hate the Coyles? Even now? Over fifty years later?”
Simeon dug into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. He used it to scrub at the lettering on his side of the marker.
“Simeon?” Thea refused to accept his silence.
“Because.” He slapped the stone. His eyes were brewing when he leveled them upon her. Gone was the timid Simeon, the awkward Simeon, the soft-spoken Simeon. In his place stood a man who battled against his inability to protect his family, and his ineptness to dispel the rumors and division that had kept the Coyles ostracized by the people of Pleasant Valley.
She waited.
Finally, the words came as though dragged from his mouth. “She is dead, Thea. There is no Misty Wayfair haunting the woods. There is no ghost. No curse.”
Thea drew back at the vehemence in his tone. “Then how do you explain it? Who was in the woods this morning, taunting me?”
He raised his eyes to the sky in barely veiled exasperation. “I don’t explain it. I can’t explain it. My family continues to pass away, one by one, and the songs are sung, and Misty is seen. Our cousins, the Fortunes, continue to ignore us as chattel and live in the legacy my great-grandfather began. Oust the Coyles, the Irish Catholics, and Fergus the unwelcome son-in-law. My grandmother suffered because of her father; she suffered because of Misty Wayfair. We suffer still!”
The force of his words echoed through the woods.
They stared at each other, the pillar gravestones between them. Thea’s palm pressed against Misty’s name, and Simeon’s against the gravestone on his side.
“Don’t you want to know, to find out, to understand what happened?” Thea breathed.
Simeon reached forward, and his hand snagged hers. The warmth of his callused fingers shot a thrill through her, and then he pulled her toward him. She stumbled at the tug, grasping at his coat to steady herself. But there was no warmth in his eyes as he made her turn, made her look at the carving he’d cleaned with his hands.
His breath was hot on her ear as he leaned in and replied, “Don’t you want to know? To find out? To understand? Or are you like me, weary of trying.”
Thea focused on the name.
Simeon continued. “We are the descendants of a greater tragedy. Bigger than ourselves, Thea. When you unleash the monsters, they will find us. They will find you.”
She didn’t know how to respond. Not as her eyes took in the name of her mother.
Penelope Alice Reed Wayfair
The woman she’d been trying for so long to find was dead. As Thea had wished it to be. And there was no taking back wishes once they’d been given life.
Chapter 28
Heidi
She’d ended up at the Crawford home. She shouldn’t be surprised. Heidi was drawn to them like a moth to a flame, a bee to pollen, a bear to honey, or whatever appropriate cliché someone wanted to associate with it. It was more than the random text from Connie, inviting her to a homemade dinner—Connie knew Heidi’s welcome was outlived at Brad and Vicki’s—it was the idea of family. Heidi had to remind herself that she couldn’t expect to simply insert herself into a functional family unit, and yet here she was, leaning back in an overstuffed chair and playing Risk with Emma.
Venison steaks off the grill consumed, along with a spinach and strawberry vinaigrette salad, followed up with a slice of rhubarb pie. It was all so . . . homespun. Especially since Murphy was out in the yard, putzing around with an old chainsaw he’d picked up at a garage sale, and Connie was doing a crossword puzzle on the sofa just to the right of Heidi and Emma. It was the opposite of Heidi’s life. She was edgy, her burns and cuts stung, her mother’s words echoed in her ears, and the questions plagued her with dogged persistence.
Couldn’t she ignore it all for one night? One night of blissful peace? Just pretend that she wa
s—somehow—a Crawford, and the hardest obstacle ahead of her was how to overtake the territory of Western Europe. And how to ignore Rhett. Firefighter Rhett. Volunteer firefighter.
He was like the proverbial hero. Brawny, grouchy, earthy, and . . . fireman-y. But for all his Hulk-smashing, the green skin was wearing off and he was becoming a man. Just—a man. That was perhaps even more dangerous. Heidi wasn’t in the right emotional state to ward off dangerous. It was good he was outside and not sulking in the corner. Good that the ball he was throwing to Rüger just beyond the window was green and reminded her of his grumpy side. Good that he had stopped and looked at her through the window and . . .
Heidi tore her eyes away.
Emma stared at her, a questioning look in her eyes. “It’s your turn.”
Connie glanced up.
Heidi cleared her throat. “Yes.” She picked up a die. “I’ll roll one and attack Western Europe.”
Emma gave her a smile of satisfaction that the game was on.
She lost the attack.
Heidi sighed. Figures.
“Heidi.” Rhett’s voice cut through the room. Heidi started, and a few of her armies tipped over. Emma reached to right them.
“Yeah?” Heidi eyed him, very aware that Connie was looking between them.
There was a weird tension in the air, as though something had shifted. She didn’t know what or why. But for some reason, she saw him differently now. Maybe that was it. He had calmed her after the spray-painted ominous message at the asylum ruins, and he’d tackled her during the fire, and somehow his force had shown her he had more control over the situation than she did. Why did she like that? She’d no desire to be dominated. No. It wasn’t domination. Far from it. It was that he was logical and capable of handling such moments when she clearly wasn’t. When she was jumpy and on the verge of tears. The yin to her yang.
“Come outside,” he said. Another directive, but spoken in his no-nonsense voice that communicated nothing other than a suggestion but without the extra words.
The Curse of Misty Wayfair Page 25