Lost Among the Living

by Simone St. James

  Perhaps he is protecting you, I heard Alex say.

  I crawled to Alex and cradled his head. “Don’t look,” I whispered, my breath pluming in the icy air. Behind me, there was a smell of blood, the heavy scrabble of something on the terrace tiles, the sound of breath that I knew was hot and rancid, and very soon Robert stopped screaming.

  • • •

  I curled up against Alex in the silence that followed, pressing my body heat to his. He had begun to shiver.

  “I have to go to the telephone,” I told him, not wanting to let him go. My own hands were shaking, and my stomach churned. I tried not to think of the dragging sounds I’d heard on the terrace. Robert was gone.

  Alex found the strength to grip my waist with one bloodied hand. “I already did,” he said. “They’re coming.”

  I stroked his temple and pressed my cheek to his. Alex, who solved problems even after he’d been shot. Alex, who had taken every risk in order to come home to me. Alex, who had done everything only because he loved me.

  “Don’t leave me,” I said to him.

  He gripped me harder, winding his hand in the fabric of my blouse as if holding on, and then he closed his eyes.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  In the end, my husband refused to die.

  It was a close thing, so close that at my lowest moment I sagged against the wall of the hospital bathroom, where I had just dry-heaved the contents of my empty stomach, and sobbed without restraint. My stomach and chest were dark with bruises from where Robert had kicked me, and my knee was twisted in pain. I had worn the same dress for days. I stared at the bleach-scented tiles through burning eyes and told myself I simply couldn’t survive his death again. But afterward, I got up and went back to his bedside and held his hand through another night.

  The world became disjointed, as if I were watching it from afar through broken glass. I no longer knew the timeline of my life. Men spoke to me—men I didn’t know, one after the other in a long line. Men in suits and uniforms and policemen’s caps, men with mustaches and beards. There was a doctor, telling me that the bullet had gone high, angled upward into Alex’s shoulder, and had missed his vital organs, but he had bled so much the situation was still grave. You must be strong, Mrs. Manders, for his sake. I thought, I am already strong. I was strong yesterday, and the day before that. But I did not know whether I spoke aloud.

  Moments—or hours, or days—later, there were faces of policemen, asking me questions. What, exactly, did you see? Where is Robert Forsyth? Did he strike Mrs. Forsyth before or after he fired the gun at your husband? Are you sure? Are you certain the knife pierced his leg? What exactly did he say? Let us go through it again, Mrs. Manders. Are you quite certain? I answered them with a voice that seemed to come from someone else’s throat, the words forced and difficult, as if they had been swallowed inside me and would not come up again. The thought of Frances moved through my scattered mind, and I remembered that it was very important I not speak of her, that I not tell what her father had done to her, though I could not quite remember why.

  I had memories of moving like a ghost through the corridors of the hospital, finding my way from the men’s ward to the women’s ward. Of Dottie lying in a hospital bed, bandages swathed around her head, her eyes sunk into dark pools of skin. Concussion, they had said. I sat by her bedside when I could tear myself from Alex’s, though I did not hold her hand. The first time she opened her eyes, she stared at me blearily without speaking, and we sat in silence, looking at each other like strangers.

  “Where is he?” she asked me finally, her voice a rasp.

  I searched my memory. “Gone,” I replied.

  “Escaped?”

  No. Wherever Robert Forsyth was, he had not escaped. “It was Princer,” I said.

  Her face relaxed, and she looked away. “Good girl,” she said, and I knew she was not speaking of me.

  I did not tell the police about Princer. I told them that Robert Forsyth had shot my husband, pistol-whipped his wife, and assaulted me. When I had stuck a knife in his leg, he had run through the doors to the terrace and vanished into the woods. I saw the rest of it every time I closed my eyes—the leaves, the thing coming from the woods, Frances raising one pale hand, the sound of the thing coming through the French doors behind me—but I didn’t speak it aloud. I sat by Alex’s bedside and watched the waxy pallor of his face and tried not to remember any of it at all.

  I sat across from David Wilde, who was coaxing me to eat a bowl of soup. He was dressed in a suit of navy wool, with a gray necktie that set off the strands of silver in his hair. He held a cup of tea in his good hand. He, too, spoke to me, and as the soup revived me, I began to comprehend his meaning.

  “Newspapers?” I said.

  “I have fended them off,” Mr. Wilde replied. “No reporter will be bothering either you or Mrs. Forsyth. They’re still running stories, of course—what happened at Wych Elm House is prominent news. I’m hoping that with no statement from the family, the interest will eventually die down.” He set his teacup in its saucer and pushed my untouched cup across the table toward me with unmistakable meaning. “I have also seen to the servants’ wages and arranged to have the house cleaned. It should not be distressing for you and Mrs. Forsyth to return to Wych Elm House.”

  With the tea, the fog cleared from my brain and it started to work again. “What about Martin?” I asked him.

  “He is under a doctor’s care in London,” Mr. Wilde replied. “I have spoken to both him and Mrs. Forsyth—Mrs. Cora Forsyth, that is. He is not well enough to travel here. He goes under surgery in two days. I have kept the reporters away from them as well.”

  I thought you might have murdered Frances, I nearly said aloud. What a fool I had been. “Mr. Wilde, I am so sorry,” I said.

  He thought I was apologizing for the trouble he’d gone to. “It’s my job, Mrs. Manders,” he said in his calm, competent voice. “The family is going through an exceptionally difficult time.” He spoke more gently. “How is he?”

  “They tell me he’ll live.”

  “Then you must get back to him.”

  I returned to the hospital room to find Alex awake in his bed. A nurse had propped a pillow behind him and given him a sip of water. I stood in the doorway for a moment, feeling a wild beat of disappointment because a nurse had been here instead of me. And then I was at his bedside, taking his hand in my shaking one and most certainly not crying.

  “Come here,” he said after a moment, and I leaned onto the bed, my arms around his neck, as he put his arm around me and let me sob quietly.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, his voice choking a little. “He took me by surprise. Stupid of me.”

  “I hate you,” I said into his neck.

  “Yes, I know.” He rubbed my shoulder and my upper arm through my cardigan, his grip weak but determined. “How long have I been out?”

  “Four days.”

  Alex swore softly.

  “I’m sorry. Does this hurt?” I asked, trying not to grip him quite so tightly.

  “Stay where you are, if you please. I have you exactly where I want you.”

  “It’s been horrible. I am a blotchy, overwrought dishrag,” I said, turning my head on the pillow next to him and running my fingers over his four days’ beard. It looked handsome on him, of course.

  “You are gorgeous,” Alex replied, his thumb weakly rubbing the back of my neck beneath my hair. “Now tell me everything that’s going on.”

  “You just woke up.”

  “Yes, and the police have probably been informed already. They’ll be by for a chat anytime. So tell me everything, Jo.”

  I did, surprised at how much I could recall through the haze of my panic. He stayed awake long enough to say it was all a bloody mess, and he would make everything right, and that he’d be out of bed in no time; it was just one bullet. Then he dri
fted off to sleep again. I disentangled myself from him and went to the women’s ward to see Dottie.

  • • •

  “Alex is awake,” I told her.

  Her head was still bandaged, but she was sitting up, her hands folded on top of the coverlet. Her gaze was alert, but there was something different about it, something not quite Dottie. There was no sign of her usual sharpness. Instead, she looked at me from her dark-ringed eyes with an expression tinged with confusion.

  “I have just spoken with David Wilde,” she said.

  I nodded. He had visited her after his conversation with me, then. “He told you about Martin?”

  “Yes.” Her hands twitched on the covers. “Manders,” she said, though the word was spoken softly, with none of its old sting. “I have been thinking.”

  I sat and waited. Her thinking seemed to have slowed.

  “I have told David everything,” Dottie said, ignoring my surprise at her use of his Christian name. “Everything that I heard . . . Robert say to you. Though I did not repeat what he said about Alex.”

  She meant the part in which Robert had spoken of Alex coming home to investigate treason. “Dottie, there is an explanation—”

  “Stop,” she said weakly. “I don’t wish to know more than I already heard. Alex’s doings for the past three years, whatever they were, are his business. It’s David I want to talk about. He has apologized to me.”

  “Apologized?”

  “There is a woman living in the village,” Dottie said. “A former servant of the family. Over the time we’ve been gone, David and this woman have formed a personal attachment.” A flash of her old sharpness crossed her glance. “I hope I do not shock you, Manders.”

  “No,” I replied. “Though I wonder about Mrs. Wilde.”

  She pursed her lips just a little. “David’s troubles are of his own making and are not for me to repeat. I’m too tired to even attempt it. However, this woman—”

  “Petra Jennings,” I supplied.

  “Yes.” She showed no surprise that I knew the name. “She came to David and told her Robert had threatened her.”

  “Threatened?”

  “Yes. When you and Alex left me that morning, you apparently went to this woman’s home and spoke to her. Robert knew of it somehow. He thought that Alex had told her his secret—what he did to Frances and why. He believed she was going to be used against him as a witness to the day Frances died and to the sketches Frances had made in her book. He told her that if she agreed to testify, he would kill her.”

  I sat back in my chair and stared at her, my tired mind putting it together. “That’s why she left her home. That’s why she was gone.”

  “David thought it best to get her to safety, so he accompanied her to her home and helped her pack her things. Then he moved her to a hotel in a nearby town under an assumed name. When he had finished, he fully intended to warn me.”

  “But he was too late,” I said. Alex and I must have come to Petra’s house only shortly after they had left.

  “Yes.” Dottie raised a hand and lightly touched her bandage, then dropped it again. “He wished to apologize to me, not only for his failure but for the embarrassment of his situation. I had no idea about the woman, of course. I would have taken him to task if I’d known.”

  I thought about it. What if Alex and I had been earlier arriving at Petra’s house? What if we’d met her and David Wilde, if we’d been warned? Everything could have been different.

  “What I’ve been thinking,” Dottie said, “is that you must have known about Robert. That’s why you went to that woman’s house. You and Alex must have known, and you did not tell me.”

  “No,” I said. “We didn’t know. But we believed it wasn’t suicide, that someone had killed her. We thought Petra Jennings might hold the key.”

  Dottie leaned back against her pillows. “You believed she’d been murdered because of Frances’s ghost,” she said, her voice tinged with confusion again. “Is that the way of it?”

  “Yes. I wanted to tell you, that day in the library, but it already sounded mad. And I had no proof.”

  Dottie waved a hand at me, and I noticed how the bones were almost visible beneath her pale skin. “I am not interested in more apologies. My daughter, whatever her reasons, chose you to appear to. She chose you to tell.”

  She also chose me to protect, I thought but did not say. “Yes.”

  “What I want . . . The only thing I want, Manders, is to know whether she is still in Wych Elm House.”

  I would have to go back to the house to see. The thought of going back there froze me to my seat. “I can’t.”

  “I think you can,” Dottie said.

  I felt sweat break out on my back, my palms. “And if she’s there?”

  “Then find out why.” Dottie’s voice was drifting into exhaustion now. “Find out what keeps her from being at peace.”

  “Dottie—”

  “Please.”

  She had never said that to me before. She had lost her daughter, her husband, and possibly her son, while I had Alex back. I understood how loss like that can rob you. It made no matter that I never wanted to see Wych Elm House again.

  “All right, Dottie. I’ll go,” I said. I stood, but at the door I turned to her again. “May I ask you one question?”

  Her eyes had drifted closed, but she waved a hand in agreement.

  “Why did you come back?” I asked. “You left the house to follow Martin to London. Why did you turn around?”

  She opened her eyes and gave me that confused look again, and seemed to have to search for the words. “He asked me,” she said finally, the words lacking her usual force. “In the letter he left. Martin asked me not to follow him. I disregarded that at first—I was furious. But as I drove I realized that following him would only make things worse. Martin is grown now, and married, and he did not need his mother chasing him around the country.”

  “So you turned around and came home,” I said, “and overheard everything.”

  “I was on the front step when I heard the gunshot,” she said. “I thought we were being robbed. I told the driver to go for the police, and then I walked around to the kitchen door to get a knife.” She closed her eyes again. “The servants were gone. I could hear Robert’s voice. You were screaming, screaming.” She paused. “I never wish to hear that sound again. But I got a knife and crept up the stairs to see if I could stop it.”

  I thought of her, small and narrow, walking to the kitchen door in her oxfords to fend off whoever was robbing her precious home. How utterly indomitable she was. “Dottie,” I said, “we should have used you to win the war.”

  But she had already drifted off, and she didn’t hear me.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  It was nearly ten o’clock the next morning when I stood on the front steps of Wych Elm House, getting up my courage to go in. I felt outside myself, like a strange skin had been pulled over the old Jo, the events of the past few days changing me in ways I did not yet recognize or begin to understand. All I knew was that I wore the same dress as the old Jo, the same shoes, the same hat and gloves. There was an ache behind my eyes that I knew came from exhaustion, my bruises hurt, and my legs felt weak, but still I made myself open the door and go through it.

  The house smelled of lemon polish and wood underlaid with a harsh, clean smell that I didn’t recognize. Here was the familiar umbrella stand, the worn rug. I stood for a moment, as if Frances would show herself to me as I stood there by the front door, waiting for her to appear. When nothing happened, I walked into the corridor.

  I passed rooms left as I remembered them. The large parlor, where I had first met Martin, where I had first seen Alex the night of the party. The small parlor, where I had seen Frances sitting in a chair, her head turned to look at me. She was not there now; nor was there any trace of her.
I felt as if I were touring a house I had not seen in years, or perhaps only touring it in the depths of my memory, an old woman thinking back to a place I had been.

  In the library, I stopped in the doorway, jolted back to the present. Dottie’s desk was tidy, her papers stacked, the telephone in its cradle, her ashtray clean and set perfectly on the front corner. My typewriter under its cover sat at the little table by the window, my chair pulled up beneath it. The shelves of untouched books, the small sofa—all was just as it was supposed to be, yet it had the quality of a museum piece, of strangers putting together a room as they guessed it should look.

  I glanced down and noticed that the carpet was different. It had been changed—the old one must have been too soaked with Alex’s blood to be saved. I tried to picture a team of servants in here, rearranging the furniture and rolling up the bloodied carpet, but my mind’s eye failed me. Alex had been shot here, had staggered to the desk and used the telephone. Someone had dutifully wiped his blood from the receiver.

  I backed out of the library and continued down the corridor. My temples were throbbing. Here, on this clean and polished section of floor, was the place where I had fallen, where Robert had kicked me. The skin of my ribs and stomach was still an ugly purple and yellow mix. Here was the place I had lain screaming. I made myself blink and look away.

  I passed the doorway to the back stairs, where Dottie had crumpled to the floor, and walked into the morning room. This room, too, was clean, everything put away by strangers. The carpet was new—again, Alex’s blood must have ruined the original. Especially in the spot where he had lain, holding on to me, his head in my lap as I waited and waited for the ambulance to come.