Farthest House

by Margaret Lukas

  “Well, thank God for that. Haven’t I nursed you all summer? Clay isn’t family. Mom would turn over in her grave. This is a family estate. It must stay in the family. Anything else would be criminal.”

  Criminal? Willow’s eyes narrowed. Was it possible that Tory hadn’t noticed the missing books, or was she playing the biggest bluffing game of her life?

  “It’s your illness,” Tory said. “It’s confusing you. You may not think so, but you’re not yourself.”

  “You need to live elsewhere. I’m telling you to go.”

  “This is my house.” A long and thin finger pointed to the floor. “Everyone knows this is my house.”

  Watching the pair, I felt sorry for Tory. The things she’d done were wrong, but I still remembered the little girl. She’d never lived anywhere else; all her ghosts were there.

  “It isn’t your house,” Willow said. “You know it isn’t.”

  “I won’t be sent away. I won’t have people knowing Mom left this to you.”

  Willow watched her, wanting to rip the stupid fabric from her hands. She’d watched the charade of Tory’s sewing the summer long. “Is that it? Your pride?” As she asked the question, Willow realized it had been Tory’s pride, too, that benefited from the phony will. Papa hadn’t benefited. He must have gone along with it though, and the thought made Willow shift in her chair. “Tell people whatever lies you want, I don’t care. Tell them the house is too drafty or you have bad knees and can’t manage the stairs any longer. I don’t care what lie you tell them.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’ve earned this house, and it’s mine.” She dropped her eyes to her work. An easy and cold confidence controlled her movements. There was a long silence before she raised her chin, her face composed. “I’m sorry,” she smiled. “You surprised me is all. I never expected this of you. Maybe there’s been a misunderstanding.” She put her hoop back in her basket. “We’re Starmores.” A second smile. “We decide everything over tea, don’t we? The kettle is already on. Do you mind? I’ll fix a pot and be right back.”

  Willow’s mind felt wind-swept as she watched her aunt leave with a straight back and her carriage proud. She had no intention of eating or drinking anything Tory touched, and Tory’s assumption that she would was as naive as locking up a room and publicizing where you kept the key. Pitiful, actually. So pitiful that Tory obviously needed psychological help, and Willow wondered if Papa had known this about his sister. Who killed bees and spent their life making the same dolls over and over and hoarding them in boxes?

  46

  In the minutes Tory was away, Willow paced the library. Too soon, her aunt returned carrying the tray, the teapot, and the two floral cups. Each cup already held tea—exactly as Willow expected. Seeing the cups and certain that the pansy with its repaired handle contained more than innocent tea, Willow’s emotions went from anger to sorrow.

  Tory set the service down, positioning her rose cup in front of herself and the pansy cup in front of Willow. Even the purple cup, Willow realized, which she’d seen as a special recognition, had only been a way of marking the poison. Furious, she reached across the small table, resisting an urge to fling the whole service onto the floor, and picked up the rose and set the pansy in front of Tory. “Drink your tea.”

  There was hesitation as Tory looked from the cup to Willow. “You were in my bedroom.”

  “Rather brave, wasn’t it?” She might have smiled. “Do you really consider that your bedroom? How about your chamber? Laboratory? Dungeon? Maybe dumpster?” She watched Tory lift the pansy cup, touch the china to her lips and swallow.

  “You don’t scare me,” Tory said. “I knew you’d been in my room because I smelled the invasion.”

  “There’s more than one kind of invasion,” Willow said. “They all stink.” She’d told herself she wouldn’t drink, swore to herself she’d not touch her lips to the tea cup, but she’d thrown down a gauntlet of sorts in switching the cups, and Tory hadn’t backed down. She lifted the rose and drank. The tea, with neither cream nor Jonah’s honey, tasted more harsh than savory. She tried to match Tory’s outward calm, as her mind churned with possible scenarios. If Tory tricked her, putting the evil in the rose cup, so be it. She’d been sick all summer, and she would survive another dose. Tory wasn’t going to give her a lethal amount—if Tory knew what that was—before she had the notarized signature she wanted. If Tory became sick, wonderful; she deserved a night, hopefully a week, of puking. The only thing that mattered was getting her out of Farthest House. If necessary, a lawyer could be called and papers served. A bit of her tension eased away, “How did you get my painting?”

  Tory waved a dismissive hand. “Shall we talk about what’s important?”

  “That’s important.”

  With a small sigh of irritation, Tory sipped more tea. “While you were in the hospital with Prairie, I went to your apartment to see Derrick. I had a baby gift.” The cup touched back onto its matching saucer. “Julian was there, and I must say, all in a huff. Seeing me only made him angrier. He was hardly a man celebrating the birth of his first grandchild. They left me standing in the hallway and went off to their important business. I walked in.”

  “What did you want with Derrick?”

  “I told you, I had a baby gift.”

  “Were you trying to find out how we were? Plotting ways to get your name on the will?”

  She shrugged. “The painting was on the easel. You underestimate me. You’re too much like Julian. Weak. I’m not leaving here. You can have the place when I’m gone. Until then, since we can’t share, Farthest House will remain in my possession.”

  “I can have you carried out.”

  “You won’t. Not unless you mean to send Jonah to prison.” Her words swelled in the air between them and seemed to sweep and fill the library. “Julian,” Tory continued, “knew all along you would inherit Farthest House, but he agreed to keep quiet about the will.” For years Tory kept the secrets, and now she relished the telling. “He couldn’t bear the thought of harming Jonah or Mom’s reputation. Maybe, he even considered you. Or was it just his own reputation he couldn’t see destroyed?”

  Under the table, Willow crossed her legs, uncrossed them, crossed them again, the foot off the floor tapping in the air. She remembered the night Papa and Red fought in the backyard, Red knocking Papa down, shouting at him to “fight,” and Papa lying on the unmown grass doing nothing. From the grass, he moved to the kitchen table and sat there seven years drinking wine and hoarding newspapers. “He managed,” Willow said, “to destroy his own reputation.”

  “I see you with Clay. Telling him, ‘Don’t write that.’ You’re even having Prairie’s name changed, aren’t you? Drunk on the family name, no matter the cost.”

  “What does this have to do with Mémé’s will?”

  “Watching you squirm is such great fun. I’ve waited so long for this day.” A sly smile toyed with her lips. “Did your precious Papa ever mention Mr. Phillip Jatlick? Our father? Did he tell you about the afternoon he walked into my room and found me being raped? Did he tell you how Mr. Phillip Jatlick grabbed him by the collar, punched him a few times in the stomach, and threatened to kill him if he told?”

  Willow felt punched, her stomach filling with a hard ache. When Papa found Derrick with Mary, had the scene from his childhood flooded back to him? She stared at the narrow block of Tory’s face.

  “My little brother, doubled over and crying, left me with that fiend.”

  There was a tremor in Willow’s voice. “How old was he?”

  Tory laughed, a quick, hard shot of sound. “Thirteen. Throughout history, boys no older and some much younger have been soldiers.” She took her time; she’d had decades to formulate her thoughts. “But he was no soldier. Later that same night, I found him hiding in the trees, cowering like a runaway, and I made him promise to kill the bastard. He never kept that promise. I had to do it myself. Your father lied to me. He failed me, Willow.”

&n
bsp; Though Tory spelled out the facts, Willow struggled with them. “He failed you, because at thirteen he didn’t commit murder for you? Do you expect me to be ashamed of him for not doing that dirty work at thirteen or even thirty or fifty? Besides, I think you’re lying. Am I supposed to pick up Prairie and run away afraid of you?” She leaned back, tried to settle into her chair, to appear calmer than she felt. “I’m not going anywhere, Tory.” In the attic, she’d painted a picture of herself as a crone with roots growing from wide hips.

  “He didn’t do what he promised,” Tory said. She finished drinking the rest of the tea in the pansy cup and refilled it. “I finally found my own solution, and with Jonah’s rake, I beat the body.”

  Willow couldn’t speak. There had been a woman in Omaha, she remembered, a murder there.

  “You know the story, how Jonah was nearly lynched for beating a woman to death with a rake. With so much of Mr. Philip Jatlick’s blood all over his rake and my testimony, he wouldn’t have gotten away the second time.”

  “But he didn’t kill that woman. That was never proven.”

  “Then, why did he bury Phillip Jatlick’s body? Would an innocent person have done that? He knew there would be a mob after him.”

  The disclosures rattled through Willow’s brain. “You framed Jonah?”

  “I didn’t frame him. His own fear did that. And society. I was seventeen, a young and innocent white girl. It would have been my testimony against that of a black man with a prior incident.” She lifted her brows. “Well. He’d have been strung up for both murders.”

  “You would have let him go to jail?”

  “You’re not listening. He’d have never gotten to jail, never had a trial. He certainly wouldn’t have lived all the way to the electric chair. The bloody rake would have sent the vigilantes off and hunting. By the time anyone wondered what I’d seen, it would have been over. He wouldn’t have lived for more than a few hours, depending on how much fun the mob wanted to have. You know your local history, don’t you Willow? You’ve heard the story of Willie Brown? Dragged through the streets, hanged, his body burned? Jonah witnessed it. We all saw the corpse in the newspapers.” Her gaze left Willow and made a slow, almost amused circle of the room. “I’m seldom in here. It’s very lovely, don’t you think?” She looked back. “I wonder who Mom would have fought for, Jonah or me?”

  Willow’s heart was knocking. Her mouth was dry. “You murdered your father and framed Jonah, and you’re telling me Papa knew and let you get away with it?”

  “If you call the police,” nothing in her voice conveyed concern, “I’ll tell them where the bones are buried. They won’t find any evidence against me, not after this long and without a coffin, but they just might find puncture marks on the skull.”

  “And if you lead them to the body, you’ll be incriminating yourself.”

  “Not if I convince them I was traumatized and so afraid for my own life that I suppressed the incident. But now, it seems,” her eyes widened a bit, “why, my memories of that awful night are returning.”

  For Willow, the air in the library had turned sodden and taken on the color of gravestones. “When did Papa find this out?”

  “I told him the morning of Mom’s funeral. He was letting himself believe Mr. Phillip had either drowned in the river or been sucked into the bowels of some far-off city. I thought that amusing.” She smiled, “Julian patrolled Omaha’s streets looking for criminals but never thought to look in his own family. Even more amusing Willow, he knew the truth for ten years before he died. He never came for me. He broke the law by letting me go free, and he broke the code of honor he’d sworn to keep.”

  Willow stood, paced, and stopped before Luessy’s row of mysteries. “The raven. This explains it. Why Papa quit police work. He couldn’t go back to arresting others while letting you go. And he couldn’t arrest you knowing what he did about your father. You’re a monster.”

  “Because I wouldn’t be a victim again?”

  “Because, after so long, you told him. You knew it would ruin him.”

  “He deserved to suffer. He was getting over Jeannie’s death, I could see that. Did you know that in the years you spent weekends here he started dating?”

  “But that ended when he heard your news and quit working. You denied him happiness, which was the whole point, wasn’t it?”

  “And there was the will, of course, which needed to say I owned Farthest House. That was all. Not so much, considering.”

  “You ruined your brother’s life so that for ten years people would believe you owned Farthest House?” That was too mean even for Tory. “There was more, wasn’t there? That was just the first step. The plan all along was to get your name on a legal will.”

  “I didn’t know why he quit the force. I hadn’t thought his not being able to arrest me would mean he couldn’t arrest others. How honorable.”

  Willow dropped back into her chair, bumping the table, and sloshing the tea in her cup. “He should have locked you up. You’re crazy.” She leaned forward. “Most people wouldn’t take that as a compliment.”

  “I’m his sister, and we were very close. He’s the one who walked out of the bedroom that afternoon. The shame didn’t just stay with him; it must have grown. He knew Mr. Phillip deserved to die. How could he arrest his sister for having killed a monster thirty-three years earlier? Let’s not forget Jonah. Julian tried for years to clear his name in connection with the murder in Omaha. He wasn’t going to implicate him in a murder cover-up, where he’d be charged, at a minimum of abetting a criminal and obstruction of justice. Suppose the case got away from Julian and ended up with Jonah being convicted? It was all too messy, too risky, over the death of a man who deserved what he got. Nothing made sense but to let it lie.”

  Tory’s skin looked waxy in the lamplight. “‘Mr. Phillip Jatlick,” she repeated to herself, “deserved to die. Julian knew that. Maybe, he was ashamed at not being the cracker-jack detective everyone thought he was.”

  Willow’s stomach rolled, but not from the tea. Her thoughts were on Papa swathed in bandages, the horrible face that had not been his face, and her mother: Jeannie. Like Tory, referring to her father as Mr. Phillip Jatlick, she never used the term mother. She turned to face the nearest library window, hoping to see out into the garden. The glass, however, only reflected the emotional squalor of her pinched face, the backside of Tory’s head with its tight bun, and the woman’s thin, bitter shoulders.

  “All this time,” Willow started to say and stopped. On his deathbed, when it seemed impossible that Papa could still care about Derrick, he wished he’d killed someone. That someone was his father. Had Tory said something to her brother while standing over his hospital bed? But Papa kill? That desire, as much as wanting to protect Tory and Jonah, Willow realized, may also have made him give up police work. He knew he carried the resolve to murder, and if he’d been a bit older or the circumstances different, perhaps if there had been a gun in the house, he might have done it. How then, could he continue to arrest others?

  “Simple isn’t it,” Tory said finishing the last of her tea. “Julian was too upset over the murder to care about the phony will.”

  “You ruined his life out of revenge and for this house, and the phony will. How did you figure that would work? Mable and Jonah were sure to tell a few loose-lipped people, and all of Greenburr would soon believe you inherited the place? How soon after that did you start scheming the second phase of your plan: getting your name on a legal deed?”

  Tory rose, her body seeming to stretch into the air. “I think we understand each other now,” she said. “In the morning, you can take your brat and move back to Omaha.”

  “Why would Jonah stay here all these years?”

  “He felt safest with Mom. Julian was trying to clear his name. Then age and Mable.” She shrugged, “I did threaten a time or two to unearth the body if he left.” She started down the aisle. “Finish your tea, dear.”

  “Taking over the hou
se against Mémé’s wishes is a way of getting back at her, maybe for not protecting you. Taking it from me is a way of getting back at Papa for the same reason.”

  Tory continued out, her walk erect, practiced, while the hoofs of a hobgoblin danced on my chest.

  “Once your name was on the will, Tory,” Willow was shouting, her hands in fists, “what did you plan to do with me? Up the doses? Then what were you going to do with Prairie? Force her on Derrick?”

  Tory disappeared, and Willow stared at the empty doorway. Now, she had the answers and she wished she didn’t.

  After a minute, she lifted first the rose cup and then the pansy to her nose. Did the pansy cup hold the scent she’d smelled on her own skin? In which case, Tory drank her own potion. Hopefully, she’d not only be sick for a couple of days; hopefully, she’d also be stung by a few dozen of the bees she lured into her trap.

  For the next hour Willow sat. All around were the old books Luessy loved, and there was the desk where Luessy read, her mind in flights of fancy. Finally she stood. Tory would be in her room by now, her tumbler of sherry in hand, and Willow wanted to walk in the garden with its moonflowers and winding paths a final time before she left. She’d walk under the stars and rein her scattered thoughts into a semblance of order.

  She pushed in the two chairs and looked around with sadness. She was saying good-bye to the room, but only for now. She’d be back, but that might not be for twenty years. Jonah would be gone by then. Should she go to him, tell him goodbye and that Tory trapped his bees? He couldn’t fight the witch, and knowing the fate of so many bees would only upset him and make him give up his hives. He needed them and deserved to keep them. Knowing might even make him leave Farthest House. He wouldn’t go to Mable’s for fear of the ridicule she’d receive. He hadn’t married her, after all. He’d walk away, not allowing himself to be loved, and too soon he’d end up dying alone under some cold bridge.