Confusion, rage, fear, disbelief—Willow couldn’t name all the wars being fought in her body. Leaving the tray behind, she hurried out of the library, her gaze sweeping up the wide and empty staircase for Tory. She passed through the foyer, into the kitchen, and went outside.
Stars hung so low she wanted to scale them, use them like footholds to crawl away, deeper and deeper into the depths of space, but blood tumbled in her ears and cemented her to the Earth. All summer, she worried about Mary, while Tory worked her stunning evil, and Prairie ate Tory’s food and learned to walk under Tory’s hateful gaze.
She walked down the unlit cobblestone paths and past roses turned black by the night. Across the yard, Jonah’s cabin looked faint and powdery in the moonlight. Fragile. She wanted to go to him at the hospital and assure him that she was on his side, but of course, he wouldn’t want her knowing about the murder. Hopefully, he was sleeping, the sound of lovely bees in his ears. He’d been right: at Farthest House the old were still finishing up a past. He tried to make her leave, but she wasn’t sorry for having spent the summer, ill as she’d been. The months renewed her love of the house, the beautiful, souled house, and she’d gotten to sit in his kitchen and feel his hands tending a bee sting on her neck.
At the edge of the hill, she looked down on Greenburr and knew Prairie was safe with Clay. She’d wait until the house came to her, Tory dead or finally carried out like a stunned bat and deposited in a nursing home. There would still be long years within the walls, with the books, and in the attic painting. She didn’t want Mr. Phillip’s murder made public, Farthest House robbed of its rich and incredible environment for raising Prairie, turning it into a place her friends would shun, as would their parents. And there was Jonah to consider. She would not have him hauled off and forced to endure a trial. The law was still more likely to believe Tory than him, and he was guilty of tampering with evidence. No house was worth destroying him. Was this the real reason he never married Mable, because he might, at any time, be hauled off to jail? He wouldn’t put her through that, have her married to a man behind bars.
She cursed herself. She should have recorded their conversation! Papa taught her that. How she missed him, and now that she knew the truth, there was so much she wished she could say to him. He’d been a good man, not perfect, but life didn’t give anyone the space for perfection. He’d been a good man, a good father to her.
She felt uneasy again. If there hadn’t been the fire, what had Tory planned to do with him? The two of them, with Willow’s twentieth birthday fast approaching, must both have been bracing for a fight. He would have nixed any plans that included taking Prairie to Farthest House, and his name would have been the first on any will. Was it possible that Tory started the fire? Likely, she’d even had a key. Papa would have given her and Mémé one when he first purchased the house, back when things were good between them, and never thought to change the locks. Or if Tory had gotten caught in Omaha the night of the ice storm, Papa would have opened his door to her. At the hospital, Red said there were bottles on the table—a detail that still bothered Willow. Were they sherry bottles? Did Tory bring them? Papa and Tory might have had a drink; he could have been talked into it, and when he went to bed, how easy it would have been for Tory to light a couple of cigarettes. Already in bed, Papa wouldn’t have questioned hearing her in the bathroom or walking around the living room.
A tremor grew in Willow’s hands. What about Jeannie? Jonah said she was sick before she died, and the bees stung her. Was it possible Tory gave her poison? Could that have made her too weak to survive childbirth? If Tory hated her brother enough to kill him, she’d kill the wife he loved.
The phone rang in the kitchen. It could only be Clay, and Willow walked numbly back through the darkness. If Tory murdered her own father, Papa, and Jeannie, that was three murders. Why not Mémé, who got so sick after arguing with Tory and died within the week? Four murders? There hadn’t been such a mass murderer in Nebraska since Charles Starkweather.
The phone rang on, and when she reached it, Clay’s worry was obvious. “Are you all right? Willow?”
The sound of her name on his breath made her shut her eyes with relief and longing. “I’ll never send you away.”
“Are you okay?”
“It’s terrible.”
“What’s going on?”
“Can Prairie and I spend the night there with you?”
“Of course.”
She ached to feel his arms around her, to already be at his house where books covered his kitchen table and a golf club held the baseball cap of the brother he loved, and where Prairie slept in real safety. She’d tell him everything, and together they’d go first to Red. Reaching Clay, though, meant walking the impossible distance back through the foyer, climbing the stairs for the car keys in her purse—where Tory drank her sherry and gloated—then back down and out to her car to drive down the hill to him. A trek when she was just managing to breathe and stay on her feet. Even the thought of hanging up the phone was equivalent to the thought of cutting an artery. She needed a moment to regroup and gather strength. “How’s Prairie?”
“Sound asleep. Has been for a couple of hours. I’ve been reading your grandmother’s mystery and waiting for your call. I guess I spooked myself.”
“Mad Apple? Did you finish it?” Trite conversation, but anything to keep him talking, to have his voice continue to hold her steady.
“I didn’t see the ending coming. The poisons didn’t kill them all. Not directly, anyway. For some, alcohol finished them off. Sooner or later, they took a drink, or had medicine containing alcohol, and bam. The deaths looked like heart attacks.”
A slow shaking crawled up from Willow’s feet, bucked through her stomach, and put rain in her voice. “Her sherry.”
“What? Tory? What’s going on?”
The rain battered in her throat, not forming words, only grief noises.
“You’re scaring me,” Clay said. “Should I call the police?”
She nodded as though he could see the hard and mute shakes of her head.
“Willow?”
“Tory, I think, I don’t know.” She missed the phone’s cradle the first time. The air in the kitchen crackled hot in her ears, and behind her, she saw the back door wide open. Her body felt Jonah-old, shuffling to close the door, to do for the sake of the house what the house needed. Then shuffling, fighting weight as if in a dream, back to the foyer where a god’s eye hung without light, climbing an empty staircase, pieces of herself sloughing off: a hat, mittens, hands, legs, and a blue coat with the collar of a dead rabbit.
47
The following afternoon, Willow sat in the shade of the portico with one of my first watercolor journals, and Prairie pulled a clattering contraption on a string no longer than her arm. All across the garden, bees crawled over blooms, their legs round and fat with pollen, but none bothered Willow. She stared at the rocks marking Thomas and my graves, and she longed to speak to her father.
She hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, but she was too restless to try, and she didn’t want to close her eyes on Prairie. Tory’s disclosures and her death were cruel and crushing, and Willow doubted she’d ever feel real safety again. Suppose she tried to sleep and woke, and Prairie was gone, too?
She’d suffered the police and ambulance sirens racing up the long hill, the invasion of their red and blue flashing lights panning over the windows, the sheriff’s boots striking the wood floors through the foyer and up the wide staircase, the sight of Tory’s body being carried down in a zippered body bag, looking longer and more substantial in death than it had in life. All of it brought back the panic she felt that icy night in March.
No mention was made of the state of Tory’s room, though after finding the body, Willow swept everything from the desk into the wastebasket. Tears flowed and anger made her hands swipe in wild motions: the pills, pestle, mortar, and drying Datura. Still, those who took away the body saw plenty. By now, word of the mess
had likely passed through town, along with the news that Tory died of a heart attack. Dr. Mahoney had asked Willow if she wanted an autopsy, and when she said, “No,” he agreed. “No point in it,” he said, “I know a heart attack when I see one.”
Prairie ran to Willow, sinking against her legs, and Willow rubbed her back, kissed her cheek, and just as quickly Prairie was off again as if she’d been refueled. I have her, Willow thought, trying to refuel her own depressed spirits, and Clay. And Jonah is back. Though she doubted the two of them would ever be close again.
She drew her legs up, her heels on the edge of the chair seat, and hugged her knees to her chest. On her jeans, a tiny red spider crawled over the rise of one knee and only inches from her face. She wanted to press her thumb down onto its small hairy back, and she wanted to take it up and keep it safe in the palm of her hand.
Forgetting the spider, her gaze crept back over the garden and the bees to the grave rocks. It all started there, and now Tory, too, was dead. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Tory sat in the library, her thin fingers lifted the pansy cup—that marked cup—her eyes steady and piercing over the rim as she drank. Now she was dead.
Though Willow lacked the will to paint, all art healed, and she forced herself to open my old journal. In a moment of silence, when Prairie dropped her string, she heard the paper and binding whisper awake. The page corners showed the most disintegration, crumbling as light as the flaky tops of too-dry piecrusts. She ran a finger over the dusty edges and then down over lines I’d drawn.
While Willow looked at the paintings, my own emotions rose and fell. Unlike her, Tory’s death didn’t cause me undo grief. I knew Tory was as alive now as she’d been sitting in the library, but Tory, like Sabine, had suffered in the physical, and I had a hand in that. I was both guilty and innocent in both cases. Until I fully understood that scale of justice and forgave myself, I could not move forward.
When I received the letter from France and saw it was from Mme. Francoise, and not Sabine, I knew it contained the gravest news. Sabine, I was told, had become pregnant, and my mother, when Sabine could no longer hide her condition, took to her bed. Mother refused food from that day forward, and within the month, she was dead. I could imagine her in her bed, gradually fading away, starved as a saint, the holy ascetic, her bones lifting out of her body, while she forbid her daughter entrance to the room. Dying before the birth of her grandchild, glad to have missed the shame. And Sabine was left to carry the burden of her mother’s death, too.
Sabine conceived even as I, a married woman, failed to do. Throughout her pregnancy, she never named the father. The Beast would only have denied his paternity and had her church-condemned for pointing at him. He would have called her a witch and turned the village against her. Perhaps, he was the first to suggest she climb the precipice, an act of contrition for her triptych of sin. I, the only one who knew him, hadn’t brought Sabine with me to America, hadn’t thought this thing possible for my little sister. I believed, like most children of abuse, that I deserved it, and that Sabine’s life would be full of ease and beauty.
She didn’t take her life for his benefit. She felt hers was over, and still she waited for the baby. Then one dark night, soon after the birth, she stood at a cliff’s edge and leapt toward the stars. But not before shearing her hair and passing through the kitchen into the scullery where amongst the shadows she stretched out her small, white hand on the scarred tabletop. While her infant slept in a warm cradle, a nurse snoring at her side, Sabine raised the small hatchet used to rid skinned rabbits of their limbs and brought it down. I heard the cry across the ocean, calling me back to the night she and I studied Thomas’s photograph of a woman who in grievous mourning had done the same thing. That night, Sabine had been in disbelief that a woman could suffer so. Sabine, by raising the cleaver over her hand, leaving the blood and her flesh there for the maids and Mme. Francoise, was telling me she knew pain that deep.
At her funeral, The Beast had Sabine’s body draped in black, shrouding her broken bones and face, but he left her ruined hand uncovered, resting on a raised pillow, a warning to all would-be sinners of the ravages of fornication. He announced to the parish, with Sabine’s shrouded body not five feet away, that the infant girl would not be sent away to a foundling house. He, the good bishop, would raise the child under his own roof. His flock, if not the house staff, nodded their approval. He would give her tutelage. I wondered if she would reach as much as eight years of age before that began. Or would she be only three years or four? And the infant, without a single protector. That was the reason Sabine needed to send a message—an act of mutilation so outrageous—that it was certain to reach me thousands of miles away.
Willow’s sudden alarm drew my attention back to her. At the bottom of the page she was on, I’d written: I, the only one who knew him. And then: Death rides into a village holding the reins of three horses. I will not let the infant be the third. The words, displaced across time, startled her.
Clay stepped up to her, bent, and kissed her cheek. She hadn’t heard him open the door or cross to her, and she closed the book, the words forgotten. He’d gone home for a shower and fresh clothes, and now, he’d returned shaven and neat, though fatigue lingered in his eyes. He sat down beside her, and Prairie came running to stand between them.
He’d called for the ambulance the night before from his place, and after reaching Farthest House and carrying a sleeping Prairie to her crib, he held onto Willow through the commotion and through the night. After Tory’s body and the emergency vehicles left, they talked of a hundred things. Toward morning, they finally dropped fully clothed onto her bed. She stared at the stubble on his cheeks and watched his face gradually relax into sleep. As he slept, she fought an urge to wake him. Had he seen everything? The rafters of dying plants? The pills in the waste basket, the painting? Had he seen the box of dead bees? How many others in the wall of boxes did he think held bees? She even fought an urge to shake him awake and warn him: You better leave. People in my life die.
She looked out as the door of Jonah’s cabin opened and he stepped into the light, his back slightly straighter and his gait less stiff. She expected him to move to his bees or to his shed for a hoe or rake, ignoring her as he’d done all summer. Instead, he stepped onto the walk, and step after step, his advance still that of a gentle old man, he came on. When he reached the flagstones, Willow was shaking, and Clay reached out, laying a steady hand on her back.
Jonah lowered himself into the chair on her right. He nodded first at Clay, his heavy eyes smiling, and then to Willow, “Yup.”
48
I was already old the night it happened, leaving all our lives changed forever. That evening, I strolled up Old Squaw Road toward Farthest House among talking birds and chirping insects. I’d had dinner with another widow lady, and afterwards, we sat on her porch and remembered our husbands. I cried a few, shaky tears thinking of Thomas, and we laughed at a couple of young women walking arm in arm toward the town’s small theatre. They had no male escorts and wore neither hats nor gloves. The Great Ziegfeld was playing and had young people spending their money to see it not just once but a second and, sometimes, even a third time. My friend and I laughed until we each peed a few drops in our knickers, and then, we laughed again, this time about the number of knickers an old woman can soil in a day.
I continued my stroll up the hill. The setting sun threw all the colors of a French villa across the sky, and the cooling evening air on my arms made me long again for Thomas’s touch.
Julian, who liked to comb the newspapers with his mother, keeping up on recent crimes, had turned fifteen. He was in Omaha with Luessy doing research, a trip she made three or four times a year. She divided her days there between the main library on Eighteenth and Harney and the police station, where she combed public records, talked with detectives about the latest police procedures, and listened to the stories of the uniformed men who walked a beat.
I rounded the hilltop corn
er, stepping from Old Squaw Road onto the long drive of Farthest House. The sight stopped me. A black Plymouth touring sedan lurked at the top. Phillip Jatlick. He was the villain who fathered Luessy’s children, and now he’d returned after weeks away.
My legs trembled from the climb, but I had a new reason to hurry. With my breath prickling my lungs, I struggled up the drive, until I finally puffed through the front door of Farthest House—my home too, since the fire that destroyed Little Nest.
Sobbing. The sound caught me, raced my heart and pinned me to the doorway. Victoria—still the name she went by at the time—and Julian were in high school, and I hadn’t heard that sort of sobbing and wailing since they’d outgrown falling off bicycles and bloodying knees. I rushed across the foyer and into the kitchen.
Victoria, standing in the satin ivory slippers I’d given her, worked with a mop. The slippers were soaked to deep red and sagged on her feet. She shot the rag head back and forth, smearing a burgundy stain the size of a washtub into the size of a table top. Blood. The back door lay open and the wide swath of a bloody smear, surely a dragged body, trailed across the threshold and into the night.
I found my voice. “What happened?”
She screamed and jerked, and her shoulders heaved in great wracking sobs. The front of her dress was a slick red apron that clung to her body.
I prayed the horror in front of me was a hallucination, that the trek up the hill had blown blood vessels in my aged brain, or sent clots to stopper them, and I was suffering an aneurysm or stroke. Dying, my brain might have been reliving scenes snatched from deep in the pages of one of Luessy’s murder mysteries. I’d have accepted anything for myself, if only Victoria could be saved. But I’d seen the car lurking in the drive, and on the table next to a soup bowl was a whiskey bottle with only an inch of alcohol still shimmering in the bottom: Mr. Phillip Jatlick. In the weeks of his absence, I’d been promising myself he was dead, safely rotting underground, his liver having finally drowned, or some woman wearing a red petticoat had mercifully pressed her derringer to his fancy shirt front and pulled the trigger.
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