by Don Sloan
Over the intervening years modernizations had taken place, but always with an eye toward preservation of the house’s exterior and, to a remarkable degree, of the interior. Even some of the furniture inside dated back to the 1880s, including a remarkable baby grand piano in the parlor. Nathan had learned to play on this piano, taught patiently by his Aunt Millie, and he could still sit for hours playing endless riffs and chord changes that started out in the key of C but usually wound up two or three changes up or down.
He played as the mood took him―usually pensive melodies that mirrored his steady but reflective personality. Never one to draw attention to himself, Nathan had been the antithesis of his fast-moving father and mother, who had lived life to its fullest, growing up in the 60s and spending much of their youth shocking the much more staid members of the family who gathered at this wonderful mansion on holidays and during the summers.
These were special times for Nathan, who remembered his parents fondly. They had only the two children, and lavished love and affection on Nathan (as the “baby”), not holding back in the least and letting him share in their great zest for living. Perhaps it was this very penchant for experientialism that caused their deaths, while Nathan was at college one year. His parents had died while on a cruise in the Bahamas―victims of an unfortunate mishap when the small boat being used to ferry passengers back and forth to a private island had capsized in rough seas.
Neither of his parents were particularly good swimmers and they had disappeared quickly beneath the waves, since no one in the launch was wearing a life vest. Nathan had received the news while at Berkeley, during the fall semester of his senior year, and the entire experience had been surreal: the half-hearted search for survivors conducted by Bahamian authorities, the memorial service in Philadelphia, where his parents had lived in a brownstone not far from the one he now owned. And, finally, the deep sense of loss he had carried for all these years, wishing he could share mornings like this with his father and mother, yet knowing it would never be.
The dull ache of loss never quite went away, but Nathan was not the type of person to dwell on such matters. And so he thrust the feelings deep into some inner pocket of his soul, to be taken out, he supposed, and dealt with at some future time.
The eastern sky was still dressed in shades of ruby and amethyst behind a quickly rising sun as Nathan turned the corner off Beach Avenue onto Howard Street. “Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. A change must be on the way,” Nathan said to himself as he headed into the heart of the small town. Cape May had a rich history and it was evident in just about every corner.
Originally explored by Cornelius Mey in 1621 for the Dutch West India Company, the area still bore his name. It grew slowly into a prosperous whaling and farming community and then, as southern gamblers seeking to escape the summer heat came to the area in the early 1800s, it became an internationally known resort. Still later, society up and down the Eastern seaboard made it the “Playground of the Presidents.” A disastrous fire destroyed the center of the resort and many of the hotels in 1878, but it was quickly rebuilt, establishing the treasury of Victorian architecture.
Nathan walked more quickly now as hunger pangs awakened within him, and he reached the Chalfonte Hotel at the corner of Sewell Avenue and Howard Street. Built in 1876 by Col. Henry Sawyer, the fine old hostelry still served one of the most magnificent family-style breakfasts in the area. Sawyer, a prisoner of the Confederacy during the Civil War, achieved greater historical note when, during the war, he was exchanged for Col. R.E. Lee, Jr., son of the Confederate leader.
Nathan ordered hot black coffee, a full ham and egg breakfast with a side order of fluffy biscuits, and pulled out a small notebook to begin planning his day.
Sarah was still sleeping while Nathan was having breakfast. Her night had not been a pleasant one, with bizarre dreams she did not understand. In the dreams, she flew about the house as though transported by spirits, witnessing first one horrific scene and then another.
it wasn’t the alcohol that made him do it, you know
well, then, what was it, my dear?
it was the terrible jealousy that had turned him into
a floating slaughterhouse, full of slaves still pinioned by their legs to their berths but lying now in staggered heaps that buzzed with bluebottle flies and
couldn’t be the same wife he married in 1858, just before the War. This one had no eyes because he had gouged them out before
turning to the youngest daughter, crying in a corner of the room as she blindly stumbled about the beautiful morning-drenched kitchen, innocent as a mother’s love but now dangerous as an early autumn hurricane, riding in on
the blood-covered backs of rats, running for cover as he drew a practiced bead on each one and fired the single-shot musket until it
fell smoking from his own dead hands, the last shot traveling on a straight line from the roof of his mouth and out the back of his head.
“No!” shouted Sarah as she sat straight up in bed, drenched through her cotton nightshirt in cold sweat. “No! No more!” she cried aloud. Her eyes flew open and she was astonished to see bright morning sunlight flooding the room. But the voices, the voices still echoed in her mind. Already they were fading, but they left a pounding―a throbbing sensation that could not be attributed completely to the wine from the night before.
“Oh, man,” she said finally. “Sarah, when you decide to get drunk and have a nightmare, that is one area in which you excel. Man!” she said again. “Your imagination puts Stephen King in the shade.” And suddenly Sarah laughed, for she could not stand the writings of King or any other horror novelist. When she read at all (which was seldom) she preferred magazines, and these she thumbed absently from back to front, noting chiefly the photos and the captions under them.
Standing in the full, cheery sunlight that streamed in the front window, she yawned and scratched, and made a mental note to take a long nap that afternoon. And with that thought firmly in place, she moved off toward the bathroom down the hall.
Sarah had grown up in a South Philadelphia neighborhood on South 12th Street. It was a middle-class collection of brick-faced, three-story houses, each one a carbon copy of the next, with cosmetic differences apparent mostly to the owners. Her father and mother had also lived there, he a pharmaceutical sales manager and she a tireless volunteer worker for several area non-profits. Sarah had gone to elementary, middle and high school within walking distance of each other―a long walk, to be sure, but walk she did, whenever the weather permitted. Other times she took the subway or the bus through the crowded streets, or her father or mother had dropped her off. But she had grown up totally middle class and as ordinary as Wonder bread.
It had been a happy time for Sarah and she had been to this house at the shore many times during her childhood and teen years. When she went away to college, she had not gone far―only to a university on the edge of the great city, and majored in mathematics, a subject in which she had excelled in high school. At one time she had thought of becoming a teacher and emulating one of her favorite teachers, Mrs. Brookstone. But she had found the education and child psychology courses tedious and had switched early in her junior year to a straight business degree track.
In college, she had been unremarkable except for her GPA, which startled even herself. She did not try that hard to make good grades, but the routine of study and note-taking had always been second nature to her, and she excelled without even trying. Thus, when NYU’s school of business had come recruiting with a full ride graduate scholarship, she happily packed up and moved to New York.
Two years later, with two diplomas in hand, the day after her open-air graduation ceremony in Washington Square, she went job-hunting back in Philadelphia and landed at Chase with an entry level job in one of the many cubicle warrens reserved for MBAs fresh from the nation’s degree factories. And there she worked many ten- and twelve-hour days, proving her worth in several banking areas before finally lan
ding a key staff position in the huge mortgage banking division of the company.
Living on South Christopher Columbus Boulevard near the Delaware River, in a small corner flat with two other women from Chase, Sarah had settled into a comfortable routine, working and occasionally dating, all through her early and mid-twenties, never getting particularly serious about anyone until Rob came to work one day. A chance meeting in the break room blossomed into a romance―the first serious involvement for Sarah―and when it ended recently, she felt as though she had been cast adrift.
Her friends did their best to console her, but in the end she decided that the best thing to do would be to get away and lick her wounds alone, and try to re-center her life with new priorities and goals. It was a formula that had worked well for her in the past and would undoubtedly do so again, once the grieving was over and she was able to start fresh again.
That was the primary reason she had come to Cape May on a mission―to rediscover herself in terms that she knew were not going to be dependent on anyone but herself. If nothing else, experience had taught her that when all else fails and everyone is busy leading their own tangled lives, it’s solely up to you to jump-start your recovery and choose life again over all other alternatives.
“Nazis Invade France!” screamed the headline of the Cape May newspaper Nathan picked up in the attic. The Jesus-Returns typeface took up half the front page, and was reserved only for the most momentous of news.
“Well, I guess that pretty well qualifies,” Nathan said, and, putting the brown, brittle edition to one side, he picked up another, this one an issue dated around the same year―1939―but with local headlines at the top: “Dismembered Corpse Puzzles Investigators. Unsolved String of Homicides Continues.”
These were the stories that Nathan had heard about as a child, but never in great detail. One of the rites of passage for young cousins in his family had been the endurance of the re-telling of these stories around bonfires on the beach. It was the unhappy chronicle of insanity and evil deeds supposedly played out in the houses along this stretch of Beach Avenue that each new cousin, brought on family holiday to the shore, was forced to hear as night crept close around their shoulders and the sea waves crashed just beyond the firelight.
Nathan now read with interest the news stories from that time period, when a serial killer had allegedly ranged up and down the sleepy sea town, perpetrating the most terrible crimes possible and, in the end, escaping justice by eluding police. The murders, seemingly random, had never been solved, although suspicion had centered on migrant workers moving through the area on their way to work the apple orchards of the Northeast.
This theory, which was the best that could be put forth by local authorities, never fully materialized and the series of incidents faded slowly from local gossip and speculation into that great netherworld where all unwelcome stories finally go. Daily life, which had moved forward as America was plunged into World War II, forced the incidents into recent memory, then distant memory and, finally, into the legendary stuff of which all great ghost stories are made―incidents with the Lizzie Borden combination of horror and true crime, but comfortably either far-off or in a distant time and therefore unbelievable except by firelight.
Nathan had decided after breakfast that morning to begin poking around in the attic to make sure there were no leaks hiding in the roof of his new property. And up among the broad timbers that formed the great skeleton of the house he had found no leaks—but he had discovered this trunk full of newspapers shoved under a pile of assorted wooden odds and ends.
Nathan read the articles with interest about the doings from 70-plus years ago. But, even in the dim, dusty confines of the attic, he could not muster up any fear or connection with the house in which he now spent his vacation. These were stories from another time, and he dismissed them, bundling the papers together and carrying them over to the narrow doorway leading to the stairwell. “They’ll make good fire starter,” he said, as he dropped them with a thud onto the floorboards.
He straightened up and glanced over to the dormer window through which he could see straight out to sea. The sun was now up high in the February sky, hidden behind a high-flying wrack of clouds on its way in from the south with the weather change. The wind whistled and whooped around the eaves as Nathan walked over and looked out. A beautiful morning had turned quickly into a gray winter’s day with the promise of snow and dropping temperatures.
Well, he thought, not a big deal―I’ve got plenty of firewood and fire starter. But, as he turned to go downstairs, he noticed something strangely out of place: a tapered candle in the center of the windowsill. It had been burned, but the dust that lay thick as fungus on the heavy pewter candle holder showed that the taper had been there a very long time. And for what purpose? Nathan thought. Someone long ago had sat beside this window in a nearby straight backed chair with a candle, perhaps reading during a long, dreary day and using the candle as additional light. The view from the dormer was a good one, and Nathan could imagine himself passing some time himself up here in the cozy nook. So he left the candle, making a mental note to bring matches and a book with him next time he visited the attic.
At 5 p.m. Sarah decided to go out to eat. It had been a busy day for her around the house, but a productive one. She had gone straight through and removed every sheet and blanket from every stick of furniture, scrubbed the kitchen free from years of half-hearted cleanings and otherwise tidied up in a hundred ways, so the house now felt as though it had her imprint.
She no longer felt the dark lingerings of the night whispers, and it was as though she had exorcised the house somehow through sheer sweat and hard work. The idea of a nap had not crossed her mind again since the morning and now, as she glanced at her watch and saw the time, she realized she had gone through the day without eating―something she often did and about which Rob had often chided her. Indeed, it was not an illness―just absent-mindedness that bordered on clinical single-mindedness.
Some people would call it task-intensive behavior, Sarah thought, but Rob had always referred to it as a mild form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. This from a man who could not have organized a sack lunch, much less his own life, she thought. And it was over just such a minor, personal issue that the final argument had come―the one that had sent Sarah from their apartment in tears and, a few days later, to the shore and to this day, with the sky darkening outside.
“Looks like snow,” she said, as she bundled on the down jacket and wrapped a colorful woolen scarf around her neck. “Guess I’ll need this, too,” she said and pulled a light blue woolen cap, with tiny interwoven violets, down over her ears. Glancing at her reflection in the hall tree mirror, she saw a young woman somehow changed from just last week, somehow older.
For the first time she saw wrinkles creeping into the corners of the skin beside her eyes and she drew a wry face, imagining how she might look in 40 years. “Well, at least I’ll wear nice hats,” she said finally and smiled, banishing the image of old age to its proper place―that holding area of the mind reserved for unpleasant thoughts and memories, to float and bump against other images and strands of past happenings until they become hard to recall and therefore less painful.
She opened the door and went out into the gathering gloom of a pending nor’easter.
Nathan had also planned to go out to eat. His day had been much like Sarah’s, puttering around the house and outbuildings, looking for projects that might keep him busy during his two-week stay. He had found several, but had decided in the end to just pace himself and do one per day, leaving the rest of the day open for aimless meandering up and down the beach or lounging with a good book in front of the fire.
Unlike Sarah, he had no issues with inactivity, or breaking off a project in the middle to do something completely worthless. He had learned long ago that life should be enjoyed rather than just gotten through. “You’re going to be dead a long time, Nathan,” a friend had told him once during a period
when he had been working for many hours straight. “You need to remember that the work will always be here, but you may not be.”
Nathan had taken this advice to heart and it had given him a wonderful perspective on living and dying. Now, neither work nor any other task seemed to be as important in his priority-setting as they once had been.
He threw on his Lands-End jacket and went out bare-headed onto the wide front porch. He looked to his left and was pleased to see the Adirondack chairs sitting patiently waiting for him. He had brought them around from the outbuilding and promptly crossed that task off the list he had made at breakfast.
He looked up and noted that the clouds had gathered into a seamless, dark blanket that floated only a thousand feet or so above the crashing waves. To Nathan, they looked bloated and bruised, as though something needed to be disgorged. That would be a heavy snowfall, Nathan thought, and none too far away at that. “I’d better get going,” he said, and walked out the front gate.
Snowflakes began to fall as tiny granules, covering Sarah’s jacket and hat with a layer of white. The temperature was dropping and the wind had whipped up as she turned the corner from Jefferson onto Kearney Avenue. The wind gusted across the almost deserted streets and twisted the fine snow pellets into pale sheets that skimmed across the pavement and skidded against the curbs.
There was very little traffic and Sarah crossed in mid-block to reach the door of the Italian restaurant that was her favorite. A rising wind took the front door out of her hand as she opened it, banging it back against the brick front of the restaurant.
With some effort, she retrieved it and pulled it shut behind her as she entered the familiar interior, warmed by a friendly blaze in the propane fireplace off to her right. There were several people dining, but one table for two sat empty near the fireplace and without hesitation she crossed to it and began taking off her jacket and hat.