Unfinished (Historical Fiction)

by Harper Alibeck

  Unfinished

  by Harper Alibeck

  If love never dies, where does it go?

  Unfinished

  © 2012 Harper Alibeck

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

  Editor: Leslie Truver

  Cover Designer: Erik Zoltan

  Chapter One

  SPIRITUALISTS AND MEDIUMS ALWAYS HAD such cold hands. The room had been warm and friendly when Lilith Stone entered, dragged here by her mother, Margaret. Why a billionaire's wife spent so much time in séances with her friends was beyond Lilith's grasp of human nature, but then again, so were so many of her mother's choices.

  Her mother kept the group small; Cornelia Davis and Marjorie Wallis were, along with Margaret, the “Beacon Hill Biddies.” As they entered the medium's small, clean home, Lilith watched her mother evaluate the room. Shabby silks and linens covered every surface, the stain worn down to bare wood on most of the furniture. The Cambridge rowhouse inspired neither confidence, nor a sense of safety. The coachman waited for them outside, standing guard should they need assistance.

  “Welcome,” said Miss Evangeline Wolf. Her dress was plain, with a sense of fashion that dated back to Lincoln's presidency fifty years ago. Hair swept up in a fashionable coiffure, the contrast was a surprise. Intelligent brown eyes peered out from under a large forehead, and her brown hair was slicked back around her face, then puffed up. She was quite thin, but broad, her shoulders appearing to hang her dress like a seamstress's mannequin, a placeholder for the clothing.

  “I've heard she studied with the Fox sisters!” Lilith's mother whispered to the group. Margaret's appearance mirrored that of the medium, with brown hair and eyes, though a tiny frame that matched Lilith's. Both were barely five feet tall, with waists a man's hands could encircle. Lilith had inherited the shape of Margaret's jaw, which on the older woman now held small jowls, years of stress pulling her down to the ground. Perhaps this spiritual meeting could help to lessen that drag. Lilith knew that her sister, Julia, was Margaret's main worry, and would be the focus of this ridiculous show.

  “Margaret, did she really? The Fox sisters contacted some spirits who are impossible for others to reach!” Cornelia's breathy, high voice made the back of Lilith's throat fill with salty saliva. Lilith could do without the medium, but tolerated her mother’s insistent request. With Father out of town, Mother sprang to life, and having Margaret back to her old self a little, even at the cost of a séance, was a pleasure.

  Cornelia Davis looked like a female version of Teddy Roosevelt. Including the moustache, almost. Polite company avoided any mention of the small animal growing on her lip. When you married a steel magnate worth hundreds of millions of dollars, it was amazing what others could ignore.

  “The younger Fox sisters were able to convince the spirits to make sounds – to communicate in our world,” Marjorie added. Excited as a schoolgirl staring at her first girlish crush, Marjorie's color was higher. Higher than usual, for the grey-haired woman always seemed flushed. A few nips of sherry before noon, and more after, kept her face rosy. Her body as wide as it was tall. Lilith sized up the room. A free Saturday night in Cambridge and she, a young woman of twenty-four, was spending it with three middle-aged women and a con artist who preyed on the rich?

  She couldn't help herself. “You do all know,” she announced in a voice loud enough to carry into the next room, where Miss Wolf retrieved candles, “that the Fox sisters were frauds. One of them recanted her story about her abilities publicly in the newspapers. They never contacted the world of the spirits. It was all fake.”

  “Lilith!” Margaret hissed.

  Cornelia rolled her eyes. “But do you know, dear, that the same sister recanted her recant?”

  “If she could truly speak with spirits, and had intimate knowledge of affairs we non-spirit-speakers cannot know, why should she be so indecisive? How can anyone trust a word out of her mouth? Or a sound from her knuckles?” Lilith retorted. Cornelia inhaled sharply and glared at Margaret, who pointedly avoided her. As if her mother could chide her like a schoolgirl – Lilith was regretting this outing already. If learning how to unlock Julia's mind could be the end result of any of this ridiculous tedium with this pseudo-medium, then Lilith would hold back. Barely.

  Miss Wolf added to the regret by entering the room and insisting everyone sit and hold hands.

  “A word about the Fox sisters, if I may,” she said, as the women settled themselves in their places around the thick, wood table. “I did, indeed, have the pleasure of studying with them...” Her voice trailed off and her eyes locked on Lilith. A deep, unsettling silence filled the room.

  The muscles on Miss Wolf's face slid down, taking skin with them, changing her look from that of a haggard, working class phony to a blank slate, a putty face that held no real humanity. Lilith's body flushed suddenly with crawling skin, less from the chill and more from the eyes that peered like a hawk's, making Lilith her prey, from that mask of skin.

  “Why have you come?” she asked.

  Margaret cleared her throat. “My daughter. Julia. She is twenty years old and was born with a feeble mind. We see glimpses of more in her and I wish to channel a spirit that understands her.”

  The medium said nothing, which made Margaret speak more. “And my husband wishes to institutionalize her, but I do not agree. I feel that there is something – ”

  And then Miss Wolf opened her mouth and took in Lilith's dismay at the entire spectacle, making matters worse by grasping Lilith's hands in her own, as if she were drowning.

  The putty face molded into an intense, squinty shrunken head, the change in affect causing Lilith to gasp.“You do not believe,” Miss Wolf said, her voice a monotonic chant that belied her furious eyes. “But you do not need to believe. The world you denigrate continues with or without your understanding of it.”

  “What? No – I am not the daughter she is talking about!” Lilith exclaimed, pulling her hands back. The medium clung to her, nails raking her palms, a sharp pain of pierced skin filling Lilith.

  Marjorie let out a gasp, then exhaled, sending warm air that smelled of brandy and beef into the room, making Lilith nearly gag. The nausea was a welcome break from Miss Wolf's intensity, which both fascinated and revolted her.

  “But you do not believe.”

  One forceful pull released her from Miss. Wolf's grasp. “I do not care whether my belief matters to your 'world',” Lilith replied angrily.

  “Of course not. The soulless never do.”

  Margaret let out a small squeak and grabbed Lilith's shoulder, then pulled back sharply when Miss Wolf shouted “No!” Squeezing Lilith's shoulders as if grasping ropes to pull a ship to docks, she continued, listing to and fro slightly as her words came out in a slight sing-song.

  “You are a conduit. You are a channel for a very, very old spirit. This spirit comes back every century, seeking closure. I...I do not know its mission. Perhaps we're never meant to know. But you are not a single soul like all the others here. Everyone in this room is a single soul, meant to live and die and go back into the souls’ cloud, shattering upon death into thousands of fragments. When a new child is conceived, the remnants gather together, mixed portions of thousands of slivers of different souls, creating a new one.

  “That is not what happens with you.” Her dark eyes tur
ned black, narrowing, casting an evil feeling at Lilith that made her want to crawl out of her clothes and run naked through the streets to avoid the medium's scrutiny.

  “You are a whole, formed soul that never shatters. It inhabits a new child in its entirety, bent on completing a journey that is not of your doing. You are not like the rest of us. And you will never know its goal.”

  Hushed murmurs filled the room as her mother's friends bent their heads together, eyes boring into Lilith's skull. Why had she come here? She shook her head with regret, but could not bite her tongue.

  “If – if – any of this is true, then what on earth is my 'soul's mission'?” An act of sheer will prevented her from rolling her eyes.

  The medium flinched and pulled her hands away from Lilith's. The chill that filled her bones began to recede. “To ask that question is dangerous.”

  Lilith huffed dismissively. “Now I cannot ask my own soul a simple question?”

  “Lilith! Stop it,” her mother chided. A quick glance at Margaret showed she was terrified, her body leaned away from her daughter, friends' faces taut with horror.

  “Stop what?” Lilith's tone softened. Her mother's heart was a concern, and Margaret looked as white as Belgian lace.

  “Your soul is not your own. All you can do is to remove the obstacles that prevent it from its journey,” the medium continued, as if under a spell.

  “Obstacles?” Now Lilith was merely amused.

  “Yes. Most souls that use people as conduits have unfinished business. They spend centuries inhabiting conduits, using them to fulfill what could not be completed in the life before. A mother who dies in childbirth might come back to meet her child. Or lovers who were unable to experience true bliss might reconnect in future centuries.”

  “I am no mother,” Lilith exclaimed.

  “You have the motherly instincts of a brick,” her mother muttered. Lilith stifled a laugh. The entire production had turned into a séance circus.

  “Then contemplate this,” the medium urged. “What is holding you back in your life now?”

  My father, she thought, but did not say. Even Lilith knew when to stand on the safe side of the line.

  One other obstacle, though, stood in her way. That, too, she dared not mention in polite company.

  “And if I am a conduit for a lost love,” she humored the room, “would finding a way to my soul's match in this world be the answer to this problem?”

  The medium shook her head sadly. “Nothing will fix this problem for you in your current life, Miss. You are what you are. All you can hope to do is to help your soul to progress so that, in the next century, in the next body, she can find peace.” Her face resumed shape and tone, the muscles returning to their place deep in her jaw, color flushing her cheeks. Lilith could feel relief flooding the Beacon Hill Biddies behind her.

  “Why would my soul need this centuries-old ritual?”

  Weighing her words, the medium stood, faltered on unsure legs, then walked to a small door, opening it and nearly crossing through without answering. She paused, turned back, and said, “Because your entire life has been a lie. The lie needs to be undone. No soul can rest until it has experienced absolute truth.”

  A loud thump interrupted them. Margaret lay prostrate on the floor, legs akimbo, neck twisted at an odd angle against the cheap, bright carpet.

  “Mother!” Lilith cried, leaning down and elevating Margaret's head. “Michael!” she screamed, calling for their coachman. Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs as Lilith lowered her ear to Margaret's mouth. Relief flooded her at the feel of hot breath against her earlobe, her hand checking for a heartbeat and finding it steady. The man thumped up the stairs, reeking of tobacco and flush-faced with surprise.

  “Mrs. Stone? What happened?” Michael asked, leaning down and delicately sliding his arms under her legs and waist. Lifting Margaret seemed to rouse her enough to murmur something like “You can't know.” Lilith swallowed hard, the pebble of truth reappearing. Her mother's secret was her own, a different sort of obstacle that, thus far, had traveled through two generations. Not quite timeless, yet persistent nonetheless.

  Removing her coat and draping Margaret with it, she shooed Michael toward the door, a man of barely twenty carrying Margaret's tiny, elegant frame, careful to catch each step without stumbling. As Cornelia and Marjorie flitted about their biddie friend, the medium slipped from the room, glancing back nervously at Lilith as if being a conduit were a contagious disease.

  No more séances. Whatever lies stood in Lilith's way, none were worth her mother's health.

  Or Evangeline Wolf's dead eyes.

  Chapter Two

  LILITH NEVER EXPECTED TO BE STARING into her father's eyes when she lost her virginity.

  The early autumn evening was the perfect setting for John Alastair Stone's annual Beacon Hill event, the party that would fuel the society pages of newspapers within one hundred miles for weeks to come. Though Stone had spent the last few years in Toronto with his wife and daughters, he'd been born, raised, and machine-honed by the Mayflower pedrigreed family that had lived on Beacon Hill for generations. Now he'd come back to roost.

  The Harvard-Boston Aero Meet was the topic of choice, as most of the party's guests had attended the airplane show. President Taft had been in town, and John Stone had met with him, a fact he worked into every handshake, each conversation, and any offhand comment he could. Former Mayor Fitzgerald monopolized as much of Stone's attention as possible, discussing a business venture with the billionaire, and Lilith gratefully took the opportunity, out from under her father's surveillance, to achieve her goal.

  That night, Lilith positioned herself with Jack Reed, her father's new lawyer, and flirted until he knew exactly how to get her. And then she let herself be caught. The gardens were lush with ripe, turned Japanese maples and oak trees pregnant and laboring to drop their gold, pumpkin and adobe leaves on the New Hampshire granite stone floor. A bundle of mature hostas under a small maple tree provided ample ground cover and shade for Lilith and Jack.

  “Are you sure?” he murmured into her lips, his mouth a buffet of red wine and garlic.

  “Of course,” she purred. She was done with her maidenhead, ready to discard it like a broken pen or an old, torn towel. It did her no good, and at twenty-four it was a nasty reminder that she'd held on to her virginity for all the wrong reasons. In the beginning she was a good girl and stayed pure because her mother insisted. After a few years, though, she found that remaining a virgin was easy; finding a man worth sleeping with was the hard part.

  No man met her standards.

  And now her hymen was a niggling bother, something that she'd likely lost years ago riding horses at her father’s country estate, but whether the actual membrane was intact did not matter to Lilith. In fact, she doubted it, given her time at McLean and the treatments she'd received. The symbolism, however, was critical. She needed to free herself from the straightjacket of her untouched vagina.

  Well, untouched by passion.

  And with her consent.

  An obstacle in her soul's path. Indeed.

  Jack seemed nice enough, with a well-muscled body he hid under professional dress. Her eye had been drawn to him for the past year, a sympathetic man who seemed uncowed by her wealth and mind, though keen to exploit the former if it met his ambitions. A social-climbing lawyer, she knew he'd view this as a conquest but would, if need be, remain discreet. She also knew that she could trigger her father's temper with one careful whisper hissed within hearing distance of the worst Boston gossips.

  Having a twenty-four year old, unmarried daughter was a source of great embarrassment to John Stone. Knowing she'd given herself up to a lawyer, a near servant in her father's eyes, would be unforgivable. Yet she could not help herself. Surges of desire consumed her these days, as if the recognition of the obstacle made it the center of all being. Right now her focal point was a hot spot of flesh that took over her mind, her senses, her nerves and her hear
t.

  You're not untouched, a voice inside her whispered, like a snake sharing gossip, the hiss an echo that stretched out from seven years ago to now. She pushed it aside, imagining a hand reaching for a door to a cage that enclosed the snake. Whatever had happened in the mental ward was done. It could not be undone.

  But this? This she could control.

  Lilith smiled through another sloppy kiss. Jack took it as encouragement and a slow hand slid up her ribcage, searching for a breast. His other hand slid up her leg, past the garter clasp and under her bloomers to find her already wet. She'd known it would feel illicit to have a man's touch under dress but had not anticipated how her body would respond, the maddening flush of need and craving that would replace her racing thoughts. The quelling of intellect and the piquing of passion, the rush of want that only his mouth, his hands, his manhood could fill.

  And all on her terms.

  He groaned and she threw herself into the kiss, less from passion and more as an object lesson. This is how you kiss someone when you are about to make love. This is how it feels when his hand caresses your inner thigh. This is how it feel when his touch is wanted. This is how it feels when he places your hand on his clothed bulge. This is how you grasp an erect –

  And then her father's voice boomed into the open air above their heads.

  Now she began to enjoy herself, welcoming Reed's mouth against her own, a yearning tongue finding each inch of her, movements strong and close, helping to unleash a pent-up frustration that she'd carried for years, desperate now for release in the arms of a man whom she invited into her body.

  “What a lovely night for a party, Fitzgerald.” A voice replied, its tone accented with an Irish lilt, but Lilith couldn't make out the words. “What's the return on investment, then?” her father replied, his voice conspiratorial and cunning.

  He paused. His tone changed, a smile coming through his words. “And, apparently, young love is in bloom, even in this late autumn!” His baritone laugh carried through the garden and Jack froze, his arm wrapped around Lilith, holding one hip in his hand, inches from consummating the moment.