Dead and Breakfast

by David Crossman

  “Yes, thanks. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  It was evident she had more than setting the table in mind. “See you at eight.”

  Caitlin glanced at her watch. “Don’t remind me. Do you girls need any help getting up to bed?”

  “Oh, no,” said Heather. “I can help her up the stairs.”

  “I feel like an invalid. I’m sure it’ll be all right in the morning. Thanks. Goodnight.”

  As Caitlin made her way up the old spiral staircase to her room, she halted on the landing. A simple observation broke through the cobwebs in her over-tired brain. When the girls first came in, she’d have sworn Delilah had been favoring her left foot. But, seated by the fireplace, it was her right ankle that got all the attention.

  Of course, as tired as she was, she didn’t have much faith in her recollection.

  An immense and ancient stillness gripped the chateau some two or three hours later when Caitlin made her nightly pilgrimage to the bathroom. She was just about to pull the flush chain when she heard hushed whispers in the hall.

  Tiptoeing to the door, she placed her ear against the crack between the door and the jamb. A baby’s breath of cool air sifted through the opening, carrying with it the unmistakable sound of voices engaged in covert conversation. Women’s voices. While not enough of the words were clear for Caitlin to extract their meaning, it was evident that emotions were on edge.

  For a moment, Caitlin thought of opening the door a crack, but reminded what a noisy proposition that could be in such an old house, she opted for a peek through the keyhole.

  The heavy iron key, perhaps original to the chateau, turned with surprising ease in its antique housing as she drew it quietly into her palm. She dropped slowly to one knee on the cold stone floor and applied her eye to the opening. The lock itself was too thick to allow a view of anything but that which it framed immediately. A light breeze of compressed air wheezed through the keyhole and dried her eye.

  The bluish wash of moonlight sloping through the balcony window at the far end of the hall was too weak to provide more than a distinction of shadows. To the left, something moved periodically in the distance at the extreme periphery of her vision. A sleeve, the hem of a garment, it was impossible to tell what it was, much less to whom it belonged.

  The exchange was followed by an unnaturally long, palpably tense silence that, in turn, was punctuated by a flurry of whispers, and Caitlin had the impression that one of the whisperers had just yielded to the other. So intensely was her concentration focused on her eye and ears that a slight, unconscious shift in position was sufficient to pry the key from her fingers. It clanged loudly on the floor.

  Reflexively her hand darted out to mute the ringing but, miscalculating in the darkness, she sent the key flying across the floor, peeling with the animated joy of a runaway bell.

  She drew a sharp breath and turned her ear to the keyhole. The whispering had stopped. In its absence, the thick silence congealed in the hall and filtered into the darkened recesses where the past resided – a silence so deep that the sound of stealthy footsteps that followed didn’t dispel it, but inlaid it with footprints.

  Somewhere a door latch clicked deliberately into place. With as much stealth as possible, Caitlin coaxed the door open to a long, muffled whine of complaint and stepped into the hall where the weary veil of moonlight left much to the imagination. It was impossible to tell which of the doors had so recently closed, not that knowing would have left her any less in the dark, since she wasn’t at all sure who was billeted where, nor could she be sure everyone was where the guest register said they should be.

  A sudden sigh of wind drifted down from the tower, wrapping its damp, chilly hem around her bare legs. At the tall stained glass window, it squeezed through chinks in the plaster and whistled eerily into the night.

  Caitlin gripped her pajama collar around her neck.

  Chapter Four–Lay Me Down to Die

  Joanna Capshaw was not an early riser, and the sedative that Amber had given her should have assured her a long night’s sleep, but something had awakened her. “Amber?” she called ,loudly enough to be heard by her stepdaughter in the adjacent room if she were awake, but not so loud as to wake her. There was no reply.

  She sat up in bed and strained her ears in the dim, gunmetal gray luminescence preceding the dawn. It had been a sound. A voice? She tried to remember but, like a dream, the memory evaporated as soon as she sought it, and it was impossible to make any meaning of the residue.

  Her arms were cold. It was then she realized one of the high windows to her balcony was open. How was that possible? It had been raining when she went to bed, so she had asked Amber to shut and lock it tight. She was sure she had.

  In the brief interval of waking, the sky had brightened slightly, enough, at least, to define the objects in the room, if not give them color. She took her pajama jacket from the bedpost and threw it over her shoulders.

  Even the shock of her feet on the cold stone floor couldn’t erase the echo of the sound that had awaken her. “Amber?” she said again.

  In the full-length mirror on the wall across from where she stood, a reflection came slowly into view. The negligee was familiar, but the frail, frightened woman that filled it was a stranger. Her eyes, little more than black hollows in the pale light, stared back, unblinking, betraying both a numbness and a desperate neediness; a cruel parody of the woman Joanne had once imagined herself.

  Her husband’s accident had left her to raise his daughters on her own. And now only one of them was alive. The other was with him.

  Outside, a lone bird tuned up listlessly, rehearsing his age old part in the raucous symphony that would follow.

  What had wakened her?

  Jamming her toes into her slippers, she scuffed sleepily across the broad expanse of the room.

  The floor-to-ceiling window opened outward, so she had to step out onto the shallow balcony to reach the latch. That chilly communion with the raw morning mesmerized her briefly. It was too early to tell what kind of day it would be. The shredded veils of mist that haunted the hollows and hillsides was common to the region and heralded both fair weather and foul.

  Grasping the wrought iron railing with both hands, as if she would seize the morning and hold it in place by the force of her will, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, slowly. It was the first time in a long time she had inhabited her senses or felt any connection with the world around her. Perhaps time, after all, would diminish the nightmare of the last year to manageable proportions.

  She exhaled deliberately, completely, exorcising the persistent spirits of those memories. New sounds flooded into the vacuum of her consciousness: dew drops falling from the eaves and splattering on the flowers in the window box, the low-throated clucking of swans in the reeds that lined the river where it spilled into the moat, and the rhythmic gurgling as it emptied through rough-hewn drains of stone into the deep, black waters of the mill pond.

  Joanna had just allowed herself to smile when the idyll was shattered by an alarming cacophony of inhuman cries. Her eyes flashed open as a small flotilla of ducks dispersed in a shimmering panic of foam and feathers, as if a stone had been hurled amongst them.

  Something drifted through the reeds and into the moat. Trash? Joanna blinked and squinted through the mist. Somebody’s laundry? In an instant, her heart went out to the poor homemaker who would wake to find the clothesline had been robbed by the wind. Then, as if by chemical reaction, the fog dilated around the object, revealing a distinctive web of matted copper hair, pale, delicate hands and feet, even the billowing folds of the familiar lavender nightgown.

  Joanna choked on bile that surged to her throat, her hands flying to cover her mouth as the world began to whirl around her.

  As if turned by invisible hands, the body rolled slowly over, exposing wide, lifeless eyes to the careless dawn.

  Joanna vomited over the railing, the acid burning her throat, but was unable to take her
eyes from the body as it drifted toward the dam. There, it fetched up briefly in the eel grass before being siphoned down the sluice into the lower mill pond – violently disrupting a little raft of ducks that orchestrated the morbid scene with excited commentary – and out of sight.

  “Amber?” The name escaped her lips like an incantation. Too dizzy to remain standing, Joanna dropped to her knees on the balcony, clutching the bars with bloodless fingers. A call for help, a cry of disbelief, a scream of insupportable grief wove briefly together and unraveled in a single, agonized wail. “Amber!”

  “Joanna?”

  She wheeled around as if struck, falling to her bottom on the dew-covered stones of the balcony. “Amber?” she whispered, the word embodying her bewilderment.

  Amber bent down and, taking her stepmother under the arms, pulled her unsteadily to her feet and guided her to the horsehair love seat to the right of the window. “What’s the matter?” said Amber, her voice edged with alarm. “What were you doing out there?”

  “I saw . . . I saw . . . ” What had she seen? Amber, floating dead in the water. But Amber was here. Alive. Dry. “Why are you dressed? Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been out; I wanted to take some early pictures, like we did yesterday. Remember? I told you I would. Last night?”

  Joanna remembered. “Yes . . . I remember.”

  “I’d just come back to the room to get a sweater, when I heard that ungodly racket. I’m amazed everyone in the house hasn’t come barging in here. What happened? Why did you call me?” She stroked Joanna’s brow, but Joanna jerked away at her touch.

  “You’re hand is cold.”

  “My hands are always cold. Now,” she cradled Joanna’s head on her breast and stroked her hair, “tell me what happened.”

  Joanna clutched her furiously. “I thought I’d lost you, too!”

  “Should I send for the doctor, d’you think?” Jill asked when Amber had unburdened herself over a fortifying cup of tea. The kitchen was a good deal warmer than the dining room, where the rest of the guests were talking animatedly over breakfast.

  “Her problem isn’t physical, Mrs. Webster,” Amber replied softly. Her gaze rested on the fire and she spoke consciously, as if attempting to recall the language of an alien world. “She’s not been well, not really well, for some time. She . . . imagines things.” She lowered her voice even further. “Horrible things.”

  Amber glanced quickly, apologetically at Jill. “I know some of the guests heard the scream . . . and I’m sure they wonder where she is. I just thought you should know.”

  Jill made it a habit not to become involved in conversations of a personal nature with her guests, but was unwillingly compelled by the cryptic glimpses into Amber’s world, not to mention the anachronistic enigma of the girl herself, as portrayed by Caitlin. The hint of a darker dimension to Amber’s story was irresistible. “This . . . sort of thing . . . has happened before?”

  Again, a brief flash of the eyes, as if startled by an intrusion on her private thoughts. “Pardon?” said Amber. “Oh. Yes. Yes.” She hesitated. “Nothing quite this . . . dramatic, but . . . ”

  Jill sensed in Amber the bitter struggle of a young woman torn between a deep secret and a torturous need to share it.

  “I promised not to tell,” said Amber.

  The words reminded Jill of something her mother had told her; “Every promise has its price,” she said, automatically.

  Amber questioned her with a look.

  “It means there are times when whatever was promised takes a back seat to new circumstances. Which will do the greater harm, to keep your secret, or to share it?”

  Jill was inwardly amazed to hear her mother’s words coming out of her mouth. Had her mother done the same? And her mother? Had Eve, in fact, coined the motherly phrases every daughter tells herself she will never repeat, and somehow embedded them in the ‘X’ chromosome for eternity?

  Amber seemed to consider the question as if it were original. “I don’t know, Mrs. Webster. I don’t . . . you see, Joanna – my family – has suffered some terrible shocks in the last few years.”

  Jill and Caitlin walked slowly down the rows between the raspberry bushes. Jill mechanically picked the best berries and dropped them with a plop and roll into the old plastic yogurt container. The rest she left for the birds and Caitlin, who now and then ate one, cool and freshened by dew, crushing it against the roof of her mouth with her tongue and sucking the sweet juices down her throat.

  “Did you know Mrs. Capshaw isn’t Amber’s mother?” Jill queried.

  “No?”

  “Stepmother.”

  “Really?” Caitlin replied with mild interest. “No, I didn’t know.”

  Jill thought a moment. She plucked an aphid from a berry and impaled it emphatically on her fingernail, which she wiped on her apron. “Quite a story there, and not a happy one.”

  Caitlin cocked an eyebrow, which was sufficient to elicit the rest of the story.

  “Amber is a twin.”

  Caitlin had been prepared to reserve comment until the story was told, but the notion of two Amber Capshaw’s wandering lost through the wrong century was startling. “Really?”

  “Yes. Identical. The sister’s name was Gayla.”

  “Was?”

  “She’s dead.

  “Oh, my goodness,” said Caitlin, her hand going instinctively to her throat. “What happened?”

  “Like I said,” Jill replied, “it’s not a happy story.” She bit a sharp, hairlike raspberry thorn from her thumb and spit it out.

  “Taking the tragedies in order, we start with the girls’ mother, adoptive mother, Nancy.”

  “Adoptive?”

  Jill nodded. “She and Mr. Capshaw adopted the twins when they were infants. They were in an accident about three years ago . . . the parents. He survived, she died.”

  Caitlin sighed heavily. “I had no idea.”

  “It gets worse,” said Jill. “Philip fell in love with the nurse who took care of him after the accident.”

  “Joanna?”

  “Joanna. They were married a little over a year later. Then he died within a year after that.”

  “That’s unbelievable. How sad. Pathetically sad.”

  “Sadder than you think. As Amber tells it, he fell from the roof of the barn, and Joanna is the one who found him. His head was crushed.”

  This time Caitlin said nothing, but scolded herself silently for having prejudged the Capshaws, mother and daughter, as wealthy eccentrics indulging one another’s peculiarities.

  Jill continued. “Joanna took it hard, as you might imagine. In fact, that’s when Amber thinks she started to . . . unhinge a bit.”

  “You mean she’s not . . . ” Caitlin tapped her forehead meaningfully.

  Jill shrugged. “You have to make up your own mind, I guess. But there’s more to the story.” Another aphid was thoughtlessly vivisected and flicked to the ground. “Some time after he died Mrs. Capshaw took the girls to a place called New Hampshire. Are you familiar with it?”

  “Yes. It’s in New England,” said Caitlin, forgetting how little she’d known about the geography of the States before taking up residence there.

  Jill was unenlightened, but plunged ahead. “Well, they have a summer place there, on a place called Winston Lake – Watson’s Lake? Something like that.”

  “When was this?”

  “August.”

  “Two months ago? I thought we were talking ancient history. Then, the sister . . . what was her name?”

  “Gayla.”

  “Gayla.” Caitlin fixed the name in her brain. “She died this year?”

  “If you’d let me finish the story,” said Jill, feigning exasperation.

  “Right. You’re right,” said Caitlin, locking her lips with her fingers. “Not another word ‘til the tale is told. Cross my heart,” she added for good measure.

  “That’s odd,” said Jill, tossing a playful nod toward the sky. “I
hadn’t noticed the pigs flying.”

  Caitlin drew herself up in playful indignation. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”

  The shimmering laughter that ensued was skewered by the rays of the early sun, but served to dispel the emotional miasma. “My ears are at your service.”

  Jill topped off the yogurt container with a last handful of berries. The surplus tumbled out of sight in the deep, damp grass – a breakfast feast for some passing grub. They turned toward the house and began walking slowly through a tall stand of sunflowers, which bowed their heavy heads like penitents at the Bishop’s door. Jill resumed.

  “Gayla was keen on canoeing, apparently, and the three of them would often go out on the lake after supper.”

  Caitlin’s imagination leaped ahead. “I don’t like where this is going,” she remarked.

  Jill rushed to the conclusion, as if sharing the story would somehow dispel its horrors. “They were on the far side of the lake and were just turning back when the canoe tipped over. Amber says she’d inhaled a quantity of water and was too preoccupied trying to breath to see exactly what happened.

  “Next thing she knew, she was under the overturned canoe, as was Joanna who was frantically demanding where Gayla was.”

  “Weren’t they wearing life vests?”

  “Gayla wasn’t. She fancied herself an expert swimmer, I gather. And must have been quite strong-willed, as well.”

  “The dominant twin,” said Caitlin.

  Jill nodded. “Joanna, who’s no great swimmer herself, was screaming Gayla’s name and thrashing about under water for several minutes . . . but there was no sign of her.

  “They righted the canoe; you can imagine what an ordeal that was for a couple of hysterical women. But they managed to paddle back to the house and call the authorities.