Time runs short, as do the pages in this journal; thus, I will not recount the conversation that ensued. In the end, she begged me to allow the child to live. I said that I would, under the condition that it never see the light of day in this small village. Having endured the shame of my sister’s suicide and the whispers about her motive, I could not endure more of the same over a bastard daughter.
“If you must send her away, then I shall go, too,” Florence told me. Yet I knew she lacked the means to leave, and I shall confess that even then, I could not bear to let her go.
Desperate, I proposed a solution. We would send word to Father that Florence and the child would be joining him in the South for a month, and I would send the servants away for the duration of her trip. During that time, I would claim that the child had died along her journey.
Florence rightfully declared it a preposterous plan. But she was crazed with the need to save her child, and herself. She had nowhere to turn but to me, and she knew she must atone for her dreadful sin. She needed me—and I her.
The plan worked—for a time.
Keeping up appearances, I bid farewell to my wife and daughter on the crowded train platform in Hudson. They disembarked in New York City, where I met them under cover of darkness and transported them back home to the small windowless chamber.
A week later, I announced that the child had died en route to Carolina. A bit later, I reported that my wife had returned alone and bereft. We accepted condolences and went on with our lives, keeping the child hidden away in the nursery where my wife could tend to her, mothering to her heart’s content. I provided the servants with a handsome severance, telling them my wife’s condition was tenuous and she preferred the quiet, empty house.
I never again saw Father alive. That summer, he suffered a stroke in Georgia, and then another that proved fatal. At last, I was free, yet now encumbered by a dreadful secret. Too late, I came to realize that I might have come to accept the child with Father’s pervasive presence gone from my life. But it was too late to undo what I had done. I could hardly produce in public a child who had remarkably come back to life.
Bound by our wretched secret, Florence and I found our way back to each other’s arms. In January 1910, not long after the great daytime comet lit the skies as if to herald her arrival, another daughter was born, this time my own. I named her for my lost sister. My affection for Augusta Amalthea eclipsed any glimmer I might once have felt for the illegitimate Zelda, in whose face my father’s black eyes glittered, and in whose small body, I knew, his black soul lived on.
I insisted that we move her to the vacant third floor so that my daughter could occupy the nursery. I allowed Florence to fill a small room at the back of the house with toys and every comfort a child could desire. For my own part, I ensured that she would never escape. Some might have considered it a cell and yet, as I reminded my wife every day, I had allowed the child to live. I had allowed the adulteress to stay under my roof despite her betrayal.
Still dependent on my benevolence much as she had been on the benefactors of her youth, she had no choice but to carry on as we had, tending to one child on the second floor and the other on the third.
It was unbearably hot up there with the windows closed in the summer months. In the midst of a terrible heat wave, Florence begged me to remove the locks so that she might let the fresh air into the room. I refused. I didn’t trust the girl. Imagine if she escaped to wander the town and share her tale? Florence did not argue. She knew that she, too, would be incriminated if Zelda were discovered.
I did not visit the girl once my own daughter was born, but Florence told me that she shared our love of literature, implying that she, too, escaped her oppressive existence through her books and her imagination.
The years passed, and we conceived a son. Augusta was quite jealous, but I spoiled her by indulging her whims and allowing her to keep a little orange kitten. Every night when I came home, she would tell me of her adventures with Marmalade.
I had forbidden Florence to introduce my precious Augusta to the bastard half sister, and she swore she never would. But one day not long ago, when I asked little Augusta how she had spent the rainy afternoon, she said, “Why, Papa, I played with the angel in the attic.”
I knew, when I looked at my wife’s face, that she had betrayed me once again—this time not with her flesh, but with her word.
After our daughter had been soundly tucked in that night, I confronted Florence. She confessed that Augusta had become so frightened hearing thumps from the ceiling above her bed, that she foolishly told her the fanciful tale of a secret guardian angel who lived in the attic. One morning, inevitably, she carelessly neglected to lock the door to the third-floor stairwell, and Augusta snuck up after her.
Blind with rage, I seized the small axe beside the woodstove and brandished it at my wife. She fled in terror, and I chased her to the hall, where I hurtled the axe as she attempted to rush up the stairs. It narrowly missed her, landing with its blade embedded in the wooden newel post.
Had it found its mark, I would have lost everything.
In the sobering light of morning, I realized that Zelda must now meet the fate I had imposed at her cradle. I was no longer too cowardly to carry out my intention, but I knew I must be cautious.
In retrospect, I suppose it would have been simpler to murder the girl and immediately dispose of her body. But my mind has been clouded with fury and, perhaps, delusion. I was compelled to see her lain out like Perrault’s Beauty in the Wood, a scene I had envisioned many times over the years.
I remembered Miss Lizzie Borden, and how rumors of a stranger roaming the streets of Fall River at the time of her parents’ murder had introduced a shred of reasonable doubt. What if there had been a similar murder in Fall River not long before that of her parents? Then no one would have suspected her of the murders—particularly if a third incident followed. The police would have been caught up in a frenzied search for a madman, and the true culprit would have escaped accusation.
When, in my search for two additional Beauties, I came across those shameless women at the Pleasure Park, I could not help but think of my wife. I would punish them as I could not punish her when she brazenly embarked on the illicit affair that had nearly destroyed us.
When I had to decide where I would deposit the corpses, I knew that I must choose households similar to our own. Twelve years ago, after Dr. Silas Browne attended Zelda’s birth, I detected a glimmer of disapproval in his eyes at my perhaps unenthusiastic response to his hearty congratulations. I bore no vengeance against my neighbors Julius and Sarah Palmer when I chose their household on Schuyler Place. Their children are grown and there are vacant beds throughout their home.
Two weeks ago, when the corpse was discovered at the Browne household, Florence was concerned for our safety. It never dawned on her that I might be behind the dastardly crime.
A week later, I intended to kill Zelda as methodically as I had the whore. But when the time came, it resulted in a considerable mess, and I spent hours scrubbing the room of evidence. For her eternal sleep, it gave me great satisfaction to choose Father’s long-vacated bedroom, just steps away from our own at the top of the stairs, and far from my precious Augusta’s at the end of the hall.
It was Florence who discovered her, of course.
And Florence who claimed never to have seen her before in her life.
Perhaps she suspects my role.
And yet, perhaps she, too, is relieved that our long nightmare has come to an end.
The guilty have been punished. Justice has been served. I am no coward.
And now, it is time for me to dress for the ceremony on the Village Common, where I shall slip this volume into the chest where it will remain safely hidden.
I close this final entry with my signature and a stanza from Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” He penned the words, quite fittingly, upon his release from a long incarceration.
I shall do
the same.
Sincerely,
George H. Purcell
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Chapter 20
Thursday, July 7
“Mom! Where are you? Mom!”
“I’m right here!” Not taking the time to dry her hands, Annabelle quickly steps out of the first-floor bathroom to find an anxious Oliver standing right outside the door. “I told you where I was going.”
“But you said you’d be right back.”
She swallows her frustration.
In the week since Oliver turned up safe and Catherine vanished, the path through the daily minefield has been explosive at every turn, and there’s no way to shield him from the fallout.
His bewilderment at seeing her in his bedroom that night with a police officer quickly turned to anxiety when the room filled with people, including several police officers.
“Why were you hiding under there?” Nick Colonomos had asked him, once Annabelle and Trib had taken turns hugging their son with relief and managed to calm his nerves. “Did something happen that made you afraid?”
Ah—the mother of all loaded questions.
Oliver hesitated, looking at Annabelle, who nodded and told him to tell the truth.
“I was afraid because my parents were out,” he admitted. “I don’t like to be alone, and Catherine didn’t want to come upstairs with me when I went to bed.”
“Why not?”
“She was busy texting her friends.”
“So you came up here and hid under the bed?”
Oliver shook his head, explaining that the cubby is his secret hideout. He’d cleared out the stuff Annabelle had stored there and used the old pool tiles to create a floor. He equipped it with a flashlight and a couple of pillows for lounging.
“He likes it there because it makes him feel safe in this big house,” Annabelle clarified for Lieutenant Colonomos, who was writing it all down in a notepad, and for the other cops who were there. All those brave, uniformed men, even the clean-cut young Officer Greenlea, were thinking the same thing, she knew: This kid was acting like a big baby.
Greenlea was the one who said to Annabelle, almost accusingly, “So you knew about this hideout? But you didn’t look there for him?”
“I didn’t know he was spending time in there, no. It didn’t occur to me to look there when I first came up.”
“And you didn’t call out to him when you came into the room?”
“I did, but he was wearing headphones. He didn’t hear me. And because Catherine is missing, I guess I jumped to the wrong conclusion.”
“Catherine is missing?” Oliver asked in a small voice.
There was no protecting him from the truth, or from his pivotal role in the investigation. He’s since been questioned several times, but can shed no light on the disappearance.
Her friends said she’d been texting with them, and that she’d mentioned lately that she hated her mother and wanted to run away from home—most recently, that very morning.
It was a bitter pill for Kim to swallow.
She and Ross have been in seclusion all week at home with Connor, whom they retrieved from camp. They won’t let him out of their sight, and Annabelle doesn’t dare let Oliver have any contact with him because it will mean subjecting him to Kim’s hysteria.
She and Trib have been trying to downplay the fact that Catherine might have been abducted, or that there might be a connection to the copycat crime that occurred the same night at the Yamazaki household.
She’s been praying, like everyone else in town, that one has nothing to do with the other. But if the prevailing theory is correct, and Catherine left this house of her own accord, wouldn’t she have come home by now? Or at the very least, wouldn’t she have contacted her parents to let them know she’s all right? Especially since the media has gone into overdrive trumpeting headlines like The Sleeping Beauty Killer Lives and More Mundy Murder.
Juanita Contreras, the young woman whose body turned up at 65 Prospect Street, had disappeared after leaving work at a White Plains mall about a month ago. No one knows where she’s been in the interim, and there are no leads. She’d been dead for well over twenty-four hours when she was found.
The police and the media have been interviewing residents of The Heights all week, trying to find someone who saw something out of the ordinary. But as Trib put it in his editorial, “During these extraordinary times in Mundy’s Landing, who among us hasn’t encountered a stranger? Now we wonder whether a cold-blooded killer was lurking behind the innocuous mask of a benign face.”
There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the person who staged her body at the Yamazaki house might attempt a repeat performance in this house tonight.
Thus, the Binghams have been under police guard all week. Annabelle and Oliver have left only for daily appointments with Dr. Seton, who’s helping Oliver process what’s happened—to the tune of over two thousand dollars. The rest of the time, they’re stuck at home, getting to know various police officers who take turns standing guard over the house—and yes, over the family as well.
It helps somehow that Steve is here, still working on the pool. At least he’s someone to talk to. Someone who isn’t distraught over a missing child, anyway.
Annabelle has tried to comfort Kim the best she can, speaking to her for hours on the phone. But they both know that if Catherine didn’t run away, then something terrible has happened to her. Having experienced a few frantic moments thinking Oliver was missing, Annabelle can’t imagine the hell her friend is experiencing.
Trib goes to the office every morning and comes home every night to sleep in Oliver’s bed so that Oliver, too frightened to stay alone, can share their bed with Annabelle. Embarrassed, he made her promise never to tell anyone.
“Not Connor,” he said, “and not his parents, and not Catherine, if she comes back. Not the policemen, either.”
Their incredulous reaction to the fact that he’d had a babysitter had not escaped Oliver.
Annabelle promised.
She wouldn’t have been comfortable letting him spend the night alone in his room right now even if he’d been willing. She’s been carrying her utility blade around in her pocket, just in case . . .
Just in case a painted window sash needs to be opened?
Just in case a maniac breaks into the house in the dead of night?
But the hypervigilance is wearing thin. She hasn’t had a moment to herself in a week, waking or otherwise. Not even in the bathroom, she thinks now as she follows Oliver back to the kitchen, where they were about to sit down to a dinner of canned soup and the last of the crackers.
Trib ran out to the store over the weekend, but they’ve gone through everything he bought and nearly all the staples. Sooner or later, she’s going to have to go to the supermarket.
Later, she thinks.
Everything can wait until later.
Except rest. Seven nights sharing a bed with Oliver have taken a toll. He thrashes in his sleep—when he’s sleeping. When he’s not, and she is, he wakes her up. And in the rare moments when Oliver is slumbering peacefully, she finds herself lying awake, running over the details in her mind. At this point, she hasn’t slept more than an hour or so at a time since last Wednesday night—and even then, she was tormented by nightmares and speculation about the Purcell family mystery . . .
And intruders.
She told Officer Greenlea about the figure she’d seen watching the house a week ago. He was concerned, and took down the information, promising he’d check into it.
But what, she wondered then—and wonders now—does that even mean? You can’t hunt down a shadow long after it’s faded away.
He’s trying to reassure her that the authorities are doing their best t
o find the culprit and prevent what happened at 65 Prospect from happening at 46 Bridge.
And she’s trying to pretend that it isn’t inevitable.
“I’m not really hungry,” Oliver tells her as she puts two bowls of soup on the table. It’s too warm for soup, even with the window fans—unearthed at last—stirring the air.
The silver lining to having been trapped in the house all week: she’s managed to unpack and organize the rest of their belongings. She was embarrassed last week, hearing one cop telling another that the kitchen must have been ransacked.
At least now the household is in order, and she’s no longer fixated on crimes that took place a hundred years ago. She doesn’t dare allow herself to go down that road again. She needs to focus every ounce of energy on getting through today.
And tonight. And tomorrow.
“Would you rather have a sandwich?” Annabelle asks Oliver, opening the fridge to see if there’s any cheese, or at least some jelly to spread on the remaining heels of bread.
“No, thanks.”
Good. No cheese, no jelly.
“Listen,” she says, “I’m not that hungry either, but we have to eat. So let’s eat the soup. We’ll go to the store tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, when the worst is behind them.
Tonight is the night—July 7. After it has passed uneventfully, she can breathe a sigh of relief.
“Are the police still going to be here with us then?” Oliver asks.
“For a little while longer, I think. Okay?”
What is she thinking, asking him if he’s okay with that? It’s not like they have any choice in the matter.
To her surprise, Oliver says, “I like having them here. I don’t want them to go.”
She smiles faintly. “Is it because Officer Greenlea played Xbox with you?”
The cop, in his early twenties, is familiar with all the video games Oliver likes to play. He hung around after his shift the other night to beat him soundly at one of them, and Annabelle was grateful for the reprieve.
“It’s because I feel safe when they’re here,” Oliver said. “If they go, I don’t want to stay here.”
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