by JL Bryan
“Great. Another possible bad fate for our client and her kids.” I filled him in on the events of the previous night.
“This is getting worse, Ellie,” he said, the worry plain in his voice. “I think you and Stacey should stay inside together from now on.”
“But then who will—”
“I’ll sit in the van,” he said. “I’ll keep watch.”
“We can handle this.”
“I thought I could handle it alone, too, Ellie,” he said. “I was wrong. Learn from my mistakes. And to be honest, I want to see this thing beaten and caught.”
“You’re the boss,” I replied, but I wasn’t happy about it. This same entity had hurt Calvin before. I didn’t want to see him get hurt again. Saying that aloud would just rile him up, though.
As we spoke, I grabbed my tablet and walked out onto what my landlord would call my “balcony,” which was more like a brick ledge with rails. It was a nice place to sit and have coffee, soaking up the green sunlight filtered through the oak canopy above.
“What else?” Calvin asked.
“I have an email from Grant.” I skimmed it quickly. “He’s found something for us. Hopefully it’s better news than you had about that poor kid.”
“Couldn’t be much worse,” Calvin said. He was right about that.
After an exciting lunch of apples and celery, I met up with Stacey and drove over to the Historical Association mansion, a beautiful gray-brick place trimmed with black wrought-iron railing, a feature ubiquitous around the city.
“Sorry to meet you at the servants’ entrance,” Grant whispered, opening the side door for us. “The Docents Committee is having tea in the front parlor. Come, come, you both look lovely.”
“So do you, Grant,” I said. He was impeccably garbed as usual, in a white summer suit over a mint green shirt, the entire ensemble seeming to cool and sweeten the air around him. That was probably his cologne, though. I noticed an unfamiliar row of salt-and-pepper bristles on his upper lip. “Are you growing a mustache?”
“Simply an experiment, nothing more.” He led us toward the polished rosewood back staircase, the railing made of elegantly sculpted black iron columns.
“You look like Clark Gable,” Stacey offered as we followed him up.
“Then I shall never shave it off.”
“Is that what the Docents Committee is meeting about?” I asked in a hushed, conspiratorial whisper. “Your new mustache?”
“Much larger issues.” Grant rounded the landing, leading us up to the second floor. “They’re deciding on the flower arrangements for next season and what to serve at the Society dinner in two weeks. There was some discussion of buying a new carpet for the first-floor reading room. The meeting might come to blows.”
The upstairs hall was brightly lit and hung with paintings of Savannah and the nearby islands drawn from across the past two centuries. At one point, we crossed a cutaway balcony and glanced down at the front parlor, where a cluster of well-dressed silver-haired ladies, ranging in age from sixty to ninety, sat ramrod-straight in the antique wing chairs, having a serious discussion in low voices. I imagined the argument growing heated as Grant had mentioned, the elderly ladies shouting, flinging their cups and cookies at one other, finally descending into all-out brawl, pearls and purses flying.
I doubted it would happen.
“This way...” Grant turned an ornate little curved handle on one door. He brought us into his office, where everything screamed antique, from the polished walnut rolltop desk against the back wall to the chairs engraved with little grape-and-leaf shapes. Tall rectangular windows looked out on the grassy park across the street, framed by light, gauzy floor-length curtains. Bookshelves crowded the walls, densely packed but neatly organized.
Grant sat at a more modern desk at the center of the room, with a sleek black computer and stacks of documents. More documents, folders, and leather-bound books sat on a rolling cart parked beside his desk.
“I apologize for the mess,” he said. “Have a seat. Should I smuggle up tea and cookies from downstairs?”
“We don’t want to trigger an international nuclear incident,” I said.
“Very true. The reading-room carpet might never be replaced. Well, let’s begin with the Bible.” Grant lifted a heavy leather volume the size of an unabridged dictionary and placed it before us.
“Are we going to get religious here?” I asked.
“Not at the moment. We’ll skip to the end.” He gingerly opened the old Bible, revealing rows of names and dates written in faded ink on two blank pages by the back cover. I nodded. Lots of families used to note births, marriages, and deaths in the old family Bible.
“The Barrington family occupied the land you’re studying,” Grant said. “This may look like a dry collection of names and dates, but see how much we can learn from it.” He pointed to a pair of names with his pen, not touching the fragile old paper. “Two brothers, Joseph and Edgar Barrington, born on the same date in 1795. We know right away they’re twins, but we can’t say whether they’re identical or fraternal.
“In 1820, Joseph marries Rebecca Moore, born in 1803,” Grant continued. “In 1821, she gives birth to a boy, Joshua. Two years later, a girl, Sarah. Then the dates tell a darker story. Joseph dies in 1825 at the age of thirty, leaving a young widow and two small children behind. Both children died about two years later, on the same day.”
“This is exactly what we’re looking for,” I said. “Grant, you’re a genius.”
“You can thank the Association’s endless appetite for acquiring every stray piece of paper in the city,” Grant said.
“It looks like the wife lived to be sixty—” I began, leaning forward and reading the handwritten dates upside down.
“Ahem. I’ve spent all day cobbling together this information, so I will be the one telling the story,” Grant said.
“Sorry,” I said, sinking back into my chair. “Please continue, sir.”
“Thank you. As I was about to say, Rebecca lived until 1863, dying amid war and deprivation. She did not re-marry. And, as we can also see, Edgar lived until 1856 and never married.”
“Sounds like Edgar could be our boogeyman,” Stacey said.
“Boogeyman?” Grant’s neatly groomed white eyebrows perked up in interest.
“That’s what we’re hunting this time,” I said. “It hides in closets, it makes you see things and feeds on your fear.”
“I’ve heard this before,” Grant said. “Is it similar to the ghost that put Calvin in that wheelchair?”
“We think it’s the same one,” I told him.
“Oh, dear. Be careful, both of you.” Grant looked deeply worried, lines crinkling his forehead as he frowned at me.
“We will,” I said.
“Promise me.”
“I’ll even make a note of it.” I took out my pocket notepad and jotted down the two words. “Be...careful.” I turned the notepad around to show him.
“I’m satisfied that you’re taking the threat seriously,” he said. “Where were we?”
“Edgar Barrington,” I said.
“Yes, thank you.” Grant opened a binder filled with faded old documents in the blocky type of nineteenth-century printing presses. “As far I can determine from tax records and assorted correspondence, Edgar lived in the house with his brother Joseph. Joseph was the one who built the house. He prospered in the trade of agricultural commodities, mainly timber for shipbuilding and export. An American tale, truly—Joseph made his fortune, built himself a mansion, and found a well-bred young lady to install inside it.”
“What did Edgar do?” I asked.
“Edgar worked for Joseph in a subordinate capacity...an errand boy, more or less. He never made a mark on his own. After Joseph died, the business foundered badly under Edgar’s management...until Edgar was placed in a mental asylum in 1829, where he lived until his death. I have the commitment papers around here somewhere...” Grant reached for an old folder. “In a
ny case, it fell to young Rebecca, a woman who’d lost her husband and both children, to manage the business. Which she did well, finally selling it at quite a profit. All of which evaporated in the war.”
“Sounds like a tough chick,” Stacey said.
“Indeed. Here are Edgar Barrington’s commitment papers...According to his sister-in-law, he was often found crawling the floors of the house at night like an animal, or standing for hours in the garden, staring at nothing, laughing to himself or drooling. At other times, he would pretend to be his dead brother and insisted that people call him ‘Joseph.’”
“Weird-o-rama,” Stacey said.
“He was witnessed in public, disheveled, what the paperwork calls ‘a state of utter disarray.’ He would skulk around school buildings, churches, and parks, staring at children as they played.”
“I’d like to change my vote from ‘weird’ to ‘creepy,’” Stacey said.
“Several witnesses offered statements, including neighbors and business associates, but it seems clear to me that Rebecca, Edgar’s widowed sister-in-law, spearheaded the effort to have him committed.”
“Leaving her with the house and the business,” I said.
“The man killed her children,” Stacey said, sounding defensive. “And he was clearly a bag of nuts, stalking other kids...”
“How did his brother Joseph die?” I asked Grant.
“A horseback riding accident,” Grant said. “Interestingly, Edgar was the only witness to Joseph’s death.” He said that with an air of a person casually unloading juicy gossip, knowing it will bring a big response.
“So Edgar might have killed his brother, as well as his brother’s children,” I said. I was scribbling on my notepad like a madwoman.
“Good thing he got locked up,” Stacey said.
“Truly. He died in that asylum, too,” Grant said.
“Uh.” Stacey sat up in her chair, looking at me with wide, worried eyes. “This isn’t going to lead to us digging around in another haunted old insane asylum, is it? Because I’d rather go snorkeling with sharks. With a big tuna steak dangling around my neck.”
“Then you’ll be happy to learn that is not an option,” Grant said. “This particular hospital was demolished long ago. As was the Barrington house itself.”
“The big Tudor place that’s there now was built in 1905,” I said. “That’s where a boy named Kris Larsen disappeared in the nineties. Do we have any pictures of this Barrington family?”
“We have a photograph of Edgar Barrington, apparently taken at the asylum.” Grant produced an old brownish photograph protected by plastic.
The man lay on his back, his mouth slightly open, his eyes glazed. His face looked pinched and thin, his nose and cheekbones so sharp they looked like they could cut paper. His hair had gone gray. His fingers were long and thin, like a pianist’s.
“He looks dead,” Stacey commented.
“He is,” Grant said. “I found this along with his death certificate. He died of tuberculosis in 1856, probably acquired inside the asylum, which helps explain his bony condition.”
I gazed at the picture for a moment, trying to connect this thin corpse to the robust dark figure who scurried along ceilings and walls, tormenting children in the night.
“I’ve also found a few items of correspondence written by Edgar, as well as some by Rebecca,” Grant said. “You may find the Edgar one particularly interesting. It is dated 1828, and he seems to have written it to Rebecca while he was out of town surveying a timber purchase. Here.”
Grant brought out the old hand-written letters. Edgar’s handwriting was a jabbing, spidery crawl.
“All I see makes me think of you,” I read aloud from the section Grant had indicated. “The mating creatures in their rut, the great trees fallen and bleeding, their sap like blood returning to engorge the earth with life.”
“A real poet,” Stacey mumbled.
“It torments me to share our home yet not our flesh— Wow, that’s pretty blunt. You are the wife of my lost brother. Biblical law makes it clear you should be mine,” I read.
“He’s wrong on that point,” Grant said. “Deuteronomy requires it only if the first brother dies childless. Joseph had left a son and a daughter.”
“Who both died two years later,” I said.
“That makes me think of this Serengeti documentary I saw,” Stacey said. “When a new male lion takes over a pride, after defeating the old alpha male, he also kills all the previous alpha’s cubs. Makes all the females go into heat so they can have the new leader’s cubs instead.”
“I don’t believe it made our dear Rebecca go into heat,” Grant said. “The letter shows Edgar’s unfulfilled desires for her.”
“You have shown me a colder face, and resisted me, and you call me mad. My madness is for you, Rebecca. We are bonded each to the other, by chains stronger than simple vows, stronger than blood itself. You are cruel, your presence stirs me to arousal, leaves me in torment and pain—” I read.
“That poor woman, living with that creep,” Stacey said. “I wonder if she suspected him.”
“Did they ever find the two kids’ bodies?” I asked Grant.
“I’ve read nothing about that,” Grant said. “The children were reported missing and never recovered. The date of their disappearance was later recorded as their date of death.”
“We know where the bodies went,” I said.
“Then perhaps you will lay them to rest,” Grant replied.
“No way. I’m not going down into that well,” Stacey said.
“So, here’s the scenario I’m seeing,” I said. “Edgar lives in his twin brother’s house, watching Joseph and his family every day. Edgar’s not successful on his own, he’s unmarried, he’s basically living in his brother’s shadow. Maybe he’s already mentally disturbed and can’t get his own life together. So he’s jealous. Jealous and crazy. He kills his brother to try and take his place. Then, a couple years later, decides to kill the two kids. Maybe he wants to have his own with Rebecca. He clearly wanted her to marry him, and she clearly resisted, and finally had him committed. How does that sound?”
“Sounds like he was a total whack-a-doodle,” Stacey said. “But yeah, that’s the picture I’m getting so far.”
We read through more correspondence, including the letters by others who’d observed Edgar’s increasingly bizarre behavior. These seemed to have been written in support of Rebecca’s bid to lock Edgar away in the asylum, providing evidence that he was off his rocker. Rebecca struck me as a strong and resourceful woman, weathering the worst tragedies, using lawyers and doctors to remove Edgar from her life for her own safety, though she’d been too late to save her children.
From a letter from Rebecca to her sister, written early in Joseph and Rebecca’s marriage: “I thank you for your kind comments about the house, but I must tell you, the house demands so much it seems to own me. Even with five household servants I cannot keep up. And the children! Two overwhelm me—I do not see how you manage five, dear sister. I remember believing marriage would free me from Father and his cruelty, giving me freedom and power at last—how foolish I was.
“I prattle about the burdens every woman must share in this life, but I face another in this home. I beg you repeat none of this. Joseph’s brother Edgar continues to dwell with us, and his presence unsettles me. He has none of Joseph’s loud and boastful manner, but is a creature of shadows and whispers. Strange that two men so identically crafted on the surface could be so different. Edgar sulks and slumps, and appears shorter than Joseph.
“It is unfortunate to say, but I must confess it somewhere to unburden myself. When, by ill chance, Edgar and I find ourselves unaccompanied, alone in a room with no witnesses, he looks on me in a manner that puts me in mind of a starving dog, eager to gnaw upon my bones. It is all the stranger that he wears the form of my husband. These encounters disturb me. There is no other proper word for it.”
After more reading, we came ac
ross this passage, in a letter to a friend a year after her husband died: “Edgar craves me in marriage. He drools like a hound. He makes no secret of his desire. But I have been married once, and have no wish to bind myself to a low creature who wears the face of Joseph yet is an inferior soul to my dear lost husband. My children place sufficient burdens upon me, as do the men from the office who come to me for advice, knowing that I understand my late husband’s affairs and investments, and am not an irresponsible fool like Edgar. They let him make pronouncements, then ignore him and follow my advice instead.
“Edgar grows stranger by the day and year. I must lock my bedroom door at night, for I have opened my eyes more than once to see him standing over me, his form rigid as a corpse seasoned two days in the ground, his breath panting as he watches me sleep.”
There was a long gap in her letters after the day in 1827 when her children disappeared, as if she could not bring herself to write after losing her children, followed by a flurry of correspondence dated 1828 and 1829, most of it about having Edgar committed to the asylum.
“I’d be interested in finding anything she wrote after Edgar died,” I said. “Did he start haunting the place right away?”
“I suggest we divide up the remaining papers and read through them separately,” Grant said.
Stacey sighed as Grant placed a few inches of folders and unsorted documents in front of her.
It took us a lot of reading, hours of it, shuffling through old bank records and squinting at the faded handwritten letters. Stacey was the one who found it.
“Here,” Stacey said. “1859, four years after Edgar died. Letter to her cousin. Sandwiched in between her fears about the rising division in the country, her belief that Lincoln’s election was a sign of troubled times to come...listen to this. ‘I cannot release myself of agitation. By night, I find myself tormented by visions of Joseph and the children, and these visitations are far from happy. In my mind, my poor lost children stare at me with hate and loathing. I wish only for an end to this torment, as I wish for peace in our nation...’ And then back to blah blah here comes the Civil War,” Stacey concluded. “That sounds like our boogeyman.”