“No. Did you?”
How ridiculous would it sound? “I heard my mother.”
“What did she say?”
“She wanted me to push the spirit away.”
“That’s what you meant when you said you didn’t know how?”
“I said that aloud?”
“Several times. You shouted it, in fact. I tried to ask what you meant, but you couldn’t hear me. You walked over to the window and stood there, muttering. I didn’t want to wake you—it was as if you were sleepwalking, and I’ve heard it’s a bad thing to wake a sleepwalker. But then you started gasping. I couldn’t watch you…what happened upstairs, I couldn’t go through that again. So I slapped you. I’m sorry.”
I touched my cheek with my free hand, but the sting had subsided almost immediately. “Better than letting her strangle me.” I couldn’t help wondering, though, if his violence, restrained as it was, had served to confirm the spirit’s association of him with his great-grandfather.
Liza’s lips moved against my neck. “Did you see her?”
“I was her.”
She pulled away and peered up at my face. “Then you know who she was!”
“May’s mother.”
“Good God,” said Nathaniel.
“Remember what Adriana Livingston told us? Things left undone in life create unquiet spirits. In life, her daughter was stolen and she never had the opportunity to retrieve her. She wants a daughter. In particular, the daughter of the people who took hers.”
A draft scuttled through the room and the shards of window glass clinked on the floor. The planchette, lying atop the board, stirred restlessly.
“I wasn’t even born when May was stolen from her family!”
“Do ghosts understand time?” I picked up the planchette and threw it through the crack in the curtains out into the thick, wet snow. The board and box I consigned to the fire, feeding the flames with the bellows be sure they burned. The door had opened before my arrival, but I would not wedge it wider.
Nathaniel let go of Liza and stood, pacing and rubbing his forehead. “I don’t suppose it matters. Either she understands and doesn’t care, or she doesn’t understand. But how did she get here? Her daughter was in boarding school in Canada, for crying out loud. How did she ever find this house?”
“We may never know. But she did.” The scene unspooled in my head. “She came at night and she raised a fuss and your great-grandfather, along with at least one other man, they killed her. She showed me one night in a dream, but I didn’t understand what I was seeing until today. They beat her and hanged her and dumped her body in the pond.” Again the taste of brackish water filled my nose and throat. “I don’t think she was dead when she went in, either.”
“My great-grandfather. Nathaniel. The hero of the fire. He stole her child and then he murdered her. No wonder she’s out for revenge.”
The temperature dropped and the wind pushed harder against the curtains. I thought about that small plastic piece outside, knocking to find a way in. The ash flew from the grate and whirled up into that same unnatural column I had faced upstairs. As one, Liza, Nathaniel and I backed away from it. A hail of glass flew at us and Nathaniel shoved me and Liza out of the way, taking the brunt of it on his left side.
“Stop! Just stop!” Liza wrenched herself from my grasp and took off. “Leave them alone! I’ll come!”
“No!” I reached for her, but she was gone. Before Nathaniel and I could catch her she was out the door, which slammed hard behind her.
“Liza!” Nathaniel yanked on the knob, but the door remained stubbornly closed.
“Window!” I ran for the library. We pulled the drapes free of the broken window and climbed out into the white wilderness.
The wind howled, blowing us back against the house, flicking ice against skin in a prickling battery. Nathaniel called for Liza, but his words were snatched up and tossed away.
“The cemetery,” I shouted. “She’ll go to May’s grave.” He grabbed my hand in his good one and forged ahead through the blinding, blowing snow. The drifts clutched at my legs like clamoring hands. My eyes watered and the tears froze on my lashes. The air burned my sinuses and rippled all the way down to my lungs, but I would not stop. Could not stop.
As we approached the cemetery, the snow thickened to a white so heavy it appeared black. My legs disappeared into the gloom below the knee. I glanced back over my shoulder only to see that behind us light still filtered through the clouds. We were pushing into the heart of the storm.
A piece of ice flew out of the void and sliced through Nathaniel’s cheek. Blood bloomed, shocking and red-black in the muted landscape. He cursed and wiped at it with his sleeve but did not slow.
I lost my vision completely a few steps later, and had no idea where we were. I had to trust that Nathaniel, who’d grown up on the property and had spent nights in the cemetery as a child in the midnight darkness, had enough muscle memory of the place to take us there.
Minutes, hours, days later, we reached the two crosses. I stumbled over a rock and landed shoulder-first on the iron cross. Pain screamed through me, shocking my spine, and it worsened when I leaned on the crossbar with my good hand and pushed myself up. The cold dulled the agony soon enough, but numbness, nausea and weakness came hard on its heels.
“Liza!” Nathaniel called.
I forced myself to my feet and felt around until I found the stone cross. Running my fingers down it, I found her huddled at the base.
“She’s here! Liza, speak to me.” I pulled her into my arms, using my good right arm to hold my left in place, trying to warm her against me. Nathaniel dropped beside us.
“She’s so cold.” A massive tremor rocked me. I wasn’t going to be much use to her. “Liza, wake up and look at me. Please.”
Her eyes opened and I reared back so quickly my head slammed into the stone cross behind me with a sickening thud. Something lived behind those eyes. Something dark and angry and filled with malice. Even in the strange, unnatural blizzard, I could tell that this was not the girl we knew.
“She is with me now. She wants to be.”
“She doesn’t. You forced her.”
Nathaniel knelt beside us and cupped her face in his hands. “Liza, I know you’re there. Come back to me, honey.”
“She doesn’t want to.” Liza’s lips moved out of sync with the words, like a soundtrack running a split-second behind. “She is my daughter, not yours.”
“She’s not,” I said. “I know you hurt, and you’re lonely, but this is Liza, not Little Fawn. And this is Nathaniel Prescott, not Nathaniel Fairchild. He’s never hurt you, and he loves his daughter.”
“She needs a mother,” puppet Liza insisted.
“She needs a life. You’ll kill her and she still won’t be your daughter.”
“She is not yours, either.” Liza’s white, bloodless lips twisted into a mocking grin, tearing a hole in my heart to mach the one in my shoulder.
“She’s mine.” Nathaniel growled. “And she loves Molly. She loves both of us enough to sacrifice herself to save us. If you loved her, you’d honor her desires.”
“You don’t deserve her,” not-Liza sneered.
“I know.” And it was true, But that was the wonder of love. You could not earn it. It came or it did not. This mother-thing would understand that much. “But I love her. You love your daughter. You wish you could have kept her, looked after her, loved her in life. But you don’t love Liza. Your daughter is here, buried beneath this cross.” Suddenly I realized that the Wiltons must have volunteered to bury the “stranger” found in their pond. It would assuage their consciences while improving their reputation in town. Why else the second cross? “This is you, isn’t it? Next to her. But I can’t reunite you. I don’t know how.”
Those ancient eyes stared out at me for a long moment. My breath caught in my throat and not-Liza raised her hand to my neck, pushing me back against the cross. “If you love her so much, you could join us.�
�
“Liza,” Nathaniel begged, “please, sweetheart, push her out. You can do it. I need you to. Molly needs you to. I don’t care what she told you about me succeeding without you, that won’t happen. You’re the only thing that’s kept me going for the past two years. I need you. Every day. I know sometimes I looks as if I don’t, but that’s just fear. I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing and chasing you away, so I don’t do anything at all. I’ll do better, sweetheart, I promise. But I need you to come back to me. To fight.”
The black pits of the not-Liza’s eyes moved to his face for a moment, then back to mine.
“Liza,” I choked out, “I know you want to help but this is not the way. You are not her daughter! Shake her off!”
“You know nothing of love,” the not-Liza spat.
Nathaniel grabbed her and tried to wrench her away from the headstone, away from me, but she kicked out and there was no way for him to get her without injuring her. The grip she had on my throat loosened, however, so I sucked in a breath of icy air and fought her the only way I could.
”Did you abandon your daughter?”
Her eyes blazed, hot enough to melt the snow around us and the fingers tightened on my throat once more. “No! She was stolen from me.”
“You did what you thought was best when the school men came. She didn’t disappear into the night, you gave her to them. You told them to call her Fawn. You made a mistake, but you made it out of love. That’s all we can do in life. Love one another to the best of our ability. Humans make mistakes. Your daughter forgave you.”
The heat died out of her face and a weary veil covered her features. The Liza we knew had disappeared beneath the visage of an old woman, haggard, angry, and bitter. “How do you know?”
“You saw your daughter the night Nathaniel Fairchild took your life. She saw you, too. She knows you were coming for her. At the end, she felt your love. Let go of your anger and you’ll feel hers. You are so consumed with hate and your need for revenge that she can no longer find you. Let it go, remember how it felt to love her, and she will return to you.
“We don’t know how to reunite you properly, but we’ll do our best. I swear to you, We’ll find out what was denied to you and do our best to make it right.” It was a reckless promise—to promise Nathaniel’s help to something that had tried to kill his daughter—but I believed he would honor it. So much had been taken from May and her mother. He of all people could understand it.
The pressure against my throat tightened and the not-Liza laughed her familiar discordant cackle. “You expect me to believe that?”
I could not speak. Luckily, Nathaniel did. “What do you have to lose? You have stolen my daughter. Check on your own. See whether Molly is telling you the truth about that much. You have my word as well as hers that we will follow up to see that as much as possible is done to make things right. Believe me, we’re going nowhere without Liza.”
A second later, Liza’s grip eased and Nathaniel pried her arm from my throat. Freezing air rushed into my lungs and I choked. Liza remained stiff in my lap for a long moment, waging some internal war. Then her body sagged.
“Give her to me,” Nathaniel said.
I held on for one second before letting him take her. One last moment of connection to a child I’d come to consider my own.
“We’re not through this yet.” Nathaniel hiked her up in his arms. “Grab my waist. We have to get back to the house before we freeze to death out here.”
My left arm, damaged by the iron cross, refused to function, so I clung to his belt with my frozen right fingers and set off after him in the dark.
The front door stood wide open and the lights blazed into the night, calling us home. It should have been a relief, but even from my position I could tell that Liza had not moved, had not shifted in her father’s arms the whole way back. If we could not save her, all this was for nothing.
Nathaniel laid her on the sofa and turned to stoke the fire, which had died back to nothing while we’d been gone. “Get a blanket. Or ten.”
I went for the stairs as fast as I could, but I was having trouble breathing, walking, seeing straight. My left arm, out of the brutal cold, began to throb. I staggered up the stairs into my room and gathered the duvet but when I straightened back up the world dimmed and I dropped to the floor. Not yet not yet not yet. All I had to do was make it back to Liza and then I could pass out. Then it wouldn’t matter.
Of course it matters, my mother said. It will always matter. She needs you.
“I tried to close the door.”
You did. But I can help you. Let me help you.
The next thing I knew, I was lying on the sofa in the living room while Nathaniel bandaged my shoulder with gauze from a first aid kit. The duvet I’d last seen upstairs was tucked around Liza, who had curled up in one of the wingback chairs.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?” he asked.
Now that I was warm again, the tearing, searing pain had returned and it took everything I had not to cry. “I didn’t think it mattered.”
His hands stilled, then moved to cup my face. “It matters.”
I glanced at the chair, my heart beating too fast for me to hold his gaze. “Is Liza okay?”
“She will be. That thing never wanted to hurt her.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be fine. Molly, look at me.”
I did.
“I owe you more than I can ever repay.”
My throat closed and those damnable tears filled my eyes. I blinked them back. “I don’t need your thanks. Anyone would have done the same.”
Liza’s fuzzy voice interrupted us. “Molly?”
“Right here.”
She slipped out of the chair and made her way over, the duvet a royal cloak trailing behind her, then dropped to her knees and threw her scrawny arms around my waist, resting her head against my chest.
“Be careful!” Nathaniel warned.
“She’s fine.” The words barely made it past the convulsive clog of emotions in my throat.
“I love you, too,” she whispered to me.
Tears dripped from the corners of my eyes, running down my face. But my good arm was holding her, and I could not raise the other to wipe them away.
Nathaniel cleared his throat. “You should both be in the hospital. But I can’t get you there. Not yet. When the storm breaks, I’ll take the snowmobile and go for help.”
Liza looked up. “I’m okay. Just cold. I could go make soup. That would taste good.”
“I don’t want us to split up.”
She shook her head. “It’s safe now. She’s gone. She found her daughter.”
“You know that for sure?” I asked.
She nodded. “They’re happy. I can’t feel them anymore. She was so sad. I didn’t even realize, you know, that she was the one making me feel so bad. I thought it was me, creating her because I was feeling bad. But it started with her. It would be nice if we could help find their tribe, get the right people to help them properly.”
I felt the tension seep out of Nathaniel as he squeezed his daughter in a tight hug. “We will. I promise. No more feeling bad without telling me, right?”
“Cross my heart.” She suited action to words.
“Good. Still, I’ll tell you what, I’ll make soup, you stay here with Molly.”
“You should both go.” They needed the time together. “I’m about to fall asleep and won’t be company for anyone.”
They left the room then, and I felt my mother’s presence. Not that cold, cancerous thing that had come to me in the early days of my stay, but the warm, loving woman I’d known in life. I waited, hoping I would see her, at least hear her, but she did not appear. The door was firmly closed. And yet I understood. She was waiting, just on the other side, in case the time had come for me to join her.
I closed my eyes and let myself drift, only to open them once more when a strange, ululating wail sliced through the room. Footsteps thu
ndered up the hall from the kitchen and I heard the door wrenched open.
“Dad! It’s a fire engine!”
Sure enough, a few minutes later, I heard stamping feet and men’s voices. My eyelids were too heavy to lift and I could not focus well enough to hear entire conversations.
“…brother-in-law…trouble…insistent…snow…tire chains…”
Matt, I thought. Matt had called them. What a nice guy.
Then Nathaniel. “…left shoulder…blood loss…cold…”
And then they lifted me and the pain brought me screaming out of the drifting daze.
“Be careful!” Nathaniel shouted.
“She’s up,” said one of the firefighters. “Miss, can you walk? It might be less painful if you can.” He helped me onto my feet, and then Nathaniel was holding me up, an arm under my good shoulder and around my waist.
“Slow, Molly.”
I leaned heavily against him and let him guide me as my eyes drifted shut again.
Hums and beeps and white lights and the scent of antiseptic. A hospital room. Cool air, sterile, without personality. Or ghosts. I opened my eyes and found Nathaniel next to me. His face was longer, leaner, hollower than I’d ever seen it. Fear froze my heart.
“Liza? Is she okay?”
A grin broke across his face and suddenly he was young, handsome, his shoulders straight and unburdened. “She’s great. Chattering, crocheting, driving the nurses crazy. One of them has taken her out for real food. The cafeteria here is pretty ghastly after a couple of meals.”
“A couple of meals? How long have I been asleep?”
“Two days.” He sucked in a deep breath. “I thought we were going to lose you. They told me…” He swallowed and shook his head.
“Told you?” My heart had not been damaged. Why was it beating so hard?
“They told me you’d make it, that you’d survive, but I couldn’t let myself believe them.” He sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. “I tried sending you away. More than once. You wouldn’t go.”
“No,” I whispered.
“Now, I am going to ask you something entirely different.” He took my good hand in both of his. “My daughter loves you. I love you. Please. Stay with us.”
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