by Linda Hughes
Later, Lizzie — Elizabeth to her husband and others in polite society, and Mrs. Sullivan to the servants — told Abby that the bayside rooms of the house had spectacular broad views of the water. However, the hills and dunes slanting down from the house were too steep to allow anyone to see where the bottom of the hill met the beach, where Abby always walked.
Before meeting Lizzie, Abby had heard, of course, that Mr. Sullivan, Jr., married a lively young woman, so she figured that was who would be in the cottage. Being mistress of a big, fancy house with a bigwig husband, Abby assumed she’d better steer clear of the elite, undoubtedly stuffy, woman.
Then one day she’d been walking her beach and spied a beautiful young woman with wild black hair, dressed in nothing more than her undergarments, her arms spread wide, standing on the edge of the knoll looking out over the bay. Abby howled with laughter, walked straight up the hill to the woman, introduced herself, and they’d been friends ever since.
Now, years later, her friend’s grown daughter was coming home and might be curious about her mother’s old cottage. Abby walked the same path toward that same cottage, memories flooding her mind. Reaching the spot where a path trickled up the hillside to the cottage, she stopped and looked up. She’d continued to walk the beach throughout the years but had never had the will to visit Lizzie’s cottage without her there. It seemed like an intrusion, the invasion of a sacristy. Deep inside her soul, she suspected she’d been harboring a glimmer of hope that someday her friend would return.
Having seen Lizzie in the woods outside the asylum just that morning and knowing the girl, Meg, would be here soon, Abby had suddenly become obsessed with wanting to check out the cottage to see if there was anything there that would alarm or emotionally distress the girl, should she come snooping about. Abby also wanted to see if there was a clue as to the real reason Elizabeth had been committed to the asylum. The return of the girl had shaken her into finally wanting to face the truth.
Funny, how she could see the future for others, but could hardly handle the present in her own life. The irony did not escape her.
A light rain shower that afternoon had come and gone, leaving a fresh scent in the air, but the late afternoon sun had dried everything out enough that the path proved an easy climb with no slippery spots. The Chippewa in her made such walking easy, anyway, she reckoned.
Approaching the cottage from the bay side, she walked around the structure to get to the door, which sat on the land side. She was pleased to see that the place remained in decent shape, considering its abandonment for fifteen years. The windows were streaked with grimy sludge, but none were broken. The roof didn’t appear to have any loose shingles, although they’d faded with some chipped at the edges. A pile of sand blown over from the dune had encroached on the fieldstone chimney, but it only reached up about five feet, doing no real harm. In fact, the chimney stood as stalwart as it always had, like a soldier refusing to give up his post. The clapboard siding was badly in need of paint, it’s pale yellow that Lizzie had ordered done having chipped and mottled to dull shades of beige. The blue gingerbread trim that Lizzie had added to the eaves around the perimeter of the building hadn’t fared too well, having a few spots where the open-lace woodwork had weathered away. The heavy wood door, however, remained in decent shape, having stood the test of time remarkably well.
Surely the door would be locked, Abby surmised, as Herbert would have had the place secured. Something, however, made her reach out to try the ornate brass knob, weathered to black. It felt sticky but she wrapped her fingers around it and turned.
She heard the latch release. She pushed. With a mournful creak worthy of an old haunted church, the thick wood door hobbled open.
Abby stepped inside.
“Holy Jesus, Mary Mother of God,” she rasped, making the sign of the cross on her chest even though she wasn’t Catholic.
Stale air assaulted her lungs. Stillness overwhelmed her senses. Her heart pounding, she gasped for air.
Now she knew why she’d not come before this, struck as she was with a vicious foreboding that in this place her spirit guides would tell her what had happened to that adorable little boy, Harry. This cottage, so silent, screamed of secrets and mystery. She’d always wanted to believe the child had been kidnapped by someone desperate for a son, someone who’d loved him and raised him to be a happy young man. That was most likely folly, she knew. The boy was most likely dead. Was that what she felt here? Death? Had some demented person taken him from here to brutally murder him? Or in her terror was she imagining things?
Breathing deeply, praying to both the Great Spirit and the Lord Jesus Christ, she looked around. Except for layers of dust — she wondered how that happened with the place closed-up — it looked as if Lizzie had stepped out of the cottage just yesterday.
Her colorful canvasses lay about. One, almost finished, sat on the easel. It portrayed the lovely white gazebo with the bay in the background. A woman in a plain, loose-fitting yellow dress lounged in the hammock in languid repose. The skirt of her dress trailed off the hammock and brushed the floor, while her arm dangled nonchalantly over the side, as well. A mass of blond hair could be seen, but her face turned away toward the deep blue water, leaving her features out of view. A strikingly restful scene, Abby’s heartbeat relaxed at the mere sight of it and with the joy of seeing more of Lizzie’s work again.
Abby had spent many an hour here, sitting on the chaise reading while Lizzie painted. They shared picnic lunches and drank tea. Sometimes Lizzie brought a bottle of wine from Herbert’s cellar. Sometimes they talked up a storm and sometimes silence fit their mood. Always comfortable together, they’d never had pressing expectations of each other.
Lizzie’s yellow apron, the one she always wore when she painted, streaked with paint every color of the rainbow, hung in its usual place from a nail on the wall. Abby fingered the fabric, now tattered with age.
She went to the chaise lounge and picked up an afghan carelessly thrown over the side. The flowered chintz fabric, underneath where the afghan had been, glared up at her in full color while the rest of it had faded. The afghan itself had been, she remembered, bright red but had morphed into an unpleasing dead rose.
At the windows, she ran her fingers down the frail sheer curtains, causing dust mites to filter through the air, catching what little light found its way through the dirty windows, making the dust specks look alive as they aimlessly wriggled about.
The Blue Willow tea set, covered in grime, sat on the small table, right where it had always been. The large table still held tubes of paint, dried up now, and other paint supplies. Herbert hadn’t even bothered to have them taken to his wife; he’d just provided new ones.
His refusal to come here or to give orders for anyone else to come here to clean the place out struck Abby as telling. He’d avoided this cottage the same way she had.
Abby didn’t touch the many paintings that were strewn about. So lovely, what a waste to sit here unseen, she thought.
Then, as if moved by an unseen hand, her head turned to notice, for the first time, a painting of a cemetery scene, sitting on a rug and propped up against the wall to the left of the fireplace. It would seem a morbid subject, yet she found it captivating, drawing the eye to dilapidated wooden crosses casting pale blue shadows over a blanket of white snow at sunset. She recognized it as the old Indian cemetery outside a deserted Methodist church a few miles up the peninsula, hailing from the days when many Chippewas had taken on that faith. The scene moved the Chippewa woman to tears and she gently touched one of the crosses.
The painting slipped and fell flat onto the floor with a loud whoosh, scrunching up the rug underneath it.
“Oh, damn it all to hell!” Abby let loose, then berated herself for using that particular phrase to swear at a religious scene. Bending to pick it up, she saw something on the floor, something that had been covered by the rug.
No longer interested in rescuing the painting, her eyes became gl
ued to the floor. Using the side of her foot to push the painting away to get it completely off the rug, she pulled the rug all the way up and tossed it aside.
There, in the wood floor, sat a trapdoor. Without hesitation, Abby reached down and pulled on the heavy metal ring nailed to it. The door opened with a whisper of a whine. Peering inside, she could see a diagonal ladder with wide steps descending into what looked like a pitch dark cellar. Or a cave.
She straightened up and scanned the room. Grabbing a large candle and finding the box of matches in the same spot as always, she lit the candle and held it tightly as she went down the ladder.
When she reached the bottom and turned around to look about, Abby gasped. This, she realized, changed everything.
7
Elizabeth seldom thought about the past. Her marriage to Herbert, her children, and even her cottage by the bay did not often cross her mind.
But today for some reason her mind kept wandering back to more than fifteen years ago when she was still living with Herbert, with two young children to add to the package. Marriage had been a daunting enough task for her; raising children proved impossible.
She cocked her head to study the bonnet covering the features of the girl’s face in her painting. Never liking to show the face when she painted a person, she always had to concoct a way to hide it. She loved the expressions on the faces of animals, so painted those in detail. But human facial features did nothing more than confound her; thus, she avoided them. In this instance, a big straw hat worked well, but it looked too yellow. Real straw had a more muted tone. She picked up the burnt umber tube of paint and spent the next fifteen minutes dabbing it onto the image.
“Ah, that looks just right. As natural as can be,” she announced to herself, stepping back for a better view.
This painting of a preteen girl holding a pink baby pig had turned out to be delightful. Of course, the artist found all her work to be delightful.
Uninvited, an image of another painting all those years ago flashed through her mind. It had been of a woman in a yellow dress lounging in the hammock on the gazebo. Her face turned toward the water and away from the viewer. Elizabeth hadn’t been able to finish that painting and wondered whatever happened to it.
Not that it mattered. She had plenty of others like this one.
It seemed curious, even to her, that she didn’t miss her cottage at all. The place had meant so much to her. But then it became tainted with the obligations of marriage. Eventually she hated the cottage as much as she hated the house because the two became inextricably connected. Getting away from Herbert had meant giving up the cottage.
It was a small price to pay.
She had everything she needed right here to paint, although she did miss the beautiful view of the bay. But she could always go to the third floor of Building 50 and see it again, although from a further distance. She’d made some lovely sketches from there and painted a number of pretty pictures of the bay from that angle.
In a quandary now, she couldn’t decide between marine blue and emerald green for the girl’s dress, so she stroked a patch of each underneath the pig, which lay in the girl’s arms.
“Oh, the blue looks wonderful!” She painted a few strokes and it looked perfect.
Another errant memory invaded her thoughts. Her little girl, Meg, had on a blue dress the last time Elizabeth ever saw her. And her little boy, Harry, had on a blue suit the last time she laid eyes on him.
“No,” she said, squeezing more emerald green paint onto her palette. “Green will be better.”
Working feverishly, she corrected the mistake.
She should have wanted to be a mother. The thought struck her as it always did: Unwanted and unwarranted, as far as she was concerned. Motherhood wasn’t for everyone. Whoever decreed that it should be had apparently never been a mother. Some bastard of a man, obviously.
The asylum harbored a number of women who agreed with her. There were female residents who’d had nervous breakdowns after being overworked on their family farms with a bunch of children to rear. Others became afflicted by puerperal as a result of childbirth, fever and urinary infection. That sounded absolutely horrible to Elizabeth. And then there were those who suffered severe depression after childbirth. She certainly could understand that.
There were others, however, that she didn’t understand. In her cottage especially, there were aging women who had not adjusted to the change of life, feeling as though they weren’t real women if they could no longer reproduce. Poppycock! Elizabeth was too young for it now but looked forward to the day when she experienced the change and wouldn’t have to deal with her monthly curse. It was nothing but a bother. She’d never felt as if she had to spit out babies in order to be a woman.
Men and women alike were here for a variety of other reasons, as well. Some were mentally retarded and some of the older ones had become feeble minded with age. There were those who had general poor health, intemperance, and business failures. Some drank too much. Others threatened suicide. She’d even heard of people being committed for religious excitement, nostalgia, and seduction. Some had physical disabilities like peg legs, hair lips, and epilepsy. There were the consumption patients scattered throughout the place, those who Dr. Munson was trying to collect next door in Cottage 25. And there were those who simply had no place else to go but the asylum. Not to mention the wives who’d been “put away” by their philandering husbands.
A hodgepodge group of outcasts to be sure. Elizabeth smiled. They were, after all, her people, as close to a family as she would ever get.
She stuck her paintbrushes into the jar of turpentine, wiped her hands on a rag, took off her apron and hung it on the peg on the wall, and patted her hair. It was time to go down to dinner with her family. This was pot roast night, one of her favorites.
8
“Excuse me, Miss.” Meg looked up into the bespeckled sea blue eyes of a ruggedly handsome young man in a suit. Her heart did a little flip.
No, don’t you dare! she warned herself. Men are scum, remember? I’m off the bozos for at least the summer.
Her heart flopped when the handsome man smiled.
“We were wondering if you know how to play euchre. We need a fourth.” He jerked his thumb toward two older gentlemen sitting at a table across the aisle one row behind her in the first-class train car.
She blinked. “What?” Well, that was stupid! she reprimanded herself. She’d been half hypnotized by the clack-clack of the wheels on the rail and the endless miles of green trees flashing by the window. Coming back to the present felt like coming out of a fog.
“Euchre. Would you like to join us?” He raked a hand through his mass of sandy-colored hair, giving Meg an urge to run her fingers through it herself.
“Oh. Euchre. Yes. I used to play, but it’s been years. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good.”
“That’s okay, because I am very good. You can be my partner.”
Damn! He smiled again and held out a hand.
Meg took his hand and let him gently help her to her feet. He led her to the gentlemen’s table.
One man slipped out to let her scoot in by the window. She wore a Chanel sitabout dress of green satin, and the fabric of the flared skirt swooshed along the leather seat as she skimmed over it. Her long pearls clanked on the side of the table and she placed her hand over them to still them. Having taken off her cloche hat earlier, she touched her hair but then thought better of it, realizing it betrayed her nervousness. Daintily, she folded her hands on the table.
“Hello,” the man next to her said. “I’m Walter. Glad you can join us.” He sat back down now that she was settled in.
The man on the other side of the table had been pushed over when the handsome man sat beside him, so he didn’t stand up. But he graciously reached across the table and said, “Just call me John.”
Meg shook hands with him and with the man at her side, and said, “Hello. I’m Meg.”
“Charmed, I
’m sure,” Walter said.
When she looked at the handsome man, his stare made her blush. “And you are?” she asked.
“Oh,” he said, blinking as if coming out of a trance himself. “I’m Jed.”
Meg reached across the narrow table to offer her hand once more, but instead of shaking it Jed took her fingers in his, lifted her hand, and gently kissed her knuckles. His lips were warm, with a slight touch of moisture that lingered sensuously on her skin.
Her heart flipped and flopped.
“Hello, Jed,” she managed to say.
“Okay!” John announced as he dealt the cards. “First jack deals!”
John won the deal and the game ensued. Euchre had been around this area since French fur traders were the first Europeans to settle the Great Lakes region. Everybody in Michigan seemed to know how to play. Meg had learned from her nanny when she was ten, and played with her and the upstairs maids every Friday night when her father went to town council meetings. How she’d loved those nights! Her nanny and the maids were fun, not stuffy like most of the other adults she met, her father’s friends and business associates. The upstairs card games lasted for two years until Meg left for boarding school when she was twelve, so it had been a long time since she’d played. But once the men reminded her of the unusual basics, like jacks being the high cards instead of aces, the knack of the game came back to her. Plus, her partner, the handsome man named Jed, hadn’t lied about being very good. They soundly won the first game.