chapter 18
I STOOD IN FRONT OF A PLAIN NARROW RECTANGLE OF a two-story house, white-sided with dark shutters.
“Doesn’t look like the throne room,” I muttered.
“Definitely not.”
I started, and saw Kristof beside me.
“What am I doing here?” He shrugged. “My guess is as good as yours. Either the Searchers accidentally sucked me in along with you or the Fates want me to start pitching in.”
We looked around. The sun had barely crested the horizon, but Mother Nature had turned the dial onto full this morning, and it blazed down, promising tropical conditions by noon. I glanced at the house. Every window was closed despite the heat. Air-conditioning? A horse and buggy trotted past behind me. Okay, probably not air-conditioning.
“Colonial America,” Kris said. “Does that sound like any ghost-world regions you know?”
“Boston…but this doesn’t look like Boston. And the ghost world is never this warm.”
A door opened across the road and a man dressed in trousers and a long-sleeved white shirt hurried out, carrying a hat and a black bag. He had salt-and-pepper hair, a high forehead, and thin whiskers that joined his mustache to his sideburns.
He hurried to the street and, without so much as a glance either way, crossed…and walked right through me.
“Okay,” I said. “If he’s a ghost, too, how did he do that?”
The man pushed open the gate of the house I stood in front of, and strode through. He climbed the few steps to the front door and rapped. A man opened the door. He was tall and thin, with white hair and a beard. Despite the heat, he was dressed in a black suit, with his jacket buttoned. He grunted a surly hello at the younger man.
“Just stopped by to see if you folks are feeling any better,” the neighbor said.
“Feeling better?”
“Yes, your wife came over this morning, said you’d both been up all night with stomach complaints. She thought someone might have put something in your food—”
“In our food? That’s preposterous. Abby would never say—”
“Oh, you know how womenfolk are. They get to worrying sometimes. She seemed fine to me—”
“She is fine,” the man said. “We’re all fine, and if you go charging us for this visit—”
“Now, Andrew, you know I’d never—”
“You’d better not,” Andrew said, and slammed the door.
The doctor shook his head, hefted his bag, turned, and walked through me again. There was a movement in one of the main-floor front windows, a young woman washing the glass. Her face was bright red from exertion and the heat. From her simple outfit and the size of the house, I assumed she was a maid.
“Crack open a window,” I said. “You got rights, girl. No one should be working in this heat.”
The young woman’s eyes went round. She dropped the rag and bolted.
“Shit!” I said. “Am I not supposed to do that?”
An exterior door slammed. Kristof gestured toward it and we both took off, following the sound around the house, past the side stoop. There we found the maid puking into the back garden.
“Oh, geez, they really are sick,” I said. “They’re making her work when she feels like this? Isn’t there a labor board in this town?”
“Not in real Colonial America,” Kristof murmured.
“Which is where I suspect we are.”
“In the past?”
Before he could answer, the maid retched and hurled. I patted the poor kid’s back, but I knew she couldn’t feel it.
“You sick again, Bridget?” a voice asked.
Another young woman, also simply dressed, leaned over the side fence. She shook her head. “That’s what you get, having to dump those slop buckets every morning. Bound to make anyone sick. Cheap old bugger. He can afford a water closet. Just too bloody cheap.”
Bridget moaned and wiped her sleeve over her mouth. “It’s not the slop buckets. It was supper last night. I told him that mutton stew wasn’t no good no more. Not after three days sitting out in this heat. But he said—”
“Bridget?” A plain dumpling of a middle-aged woman appeared on the side stoop. “Bridget! What are you doing out there, chitchatting the day away? I want these windows cleaned.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Bridget accepted a sympathetic nod from her colleague, and trudged back inside. Kristof and I followed, through the kitchen and into a room with a sofa, several chairs, and a fireplace. The man of the house—Andrew—adjusted his jacket and headed toward what I assumed was the front foyer. With a curt nod to his wife, and another to a round-faced, dark-haired woman on the sofa, he strode out the door, evidently unaffected by the bad stew.
I followed Bridget into a more formal version of the room we’d just left. The parlor. Until I’d moved into my Savannah house, I’d thought parlors were places that sold ice cream. Wiser spirit that I was, I now recognized a real parlor when I saw one.
Bridget picked up her discarded rag and resumed cleaning the front windows.
“What the heck am I supposed to be doing here?” I asked Kristof. “These people can’t hear me, can’t talk to me. What am I supposed to see, and why?”
I walked back into the other sitting area, where the two women were. The younger woman—the daughter?—continued to do needlepoint on the sofa, while the older woman, Abby, shook out a tablecloth from the side table.
The younger woman was definitely old enough to be married, especially in this time period, but I couldn’t see a ring on her finger. As she worked, she kept her head bowed, and her shoulders pulled in—the natural posture of a woman who’s accustomed to hiding from the world. Her light-blue dress had been washed too often, and she looked bleached out against the dark sofa. Yet, despite this outward timidity, she poked the needle through the fabric with quick, confident jabs.
Abby had moved on to dusting the mantel clock. Both women worked without an exchanged word or glance, as if each was in the room alone. After a few minutes, Abby walked into the front foyer. Her shoes clacked up a flight of steps. The younger woman lifted her head, tilting it to follow the sound of Abby’s shoes across the upstairs floor. As she tracked Abby’s path, her eyes flicked past mine and I blinked. In that gaze I saw something as coolly confident as her strokes with the needle. She waited until Abby’s footsteps stopped, then resumed her work.
“Okay, this is going nowhere,” I said. “Maybe I was supposed to follow Andrew.”
The young woman’s eyes flicked up, gaze meeting mine for a split second. Then it dropped back to her needlework.
“Hey,” I said. “Did you see—”
Bridget tore through the sitting room so fast I felt the breeze. She raced for the kitchen. The side door banged shut. A moment later, the retching began. The woman on the sofa shook her head and poked her needle through the fabric again; then, after the first stroke, she stopped. Her gaze lifted to the ceiling, where we could hear Abby bustling about. Then she tilted her head toward the back of the house. The sounds of Bridget’s vomiting continued.
The woman cautiously rose to her feet, looked around again, laid down her needlepoint, and headed for the front hall.
“I swear she looked right at me a minute ago,” I said to Kristof.
I hurried after her, with Kristof at my heels. In the hall, the woman stopped and latched the inner bolt. Then she turned and climbed the stairs.
“You!” I called after her. “Hold on!”
She didn’t pause. At the top, she walked across the hall and through an open bedroom door where Abby was making the bed. A man’s trousers hung over a chair, and shaving implements littered the bureau, next to a wash-basin filled with scum-and-whisker-coated water. On the floor was an open suitcase.
“Make yourself useful and dump that water, Lizzie,” Abby said.
The younger woman—Lizzie—didn’t move. “I heard Uncle John talking to Father last night.”
“Eavesdropping?” Abby said.
“I hear Father is going to change his will.”
“That’s his business. Not yours.”
Lizzie circled the bed, staying across the room from Abby. “But it is my business, isn’t it? You don’t think Emma and I know what you’re doing? First persuading Father to let your sister stay in the house on Fourth Street, then persuading him to transfer ownership of that house to you, and now a new will.”
“I don’t know anything about a new will,” Abby said.
Lizzie crossed the room and looked out the front window, turning her back on the woman I assumed was her stepmother. “So there is no new will?”
“No, there isn’t. If your father has written one, he would have told me.”
Lizzie nodded. She walked to the bureau and picked up the water basin. A few moments later, she returned the empty basin to the guest room. Then, without a word to her stepmother, she headed for a bedroom farther down.
Downstairs, the side door banged again. I looked toward Lizzie’s bedroom, but whatever fire seemed to have been starting up here had sputtered out. Better check out the situation below.
We found Bridget back in the parlor, washing the side windows now. From upstairs came the sound of footsteps. Then a few muffled exchanges. Bridget paused her cleaning and looked toward the dining room, as if the voices came from in there.
“At least they’re talking again,” she murmured.
She hoisted the pail of wash water and headed through the sitting room and around to the side door. I trailed her outside and watched her dump the water over her puddle of vomit. Then she walked to a pump and refilled the bucket.
“Pumping your own water?” I said. “Thank God I was born in the twentieth century.”
Kristof shrugged. “A hundred years from now people will probably be amazed that we cooked our own meals.”
I jerked my chin at the house. “They’d be amazed that we cooked our own meals, too.”
When we got back inside, someone was banging at the front door. Bridget hurried to answer it. She grabbed the door to pull it open and nearly fell over backward when it didn’t budge. She grabbed it again and twisted.
“Bolted?” she murmured, reaching for the lock. “In the middle of the day?”
The banging grew louder. Bridget fumbled with the lock. The moment she got it undone, the door flew open and she toppled backward to the floor. A laugh floated down the stairs.
“That was quite a pratfall,” Lizzie called from the top.
Andrew strode inside and handed Bridget his hat. Clutching a white parcel beneath his arm, he marched into the sitting room and took a key from on top of the mantel. As Lizzie watched him, she fixed a hook that had come unfastened on her dress.
“Back so soon, Father?” she said.
He grunted something about not feeling well, then walked through the kitchen to the side foyer. Instead of heading out the door, he climbed the rear steps. I followed. At the top of the stairs was a landing with a single door, then more steps leading to the attic level. Andrew unlocked the door and went into what was obviously his bedroom. After dropping off the parcel, he locked the door behind him and headed downstairs.
“Where’s Abby?” he asked his daughter as he walked into the sitting room.
“She had a note from a sick friend and decided to pay a visit.”
Andrew harrumphed and, without so much as loosening his tie, stretched out on the sofa and closed his eyes.
Note? Sick friend? When had this happened? Oh, wait, I’d been out back with Bridget for a few minutes before Andrew got home. Still, Abby must have left awfully fast…
Bridget walked in, carrying her bucket. Her gaze slid to Andrew. Lizzie shooed her into the dining room and followed, as did I. While Bridget washed the windows, Lizzie set up a board and began ironing handkerchiefs. They chatted quietly about whether Bridget was going out later that day, but Bridget confessed she was still feeling poorly. I only caught snatches of the conversation. My attention kept wandering back to the “note” and the “sick friend.”
I left the two women, peeked in on Andrew, who was now snoring, and headed for the front stairs. The moment I got to the top of the stairs, I saw Abby. She was still in the guest room, and the door was still open. She was on the floor, facedown, as if she’d fallen to her knees, then slumped forward to the floor. A pool of blood surrounded her. Her head and shoulders had been…hacked. There was no other word for it. I’ve seen death before, and I’ve seen violent death, but this made even my gorge rise.
“Jesus,” I swore. “How—what—?”
Kristof strode past me, and surveyed the room with a prosecutor’s eye. As I walked inside, still struggling to understand what I was seeing, I nearly trampled a piece of Abby’s scalp. I stepped over it, then looked down at the body.
The first blow must have killed her. If it hadn’t, Abby would have cried out and Bridget or I would have heard her. But the killer hadn’t stopped with one blow. There were ten, twenty, maybe more cuts, deep cuts. The fury that had gone into this killing, the absolute rage…I stood there, and I stared at the body, and I couldn’t fathom the degree of hate that had done this.
“Who?” I said, wheeling on Kristof.
As his eyes met mine, I knew the answer was obvious. Dead obvious. But I thought of Lizzie, standing at the top of the stairs, laughing at Bridget’s struggle with the door lock, then calmly ironing handkerchiefs while her dead stepmother lay one floor above them. To switch from this kind of rage to that kind of calm within minutes, well, it made no sense. What kind of monster—
I looked back at Abby. As I did, in my head I heard a skipping song from childhood.
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done—
“Oh shit!” I said, and raced for the steps.
I took them two at a time, turned at the bottom, and dove through the closed door.
Wearing her father’s overcoat, Lizzie stood behind her sleeping father’s head, with her back to me. She lifted a bloodied hatchet, then swung it down.
She gave her father forty-one.