A few weeks after Nellie had been to visit, I was in the kitchen pouring milk when I heard Lucy and Myrtle whispering in the passageway behind me. Jennie sat by the table with some mending, and the two of us exchanged glances at the sounds. I could tell there was fear in her gaze when it darted toward the door, which certainly did nothing to dispel my own sense of unease.
I thought it best to check on them and stepped out there, where the sight of the open cellar door hit me like a fist. I went cold, then hot. I barely noticed the stool they had brought in and stood on in order to get to the key above the door. All I saw was that open door and the darkness behind it like a maw. I heard the girls’ feet as they scampered down the steps, not remembering at all that I had told them it was dangerous. I even heard them giggle, quiet and suppressed, as they slipped farther down in the darkness.
They were halfway down the stairs before I caught them. It would have been very bad for them to go down there that day. I had not cleaned up from the last crate yet; the oilcloth was still on the table with my tools scattered on top of it, and what little light filtered down the stairs would have revealed it all sufficiently to be hard to explain away. The victim’s bloody clothes lay in rags on the floor.
I hauled the girls back up by their arms; they were both squalling by then, from fear or shame I could not say. Myrtle’s face was red and teary; Lucy’s was twisted up and pale. I proceeded to give them both a hard beating in the kitchen. I had never beaten them like that before, had barely smacked them at all. The force of my anger surprised even me, but the enterprise depended on their obedience.
If they did not do as I said, everything would be lost.
“We just wanted the marzipan cake!” Lucy cried. “Aunt Nellie said you keep sweets down there!”
“Well, I don’t, so there’s that,” I told them; my hand was aching from the punishment. “You could have broken your necks on those stairs.”
Myrtle’s eyes were puffy and red from crying. She stood with her hands pressed to her cheeks and looked at me with horror in her eyes. It made me want to cry as well, but how else was I to teach them to never, ever go down there again?
When the air had gone all out of me and their tears had all dried up, the girls went to their room with burning cheeks. It was a harsh lesson, but at least I felt sure they would never do something so foolish again. Marzipan cake! Nellie and her fancies! How could she do this to me? I almost regretted letting her live!
Jennie had been sitting quietly through it all, squinting and flinching whenever my hand landed another smack. The mending in her lap was all forgotten as she endured her sisters’ punishment.
Good, I thought then. When she sees what happens to them, she will never venture down there herself.
Then came the night when Lee Porter died.
The man was already married, as it turned out, so he sure had what I gave him coming. I had him down on the cellar floor; the oilcloth beneath us was slick with red and the cleaver in my hand smeared with the same. My hands were very red that night, as Mr. Porter was a heavy bleeder.
Then, all of a sudden—a sound—a quiet creaking on top of the stairs. I barely even noticed at all, being so intent on my work, but I knew that sound so well that it sliced through the haze and made me slow down the butchering. It was the sound of the door swinging open, but slowly, as if someone did not want me to hear.
A movement caught my vision then, and I looked up to see a flickering on the wall above the stairs. Someone was standing on top of the steps holding a lamp or a candle.
I paused to catch my breath and quiet my hammering heart. I looked at the mess on the table—at my hands so red in the light from the kerosene lamp—and quickly assessed my options: Should I step forth and show myself, bloody and reeking, to the person up there, and risk that they slipped away before I learned who it was, or could I be more clever about it?
I chose the latter option.
I unhooked the lamp from the ceiling and went to the door that led out into the yard. Then I extinguished the flame just as I slammed the door once, giving the illusion that I had gone outside. Next, I crouched in the darkness by the door, as quiet as I could, not even moving an inch, cursing myself all the while for not having had the wits to lock the cellar door from the inside—I suppose I was not in the habit, since it had never been a problem before.
The flickering on the wall was stronger then, when my own light was out, and so I was sure that someone was still there, someone with an uneasy hand, as the light lifted and fell on the bricks. I also thought I could hear a rustling, and the sound of uneven breathing.
I waited there a good long while, wondering if the person would come down or leave. I swear I was hoping for the latter, but I had brought the cleaver with me, and was clutching it hard in my hand as I sat there, waiting for that light to either grow brighter or disappear. My back started to ache after a while, and the muscles in the legs protested the strain, but I still sat there, breathing as quietly as I could, just waiting for that person to make up their mind.
I was fully expecting it to be one of the Greening brothers, the farmhands I had just hired, poking their noses where they did not belong. Wondering, perhaps, what the widow was doing in the cellar all alone, late at night, but when the person finally came down the steps, candle held high in a shivering hand, that was not who it was. There was Jennie, looking much like a wraith in her nightdress on the stairs, her hair hanging loose to frame her heart-shaped face.
I did not know what to do right then, if I should rush at her or stay quietly by the door. Perhaps she would turn and go back, I thought—and then I wondered if she had come there to look for me because one of the younger children was ill. When she had come halfway down, she lifted the candle, to better see the room before her: bloody table, limbs and all. Even from the distance, I could see how her eyes widened, and how the hot wax spilled down from the candle and onto her hand, shivering in her grasp. Yet she moved the candle around in a half-circle motion, let the light spill onto sacks of flour and heaps of potatoes, rows of jars and barrels of apples, until it found me, crouching by the door.
She startled when she saw me, turned and ran back up the stairs—her stealth suddenly vanished. I dropped the cleaver and was at her heels at once, chasing her disappearing light. As I paused in the kitchen to unhook the lamp above the table, I could hear her move on to the upper floor, and found her extinguished candle in a corner on the landing when I continued the chase, rushing after the sound of her footfalls until I heard the door to her bedroom slam shut. Then I slowed down the pace.