Emily's Ghost (19 page)

By the time Maria
returned, Emily and Mrs. Gibbs had cleared the table and were
loading the dishwasher. Maria handed Emily a crisp, linen blouse
much finer than the one she'd stained and directed Emily to a
bedroom which lay just beyond the receiving room.

The circular layout of the
ground floor really was ideal for an owner-occupied bed and
breakfast, Emily decided. She made her way to what was once a music
or morning room, as exquisitely fitted out as every other room
downstairs. Emily couldn'
t
help wondering how long
it
would be before Frank nailed
drywall over the tapestried paneling. After changing, she hurried
out, then noticed a carpenter's wooden toolbox in the hall with a
small flashlight tucked neatly between the hammer and the cordless
drill. She picked up the minilight and slipped
it
in the pocket of her mid-length
skirt.

Emily's blouse and the
wine-stained tablecloth were soon sloshing side by side in the
front-loading washer, exchanging tales of woe. Mrs. Gibbs poured
coffee, and Maria set out a tray of petits fours. The last course
took place in the drawing room, where the women perched gingerly on
horsehair-cushioned chairs. "We have a small sitting room off our
bedroom, which we prefer," Maria admitted. "Frank finds this room
gloomy. Even our guests seem to avoid it."

"It
is
a somber room," Mrs. Gibbs
agreed. "But then the Victorians weren't exactly party animals,"
she added.

Emily was thinking about
the effect a room like this would have on a courtship. "I wonder,"
she mused, "if Hessiah Talbot was ever kissed here."

It was a thought best left
unspoken. Maria dropped her cup on its saucer with a crash and
began to choke. It was a ghastly sound; her eyes were wide as she
leaped up from the love seat and began to flail ineffectually at
her chest. Emily was at her side instantly, prepared to perform the
Heimlich maneuver, when Maria suddenly waved her away, swallowed
hard once or twice, and took a sip of coffee. She sat back down,
and so did Emily.

Mrs. Gibbs said mildly,
"Went down the wrong pipe, I expect." And that was that.

But the incident added to
Emily's sense that Maria was connected to the Talbots in some way
other than shared real estate. She wondered why the outspoken Mrs.
Gibbs hadn't brought up Hessiah Talbot once during dinner. Perhaps
she'd given up on the subject long ago. And now the evening was
clearly winding down and any opportunity fading.

"Dear me," Mrs. Gibbs said
after a few minutes, "I should be running along before the sun goes
down. I don't like to drive after dark. Thank heavens for June
twilights."

Emily rolled out her plan.
"As for me, I've had altogether too much wine to drive in the
light
or
dark. I
think I'll book a room here for the night."

"Here?" Maria repeated,
stunned. "But . . . have you packed anything?"

"Nope," Emily answered
cheerfully. "I'll have to wing it."

"Not me, thank you," said
Mrs. Gibbs. "I need my Serta. Besides, I'm sober as a judge. The
problem with you two," she added with a wink and a pinch of her
ample waist, "is you don't have the weight to offset the
wine."

Mrs. Gibbs packed up her
Crockpot and bade them both good night. "You will let me know how
your little article turns out, won't you?" she asked Emily with a
deliberately bland look. She'd guessed that Emily was up to
something; obviously she was a very shrewd old lady.

That left only Emily and
Maria.

Emily said no to another
cup of coffee, protesting that she was keeping Maria from her
duties. Maria replied that she had no duties, and Emily suspected
she wasn't just being polite; the place really did seem to run
itself. She wondered whether Maria had any domestic help. Somehow
she felt sure she did.

"It really is a grand old
house," Emily said. She decided to drag up the Talbots one last
time. "Have you ever been visited by descendants of John Talbot?
You know, great-great-grandchildren passing through on their way to
Disney World, that sort of thing?"

"There are no direct
descendants," Maria said sharply. "None." She let out a little
gasp, as though she'd been indiscreet again. "That's what I've
heard anyway. No ... I'm sure someone would have said."

"Oh. I'm sorry to hear
that," Emily said carefully. "It's always sad when a line dies
out." She tried to chat away the moment. "There's no danger of that
happening in
my
family. I have four brothers -- four Bowditches -- and every
one of them is married with children." She sighed heavily. "And I
suppose I will be the spinster Bowditch."

It was the most irrelevant
little confession; Emily had no idea why she'd made it. It had to
be the wine.

"I don't think there's
anything wrong with never having married," Maria admitted in her
sad, dreamy voice. "Nothing at all."

A thought occurred to
Emily.
So that's where the faraway comes
from. She's unhappy with dear old Frank.
She wondered just how old Frank was. A young and beautiful
wife, a steady turnover of male visitors, and a plumber-husband
working all the time—it didn't look promising.

Still, it was none of
Emily's business. She stood up and said, "Is there any chance that
you sell toothbrush kits from that charming reception
desk?"

"I do, but not to you,"
Maria said with a pretty wave of dismissal. "Come, and I'll give
you one as well as your key. You'll want to freshen up. Room six is
very quiet."

"Can I be on the third
floor, above an empty room instead?" Emily asked quickly. "I have
an exercise routine in the morning. Nothing that your plaster can't
handle, but I'd hate to disturb anyone."

Maria started to say
something, then stopped. "If you prefer," she said at
last.

They parted with polite
phrases, and Emily made her way up the elegant staircase to the
inelegant third floor. The finished half was neatly separated by a
sheet of plastic from the unfinished gutted part that ended in the
new door to the tower. Emily went to Room 8 and waited. Sometime
past midnight, when the light on the staircase was dimmed and the
flow of distant traffic muted, she crept out of her bed and tiptoed
behind the sheet of plastic that separated the world of the Salvas
from that of the Talbots.

At the end of the hall she
took hold of the knob of the tower-room door, turned, and pulled.
The door wouldn't open.
Damn!
she thought.
Was there a
key?
She shined the flashlight on the
right stile: no lock. But she discovered a barrel bolt mounted
vertically at the top of the stile, with its bolt drawn down. That
meant that Maria had gone back and bolted the door since the
afternoon. Why? Why have a barrel bolt there in the first place?
Emily slid the bolt, opened the door, and went into the tower room
on tiptoe —- why, she didn't know, since she'd just determined that
no one could be in any of the three tower rooms.

Emily was grateful for the
full moon; it washed the top floor in pale white light. She was
able to make her way without a flashlight to the slant-top desk --
the desk that she was absolutely positive stored secrets she should
know. The top drawer slid open easily. Holding the tiny flashlight
between her teeth, Emily flipped through a pile of papers, then
another, and quickly determined that some college kid named Kyle
Edwards had used the desk for his own, a generation
earlier.

Disappointed, she opened
the second drawer and found more term papers and a packet of
airmail letters bound by a rotted rubber band. She shined the light
on the top blue tissue envelope. It was postmarked Paris, 1972.
Flipping through the lot, she found them all addressed, in the same
European hand, to Kyle Edwards. She held up the packet to her nose,
inhaling the faded fragrance that hinted of words of love. She
tossed the packet back into the drawer.

That left the bottom
drawer. Heart hammering, Emily pulled it open to find ... nothing.
It had been completely cleared. Yet earlier that afternoon she'd
noticed that it had been partly open and stuffed full of papers and
bound books or possibly journals. Bitterly disappointed, she slid
the drawer back. It resisted. She pulled it open again, carefully,
then reached in and back and around, searching for the hindrance.
Something was caught between the drawers, and when she removed it,
she saw that it was a very old photograph of a family posed in
classic formation next to a pedestaled fern: father, mother, son,
son, infant in mother's arms.

Emily turned the crumpled
photograph over and read "July 1862." She did some quick
arithmetic. In 1862 Hessiah Talbot was about a year old. Yes! Her
hunch was right! The drawer must have been a treasure trove of
Talbot history, and Maria had carted off the contents sometime that
afternoon, because -- Emily had no idea why, but one way or another
she was going to find out. What a lucky break, finding the
photograph that was left behind, the photograph ...

The photograph that had
one too many children in it.

Oh, hell,
Emily thought, deflated. This is just some family
or other from about Hessiah's time period. She stuck the photo in
the voluminous pocket of her skirt and removed the drawer
altogether, searching with the flashlight for more. But there was
nothing. She was in the process of replacing the drawer when she
realized that her eyes were smarting and that the overwhelming
mustiness of the tower room had turned into another smell
altogether.

The smell of
smoke.

Smoke! It couldn't be
happening! Emily jumped to her feet, hitting her head hard on the
edge of a marble tabletop. She rubbed the back of her head
furiously, willing away the pain, fighting a woozy disorientation.
"You have a nose for news, Emily," her mother used to say, "but not
for anything else." Her mother was right, she thought, rushing for
the door. How had she not smelled smoke? And where was the
fire?

She grabbed the doorknob
and pushed instead of pulled. Then she pulled. It didn't matter.
The door was obviously bolted on the other side. Panicky now, she
turned back to the room, looking for another exit. The original
door stood across the room, dark and massive in the moonlight.
Beyond it must be the crumbling old stairs, situated between the
tower and the main house. Emily ran for the door, lifting the folds
of her skirt to her mouth, filtering the thickening smoke. She
groped at the doorknob, felt a giant key still in the keyhole,
turned it, swung the impossibly heavy door inward. She staggered
two steps toward the old hail landing. Her foot caught a wire
hanger that was on the floor and sent it flying.

Into empty space.
There
was
no hall
landing, she realized with horror as she peered over the threshold.
All she could see was part of a shadowy framework for a stairwell;
it would be suicidal to try climbing down it in the dark. She
gulped a few mouthfuls of fresh air and tried not to panic. There
was no evidence anywhere yet of flames. She could scream for help,
here or at the bolted door. Being caught as a snoop was the least
of her problems now. She closed the heavy door and made a sprint
across the room; she wanted to be at a viable exit.

But the smoke was heavier
now, obscuring visibility, making breathing impossible. Emily swung
open the first casement window she found and drew in enormous gulps
of clean night air. She should cry for help, rouse the
neighborhood. But the thought was repugnant to her.

The moon was absolutely
brilliant. She couldn't imagine why there wasn't a hook and ladder
already on the side lawn. The lack of one infuriated her and at the
same time jogged her memory: Mrs. Gibbs had said that the phobic
John Talbot had ordered a kind of fire escape cut into the granite
walls of the tower. And Emily could see, leading from the casement
window to her left, a series of steps carved into the tower, each
no more than half a foot wide, zigzagging to ground
level.

Without hesitating she ran
to the exit window and climbed out onto the sill. Without looking
down -- if she did that, she would faint from fear -- she began
backing down the steps of the tower, clinging to the rusted iron
handholds that were set every couple of feet in the granite wall,
picking her way step by step down the three-story vertical drop.
When she was fifteen feet from the ground, she tripped on the hem
of her skirt, and the handhold she grabbed gave way completely,
making her lose her balance and go flying off the side of the tower
like a cat through an unscreened window. She landed on a hedge of
boxwood, breaking a few branches, and tumbled onto the lawn more or
less in one piece.

God in heaven
was the only thought that filled her
mind.

But two seconds later she
was racing for the front doors, which were already thrown open, and
running up to warn Maria, who gave every indication that a fire was
in progress. The innkeeper was hurrying the guests out of the house
in a surprisingly calm way. When she saw Emily she did a violent
double take.