Farthest House (37 page)

“This is it,” Willow said aloud. This was the moment in her dream when fear sent her flying back to her own bed, but she wasn’t dreaming now. This was happening in real time, and she couldn’t hope to wake up and find herself elsewhere. The plants, the mushrooms, and her summer-long illness—she let out an involuntary cry. Tory was poisoning her.

The realization echoed through her, doubled back, and had to be realized again.
Tory was poisoning her.
She was putting bane in the soups and teas and everything else she served up. Datura, yes, but mushrooms, other plants—roots, stems, seeds—maybe even shavings from morphine pills prescribed in the 1940’s for toothaches. Tory likely didn’t even keep a record of her ingredients, and the combinations could be nearly fatal. Maybe they were only accidentally non-fatal.

This explained the invitation to Farthest House. It explained why Tory sent Mable to the apartment to befriend Prairie. Most hurtful was the realization that Tory used even her brother’s death to her advantage.

Staying in the room, given all she knew, was impossible, and Willow rushed back into the hall breathless. An all too-familiar pain of rejection burrowed through her. She needed to pack up Prairie and be gone by the time Tory returned. Leave Nebraska altogether. Flee the way Derrick had and find a new life.

She tried to breathe deep, to use her breath like a ballast. She couldn’t run far enough to outrun this. Back to Omaha wouldn’t do it, nor across the country, and she wouldn’t try. Prairie deserved a beautiful home, not a string of run-down apartments. She also deserved having Clay in her life.

Shivering in the hall, she half expected Tory to appear on a broom and come flying down the long corridor, cackling. She needed to hurry, and though she didn’t want to go back in, she had to see and face it all. The dark bundles hanging from the ceiling, the pharmacy on the desk, and even the hoarded dolls were evidence of more than just an old woman’s bitterness. She had no proof Mary set Papa’s house ablaze, but she had real proof now of a crime, and she needed to take her time, not botch the opportunity. Evidence had a way of disappearing, and she needed to find out all she could before she called the local sheriff. If Tory suspected anything, she’d start flushing poisons down the toilet before the law arrived—she knew which ones to destroy first.

The thought of contacting the police filled Willow with dread. She wouldn’t be believed, and she’d be tagged crazy. Red hadn’t believed her before about Mary. Another call to him now, this time to say Tory was poisoning her, would sound like another cry of
wolf.
He’d think she, not Tory, needed to be locked away. Greenburr’s local sheriff wouldn’t believe a far-fetched story from an outsider about one of his own, either. Dr. Mahoney wouldn’t be of any help substantiating her claim of being poisoned. He already believed her illness was mental. Nothing in his records would even hint at her being poisoned, and he likely scratched
hypochondriac
in red ink next to every chart entry he’d bothered to make on her. And if someone did issue a search warrant, would they find only an eccentric old woman’s bedroom? Collecting plants wasn’t a crime, nor was keeping old medicines.

She wished Clay was there. He’d drop whatever he was doing and hurry to her, but calling him wasn’t what she wanted of their relationship. She wanted a lover and a partner, not to put her fate in his hands, not to commit herself to spending her life on the small pallet of his palms. She had to finally stand on her own, or she’d forever be swept from one Mary or Tory to the next.

She started back in, slower this time, dust beneath her feet. Again the swamp odors and the one scent like a familiar but distant hum. She stopped, raised her forearm to her nose, letting the sleeve of her robe slide back. She sniffed her skin, pushed the robe higher, testing the scent on her upper arm, and then her underarm. Yes, the odor was transformed, altered by her body’s chemistry, but some trace of the odd fragrance in the room was there. She’d noticed it on herself before, especially during her worst days and nights of sweaty, fitful sleep, which likely meant after one of Tory’s sickly doses. She brought her arms in tight against her body. If she could detect the scent on her skin, could bees? Was that why they singled her out?

The bees belonged to Jonah. As mean and cold as he had been all summer long, she still couldn’t believe he wanted to hurt her. He wanted her and Prairie to leave, but did that prove he knew or at least suspected something evil? He lay in the hospital and would likely be back in a day or two. Meanwhile, she couldn’t run to the police until she knew how he would be affected. He already had suspicion attached to his name.

Willow was happy to see half a dozen sketchbooks I’d filled with watercolors stacked on the table. All roughly the same two-inch thickness, hand-sewn, and with the same cardboard covers, the pages had warped and crinkled from the moisture of my paints. Not trusting what Tory would do when the whole hideous truth came to light, Willow took up the books and cradled them to her chest. She’d hide them for safe keeping. On the table was an ancient text on mushrooms titled
The Good, The Bad.
She
turned several pages of large and detailed pictures before her gaze fell on the book lying beside it. Mémé’s mystery:
Mad Apple.

She stared at the picture of a bright red apple with two white trumpet flowers on the stem: Datura. She decided against taking Tory’s copy; she could read Clay’s. With her arms full, she turned to give the room a final inspection. Another white file box sat beneath the garden-facing window. The window shade had been pulled nearly to the bottom but stopped where a piece of rubber pipe came over the sill and down to a hole in the lid of the box. She moved closer, unsure of what she was seeing. The window was raised a couple of inches to accommodate the tubing, and the open space on either side of the pipe was sealed with black tape. Again, Willow felt an urge to leave immediately:
Run, go now
.

She took the final steps forward and lifted the shade. A slim hummingbird feeder, containing a substance that looked like honey, hung behind the windowpane, between the glass and the screen. Beneath the feeder, sheets of aluminum foil were taped to the walls of the encasement and twisted to form a cone that funneled into the pipe.

She didn’t understand. As she studied the whole jimmied affair, her body growing more chilled the longer she stared, a bee lit on the wire screen. The insect walked back and forth and finally tipped through an opening—a slit in the mesh that looked made with a knife. The stab and drag of a blade. Inside the screen, the bee landed on the feeder. Seconds passed as it fed. Moments later the insect tried to lift but struck the screen spinning and went silent, except for the tiny sound its body made dropping onto the foil. She watched as it slid down and disappeared into the mouth of the funnel.

Her toes were an inch from the box, and her stomach lurched. With trembling fingers, she lifted one corner of the lid. Thousands and thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dead bees. She glanced back to the wall of boxes she’d thought were all dolls.

Her body was clumsy with horror, and she fought for balance as she backed away. Her heel caught on something behind her, and it moved as though alive. On the floor, leaning against the table legs was a large but thin object, more oblong than square and covered with a yellowed bed sheet. The dimensions sent new cold lapping over her feet. 24”x36,” her preferred canvas size.

Her mouth twisted in shock and grief. Her heart pounded, and the noise filled her ears. When she could, she pinched and gave the sheet a single quick tug. The cloth scraped along the top but it moved only inches. She had to touch the dusty cloth again and give it a second yank. The sheet fell away, slowly, seeming to slither off its prize.

A cerulean blue sea and an unborn child.

45

Pulling into Clay’s drive, Willow was reminded of her own childhood home; though her house didn’t have a driveway, an attached garage, or forest-green shutters. That home, where she lived with Friar and Papa and cubbied up in a small room with yellow-duckling wallpaper, was gone.

There wasn’t time for remembering or self-pity. She lifted Prairie from her seat in the back. Clay’s door lay open, and through the screen, she saw him across the room, sitting at a wide desk. The stories he’d told of his childhood, especially of Robbie’s death, made her wonder briefly how best to paint his visionary portrait. Like the rest of the world’s occupants, his past held layers of wounds. The superficial ones, the skin-deep red welts healed in a few days, but a deposit of unhealed bruises lay beneath. How best to capture that on canvas? What features needed to be fore-grounded and brought to life, and which ones could rest? She was stalling.

“Hey, Willow!” His feet came off the desk, his book hit the desktop, and he hurried across the room to draw her inside. “I’ve been worried about you. How’s Jonah?”

Standing in the circle of his arms, as he held both her and Prairie, she breathed deeply of his scent and tried to absorb his surety into her own body. “Are you all right?” he asked. He lifted her chin, “Are we all right? Is Jonah all right?”

“Yes. Yes, and yes.” Whatever would happen now, she was going to be all right, as was Prairie. Though thoughts of Tory pressed a weight on her heart, and she had no idea what would happen next, Farthest House was hers, she’d never take another dose of poison, and most importantly, Prairie was safe.

“Welcome to my abode,” Clay said, swinging his arms wide.

She’d not imagined his place; he always seemed at home in Farthest House. She took a step away, and keeping Prairie on her hip, looked around. Bookcases covered the wall at one end of the room, shelves crammed with volumes, some piled vertically, some horizontally, filled every inch of disorderly space. More books and papers teetered in wobbly-looking stacks on the floor, a leather sofa sat opposite the desk, and a golf bag leaned in a corner with a Yankee’s cap hanging from one of the clubs. Her eyes stopped there. “Robbie’s hat?”

“Good guess.”

Not a guess,
she thought. And not a guess that the stains on the brim were Robbie’s and the clasp in the back was still fitted to the size of Robbie’s head.

“Can I get you something to drink?” He took Prairie from her, and they moved to the kitchen where more papers, books, a backpack, even a frying pan and an open loaf of Wonder Bread sat on the table. His coat hung over the back of a chair, and she wanted it to lift and float through the air to her. He pulled a second chair out. “You don’t look so good. Have a seat. Prairie, you want a cracker?”

Willow tried to sound light. “She’s a child, not a parrot.” Then, before he could quip back, “Has Mary paid you any more visits?” This time, the flesh on her arms did not turn cold at the thought. Tory was a much larger concern.

He sat Prairie down, filled a glass with cold water and ice for Willow, and brought it to the table. “No, and I’m sure she won’t. She got her pictures.” He moved a book on the table, putting it in front of her.

“Mad Apple
,” Willow said. “You’re reading it?”

“Remember my saying that one of the mysteries was missing from Luessy’s library? I wrote down the titles the other day and compared the list to my collection. This is it.”

She nodded at the book. “It’s in Tory’s room.” And then, “Papa once threw it across the room. He wasn’t a book thrower.”

“You read it then? You remember the poor bankers?” He filled another glass with ice. “They’re all getting sick.”

He wore navy dress slacks with slim pressed lines down the lengths of his long legs and a pale blue oxford shirt open at the collar. She rested her gaze there, on his throat, and tried to remember the texture against her lips. “I need you to watch Prairie for a couple of hours. Tory and I need to talk, and I’m afraid it won’t be pretty.”

He waited. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

“There’s too much I don’t understand. I’m just not sure yet what’s going on.”

Clay forgot his glass, slipping his hands into his pockets. “You’re not explaining much,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“What if you had one family member and they…” She couldn’t admit Tory was likely poisoning her. Knowing she was hated that much made her feel loathsome. “I know Tory has done a lot for you, but right now I don’t want to talk about it. I just need a couple of hours.”

“Maybe I should be there, too.”

She shook her head. “I need you to watch Prairie.”

“It’s not my business, is that it? Even now?”

She knew she was hurting him, asking him to watch Prairie, not trusting him with the truth. “Please, don’t take this personally.”

He took a step back. “Personally? I thought it’s been personal for a long time, Willow. You’re upset with Tory? It’s not Mary, now? How about Jonah? Is he part of this little war?”

“He has nothing to do with this. I’ll explain everything when I know.”

“Sure. Whatever you want.”

She was close to tears. “I know Tory has done a lot for the library, but—”

“But what?”

“I know you want to help, and I appreciate that, but you can’t help me with this.”

“How about I also can’t let you walk into something dangerous. After Jonah’s little trick, anything could happen. Do we need to call the sheriff?”

“No. Not yet.” The question had plagued her since leaving Tory’s room, but Tory was Papa’s sister, and if she called the sheriff, what would she say? ‘Throwing up and migraines?’ She owned Farthest House—that couldn’t be disputed. It was best to just rid the house of Tory, not press charges, and not have the whole town talking. She didn’t want a stigma attached to the house, and she didn’t want newspaper articles and rumors that would plague Prairie’s school years.

“Well then, you work it out.”

Prairie fussed at the sound of Clay’s raised voice, and Willow reached for her, but Clay reached first. He picked her up and his car keys on the counter. “We’re going for ice cream.”

She felt panic flash heat through her hands. “You promised you’d never leave me.”

“Willow, I’m not
leaving
, but there are plenty of ways to send a man away.”

“What does that mean?”

He turned around and looked her in the eye. “Nothing. It doesn’t mean one goddamn thing, okay?” He started to leave, Prairie’s head on his shoulder, but he turned back, “No, it means I’m worried about you, and I’m fighting for us. I’d like to think you’re fighting for us, too.”

In the kitchen at Farthest House, the teakettle simmered on the stove, and steam lifted from the spout. Tory sat at the cleared table and looked up as Willow entered. “What’s so serious that you couldn’t join us for dinner? Mable said you’ve been up all day and also avoided lunch.”

Willow hadn’t planned how to begin, and Tory’s frankness made her hesitate and glance out the window to where the garden was slowly being shrouded in dusk. She approached the table, but she couldn’t relax enough to sit. Her aunt’s hands were empty, and the doll segments were nowhere in sight. Her long fingers looked restless and sinister.

“Everyone is gone,” Tory prompted. “Clay, Prairie, even Mable. Off to the hospital again. What now?”

The backs of Willow’s knees felt damp with tension. Was Tory really adding toxins to the soups and tea she made? If only Dr. Mahoney could be right and the migraines and nausea were from tension.

“We’re alone, Willow.”

The sinister bedroom with its pharmacy lay directly overhead, and the kitchen was where the raven descended on Papa. “Can we talk in the library?”

Tory’s impassive gaze remained fixed, her chin a wedge throwing a shadow down and across her neck. She continued sitting, her thin form ridged and uncompromising. So different from her childhood, when she was all legs akimbo over the back of a stuffed chair or swinging them as she lay on her stomach on a rug, playing board games with friends or Julian.

“If you prefer,” Tory said, each word severed from the next. “But Willow, ghosts do not exist.” And then, “
My
mother is dead.”

Willow cringed.
My
mother
,
as though going to the library tread on some reverent ground to which Willow had no claim. “I do prefer, Tory.”

“All right. I’ll just get my sewing.”

Crossing the dim foyer with its dark paneling and the day’s last gloaming light, Willow listened to the sharp sound of Tory’s heels striking the floor behind her. The rapping veered off, and Willow continued on, her bare feet as silent as the library she entered.

Surrounded by Mémé’s books, both those Mémé wrote and those she loved, Willow took her time moving down the aisle, past the rows, each packed with volumes she knew hadn’t been touched since Mémé’s death. They were hers now, and if she lived to an ancient age, she would read them all. She thought of the watercolor journals she took from Tory’s room. Tory certainly knew by now that they were gone and she’d been found out. She knew Willow had seen it all: the dried plants hanging from the ceiling, the hoarded dolls, the vials of powders on the desk, the dead bees, the painting. She knew, too, that she had to leave.

Tory marched down the aisle and took a seat at the small table in front of the tall windows where Julian held Willow as an infant. Pulling a round piece of cotton from her basket, Tory set it over the bottom half of a small wooden embroidery hoop, placed the top wooden ring carefully, squeezed the two pieces all around and tightened the tiny gold screw. Her fingers were mesmerizing in their waltz and flight.

Willow took the chair opposite, watching her aunt’s long fingers, the same ones that worked the wooden pestle, strung mushrooms and opened vials of expired prescriptions. All the while she gauged or guessed Willow’s level of tolerance, deciding day to day when to back off a bit and when to give another dose of her bane, maneuvering Willow’s body like a puppet to be animated or dropped at will.

The physical distance between them was small. Willow could have reached across and laid a hand on Tory’s wrist. “Papa once made me a doll,” she thought she’d choke on her own politeness. “Maybe you inspired him.”

“Maybe.”

She’d try and keep things civil, not because Tory deserved civility, but because Tory had answers—the only living person who did. “How did your meeting go with your lawyer?”

“We missed you.” Tory kept her eyes on her embroidery, giving the fabric in her hoop a final round of sharp tugs. Her head lifted then, and her eyes held a stunning force. “In the few hours I was away, you made a miraculous recovery.”

“Well, I’m obviously not going to sign the will you worked on today.”

Tory leaned forward, her face dark. “But if something should happen to you?”

Cold touched Willow’s arms. She looked away and out the window expecting to see the trees churning. How crazy was Tory? “I’m not planning on dying soon.”

“You decided all this today? Weren’t you just as sick this morning as you’ve ever been? I suppose Clay put you up to this. He’s too old for you.” Her smoldering gaze lowered and stalled on Willow’s weaker right hand. “You’re not at all the type of person he’ll have for a wife.”

The hot attention on her hand and the supposition that she was unworthy of Clay felt delivered with the slap of a wooden paddle. Keeping her hand on the table required will power. “This is about us. Not Clay.”