Legacy of Lies (11 page)

“To what?”

“Redcreep. It grows here on the Shore. Since colonial times, girls and women have used mixtures of it as a beauty potion. It dilates the eyes, brings color into the cheeks. They found a bottle on Avril’s bureau.”

“And the real story?” I asked.

“It was an overdose. Avril, like a lot of girls back then, had taken redcreep before. She wasn’t allergic to it. She was sneaking out to see Thomas that night-Helen and I both knew it-and wanted to look pretty. She became ill at the mill, which was their secret meeting place. Thomas rushed her to the doctor, but she died on the way. An overdose of redcreep. Even good things can harm you if too much is taken at one time. So typical of Avril,” she added, “always wanting to do more, try more, have more, always flaunting limits.

“The family did not want a cause like ’overdose’ to be listed in the paper. That would make Avril responsible, and she never got blamed for anything. Of course, the Scarboroughs had their way, as money always does.”

Mrs. Riley rested her chin on her hands. Her voice sounded tired, as if the bitter edge I’d heard earlier had turned, and all she could feel now was the flat of the knife.

“I guess that’s most of my questions,” I said. “How much should I pay you?”

“There is no charge for today,” she replied, rising with me.

“Really, I planned to,” I told her, but she refused the money and led the way to the door.

“I would send your grandmother my regards,” she said, opening the door to downstairs, “but I doubt that would please her. It would be best not to mention that you saw me today.”

“Why?”

“It’s free advice, girl,” she replied. “Take it or leave it.”

“Thanks,” I said, and took a step down, which was a good thing since she closed the door on my heel.

eleven
 

I grabbed breakfast downstairs at the café then headed for work at Yesterdaze. Ginny was incredibly patient with me that day. I had to count a pack of singles four times before I got it right and gave her nickels when she asked for dimes. At 3:10 I apologized for my mistakes.

She smiled. “Don’t worry about it. Are we still on for Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday?”

“Yup.”

Ginny was giving me Friday off to rest up for “the weekend invasion.”

Instead of going home after work, I wandered up and down High Street and the streets around it, thinking about the things I’d learned from Mrs. Riley. I didn’t see the jeep pass by, not until Alex hung out the back, waving and calling my name. It stopped a
half block ahead of me and two girls got out, Kristy and one of her echoes. They looked in my direction, then quickly turned away and said something to the guys.

As soon as they started up the walk, Alex called out, “Hey, Megan, where you going?”

“Nowhere special,” I answered as I got closer. “Just walking.”

“Want a ride?” he asked.

I glanced at Matt, hoping for an invitation from him. He said nothing.

“Climb in,” Alex encouraged me. “You can ride up front.”

“I don’t know if I want a ride that bad,” I told him. “I saw how Matt drove the first day I was in town.”

“How did I drive?” Matt asked.

“You nearly took Ginny’s fender with you.”

He frowned. “You sure? I didn’t see you.”

“No kidding!”

Alex laughed, then Matt smiled and reached across the seat to open the door. I climbed in.

We drove to a street of Victorian homes that faced the college campus, stopping in front of a tall white house with green shutters and a wraparound porch. Alex hopped out on the passenger side, then leaned on the edge of my door.

“Would you go out with me?” he asked.

I didn’t expect the question. “Um . . .” I started to turn toward Matt.

Alex reached up and caught my face lightly with his hand. “You don’t need his permission, do you?”

“I guess not.” I heard my cousin’s seat squeak. “It’s just that I’m not here for very long, and I don’t want to screw up the friendship you guys have.”

“If Matt doesn’t like me going out with you, then
he’s
screwing up the friendship, right?”

I thought about it, then smiled. “Right. So when?”

“Thursday night? We don’t have school Friday and there’s a big party at Kristy’s.”

“Oh, no, sorry. Sophie and I are going to a movie.”

He looked surprised. “Can’t you change it? I thought girls had a rule that when one of them got asked for a date, all other plans were off.”

“I don’t go by that rule.”

Behind me Matt laughed, a little too loudly, I thought.

“It’s not fair to the other person,” I explained. “Especially Sophie. She’s got enough to do with school and work. I don’t want to change plans on her.”

“You mean Sophie Quinn?” Alex asked. “We used to be best buddies when we were in grade school. Why don’t the four of us go to the party-you, me, Sophie, and Matt?”

Now I did turn to my cousin.

He shrugged. “Okay with me.”

“I’ll ask Sophie what she wants to do,” I told Alex, though I was pretty sure she’d be thrilled to be Matt’s date.

Alex probably thought the same thing, for he gave the door a satisfied thump. “See you Thursday night.”
As we pulled away from the curb, I said to Matt, “Don’t worry about me and your friends. I’ll be on my good behavior.”

“I was just getting used to you,” he replied, “and now you’re going to change?”

“I can’t win with you!” I exclaimed.

“Didn’t know you wanted to.”

I shook my head and sighed. “Listen, Matt, before we get to the house, we have to talk.”

“About Grandmother,” he guessed, and slowed down a little. “Did she get worse after I left?”

“Not worse, but she’s really starting to get to me, the way she blames me for the things that are moved. I needed some information so I could figure out what was going on. I went to see Mrs. Riley.”

The firm set of his mouth and long silence told me he didn’t like what I had done.

“She used to work for the Scarboroughs,” I went on, “back when Grandmother and Aunt Avril were teens. Did you know that?”

“I knew she had worked at the house.” He flicked the Jeep’s blinker with one finger, then made a sharp turn. “And I know better than to trust her.”

“She told me that the Bible, the clock, and the painting were moved back to where they used to be years ago, when Avril was alive.”

He glanced sideways at me. I couldn’t see enough of his face to know if he was surprised by the news.

“Mrs. Riley has a way of coaxing information out of people,” he said, “then feeding it back to them in a
different form, so that they think she’s telling them something new.”

“But she guessed where the clock was found. And though I told her the landscape was moved to the music room, she knew it was hung over the Chinese chest.”

“Megan, think about the size of the painting. Where else would you hang it in the music room? As for the clock, a lot of people keep them in entrance halls. Every old house in Maryland has a grandfather clock in the hall or on the stairway landing.”

“It’s too much of a coincidence,” I insisted.

“Mrs. Riley makes her living off coincidences. I hope you didn’t pay her a lot.”

“She didn’t charge,” I replied somewhat smugly.

“She’s counting on you to come back. Then she’ll charge double,” he said, sounding just as smug.

We rumbled across the Wist bridge. I turned back to look at it, remembering that Sophie had seen the ghost there. Didn’t ghosts haunt battlefields and other places where they died? If Avril had died somewhere between the mill and the doctor’s, could it have been while Thomas was driving over the bridge?

“Where’s the mill?” I asked.

“On the creek. About a third of a mile beyond Grandmother’s driveway there’s a road to the left. It runs down to the mill.”

“We’ve got some time,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“No,” he responded quickly.

“Why not?”

“There’s nothing to see,” he said. “It’s been abandoned for years and is full of mice and rats.”

“Okay, I’ll go later without you.”

He shook his head. “Pigheaded.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “amazing, isn’t it? We’re not related by blood, but we share that family trait.”

“Listen to me, Megan, you can’t go inside the mill. Most of it’s made of wood, and it’s rotting. The structure’s unsafe.”

As he said that, he drove past Grandmother’s driveway. I tried not to smile.

“Don’t smirk,” he told me.

“Another family trait.”

“I’m taking you there so you don’t go by yourself,” he said. “Understand?”

“Yes. Thank you, big brother.”

Mutual smirk.

The road down to the mill was bumpy, its stone and shell layer worn away, leaving long bare spots and deep ruts. Bushes and small trees grew close to the road and scratched the sides of the Jeep. Matt muttered a few choice words. Then suddenly we were in a clearing with a sea of tall grass washing around us. The soft weathered wood of the mill rose above it, two stories, topped by an attic under a sloping roof.

“It’s the one in the painting,” I said.

Matt nodded.

A structure like a dormer window projected out of the middle of the steep roof, but it was larger, framing a door. The roof door gaped open, leaving a dark cavity
in the light gray building. The first and second stories had doors that lined up beneath the roof entrance, but they were closed, as was a side door. All the windows were shuttered.

“Where’s the waterwheel?” I asked.

“Around the side.”

I got out of the Jeep.

“Megan? Don’t go inside.”

“I’ll be back.”

A moment later he trudged behind me to the bank of a stream that ran toward the basement wall of the mill. The large, motionless wheel next to the wall looked like the rusty paddle wheel of a steamboat.

“Not exactly rushing water,” I observed.

“The mill works from a pond,” Matt explained, pointing toward a rise in ground on the other side of the road. “When the gates are opened, the water comes in over the top of the wheel, using gravity to turn it.”

I nodded, then gazed up again at the dark entrance into the roof. “Have you ever seen a ghost here?”

“There is no ghost,” he replied.

“This is where Avril came, the day she died.”

He looked at me surprised. “How do you know that?”

“Mrs. Riley told me. She said Avril came with our grandfather. Thomas was Grandmother’s boyfriend first, then Avril stole him from her. This was Thomas and Avril’s secret meeting place.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Do you have any reason not to?” I asked.

“Mrs. Riley is a gossip and she’s always been out to get our family.”

“That’s a pretty flimsy reason.”

“We’ve spent enough time here,” he told me abruptly, then started toward the Jeep.

I caught up with him. “Mrs. Riley said-”

“I think it’d be a good idea,” he interrupted, “if you, Lydia Riley, and Grandmother started living in the present.”

“Not knowing what happened in the past can keep you from living fully in the present.”

“It’s not relevant,” he argued, and opened the door on my side of the Jeep. “Get in.”

“No.”

He reached for my arm.

I pulled back, but he held on, so tightly I winced. “You’re hurting me!”

He let go.

“I have some more looking to do.”

Matt leaned against the Jeep and said nothing.

I headed around the other side of the mill. As the land sloped down to the water the ground beneath my feet became soft and claylike, perhaps flooded by the creek, which was about twenty feet away. The mill looked tall from the creek side, four stories of it towering above me, the basement’s brick wall exposed. At the base of the building was a Dutch door, its lower half open. It was an inviting mouse hole-and people hole.

I walked over to the double door and pushed on the top half. It didn’t budge. I knelt and crawled through the bottom, tumbling into the darkness head-first-there were two steps down on the inside. The floor was wet, covered with gross stuff. Ahead of me I could see nothing but vague shapes. Standing up, I turned toward the door and ran my hands over the top portion until I felt a bolt. After several tries, I slid it back and pulled open the upper half of the door, letting in more light.

When I turned to face the basement again, I gasped. At the far end of the long room were wheels-big gears-one interlocking with the next, the largest as tall as 1.1 was in the basement of my dream, where I had hidden from Matt. I sank down on the doorstep, afraid to cross to the other side, afraid to get close to those wheels.

How had I come to dream of this place? I doubted I was reading the images of my
mother’s
mind. The voice, the dreams, awakening in Avril’s room, the movement of objects to where Avril would expect them-it was Avril I was connecting with.

My skin felt cold and clammy. I stood up quickly. “Leave me alone,” I said, stumbling out of the entrance. “Just leave me alone!”

Matt, who had been hovering a short distance away, heard me. He stepped back, turned abruptly, and strode up the hill to his Jeep.

* * *

Neither of us spoke on the way home. I knew Matt thought that I was telling him to leave me alone, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. He wouldn’t believe I had been talking to a ghost.