The Fate of Mercy Alban (10 page)

Matthew held my gaze for a long moment. “Grace, if you’d rather just sort this out with the police, we don’t have to do this now.” He put his wineglass on the end table next to him. “We’ve got a few days before the funeral, so I can come back another time. You’ve really got your hands full and—”

“Don’t be silly!” I interrupted a bit too forcefully. “I’d really like to go over the service now so that’s off my plate. And, this just occurred to me, I think it’s good to have some activity going on. I’m hoping that our intrepid intruder is gone, scared off by us stumbling upon his hiding place, but if he isn’t—the more people around, the better.”

Just then, I noticed lights outside the window and unfolded myself from my chair, moving across the room to get a better look. I pushed the curtains aside and peered into the twilight. “There’s the police now.” Matthew joined me at the window and we watched two squad cars pull into the drive.

A few moments later, the doorbell sounded. I started to answer it but saw Jane scurrying from the kitchen and stopped in my tracks. I had to remember that answering the door was Jane’s job. I watched her wipe her hands on her apron before she pulled the door open and ushered a man inside.

Stepping into the parlor, she said: “The police to see you, miss.”

As Matthew and I walked into the foyer, I smiled at two uniformed officers, extending my hand to one of them. “I’m Grace Alban and this is the Reverend Matthew Parker. Thank you for coming so quickly.”

And then it was time to repeat the whole story, yet again. As I finished, one of the officers nodded. “The chief has asked us to patrol the house and grounds, securing any exits. I’m assuming you’ve got all the doors and windows in the house locked?”

Of course! I had been so worried about securing the interior passageway doors and peepholes that I didn’t even think of locking the outer ones, too. When I lived here, it was one of the household staff’s last duties of the evening, locking everything up tight. But with only Jane and her husband here with my mother for all these years, I wasn’t sure if that was still the case.

“If they aren’t all locked, they should be,” I said. “Jane, will you ask Mr. Jameson and the boys to tend to that, please? All the doors and windows on the first and second floors.”

“Right away, miss,” she said, adding a quick aside to me, “We’ll be ready for dinner in just a few minutes.” With that, she headed back toward her kitchen lair.

“Chief Bellamy said he was arranging for a twenty-four-hour guard,” I said to the officers. “Is that right?”

“We’ll be here overnight, Miss Alban,” one of them confirmed. “When we’ve given the house a look, you’ll have two men in the front, two in the back. Nobody’s getting into this house on our watch.”

“Thank you.” I exhaled. “I’ve got my young daughter here and it’s good to know you’ll be on guard.”

“Just doing our jobs, ma’am.” He smiled. “Protect and serve.”

“Well, then. Do you have everything you need?” I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “You’ll be warm enough outside?”

“Don’t you worry about us,” he said as he took a walkie-talkie from his belt and held it out to me. “And if you need us, if you hear or see anything, just holler. Press the red button to talk.”

Jane and her husband floated back into the room so silently I didn’t even realize they were there until Mr. Jameson spoke. “I’ll take you and your men through the house,” he said to the officers, who followed as he ascended the stairs.

“So that’s what police protection feels like,” I said to Matthew, exhaling again.

“You can’t be too careful,” he said, watching the officers until they turned out of sight on the second floor. “I’m glad they’re here.”

“I am, too,” I said, picking up my wineglass and taking a sip. “Once they finish going through the passageways and are patrolling the grounds, I’ll have Jane bring them out some supper. And ours is probably just about ready, too, so we should migrate to the dining room. I hope you like chicken!”

As we took our places at the table—me hesitantly taking the head and Matthew next to me on the right—Jane brought out our first course, French onion soup with crusty bread with butter, and we got down to business, talking about how the service would go, this reading followed by that hymn.

Discussing my mother’s final wishes at our dining room table, where my family had eaten countless dinners together, conjured her spirit in a powerful way. Matthew was sitting in her usual spot. As I looked at him, I could also see my mother’s image superimposed over his own, there in her blue Chanel dress and hat, a strand of pearls around her neck. She smiled and nodded, and I heard her voice, soft and low, in my ear. “Thank you, darling. You’re doing everything right.” I felt a whoosh of cool air, buoying along the faint scent her favorite perfume, and then it was gone.

I sopped up a little of the soup with the last of my bread. “It’s so strange to be in this house without her,” I said. “It’s not just that it feels empty to me; it’s almost like the house itself feels her absence somehow. As though the walls and floorboards and banisters are grieving with me over the loss of her. Does that make any sense?”

“In a way,” he said slowly, “I can understand that. There’s so much family history here, it’s as though the house is infused with their spirits.”

But that’s not what it was, not really. Certainly, I felt the spirits of my family keenly, but that’s not what I was talking about. He didn’t get it, and I didn’t blame him. He didn’t know what it was like to live in this house and feel whatever it was that radiated from its very foundations. I thought about the letter from David Coleville to my mother that I had read the day before. I could see the words in my mind as though they were right in front of me.

It was complete nonsense and I knew it. And yet … when I really thought about it … I shuddered and took another sip of wine.

“And I know it can’t be easy for you,” Matthew continued, his voice snapping me back to the present. “You’re dealing with your mother’s death on top of being home for the first time in so many years. The emotion that surrounds those two rather monumental things would be overwhelming for anyone. And now you’ve got to worry about a possible intruder? You’re shouldering it all very well—the name ‘Grace’ fits you, it really does—but it’s a lot to deal with.”

He was looking into my eyes with such genuine concern, just like he had earlier in the day. This man really did seem to care, and it occurred to me that he was in the perfect occupation.

“It does seem like it’s been one thing after another, doesn’t it?” I managed a smile. “But it’s fine. I’m okay.”

“I know you are.” He smiled back. “From what I’ve seen of you, I have gotten the impression that you’re a strong woman. Your mother’s daughter through and through. But—” he hesitated a bit and then continued. “Something you said this morning, or rather didn’t say, has been on my mind.”

“What’s that?” I wanted to know. I put my elbow on the table and rested my chin in my hand.

“You never did tell me what kept you away from here all these years,” he said, his voice softening. “It’s clear to me that you feel a certain reverence for this house and your family history, and yet you stayed away for decades. You evaded the question when I asked it this morning, and I’ve been wondering if you just thought it was none of my business, that I had no right to ask, or if it was something else. Whatever it was, I just want you to know that I care and that you can talk to me about it—or anything else—if you ever decide that you want to. It’s a big part of my job, listening.”

I looked at Matthew Parker and, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I felt that he was safe harbor, somehow. He was right—it was his job to listen, to counsel. Maybe I could get it off my chest, once and for all.

I hadn’t intended to talk about this to anyone, ever. But it was as though being back here, and especially my father’s “visit” the night before, had unearthed the box where I had put these memories and buried them, and now they were screaming to get out. Before I knew it, the words were spilling forth.

“When I was twenty and my brothers were eighteen, we decided to go sailing one November afternoon,” I began, the images of that day swirling in front of me. “We had been sailing our whole lives—it was a passion of my father’s and he brought us out on the water when we were very young. Some of my earliest memories are of skimming across our bay in one of the several sailboats our family had back then.”

Matthew leaned forward. Now it was his turn to put his elbow on the table and rest his chin upon his palm.

“It was an unseasonably warm day, so we thought nothing of it when the wind picked up a bit.” My voice broke, remembering my brothers’ laughing faces as we zipped along. “We sailed out of our protected bay and into the main body of the lake. We went farther out than we should have. But it was just so much fun, we were going so fast.”

My hands were shaking as I picked up my wineglass. I took a long sip and continued.

“But as it turned out, it was one of those deceptive, sly November days here on Lake Superior. The weather changed. Lake Superior is like that, you know. Murderous when it wants to be. It wouldn’t have blown up a storm when we were safe in our own bay, not then. It waited until we were far away from shore. We should have known better. I should have known better. But we hadn’t noticed the clouds building up, or if we did—kids that age. They think they’re invincible. We certainly did. But when the wind shifted and the rain started, we realized we were in a lot of trouble out there.”

My eyes were unfocused, staring back into a moment in the past that I had all but blocked out of my mind. I could feel the spray on my face, the stiff wind tangling my hair.

“We sailed for hours against that wind, trying to get back to shore. The waves were so huge and the rain was just beating down on us. The boys were expert sailors, but this was too much. If we had just taken the larger of our boats, we might have been all right. But we weren’t. And it was my fault. I was the eldest, I should have gotten us to shore sooner.”

I saw his lips moving: “It wasn’t your fault,” but I could barely hear him, so deeply was I caught in the story that was unraveling.

“The boat capsized,” I went on. “All of us tumbled into the water and then it was a frenzy—grasping for the side of the boat, flailing around in the water. I saw a huge wave—to me it looked three stories tall—bearing down on us. And everything went an icy black. I was clinging on to the side of the boat, but my brothers … they were gone. Just gone. Taken by the lake, both of them.”

Matthew shook his head and closed his eyes.

“I hung on to the boat until the Coast Guard arrived. I never saw my brothers again.”

I could see the image of my father watching the Coast Guard vessel, with me on it, pull up to our dock. His eyes were bright, his face expectant—his children were saved!—but then he saw me alone coming toward him, still wearing my life vest, wrapped in a blanket. He ran past me and onto the boat, looking everywhere, calling the boys’ names. “Where are they? Where are my sons?” And when the reality hit him, he staggered onto the dock and collapsed onto our beach where he let out a wail that seemed to have no end—an ancient primal keening that pierced my soul with its power.

Jane led me into the house, into my mother’s open arms, where we, too, collapsed onto the floor and wept for those impish, devilish boys whom we loved more than anything.

I swallowed hard and continued. “My father sent out a fleet of boats to look for the boys, but their bodies were never found. He was never the same after that. His grief for them, it consumed him. The man he had been, the father I had known, was gone—his humor, his wit, the sparkle in his eyes—taken just as swiftly as the boys were taken by the lake.”

I could see him, then, standing in the pounding rain, raging at the lake itself. He was in the water up to his waist when Mr. Jameson and some of his groundskeeping staff reached him and pulled him back onto land. Jane called our family doctor, who hurried to the house and sedated him, and my mother and me, too.

“After that day, my dad started drinking heavily and just withdrew. He was angry, despondent, and crushingly sad all at once. I never heard him speak another civil word, not to anyone. And he never looked at me the same way. Before that day, I had been his little princess. But I could tell he blamed me. Losing Jake and Jimmy—it killed him. Literally. Not long after they drowned, he took his own life. He walked out into the lake to be with them, forever.”

“Oh, Grace,” Matthew said, his eyes brimming with tears. “I’m so sorry. I …” He let out a long sigh. “There are no words.”

And then I told him what I had never told another living soul, not my mother, not my husband, not anyone. “The last words he spoke to me were: ‘Why couldn’t it have been you?’ ”

I had finally said it out loud, I had told a man I’d just met hours before what I had been too ashamed to reveal to anyone for more than twenty years.

“You know he didn’t mean that,” he said, fishing a handkerchief out of his pocket and handing it to me. “It was the grief talking. Not your dad.”

As I dabbed at my nose and eyes, the minister did what he does best. “Lord, please grant this woman peace.” Looking toward the ceiling, he added, “Right now would be good.”

This brought a slight smile to my face. “A little demanding, aren’t we?”

He smiled back. “I wanted Him to know I was serious. No fooling around, God. Peace for Grace Alban. Now.”

I tried to hold on to that smile but it faded as quickly as it came. I was shivering deep inside my core. I was as cold as I had been in the middle of the lake that day.

“I felt like my mother blamed me for all of it—she never said as much, but I know she did,” I said. “I blamed myself. Her husband and sons were dead because of me.”