The Haunting of Maddy Clare (28 page)

“Afraid of her?” Matthew frowned.

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Macready broke in. “It was nonsense, I always said.”

“Mrs. Clare.” I spoke gently, and she turned her fragile attention to me. “Please tell me. Why was your husband afraid of Maddy?”

Tears began to course down her cheeks. She seemed hardly aware of them. “He always said—he always said that night she came, she looked like she’d been buried. She looked like she’d come from a grave. My husband believed Maddy was dead before she even came to Falmouth House.”

There was a long silence. I knew my mouth hung open; I tried to think what to say, but my mind was white. I had no words.

I looked at Matthew, hoping he would scoff, would make things sensible again, but he was only frowning. The thought was insanity, but wasn’t our entire situation insanity? With Alistair upstairs in a dreamworld, and me exhausted from a running nightmare in the woods? For a dark, spinning moment, anything seemed possible.

Mrs. Macready broke the silence. “Nonsense,” she said, with such force I turned to her and saw a dark red flush coloring her neck and cheeks. “It’s nonsense. That girl was no such thing.”

“She wasn’t right, Meredith,” said Mrs. Clare. “You know she
wasn’t. The way she looked at us—the way she behaved. She was never right. She came from somewhere in the woods with dirt in her hair. That girl was never right.”

“She was a girl!” Mrs. Macready looked at us, pleading and disgust on her face. “Was it a dead girl who got those terrible ear infections the first few years? Was it? A dead girl I nursed with those fevers, who sweated and cried out in her bed? Was it a dead girl who liked to eat plums and hated the taste of my Christmas cake? A dead girl whose hands chapped from the lye soap, whose hair I cut every six weeks, who got her first courses the spring she came to us?” She glared at all of us, forgetting even to be embarrassed to mention such things in front of Matthew. “I gave her her first linens and taught her how to use them. That was no ghost. I’ll lay my life on it.”

Mrs. Clare wiped her face. “I loved her, too, Meredith. But even I knew she was inhuman somehow. She was a monster.”

“She was broken.” Mrs. Macready stood firm. “There were times—she’d look around her, and I could swear she had no idea where she was. Her memory came and went. Most of the time she knew me; but sometimes—even after years—sometimes she looked at me so strange, like she had never seen me before. Those were the times she went quiet, wouldn’t speak. Yes, she had rages. I didn’t understand them either. There were times it felt like—oh, like getting near her was getting near a shark, or a deadly snake. Something that would kill you if you let it. But sometimes, when she was calm, when she was half-asleep or sitting quiet peeling apples, you could see the girl she’d once been. Before someone broke her.”

“All right, then.” Matthew spoke gently—or as gently as he could. He sat in the chair Mrs. Macready had vacated, next to
Mrs. Clare. “Maddy wasn’t dead when she came to you. We can establish that. But still, you may be on to something.”

We looked at him. The glint of excitement had come into his eyes—the one I’d seen before. “What do you mean?” I said.

“She may not have been dead.” He looked around at us. “But you do not have to be dead to be buried.”

H
e was right. Even as I recoiled, I knew it. The implications were so horrible, it took a moment to even imagine them.

Pretty little dead girl,
Maddy had said.
Staring at the sky.

“It can’t be,” said Mrs. Clare.

“It can,” said Matthew. “Someone molested Maddy. Then that person strangled her. And then that person buried her, believing she was dead.”

“But she wasn’t,” I said, feeling it, believing it, my voice hoarse in my own ears. “She woke up, and then she ran.”

Run. Run.

I closed my eyes.

“My dear girl,” Mrs. Macready breathed.

“If it happened the way you say,” said Mrs. Clare, “then someone is guilty of murder.”

Behind my closed eyelids, it all came together. Maddy. What she had said. “More than one person,” I said.
Three of them on me.
“There were three of them, at least for the original attack.”

Run. Run.
“I think perhaps,” I went on, “Mrs. Macready is right. I think when Maddy woke, she had little or no memory of what had happened—at least for a time.”

“It would be why she couldn’t speak, at least at first,” said Matthew. “If she had been strangled.”

My gaze met his. “And it’s why she wants to know where she’s buried,” I said.
Pretty little dead girl, staring at the sky.
“She wants to know where she was buried the first time.”

“Can we find it for her?” asked Matthew.

“I think we can,” I said. “I know what it looks like—she has shown me her memory of it. I think we can find it, if we look for it.”

“What does it look like?” said Mrs. Clare.

“A redbrick chimney,” I replied, “visible in the treetops. Do you know of any house that looks like that?”

She thought about it, then shook her head. “No, I don’t. But if the roof is visible so high, the house must be large. We don’t have many buildings that big in Waringstoke.” She shrugged, and I had a terrible feeling I knew what she was about to say. “And the largest house in town, of course, is the Barrys’.”

We checked in on Alistair, who was sleeping uneasily, cold sweat on his forehead, his chest rising and falling. In the corridor outside his room, Matthew and I made a plan.

“This isn’t good,” I said under my breath. “If Evangeline Barry is involved in this…”

“I know,” he replied, scrubbing a hand over his face. I heard the scrape of bristles against his palm. “I don’t even want to think about it. But we have to look into the possibility, and go to the Barry house.”

“Do we pick a pretext?”

“I don’t know,” Matthew said. “I’ve never done anything like this.”

“Neither have I.”

Matthew’s jaw was set in pain. “Alistair would know what to do. I sit thinking about it—wondering what his next move would be. He was never out of ideas. I’m not him. I just don’t bloody know what to do.”

I bit my lip. “I think that Tom Barry will be suspicious if we turn up, no matter what we say. And if it’s the right place…”

“I don’t suppose you’d let me go without you?”

“No. You need me to identify the spot.”

“All right, then. But we’ll go after dark and have a quick look, that’s all. In and out. I won’t have you in danger. If we do it now, everyone will see.”

I looked longingly at Alistair’s door. He had not eaten or drunk again today. Time was running out for him. “What do we do in the meantime?”

“I’m open to ideas.”

“Let’s go into town. I want to see Mr. Nesbit.”

Matthew stared at me. “What?”

I explained to him what I’d had no time to say before—about my conversation with Mrs. Barry. “I’d forgotten about Mr. Nesbit,” I said, “but he was seen at the funeral. And he was avoiding you. Perhaps he knows something.”

Matthew looked down, thinking. He put his hands in his pockets, and in that moment I could see him in uniform, somewhere on a damp green field, slouching in the early-morning fog, a tailor’s son of hardly twenty, suddenly trying to live to see another day.

He looked back up at me. The boy disappeared, and there was a man in his place, dark-jawed and battered, whose deep-eyed gaze took me in with a long, slow burn.

“All right, then,” he said in the voice that stayed with me always. “We’ll do it your way.”

We walked to town. It wasn’t right to take Alistair’s motorcar; in any case, I had no idea how to drive, and Matthew drove only a motorcycle. His cycle was housed in the inn’s old stables, in a stall under a blanket, as if it were a steed. It seated only one.

The sun had come from the clouds and burned off the fog. It looked to be a warm day, hot even, the first cloying air of late June pressing down. Only a faint breeze brushed us as we ascended the hill.

Matthew’s gait was leisurely, and I did not know whether this was on purpose, or whether his injuries pained him somehow. Perhaps he was simply exhausted, like me; I was so very tired I had passed into free-flying giddiness, as if I were weightless, my head buzzing. The world looked very bright. I fell in step next to him and we walked side by side, Matthew’s boots crushing the weeds by the side of the road.

“Maddy is quiet right now,” I said. “I can’t sense her. It should be a relief, but I don’t like it.”

“It’s day,” said Matthew.

“It makes no difference to Maddy. I saw her in the barn during the day. Now that she’s left the barn…” I looked off into the trees, which waved their dark green tops only a little in the breeze. “We don’t know where she is. It seems she could be anywhere. I didn’t sense her in Alistair’s room, but I’ve missed her before.”

“You have extraordinary sensitivity,” said Matthew. “Have you ever seen ghosts before?”

I considered the question, surprised. “No. Never. Just Maddy.” Just Maddy. She had chosen me, for reasons of her own. I shuddered.

“Interesting,” said Matthew.

I thought of my house that June day years ago, the hot, sunny, oppressive quiet when I came home. The silence that seemed like torture to my ears. It had been horrible, but I had seen nothing, been given no sign. In all the years since, I had seen nothing of the only people I wanted to see. They had simply gone over the edge, without looking back. “Have you seen many?”

“No.” I thought that would be all, but he continued. “I’ve seen lots of evidence, I suppose. But evidence that could not be faked, or mistaken—no. Only a few times. And Maddy.”

I shook my head. “I know nothing about any of this. I don’t know what can be falsified, what to look for. I don’t know the first thing about ghosts. Honestly, I have no idea why Alistair even hired me.”

“Don’t you?” said Matthew.

“Well, he needed someone quickly, of course. And I was available. And I suppose it isn’t a very popular specialty. I heard him say something about knowing how sensitive I am, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

Matthew grunted. “Alistair has always liked beautiful women.”

I felt myself blushing hotly in the warm sun. I could not look at him. No one had ever called me beautiful before, but for Matthew to say it—and yet it wasn’t much of a compliment, in its way. To keep the tone light, I risked a glance at him from the corner of my eye and said, “Are you saying I have no other attributes, Mr. Ryder?”