The Mill River Recluse (15 page)

Mary had no idea how long she had been sitting on the bathroom floor when she finally stood. The razor blade was still in the sink where she dropped it. Now she picked it up and put it back into the medicine cabinet. Shaking, she walked back into her bedroom. Her gaze traveled haphazardly from the unmade bed, to the window overlooking Mill River, to her bureau, finally resting on the small black marble statue of a horse.

When had she last been to the barn? Or out of the house, for that matter? Months, at least two or three months. Maybe more. Her horse might not even recognize her.

The thoughts flashing through Mary’s mind were haphazard, chaotic, but her sudden fixation on the marble statue triggered an urgent desire to see Ebony. She dressed as if she were in a trance, looking blankly ahead as her fingers fumbled buttons on the shirt. She didn’t bother with stockings, but slipped on a pair of boots and went downstairs to the back door.

The crisp scent of fresh air registered vaguely in Mary’s mind as she made her way down the path to the pasture. Her eyes were unaccustomed to bright light, and so she walked almost blindly, aided only by occasional glimpses through pupils struggling to adjust to the sun. Her body felt disconnected, as if the commands coming from her brain to her legs were traveling great distances before reaching their destinations. The clothes she wore rubbed uncomfortably against skin that had forgotten the feeling of everything except bedsheets and soft nightgowns.

Ebony and Penny were grazing in the pasture. She walked through the grass toward the fence. The horses were beautiful, surreal, swishing their long tails in unison.

“Hey, old girl,” Mary said to the black mare. Her voice was little more than a croak, but Ebony raised her head and pricked her ears. “Ebby, come here girl,” Mary said, and the horse nickered and walked to the fence, waiting.

Mary held her hand out to Ebony’s nose. She touched the velvet skin on the horse’s nose, ran her hands over the soft black face. Ebony nuzzled her arm and breathed a great sigh through flared nostrils, as if to say, “At last.” Mary threw her arms around the mare’s neck and sobbed into the thick mane.

Where was Monarch?

The question occurred to her and was answered immediately as a loud snort sounded from the barn. She left Ebony and walked through the double doors, toward Monarch’s stall, but stopped in shock as the horse came into view.

The first thought that ran through Mary’s mind was that this horse looking back at her was not Monarch at all, but some other animal whose ribcage was prominently visible through a dull, dark coat. The next was that the horse had changed color. When she stepped closer, Monarch shifted uneasily in the stall. His hooves made an odd suction noise. Mary noticed that the floor of the stall was covered in a layer of soiled straw and manure so deep that it came up well past the horse’s pasterns. His eyes were half-closed and caked with mucus. Worst of all, the drab fur on his chest and back was streaked with long, half-healed cuts—cuts made by a whip.

For a moment, she simply stood staring at the Monarch. She struggled to understand what had happened.
Patrick knows about this
, she thought. Then a bolt of lightning ran down her spine and her mind formed its first rational thought in months:
Patrick must have done this
. She pushed the thought and accompanying rage out of her mind, though, to focus only on the poor creature in front of her.

Mary slowly opened the door to Monarch’s stall. The horse moved backward until his rump pressed against the wall. Talking in a low voice, she spoke to him and stepped forward. He shied away from her hand and she stopped, talking patiently. Finally, she drew close enough to grasp the horse’s halter. As she led him outside the stall into another, Monarch walked with the unsteady gait of an old man.

Once the colt had been secured in Ebony’s stall, Mary tore an armful of fresh hay from an open bale and filled the hay net hanging there. Judging by the way the horse tore into it, it was probably the first food he’d had in days. She placed a bucket of fresh water in the stall beside him. Then, as the humid air thickened, she began working.

Hours later, after Mary had cleaned Monarch’s stall, groomed the horse as best she could, and refilled his hay net, oat bin, and water bucket, she brought Ebony and Penny in from the pasture and headed back up to the house. Her thoughts were concentrated on Monarch’s well-being. She needed to call the veterinarian right away, because in addition to his obvious malnourishment, the horse was favoring his right hind foot. She suspected an infection, maybe an abscess, that had developed after he had stood in filth for weeks.

As she walked back toward the house, Mary noticed neither the wind that had begun to sweep through her hair nor the purplish-green tint of the sky. An approaching rumble of thunder did nothing to distract her, but the rumble of Patrick’s Packard coupe coming up the driveway seized her attention. She came around the house and saw the car parked crookedly. Patrick was just stumbling out. She felt no fear of him, only the incredible rage that she had suppressed in the barn. Her disheveled hair blew wildly around her head as she began to scream.

“Why did you do it? Why? My God, Patrick, he was nearly dead, half-starved when I found him, and you knew! You
knew
!”

Even in his drunken state, Patrick was shocked to see Mary outside at all, much less raving and carrying on as she was. It was so unbecoming of her.

“You sure know how to greet your husband after a hard day’s work, Mary.” Patrick paused and smiled. “The bastard’s still alive, is he? Well, give him a few more days, he won’t be.” The first large raindrops began to fall as Patrick brushed her aside and staggered into the house.

“You’re a monster! How could you mistreat such a beautiful horse? You wanted him especially! You paid double for him, even worked a summer to get him from my father! And you leave him shut up in the barn to starve?” They were climbing the marble staircase, Patrick pulling himself up and Mary screaming behind him.

“
That horse
is the monster,” Patrick slurred, throwing his hat and jacket onto the bed. “Never learned to do what was expected. Always trying to bite and kick, trying to throw me when I rode him. Never was fully and properly broken.” Mary’s blue eyes snapped at the indirect insult to her father. “He thought he could do whatever he wanted with me. Well, I showed him. He knows now, he does.”

Patrick was yelling down at her, and the odor of alcohol on his breath was overpowering. She backed away to escape the smell.

“I helped raise that horse.” Tears started to roll down her face. “He’s a good horse. The only reason he, or any other, would act that way is if he were mistreated. I saw the scars, Patrick. How many lashes did you give him?”

“Enough to show him who was boss,” Patrick said, undoing his tie. “And obviously you could do with learning the same lesson. You never learned how to be a proper wife. Never wanted to do what I wanted. You’re just like him. You looked really good at first, really good.” The words lolled around in his mouth. “Had to have both of you. But you weren’t good at all, and neither was he. Not good at all.” A crack of thunder sounded over the house as the sky darkened. Patrick fumbled with a lamp, and when his clumsy fingers couldn’t find the switch, he picked it up and threw it across the room.

Mary screamed. Her instinct told her to run, but Patrick stood between her and the bedroom door. He lurched forward. His arm caught her and flung her in the same direction as he had thrown the lamp.

As Mary struggled to her feet, Patrick walked purposefully toward her bureau. He reached out for the black marble statue of Ebony and held it up. He ran a finger over the smooth lines of the carving as lightning flashed through the window.

“You stay away from me!” Mary said as Patrick advanced toward her, but he only smiled and kept coming. “Don’t you think it’s funny,” he said when he was two feet from her, “how, after months of neglecting me, when I’m about to be sucked into a war and my family won’t do a bloody thing to help me, that all my wife cares about is a GODDAMN HORSE!”

He swung the miniature Ebony as hard as he could. Mary turned her head, tried to push him away, but the black marble figurine smashed into her face just above her left eye. She collapsed, unconscious, with Patrick swaying above her.

He stood that way for a moment before dropping the black marble statue. It hit the bedroom floor with a deep
clunk
, but he didn’t hear it. He didn’t know whether Mary was alive or dead, but his inebriated brain told him that he had to get out of there. He would leave, drive away to some place where the draft board and the authorities would never find him. He would rebuild his life, free of his demanding family and frigid wife.

Patrick threw open the door to the bedroom closet, pulled a suitcase from the top shelf, and began stuffing clothes into it. Then he grabbed his hat and stumbled down the marble staircase to the car.

Torrents of rain pelted Patrick as he threw the suitcase into the trunk and got behind the wheel. So much water on the windshield ensured that the wipers were ineffective, and combined with his blurred vision, almost completely obscured his view of the road ahead. He drove through Mill River and decided to head for Canada. There, out of reach of the government and his family, he could assume a new identity, get a job, and start over.

Patrick was thinking about how to access the funds in his bank account when the road began to twist and turn. He managed to steer the Packard around the first sharp curve, but the car fishtailed as he careened around the second. Alarmed, he slammed on the brakes but could not control the car. It skidded off the road into a cluster of maples.

I’ll need a new car, too
, Patrick thought in the instant before impact. Then all went black as he was thrown through the windshield onto the midnight blue hood.

Chapter 11

Since the end of Sunday Mass an hour earlier, Father O’Brien had been sitting in his office in the parish house, thinking. Tired and emotionally drained, he was quite sure that the service he had just conducted had been the most difficult of his long career. Worse yet, every time he glanced out the window, Mary’s marble mansion gleamed in the bright sunlight. A white monument surrounded by the new snow, it was a beautiful and sorrowful reminder of her.

A knock at the parish house door startled him. When he opened it, Daisy Delaine stood in front of him, holding up a jelly jar of brownish-green liquid.

“Hello, Father,” she began breathlessly. “You know the potion I mentioned last night? The potion for Mary? Well, here it is. It’s my healing potion, the strongest I’ve ever made. I just know it will help her. I thought maybe, on account of the snow, you could give me a ride up to her house.”

Father O’Brien fought back tears as he ushered the little round woman inside. After he closed the door behind her, she stood in the foyer of the parish house looking up at him with wide, worried eyes.

“Daisy, I—” he began, but his voice broke as the pent-up tears began dripping down his cheeks. “Daisy, I was about to come see you. She passed on last night, my dear. Mary died last night.”

Daisy flinched as the shock of his words registered on her face. “Oh,” she said, looking down at the jar in her hands. “Oh. I’m too late. After I made the snow, I hurried, but I just need a little more time to give her….” She began to tremble, and Father O’Brien took the jar from her so that her unsteady hands wouldn’t drop it.

“Come sit with me a moment, my dear,” he said, placing an arm around Daisy’s shoulders and nudging her toward the sofa in his living room. He sat down beside her. “Daisy, look at me,” he said, and the little round woman raised her teary eyes to meet his own. “You have to understand something. As much as we wanted Mary to get better, there is nothing that you or I could have done to make her well. God decided that it was her time to go, and not even your strongest potion could counteract that decision. It’s not your fault that she’s gone.”

“Father, I don’t know what I’ll do without her. Other than you, I don’t have anybody. She was…she was my…”

“Shh, I know,” Father O’Brien said as he reached out to the sobbing woman. “It won’t be easy for either of us. But Mary wouldn’t want us to be sad. She’d tell us to be strong and happy, and to remember all the wonderful times we had with her, yes?”

Nodding and sniffling, Daisy sat back and wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

“Will we have a funeral for her?”

“In the spring, my dear. Mary wanted for us to scatter her ashes at her father’s farm once everything is warm and green. Will you help me do that?”

Daisy nodded again. Trying to collect themselves, they sat together in silence for a few minutes.

“Would you like to stay for a little while? I was just about to fix some lunch,” Father O’Brien said, even though he didn’t feel like eating.

Daisy sniffed loudly and shook her head. “No, thank you. I was planning on taking some advance orders for my famous love potion. For Valentine’s Day. Maybe it’ll help keep me from thinking about…about her.”

“She wouldn’t want us to be sad,” Father O’Brien said again. He handed Daisy the bottle of brownish-green liquid, which she returned to her pocket.

“I know.” Daisy stood and walked slowly to the foyer. As she reached the front door, she turned to him. “Could I put you down for your usual order?”

Father O’Brien had to smile. He usually humored Daisy with purchases of her strange concoctions, but she had never tried to sell him her love potion. Of course, she was upset, and he suspected that she might be having a harder time selling this year.

“Well, Daisy,” he began gently, “I don’t remember ever buying any
love
potion from you in the past. And you know that, since I’m a priest, I, um, really couldn’t use it. But,” he added, seeing the dejection begin to appear on Daisy’s face, “why don’t you put me down for one jar, a small one, and I’ll pass it along to someone in need.”

“Okay,” Daisy said, with the faintest, fleeting glimmer in her eyes. “I’ll come by with it in a few days. And,” she said in a whisper as the glimmer disappeared, “I’ll try not to be sad.” Her eyes overflowed again as she trudged outside toward the next house on the street.