The Seeker A Novel (R. B. Chesterton) (32 page)

“No, Aine,” he said patiently. “You’re a young woman whose past doesn’t check out. That’s what I’m here about. I need some straight answers.”

“My family is my business. I shouldn’t have to drag their reputation behind me.”

“I called the school. Brandeis doesn’t have you registered as a doctoral student. They said you dropped out of the program last year when you had an altercation with a professor.”

“So? When I finish my dissertation, I’ll sign up for the final classes. Why should I have to pay them while I’m writing?” I resented his implications. He was calling me a liar.

“You told Dorothea you would present your dissertation in the spring. You can’t defend unless you’re enrolled in the doctoral program.”

“I’m a student. Classes don’t begin until the middle of January. I have to go in and sign up. That’s all. I planned to do it the sixteenth.”

“I need a contact for your relatives.”

“My granny is dead and so is my father. My mother died when I was a child.”

The litany of losses brought no sympathy from the chief. “Who is a contact for you?”

“My uncles, aunts, and cousins are engaged in criminal endeavors. I haven’t spoken to any of them since my grandmother’s funeral. The Cahills. Look them up and call them if you want. They won’t remember me. And I sure don’t want to remember them.”

His shoulders relaxed a little, and so did I. It was only normal for the law to question the stranger in town. It was a part of great literature.

“Have you seen anything strange around town?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” Was it possible the chief had seen something unusual?

“A stranger in the woods around Walden Pond.”

“Like who?” I couldn’t risk too much.

“The night you were caught in the blizzard, you said something about a young girl. You were nearly frozen to death and incoherent, so I didn’t put any credence in it. I’ve changed my thinking. Aine, is there someone in the woods?”

I couldn’t be certain if he meant to trick me or not. I couldn’t risk it. Mischa was my cross to bear. “It must have been the fever talking. I don’t know what you mean.”

He sighed. “Very strange things are happening in Concord. A woman was beaten to death and now a young man is poisoned. Both are connected to you. Both are connected to Joe.”

I couldn’t disagree with his assessment, so I said nothing.

“When was the last time you saw Patrick?” he asked.

Here it was. I had to be careful. “The day he died. He came to the cabin while I was putting on my makeup for the Christmas Eve party. He brought some logs for the fire and banked it so I would have warmth when the party was over. He did that every day.”

“Was he upset?”

No way was I going to explain about his crush. “About what?”

“About you.” He was like the crow, smart, alert, and I knew Joe had told him about my fling with Patrick.

“No, he wasn’t upset with me in the least. I failed to make Joe understand that Patrick enjoyed flirting with all the women staying at the inn. Including me. Dorothea pretends she doesn’t know, but that’s a social convention. Patrick was funny and fun. He was popular with the ladies, but it didn’t mean a thing. Our affair, if you can call it that, was casual. It was a fling.” I flipped my fingers. “It was a momentary thrill for both of us. I’m sorry if that offends your sense of morality, but that’s what it was. We were both consenting adults.”

“Morality isn’t my business. Murder is.” He sat forward. “You’re keeping things back, Aine. I don’t know what, but I sense it. I promise you, I’ll find out. It would be best for you to tell me now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I kept my expression calm even though my heart thundered like pounding horse hooves.

“You have information about both these deaths. I’m not accusing you, but I know you’re not completely innocent.”

“If I knew anything, I’d tell you. I’d tell Joe. I’m in love with him.” The words surprised me as much as McKinney.

“I’m not sure that’s good news, Aine.” He stood up. “Don’t leave Concord.”

“I have to go to Brandeis to register for my classes.”

“Check in with me before you go. I mean it, Aine. I won’t be happy if you drive out of Concord without clearing it with me.”

“Am I a suspect in Patrick’s death?”

“You’re a person of interest.” He opened the door and closed it firmly behind him, but not before I’d seen night slipping toward the cabin. Soon darkness would swallow me, and I would be all alone. Except for the child in the woods, the creature who wanted to lay claim to my soul.

44

New Year’s Eve blew into town indistinguishable from the preceding week. Cold, alone, swaddled in blankets, I tried to sleep but couldn’t. So I counted the minutes until the end of one year and the beginning of the next. There was no knock at my door, no Auld Lang Syne. No call from Joe. Not even Dorothea came to wish me a happy new year. The sentiment of my friends came through loud and clear. I was suspect.

Mischa, too, left me alone. She was sly, letting me twist in my loneliness. She could have come inside any time she chose, but she lurked about the forest instead. I sensed her there, watching for any sign of weakness from me.

But I could be sly, too. By refusing to look out the window or door, I refused to acknowledge she was near. I had no doubt she had plans for me, but I wouldn’t play into her hands. The cabin didn’t protect me, but it worked as cover. At least for the moment.

I wondered how long it would be before Chief McKinney returned to arrest me for crimes I hadn’t committed. Each breath I took felt constricted. Things were closing down around me.

When the small bedside clock showed midnight, I pulled Bonnie’s journal out from under the bed. I turned on the lamp at my desk and sat down. This time I wouldn’t be stopped. I would find the truth.

I flipped to the back of the journal. The last page was new, the beautiful script clean and undamaged, as if it had just been written.

There is great mischief afoot in the woods at Walden Pond. The child I’ve worked so hard to befriend is not a child. She is something old and evil. The Sluagh do her bidding, and they have been spying on me. Even the friendly warbler who sings so sweetly each morning takes his orders from the child. The woods are bleak and dark, and things I fear roam about freely.

Tonight I will call forth the old spirits, the women of Salem, the crones of the Iroquois, the women of Bedford who watched their men sail away with no hope of return. I will bring their spirits to me in the woods and seek a remedy for this evil child that slips through the trees laying traps and plotting against me.

In the past week, she has killed an elderly woman, Mary Shoats, on the outskirts of Concord. A woman I was known to visit. A woman already under suspicion because she knew the healing herbs, and also those that can make a woman slip a child. Mary was a good woman who knew that sometimes there was no food for another mouth. One child unborn or five already living who might starve. Mary was kind in the way of nature, the way a mother cat will kill a malformed kitten. But she’d drawn attention to herself, and there was talk against her.

She was found dead Monday, her head bashed in where she sat at her kitchen table. The bloody rock was discovered in my basket behind the livery stables in a pile of old hay. My basket was stolen the week before, but there are those who don’t believe me. They think I killed old Mary.

My vision blurred and I covered my eyes for a moment. My aunt Bonnie had been framed for a murder, just as I had.

My pointer finger traced the crisp writing and I read on.

This tragedy has called attention to my living arrangement with Henry. I have become quite scandalous, I fear. Funny how the mark of shame rests only on me. Henry is not accused, because it is believed that I somehow cast a spell over him and dragged him, unwilling, into sin. I am his Eve.

He is unhappy, and I know that his family is disappointed in him, because he’s chosen to live outside the bonds of marriage. While they are saddened by him, they find me to be the harlot. Henry is an innocent victim of my conniving ways. I have corrupted him, at least in their view of it.

He spends more and more time alone in the woods, and now I have begun to fear the child will harm him. She will do anything to spite me. I am not certain why, but I sincerely believe she hates me.

So I will call up the spirits of those wise, dead women to help me. I will find a way to banish the child from the woods. To rid my life of her. I have determined to do whatever is necessary to end her.

A crash against the window made me jump and scream. It had to be a bird. One of her spies, watching me. She knew every move I made.

There were only a few more pages to read. Bonnie’s words—these new words that had never been in the journal before—showed me a bleak future. Whatever help she’d obtained from the sage crones of the past, it wasn’t enough to fight Mischa. The child was older and wiser than the combined knowledge Bonnie consulted. In the end, Bonnie died. Whether by her own hand, murdered by Thoreau, or killed by the very child she’d once befriended. What chance did I stand against the darkness inside Mischa?

I clutched the journal to me. If I packed up and left Concord today, would it save Joe? Would Mischa chase me around the globe, murdering those who dared come close to me? My aunt had been haunted by this creature nearly two hundred years before. Had the cunning Mischa merely waited for another Cahill to fall into her web? Was it my bloodline that stirred her from her sulphuric slumber? Without the answers to those questions, I wasn’t certain my departure would stop her here in Concord.

And there was the little matter of Chief McKinney ordering me to stay in town. If I chose to go home to Kentucky, though, he would never find me. There were hollers in the mountains only my relatives knew how to find. Thus their success as moonshiners.

A sudden homesickness for the mountains sent me to my feet, still holding the journal. The night was still and dark, but in my imagination I went to the rocky ground and sunshine of May in the Kentucky mountains. The wild phlox and wood poppies flowering blue and yellow. The electric green of the new leaves on the trees. A land of sun and warm breezes, nothing like the bone-rattling cold of January in Massachusetts.

I had not cried for the mountains. Not ever. I left for boarding school as a child, rushed away from gossip and a father who drank to deaden himself. Granny Siobhan was the only person who ever believed in me, and she was a stout oak to shelter behind in a gale. After she died, there was no yearning for home. Nothing to miss.

In boarding school, I was the butt of jokes and pranks. The other girls mocked my accent, but the teachers were encouraging and found my interpretation of the novels and stories we read to be unique. I wonder now how much they knew of my background, if they were aware that I could likely never go home again. What had Granny told them about my circumstances? Too late to ask now.

Water under the bridge, as Granny would say.

This night, though, I missed the mountains. There were places where waterfalls covered secret caves. I’d explored them and found the carcasses of small animals. Skulls with sharp incisors that might be a cat or fox, or something else. Creatures lurked in the mountains, older than the rocks themselves.

My hands and arms ached from the intensity of my grip on the journal. And I was freezing. I needed firewood, but I was afraid to brave the woodshed. The cabin couldn’t keep Mischa out, but it felt safer nonetheless. Outside, she could come from any direction. But it was chance Mischa or freeze. My feet were numb, and I worried that frostbite would take my fingers or toes. Or my nose, like my poor cousin.

That grotesque image sent me shuffling into my boots and coat. The woodpile was behind the toolshed in back of the cabin. The trail to it was obscured with bushes that Dorothea always intended to ask Patrick to cut back. Now that would never happen. I found my heaviest gloves and opened the door.

The night was silvered in moonlight. If the moon wasn’t full, it was close. It cast long shadows painting the tree trunks black and silver. My breath frosted as I eased down the steps and hurried along the path. I needed at least two armloads, but I would make do with one for the remainder of the night. Tomorrow I would stack the split logs to the porch rafters for easy access.

I was only halfway to the woodpile when I heard the giggle. I couldn’t determine which direction it came from, but there was no doubt who it was.

“Mischa.” I spoke her name with authority. Servility would have no impact on my destiny. If she meant to kill me, she would.

The musical laugh came again. On a whispery breeze, I heard her voice. “She’ll come to us.”

I kept moving. If she wanted to confront me, she’d have to abandon the woods and show herself. I aimed to grab the firewood and rush back inside.

But it wasn’t Mischa looming in the center of the trail. It was a woman in a long black dress. She wore her hair in a bun, but she reached up and loosened the pins to let it fall down her back, a deep auburn cascade. She was beautiful in a severe way. And I knew her.

“Bonnie.” I was afraid to approach her. “Help me, please.”

“She has need of you,” she said, and she floated toward me without walking.

I stumbled from the surge of fear. “No.” I backed up several steps before I gathered my courage and held my ground.

“She has need of us both. We offer a path. She fears us.”

She was close enough to reveal pale skin and dead eyes. Though her dress was black, the front was soaked in blood.

“I’m nobody’s path.” I couldn’t let her convince me otherwise. “What happened to you?”

She chuckled, a dark and smoky sound. “My destiny. Just as yours will happen to you. We’re cursed. The lot of us. Cahill blood has damned us. But you and I carry the darkest curse. We can see her, and that’s the thing she covets most. The thing she fears the most.”

“Why do you serve her, Bonnie?”