Manor of Dying

by Kathleen Bridge

  Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

  I felt a large paw on my back and heard a male voice say something I couldn’t make out. Cole and Tripod? Earlier, I’d removed my hearing aids because they were no match for the buffeting wind. Turning slowly, ready to jump into Cole’s arms, I found Patrick Seaton and his greyhound Charley. In her mouth was my missing glove.

  Before I could thank her, Patrick looked behind me at what I’d written in the sand and said, “Did you know Keats only wrote fifty-four poems in his short lifetime?”

  “Actually, I did,” I said, adding a nervous schoolgirl giggle.

  Charley dropped the glove on the wet sand and left in search of more treasure. For a minute there was an awkward silence, then I figured out why: with my hat and scarf almost completely covering my face, he hadn’t recognized me from the time we’d met on this same beach last September or later at Old Man and the Sea Books. I unwound the scarf and said, “Patrick, right?” Then stuck out my ungloved hand.

  He took it and said, “Your fingers are blue, Meg. Looks like Charley found your glove just in time.” The corners of his mouth turned up in a grin that transformed his face into someone unrecognizable. Many times in the past I’d watched his dark shape from the deck of my rental cottage as he traversed the shoreline in one of his melancholy sojourns. His body always hunched, head held down, the only facial feature visible under his hoodie—a frown.

  I’d felt a connection when we’d first met, and I felt one now. “More of a puce, I think.” Just that he remembered my name had my heart doing jumping jacks. Something I needed to analyze later. Today, his changeable eyes were a dark green, like the ocean behind him. His tousled, sandy-blond hair was highlighted with sun streaks of gold, his strong jaw was covered in a couple days’ beard, and his ears were almost the color of my left hand.

  “You’re correct,” he said, “your fingers are more of a purple brown. However, if you stay any longer in this subzero weather, they might turn white and you’d be in danger of losing a few.”

  Only a writer would know what color puce was, making me think of the bad movie I’d just played as an extra in—Nightmare at Nightingale Manor. Knowing he was Mr. & Mrs. Winslow’s screenwriter, I didn’t see the point in filling him in on the murder until we learned more. Maybe it wouldn’t affect him at all. I couldn’t see the production continuing on Shelter Island after what had happened, plus I wasn’t a fan of dumping torrential rain on anyone’s parade. Especially the man who’d held my curiosity ever since I’d first found writing in the sand in front of his cottage. The press would be all over it soon enough.

  “Are you left-handed?” he asked.

  I laughed. “Yes.” I bent to pick up the glove, then stowed it in my jacket pocket. I pulled out the envelope I’d found in Nightingale’s attic, not wanting whatever it was to touch the sandy drooled-upon glove.

  “Was that something you found inside a bottle, washed ashore? It looks old,” Patrick said, glancing at the envelope.

  Unfolding it, I saw a name written in flowery script, Arden. I stuffed it in my opposite pocket. In the attic, I’d only glanced at it quickly, not noticing the faded writing under the closet’s dim light. “No,” I answered. “But I like your thinking. The beach holds many treasures, doesn’t it?” I pointed to where Charley, dressed in a rainbow-striped knitted sweater, came bounding toward us with a dead crab dangling from her mouth. She laid it at Patrick’s feet.

  He patted her dark gray head and reached for the stick I’d used to write my quote, then threw it to her. “She does have a penchant for finding treasures that are extremely odorous,” he said, then put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, shouting for her not to travel too far away.

  Charley looked back at him and moved closer to us.

  “What a well-behaved pup. I know when we met on Labor Day weekend you said you rescued Charley from a greyhound racetrack that was forced to shut down. She sure looks happy enough now.”

  “She’s thriving.”

  There was a small gap in the conversation while I once again mulled over letting him know about the murder. Instead I said, “I’ve been out of the loop. Any more surprise nor’easters or blizzards heading our way?”

  Before he could answer, a figure appeared at the top of Little Grey’s steps. Claire glanced down at us and waved. Then she shouted something, but it got lost on the wind. She started down the snowy steps, grabbing the handrail like a lifeline. We really needed to go shopping; she was dressed once again in a thin raincoat. When she reached the sand, Charley galloped toward her. Claire reached in her pocket and gave the dog a treat. It seemed they were old friends.

  Out of breath, she joined us. She gave me a huge hug. “I’m so happy you got rescued. I’ve never seen so much snow. But, then again, I lived in California.”

  When I’d called her, I hadn’t told her about the murder, just that we’d been snowed in at Nightingale Manor and to please feed Josephine.

  Claire turned to Patrick. “I didn’t know the two of you were acquainted.”

  I laughed. “This is only our third face-to-face.”

  “But we’ve known each other for over a year in a deeper and more visual way. Your sand-script is quite distinctive.” He pointed at the Keats verse I’d left and winked.

  I felt my face heat. It was as if he knew about my hearing loss and the importance of words in my life. It seemed the cat was out of the bag that I was the one responding to his verses with my own.

  Claire made things awkward when she said, “Oh-h-h, Patrick, your poetry in the sand . . .”

  I gave her a dirty look and cut her off. “Claire, how do you and Patrick know each other?”

  “Patrick and I are part of a small poetry book club that meets once a month for dinner and wine tasting. We alternate homes. Patrick can make a mean beef bourguignonne,” Claire said, raising an eyebrow. “Meg, join us! I know you love poetry.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t cook a lick.”

  “Don’t worry,” Claire said. “There’s another in our group who’s culinarily-challenged. She just picks up something from one of our fabulous Montauk eateries and pretends to have made it herself.”

  “No one will call her out on it because we love everything she serves and can only imagine what she’d make on her own,” Patrick added. “Come. Our next poet is Robert Frost.”

  “Please do,” Claire said excitedly. Then she sneezed.

  “Bless you!” Patrick and I said.

  I glanced at Claire’s long skirt pressed against her legs from the blustery wind. “Speaking of frost, not the poet, but frostbite”—I put my arms around Claire’s frail shoulders—“we should probably go up and thaw out before a warm fire.”

  Patrick glanced up to the top of the dune. “Is this where you live?”

  “Yes, just moved in,” I answered. “Claire and I are neighbors.”

  “Thought you lived closer to town?”

  “I did, but that was a rental. My lease was up.”

  “The cottage that was just bulldozed, right?”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  “Well, your new quaint cottage looks similar. Not ostentatious like some of the newer ones going up.”

  I loved that he used the word quaint. I’d always suspected Patrick had been the good Samaritan who’d done kind acts when I’d lived in the rental. Like adding kindling to my pile of firewood and cleaning up after someone had pulled a prank on me with a bucket of fish guts.

  “You two go,” he said. “Charley needs a bath and a warm-up in front of a fire, also. Nice seeing you again, Meg. And Claire, I’ll see you at Kevin’s next week. Try to talk Meg into coming. Old Man and the Sea still has some copies of the Frost book we’ll be using. It has discussion questions at the back of the book we loosely follow.” Then he turned toward the ocean and whistled for Charley to follow him west.

  Claire and I watched the pair until they were out of view. As we
walked toward the steps leading up to my cottage, my thoughts were on Patrick. I was struck by how different he was from when I used to see his melancholy figure walking the shore. Always during or before a storm or at nightfall, never during the day. Perhaps he’d learned how to better handle his grief over losing his wife and child. Time didn’t heal all wounds, as I learned after losing my mother, but it did push you toward a new normal.

  When we reached the top of the steps, Claire interrupted my musings. Turning toward me so I could read her lips, she said, “I have a fire waiting for you, and Jo is fed and satiated until it’s time for her snack. I want to hear all about Nightingale Manor. I could tell from your voice on the phone there was more going on than just getting snowed in at a former mental asylum. I want all the details. And the scoop about you and the gorgeous Patrick Seaton, but I can see you’re exhausted. Stop over tomorrow, if you’re up to it.”

  I welcomed having a new friend to share with and help me sift through what happened on Shelter Island, but she was right, I needed time alone to digest the past twenty-four hours, including my feelings for author-screenwriter Patrick Seaton. It might be too late to untangle my mixed emotions when it came to Cole and Patrick. It’s only as complicated as you make it, my mother always said. She might have been right, but I knew from the past, simple was a path I rarely followed.

  After Claire left, I hurried inside to my chair by the fire and extracted a fat lump of cat, then sat to read the letter I’d found in the attic at Nightingale Manor. Jo looked at me, turned down her nose and slunk off to the kitchen to see if I’d replaced her dry food with wet. I hadn’t.

  “Missed you too, but I know Claire fed you. Don’t try to pretend she didn’t. Eat the dry food.” The vet said she needed it to keep her teeth sharp. I’d told him my foot kept them sharp enough. Whenever I’d mistakenly kick her in the middle of the night, she’d turn into Vampira and take a blood-letting nibble.

  I glanced out the cottage’s side window that faced my walled garden to the right and the ocean to the left. I never wanted to leave. I had a brick fireplace in my walled garden and loved spending time outdoors in the early evening, reading mysteries on my ebook reader and toasting my toes along with a marshmallow or two. Winters on Long Island were fickle: you could have a day in the fifties one day and twenty below the next. Growing up in Michigan had been a different story, tons of snow and always cold enough to make it stick until at least the end of March. And then there was always the surprise April snowstorm. Memories of building snow forts with my dad and skating on the river made me smile as I scratched behind Jo’s ears.

  I laid the luggage tag from Arden’s suitcase, the onionskin paper with the old train tickets folded inside, and the envelope on the tray table next to the chair. My hand shook as I picked up the envelope. The suspense had been killing me, but instead of ripping it open, I got up and went to the kitchen, opened a drawer and got out a knife. My antique scrimshaw letter opener, a gift from a previous Cottages by the Sea client, was still packed in a box in the guest bedroom. Soon, I thought, maybe even tomorrow, I would start the task—well, not really a task—of decorating the cottage. It was time and it would keep my mind occupied with something besides the murder. I went back to my chair and carefully used the knife to make a clean slit in the thin envelope. With trembling fingers, I extracted the delicate paper inside. It was of the same onionskin as the one with the train tickets that Claire had taken out of the doll. Glancing over at the table with the luggage tag and paper holding the train tickets, there was no doubt all three had been written by the same hand. Arden Hunter’s.

  I smoothed out the page, worried it might disintegrate in my hands.

  Marian, I am not insane. And neither are you. You lost a baby, you didn’t lose your mind. And I lost the love of my life to the ravages of polio. I plan to leave this place before my scheduled operation and I think you should go with me. I am afraid. I know Dr. Tobias has been a good doctor to us both, but I fear this upcoming operation that he proposes will be the end of my identity, if not my life. Nurse Mary has been kind enough to procure two tickets on the Long Island Railroad to Pennsylvania Station for our escape. I feel if we travel together maybe one day we can return to the big screen in a comeback picture, letting the past remain buried. I owe it to the memory of Fred and you have your son Grayson to think about. I’ve tried to tell the doctor of my concerns, but he seems confident the procedure will work. In my opinion he is overconfident. I’ve had Nurse Mary take out the seam in the arm of your Amanda doll and put the train tickets inside. Don’t worry, you can’t even tell that she has been disturbed. I know how much Amanda means to you, but it was the safest place I could think of to put them until it is time to leave, away from warden Louise’s prying eyes. Lately, that is how I feel here. Like a captive without a voice. Please meet me under our pine tree after lights-out tomorrow evening and I promise all will be well. Don’t we deserve happiness? Or at least our autonomy? I didn’t know, and I’m sure you were also unaware, that Nightingale Manor isn’t the sanctuary they’d promised us. It is more of a prison and I don’t understand why they are keeping us separated. Why can’t we be together, like when we arrived? Are you ill? Have I done something wrong? Just know my affection for you hasn’t changed.

  Your friend in pain and hopeful resurrection,

  Arden

  I placed the open letter next to the other two samples of writing. Yes. Arden Hunter had written all three. But did that change anything? Dr. Tobias Nightingale, Dr. Blake’s grandfather, was talked of kindly in the letter. But I understood Arden’s fear; it was doubtful she would have survived a lobotomy. Maybe there was another scenario to that day. Perhaps Marian went to save Arden and she and Dr. Tobias struggled. Or Marian got upset that Arden defaced the doll named after Marian’s dead baby and was mentally incapacitated and grabbed the ice pick out of the doctor’s hand and murdered Arden, just like the doctor had reported. But then why were the tickets still inside the doll and how had the doll ended up in the woods? Had Marian waited for her the night in question? It seemed Arden and Marian were friends, not enemies, just as Elle’s great-aunt Mabel had told her. Did Arden and Marian choose to go to Nightingale Manor together to heal and lament their losses? Arden mourning the man who died of polio, and Marian her dead baby? I would probably never find out. And what did it matter? And what did it have to do with the modern-day murder? One final conundrum: who had been in the attic during the power outage and why? Too many questions and no answers. My mind was spinning. I glanced toward the hearth. All that was left of the fire were embers that blinked and spit sparks of red, yellow and blue. Tomorrow was a big day. Big in the sense that I would give my official statement about Blake Nightingale’s murder. For the ease of it all, I’d been trying to talk myself into believing that Dr. Blake’s former patient, the one who was suing him because of what he’d done to her on Bungled, was his killer. If you dug into the Nightingale family online, it wouldn’t be hard to find out about the old murder. Maybe the woman decided to extract her revenge by doing a copycat killing? Farfetched but not out of the realm of possibility.

  I stood and walked to the bookcase. Jo had long since gone to bed and I knew I should join her. Instead, I took the luggage tag, letter and tickets and pressed a section of molding on the bookcase. The door opened to my secret, hidden room. It really wasn’t that much of a secret to everyone near and dear, and it was the opposite of a panic room; it was a place to shut out the world while still having a view of the lighthouse. Its light, a beacon of stability and comfort. Stepping inside, I randomly pulled out one of my nineteenth-century antique gilt books of poetry. Wordsworth. I put the letter, tag, and tickets inside and stuck it back on the shelf. Then I sat on the window seat and looked toward the light. Usually comforted by its sight, I shivered. What had Dr. Blake done to have someone do such a thing? To get my mind off my macabre thoughts, I reached for a book on twentieth-century poets and went to the index and found my favorite poem by Robert Fr
ost, and probably the rest of the world’s, “The Road Not Taken.” An hour later I drifted off to sleep with thoughts of Patrick Seaton. Not Cole.

  Bad Meg.

  Chapter 15

  Friday, I woke to a scratching and loud meowing from Josephine. I’d fallen asleep on the window seat in my hidden room and felt guilty that two nights in a row Jo had slept without me. Scurrying to the door, I pulled it open. “So sorry, my furry feline. Promise tonight we’ll be bedmates. I’ll even rub your fat belly until you fall asleep.”

  For only having one eye, she sure knew how to make it work. She looked at me with distrust and I knew the only way to placate her was to add a few stinky sardines to her morning meal.

  After a quick cup of coffee, I showered, dressed and headed out to Southampton. The roads were better than yesterday when I’d driven home from Sag Harbor. The fact the sun was out and the temperature was in the upper forties had a lot to do with it. The only problem was that in certain places the melting snow was flooding sections of Montauk Highway. I was told to be at the Southampton Police Station at ten o’clock. It was only eight. Southampton was twenty-eight miles away, a no-brainer when the roads were clear, but who knew when I’d get there. Elle had left a message that she and Felicity would meet me at Priscilla’s Tea & Toast at nine thirty. Not that we had to coordinate our stories, but it wouldn’t hurt to do a quick recap. I planned to bring up the time line of when we’d heard the harrowing scream that might have come from Dr. Blake. My guesstimate would be around two in the morning because I knew it was shortly after my phone died.

  My Woody made it through the water that had flooded the road in front of the Windward Shores Hotel. I continued west on 27A-Montauk Highway, passing snow-crested sand dunes backed by a sparkling Atlantic. The Seafood Shanty was boarded up with plywood, its roof covered with snow that was melting so fast it looked like the runoff from an infinity pool. When the Shanty opened in April, cars would line both sides of the highway for a chance to sample their famous lobster roll. On the outskirts of Amagansett, I opened my windows before reaching the East End Farmers Market, slowing as I passed to catch a whiff of pine from the Christmas trees stacked near the road.