by Megan Hart
I stayed up with Persephone, reading her what I could of Dr. Doolittle and hoping she heard me. It was almost lunch time before she woke.
"Connie," she said and I burst into tears.
She grabbed me and held me close, rocking and shushing me as though I'd been the one who was attacked.
When I'd finished, she cradled my face and grinned. The purplish-green knot closing her left eye was the size of a golf ball.
"I forget sometimes that you're just a boy," she said. "I'm sorry for that."
Not sure what she meant, I just nodded.
"Go fetch me some water, now. My mouth is so dry Bedouins are driving camels across it."
Once the doctor had examined her, he went to fetch the Sheriff. I sat with her and held her hand as she sipped the water.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Oh, the usual." She smiled.
"It's not funny, Seph. You look like you went twelve rounds with Jack Dempsey."
"At least I still have all my teeth."
It took me awhile to get the whole story from her. I only heard the highlights that day and, even when the Sheriff came, she shooed me off. I really didn't know everything until a couple of years later, after Houdini's funeral, when she'd had a few too many and finally filled in the remaining gaps. I think maybe that's what she meant that day commenting on my age. I think she worried she was stealing my childhood in some way by exposing me to the darker side of the world. Growing up on the streets, I was tougher than most kids and, in many ways, had to grow up too fast. But she wanted to protect me, that had been obvious since the moment she'd snatched me away from those goons I was playing ghost for and put a proper roof over my head.
I hope she knew how much I appreciated everything she did for me.
Anyway, I'm sure I'm still missing a few details, but here's what happened the night before as I've pieced it together.
18
She finished her project in the work shed, or at least as much as she'd been able to do without the vacuum tubes. Something had been tugging at her, her mind piecing together a string of clues, and she thought she might have worked the whole thing out. Flooded with nervous energy, she needed to do something but didn't know what.
What she did know was that the old library seemed to be a place no one had checked out yet. Reasoning she might at least be able to find some alcohol there if nothing else, she grabbed her flashlight and walked the four blocks to the old building.
It was dark inside, the only noise the November wind rustling the trees. She walked around to the back door. Locked, of course. She found a rock and proceeded to smash the lock open.
Flicking the flashlight on, she stepped through the door.
Boxes and crates cluttered the place alongside empty shelves and stacks of chairs. The dry scents of dust and old paper filled the large room. On one wall, a locked door labeled "STAFF ONLY" drew her attention. She used the rock again, this time gaining entrance to what had once been the library offices. This must have been the "gentleman's club." A few sofas had been arranged around a coffee table covered in ashtrays, the stale scent of cigars and old booze still heavy in the air. Decks of cards and a tray of poker chips sat on the floor. Old lamps were scattered about the room, most still half filled with oil. The place even had a Victrola, a small stack of Red Seal records beside it. Someone had left an Enrico Caruso on the machine and she considered playing it, but thought better of it.
"There is a God," she said when her flashlight lit up a dozen bottles of liquor on a table in the corner.
Unable to find a glass, she sipped directly from a bottle of rum. She'd never been a fan of straight rum. It tried too hard for her taste. But the fire when it hit her belly was good and clear and helped her think.
Two other rooms attached to this one, each with a locked door as well. She continued her tactic with the rock, amused at feeling like a hoodlum. The first room was a supply closest where cases of liquor had been stashed. The second a proper office. She slipped into that one.
A large desk dominated the room. Off to the side, a massive sofa sat against the wall. A sheet had been draped over it and a couple of pillows laid out. Wrinkled and mashed, it had obviously seen recent use. Leaning over it, she caught the faint whiff of perfume and stale sex. This was where the tryst happened. Or a tryst, she supposed, though she never believed in coincidences. Caitlin had been here.
Stacks of paper covered the desk and she lowered herself into a leather chair behind it. A glass sat amidst the paper, a splash of clear liquid inside of it. Next to that, another ashtray held a half smoked cigar. She touched the tip with her finger and was relieved to find it cold.
Scanning the papers on the desk, they read like drafts of some kind of legislation.
The desk also housed a locked drawer. Running her hand along the underside of it, hoping she could find a way to pop it open, her fingers instead ran into something thick and chalky. It flaked at her touch and, when she shined the flashlight on it, she knew it was blood.
Sliding back, she shined the light further down the desk. Blood had caked on the corner. It smeared the wall to the right, streaks and hand prints suggesting someone reached out frantically, trying to grab hold of something, anything. More blood stained the floor.
This was where Caitlin had been killed.
Of course it was. Quiet, secluded, one could do anything here and keep it a secret. The walls of the library were concrete and this office buried deep inside. A crowd could be pressed against the outside of the building and never have any inkling that a teenage girl was being taken advantage of in here.
No one would have heard her screams.
The room felt suddenly tomb-like and Persephone shuddered. She felt hollow. Numb. She should leave, go tell the Sheriff what she found here and then put as many miles between her and Gallow's Grove as she could.
She moved to do just that yet, when she reached the back door, she thought of something that had been said to her earlier and rushed back to the office. Fumbling around until she found a letter opener, she jimmied the lock open on the drawer.
A stack of letters sat inside.
Removing them, the faint scent of perfume rose from the pages. She'd done that same thing when she was younger. Those had been such ridiculous days and she wondered how close she might have come at times to sharing Caitlin's fate.
The handwriting neat and precise, her words almost poetic, Caitlin wrote about how much she loved him, how she knew it would be a scandal if it was ever revealed they were together but she almost didn't care. Yet all she wanted was to leave town and it seemed he’d been slipping her money every time they met to help her do so. She said over and over in the letters that she wished there was a world where she could wake up every morning staring into his blue eyes, but she knew that could never be and she accepted it. Every letter seemed to contain some variation on that same theme as though she felt, if she said it enough, she'd eventually believe it.
At least, that was, until the final letter. She had told him at some point before she'd written it that she was pregnant. She'd been waiting for him to decide what to do about it. He had demanded, it seemed, that she see a doctor he knew in Albany who could take care of situations like this, but she refused. Would he stand up and do the right thing, she asked? Would he leave his wife and marry her?
"Poor, naive thing," Persephone said.
"She didn't seem that way at first."
Persephone looked up to see him in the doorway.
"It was mutually beneficial, in the beginning. I suppose I was also naive in thinking it could stay that way."
She gripped the letter opener hard and held it beneath the table.
"I may have even loved her. I'm not sure."
Running through a hundred calculations, she knew she had nowhere to go but through him.
"I came here now," he said, "to clean things up. The blood, the letters, all of it. I should have done it that night, but I couldn't bring myself to. I never w
anted to hurt her. She just wouldn't stop talking about visiting my wife." The Senator scratched his cheek. "It would have ruined me. Politics aside, my wife's family is the source of our wealth, and her miserable old father seems as though he'll never die. I grew up in poverty, Miss Gale. I don't plan to ever go back."
She stood and slid an ink pen into her free hand. "And what now?"
"You should have simply stuck with debunking the séance. That's all that was needed. My son would have gone free and no one would have looked in my family's direction again. The embarrassment of following ghosts conjured by a thirteen-year-old girl would have been too much for them. Yet you just had to exceed your bounds. I should have known. You were always a wild one." He took a step into the room. "If I'd only gotten here an hour earlier to clean up, we could have avoided all this. Procrastination truly is the devil's friend."
"It would have only stalled things," she said, attempting to do the same. "You gave yourself away earlier."
"Oh? And how's that?"
"You told me you were an important man doing important things."
He didn't seem to understand or care. He took another step into the room.
Taking stock of the situation, she knew she wouldn't have many more chances.
"Connie, now!" As she yelled it, she pitched the ink pen behind her back to bounce from the wall over the sofa.
His eyes went to it and she rushed him, feinting to his left before ramming her shoulder into his right. Still looking for me, he hadn't expected her to be on the offense and so she knocked him to the side and rushed out the door.
He was faster than she'd given him credit for and grabbed her by the hair on the back of her head, jerking her to the side and tossing her over one of the sofas, knocking the Victrola into the floor and smashing her face into the wall.
Scrambling to her feet, his fist slammed into her cheek. Twisting, she fell to the floor, stars exploding in her eyes and the coppery taste of blood filling her mouth. A black wave crashed over her, threatening to take her down into unconsciousness where she'd never wake.
He'd kill her and quick.
Through sheer force of will, she avoided sinking away – though just barely.
"I hate having to do this, Miss Gale. I hope you know that."
The letter opener still in her hand, her knuckles aching from gripping it so tightly, she took a deep breath.
"It's a shame we never really got to know one another." He stepped toward her and kicked something out of the way. It thumped against the wall. "You would have liked me."
She slid her empty hand beneath her for stability. Even that small motion made her head swim and bile scorched the back of her tongue.
A shoe came down beside her face, a knee on the other side of her body. Grabbing her shoulder, he rolled her onto her back. His hand wrapped around her throat, squeezing until stars went off again.
He raised his fist and brought it down on her.
The world rocked and blackness again crowded in. She would be gone soon.
Raising his fist again, she slammed the letter opener into his throat.
Gasping, he grabbed her wrist and tried to pull her hand away. She pressed deeper, refusing to give any ground.
He squeezed her neck harder and she knew she couldn't stay conscious much longer. If he only let go of the letter opener and hit her again, she'd be gone.
Instead, he pulled on her hand even harder and the weapon began to slide from his throat. Blood trickled hot down his neck and over her fingers. Another few seconds and it would be free.
Darkness crowded her vision and her lungs began to burn.
Desperate, she flicked her wrist, jerking her hand around the underside of his jaw.
He gurgled twice and then everything went black.
19
A weight pressed down on her and it hurt to breath. Her face ached and her throat burned. Blinking several times, something sticky held her eyelids closed. She wiped the warm gunk away. It was blood, and she knew it, afraid it was her own.
Her vision cleared and she stared at Senator Carmichael slumped onto her chest, eyes wide and glassy. His blood covered her, the jagged wound in his throat confusing her for a moment. Then she remembered that she had ripped that wound open and felt like screaming.
Shoving hard and bucking her hips, she pushed his body away. He thumped onto the floor and she scooted to the side. Sitting up made her sick and she emptied her stomach onto the floor next to her.
She sat there for several minutes until the world steadied around her. When she stood, she fought the urge to bring her foot down onto his limp face.
Pain shot through her ankle with every step as she hobbled from the library. Her face throbbed the entire walk back, and she knew she would again pass out.
She forced herself on until she reached the Inn.
20
The Sheriff found the letters when he went to retrieve the Senator's body. The blood in the office was just as Persephone described it and, as much as he hated to, the evidence forced him to release Simon.
We stayed in Gallow's Grove another week until Seph's face healed up enough that she could cover the bruising with make-up. The last thing she wanted was a thousand eyes on her, and the thousand whispered rumors that would follow, once we were back in the city.
She spent the nights that week tweaking whatever she'd built in the shed. The days she spent on the porch, a white veil hiding her face, waiting for Simon to come see her.
He never did.
"You want me to go invite him over?" I asked after the first day.
"No."
"After everything you did, the man could at least say hello."
"I killed his father, Connie."
I almost argued with her about that. She had to kill him, after all. But I could tell she didn't want to hear it. It had been an awful chain of events that, I realized sitting beside her, had been made all the worse by the fact that she was in love with Simon. She never said it but she didn't have to. All I need to know it's true is my memory of that first kiss I had with Neph. If Persephone felt a fraction of that when she was with Simon, then I truly feel horrible for how things played out.
Speaking of Neph, her and Rose had come by a few times to see Persephone. Rose brought butternut squash soup, a favorite of Seph’s as a kid. I wish I could say those visits were warm and filled with laughter, that Persephone worked to alleviate the years of tension between them, but I'd be lying if I did. They were cold and awkward. But no one fought. I suppose that was something.
At no point in these visits did anyone bring up the murder or the séance. That may have been for the best.
The vacuum tubes arrived three days before we left and that improved Seph's mood somewhat. She vanished into the shed with them and I didn't see her for a full day straight.
Nephthys and I visited the cemetery almost daily. We opted to take the long way around through the forest to keep prying eyes off of us. The day before leaving Gallow's Grove, we came across Caitlin's funeral. Sitting at the edge of the woods, hidden by barren trees and piles of wet leaves, we watched as they lowered her into the ground.
It was a small service and, after the preacher had said his words and most people left, we observed Sheliah Preston speaking to Don and Mary Ennis. All three of them broke into tears and embraced. A few months later, Neph had said in one of her letters that Sheliah and her mother had moved into the Ennis house to help around the place. Don and Mary were often seen playing in the yard with the baby. That might have been the only good that came from our time there.
When the cemetery had emptied, we walked over to the tomb where we had waited out the thunderstorm and sat cuddled beneath that angel again.
"I wish you could stay," she said.
"Me too."
"No you don’t." She laughed. "You're a city boy. What would you do out here?"
"True." I kissed the top of her head. "Let me ask you. When we did that séance, why did you... I mean Caitlin... Why
did the pointer keep going to Simon?"
"I've wondered that. Simon and his father looked so much alike, maybe that was part of it. Pointing out the son to indicate the father. And ‘SC,’ while we thought it meant Simon Carmichael, could have also meant Senator Carmichael."
"It's a good thing it did point him out, I guess. Otherwise Persephone wouldn't have been so motivated to sniff out the real killer."
She was quiet.
"I mean, if someone who went for a lot of walks at night had seen Caitlin and the Senator together, had maybe been a little scared of the whole thing when her body was found, then getting Persephone on the trail might have been the best move to make."
"You're never going to believe I can actually speak to the dead, are you?"
"I don't know. But I promise you I'll never not believe it."
She smiled up at me. "And that's why I wish you could stay."
We didn't talk much the rest of our day spent up there, but I sometimes still wake feeling her cuddled up against me, our hands intertwined, her lips on mine. Such is the power of first love.
"Connie," Persephone called out from the porch as I approached.
Dusk had shot the sky through with purple and orange and I thought the excitement in her voice was because we had a train to catch the next morning. I still hadn't packed yet, after all.
"Connie, I thought you'd never get back. I have to show you something."
I followed her out to the shed. She threw open the doors and led me in.
Shelves filled with tools lined the walls. Sawhorses had been pushed up against them to make room for the massive table dominating the space. Letters had been carved into it and a dark stain applied. It was almost the twin of Nephthys's Ouija table.
A planchette sat in the middle.
I whistled. "Where did you learn how to work wood like this?"
