by Alma Katsu
He checks the rearview mirror again. “I dunno … they have the license plate number now. If they remember our names, my name …” They are going to have to abandon the SUV and Luke feels terrible for having borrowed Peter’s car. He must take his mind off it. “I don’t want to think about it now. Tell me some more of your story.”
PART III
THIRTY-TWO
The highway to Quebec City runs two lanes in each direction and is as dark as an abandoned airstrip. The leafless trees and featureless scenery remind Luke of Marquette, the tiny town in the lonely upper corner of Michigan where his ex-wife settled. Luke has been up once to see his girls, right after Tricia moved in with her childhood sweetheart. Tricia and Luke’s two children now live in her boyfriend’s house, on a cherry farm, and his son and daughter stay with them a couple of nights a week, too.
During the visit, Tricia seemed to Luke no happier with her sweetheart than she had been with him, or maybe she was just embarrassed to be seen by her ex in a run-down house with a twelve-year-old Camaro in the driveway. Not that Luke’s house in St. Andrew was much better.
The girls, Winona and Jolene, were unhappy, but that was to be expected; they’d just moved to town and knew no one. It almost broke Luke’s heart to sit with them in the pizza place where he’d taken them for lunch. They were silent and too young to know whom to blame or be mad at. They sulked when he tried to draw them out, and he couldn’t bear the thought of taking them back to their mother, saying good-bye when all of them were so raw and hurting. He also knew it couldn’t be helped: what they were going through couldn’t be solved in a weekend.
By the end of his time there, as he was saying his farewells on the cement steps in front of Tricia’s front door, things had improved for him and the girls. Their panic had subsided, they had found some solid ground under their tiny feet. They cried when he hugged them good-bye and waved as Luke pulled away in his rental car, but it still tore at his heart to leave them.
“I have two daughters of my own,” Luke blurts out, overcome by the urge to share something of his life with Lanny.
She looks over at him. “Was that their picture, at your house? How old are they?”
“Five and six.” He feels a tiny glow of pride, all he has left of fatherhood. “They live with their mother. And the guy she’s planning to marry.” Someone else was taking care of his daughters, now.
She shifts so she faces him. “How long were you married?”
“Six years. We’re divorced now,” he adds. “It was a mistake to get married, I see it now. I’d just finished my residency in Detroit. My parents’ health was starting to fail and I knew I’d be coming back to St. Andrew … I guess I didn’t want to come back alone. I couldn’t imagine finding someone there. I knew everybody, since I had grown up there. I think I saw Tricia as my last chance.”
Lanny shrugs, an undercurrent of discomfort in her frown. Uncomfortable with too much honesty, Luke decides, whether she’s the one being honest or not. “What about you? Have you ever married?” he asks and his question prompts a laugh from her.
“I didn’t hide myself away from the rest of the world all this time, if that’s what you think. No, I came to my senses eventually. I saw that Jonathan would never commit to me. I saw it wasn’t in him.” Luke thinks of the man in the morgue. Women would throw themselves at a man like that. Never-ending come-ons and propositions, so much want and desire, so much temptation. How could you expect a man like that to commit to one woman? It was only natural for Lanny to want Jonathan to be faithful, but could you blame the man for disappointing her?
“So you found someone else and fell in love?” Luke tries to keep the hopefulness out of his voice. She laughs again.
“For a man who married in desperation and ended up divorced, you sound like a hopeless romantic. I said I was married, I didn’t say I fell in love.” She twists so that she’s facing away from him again. “That’s not true, exactly. I loved all of my husbands, just not the same way I loved Jonathan.”
“All of them? How many times have you been married?” Luke again gets the uncomfortable feeling he had in Dunratty’s, looking at the mussed bed.
“Four times. A girl gets lonely every fifty years or so,” she says, smirking, making fun of herself. “They were all nice, each in their own way. They took care of me. Accepted me for what I am, however much I could share with them.”
These glimpses into her life make him wish for more. “How much did you share with them? Did you tell any of them about Jonathan?”
Lanny tosses her head and shakes out her hair, still hiding her face from him. “I’ve never told anyone the truth about me before, Luke. You’re the only one.”
Is she just saying that for my benefit? Luke wonders. She’s trained herself to know what people want to hear. It’s the kind of skill you have to develop if you’re going to survive for hundreds of years and not be found out. All part of the subtle art of weaving people into your life, binding them to you, getting them to like you, maybe even to love you.
Luke wants to hear her story, to know all about her, but can he trust her to tell him the truth, or is she just manipulating him until they are safe from the police? As Lanny settles back into thoughtful silence, Luke drives on, wondering what will happen when they arrive in Quebec City, if she will disappear and leave him with only her story.
THIRTY-THREE
BOSTON, 1819
I had planned my trip back to St. Andrew with the enthusiasm customary for a funeral. Using a sack of coin from Adair, I booked passage on a cargo ship sailing from Boston to Camden, and from Camden onward, I would travel in a specially hired coach with a driver. The only transportation to and from St. Andrew had traditionally been the provisioner’s wagon, which brought fresh goods for the Watfords’ store twice a year. I planned to arrive in style, showing up in a handsome trap complete with cushions softening its hard benches and curtains over the windows, to let them know I was not the same woman who’d left.
It was early fall, and while Boston was only chilly and damp, the passes on the approach to northern Aroostook County would already have snow. I was surprised to be nostalgic for the snow of St. Andrew, the high, deep drifts and landscapes of unbroken white, the scalloped edges of pine trees peeking out from under thick coats of snow. As a child, I’d look out the frosted windowpanes of my parents’ cabin and watch the wind blow horizontal sprays of snow as fine as dust, and be grateful to be inside the cabin with the fire and five other bodies keeping me toasty warm.
So that morning, I stood in the Boston harbor, waiting to board the ship that would take me back to Camden in completely different circumstances than when I’d arrived: two trunks of beautiful clothes and gifts, a purse with more currency than the entire village saw in five years, and luxurious travel accommodations. I’d left St. Andrew a disgraced young woman with no prospects and was returning as a refined lady who’d stumbled across a secret provenance and lucked into riches.
Obviously, I owed Adair much. But it did not make me less sad about what I was doing.
While at sea, I hid in my cabin, still overcome with guilt. In an attempt to blunt my emotions, I sat with a bottle of brandy and, with drink after drink, tried to convince myself that I was not a traitor to my former lover. I was coming to present an offer to Jonathan on Adair’s behalf, a gift one could only dream of: the ability to live forever. Any man would readily accept such a gift—even pay a fortune for it—if it were presented to him. Jonathan had been chosen for admittance to an unseen world, to learn that life as we knew it was not all there was. He could scarcely complain about what I was bringing him.
Yet I knew that this other plane of existence came with a price. I just didn’t understand what that price was yet. I didn’t feel superior to mortals, as I didn’t feel like a god. If anything, I felt I’d left the sphere of mankind and crossed to a realm of shameful secrets and regret, a dark underworld, a place of punishment. But surely I was not entirely lost. Surely there was
a chance to make up for one’s sins, for atonement.
By the time I’d arrived in Camden, hired the carriage, and started my solitary trip north, the idea of rebelling against Adair began to creep into my head again. After all, my surroundings were so unlike Boston that Adair seemed so far away. I bargained with myself: if, after arriving in St. Andrew, I saw that Jonathan was happy in his life with his overbearing family and his child bride, I would spare him. I could take the consequences on myself: I would slip away and make my own way in the world, because I could never go back to Boston without Jonathan. Ironically, Adair himself had given me the means to flee: I had more than enough money to get off to a good start. These fantasies were short lived, however; I couldn’t forget Adair’s warning to do as I was ordered or suffer at his hand. Adair would never let me leave him.
In this unhappy frame of mind, I steeled myself to roll into St. Andrew that October afternoon, to face the surprise of my family and my acquaintances for being alive, and their eventual disappointment at what I had become.
I arrived on an overcast Sunday. I’d been lucky that the season wasn’t as punishing as it could be and the snow along the route had been passable. The trees were bare against a gray flannel sky and the last leaves clinging to the branches were a dead color, shriveled and curled, like bats hanging from their roosts.
The church service had just let out for the day and the townspeople spilled from the broad doors of the congregation hall onto the common. The parishioners stood conversing despite the cold and the wind, reluctant as always to forgo companionship and return home. No sign of my father; perhaps with no one to accompany him, he’d taken to going to the Catholic mass for convenience. But my eyes found Jonathan immediately, and my heart rose on seeing him. He stood on the far edge of the common where the horses and carriages were tethered and was climbing into his family’s buggy, his sisters and brother waiting in a row for their turn. Where were his mother and the captain? Their absence made me anxious. On his arm was a young woman, white with fatigue. Jonathan helped her into the front seat of the buggy. There was a bundle in her arms—a baby. The child bride had given Jonathan something I could not. At the sight of the baby, I nearly lost my courage and told the driver to turn around.
But I did not.
My carriage swept into this scene, and was immediately an object of curiosity. At my signal, the driver pulled the horses up and, heart in my throat, I sprang from the carriage into the crowd that had gathered.
My reception was warmer than I’d expected. They recognized me, despite the new clothing and styled hair and hired carriage. I was encircled by people I’d always suspected cared little for me—the Watfords, Tinky Talbot the blacksmith and his soot-smudged brood, Jeremiah Jacobs and his new bride, whose face I recalled but whose name escaped me. Pastor Gilbert bustled down from the congregation hall steps, his vestments twisted by the wind, as my former neighbors whispered around me.
“Lanore McIlvrae, as I live and breathe!”
“Look at her, all fancied up!”
Hands reached from the crowd to offer a handshake, though I saw from the corner of my eye the clucking tongues and shaking heads on the fringe. Then the crowd parted for Pastor Gilbert, who arrived red faced from exertion.
“Dear lord, is it you, Lanore?” he asked, but I scarcely heard him, I was so preoccupied by his appearance. How Gilbert had aged! He’d shrunk and his portly belly had slimmed, but his old face was wrinkled like an apple forgotten in the cold cellar and his eyes were rheumy and red. He clasped my hand with a mixture of affection and trepidation. “Your family will be so happy to see you! We’d given you up for”—he blushed, as though about to let slip the wrong word—“lost. And here you have returned to us—and in such obvious good fortune.”
At the mention of my family, the expressions of the onlookers shifted, though no one said a word. Good God, what had happened to my family? And why did everyone seem so much older? Miss Watford had streaks of gray in her hair I did not recall. The Ostergaard boys were fully grown and bursting out of their hand-me-down clothing, wrists protruding from the too short sleeves of their jackets.
The crowd parted again at a commotion in the back, and into the circle stepped Jonathan. Oh, how he’d changed. He’d lost the last of his boyishness, the carefree sparkle in his dark eyes, his swagger. Handsome still, he had an air of sobriety about him. He looked me over, taking in my obvious changes and seeming saddened by them. I wanted to laugh and throw my arms around him to break his somber mood, but I didn’t.
He layered my hand between his two. “Lanny, I didn’t think we’d see you again!” Why did everyone keep saying this? “By the looks of things, Boston has been good to you.”
“It has,” I replied, offering nothing yet, wanting to pique his curiosity.
At this point, the young lady holding the infant edged through the crowd and hovered at Jonathan’s elbow. He reached back and ushered her forward.
“Lanny, you remember Evangeline McDougal. We married shortly after you left. Though there’s been enough time since your departure for us to have our first child, I daresay!” He laughed nervously. “A girl, can you believe my first child would be a girl? No luck, I say, but we’ll get it right the next time, won’t we?” he said to a red-cheeked Evangeline.
Logically, I knew that Jonathan would be married and that it was possible he’d have a child by now. Seeing his wife and daughter, however, was more difficult than I would have imagined. My lungs felt constricted. I went numb, unable to mumble congratulations. How could everything have moved so fast? I’d been gone only a few months.
“I know it seems so soon, fatherhood and all,” Jonathan said, looking down at the hat in his hands, “but old Charles was determined to see me established before he passed away.”
My throat tightened. “Your father is dead?”
“Oh yes—I forgot, you haven’t heard. Right before my wedding. It would be two years ago, I think.” He was dry-eyed and calm. “He’d become ill right after you left.”
More than two years since I’d left? How could that be? It was unreal, like something from a fairy tale. Had I fallen under a spell and slept while the rest of the world went about its business? I couldn’t speak. Jonathan squeezed my hand, breaking my trance. “We shouldn’t keep you from seeing your family. Do plan to come to the house for dinner, soon. I would like to hear what adventures prevented you from returning to us until now.”
“Yes, of course.” My mind was elsewhere: if all this change had been visited on Jonathan’s family, what of my own? What misfortune might have befallen them? And, judging from what Jonathan had said, two years had elapsed since I’d left town, though this made no sense. Did time move more quickly here, or had it passed more slowly in Boston, in the swirl of nightly parties and the languor of Adair’s rooms?
I asked the driver to stop the coach up the road from my parents’ house. The cabin had changed, there could be no denying it. Modest to begin with, it had grown shabby while I was away. My father had built it himself, like the other first settlers (the only exception being the captain, who’d brought carpenters up from Camden to make his fine house). My father had made a single-room log house designed to be built onto later. And build on he did: an alcove behind the main room to provide sleeping space for Nevin, a loft for us girls, where for many years we’d slept three abreast, like dolls on a shelf.
The house sagged like a good horse that has aged. Chinks of wadding had fallen out from between the logs. The roof was missing a few shakes. Debris had piled up on the narrow porch and the bricks in the chimney had loosened. I saw dots of reddish hide between the trees beyond the house, which meant cattle still grazed in the pastures. My family had retained at least part of the herd, but judging from the condition of the house, something drastic had happened to their fortunes.
I studied the house. The family was home from church—the wagon stood empty by the barn and I could see the ancient chestnut gelding grazing in the pen—but there wa
s no activity around the house, just a ragged plume of smoke rising from the chimney. A mean fire on a cold day. I stole a glance at the woodpile. Neglected. The firewood barely stood three rows high with winter coming on.
Finally, I asked the driver to pull up in front of the house. I waited for a sign of movement within, but getting none, I drew up my courage, climbed out of the carriage, and approached the door.
Maeve answered my knock. Her mouth agape, she took me in from head to foot before shrieking and throwing her arms around my neck. We managed to waltz over the threshold and into the house, her happy voice filling my ears.
“Dear lord, you’re alive! Darling Lanore, we thought we’d never see you again!” Maeve wiped tears from her cheeks with the edge of her apron. “When we didn’t hear from you … the nuns wrote to Mama and Papa and told them you were most likely lost.” Maeve blinked.
“Lost?” I asked.
“Dead. Murdered.” Maeve gave me a clear-eyed look. “They said it happens all the time in Boston. Newcomers arrive in the city to be spirited off by brigands to their deaths.” Her eyes gazed up at me, rapt. “If you were not lost, sister, then what did happen? Where have you been? It’s been nearly three years.”
Nearly three years! Again, the lost time rattled me. Outside of my time in Adair’s company, the rest of the world had been like a train keeping to its own timetable, not about to slow down for me.
I was saved from making an explanation at that moment when my mother shuffled up from the open trap door to the root cellar, her apron gathered to cradle a few potatoes. She dropped everything at the sight of me, turning white as sheeting.
“It can’t be!”
