by Jane Godman
Creed waited until they were at the grave to put the tools down and pull a long handled flashlight from his back pocket. He pointed its beam down at the ground and away from the town before placing it on the nearest headstone.
The first solid thwack of pick ax into dirt made Trinity cringe, but soon the scent of loamy earth rose up around them and the strenuous activity distracted her from the grim purpose of it all.
They found the grave to be shallow. Her hands and back were relieved, but her heart shrank in her chest and her stomach sank.
“They must have dug so many graves that summer. One more. One more. One more. They probably became more and more shallow as the fever took its toll,” Creed surmised.
Trinity didn’t reach for the ax. Nor was she relieved when Creed did.
All of this because a hundred-year-old ghost was afraid of the dark?
Only in Scarlet Falls would such a solution seem plausible.
Trinity had seen the match at Clara’s feet. She’d heard the voice in her head and she’d seen the note Clara’s father had given Eichelman.
They hadn’t exposed the entire coffin. It was deteriorated badly. Ground water had seeped upward in the soil creating mud. To try to actually pull the coffin from the grave would have been impossible. It was hard to tell where mud left off and oak began, and thick gnarly tree roots from surrounding maples had found their way into rotten wood and other things.
Creed swung the ax but only a few times before they could see rotten fabric and moldering bones.
She’d seen the dress so many times in pale but perfect condition. A robin’s egg flash in the corner of her eye or a full-on visitation. To see what was left of it was a horror, but even more so when it came to the little girl who had worn it and died too soon.
Trinity climbed up from the shallow grave to retrieve the rag doll she’d left sitting by the flashlight while she’d helped with the digging.
The graveyard was silent, but it no longer felt empty.
All the crooked white headstones and lopsided crypts and crosses seemed in limbo, watching and waiting. For several seconds, Trinity held her breath and then she heard it. The same voice she’d heard in her head at High Lake.
One, two…she’s coming for you.
Three, four…who’s at the door?
Five, six…full of tricks.
Seven, eight…too late, too late.
Nine, ten…it’s happening again.
The Girl in Blue appeared beneath the maple tree exactly where she’d been before, but this time she was joined by others less materialized, but they’re just the same and joining in her childish singing—amorphous shadows.
But it was the silent shadows that truly scared Trinity. Four dour figures stood behind The Girl in Blue. They were indistinct. Their faces a blur. But she recognized the Edwardian dresses and hats from the photograph that had caught her attention at the top of the Historical Society’s basement stairs.
What they were doing to the grave had caused the restless dead of Scarlet Falls to come out to roam.
“Now,” Creed said behind her.
Trinity whirled to face him.
He wasn’t looking at The Girl in Blue or her shadowy companions. He only looked at her, but somehow he saw them in her tension, her wide eyes and the tears in her eyes.
“Now, Trinity. Hurry,” he said. He didn’t try to prolong the experience. He wasn’t taking notes or pictures or even asking questions. He seemed to see her distress and he wanted it to end.
Trinity picked up the rag doll and stumbled back to the grave. The rhyme sung again and again in her ears, ringing loudly as if it would haunt every nightmare in the sleeping town.
With a cry, she jumped into the freshly dug hole, crying out again when her shoes sank into the rotten wood, mud and all that lay beneath.
There was no indication in what was left of where hands and chest would have been. Trinity guessed. She pressed the doll into rotted cloth and called it home when the singing suddenly began to fade.
Creed came to the edge of the grave and took her outstretched hands. He pulled her up and she allowed herself to stand against him for a few minutes before they took up shovel and pick to cover the grave.
Chapter Ten
Trinity threw her shoes and clothes away. She showered. More than once. She also had another visit from Sheriff Constantine.
He showed up at the cottage by the lake a week after their night at the cemetery. He climbed out of his SUV and even though he looked a little more tired, with a blond five o’clock shadow on his chin and shadows under his bloodshot eyes, he also looked like a golden foil for whatever darkness High Lake could exude.
She came down the path to meet him, dreading his perceptive eyes and being soothed by him all the same.
Because whatever was wrong with Scarlet Falls would surely meet its match in what was right with William Constantine.
“The inspectors are finished at Hillhaven,” Constantine began. He rolled his shoulders and looked at the lake, but unlike Creed, his perusal of the waters there didn’t look contemplative or peaceful. His eyes narrowed and his lips ever so slightly curled.
She started to ask him if it smelled like blood to him, too.
She didn’t.
“You might want to have a look at some things we found behind a wall in the old abutment,” he said. “No telling what was destroyed in the fire, but there was a boarded up fireplace and its stone protected a few surprises.”
He motioned for her to follow him to his vehicle and in its front seat she could see a couple of objects behind the glass. For some reason, her respiration increased. She thought about rag dolls and Maiden’s Tears and songs from beyond the grave.
Constantine opened the door. His SUV was so large that the objects on the seat were almost at eye level. There was a thick book stuffed with extra loose papers and other things like dried flowers and swatches of cloth. It was about the size of a standard notebook made several times thicker by the extraneous keepsakes stuffed between its pages. Around the whole of it was bound a thick piece of braided twine.
“It’s a diary. A journal. Probably from one of your ancestors,” Constantine said. He picked the book up and handed it to Trinity. She promptly put it back on the seat. It was pretty in a shabby chic, vintage kind of way and she hated it from the second her hands touched the pages. If Creed had strengthened The Girl in Blue by unearthing her doll, what would this find unleash?
If the sheriff was surprised by the rejection, he didn’t do more than arch a sun-kissed brow.
“But to be honest, it’s the trunk that brought me out here,” he said.
Trinity didn’t reach for the leather bound chest. Not after touching the diary. In fact, she crossed her arms and looked back over her shoulder at the house, willing Creed to waken.
It was large enough that her reluctance might have been seen as the feeling that she couldn’t lift it. Carved of wood and probably used to transport jewelry, money or other valuables back before luggage came on wheels, the chest was scarred, its leather straps cracked and broken. Its rich, dark wood was carved in elaborate scroll work of flowers and leaves.
“They’re forget-me-nots,” Constantine said, his voice gone soft and low. “The trunk contains human remains, Ms. Chadwick. Dust and bone fragments. We have to hold them for testing, but preliminary estimates are very, very old.”
“Hillhaven is old,” Trinity said. She backed away from the chest, no longer caring if Constantine thought she was behaving oddly. She had dealt with her share of bones.
“The good news is that the rest of the house is sound. You can move back in anytime.” Constantine looked over her shoulder and Trinity followed his narrowed gaze.
On the deck above them, Creed stood, dark and silent.
“I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you, Sheriff,” Trinity replied.
She found she couldn’t look away from Creed even to make a polite show of goodbye. She heard the crunch of boots on gravel a
s Constantine walked back to his truck.
The sun at Creed’s back painted his whole face and form in shadow, but she remembered his warm hands pulling her up from the grave.
* * *
She joined him that afternoon for his patrol around the lake. Whatever he watched and waited for—or guarded against—she was by his side. It wasn’t an easy companionship. She still worried about the darkness in his eyes, but when he took her by the hand, she worried less.
“He’s observant. Much more in tune with Scarlet Falls than his predecessor,” Creed said of Sheriff Constantine as they walked.
“Says one observant man of another,” Trinity noted.
“Clara hasn’t been back,” Creed said.
“No. She hasn’t,” Trinity confirmed. Though he would have known as surely as if he could see her himself.
“I haven’t found any more matches,” Creed said, patting his pockets. “They kept turning up at the oddest times in the oddest places. For a while, I thought you might be responsible for them, but I could never catch you in the trick.”
Trinity stutter stepped, but caught herself and continued on. She had suspected him. He had suspected her. And all along it had been Clara.
“So…I’m not haunted anymore,” she said.
They had come to a small rise that overlooked the whole of High Lake. It seemed familiar, though Trinity couldn’t remember walking in the exact spot before. She looked out at the gleam of black water and remembered its metallic bite on her lips. She remembered pasty white arms reaching for the edge to pull a boy she had followed into murky cold death.
“The town is haunted, though, isn’t it? It wasn’t only Clara Chadwick you saw all those years and it wasn’t her causing all the accidents,” Creed said quietly. He looked out over the water, too. Did he taste it when he swallowed? Was that why he had needed the whiskey’s burn? Did he remember dying when the water filled his lungs?
“Accidents happen,” Trinity said. She’d had a phone call from friends still in Boston. The police had determined the fire had been caused by a faulty hot plate in one of the dorm rooms. She wasn’t sure if she believed in their findings, but it did give her some measure of comfort whenever she thought of Jen Po.
“They happen too often to children of Chadwick descent,” Creed said.
“What?” Trinity asked.
She turned to him. The setting sun reflected off the lake and glinted in his black eyes, but he didn’t shield them. He turned toward her instead.
“I’ve spent years studying the history of this place. High Lake was used as a dunking spot in a series of witch trials presided over by a Judge Avery Chadwick in 1692,” Creed said.
Trinity suddenly knew why the rise they stood on was familiar. She’d seen it in Creed’s book lined by townspeople while a woman was lowered into water to see if she would drown and prove her innocence or live to be confirmed a witch and burned at the stake.
Bound.
Trinity could feel her arms tied to her sides again and the cold lake waters closing in.
“Half a dozen women were put to the test here. They all drowned. One of them was Lisbeth Wildes. Before she died, she swore Chadwicks would suffer for untold generations,” Creed said.
“But there’s no such thing as witchcraft. Not like they believed it to be in those days. Curses and deals with the devil,” Trinity argued.
“Several historians have argued that Wildes was a ‘wise woman.’ What we would call a ‘psychic’ today. She could find lost objects. She knew secret things about people. When they were lying. When they were hiding something. That probably didn’t help her popularity with the townspeople. I’m not proposing that Wildes was a witch. I’m suggesting dark deeds—like drowning innocent women to hide your secrets—attract darkness. Lingering darkness. And most people don’t believe in ghosts either,” he said.
“Was it that evening when you died that you became interested in Scarlet Falls’ history?” Trinity asked. Her fears about Creed’s motivations seemed to be solidifying around her like a vice.
Suddenly, he reached a hand up to brush warm fingers across her cheek. It was a butterfly touch so soft and light that it could have been a breeze, except a breeze wouldn’t have caused a sensual curl of heat in her stomach and lower.
“No. It wasn’t dying. It was you. The ferocity in your eyes, the strength you expended to beat the water from my lungs and force them to work again. I had two cracked ribs and bruises for a month,” he said. But he said it with a twist of his lips as if being injured by her while she saved his life was a fond memory. “You saved me that day, but you also damned me because once I saw you fighting, I couldn’t look away.”
He stepped closer and brought his other hand up, this time more firmly to cup her cheek.
“I’ve known something was wrong in Scarlet Falls for as long as I can remember. I was a curious kid. I always wanted to know why. Why couldn’t we go out at night? And why did people who did get hurt…or worse. I’ve always known something was wrong, but when you saved me I finally saw…something, someone who was right.”
“Glorified first aid,” Trinity said, clenching her fists that were too often too late.
“You saw. You saw what was wrong and you tried to fix it. That night in the hospital with my ribs taped and the taste of your kiss on my lips, I vowed that I would help you. I vowed that I wouldn’t rest until I helped you.”
Trinity easily found the melted chocolate in his eyes now. She didn’t know how she’d missed it before.
“I’ve been researching the town’s history ever since,” Creed continued.
“And watching me,” Trinity said.
“You’re a beautiful woman. The way you move…You should see yourself. Carefully placing each step, each touch. I don’t think you ever relax,” Creed said. He leaned in to brush her lips with his once, twice.
She did relax. But only in times like these in his arms when another kind of tension claimed her undivided attention.
He rarely tasted like Scotch anymore. She’d noticed a full bottle gathering dust on his desk in the loft. Kind of like the dark memorabilia he collected from the town. History. A relic from before when he’d been dealing with Scarlet Falls’ secrets all alone.
“So you don’t have a grim fascination with death and the occult,” Trinity said against his seductive mouth.
“My books pay the bills and give me the perfect excuse to devote all my time to historical research,” Creed said. “And I believe the history of Scarlet Falls holds the key to unlocking its mysteries.”
“And your collection?” Trinity said, thinking of the notebook, and the trunk of dust and bones she’d yet to tell him about.
“I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you about the whispers. The things I find and keep all have stories of historical significance to the town and my research. So many stories running through my mind.”
Trinity thought about the hundreds of items she’d seen in his rooms. She thought about the shadows she’d seen with Clara in the cemetery.
“Why didn’t you tell me years ago?” she asked.
“By the time you left for nursing school, I was sucked into the history of the town. I’d become a part of Scarlet Falls and I could see that you wanted to leave it all behind,” Creed said.
“I always meant to come back,” Trinity said. Although she wasn’t sure she would have if the fire hadn’t forced her.
“By that time, I wanted you to get away,” Creed said.
“I don’t think it’s possible to get away from Scarlet Falls. I think it’s in my blood,” Trinity said.
“If it is tied to Chadwick lineage that might be truer than you think. A surprising number of townspeople have ties even if they’re generations removed,” Creed said.
“How about us? Are we kissing cousins?” Trinity asked.
“No. I don’t think so. My lineage traces in another direction,” Creed pulled back from her arms and walked down toward the water. Trinity felt tensi
on rise in her muscles as he came close to its black edge.
“Another direction?” she asked.
She followed him down the rise to stand at his back.
“My family tree branches from the Wildes,” Creed explained.
Trinity breathed in a deep breath of blood-scented air and held it. A chill claimed her. She didn’t believe in witchcraft. A poor group of helpless women had been drowned in this lake. That was all. Still, she remembered the arms reaching for Samuel Creed as if they wanted him to join them.
“My father left town when I was five. He died in Montana, about as far away as he could get from Massachusetts. My mother moved in with my aunt and they raised me in a creaky old Victorian below Main Street,” Creed said.
Trinity remembered The Wilde Sisters. They’d been eccentric to say the least. She hadn’t thought about them in years, but at one time they’d ran a quirky little New Age shop beside the post office—crystals, dulcimer music, tie dye.
“They moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, right after I graduated from high school. My mother disapproves of my books. She disapproves of my interest in the town’s history and with my donations to the Historical Society. After that day by the lake, she refused to stay in Scarlet Falls. She doesn’t believe in witchcraft, but she does believe in evil,” Creed continued. He looked at Trinity, a slight smile on his lips. “And she might have a touch of the same gifts Lisbeth Wildes was purported to have.”
“But you stayed,” Trinity said, stepping closer to him.
“Yes,” he replied. One simple word that said so much. He had stayed because of her. He was trying to solve the puzzle of Scarlet Falls…for her.
Creed might have a lifetime of research in front of him, and even if he mapped out every inch of the town’s history they would probably still be in the dark.
Luckily, she was no longer afraid of the dark.
“Clara Chadwick is at peace now,” Trinity said. She leaned against Creed’s strong back and looked out over the lake where one of his ancestors had cursed her family’s blood and then drowned by her family’s hands.
