Widow's Tears

by Susan Wittig Albert

  How do you know? Ruby wondered, thinking of those headstones. And what if there’s a penalty for trying? She pressed her lips together. “Honestly, Claire. I…I don’t think I’m qualified. How about asking a priest? Priests do exorcisms. They say prayers and burn incense and the spirits get scared or something and go away.”

  “I don’t know any priests,” Claire replied. “But I know you. And you’ve seen her—twice now, years apart. That qualifies you.”

  Ruby had to admit that it sounded reasonable, especially when she was getting messages telling her not to go home. But maybe there was another way to approach this. She picked up her glass and sipped her tea. “You said you inherited this place. How much land is there?”

  “About fifteen hundred acres.”

  “Fifteen hundred!” Ruby exclaimed. “Wow. That’s a lot—even for Texas. Why don’t you just sell it and use the money to buy another B and B, if that’s what you want to do? That way, the ghost is somebody else’s problem.”

  “I would if I could.” Claire sounded wistful. “But I can’t. I have to live here.”

  Ruby frowned. “I don’t—”

  “It’s complicated,” Claire said. “Long story short, my great-aunt Hazel was a companion to Mrs. Blackwood, the woman who built this house. They lived here for decades, just the two of them, never going anywhere. Mrs. Blackwood died in her late nineties and left the house and her money to Hazel. The house was hers to live in and dispose of at her death. But if she went to live somewhere else, the house would be torn down and the acreage and any money would go to the church camp. The camp property adjoins this, on the north side.”

  “But that was your great-aunt Hazel,” Ruby pointed out. “What about—”

  Claire raised her hand. “Chapter one was Mrs. Blackwood. Chapter two was Aunt Hazel. She lived here until she died, never married, never had kids. Upon her death, she left the property to her niece, my aunt Ruth. There wasn’t much money by that time—bad investments, I guess—although there was enough to repair and modernize the place. But Aunt Hazel imposed the same condition. If Ruth didn’t live in this house, the house would be razed and the church camp would get the land.”

  Ruby felt as if she had missed something. “Your aunt Ruth? But I thought you inherited it.”

  “Be patient. Now we’re in Chapter three, Aunt Ruth’s chapter. She kept telling the lawyers she was moving out here, although I’m pretty sure she had no idea of doing anything of the sort—she was just trying to figure out a way to get around the requirement. Anyway, things dragged along for several years until the lawyers for the church camp got tired of waiting and threatened to sue, since Aunt Ruth wasn’t living up to the terms of Aunt Hazel’s will. Then Ruth complicated things still more by getting herself killed in an automobile accident.” Claire sighed. “End of Aunt Ruth’s chapter.”

  “Oh dear,” Ruby murmured sympathetically.

  Claire nodded. “Yeah, really. After Mom died, Aunt Ruth was all the family I had left. But things got complicated—legally, I mean—when it turned out that she didn’t have a will. I was her closest kin, but I wasn’t in a position to accept the bequest right away, because—” Her glance slid away. “Because I was…well, in rehab.”

  “Oh,” Ruby said, and with this second mention of rehab, the pieces clicked into place. The long silence after Brad died. The times she had called but Claire wasn’t available and hadn’t returned her calls. Rehab. Addiction. It all made sense. “I’m sorry, Claire. I know you’ve had a difficult time.”

  Claire straightened her shoulders. “My own fault, I guess. I haven’t been able to get over Brad’s death. Somehow, I’ve gotten stuck. I can’t break away from the past, from Brad, from losing him. I just keep wallowing in my grief. The sleeping pills and alcohol—they’re only another way to dull the pain.” She eyed Ruby. “I guess you know about that, after losing Colin. The pain, I mean,” she added, “not the rest of it. You’re not the wallowing type.”

  Ruby smiled a little. “Well, there are lots of ways to wallow. I haven’t done pills or booze, but that doesn’t mean I don’t—” She stopped. This wasn’t about her and her troubles, it was about Claire.

  “I actually thought I was going to make it,” Claire said. “I’d been thinking of leaving the magazine anyway. I had been hired to ghostwrite the memoir of a woman entertainer. I won’t tell you her name because I signed a nondisclosure agreement, but you’d recognize it. She’s a big-name singer in the Texas music business. Plus I had a couple of freelance editing projects on the desk. The trouble was, though, that I’d been taking sleeping pills since Brad’s death. And I was drinking again, too. And between the grief and the pain and those god-awful bills, I was a mess. Things finally got so bad, I didn’t have any choice but to go for treatment. Then Aunt Ruth got killed, and when I got out of rehab, I discovered that I had inherited this place, together with just enough money to fix it up. My career was in shreds and I didn’t have a way to support myself. I’m sure you can guess how I felt.”

  “That it was a gift from heaven, I suppose,” Ruby said. From heaven? If there was a ghost involved, did heaven have anything to do with it?

  “Exactly. A gift from heaven.” Claire nodded emphatically. “I figured I could live here, build up my ghostwriting and editorial work, maybe even write that novel I’ve been thinking about. But the writing won’t bring in enough money. The house itself will have to produce an income. That’s why I thought of a B and B.”

  Ruby thought about what Monica had told her and what she had read in the newspaper. “Do you own the mineral rights as well? You could sell them, couldn’t you?”

  “Yes, but that’s not the answer,” Claire replied. “It doesn’t matter what the oil companies are paying for a lease. The chemicals they use for fracking can get into the groundwater, not to mention the huge amounts of water they pump out of the aquifer to force up the gas. And there’s all the noise and the trucks tearing up and down the roads, and I wouldn’t have any control over where they put their wells.” She shook her head violently. “No. No lease. Period. End of story.”

  “I see your point,” Ruby said.

  Claire was going on. “I’ve got to make this work, Ruby.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she reached for a paper napkin on the table. “It’s my last chance.”

  Ruby’s heart went out to her. She knew exactly how Claire felt, for she had gone through the same thing after Colin was murdered: the sense of hopeless loss, of despair, of nothing left to look forward to. Grief was a terrible thing. It could drown you. It could flood your soul. It could suck out every bit of hope you had for the future and shriek for more.

  After a moment, Claire blew her nose. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, balling up the napkin in her fist. “It’s just that I’m desperate, Ruby. No family, no income, no home—except for this place.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “But to make it work, I have to get rid of whatever or whoever is in this house.”

  Ruby was silent, wondering whether a haunted house was the best place for a recovering alcoholic to live. But it sounded as if it might be Claire’s last, best hope. They might not have seen each other often in the last few years, but Claire had been a friend for a very long time, and she needed help.

  And there was something else, too. Deep down inside, Ruby was scared—not just tense or nervous but truly terrified—at the thought of somehow using her gift to explore the energies that seemed to have collected in this house. But at the same time, she realized that there were questions here she wanted answers to, mysteries that needed solving, things she urgently wanted to know. Who was the woman she and Claire had seen? Why was she here? The things that Claire had heard and seen in the house, and those headstones out there in the graveyard—what was all that about? She was surprised by the insistent power of the curiosity that had suddenly seized her.

  The silence stretched out. The noise of the wind had disappeared, but the sky outside the kitchen window was darker and in the dista
nce, there was another long, low rumble of thunder.

  “Finish your pie,” Ruby ordered. “And then you can give me the tour of the house. Assuming we’re not frightened off by your ghost, that is.” Playfully, she raised her voice. “You hear that, house? Behave yourself! No harp, no bell—”

  Behind her, in the rack over the table, pans rattled loudly.

  Startled, Ruby turned in her chair. The two pans in the middle of the rack banged together once again, violently. Then the movement subsided and the pans hung innocently, side by side. The wind? But the kitchen door was shut, and so was the window. And outside, the trees were still, the leaves pale in the peculiar light.

  “You see?” Claire’s smile was crooked. “That’s what I’m talking about. Just a few little everyday noises. The wind blowing, pans banging, a ball bouncing. Nothing to be afraid of—right?”

  “I think we should find ourselves a priest,” Ruby muttered.

  There was another rumble of thunder. Ruby thought it almost sounded like a chuckle.

  Chapter Seven

  Galveston

  Afternoon, September 8, 1900

  “At 3:30 p.m. [2:30 Galveston time] I took a special observation to be wired to the Chief at Washington. The message indicated that the hurricane’s intensity was going to be more severe than was at first anticipated. About this time, my brother [Isaac Cline, chief of the Bureau’s Texas Section] paused in his warnings long enough to telephone from the beach the following fact, which I added to the message: ‘Gulf rising rapidly; half the city now under water.’ Had I known the whole picture, I could have altered the message at the time of its filing to read, ‘Entire city under water.’”

  When the Heavens Frowned

  Joseph Cline, Assistant Observer

  Galveston Weather Bureau

  Hunched over his desk on the third floor of the Levy Building, Joseph Cline spent a few precious moments encrypting his telegraph message to Willis Moore at the Washington Weather Bureau so that it could not be easily read along the route. If it were known (in Houston, for instance) that Galveston could be flooded by a storm, the city’s reputation as a port might be damaged. By the time he ventured out to the Western Union office, the surging water along the Strand—the street that ran along the western side of Galveston, beside Galveston Bay—was already knee-deep, filling his rubber boots. The wooden paving blocks had popped up and were bobbing in great flotillas along the street, so that Joseph had to fight his way through them as well as through the water. The wind, gusting at over fifty miles an hour, was ripping slates from the roofs of buildings and sending them hurtling through the air. There was a fateful irony here, for after a great fire had swept through the city in 1885, the city fathers had mandated that the roofs be constructed of slate instead of wooden shingles. Now, the slates designed to protect the city from fire had been turned into deadly missiles by the wind, and Joseph found that he had to duck and whirl to avoid being slashed.

  It was only a few blocks, but every step was a battle, and Joseph, still a young man at twenty-nine and strong, was near exhaustion when at last he reached the Western Union office. He was astonished to learn that the wires had been down for two whole hours. What’s more, the clerk told him, the railroad bridge across the bay was now underwater and the trains had stopped running. In fact, a relief locomotive had had to be sent out to rescue the passengers on the 9:45 from Houston. They were safe, but the noon train from Beaumont hadn’t been heard from and was feared stranded—or worse. Normally, it stopped at the tip of the Bolivar Peninsula to transfer its passengers to the Charlotte M. Allen to be ferried across the two-mile-wide ship channel. But today, the wind had prevented the ferry from docking at the Bolivar pier. Later, it would be learned that ten passengers had abandoned the train and made for the Point Bolivar lighthouse, a quarter mile away. It was constructed of brick sheathed with metal plates, and it already housed some two hundred refugees, crammed into the staircase that spiraled a hundred feet to the top, where the kerosene-fueled light still shone out through the storm. Eighty-five passengers stayed with the train, trusting that its massive weight would withstand the winds and surging waters. It was the wrong choice. By Sunday morning, when the survivors emerged from the lighthouse, the train was gone, and with it, all sign of their fellow passengers.

  But Joseph was determined to send his telegram. Thinking that the Postal Telegraph might still be operating, he struggled to the nearby post office, where a woman, white-faced and tense, told him that he was too late. Their wires were down as well. There was no telegraph service out of Galveston. He had heard about the second floor of Ritter’s Café smashing in on top of the first-floor restaurant, had he? So many dead, even more injured and some couldn’t be pulled out because the rescuers were afraid that the rest of the brick building would be blown in at any moment, or the building next door would go down, and even more would be killed. She was closing the office right now, collecting her sister and her children, and seeking refuge in City Hall, where they would be safe.

  Joseph was incredulous at the news of the collapse. At first he doubted the woman, but because the restaurant was less than two blocks from the Weather Bureau, he went to see. He was horrified by the sight of the wreckage, and even more by the helplessness of the dazed and rain-soaked onlookers. Wasn’t safe to go in to get the dead and injured, they muttered, shaking their heads. Nothing could be done until the wind dropped. Seeing Joseph and recognizing him, they gathered around him eagerly. What did the Weather Bureau say, eh? How bad would it get? When would it be over? When?

  “It doesn’t look good, boys,” Joseph replied grimly. “Afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better.” And with that, he made his way back to the Weather Bureau offices. Now desperate to get his message to Washington, he took his last shot: he picked up the phone and tried to call the Western Union office in Houston. The Galveston long-distance operator was adamant: there were thousands of calls ahead of him. Joseph would simply have to wait his turn.

  But after putting his case to the telephone office manager and pleading that this was a vital Federal government message that had an emergency priority, Joseph at last got through to Houston. He dictated his telegram, stressing that it was highly confidential. He didn’t want officials in the rival port city to know about Galveston’s dire plight.

  A few blocks away, at the John Sealy Hospital, the anonymous letter-writer added one more paragraph to her letter: “Am beginning to feel a weakening desire for something to cling to. Should feel more comfortable in the embrace of your arms. You hold yourself ready to come to us should the occasion demand?”

  Shortly after the writer finished her letter and Joseph completed his telephone call, the long-distance wires went down. No rail, no telegraph, no telephone. Galveston was now completely cut off from the rest of the world. The horrors that were to come that night would be remembered only by those who witnessed them—and who lived to tell the terrible tale.

  * * *

  AT the Blackwood house on Q Avenue, Rachel was holding the fort as best she could. Augustus still had not come home, so she had directed Pokey, the man who did their outside work, to fasten the wooden shutters over the windows and secure anything that might be blown away. The electricity had gone out, and while there was still light, she and Patsy, the children’s nurse, gathered the household supply of kerosene lamps and set them out on the round oak pedestal table in the kitchen. Rachel and Matthew and the twins made a game of lighting one after another in turn to make sure that they still worked, while Ida carefully polished the chimneys and Angela looked on from Patsy’s arms, clapping her hands—although Patsy herself was white-faced and frightened.

  That chore done, Rachel focused all her efforts on behaving in as ordinary a way as possible. But as the wind rose, the rain lashed the windows, and the house trembled more noticeably than ever, she, too, could feel the panic rising inside her. She needed her husband. And Mrs. O’Reilly, who had a way of calmly managing in a crisis. Colle
en had gone home several hours ago, but she had left a plate of chicken salad sandwiches—cut into tiny shapes to please the children—and sugar cookies and a pitcher of lemonade.

  Now, Rachel laid the dining room table with a pretty cloth and crystal plates and glasses and the morning’s bowl of white roses—the last she would likely see this year, for the garden was already inundated by the surging brown water. Then she poured the lemonade and put on a shawl. She would go out on the front gallery to watch for their father, she told the children. He would surely be along any minute now, and when he came, there would be such fun! Matthew could open his presents and blow out his candles and they would all have a piece of birthday cake—two pieces, if they liked, for it was a large cake and the storm would keep the neighborhood families from joining them for the party. And after that, they would have music.

  But when she went out onto the gallery, Rachel could see how much higher the waters had risen around the house, and she grew more frightened. The wind had shifted farther to the east and was blowing much harder. Where in the world was Augustus? It had been noon when they’d talked, and his lunches—even his leisurely businessman’s lunches at Ritter’s—never took more than an hour. He had promised to come straight home if the storm hadn’t let up by the time he was finished eating. The bank could do without him for one afternoon, he had said, and Rachel had fervently agreed.

  Well, the storm had definitely not let up. The water was lapping at the fourth step of the gallery, a good five feet above the ground. Then, with a gasp of sheer terror, she saw the roof—the entire roof, all in one piece!—snatched from the single-story Baxter house, down the block on the Gulf side of the street, and sent tumbling over and over like a giant’s open book. A moment later, the Baxter house slumped into the surging water.

  Rachel clung to a gallery post, breathing in short, hard gasps. How amazingly lucky it was that the Baxters were not in the house! Mr. Baxter had gone to San Antonio on business earlier in the week. Mrs. Baxter had become so nervous that, two hours ago, when the water on Q Avenue had risen knee-deep, she had gone with her sister to seek refuge in the Tremont Hotel, pausing to knock at the Blackwoods’ front door and ask Rachel if she wouldn’t go with them.