“Amanda?” Ruby looked puzzled for a moment, then threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, now I get it! That’s what you meant by TS Amanda in your text message. Tropical Storm Amanda!”
“Actually, we were going to suggest that you stay all night,” Claire said slowly, trading another secret glance with Ruby. “In fact, you probably wouldn’t be able to leave even if you wanted to. And not because of that hill.”
“I couldn’t?” I frowned. “Because?”
There was a silence. “Because your car probably won’t work,” Ruby said uncomfortably.
“I don’t understand. My car was working okay when I got here. I mean, it didn’t much like that hill, but otherwise it was fine. Why won’t it work now?”
“We don’t know,” Claire said helplessly. She looked at Ruby. “Do you think maybe she should try it and see?”
Ruby looked at the rain beating against the window. “I guess,” she said hesitantly. “Then we’d know for sure. If China’s car works, then it must be a matter of…us. You and me.”
Claire nodded. “It would settle the question.”
“I’m sure there’s a plot here somewhere,” I said, looking from one to the other. “Is somebody going to tell me what it is, or do I have to keep guessing?”
Ten minutes later, I had some of the story, or at least enough to understand that something weird had happened to their cell phones, their flashlight batteries, their car batteries, and the electricity. They were about to tell me more—something about a ghostly apparition in Victorian dress and pans clanging and balls bouncing and harps playing—but I suggested that we take a break. We could save the supernatural stuff for later.
“You might be right about my car,” I said, getting out of my chair. “I tried to use my flashlight so I wouldn’t fall over something in the dark and smash our pie, but the dang thing refused to work. It would be a good idea to give the car a try, though, just so we know what’s what. And I want to check my cell phone. Does somebody have a raincoat, or maybe a poncho?”
“You’re not going out there alone, are you?” Ruby asked nervously. “It’s dark out there, China. I don’t think—”
“Then make that two raincoats,” I said. “And we’ll take a lamp.”
Claire fetched a raincoat and a poncho while I covered the top of the lamp chimney with a piece of aluminum foil to keep the wick dry, and then Ruby and I dashed through the pouring rain to my car. The ground must have been pretty well saturated, because the rain wasn’t soaking in. There were spreading puddles everywhere, impossible to avoid. Our errand didn’t take long, and we didn’t linger. Four minutes later, we were back in the house.
“You can say, ‘I told you so,’” I said to Claire, who was standing inside the kitchen door with the oil lamp. I pulled the poncho over my head and hung it on a wall peg, then bent over to unlace my wet sneakers. “The car battery is totally dead. It won’t even power the headlights. My cell phone is a goner, too.”
“Well, at least it’s not just us. Claire and me, I mean.” Ruby had found a towel and was drying her hair. “Which means that the three of us are here for the duration, however long that is.” She dropped the towel and looked at Claire. “Which also means that we have to tell China the rest of the story—as much as we know, anyway.”
“The part about the ghost, I suppose,” I said, resigned. “And the harp and the ball and the dancing pans. All that weird supernatural stuff.” I thought of what I had said that morning, showing off, trying to be funny. Bust those ghosts. Purge those poltergeists. Get rid of those ghouls. I still wasn’t convinced that we were up against something supernatural here, but I certainly couldn’t explain all those dead batteries. And it was daunting to think that we were stuck in this house, miles from anywhere, in the middle of a tropical storm, with no means of summoning help and no way to leave unless we wanted to hike seven miles to the county road and hope to catch a ride to the nearest phone. My efforts to be funny didn’t seem at all funny now.
“Yes,” Ruby said with a sigh. “All that weird supernatural stuff. I know you’re a skeptic, China. But there are some things about the world that your mega-logical legal mind just has to learn to accept. Like the bell, for instance.”
I was wary. “The…bell?”
“It’s a little brass bell on a table in the drawing room,” Claire replied helpfully. “Designed to be rung when the mistress of the house wanted something.”
“But it rings all by itself,” Ruby added. “When nobody else is in the room.” She gave me a telling look. “You heard it yourself. I know you did. Twice.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “I admit to hearing the bell, but that doesn’t mean—”
“And just in case you suspect that either Claire or I rang it,” Ruby went on, “I would like to point out that the second time you heard it, we were all together in the morning room. And there is no one else in the house.” She dropped her voice. “No one living, that is.”
“If you say so,” I said. “But—”
“And there’s the menu board,” Claire put in. “Ruby, we need to show it to her. Maybe that will convince her that we’re not making things up.”
“Good idea.” Ruby took my arm and led me to the wall, while Claire brought the lamp. I saw two stoves, one old-fashioned cooking range and a smaller gas stove. Next to the gas stove was a table and a rack of pans.
I suppressed a dry chuckle. “Those are the dancing pans, I suppose.”
“Actually, yes,” Claire said. “Sometimes they bang against one another.” She glanced at Ruby. “I’ve heard it often. And Ruby and I both saw it, just this afternoon.”
“But that’s not what we want to show you,” Ruby said. “It’s the menu board, China. When I got here this afternoon, Claire’s grocery list was written up there. But when we started to make supper, we saw that the list had been erased and this was written in its place.”
Claire held up the lamp. In the circle of its light, I saw that next to the rack of pans hung one of those old-fashioned menu boards that you sometimes see in funky restaurants. Something was written on it—not Claire’s grocery list, I assumed. Anyway, it wasn’t a list. It was phrases and words, written at odd angles all over the board in a spidery Spenserian script, the kind of writing you see in your great-grandmother’s letters.
“Read it out loud,” Ruby commanded.
I leaned closer, and read what I saw. “Crooked man, crooked cat, crooked house. And then there are three words kind of scattered around: roof hole clown.” I frowned. “No,” I corrected myself. “That’s not clown. The handwriting is a little hard to read. It’s drown.”
Behind me, Ruby gasped. “But that isn’t what we saw, is it, Claire?”
“No,” Claire said, very quietly. “When we saw it before supper, there were four words: crooked man, crooked sixpence. And there was a date. That’s been erased and this is written in its place.” She read the board again, almost whispering the words. “Crooked man, crooked cat, crooked house. Roof, hole, drown.”
“You’re sure there’s been nobody else in the house?” I asked. “Nobody in the kitchen today? Nobody could have come in while you were in the morning room and written this, for a joke or something?”
“Just Kitty,” Claire said slowly. “She’s Sam’s wife. He’s the caretaker. She was here this afternoon. But I know I looked at the board when she was leaving, because she and Sam were on their way to Houston and she said she’d pick up the things I had on my grocery list. Bread, milk, yogurt, coffee. That was what was on the board when she left. But the next time I looked, a couple of hours later, it was crooked man, crooked sixpence. And a date.”
“We know who wrote it,” Ruby said. “It was Rachel.”
“Rachel?” I asked, frowning. “I thought Claire just said that Kitty was the only one who—”
“Rachel is our ghost,” Claire said. “Rachel Blackwood.”
To give myself credit, I did not roll my eyes. I was about to ask the logical next quest
ion—Who is Rachel Blackwood?—but Ruby interrupted.
“China,” she said urgently, “this is all the more weird because I have been hearing those lines in my head all day—before I saw them on that board. And before I saw them in a book in the nursery upstairs.” She shook her head. “I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true.”
“All day?” I asked. “Starting when? Before you left Pecan Springs?”
Ruby frowned, concentrating. “No. It started when I was driving down the hill and caught a glimpse of this house, which reminded me of the title of an Agatha Christie story. Wait until you see it in the daylight, China. It really is sort of crooked, like the parts of it were just put together, helter-skelter.” Her frown deepened. “And the words crooked man popped into my head when I saw Sam for the first time. Sam Rawlings,” she added. “Claire’s caretaker. He stopped me on the hill.”
“Crooked man fits him,” Claire said. To me, she added, “The jerk beats up on his wife. In my book, that makes him crooked.”
Ruby was peering at the board. “Roof, hole, drown,” she muttered. “That reminds me of something else, but I can’t think what.”
“It’s from an old song,” Claire said. She began humming and snapping her fingers. “I can’t remember all the words, but that nursery rhyme is the verse—There was a crooked man—and he’s trying to fix his roof with crooked nails. The chorus is about a roof with a hole in it and everybody might drown. Or something.” She hummed another few bars.
“It’s called ‘Don’t Let the Rain Come Down,’” I said ironically. “Appropriate,” I added, as the thunder boomed.
“I wish Rachel would stop writing nursery rhymes and song lyrics on the board and just come out and tell us what we’re supposed to know,” Ruby grumbled.
“Rachel again,” I said plaintively. “Is anybody going to tell me who this Rachel person is and why you think she’s haunting this place?”
Ruby and Claire traded looks, then nods. “This calls for some of that pecan pie you brought,” Claire replied. “No coffee, but we do have milk. How about some hot chocolate?”
Outside, there was grumble of thunder and we could hear the rain beating against the windows.
“If we’re going to be telling ghost stories on a rainy night,” I said, “pie and hot chocolate would be a big help.” I paused, remembering something we’d skipped over. “You said that this afternoon’s message contained a date, didn’t you, Claire? But you didn’t say what it was.”
Claire took down a box of chocolate mix from a shelf. “September eighth, I think. There was a year, but I don’t remember what it was.”
“It was 1900,” Ruby said. She looked at me. “I keep thinking I know what that is, but I can’t quite get it. Does that date mean anything to you, China?”
September 8, 1900.
“Yes,” I said. I closed my eyes. “I’m afraid it does.”
Claire got the milk out and went to get a pan from the rack to make our hot chocolate. As she touched the rack, the pans began to dance.
Chapter Fourteen
Galveston
Early evening, September 8, 1900
Queen of the Waves, look forth across the ocean
From north to south, from east to stormy west,
See how the waters with tumultuous motion
Rise up and foam without a pause or rest.
But fear we not, though storm clouds round us gather,
Thou art our Mother and thy little Child
Is the All Merciful, our loving Brother
God of the sea and of the tempest wild.
“Queen of the Waves”
sung every year on September 8
by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word
The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 was thought to have begun life as a tropical wave moving off the west coast of Africa around the middle of August. It strengthened as it slowly crossed the sun-warmed Atlantic, breezed past the Windward Islands on August 27, skipped through the Leewards on August 30, drenched Cuba as it grazed the south shore and bounced across its midsection on September 3, and emerged into the Florida Straits two days later, weakened by its tussle with the Cuban mountains.
From that point on, the storm gathered strength and momentum, setting a steady track for the Texas coast. The Gulf waters had been warmed by the extraordinarily hot summer, the wind shear was light, and the steering currents were favorable, all of which made the Gulf a perfect nursery for the adolescent hurricane. What’s more, a huge low-pressure area was building in the center of the country from Canada to Texas: a giant vacuum pulling everything, irresistibly, into itself.
Propelled by these energies and growing to an almost supernatural size and strength, the storm barreled straight across the Gulf basin. It made landfall on the southwestern end of long, low Galveston Island, and its right front quadrant—the most powerful part of the storm—smacked into the city like a balled-up fist, striking at a straight-on 90-degree angle, propelled by all the pent-up ferocity of its long passage. Its trajectory thrust the wind-powered waves straight into the low-lying city, whose highest point was only 8.7 feet above sea level.
But the storm’s route and the size of what modern meteorologists call its wind field would create another deadly outcome. All day Saturday, the winds had blown out of the north, produced by the counter-clockwise circulation around the approaching storm. By noon, they had reached gale force, prying the roofs off downtown buildings (like Ritter’s Café) and pushing the water out of Galveston Bay and into the city, flooding it from the northwest. Then, around seven in the evening, the winds shifted to the southeast, blowing at an incredible 150 miles an hour with gusts much higher than that. They shoved a fifteen-foot storm surge onto the Gulf side of the island. The bay waters met the Gulf waters over the heart of the drowning city. The barrier island that was Galveston was completely submerged.
It had earned the name given to it by the unhappy Cabeza de Vaca when he was shipwrecked on its sandy shore.
Malhado. Misfortune.
* * *
THREE miles west of the city, rising like a brick-and-stone stronghold above the beach, was St. Mary’s Orphanage. Like St. Mary’s Infirmary in the city, it was in the charge of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, who were deeply dedicated to the care of orphaned children. At first, the children lived at St. Mary’s Infirmary, at Tenth and Market Streets, but after a time an orphanage was established on a beachfront property on the estate of Captain Farnifalia Green—a healthy location, it was thought, open to the sky and the sea, remote from town and the omnipresent threat of yellow fever. The facility consisted of two large, two-story dormitories with open galleries facing the Gulf and rows of windows to catch the cooling ocean breezes. It was protected from storm tides by a natural barrier of sand dunes, anchored in place by beach grasses and salt cedar. In September of 1900, the orphanage was home to ninety-three children and ten sisters.
The summer had been abysmally hot, and the sisters must have been miserable under their heavy habits and veils of coarse black serge. Saturday morning’s north wind had been very welcome, and anyone listening to their pre-dawn prayers that morning might have heard them thanking the good Lord for sending the cooler weather, even though it seemed that He was sending a storm as well. After breakfast, Mother Superior Camillus sent Sister Elizabeth Ryan with a wagon to get supplies from the infirmary in the city. The weather was indeed growing stormy, and Mother Gabriel, at the infirmary, tried to persuade her to stay until it cleared. Sister Elizabeth refused. Mother Superior was expecting her, she said.
The beach road often flooded, but this morning it was worse than usual—in places, entirely underwater, so that Sister Elizabeth had a great deal of trouble getting back to the orphanage with the supply wagon. By the time she finally returned, the waves were eating away at the dunes “as though they were made of flour,” one of the older boys would say later. Soon the dunes had disappeared and the orphanage was completely surrounded by water, so tha
t even the youngest novice could see that the storm would pose a significant peril by nightfall. The sisters prayed, consulted, and decided that God had given them no other choice: they had to remain where He had put them and trust to Him and the Blessed Virgin to keep the children safe.
In mid-afternoon, Mother Superior and the nuns herded their charges into the chapel on the first floor of the girls’ wing, the newer and stronger of the two buildings, where they led the children in prayer and in song—one of their favorites, an old French hymn called “Queen of the Waves.” But the wind and the waves battered the building relentlessly, and by six that evening, the rising water forced them upstairs. Still trusting the Blessed Mother but knowing that they had to do the best they could for the children, Mother Superior sent one of the workers, Henry Esquior, to collect all the clothesline he could find. With that, the sisters tied the children together in groups of six and eight. Then they tied one group to the cincture each sister wore around her waist, promising never to let go.
The sisters were gathered in a protective circle around the children when they heard a great, bone-rattling crash. The boys’ wing had collapsed and some of the debris had struck their building. Frightened but firm in their faith—and “very brave,” one of the three surviving boys would say later—they continued to sing.
Help, then sweet Queen, in our exceeding danger,
By thy seven griefs, in pity Lady save;
Think of the Babe that slept within the manger
And help us now, dear Lady of the Wave.
Then joyful hearts shall kneel around thine altar
And grateful psalms re-echo down the nave;
Never our faith in thy sweet power can falter,
Mother of God, our Lady of the Wave.
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