“But I don’t understand.” Claire was frowning, puzzled. “You’re saying—” She took a breath and corrected herself. “Rachel is telling you that Colleen O’Reilly was your great-grandmother? The same Colleen who is buried up there by the woods?”
Shadows from the flickering lamp washed across Ruby’s face. “Yes. Colleen had a little girl named Annie. Gram was Annie.” A broken sigh, as if Ruby—or perhaps it was Rachel—despaired of conveying to us all that she knew or felt. “Colleen took care of Rachel and her children for many years. Rachel loved Colleen and needed her. But Colleen isn’t buried here.”
There was a long pause, and tears seeped silently out from under Ruby’s closed eyelids. Her voice was raw and unsteady, so heavy with anguish that it sounded like someone else’s voice. “She was carried out to sea…in a great storm.”
A great storm. The Galveston Hurricane? Ruby’s great-grandmother had drowned in the 1900 hurricane? Perhaps the others, the children, the husband, had drowned as well. But not Rachel Blackwood, apparently. She had lived to build this house. She had lived in it until she died, in her nineties. And lived in it still—a prisoner, if I were to believe Ruby.
“But the grave!” Claire shook her head, not understanding. “Colleen’s grave is here! I saw it, Ruby. We saw it, just this afternoon. It’s here, with the childrens’ graves, the whole family.”
“Empty,” Ruby said, her voice a little louder. The word had a bleak, hollow sound. “Empty, empty.” She shivered, and I did, too. Before, it had been cold in the room. It was even colder now, and in the silence the low, grieving wail of the wind filled the air.
Claire turned to me, wide-eyed. “Empty graves?” she whispered in dismay. “Did somebody steal the bodies? What happened to them?”
I was beginning to understand—a little, maybe. Beginning to understand what Rachel Blackwood might have been about all through the unending, inescapable years after September 8, 1900. And beyond, if I could accept what Ruby was telling us.
“Just because there’s a marker on top of a grave, it’s no guarantee that there’s a coffin and corpse underneath,” I told Claire in a low voice. I was remembering a case I had read about some time ago, where friends of a man who they thought was deceased had held a closed-casket funeral, interred an empty coffin, and were dismayed to find, two years later, that they had been the victims of an elaborate fraud.
There was no fraud here, I suspected, and no intent to deceive others. But there was delusion and self-deception: a grieving Rachel pretending to the end of her life that all those she loved lay safely inside the fence of that little graveyard beside the woods. Or more likely, pretending until she convinced herself that they did, and that she could not leave them. And now she couldn’t, Ruby was saying. Now she was a prisoner of her grief, contained in the house she had built to indulge it, in the graveyard where she had buried her heart.
Claire turned back to Ruby. “But what about my great-aunt Hazel?” she asked, bewildered. “And Mrs. Blackwood? Those graves are real, aren’t they? I’m positive that Aunt Hazel is buried there. My mother saw it happen.”
The lamp flickered, and I darted a look at it, hoping it wasn’t about to run out of oil and leave us in total darkness. Somewhere in the house a door slammed. Behind us, around us, the shadows danced and swirled like silken scarves.
“Yes,” Ruby said. “Your great-aunt is buried here. And Rachel. And Augustus.”
Augustus. The husband, the children’s father. So he hadn’t died in the storm, after all. Had he lived here, too?
Claire still wasn’t getting it. “But I don’t understand, Ruby—the children, all five of them? And the servants. If they’re not buried here, where are they?”
I knew the answer to that one. “The hurricane,” I said.
Ruby let out a long sigh, and in it I heard an unspeakable, inconsolable grief—Rachel’s grief. “The hurricane,” she said. In a low, sad voice, she sang a snatch of haunting melody that I remembered from my own childhood. “Low, low, breathe and blow, wind of the western sea…” The words slid like clots of foam down the slopes of the eddying cold.
Into the silence, I said, “But Augustus survived. He lived here with her, then?”
“No, no.” A listening pause. “He died in the storm.” There were tears in Ruby’s voice. “He died in the storm, but elsewhere. His body was found under the rubble of a collapsed building, and buried. She—Rachel—brought him here, afterward.”
“So she came here and built this house,” Claire said wonderingly, “after the hurricane. And reburied her husband here.” She paused, frowning. “Wait a minute. Aunt Hazel said that Mrs. Blackwood built this house as a copy—although not a very good one—of a house that had been destroyed. So the original house, the Galveston house, was destroyed in the hurricane? Is that it?”
“Yes. Gone, in the hurricane, with the children, with Colleen and Patsy.” Ruby’s voice was ghostlike. There seemed to be a dim glow around her, embracing her. “Swept out to sea, all of them. She built this house for them. For Augustus.” The glow brightened, then softened, and the scent of violets lay warm across the chill air. “Their home.”
“Oh, now I see!” Claire exclaimed, scooting to the edge of her chair. “The music room, the nursery, the playroom! They must be…reconstructions! She furnished them as nearly like the Galveston house as possible!” She stopped, then shook her head. “No, not just those rooms, but the whole house. The kitchen, the dining room, the drawing room, this library—everything. As much like the Galveston house as she could make it. I understand now. Eighteen chairs around the dining room table, enough dishes and linens for a huge household, way too much stuff for one woman or two, living alone. Now it makes sense!”
Did it? Did it make sense? Perhaps—but a certain kind of blood-chilling, spine-tingling sense. Rachel, still a young woman, had exiled herself to this remote place and attempted to replicate the life she had lived before the storm, imagining her husband and children and servants with her in this house until imagination created a kind of reality and the encircling reality of her grief bound her to this place.
But she’d had help, of course. Claire’s great-aunt Hazel, for one, who had also come here as a young woman. I couldn’t help wondering how Rachel had managed to persuade (or entice or perhaps even intimidate or manipulate) Hazel Penland into joining her in her nunlike life of suffocating grief and sadness. But we would probably never know Hazel’s story, at least not for certain—unless her ghost appeared and let us in on why she had joined Rachel in her futile and crazy effort to capture and contain a moment in time, or unless she had left a journal of her life in this house.
But for all its psychotic grotesquerie, Rachel’s story wasn’t unique. People have gotten stuck in the past and acted out their sense of loss and grief in many obsessive ways, in life and in literature—Miss Havisham, for instance, in Great Expectations, who stopped all the clocks in her decaying mansion at twenty minutes to nine, the moment she learned that her fiancé had jilted her. Rachel, it seemed, had stopped her life on September 8, 1900, even though she had continued to live until well into her nineties. The rest of it, the life beyond the end of life—well, that wasn’t something I could understand with my rational mind, and I didn’t care to try.
But I do care about Ruby, and I was beginning to worry about her. As I said, I have seen her with the tarot cards and her Ouija board. She stays pretty much on the surface of whatever psychic experience she’s involved with. At least, that’s the way she’s described it to me. She’d prefer to dabble. She’s afraid of “going deep,” as she puts it, afraid of getting sucked into the depths of something dangerous, something she can’t pull herself out of. I hoped that wasn’t happening here. She was very pale, and as I watched, she sank deeper into her chair, and the faint glow that surrounded her seemed to dim. A little while ago, she’d said that she had resisted Rachel’s efforts to win her over physically—whatever that meant. But what if this Rachel-thing had somehow
gotten its tentacles into her psyche and was manipulating her, perhaps in the same way Rachel had manipulated the young Hazel? Ruby is tough, but she’s also exceptionally sensitive. If her emotions were engaged, she might be seduced and overtaken by a stronger psychic power.
I leaned forward. “Ruby,” I said quietly, “maybe it’s time to take a little break. You can come back and do more of this later. How about it?”
But Claire had an agenda. She didn’t want to interrupt this…this séance or whatever it was. “Okay,” she said urgently. “Okay, I get it, or part of it, anyway. But if this is all true, how do I get Rachel to leave? What does she want?”
If she heard me, Ruby didn’t give any sign of it. In a thin, reedy voice, she replied, “She’s been waiting for someone to live in the house and help her.”
I shivered. Did that mean that Ruby thought that this ghost wanted her to come and live in this house? If so, that was the scariest thing I’d heard in a long while.
But Claire heard it differently. “Help her? Me, help that ghost?” Claire gave a short laugh. “Well, if that’s what she wants, I somehow missed it. She might have been a little clearer. What kind of help?”
Ruby sighed, and I saw that her lips were trembling. She was on the verge of exhaustion. Whatever was going on here, whatever she thought she was doing, the effort was costing her a great deal. “Ruby, please,” I pleaded. “Let’s take a break.”
Ruby wasn’t paying any attention to me. “She wanted Hazel’s help, but Hazel wasn’t strong enough.”
“Not strong enough?” Claire spoke almost sarcastically. “What kind of heavy lifting does she have in mind?”
I thought that it might have been psychic strength that Ruby was talking about. Hazel had apparently been very young when she came here. Perhaps she had simply given in to Rachel’s grief—perhaps had even enabled her, in the same dysfunctional way that families can enable an addict.
Ruby went on as if Claire hadn’t spoken. “She wanted your help but she couldn’t get through to you. She’s been trying to get your attention, but she couldn’t make you understand.”
Claire’s sarcasm became irritation. “Get my attention?” she repeated sharply. “You’re telling me that all that pan banging and harp playing and bell ringing is her way of getting my attention?”
“And the puddles.” The light around Ruby seemed to become a little brighter. Her voice sounded stronger, too, as if this exchange with Claire was somehow giving her more energy—and perhaps more confidence. It occurred to me that there might be more going on here than I had realized.
“The leak in the ceiling, too,” Ruby added. “And the wind. But instead of getting your attention, it just made you angry.”
Claire huffed out her breath. “Oh, come on, now,” she said, sounding annoyed. “That’s a bunch of horse pucky. I wasn’t angry. Frustrated is more like it.” She had found a word she liked. “Yes, that’s it. I was frustrated, especially after I had to spend all that time mopping up those stupid puddles and trying to figure out what to do about that damp ceiling.”
“Claire,” Ruby said gently. Just that one word. Claire. It was an admonition.
Claire laced her fingers together, and her voice softened. “Well…okay, maybe it was more than frustration. But wouldn’t you be angry if all your wonderful plans for a place to live and work were being thwarted by pans rattling and bells ringing? After all, it’s not like I have a gazillion options. I don’t have anywhere else to live, and finding a good-paying magazine job in this economy is pretty nearly impossible. If she was going to behave that way, I—”
“Claire,” Ruby said again.
“Okay, okay.” Claire sighed. “If I’m being totally honest, I guess I have been pretty pissed off, ever since Brad died, actually. My shrink said that was a lot of what was behind the pills and the drinking. I was angry at Brad for dying. For dying and leaving me all alone, with a mountain of bills.” A tear trickled down her cheek, and she swiped at it with the back of her hand. “I loved being Brad’s wife. I never planned on being his widow.”
“Yes,” Ruby said. “And then this house came along. ‘A gift from heaven.’” A wisp of a half smile passed across her lips and was gone. “A gift from one widow to another, but with strings attached. Rachel tried to let you know what she needed from you, but you were so angry, she couldn’t get through. She didn’t want to give up, though, so she—” She stopped. “Do you see now?”
A lot of this was going right over my head, but Claire seemed to understand. “So she got me to bring you here,” she said. “Is that it?”
“What do you think?” Ruby countered. It was her own voice, and her eyelids were lifting. She was coming awake.
“I think that’s right!” Claire leaned forward. “I think she knew that you saw her years ago, when you were a child. She maybe even knew that you were Colleen O’Reilly’s great-granddaughter.”
“Yes. She knew then that I could help—someday. But not then. I was just a kid. I had to grow up and…” Ruby’s voice grew sad. “I had to suffer my own loss. I had to know what it was to grieve, too.”
Know what it was to grieve? Ah, I thought. Colin’s death. The loss of her love, her lover, from which she had not yet fully recovered.
Claire chuckled ruefully. “So I suppose the last time I saw Rachel—on the widow’s walk—her message finally got through. She was telling me to call you and ask you to come.”
“You could say that,” Ruby replied. Her eyes were open now, and she was sounding like herself, not nearly as spacey as she had a few moments ago. I breathed a silent sigh of relief. “You’re not sorry you called, are you? You’re not sorry I came?”
“Sorry?” Claire’s eyes widened. “Oh no, Ruby. Calling you was the best thing I’ve done since I’ve been here. You’ve changed the way I see everything, in just a few hours.” She gave Ruby an expectant look. “Okay. So now that we’ve got that straightened out, what does she want us to do? If we do it, will she go away and leave us alone?”
“Not us,” Ruby said. “You.”
“Me? But I can’t—”
“Yes, you can. And if you do, she’ll finally be able to let go. She’ll be able to leave this place.” Ruby paused, half-turning her head as if she were listening to a correction, then nodding. “Well, not leave—at least, not entirely, and not right away. But she will agree not to intrude on your use of this place. She’ll stop trying to get your attention.”
“Coexistence with a resident spirit.” Claire made a face. “Not exactly what I had in mind.”
“We coexist with them all the time, Claire,” Ruby said. “Not always like this, it’s true. But they’re all around us, and sometimes they need us. When that happens, we must do what we can. Like now.”
Coexisting with the dead? Well, maybe. But I wasn’t scoffing. I could hear the conviction in Ruby’s voice and had to respect her belief, which comes from a dimension of experience that I have no knowledge of—not personally, that is. I watched her carefully, wondering whether this experience, this encounter with Rachel, might mark a turning point for her, as it apparently did for Claire.
“Well, I suppose.” Claire sounded as if she, like me, was not convinced. “But I still don’t know what I can actually do.”
“You can do this,” Ruby said comfortably. “In fact, you’re exactly what she’s been looking for, which is why she’s been so…well, pushy, I guess you’d say. You’re a writer. You have lots of publishing experience. And you’ve been planning to write a book, haven’t you?”
“That’s true.” Claire frowned. “But I’m not sure what kind of book I—”
“No buts.” Ruby sat up straighter. “Rachel has a book in mind.”
“A book!” Claire exclaimed blankly. “A book about what, for Pete’s sake? What could a ghost possibly—”
“A book about the hurricane. About what happened to her family, her neighbors, the whole city of Galveston. She wants you to tell her story.”
�
�But I don’t know her story,” Claire protested. “And if she thinks she’s going to set up shop in my head and start dictating—”
“No, no, nothing like that,” Ruby said hurriedly. “No dictation. But she has made some notes. In fact, she’s made quite a lot of notes. And there are clippings and photos and old letters.” She gestured toward a table against the wall. “It’s all in that stack of scrapbooks and papers over there—a treasure trove of historical material, most of which doesn’t exist anywhere else. Hazel was supposed to be helping her with it, but she just didn’t have the writing skills. And Rachel didn’t, either. She tried, back when she was still alive, but her feelings about the story just kept getting in her way—and anyway, her spelling is atrocious. So she wants you to do it for her.”
“Oh no,” Claire groaned. “Don’t tell me this is all about my being a ghostwriter?”
It was too much. I couldn’t help it. I snickered.
Ruby gave me a long, hard, and very dirty look. “Rachel doesn’t think it’s funny,” she said stiffly.
“And neither do I,” Claire said in a huffy tone. “Ghostwriting is serious business. Nobody does it for fun.”
“Sorry,” I sputtered. “I apologize. But this is just too crazy for words, Ruby. I think all three of us must be certifiable. We’re sitting here acting as if we’ve been communicating with a ghost who wants to employ a writer to tell her story because she—”
“Stop, China,” Ruby said firmly. “You have already apologized. Don’t make it worse.” She turned back to Claire. “Rachel would like you to know that you can handle this any way you want.”
“What are you?” Claire asked wryly. “Her agent?”
Widow's Tears Page 23
