Johanna's Secret

by Maya Northen Augelli

  Josh takes up talking home repair with Greg while I ask Isabelle about her job, which seems a safe enough topic. “You know,” she says suddenly, “Josh told me that growing up, he always thought that cottage was haunted.” My eyes must register alarm, because she laughs and seems to soften a little. “Oh that was when he was a kid. But I always thought the story about the family that lived there was fascinating. I’m sure Grace has told you about them by now?” Grace, who is sitting next to me and obviously eavesdropping, jumps at the opportunity. “Actually Hennie and Greg have been doing a lot of research about it. Turns out Greg’s grandfather knew the family.” At the sound of his name Greg turns in our direction, and I hope Grace knows not to say anymore. At this point, it is his story to tell, or not, at least in regards to the role his grandparents played. “Really? Have you found anything interesting?” Isabelle looks genuinely intrigued. “I think that’s probably better for after-dinner cocktails.” Grace inclines her heads towards the kids in an uncharacteristic display of discretion. Isabelle nods knowingly, and I breathe a small sigh of relief. I want Greg to be able to take a break from it all and enjoy dinner without once again delving into his past.

  As we get up to clear the table, Josh pulls me aside. “I heard Izzy talking to you about the cottage. I know she thinks I was being a silly kid, but I wasn’t. I don’t want to scare you, but Gerri, the daughter of the previous tenant, thought the place was haunted too. She kept having weird dreams about two little boys being trapped in the back stairwell. And one day she came across what she thought was a grave behind where the carriage house had stood. “Little boys, not girls?” I ask, recalling Nan’s dreams. “Yes. Odd, because none of the children were male.” “Maybe the child Johanna miscarried? Of course in those days, you didn’t know the sex of the child before birth, but a lot of mothers swear they knew right from the beginning.” “Maybe. I can’t explain it, and I know this makes me sound crazy…” “No, not at all. My sister, when she stayed in the room after she helped move me in, had a dream that she was trapped in the stairwell.” “Really?” “Yeah. The ‘locked secret door’ thing kind of creeped her out, and she started having strange dreams. At first, I just thought it was Nan being Nan. She should have gone into theater. But now that I’ve learned about the history, I give her a bit more credit?” “Nan?” “It’s our family nickname for her. Kind of a long story,” I laugh. Luckily, Josh seems to understand that “long story” means that I don’t feel like explaining. “Was there anyone else in her dreams?” “I don’t think so. If there was, she didn’t mention it.”

  Josh nods. He seems to be looking for evidence to validate his childhood fears. It makes me wonder if they hadn’t quite dissolved with his youth, as he seems to want his wife to believe. “Do you mind if I pick your brain when Izzy’s not in earshot?” I nod approval. “She doesn’t like talking about it?” “Oh, she does. She loves to, but then she gets spooked.” “Hon,” he calls to Isabelle, “can you get the kids ready for a bath?” I hear Isabelle in the other room, herding the kids up the stairs, with Josh turning to follow. “I get to go first!” yells Bella, the older of the two, running down the hallway. “No, Luke gets to go first because he has to get to bed earlier,” Isabelle reminds her oldest child. “But we get to stay up later because we’re at Aunt Grace’s house.” Luke states. “Oh do you?” Josh calls to Grace, who is cleaning up the kitchen. Grace peers in from the kitchen and shrugs. “That’s what aunts are for.”

  With the kids taking their baths, the rest of us refill our wine glasses yet again. Greg and I keep a low profile, letting Grace and Billy catch up with Isabella. Despite the apparent closeness, Grace still doesn’t seem quite herself. I follow her into the kitchen on the pretense of helping her get coffee for everyone. “You ok?”. “Yeah,” she sighs. “It’s just tough sometimes. Josh and Izzy seem to have the perfect life. College sweethearts, happily married, great jobs, two kids. It’s where I thought I’d be by now. Instead I’m still practically living in my home town, single, renting a small apartment. I was so close once, and then he just threw it away.” I know she means the ex she told me about a couple of weeks back. “I love Izzy,” Grace continues, “but her problems seem so petty. Heaven forbid the kids’ soccer uniforms aren’t cleaned on time, ya know? I get sick of hearing it after a while.” I put my arm around her. “I know, but Grace, nobody’s life is perfect. It might seem it now, from the outside, but it’s not. At least not forever. I’m sure even if they’re happily married they have some terrible fights that cause them stress. And I’m sure as they grow up, the kids will give them more problems than dirty soccer uniforms. I mean, they’re going to have two teenagers at the same time! All those hormones… yuck!” The face I make does the trick, and Grace smiles. “Thanks, Hen.”

  The rest of the evening passes easily. With the kids bathed and settled into bed in one of Billy’s spare rooms, we adults are able to relax and finally unwind after a busy day of travel, preparation, and catching up. Thankfully, Josh steers the conversation away from anything to do with my cottage and its history. Instead, we talk of mundane activities - summer plans, Grace and Greg’s upcoming teaching semesters, Billy’s retirement.

  Greg and I finally leave around 11 PM, exhausted. Without discussion, we head back to his house. I’d packed enough clothes for the weekend, and he made no suggestion of walking me home, so I assume I’ll be spending the night at his place again. “I cannot wait to climb into bed. That was fun, but exhausting,” he says as we climb up the hill towards his house. These past couple of days have done a number on me. Maybe I’m just getting old.” “I hope not, because that makes me just as old,” I tease. He takes my hand silently as we walk. We’d kept our distance enough with Grace’s family in what seemed to be an unspoken agreement - something we seem to have gotten adept at quickly. Neither of us cares for our relationship to be center stage at a family gathering, especially with a family that isn’t one of our own. Now, it feels reassuring to be walking beside him, his hand gently clasping mine.

  Half an hour later, as we drift off to sleep, Greg’s arm protectively around me, I think yet again how easily I could get used to this. It has been a long time since I’ve felt so at home. Even in the last few months with Brent, I wasn’t truly myself. There wasn’t the ease and comfort that I was beginning to feel with Greg. I wonder if he was experiencing the same.

  I wake the next morning to Greg kissing the top of my head. A glance at the clock told me it’s 8:42. I’d slept for almost nine hours! “I’m sorry, have you been awake long?” I ask him groggily. “About two minutes,” he smiles that award-winning smile. “I must have been really beat,” he adds to reassure me. “Me too. I can’t remember the last time I slept this late.” “Well, sleepyhead, how does coffee and breakfast sound?” “Wonderful!” I’m not sure how I could be so hungry after the feast at Grace and Billy’s, but I hear my stomach growling. “Omelet, pancakes, bagel?” he offers. “Whatever you’re having. And I’m happy to help,” I add. I hate for him to have to wait on me after the stress he’s experienced the past few days. “How about you start on the coffee, and I start on the food?” he suggests. “Deal.”

  There are few aromas I like better than freshly brewed coffee, especially on a Sunday morning with no “to dos” on the agenda. Greg seems to read my mind. “I know we have things we probably should do today, now that we finally have that key, but would you mind if we just relax this morning first? I could use some time to unwind, and besides” he adds, coming up next to me and putting an arm around my waist, “I kind of like waking up and spending the morning lounging in pjs with you.” “Exactly what I was thinking.” “Well then, perhaps we need to do this more often,” he suggests, placing a mug of steaming coffee in front of me as he takes the seat closest to me at the kitchen table.

  We head back to my cottage around noon, a mixed sense of anticipation and dread between us. Everything we’ve been working on for the past few weeks has led to this
- unlocking the mystery door that started it all. We’ve uncovered so much that I can’t guess what more we’ll discover. Yet whatever is in there has been intentionally locked away for nearly a century. “You ready for this?” I ask Greg as I open my front door. “As I’ll ever be.”

  I decide to let him do the honors. It seems only fair. “Are you sure? It’s your house, after all,” he asks s he took the key from the envelope. “It’s the house that I’m renting,” I remind him. “And it’s your history, not mine.” He nods. “Moment of truth,” he states wearily, inserting the key gingerly into the lock. It is decades old, and who knows how it has corroded with time. I can feel us both holding our breath as he turns the key and we hear lock click open. As he pulls the door back, I peer inside. Sitting in front of us is an ornately decorated wooden trunk. I have no doubt that it’s the trunk Julienne brought over here from England in 1925. As I look further into the darkness behind it, I can just make out the top of a set of stairs. I guess that it indeed led to the back entrance, just as Greg’s grandfather had written. The trunk itself, surprisingly, has no lock. Greg shines the flashlight into the doorway. “Can you pull it out of there?” I ask. “I can try. It looks pretty heavy, and I don’t want to disturb it.”

  Eventually, we manage to drag the trunk out into the room. Greg lifts the latch, pulling open the top. The inside is filled with pictures, letters, and what appears to be notebooks or journals. “Everything she couldn’t take with her but wanted to save,” he says quietly. “Where do we start?” “If those are journals, which I’m guessing they are, they may be dated,” he points out. It seems reasonable enough. We begin piling them on the floor. Despite their age and a decent amount of dust, they appear to be in decent shape. Greg takes out an old black and white photo of what looks to be Julienne and a young man, standing in front of a large manor house. He turns the photo over. Ed and Jul: 1924 is written in faded ink on the back. “This must have been in London. She would have been... 17.” I calculate. A brief flip through some of the journals tells me that they go back to 1923, when she’d been sent to England. “Ah ha!” I find an entry dated 18 November 1925. She would have been in the US by then. I hand it to Greg, who takes it dutifully and sits down, leaning against the bed.

  “Wow, Sheffield may have been a good police chief, but he certainly was not a decent person. I mean, we knew that from the letter, but it gets worse.” “Oh no…” I reply with apprehension. I’m not sure I want the details, but we’ve come this far and can’t stop now. “He abused this poor girl in every possible way. And threatened that if she told Johanna or went to someone else on the police force that he’d send her back to England, claiming she’d tried to hurt his children and must have been responsible for the death of that young boy after all.’ “How horrible. Who would have sent her over to a man like that for ‘safety’?” “She probably didn’t know. And in England, if they’d arrested her, she could have been tried for murder. Probably figured she’d saved her.” “I guess.” I’m looking through pictures now. There is a photo of her with a little boy in front of the same manor house. The boy who drowned. Suddenly, I remembered Josh’s story about Gerri, who dreamed of two little boys. We’d speculated that Johanna’s miscarried baby could have been one of them. Here was a little boy who certainly had died. No boys lived, I realized. Only the girls. A coincidence, surely, but a strange one nonetheless.

  We sit on the floor of the spare room sorting through pictures and reading Julienne’s journal entries for the next hour or so. I feel a little guilty, barging into her personal life as I am, but I justify that this is intertwined with Greg’s family history, and that she passed away years ago. Eddie, too, has died, and Annaleigh and Liliana would be close to one hundred, so their chances of still being alive also seemed slim. That leaves only Scarlett, and she’d probably been too young to remember or understand much of anything that happened.

  “Hennie,” Greg says handing me the journal, “you have to read this.” The entry is dated 20 February 1926.

  Today Eddie told me a horrible story. He didn’t want to, but I made him. I knew he knew more than he’d been telling me, and I gave him no choice. He’d been telling me he may have to go away for awhile, but refused to tell me why. Said he was going to be in big trouble for something he didn’t do. That I could be in big trouble too. I promised him we’d fix whatever it was, but I couldn’t do anything if I didn’t know what was happening. I could sense something was very wrong. He’s been quiet since that night, the night my house almost burnt down and James and Johanna disappeared. Johanna must have known about the baby. This one, not the last one, thank god. It’s the only reason I can think she’d do something so awful. Everyone thinks it’s Eddie who tried to burn down my house, but it wasn’t. It was James. I’m sure of it. Eddie saw his car parked a few blocks away from here when he was supposed to be at the party. If he wasn’t doing anything wrong, why wouldn’t he park in front of the house? He thought I was sleeping. Thought he’d get rid of me and the baby, blame it on Eddie, or a terrible accident. But Eddie followed him at a distance the whole way. He went back to the party, back to Johanna. Eddie waited, hoping James would come out so that he could confront him. James didn’t re-appear until the end of the night, Johanna by his side. Eddie said James looked intoxicated, swaying slightly when he walked. From their actions, Eddie guessed that James insisted on driving anyway. He followed them in his car, worried about Johanna’s safety, hoping to confront James if they stopped or pulled over. About ten minutes later their car pulled off to the side. There was a grassy area. He pulled onto the side of the road and turned off the car so they wouldn’t see him. They got out of the car and looked to be arguing. Johanna got into the driver’s side. She didn’t have a license, but Eddie had been teaching her while James was at work. As soon as the car turned on, it headed straight towards the edge of the cliff. He drove behind them, horrified, hoping to stop it somehow, but they didn’t stand a chance, he said. He watched the car with James and Johanna in it plunge over the cliffs.

  Maybe we should call the police. But they’ll just blame Eddie somehow. I am going to try to talk him into saying something. Maybe say he was driving by and saw a car skidding off. But he thinks they’ll know he’s lying. And I hate to ask him to lie. He’s such a good and honest person. And besides, what good would it do? The girls have lost their parents. Even if nobody else knows it, we know they’re not coming back. I’d get sent back to France, or worse, England, and who knows what would happen to Eddie. They’d be completely alone. Eddie wants to leave. He thinks if we all disappear, show up somewhere else after a while, we’d be safe. I don’t like the plan, but what other choice do we have? We will have to do it in the middle of the night so that nobody sees us. After that, all we can do is pray.

  I can’t stop reading. The next entry is dated the following day.

  We are leaving four days from now. We’ll go overnight and bring the girls and Jasper. I don’t know where we’re going to go. We just need to leave. Eddie is right. Some policeman I’ve never seen before knocked on the door yesterday, asking if Eddie knew anything about what happened to the Sheffields. He denied it. He did tell them he’d seen a man snooping around here just before the fire started. He gave a description, knowing it matched James, but didn’t mention him by name. I don’t think the police believe him. I could see the doubt in their faces. James wasn’t well-liked, but he was one of their own. They’re going to protect him no matter what. Though honestly, they don’t seem overly concerned. Still, they may want someone to blame for their chief’s disappearance, and Eddie is the obvious choice. Only George seems to believe him. Wonderful George. How I’ll miss him. He’s been such a good friend and protector to us. He didn’t care for James at all. His search is for Johanna. I wish I could tell him. I want to. I tried to convince Eddie. But he says no. It won’t bring Johanna back. And people would talk. It would look bad for her. And she doesn’t deserve that. Lord, please help us, I am so
afraid.

  I look at Greg. “How far did you read?” “The 20th and 21st.” I nod slowly. I can see it no other way, no matter how hard I try. Whether Johanna herself, in her grief, was the target, or it was James she was after, I can’t say. I doubt anyone could. Maybe she didn’t even know for herself, in that instant. Though I have my hunches. We turn the whole thing over in our minds. No wonder Julienne, and then Annaleigh, insisted this stayed locked up until all those affected had passed. Edward Sharpe’s eyewitness account, written in her journal, is the only real evidence to what happened to James and Johanna Sheffield. Without it, the deaths would remain unsolved forever. “Do you think it was intentional?” Greg asks me finally. “Gut instinct?” He nods. “Yes.” Another nod. “She had what appears to have been postpartum depression, lost another child, and shortly after found out that her husband had fathered a child with her nineteen year old au pair. Maybe she intended to end her own life, and James was a casualty. Or maybe it was his life she was after. But either way, it’s just too much of a coincidence.” “Did she know James burnt down the carriage house? Or was trying to?” I shake my head. “I doubt it. News didn’t travel fast those days, and he’d just gotten back to the party shortly before they left. The only way she would have known….” “Is if Edward Sharpe got to her first, before confronting James,” Greg finishes my thought. “It’s possible. If he did, it’s probably in here somewhere,” I hand him back the journal and trudged downstairs to put on some coffee.