The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

  Then his eyes rolled up in their sockets and I was left looking into their whites.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It felt like an hour before help arrived but it was probably only ten or fifteen minutes. Noelle came running with four burley guys in Bailey sweatshirts carrying a wooden drying rack. Sunny was next with a roll of cloth that she wrapped around Dale’s shoulder with surprising speed and dexterity. We got Dale onto the drying rack and carried him off the field. By the time we reached the drive an ambulance had arrived. We handed Dale over to the EMTs, who lifted him from the drying rack onto the stretcher. I heard one of them ask Sunny what the rack was for originally and when she said it had been a drying rack for tobacco he made a bad joke about Dale being nine-tenths tobacco anyway.

  “THE MAN’S A WAR VETERAN!” someone roared.

  I turned and saw Monty, his white hair flying around his face, which was an alarming shade of red as he yelled at the young EMT. “He served his country for two tours in Vietnam. You goddamned better make sure he’s treated right.”

  The EMT muttered a yessir and hurried into the back of the ambulance. Monty wanted to go in the ambulance, but Sunny convinced him it was better to follow in the car. Looking at Monty’s color I wondered if he might not need an EMT soon himself, but all I said was that I would drive the Subaru. At which point I looked around. Noelle and the Bailey boys were standing in a knot smoking cigarettes.

  “Where’s Jess?” I asked.

  Noelle answered. “He hurt his foot in the fall so Katrine took him to the hospital.”

  “That was nice of her,” I said, thinking spitefully that if it weren’t for Katrine bringing us here none of this would have happened. Of course I didn’t say that. I already knew it wasn’t true. This wasn’t Katrine’s fault. It was Mary Foley’s.

  I DROVE MONTY and Sunny to the hospital. They both sat in the back talking in hushed whispers to each other. I wasn’t listening to what they were saying; I was thinking about what Dale had said about seeing the angel of death.

  True, Dale had probably been high enough to see leprechauns and unicorns (too high to be operating a chain saw) but hadn’t I seen Mary Foley on the weir too, standing just where Jess fell? I’d dismissed it as I’d dismissed all the visions I’d had as my imagination. But what if there really was a remnant of Mary Foley’s spirit left behind in the place where she had suffered and died? A malevolent spirit that pushed Jess. But why would the ghost of Mary Foley want to harm Jess?

  I was no further along in my reasoning (if you could call parsing the behavior of a ghost reasoning; if just thinking the ghost was real didn’t mean I’d left reason behind) when we got to the Northern Dutchess Hospital in Rhinebeck. We all crowded around the desk to ask about Dale. The young male nurse told us that he was being stitched up and that he’d lost a lot of blood but was stable.

  “What about Jess Martin?” I demanded.

  I saw the nurse’s eyes widen at the sight of me. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

  I wasn’t sure what bothered me more—being called ma’am or the assumption that something was wrong with me—then I realized he was staring at my shirt, which was stained with blood.

  “I’m fine,” I answered, willing calmness into my voice. “This is Dale Cartwright’s blood. I stanched the wound—”

  “And saved his life, I warrant.” Monty put his arm around me. “Her husband, Jess Martin, hurt himself aiding Cartwright as well. Would you kindly take this young woman to him immediately?”

  The nurse blinked at Monty’s imperious tone, but he must have encountered much worse. “Of course,” he said, “he’s right through here.”

  I left Monty and Sunny in the waiting room and followed the nurse through heavy automatic doors into a fluorescent-lit linoleum-tiled hallway with fever-yellow walls. The light and the smell of disinfectant merging with the metallic tang of blood on my shirt and the sickly shade of yellow all suddenly transported me back to the last time I had been in this hospital. I felt my stomach lurch. This was where Jess had brought me when I miscarried—

  “Whoa, there!” The male nurse—CLAUDE, his nametag read—had his arm around me. We’d somehow ended up slumped against the yellow wall. My ears were ringing and I was covered with clammy sweat.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Delayed shock,” Claude said, “after the adrenaline rush to your system. Do you want a wheelchair?”

  “No, I’m okay now. I just want to see my husband—”

  Through the buzzing in my ears I heard angry voices, one of which I recognized as Jess’s. I struggled to my feet, Claude helping me, and stumbled toward the voices into an open examining room. The doorway was partly blocked by a man wearing a police jacket. Had something more happened to Jess when he left the weir? Had there been another accident?

  “There’s my wife now,” Jess said, angling his head to see around the police officer. “Maybe you’ll listen to her.”

  The police officer turned and I recognized Dunstan. I felt that lurching sensation in my stomach again, but this time because I was unprepared to see his face. He looked different from this afternoon. In the harsh fluorescent glare his blond hair was streaked with silver and the lines around his mouth and eyes were deeper, his features harder. They softened for a moment at the sight of me, then his gaze fixed on my blood-soaked shirt.

  “Are you hurt?” he barked first at me and then, wheeling on Claude, “Why isn’t she being treated?”

  “I’m not hurt,” I said, “Jess is the one who fell—” I tried to look around Dunstan to see Jess but he was firmly planted in front of me. I noticed that Katrine was sitting in a corner, but she was watching Dunstan instead of making eye contact with me.

  “Causing injury to Mr. Cartwright,” he said. “I’m trying to explain to Mr. Martin that we need him to take a blood alcohol test to rule out the possibility that he was intoxicated while using dangerous equipment.”

  “But Jess wasn’t using the chain saw when Dale got hurt. And it was an accident . . .” My glance wavered under the blue glare of Dunstan’s eyes. I can tell when you’re lying, Dunstan had once said to me, you look off to the left. I was lying. I knew it wasn’t an accident, but I could hardly explain to Dunstan that the ghost of Mary Foley had pushed Jess. At least I couldn’t explain it to this Dunstan, the cold-eyed police sergeant. All trace of the boy I’d known and glimpsed this afternoon was gone. And I certainly couldn’t tell Jess that I’d seen a ghost. He would think I was crazy.

  “It was my fault,” I said. “Jess and I were arguing. I took a step toward him and he stepped back and fell.” I held Dunstan’s eyes through this speech, watching them grow colder.

  “What were you arguing about?”

  “How’s that any of your business?” Jess asked.

  Dunstan half turned to glare at him, giving me a better view of Jess. He was sitting on an examination table, his foot propped up on a bag of ice. His ankle was swollen and discolored and his face was bloodless.

  “You,” I said. “We were fighting about me having coffee with you. Do you want me to put that in a statement?”

  Dunstan turned back to me. He examined my face for a long moment, his eyes looking for something. It was the same searching look he’d given me thirteen years ago when I broke up with him and it had ended then with the same disappointment that crept over his face now.

  “That won’t be necessary, Mrs. Martin. If you can attest that your husband fell because he was backing away from you on the bridge that should be sufficient.” He turned back to Jess. “A blood test shouldn’t be necessary. But I should tell you that Mr. Cartwright’s blood alcohol level was way too high to have been handling a chain saw. He’s lucky to be alive. Perhaps you’ll keep that in mind the next time you’re conducting maintenance on Mr. Montague’s property.”

  I saw the blood rush into Jess’s pale face and knew he was about to say something that he’d regret—or at least that I’d regret. I opened m
y mouth to head him off, but Katrine got there first.

  “I think Jess will be concentrating on his writing for the present; he’s got a broken ankle. He won’t be doing any maintenance work for a while. Why don’t I walk you out, Dun,” she added, getting up and looping her arm in Dunstan’s.

  I should have been grateful to her for diverting Dunstan from Jess, but I felt irritated.

  “Why’d you tell him we were arguing about him?” Jess demanded as soon as Dunstan and Katrine were gone.

  “I was trying to keep you from being arrested.”

  “For operating a chain saw under the influence? Please. Officer Dusty was just trying to throw his considerable weight around. He had no legal right to ask me to submit to a blood test.”

  “Still, it’s better he knows it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Why? So he can think I was jealous that you and he were having coffee together?”

  I was about to point out that Jess had been jealous, but thought better of it. Clearly Jess was going to argue with anything I said right now. He was acting like a cornered and injured animal.

  “No, because it was my fault you got hurt. Are you in pain? Is it really broken?”

  He looked down at his ankle as if it belonged to someone else. “Katrine gave me a Vicodin on the way over here, which is why I didn’t want to take the damned blood test.” He looked like he was going to start in again, but instead his shoulders slumped. “It hurt like hell before.”

  “Oh, Jess.” I stepped closer and started to put my arms around his shoulders but he flinched at the sight of the blood on my clothes. “Fucking Dale,” he said. “The way he looked at me when I was falling, I thought he was going to swing that chain saw at me and take my head off.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was a couple more hours before we got out of the hospital. Jess had to have his ankle set in a cast, which took a couple of sleep-deprived interns two tries to get right. Sunny came in to tell us Dale was going to be all right and that she was taking Monty back to the house in a taxi. Monty told me that if Jess couldn’t get up the stairs we should bed down in the library. Which is what I decided to do after struggling up the terrace steps. Before we had left the hospital a nurse had given Jess a Vicodin that he swallowed before I could remind him he’d already taken one earlier. By the time we got back to Riven House he was groggy and delirious. Leaning heavily on me as we hobbled up to the terrace through a gusty wind he kept going over what had happened on the weir.

  “. . . thought he was going to take my head off . . . so much blood . . . like a geyser shooting out of the ground . . .”

  I shivered in the wind recalling the image I’d had of the weir breaking and releasing a tide of blood, but all I said to Jess was, “It’s okay now.”

  I got him into the library and settled him on the couch near the fireplace. The room was cold—that wind was carrying arctic air—so I made a fire and pulled a ratty old afghan over Jess. The afghan smelled like Monty’s cigars and the ointment he used on his arthritic hands and it barely covered Jess.

  “I’m going upstairs to get you more blankets,” I told Jess.

  “So much blood,” Jess murmured.

  The rotunda was awash in moonlight and shadow. The wind was blowing leaves over the oculus, splattering their shadows down the broad marble steps. The house felt restless tonight, as if it was excited by what had happened out on the weir. It seemed to have taken up Jess’s delirious mutterings. So much blood.

  Moonlight splashed over the portrait of Bayard Montague at the top of the stairs, dredging his fish-belly face out of the shadows, his cold eyes staring at me askance. I’d brought the reek and stain of blood into his house, defiling the pristine marble steps. I looked down the stairs and saw bloody footprints . . . which shifted at the next stir of leaves over the oculus and became leaf shadow. The blood on my clothes was dry.

  Still, the reek of it, now that I was away from the hospital disinfectant smell, was unbearable. I’d take a bath after taking the blankets down to Jess.

  In the bedroom I tore my bloodstained shirt off and put on one of Jess’s flannel shirts. As I was buttoning it, I heard a rustling sound coming from the bathroom. I opened the door and saw that the blind was rattling in the open window. I closed the window so that it wouldn’t be so cold when I came back up, and gave the big claw-foot tub a longing look.

  I grabbed Jess’s sleeping bag from the floor and ran down the stairs, shadow leaves scuttling at my feet as if my motion was scattering them. Jess was soundly asleep when I reached him, his face bathed red in the firelight.

  So much blood, so much blood, the house murmured.

  I covered him with the sleeping bag, making sure his injured foot was elevated. After my bath I’d come back down and sleep on Monty’s chair. I’d watch over him in case he woke in the night and needed to go to the bathroom. I’d take such good care of him that he’d see that I loved him, not Dunstan Corbett, and that there was no earthly reason for him to be jealous. We’d put this behind us just as we’d put the miscarriage behind us—

  So much blood . . .

  By the time Jess had found me in the bathroom the tub and floor were covered with blood. If he hadn’t found me, the doctor told us later, I would have bled to death. And if he hadn’t found me, no one would have. It was spring break and all his housemates were gone. We’d been fighting. Jess had told me that if I didn’t have an abortion he would leave me. “I won’t be blackmailed into marriage,” he had told me.

  I’d left his room, crying, and gone into the bathroom at the end of the hall. The old house had a big old-fashioned tub. I’d decided to take a bath to ease the cramps that were knotting my insides. Only the cramps had grown worse, twisting into barbed wire knots, and I’d passed out from the pain. If Jess hadn’t found me I might have drowned as well as bled to death.

  But he had found me, and wrapped me in his old flannel robe and carried me to his car and driven me to the hospital, where he’d stayed with me and taken care of me . . .

  Just as I would take care of him now.

  I pulled the sleeping bag over his chest, stood up, and startled at the sight of my reflection in the glass doors. Only it wasn’t my reflection. The figure on the terrace was splattered with blood too, but she was wearing a long dress and a shawl covering her head and shoulders and she clutched a bundle to her chest. I stood frozen, waiting for the image to dissipate into something else—as it always had before—into a scrap of fog, a trick of moonlight, a shift of shadow. But it didn’t. Instead it—she—turned and vanished into the darkness of the lawn.

  It took me a few moments to break the icy hold of fear and then I ran to the doors. I fumbled with the latches, the wind outside pushing against the doors as if to keep them closed, and then, when I got the latch turned, flinging them open. A pane of glass broke with a sound like ice shattering. I was halfway across the terrace before I realized that if I left the doors open Jess would freeze. I wrangled them closed and then ran back across the terrace, sure the apparition would have vanished.

  But it hadn’t. Just as I reached the edge of the terrace the wind ripped the clouds away from the moon and I caught a glimpse of white gown on the lawn below me. She was walking toward the pond.

  I ran after her. She was real. I hadn’t imagined her the other times. The ghost of Mary Foley had shown herself to me. I still felt the prickle of fear on my skin but I felt something else too. Excitement. She had something to show me—why else had she come back tonight? She had appeared to Dale on the weir—his angel of death—and now she had come back to tell me something—something about the baby she had left on the doorstep of Riven House. Only she hadn’t left it on the doorstep. She was still carrying it. Was that what she was trying to tell me?

  There was no fog tonight to mask the figure’s progress, only fitful moonlight and shadow as the wind blew the clouds across the moon. I lost her when the clouds blocked the moonlight and caught sight of her again when the sky cleared. It mad
e her look like an actress in a silent black-and-white film, her movement jerky, her shape insubstantial. But when she reached the weir, she turned to face me. See me, she seemed to be saying, be my witness. Then she spread out her arms—

  Where was the baby?

  —and vanished over the edge of the weir.

  I cried out and ran to reach her. I had to skirt the pond to reach the weir and then be careful climbing up to the bridge not to fall over the pieces of wood Jess and Dale had left there. When I looked over the edge of the weir she was gone. There was only the rushing water and to the side of the stream, Dale’s chain saw, the moonlight glinting off the bloodstained metal. Was this the gruesome sight she wanted me to see? But then I saw something else—a book lying in the blood. Elizabeth Foley’s diary. I must have dropped it when Jess fell. I’d forgotten all about it.

  I climbed down the steps and made my way gingerly across the damp ground. The diary was lying facedown in the mud, splayed out like roadkill. I picked it up, cringing at the mud and blood splattered across the cover. What would Dunstan think if I returned his grandmother’s diary like this? But then, Dunstan hadn’t said he wanted the diary back and after today I didn’t think it was likely we’d be seeing each other again soon.

  I closed the book, and looked around one more time. The moon was shining full on the weir, turning the water cascading over it to silver. I could see where Jess and Dale had repaired the stone wall, which angled out in graduated steps. Jess had been proud of his stonework, quoting Robert Frost’s “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” often. Watching the water riffling over the rough, irregular rocks I thought of another line from the same poem, something about gaps that no one had seen or heard made.

  Is that why the ghost appeared on top of the weir? Because there was a gap here between this world and the next? What would it take to close it again? I wondered as I made my way back up the hill.