The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

  Just what Jess and Katrine wanted—me out of the way and Riven House for themselves.

  As if the thought had suspended time, everything stopped. The sudden silence was shocking after the screech of metal and shattering of glass. I thought I must be dead. Slowly, I became aware of a pattering sound, like mice in the attic, and I wondered if I was back in my childhood bedroom listening to noises over my head. What a hell that would be! Like Dale going back to Vietnam when he got hurt. But then something wet and cold hit my face, shocking me awake. I opened my eyes.

  The world had turned upside down and splintered into a million pieces.

  Of course it had. Jess was cheating on me.

  I blinked away ice water mixed with hot tears. I was looking through my shattered windshield at upside-down apple trees, bony branches hanging from the clouds. I recalled a picture from a children’s book of Norse myths of the world tree Yggdrasil growing in the center of the earth. I’d gone to Norse Hel.

  At least I wasn’t in my childhood bedroom listening to Great-Granny Jackson thump-dragging her leg—

  I looked down—or up rather—toward my legs, but the interior of the car was too dark to make out anything. I didn’t seem to be in pain, though, so they must be all right.

  Then again, I didn’t feel much of anything at all. All the blood had rushed to my head because I was hanging upside down, held by my seat belt. I fumbled for the catch, my hands so numb I could barely feel them. Was I paralyzed? But when I pressed the seat belt button I fell headfirst onto the roof with a painful thud and stab in my left hip as it hit the steering wheel. I used my hands to pull myself forward along the roof toward the passenger side door, which looked like it had been pleated into a fan. What if I couldn’t get out? What if I were trapped here all night on a road where nobody came, in the cold and dark? Would Jess come looking for me? And if he found me—injured and alone—would he help me?

  The thought I’d had in the skid came back to me: this was what Jess and Katrine wanted, me out of the way.

  But no, that was too awful. Jess might not love me anymore, he might be cheating, but want me dead? I was being paranoid. This accident hadn’t been Jess’s fault. Still . . . I couldn’t wait for him to come find me here.

  I crawled toward the door over broken glass, wishing I was wearing gloves. It was so disorienting to be upside down it took me forever to find the door handle and when I did the door didn’t move. I was trapped here. I would freeze to death. When they found me in the morning they would wonder what I had been doing on this lonely road outside my old childhood house.

  She was coming from a psychologist’s appointment, Jess would say. She hasn’t been herself lately.

  And what would Dr. Schermer say? That I’d been depressed, delusional, paranoid. Little wonder if I’d run my car off the road into a tree—

  I always knew you’d come to a bad end, Great-Granny Jackson said in my head, crazy and alone.

  I slammed my hands against the car door and it swung open so suddenly I slid out into the icy mud. The fall knocked the wind out of me. I lay there for a moment looking up into the darkening sky, catching my breath, wondering if I could walk.

  I cannot die here.

  This time the voice inside my head was my own. Good. It was time I started listening to myself and not all the others. They were liars. Great-Granny Jackson, Trudy, Jess—Jess worst of all. Pretending to make fun of Katrine while he was fucking her!

  I rolled to my side and scrambled onto my hands and knees, then sat back on my heels. The Subaru was hanging over the edge of the road, upside down, the front end accordioned around the old oak. Thank God it was a sturdy old car or I’d be dead. I planted one foot on the ground, braced my hands on my knees, and got to my feet. I felt a sharp pain in my left hip where I’d hit it against the steering wheel but otherwise my legs seemed okay. I was okay. I was going to walk away from this—and I’d have to walk unless I wanted to get back in the car. My cell phone had been in my purse in the backseat of the car.

  Who would I even call? Not Jess. He’d know then that I’d been spying on him and Katrine. No, I had to think first before I saw him. Should I call Dunstan? And explain to him that I’d been spying on the cheating husband I’d left him for?

  No. I couldn’t talk to anyone until I figured this out. Riven House wasn’t far.

  A mile down the road, Monty had said.

  Monty. I had to tell Monty. He would believe me. He had believed me when I told him I’d seen Mary Foley. He hadn’t thought I was crazy.

  I started toward the road but then I remembered the black ice. Sleet was still coming down. In the few minutes I’d been standing here my hair had become icy. The footing on the steep road would be treacherous. I’d be better off in the orchard and I knew a shortcut that was quicker than the road. I turned and walked toward the trees.

  This part of the orchard, the part originally owned by the Jacksons until the Corbetts bought them out in the Depression, lay in a gentle incline between the hill and River Road, sheltered from the winds and the worst cold. But even here the icy rain was coating the branches of the apple trees. I touched one of the gnarled old branches—a Sommerfeld—and felt a slick coating of ice. In their draperies of ice the apple trees looked like girls in white dresses holding up their arms to the sky. Beautiful! But if the icy rain kept up, their branches would become so heavy they would break under their burden.

  But that wasn’t my problem anymore. My problem was getting back to Riven House and figuring out what I would say to Jess. I wrapped my scarf over my head and I walked on, my feet crunching in the newly formed ice, my head bowed against the driving sleet, playing out all the opening gambits in this scenario.

  I know you’re having an affair with Katrine Vanderberg!

  How long has this been going on?

  I want a divorce!

  Lines from some horrible soap opera like the kind Trudy used to watch. I saw myself as the shrill, hysterical wife, throwing a vase at Jess’s head, then collapsing in tears as he left—

  But could I even throw him out of Monty’s house? I had to talk to Monty first. Surely he would be on my side.

  Not that Monty had ever been a paragon of monogamy and fidelity. And he had asked Jess and me here. Riven House was still his—

  I stopped and looked up. I’d come to the stone wall that bordered the road directly across from the gate of Riven House. I remembered Jess standing at that gate, looking covetously at the house, beautiful and golden in the summer sunlight, and Katrine slyly suggesting the idea of Jess and me becoming the caretakers so she’d have an “in” on the ground when the house came up for sale.

  Had Jess been sleeping with Katrine then? Or had it started later? I thought back to how we’d found Katrine in the first place. It had been Jess’s idea that we needed a change of scene after my hospitalization, but hadn’t it been my idea to look for houses upstate?

  Yes, but it had been Jess’s idea to look around Concord because he’d always liked the countryside around the college. He’d lived off campus his junior year in one of those old falling-down houses in town—in fact, he remembered the name of a real estate company just around the corner. Van something.

  Vanderberg’s? I’d asked.

  Yeah, that was it. Do you want me to call them?

  Sure, I’d said, relieved that he still wanted to be with me after my second breakdown, why don’t you set up an appointment for next weekend?

  And then Katrine had showed us all those awful split-levels and modular homes. Jess mocking her accent, whispering little asides in my ear. When she said she’d gone to SUNY Potsdam Jess had remarked SUNY Pothead in my ear.

  Didn’t you date a girl who went there? I’d asked, but he’d shushed me. Because, I thought, he didn’t want Katrine to hear us making fun of her.

  Or because Katrine was the girl that Jess had dated in college before me. He’d dated a girl who’d gone away to one of the SUNYs . . .

  Katrine had been one year
behind me in high school. She’d gone to Dutchess Community for two years. That would have been Jess’s and my sophomore and junior years. Then she went away to SUNY Potsdam. Leaving Jess alone . . . to meet me.

  When Jess and I argued about Dunstan he told me he’d broken up with the girl in Potsdam for me. Had he ever said her name?

  Tina? Hadn’t it been Tina?

  Or had it been Trina? Which is what her aunt had called Katrine in the parking lot.

  I sat down on the wall. I could feel the ice seeping through my wool coat, but I didn’t care. I was frozen straight through now. Katrine was the local girl Jess had dated before me. How she must have hated me when Jess broke up with her. But then they’d started seeing each other again—but when?

  I thought of the last year we’d spent in Brooklyn—Jess always going out in search of his muse, out for hours, with that tattooed barista I’d thought, but what if he had been seeing Katrine?

  I go in to the city all the time. I have a friend who’s got an apartment she lets me use.

  I got up and crossed the road, heading for the gate. As I walked up the drive I pictured Jess and Katrine meeting at the friend’s apartment. Fucking in the friend’s apartment. Jess saying how he’d made a mistake, he shouldn’t have broken up with her for that crazy girl.

  What could I do? She got pregnant and then after she miscarried she wound up in the mental hospital—

  Everyone in high school said she was crazy. No one would blame you now for leaving—

  I’d feel bad leaving her with no money, alone in the city. If we moved back to Concord—

  She’d be back in her hometown. Still, it would be better for everyone if there were more money—

  They must have come up with the idea of Riven House together. Get Jess and me up here at the house as caretakers, then when Monty found out I was his daughter . . .

  But how would Katrine know I was Monty’s heir?

  Because her Aunt Jeanne worked at St. Anne’s and had seen my birth certificate.

  I had come to the fork in the road between the drive to the house and the one to the cottage. I stopped and stared up at the house. The color of old money, Jess had said. Katrine had told him that I was Monty’s daughter and together they had planned for me to inherit Riven House. Had they counted on me remembering the apple blossom girl story and following the leads in it to my birth certificate at St. Anne’s? Hadn’t it been Jess who asked Monty to give me back my old notebook with the story in it? And then I had seen the ghost of Mary Foley—

  A chill worse than the pelting sleet coursed through me. Jess and Katrine couldn’t have planned that—

  Unless the ghost hadn’t been real.

  As cold as I was and as warm as the lights of Riven House looked, I took the lower drive toward the pond and gardens. To where I’d seen the ghost of Mary Foley. Once in driving rain like today and the second time in the fog. Both times it had been hard to see her closely. What had I really seen but a woman cloaked in a shawl—

  As Katrine had been when she came to the house a few weeks ago. Could it have been Katrine pretending to be the ghost? So that I would follow Mary Foley’s story to the story of my own birth? And so that once I’d inherited Riven House Jess could have me shut away in a mental hospital?

  After all, who saw ghosts but a crazy person?

  I walked across the field, paying no more heed to the sleet that fell on me than the trees standing beside the pond noticed the ice building up on their branches. I must have looked like them, a figure bowed down by the weight of water, limbs growing heavier and heavier until they broke. I expected I would crack in two as I stood staring at the pond.

  A scum of ice clung to the surface, not hard enough to stand on yet, but if the temperature kept dropping it would be frozen solid by the morning. I pictured Mary’s body frozen beneath the ice. I looked up at the bridge over the weir and remembered the figure I had seen there and how that last time she had vanished behind it—

  But Mary hadn’t vanished behind the weir; she had stepped forward into the pond. Why would her ghost do something she hadn’t? And how, if she hadn’t been a ghost, had she vanished? I walked around the edge of the pond, my boots crunching over the frozen mud, until I came to the bridge. I climbed up the steps and looked over. The stream had partly frozen over the rock wall, water moving slowly beneath ribbed channels of ice. Without the spray of water I could see that the stone weir wasn’t solid all the way back. There was a gap between the staggered stone steps and the rock face below the bridge. I walked down the steps and picked my way across the rutted, frozen mud to the weir. Yes, there was a gap beneath the steps, narrow, but large enough for a slender woman to squeeze in.

  I crouched down and crawled in, my knees sinking into the mud. It was warmer in here, like a fox’s den burrowed under the snow. For the first time since I’d seen Jess walk out of my old house I felt a kindling of warmth. I could hear the trickle of water above my head, wending its slow course to the river. I felt like I had burrowed into the heart of the estate, into the river itself. I wrapped my arms around my knees and looked up. In the little bit of purple dusk that seeped in through the narrow opening I made out icicles hanging from the upper rocks. It was as if I’d stumbled into the crystal cave where Merlin had been shut away by the sorceress Nimue. A violet crystal cave, I thought, reaching up to pluck a pale purple icicle. It broke with a brittle chime and fell into my hands. When I brought it closer I saw what gave it color was a tuft of wool frozen inside. A bit of yarn the same lavender as Katrine Vanderberg’s scarf.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Katrine was the ghost.

  Of course she’s the ghost, I thought, she’s the thing haunting my marriage, the specter hanging over Jess and me.

  Jess knew that I’d believe in the ghost because I’d seen one before. That he must have shared that with Katrine hurt worse than the thought of him sleeping with her. He must have told her how I’d been after the miscarriage, how I’d heard a baby crying in the night.

  Katrine had laughed when I told her I thought I heard a baby crying at night.

  Foxes, she’d said.

  Only it had been her playing a tape, using it to lead me to the pond on a foggy night, letting me see her on the weir and then hiding down here, laughing at me. Later she and Jess would meet at my childhood home and laugh some more. Their plan was working beautifully. I’d started obsessing over the apple blossom girl story. Looking her up in the library and the Village Hall . . . and then, in case I didn’t think of it myself, Katrine had brought up the idea of me looking for my birth certificate at St. Anne’s, where Aunt Jeanne conveniently let me see my records. And then I’d run back here to tell Sunny—

  Sunny. They hadn’t planned on Sunny, had they? I remembered Jess’s shock when he heard that Sunny and Monty were married. Sunny could have ruined everything.

  A tremor moved through me, so hard that I thought the ground was moving beneath me. The icicles seemed to tremble over my head. If Sunny had lived I might not have inherited Riven House. Their plan would have been ruined. And so Sunny had to die.

  I was shaking uncontrollably now, feeling the cold because I was thawing out. But I didn’t have time to thaw out. I had to think about this coldly.

  I crawled out from the cave. The frigid air hit my skin and turned the layer of sweat and mud to ice. As I stood I heard my hair, frozen into long icy dreadlocks, rattle in the wind. I pulled my scarf back over my head and started walking up the hill, picturing as I went Sunny hanging from the rafters of the barn surrounded by her puppets. Was it possible Jess and Katrine were responsible for that? Had they murdered Sunny so I would inherit Riven House? And if they had murdered Sunny, what wouldn’t they do to achieve their plan? Why stop at having me declared crazy? Why not kill me? Jess would inherit Riven House, Katrine would sell it for them, and they could retire to someplace fucking warmer.

  I was walking fast now, the sound of my boots cracking through the ice like gunshots, my frozen
hair clattering like tribal war rattles. My face and hands were tight with frozen mud and tears. I was a golem risen from the mud. This is what Jess and Katrine had made me into with their plans—a monster.

  But what they hadn’t made me into yet was the owner of Riven House. I paused at the crest of the hill and looked up at the house. It rose above me like a medieval tower, the light in the library glass doors a beacon. Monty would be there sitting by the fire, waiting for me to come bring him his evening cocktail. Monty—my father and still owner of Riven House. What good did it do Jess and Katrine to have me committed—or dead—if Monty still owned the house? Monty had to die first for me to inherit the house.

  Had they planned to wait until he died? He wasn’t well. According to Jess, his doctor said his heart was failing. A shock could kill him. A shock Jess and Katrine could easily manufacture themselves. For all I knew they had done it already. Monty could be lying dead by the fire.

  I began to run. I had to get to Monty and tell him what was happening. It would break his heart to learn that Jess would plot against him. Perhaps he wouldn’t believe it at first, but I’d convince him and then we’d confront Jess together. Monty would demand that he leave. We might have to call the police. I would call Dunstan—

  At the thought of Dunstan I reflexively reached into my coat pocket, but I didn’t have my phone. It was lying in the wreck of my car. I should have gone back for it. I should have called Dunstan right away. I was going into a house alone with a man who was plotting to kill me, blundering in—

  I skidded to a stop at the steps to the terrace. Jess could be in the library with Monty. If I burst in, covered with mud and ice, blathering about murder plots, Monty would think I was crazy and Jess . . . what would Jess do when he knew I’d discovered his plans? Tearfully confess? Or kill me and Monty?

  No, it was stupid to rush into the library. I had to get to a phone before I saw Jess and call Dunstan, then try to talk to Monty. I’d go in through the boot hall and straight down to Monty’s apartment. Maybe Monty was even there, typing or napping, but if he wasn’t I could at least use his phone.