The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

  Or keep me from any of its rooms. I felt a thrill of ownership turning the doorknob to Jess’s study. I hadn’t been in it since Jess had taken possession of it. I wasn’t supposed to go into his writing space. But here I was, trespassing in the inner sanctum, going straight for his desk, where his cell phone lay in a wedge of moonlight from the window. I pulled it out of its charger, checked to see it had power, and dialed 911. A NO SERVICE message flashed on the screen. Jess had complained that the service was spotty in his study but I’d thought it was just an excuse not to use the phone. I’d have to find a place to get a signal. I could hear Jess and Katrine downstairs searching the first floor for me. I still had a little time, but not much.

  As I slid the phone into my back pocket next to the knife, my eyes strayed across the desk. There was no manuscript stack here as there had been on Monty’s desk, only Jess’s closed laptop and a few loose pages shining in the moonlight. I couldn’t help glancing at them and then, seeing my own name typed on top, couldn’t help reading them.

  It was Dr. Schermer’s report on my visit that afternoon, faxed from the hospital to Monty’s number. That must have been what Katrine was doing at the hospital today. She’d gotten access to my confidential files—after all, she had recommended Dr. Schermer—and faxed them to Jess. If I’d needed any more proof of their plan I now had it. They wouldn’t have had any trouble convincing anyone that I was unstable with this.

  Patient exhibits signs of paranoia . . . patient became defensive when confronted with past psychiatric history . . . denied having signed release forms . . . obsessed with fictional family history . . . delusional . . . possible suicide risk.

  How convenient. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Katrine had bribed Dr. Schermer. With this report my death would look like a suicide. Which meant that was what they were planning. Not just to put me away, but kill me. It should have devastated me, but instead I felt a cold joy. I had proof that Katrine and Jess were plotting to do away with me. I just had to live long enough to get it into the right hands.

  I folded the fax in quarters and stuck it in my pocket. I listened but the house had gone quiet. Where were they? Had they come upstairs? How long before they found me? I had to find a hiding spot with cell phone reception.

  I was turning from the desk when I thought of Jess’s laptop. What more evidence might be on it? I scooped it up just as I heard a creak on the wooden floor outside. They were in the gallery. Then I heard Katrine’s voice. “She’s not in her study, but you should see what she’s done with the wallpaper in there. She really is crazy.”

  Bitch. Calling me crazy when she was the one plotting to kill me. It was a good thing they’d checked my study, though. They wouldn’t check it again so soon. And I was pretty sure that they didn’t know about the adjoining closets.

  I hurried to the closet and opened the door as quietly as I could, slipped inside, and closed the door behind me. My heart was pounding as I listened for any sign they’d heard me. But I heard instead their footsteps receding to the other side of the gallery, into my bedroom.

  I crouched down in the dark and opened Jess’s laptop to give myself enough light to see. I hadn’t been in the closet since I had been getting Minnie’s Mourning Room ready for Jess. What a good little wifey I’d been, fixing everything nice for her husband. I’d piled all Minnie’s belongings into trunks and boxes and pushed them to the back of the triangular closet. And I’d noticed the door. It was only three feet high, but wide enough to crawl through into the nursery. I crawled through it now, into my study, still clutching Jess’s laptop. I put it down on the floor and, leaning against the wall, tried the phone again—this time I had service, but I was afraid that if I talked Jess and Katrine would hear me. I put the phone on mute and tapped in Dunstan’s number, which I’d memorized from the card he’d given me weeks ago, and texted him a message. In trouble at Riven House. Please come!

  Would he think it was a joke? I wondered. I really should call 911 as soon as I was someplace I could talk.

  I listened again and heard Jess’s and Katrine’s voices coming from the gallery. Even though they’d checked this room they could check it again. I looked desperately for someplace to hide—and saw the closet on the opposite side of the room—and remembered the dumbwaiter inside the closet—unused for decades, papered over because Minnie had developed paranoid fantasies that her baby had been secreted away through the dumbwaiter on the night she gave birth. The nurse had caught her putting baby Monty in the dumbwaiter because she said he was a changeling and she had to give him back to the fairies to get her own baby back. I remembered the faint peal of a bell coming from behind the wall and that Minnie believed that if she rang the bell the fairies would come to take their own child back. I remembered the sound of crying I thought I heard from behind the wall.

  Mice, I told myself now, or the groan of old pipes. There were no ghosts in Riven House, only the two would-be killers searching for me. I could use the dumbwaiter to get downstairs to the kitchen instead of taking the stairs in the rotunda.

  I hurried into the closet, opening and closing the door as quietly as I could, and crouched down in the dark to find the door to the dumbwaiter. I opened Jess’s laptop to light the wall and saw the bulge where the door had been papered over. It looked like it had grown since I had seen it last, like this was the cancer eating away at the house . . . or as if something—or someone—was trying to crawl out from behind the walls.

  I shoved the thought away and attacked the wall with my hands, tearing at paper and plaster, searching for the door. The paper was thick and lumpy, as if someone had slapped on handfuls of glue and paper, hurriedly trying to cover something up. It felt like one of Sunny’s papier-mâché puppets after it had been water damaged, its features lumpy and disfigured . . . I could almost imagine the outline of a face—a broken nose, an empty eye socket—

  I drew back my hand, covering my mouth to keep from screaming. There was a face in the plaster. I could see the skull in the light of the laptop—its hard, smooth bones jutting out of the rotting paper and glue, an empty eye socket staring at me—and then the laptop screen went black and I was alone in the dark with the entombed child.

  I wanted to bolt from the closet but even if I could have moved I’d have run right into Jess and Katrine. Instead I forced myself to reach out and tap the track pad to bring the screen back to life.

  I almost wished I hadn’t. The face stuck in the plaster was even worse than my first glimpse of it. A cracked cheekbone, a staring blue eye, a tiny bone-white hand reaching out for me.

  A doll, I told myself, a broken china doll that Minnie had shoved into the wet plaster. They had given her a doll when she kept trying to stick her baby in the dumbwaiter and then she had torn it limb from limb and shoved it into the wall. Swallowing back the bile that had risen to my throat I plunged both hands into the wall and pulled out handfuls of crumbling plaster and doll parts—a knobby knee, a blue glass eye, a dismembered foot—and also the dismantled bell that Minnie had rung to summon the servants, and later, the fairies who had stolen her baby. I uncovered a slatted door here, only about three feet high. Would I even be able to fit inside? I uncovered the bottom edge, gripped it with my torn and pasty fingers, and pulled. The door rolled up like a rolltop desk with a clatter that sounded horribly loud in the enclosed space. I listened for any sign that Jess and Katrine had heard me but detected nothing. Dank, stale air trapped for decades in the dumbwaiter chute wafted against my face.

  I shone the laptop down into the chute and made out two ropes hanging on either side. Looking down I saw a wooden shelf. Looking up I could see a large metal wheel—the pulley. I put the laptop down and grasped one of the ropes. It felt smooth, worn down by decades of servants hauling up nursery dinners and tea trays. I pulled on it and felt the resistance of weight and heard a faint creak from below. Hardly a sound at all.

  The Silent Servant. That was the other name for a dumbwaiter. And weren’t all good servants si
lent, moving on well-oiled hinges behind the walls? I bet that’s what they taught them at St. Anne’s. Be quiet. Don’t make a fuss. Even when the lord of the manor gets you pregnant and leaves you for another. The dumbwaiter rose smoothly up the shaft, a three-sided wooden box open on the side facing me. There was something in it. I reached for it, my hand shaking, bile in my throat, imagining the decaying corpse of a baby—

  But no, Monty was the baby all grown up and he lay two stories below, a dead old man—

  Somehow that didn’t make it any easier to touch the moldering cloth and pull it out of the dumbwaiter. The cloth fell apart as I touched it. In the light of the laptop I saw embroidered apple blossoms crumbling into dust. It was the blanket that Mary Foley had made for her baby, but what was it doing here?

  The cloth disintegrated under my hands and something fell out of it. Not bones. Only a book—another of Minnie’s scrapbooks. She must have hidden it in here before the dumbwaiter was papered over, maybe the last time she’d put the baby in here. But I didn’t have time for it now. I laid it aside along with the remnants of the blanket and then wrapped the rope around a hook on the side of the wall to steady the frame. I checked the ropes for frays and then the wooden frame. It felt solid, but then I weighed more than a tea tray.

  I reached for Jess’s laptop and started to close it but stopped when a line of print snagged my eye. The thing I loved first and best about my wife, I read, was her imagination.

  Was this Jess’s novel? I wondered, feeling a prurient thrill at reading the forbidden work in progress. But Jess never wrote in the first person (Too easy! he said) and he hadn’t mentioned changing for this book. I didn’t have time for this, but still, curiosity compelled me to read on.

  I loved the way she told a story, whether it was about one of the crazy old families who lived in the river mansions or growing up the unloved changeling in that cold farmhouse and turning her own frightened heartbeats into the footsteps of a vengeful ghost. It wasn’t until she started telling stories about me that I saw the danger in an imagination like hers. You aren’t in love with me anymore, You’re seeing someone else, You’re going to leave me. She spun these stories so well, inventing seductive sirens out of chance acquaintances—the barista at the café where I wrote! a middle-aged fan at a reading!—that it was hard not to believe them. Why not sleep with the tattooed barista if she already thought I was? Maybe I didn’t love her anymore. Maybe I was tired of trying to correct her version of reality like a punctilious copyeditor marking over her inspired scrawls with a cool blue pencil. Maybe I was tired of finding my wife bleeding on the bathroom floor or driving her to the hospital to have her stomach pumped.

  But perhaps her most effective feat, the story I really fell for, was the one about us starting over. We’d move to the country for a new start! We’d go back to where it had all begun and finally get things right. I’d really bought into that one. Sold everything, packed the moving van, moved up here to the godforsaken sticks. And for what? To watch her mind slowly unravel, seeing ghosts, casting herself the heroine of some Gothic romance? How tempting to play the part she’s cast for me—the Byronic villain plotting to put his wife away—

  A sound from the room outside the closet drew my attention away from the nightmare screed I was reading. Was this really how Jess saw me? Was it some exaggerated fictional version of me—or had Jess finally turned to that last resort of the failing imagination—the memoir. I didn’t have time to find out. I closed the laptop and stashed it in one of the boxes. With its light out, darkness enveloped the closet and chute, a darkness that felt like the inside of my brain. Maybe I didn’t love her anymore. I’d thought I’d faced the worst already but reading Jess’s damning—and false!—description of me felt like having my skin flayed off and my bones dismantled—like the poor doll that lay in parts all around me. Climbing into the dark box felt like crawling into a coffin. The wooden frame creaked under my weight with a noise that sounded like a baby crying. Maybe that’s what I’d heard at night, I thought, but then the thought of the dumbwaiter moving up and down on its own nearly made me bolt. I took a deep breath . . . and smelled the oil from the pulley, a smell that brought back memories of tractors and threshers, cold metal tools that could flay flesh. I grabbed the rope to unhook it—but froze at the sound of voices on the other side of the closet door.

  “I told you I checked in here.” Katrine’s voice.

  “I know but she’s got to be somewhere and this is where she would hide. This is where she’d feel safe.”

  Katrine laughed. “In this creepy room? See? Look at what she’s done to the wallpaper.”

  Katrine’s voice was close—just on the other side of the closet door. I could smell her perfume—something citrusy and outdoorsy. I had to dig my nails into the rope to keep from wrenching the door open and tackling her. That would wipe the smug smile off her face.

  “I think Minnie did that,” Jess said, his voice not as close. “Clare just uncovered it. She’s writing about Minnie . . . Wow! She’s got over a hundred thousand words!”

  He was on my laptop, looking through my files! The sense of violation shocked me (even though I’d just been reading his laptop), but then he said, “Whoa, she’s really gotten into this character,” and I felt a pang at the admiration in his voice.

  “No wonder she’s gone off the deep end,” Katrine said.

  “Yeah . . . but some of this looks really good . . .”

  “Huh . . .” Katrine said, unimpressed by Jess’s approbation. “I didn’t notice this closet before . . .”

  I released the rope at the same moment the door opened. I had a glimpse of Katrine’s startled face—I must have looked strange crouched and hunched over in the back of the closet, like the changeling of Minnie’s nightmares—and then I was hurtling downward. I tried to let the rope out slowly, hand over hand, but my own weight was too much for me to control. The rope sped through my hands, ripping skin off my palms. The wooden box crashed to a bone-rattling halt that I felt from my tailbone to my teeth. I tasted blood, then the acid wash of fear. They would be coming for me. I wrenched open the door and fell out onto the kitchen floor. I rolled up to my feet and bolted through to the library, toward the terrace doors, but my legs were so numb I lost control of them halfway there and tripped and fell. I was lying on the rug in front of the fireplace. I’d tripped over the fire tools.

  I heard voices coming from the rotunda. Clare, is that you? Monty would call when I came down the stairs. I understood now why he always heard me. The rotunda with its spiraling stairs was like a giant seashell magnifying every sound. I could hear Katrine’s voice shouting, “She’s in the library!”

  I got up, braced my hand on Monty’s desk, and started for the terrace door—when I remembered the gun in the desk drawer.

  I find a loaded gun focuses the mind.

  Was it really loaded? I’d always meant to check and unload it but I’d never gotten around to it. I opened the desk drawer just as I heard Jess say, “Clare, we don’t want to hurt you.”

  I looked up. The only light in the room came from a glimmer of moonlight filtering in through the terrace doors. I could just make out Jess’s silhouette—and then Katrine edging around him.

  “That’s right, Clare. We want to get you help.” And then I saw the gleam of steel in her hands.

  I gripped Monty’s pistol, raised it, and aimed it at Katrine. “Don’t come any closer,” I said.

  “Clare,” Jess said, the warmth in his voice nearly distracting me from the metallic click. Nearly. I knew what a gun safety being released sounded like. I fired. I heard Katrine’s scream and the impact of her body falling over the desk and the sound of something metal falling to the floor. As Jess reached for her he moved into the moonlight and looked up at me, his face, for the very first time since I’d known him, empty of all thought. For once he didn’t have a thing to say.

  Neither did I.

  I turned and ran, gripping the gun and banging out of the gla
ss doors so fast they shattered in my wake.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The sound of breaking glass ushered me into a world made of glass. It was so beautiful I nearly stopped to admire the view. The moon hung over the frozen river, turning the world silver and pearl. It looked like the enchanted fairy land Elizabeth Foley had described the night she followed Mary to the weir—

  But I couldn’t stop to admire the night. Jess was right behind me. I heard his step crunch in the glass on the terrace. He would have picked up Katrine’s gun. I ran, down the hill and toward the road. If Dunstan had gotten my text he might be on the drive by now.

  But he wasn’t. And as soon as I stepped in the road I realized how vulnerable the open space made me. I looked back and saw Jess scrambling down the hill, slipping in the ice. If I stayed on the drive he would run me down. I had to find someplace to hide while I was waiting for Dunstan.

  I sprinted across the road and scrambled over a downed tree branch. The lower drive was a maze of broken branches. Let him try to follow me in here. I’d grown up climbing trees while he’d hung out at the mall on Long Island. I stuck the gun in my pocket, first making sure the safety was on, and scrambled through the fallen pines. It wasn’t so different from climbing apple trees. Hand over hand, fitting my feet into the crooks of branches. I wished I had gloves, though. My palms were still raw from the dumbwaiter rope. I pulled the cell phone out of my pocket, but my hands were so covered with sap I couldn’t get the touch screen to work.

  I couldn’t stand here out in the open. I needed someplace warm and hidden until help came. I looked around and saw the roof of the old barn over the trees. I’d go there. At least I could clean my hands enough to use the phone and if I climbed up into the loft and pulled up the ladder Jess couldn’t get up there. I tucked the phone back into my pocket and started toward the barn, sliding over the ice. It was thick where the Saw Kill had flooded in the fall, so thick my boots didn’t break through. Jess wouldn’t be able to track me.