The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

  I hadn’t been to the barn since Sunny died. Monty had given Sunny’s volunteers permission to use it for a memorial project for Sunny and I’d seen a few of the “coven” and the Bailey students coming and going along the drive. Maybe there’d be a crowd of volunteers sitting around a circle sewing costumes and sipping herbal tea, celebrating the winter solstice. But when I reached the barn it loomed dark and quiet over the moonlit ice, like a ghost ship.

  The truth was that I’d been avoiding the barn, guilty that I’d been responsible for Sunny’s suicide and afraid that her vengeful spirit might still be lingering there. That Sunny’s death might not be a suicide gave me no relief now. If Jess and Katrine had killed her to keep her from getting in the way of my inheriting Riven House, her death was even more my fault. Sunny’s ghost would have all the more reason to haunt me.

  But the ghosts hadn’t been real, I reminded myself as I opened the barn door, I didn’t have to be afraid of them anymore. And indeed, the barn was empty. The volunteers had cleared all the puppets away and even swept up the scraps of cloth and paper that usually littered the wide plank floors. It felt empty . . . and sad. All trace of Sunny’s creative energy was gone. I had thought she was pathetic for calling her puppets her children but how much more deluded I’d been imagining myself part of a happy family with Monty and Jess. Now my father was dead and my husband was trying to kill me.

  Remembering Jess, I hurried across the long yawning space to the loft ladder. I climbed up quickly, then turned and pulled up the ladder behind me and laid it down along the ledge. Then I turned, looking for something to use to wipe my hands, and looked into two staring blue eyes.

  I nearly fell backward off the loft. The thing staring back at me was as white faced as a corpse, its blue eyes as sightless as Monty’s had been at the end. My first thought was that the coven had dug up Sunny’s body from the Montague plot and brought her here for some ghoulish ritual; my second that I’d been fooled once again by Sunny’s puppet. It was the witch puppet that Sunny had transformed into the apple blossom girl for the parade. She was one of the puppets that had been hanging beside Sunny when she died. In fact, the rope from which she’d hung still attached her to a hook in the ceiling. Maybe the police had shoved her up here and Sunny’s volunteers had forgotten about her. Maybe she was just too gruesome for anyone to want.

  I could use her dress, though, to wipe my hands clean. I scrubbed at my hands, avoiding the puppet’s reproachful gaze, then tried the phone again. Finally a signal, and the touch screen worked. I called 911. When a woman answered I realized I had no idea how to explain all that had happened. I’m hiding from my husband in a barn loft because he’s trying to kill me sounded like a prank call, so I said instead: “This is Clare Martin at Riven House. I’m hiding from an intruder in the barn. I think he’s armed.”

  “Are you at the barn or the house, ma’am?” the woman asked.

  “The barn. Please send someone quickly.”

  “Are you safe where you are, ma’am?”

  I wished she would stop calling me ma’am. It made me feel like an old woman who’d fallen and broken her hip.

  “I think so—for the time being . . .”

  “Then stay put and we’ll send an officer right away. Keep your phone on.”

  I laid the phone down on the floor, its light comforting, and leaned against the wall in the corner below a triangle-shaped window. I could feel the cold pressing through the slats but I could also watch the gate where I would see the patrol car when it arrived. I pushed the puppet away from me, closer to the ledge, so I wouldn’t have to look into her reproachful eyes. I drew my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, trying to still the shivering that had taken hold of me. It was the cold, I told myself, now that you’re not running the cold has caught up with you . . . but then I was sobbing and I knew it wasn’t just the cold that had caught up with me. It was the grief and the horror . . . and the shame.

  I hadn’t even been able to tell the 911 operator the truth, that my own husband—Jess!—was prowling the frozen night, hunting me down as if I were an animal. What had I done to make him hate me so much?

  It’s because he never wanted to marry you in the first place.

  I thought it was Great-Granny Jackson’s voice at first, but it wasn’t. It was my own voice, telling the truth for once. I’d trapped Jess, first by getting pregnant, then by falling apart after the miscarriage. How could he leave me then? I’d known he wouldn’t leave me the moment I felt the cramps and the blood running between my legs—or had I known a moment before the cramps started and the blood began?

  I won’t be blackmailed into marriage, Jess had screamed at me and I had run down the hall and locked myself in the bathroom. And I’d thought If only I wasn’t pregnant and the cramps had started—

  But you couldn’t make yourself have a miscarriage by wishing for one.

  Still—I had wished for the baby to be gone and for Jess to forgive me and take care of me and marry me.

  And that’s what I’d gotten—just like I’d gotten the highest grade point average in high school, and the Bailey scholarship, and entrance into Monty’s seminar, and Jess, and, now, Riven House.

  Clare always gets what she wants.

  So, really, hadn’t I driven Jess to this?

  “Clare?”

  The voice was so soft, so tender, I thought it was inside my own head. Surely Jess would never say my name so sweetly again—but it was Jess.

  “Clare? I can hear you crying, Clare.”

  He was below me in the barn. I slid down and crept across the floor to the ledge to look down. He was standing at the door of the barn looking down at a trail of silvery footprints that led across the old plank floors straight to the loft. My own icy footprints left like a trail of breadcrumbs to lead him to me. As if I’d wanted him to find me.

  “I’ve called the police!” I screamed.

  “Good,” he said, taking a slow step inside. He was wearing his leather jacket, which was way too light for this cold, his hands in his pockets. The moonlight made his hair look silver and his face white. How he’d aged from that first day when he’d stood in the gold light at the gate! “When the police come we can explain that Katrine came in through Monty’s apartment. That’s what gave him the heart attack. Then she’d gone looking in his desk upstairs for his will. We heard her and came downstairs. We thought she was an intruder. I shot her with Monty’s gun. I’ll say it was me, Clare. No one needs to know it was you.”

  “That’s very generous of you, Jess. How long will you wait then to kill me?”

  “Why should I, Clare? We can sell Riven House and go our separate ways . . . or . . .” He looked up at the loft. His gaze fell a couple feet to my right. He was looking at the puppet, whose head was just visible above the ledge. The look he directed at her was as full of emotion as if he were gazing into my eyes. “. . . or we could go someplace together and give it another try. Back to Brooklyn—or someplace new. Without money troubles hanging over our heads we could be good together again.”

  “And I’m supposed to forget that you were screwing Katrine and plotting to kill me?”

  “I wasn’t doing either of those things, Clare, I swear.” He moved a few more steps into the barn, his eyes still on the puppet’s head. “Yeah, Katrine was the girl I dated before you. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d be jealous. You know how jealous you’ve been in the past, how it made you—” He stopped himself as if he’d just realized that calling me crazy probably wasn’t the best tactic right now. “How it upset you. So when Katrine got in touch with me because she’d learned through her aunt that you were Monty’s daughter, I thought it made sense to come up here. I knew once Monty spent time with you again he’d fall in love with you. He always thought you were the better writer.”

  This time he couldn’t quite disguise the envious look that crossed his face, but it was soon replaced by a smile. “Heck, I see now he was right. That stuff on your laptop
is the real thing, Clare.”

  I didn’t think he was faking the look of naked admiration on his face. I’d seen him in workshop too many times—he was incapable of pretending to like something he didn’t. I’d only seen this look once before—when I’d read my story out loud that first day of class and I’d looked up to see Jess Martin—campus legend!—looking at me as if I were something remarkable. The thing I loved first and best about my wife was her imagination. The intervening years fell away and we were staring at each other across the oak conference table, the scent of cut hay and ripening apples in the air. Only Jess wasn’t looking at me right now, he was looking at Sunny’s gruesome puppet.

  “Come on, Clare, let’s get out of here together. We’ll go someplace fucking warm and rake in the royalty checks from your debut novel. What do you say, Clare? Are you going to stay here with Dusty? Do you think he’ll understand how good you are?”

  No. Because the truth was I wasn’t good. I was the girl who wished CJ Brennan to fail her English exam, who wished her own baby dead. Maybe I did belong with Jess. If only I could be sure . . .

  As he moved closer, his gaze still fixed to the puppet, I could see the right side of his face. His jaw was clenched, the muscle twitching. His right hand rested in his pocket, which hung a little lower than the left pocket. He had Katrine’s gun. Did he plan to use it when I came down? There was only one way to tell—

  I pushed the puppet over the ledge. She swung down on the rope straight toward Jess. He raised his arm and silver flashed in the moonlight but before he could fire the puppet hit him in a burst of sawdust and papier-mâché. The apple blossom puppet swept Jess off his feet and knocked the gun from his hand. I grabbed the rope and swung down from the loft, hitting the floor a few feet from the gun. I didn’t have time to grab it so I kicked it out of Jess’s reach. The gun skittered across the barn floor and into the shadows beneath the loft. “Clare!” I heard Jess call for me. I had Monty’s gun, but I couldn’t shoot him. And if I tried to hold him at gunpoint till the police came he might overpower me and use it on me. So I ran. Out the barn door and across the ice, expecting any moment to feel a bullet in my back.

  He’d been about to shoot the puppet, which he’d thought was me. There really wasn’t any question of what Jess intended to do to me. I didn’t think he was even worried anymore about how my death would look. He’d claim I was deranged, that I’d already killed Katrine and he was afraid I’d kill him.

  I ran blindly, only realizing after a few minutes that I was going in the wrong direction, toward the gardens and the pond instead of the gate. At least I thought I was running toward the pond. While I’d been in the barn a ground fog had risen, a white mist seeping out of the ice. The temperature must have gone up since the storm and the melting ice was condensing in the air. I couldn’t even see my feet, only feel frozen grass under them and the uneven rutted ground—

  Then suddenly I was skidding over slick ice. I’d found the pond, all right. I was on it. It spread out in the moonlight, pure, perfect, not a crack in sight.

  Of course there are cracks you can see and those you can’t.

  I started to turn back but then I heard his footstep behind me. I had no choice. I had to go forward. I stepped onto the ice, planting my feet wide apart to distribute my weight, listening for the sound of something breaking—

  How had I not seen this coming? How had I not known what Jess was planning? I should have seen the signs months ago—his eagerness to move up here, his pretended mocking of Katrine, even all the times he made it up after we’d fought—when had he ever done that before? Of course I could see it now; he couldn’t let us break up before I’d become the heir to Riven House and he could claim I’d gone crazy—

  I almost turned around to face him—to ask him if that’s all he wanted—to put me away. Or did he always know it would come to this? Pursuing me across the frozen pond, tracking me down to my death.

  Wisps of fog were rising up off the ice. Because it was melting? Or because she was here? This is where I saw her first—on the bridge above the weir. I could see it only a few feet in front of me. I was almost there. But I could also see the cracks spreading out before me, a pattern like the neurons in a mind gone mad. I had to follow them to the end . . . I stepped onto the bridge . . . but then I felt the touch of a hand on my arm. It felt gentle, loving—

  I turned around, the fog seeming to wrap itself around me like an embrace, but then I heard the click of metal and was blinded by the light. I couldn’t see his face, or tell if he had the gun, but he must or he wouldn’t have ambushed me like this.

  “Clare, listen to me,” he said. “It’s not what you think it is. You’ve concocted this whole story. It’s such a good story I’ve been using it myself. It’s what my novel is about—a man plotting to drive his wife insane and take over the house she’s inherited—but that’s all it is: a story. I would never hurt you. This is all your imagination.”

  In other words, he was saying I was crazy, a tool of my overwrought imagination.

  I could feel the anger rising up in me as steady as the fog rising off the ice, the heat of my ire curdling in the air around us, taking vengeful shape. I could almost see it—almost hear it—

  Jess heard it too—cracks on the ice behind him like the sound of footsteps coming toward him. He half turned, his eyes widening in horror at something in the mist.

  Then a louder crack as the ice beneath his feet split open and he shot down into the water.

  I fell to my knees and reached for him. His hand flailed at the edge of the broken ice. I slid across the ice on my belly and grabbed his hand. His eyes met mine, frantic, pleading . . .

  Looking at me as he had that first day of Monty’s class. As if he were really seeing me for the first time.

  And then Jess’s hand was ripped from mine and he vanished into the water as if something had reached up from beneath the ice and yanked him straight down to the bottom.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I was never sure later how long I lay on the ice before Dunstan found me and carried me up the hill and into the library and laid me on the couch.

  “Too long,” he said, guilty that he hadn’t seen my text, that he hadn’t gotten there sooner, that he’d gone to the barn first and then to the house and only then to the pond when he looked down from the terrace and saw me lying on the ice. “You could have died of hypothermia.”

  Hypothermia explained why I drifted in and out of consciousness as I lay on the couch and Dunstan chafed my hands and feet and wrapped me in blankets while we waited for the ambulance. And why I rambled, telling him about the ghost on the ice who had appeared behind Jess.

  “The only sensible thing you told me was where to find Jess’s laptop.”

  I remembered lying on the couch staring at Katrine, who lay across the desk, blood seeping over all Monty’s research folders, and thinking, now he won’t be able to write his book. Then the room was filled with flashing red lights and Dunstan was back barking orders, carrying me out to the ambulance so the EMTs wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene. The last thing I remembered was looking back at the library, at how the red lights filled the room the way the light from the sunsets had, as if those evenings that Jess and Monty and I sat on the terrace watching the sunset had been distilled into one magic elixir and that if that light could just be bottled and examined the truth would be known. Fortunately, there was another version of the truth waiting on Jess’s laptop that explained everything.

  “The bastard wrote it all down,” Dunstan told me when I came to in the hospital. “The arrogant prick. The whole plot. As if it were a novel! So you don’t have to worry, Clary. The whole story is there—how he plotted with Katrine to have you recognized as Monty’s heir and then make it look like you were crazy by posing as the ghost.”

  “And to kill me?” I asked, grasping at that last straw.

  A flicker of impatience crossed Dunstan’s face, quickly replaced by a look of compassion. “Yes,
only the husband in the novel is driven to it because his wife is crazy. I think in his twisted way it was how he justified himself.”

  I knew he meant to reassure me that my story would be believed and I wouldn’t be accused of murdering Jess and Katrine even though Katrine’s gun wasn’t found when the police dredged the pond. “It must have gone over the weir and down the Saw Kill to the river. It’ll be buried in the Hudson by now.”

  But what I’d read of Jess’s novel hadn’t absolved me of guilt as far as I was concerned. It’s the story she started, he’d written. I am only playing my part. What if it had all started out as an idea for a novel? He wouldn’t be the first writer to work out his hostilities toward his spouse by killing her in prose.

  “What about Katrine?”

  “We have cell phone records of their communications. They’re cryptic, but they constitute evidence of a conspiracy. When you’re able to give a full statement I think we’ll see a correlation between those calls and your “ghost sightings.” We found more fibers from her scarf under the weir and an old white dress and a shawl in Katrine’s closet that looks like what she wore when she was posing as Mary Foley. Katrine was up to her eyebrows in credit card debt and yet she’d been pricing condos in Sarasota, Florida. She was clearly expecting a windfall. Maybe she hadn’t planned to kill you, but that’s what happens when you start down this trail. You have no idea how many times I’ve heard grown men weeping that they didn’t mean to kill the clerk at the liquor store they were holding up, they just needed the money. Put your mind at rest on that count, Clare. When those two set out to deceive and steal from you they sealed their own fate.”

  I knew that Dunstan was trying to reassure me because he understood that I would feel responsible. That’s how well he knew me. As well as a second cousin? Had he figured out that connection yet? Did it matter to him? I wasn’t sure. The kisses he planted on my forehead were chaste enough, but that could be out of respect for my newly widowed state and the appropriate distance of an investigating law enforcer. I figured there was time enough to talk about our “relationship” when I got out of the hospital and the investigation was completed.