The Haunting of Maddy Clare

by St. James, Simone

  Mrs. Clare wiped her face. “I loved her, too, Meredith. But even I knew she was inhuman somehow. She was a monster.”

  “She was broken.” Mrs. Macready stood firm. “There were times—she’d look around her, and I could swear she had no idea where she was. Her memory came and went. Most of the time she knew me; but sometimes—even after years—sometimes she looked at me so strange, like she had never seen me before. Those were the times she went quiet, wouldn’t speak. Yes, she had rages. I didn’t understand them either. There were times it felt like—oh, like getting near her was getting near a shark, or a deadly snake. Something that would kill you if you let it. But sometimes, when she was calm, when she was half-asleep or sitting quiet peeling apples, you could see the girl she’d once been. Before someone broke her.”

  “All right, then.” Matthew spoke gently—or as gently as he could. He sat in the chair Mrs. Macready had vacated, next to Mrs. Clare. “Maddy wasn’t dead when she came to you. We can establish that. But still, you may be on to something.”

  We looked at him. The glint of excitement had come into his eyes—the one I’d seen before. “What do you mean?” I said.

  “She may not have been dead.” He looked around at us. “But you do not have to be dead to be buried.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  He was right. Even as I recoiled, I knew it. The implications were so horrible, it took a moment to even imagine them.

  Pretty little dead girl, Maddy had said. Staring at the sky.

  “It can’t be,” said Mrs. Clare.

  “It can,” said Matthew. “Someone molested Maddy. Then that person strangled her. And then that person buried her, believing she was dead.”

  “But she wasn’t,” I said, feeling it, believing it, my voice hoarse in my own ears. “She woke up, and then she ran.”

  Run. Run.

  I closed my eyes.

  “My dear girl,” Mrs. Macready breathed.

  “If it happened the way you say,” said Mrs. Clare, “then someone is guilty of murder.”

  Behind my closed eyelids, it all came together. Maddy. What she had said. “More than one person,” I said. Three of them on me. “There were three of them, at least for the original attack.”

  Run. Run. “I think perhaps,” I went on, “Mrs. Macready is right. I think when Maddy woke, she had little or no memory of what had happened—at least for a time.”

  “It would be why she couldn’t speak, at least at first,” said Matthew. “If she had been strangled.”

  My gaze met his. “And it’s why she wants to know where she’s buried,” I said. Pretty little dead girl, staring at the sky. “She wants to know where she was buried the first time.”

  “Can we find it for her?” asked Matthew.

  “I think we can,” I said. “I know what it looks like—she has shown me her memory of it. I think we can find it, if we look for it.”

  “What does it look like?” said Mrs. Clare.

  “A redbrick chimney,” I replied, “visible in the treetops. Do you know of any house that looks like that?”

  She thought about it, then shook her head. “No, I don’t. But if the roof is visible so high, the house must be large. We don’t have many buildings that big in Waringstoke.” She shrugged, and I had a terrible feeling I knew what she was about to say. “And the largest house in town, of course, is the Barrys’.”

  We checked in on Alistair, who was sleeping uneasily, cold sweat on his forehead, his chest rising and falling. In the corridor outside his room, Matthew and I made a plan.

  “This isn’t good,” I said under my breath. “If Evangeline Barry is involved in this…”

  “I know,” he replied, scrubbing a hand over his face. I heard the scrape of bristles against his palm. “I don’t even want to think about it. But we have to look into the possibility, and go to the Barry house.”

  “Do we pick a pretext?”

  “I don’t know,” Matthew said. “I’ve never done anything like this.”

  “Neither have I.”

  Matthew’s jaw was set in pain. “Alistair would know what to do. I sit thinking about it—wondering what his next move would be. He was never out of ideas. I’m not him. I just don’t bloody know what to do.”

  I bit my lip. “I think that Tom Barry will be suspicious if we turn up, no matter what we say. And if it’s the right place…”

  “I don’t suppose you’d let me go without you?”

  “No. You need me to identify the spot.”

  “All right, then. But we’ll go after dark and have a quick look, that’s all. In and out. I won’t have you in danger. If we do it now, everyone will see.”

  I looked longingly at Alistair’s door. He had not eaten or drunk again today. Time was running out for him. “What do we do in the meantime?”

  “I’m open to ideas.”

  “Let’s go into town. I want to see Mr. Nesbit.”

  Matthew stared at me. “What?”

  I explained to him what I’d had no time to say before—about my conversation with Mrs. Barry. “I’d forgotten about Mr. Nesbit,” I said, “but he was seen at the funeral. And he was avoiding you. Perhaps he knows something.”

  Matthew looked down, thinking. He put his hands in his pockets, and in that moment I could see him in uniform, somewhere on a damp green field, slouching in the early-morning fog, a tailor’s son of hardly twenty, suddenly trying to live to see another day.

  He looked back up at me. The boy disappeared, and there was a man in his place, dark-jawed and battered, whose deep-eyed gaze took me in with a long, slow burn.

  “All right, then,” he said in the voice that stayed with me always. “We’ll do it your way.”

  We walked to town. It wasn’t right to take Alistair’s motorcar; in any case, I had no idea how to drive, and Matthew drove only a motorcycle. His cycle was housed in the inn’s old stables, in a stall under a blanket, as if it were a steed. It seated only one.

  The sun had come from the clouds and burned off the fog. It looked to be a warm day, hot even, the first cloying air of late June pressing down. Only a faint breeze brushed us as we ascended the hill.

  Matthew’s gait was leisurely, and I did not know whether this was on purpose, or whether his injuries pained him somehow. Perhaps he was simply exhausted, like me; I was so very tired I had passed into free-flying giddiness, as if I were weightless, my head buzzing. The world looked very bright. I fell in step next to him and we walked side by side, Matthew’s boots crushing the weeds by the side of the road.

  “Maddy is quiet right now,” I said. “I can’t sense her. It should be a relief, but I don’t like it.”

  “It’s day,” said Matthew.

  “It makes no difference to Maddy. I saw her in the barn during the day. Now that she’s left the barn…” I looked off into the trees, which waved their dark green tops only a little in the breeze. “We don’t know where she is. It seems she could be anywhere. I didn’t sense her in Alistair’s room, but I’ve missed her before.”

  “You have extraordinary sensitivity,” said Matthew. “Have you ever seen ghosts before?”

  I considered the question, surprised. “No. Never. Just Maddy.” Just Maddy. She had chosen me, for reasons of her own. I shuddered.

  “Interesting,” said Matthew.

  I thought of my house that June day years ago, the hot, sunny, oppressive quiet when I came home. The silence that seemed like torture to my ears. It had been horrible, but I had seen nothing, been given no sign. In all the years since, I had seen nothing of the only people I wanted to see. They had simply gone over the edge, without looking back. “Have you seen many?”

  “No.” I thought that would be all, but he continued. “I’ve seen lots of evidence, I suppose. But evidence that could not be faked, or mistaken—no. Only a few times. And Maddy.”

  I shook my head. “I know nothing about any of this. I don’t know what can be falsified, what to look for. I don’t know the first thing
about ghosts. Honestly, I have no idea why Alistair even hired me.”

  “Don’t you?” said Matthew.

  “Well, he needed someone quickly, of course. And I was available. And I suppose it isn’t a very popular specialty. I heard him say something about knowing how sensitive I am, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

  Matthew grunted. “Alistair has always liked beautiful women.”

  I felt myself blushing hotly in the warm sun. I could not look at him. No one had ever called me beautiful before, but for Matthew to say it—and yet it wasn’t much of a compliment, in its way. To keep the tone light, I risked a glance at him from the corner of my eye and said, “Are you saying I have no other attributes, Mr. Ryder?”

  “You have other attributes,” he said.

  “Like what?” I kept my tone teasing.

  “Long legs,” he said with deadly seriousness. “Big, dark eyes. An interesting mouth. Nice breasts.”

  If I was blushing before, now I felt I was truly on fire. I turned and found him regarding me steadily as he walked, from those amazing eyes of his. There was a glint of humor there, but he was not making fun. “Well,” I said unsteadily. “That is…certainly…an interesting list. But I don’t think Alistair hired me for that. I’m not much next to Mrs. Barry.”

  “Evangeline?” Now he sounded surprised. “She’s pretty enough, I suppose. I don’t really know why Alistair is so hung up on her.”

  “Are you blind?” I said. “She looks like Norma Shearer.”

  “Hmm.” He seemed to ponder this. We crested the hill and entered the beginnings of Waringstoke. “Perhaps.”

  “Trust me—she does.” I had seen all of Norma Shearer’s films, so I should certainly know.

  “Well. It could be.” Matthew put his hands in his pockets. “I’ll tell you something, though. Even when I was in the trenches with the army, when we hadn’t seen a woman in what felt like years—not one of us fantasized about undressing Norma Shearer.”

  At my look, he laughed, the sound coming rusty from his throat. I tried to look stern, but the smile came to my lips anyway. After all, I had never heard him laugh before.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Roderick Nesbit’s house was still run-down and silent. It sat on a large, weedy clearing on the edge of town, backing onto the woods. The windows were grimy and the house stared at us from behind its peeling paint with blind eyes. There was a damp woodpile in the back, and next to it a small rotting shed with its roof caving in.

  Matthew knocked on the door and waited. Though the house was quiet, there was a feeling of presence, as if someone was home. Matthew knocked again.

  To our surprise, the door opened and a tall, thin man stood there, wearing a well-worn tweed coat and old leather slippers. He had a beard of brown hair and appeared about forty-five.

  “Yes?” His eyes took us in from beneath an impressive ridge of forehead.

  “Roderick Nesbit?” Matthew asked.

  Something entered the man’s eyes that looked, for a moment, like abject fear. “Who is asking?”

  As Matthew introduced us, his features changed again, the fear replaced with a rigid jaw of annoyance. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Please,” I said. “We want to ask you about Maddy Clare.”

  He turned to me and his expressive gaze took me in, from my everyday hat to my flowered sundress and my summer shoes. His voice was arch and dismissive. “I’m sure I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “You should,” I said boldly. “You attended her funeral.”

  He paused for a long moment, his gaze still on me. Then: “Come in, then.”

  His was a bachelor’s house, like Jarvis’. But if Jarvis had lived in an obvious bit of masculine mess, Roderick Nesbit lived in near squalor. The wallpaper in his front hall was peeling, the baseboards thick with old grime. He led us to a small sitting room, furnished with a filthy stuffed chair next to an unlit fireplace and a dusty, opaque mirror in a gaudy gilt frame.

  “You’re wasting your time,” said Mr. Nesbit. “I hardly knew the girl.”

  “Then why did you attend her funeral?” Matthew asked.

  Mr. Nesbit sat in the stuffed chair. He did not offer us a seat; indeed he could not, as he occupied the only chair in the room. He plucked absently at the chair’s grimy arms and looked away.

  As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, more details came to me. Mr. Nesbit was not only thin; he was gaunt—his clothes hung loosely, and under his beard his cheeks were hollow. He also had the bloodshot eyes and ruddy veins of a perpetual drinker.

  “I just felt sorry for her, that’s all,” he said, and his defensive posture seemed to fall away, as if it tired him too much to maintain it. “I heard she killed herself. She was just a maid. But servants are people, too, don’t you think?”

  “How did you hear about it?” said Matthew quietly.

  One thin shoulder rose in an affected, careless shrug. “Everyone in town heard about it. I’m an odd-job man, so I’m at people’s houses, hearing lots of things. That constable, Moores, he wanted it kept quiet. But nothing is ever quiet in a town like Waringstoke.”

  “Had you met Maddy while she was alive?”

  Nesbit blinked his bloodshot eyes. He looked miserable. “No. Of course not. She was a maid, wasn’t she, and doesn’t everyone say she was mad and kept to the house?”

  “But you’re an odd-job man,” said Matthew, and his voice was gentle and unrelenting. “Did you ever do any odd jobs at the Clare house?”

  It was clear Nesbit was weighing the odds of lying against the easy possibility that Matthew could ask Mrs. Clare for the answer. “Maybe here and there,” he decided. “I don’t exactly recall.”

  “Think about it,” said Matthew. “We can wait.”

  Again, the expressions on Nesbit’s face told everything. If this man ever thought to enter a poker game, he would lose every penny he had. “Now, see here,” he said, shifting in his chair and manufacturing anger. “You’re not police. I don’t need to answer you. So what if I worked for Mrs. Clare once or twice? I never met that maid of hers. I just felt sorry for her. That’s—that’s the end of it.”

  Matthew stood silent for a long moment, watching the man squirm in his seat. “All right,” he said at last. “We’ll go, then. I have one more question for you.”

  The man’s misery was acute; likely he was thinking of his bottle, wherever it was, and how quickly he could get to it the minute we left. “Just say it,” he snapped.

  Matthew nodded toward the fireplace, over which hung a long, dusty rifle. “You like to hunt?” he asked.

  Nesbit followed his gaze and again the fear crossed his face, but this time he tamped it under control. “I’ve hunted from time to time, yes.”

  “But not lately,” said Matthew. “That gun hasn’t been cleaned.”

  “I’ve been busy,” said Mr. Nesbit. “Trying to get some work here and there. It hasn’t been easy since the war. Some of us don’t have endless time all day to go hunting and whatever else. Some of us don’t live a life of leisure.”

  “Like Tom Barry,” said Matthew.

  Nesbit stilled. He raised his gaze to Matthew and said nothing.

  “I hear you don’t hunt anymore,” said Matthew.

  “I do.” Mr. Nesbit’s voice was hoarse and his words were automatic. “I do. Just not lately, that’s all.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Matthew. “It’s a nice pastime.”

  “You have to leave,” said Roderick Nesbit. “Now. Or I might dust off my rifle right now.”

  “All right,” said Matthew.

  “Now,” said Nesbit. “Now.”

  As we left, I heard sounds. Perhaps I dreamed it. It sounded like wings, like scrabbling birds’ feet on the roof. But when I looked behind me, there was nothing there.

  We walked to the pub for lunch, but we had hardly taken a seat at a small table in the corner when a large shadow came over us. It was Constable Moores.

&nb
sp; “Oh God,” Matthew muttered. “Now what?”

  “I’m glad to find you here,” said the constable, helping himself to a seat. “I’ve just been to the inn, looking for you. The innkeeper said you’d gone to town.” He lowered his heavy gaze at us. “I took a little time to visit your friend Mr. Gellis before I came. He’s not doing so well, or didn’t you notice?”

  The barmaid arrived and served us a beer; there was a short silence until she left, and then Matthew spoke, staring calmly at Constable Moores over the rim of his glass. “What are you implying?”

  “Nothing much,” said Moores. “Just that you seem happy to let a man sit alone in a room, losing his mind. The innkeeper is none too pleased, by the way. He’s about to send your friend out into the cold, and you with him.”

  Matthew sighed. “I’ve been making arrangements to take care of him.”

  I stared at Matthew, surprised. I hadn’t known. What arrangements could he mean? Constable Moores was not impressed.

  “Your friend needs to go to a hospital,” he said.

  “Perhaps,” said Matthew. “Without his solicitors, I have no power to send him anywhere.”

  “Damn it, boy, the man is sick!”

  Matthew’s glass banged on the table. “And I said I would handle it.” His voice was low and cold. “Constable, if you think I’m going to send my colleague off to some asylum just because he makes the innkeeper uncomfortable, you need to think again. Alistair is going to be cared for. Properly. I do not need your advice, or anyone else’s.”