Picture the Dead

by Adele Griffin

  Madame looks doubtful, but my feet are brisk as I disembark. I wave her driver on. “Thank you, Madame.”

  Through the carriage window she watches me, but doesn’t protest as the driver snaps the reins. Once she is departed and I’ve tripped up the steps to Geist’s door, I’m faced with a dread sensation. Inside, darkness. Nobody is home.

  With a sinking heart, I rap the brass knocker.

  “You won’t find him.”

  I whip around. The next-door housekeeper lists over the rail, as bloated as a bee. Tipsy I’d wager, and she has stepped outside for a few bracing moments of winter twilight before ducking back into her kitchen prison.

  “Where did he go?”

  She raises her hand with her slurred proclamation. “He did the right thing by her. With a ring on her finger, she can hold her head up.”

  I’m confused. “Who?”

  “Him and her. The master and his maid. Run off together.”

  “You mean Mr. Geist and Viviette were…married?”

  “Yes, Miss, in city hall, the day ’fore yesterday.”

  There’s no way to hide my incredulity. “Where are they now?”

  “On holiday. Took a train all the way up to Nova Scotia. Where no doubt they’ll be up to their usual dev’lish monkeyshines. Developing those ghosty pitchers and plund’ring the souls of the dead.” She genuflects.

  My bewilderment must show on my face, for the housekeeper guffaws. “No, no, no. There’s no romance there, Miss, lest you count the love of money. Everyone knows it was that Wallis boy brought on Viv’s condition. But Mister Geist can’t ’ford to lose her. Not in his line of work.”

  “Do you know when they’ll return?”

  “Not till next month’s end.” She blinks drowsily through the dusk. “Who are you, anyhow?”

  “Mr. Geist’s niece,” I improvise. “And I suppose that it’s very lucky I was given a spare house key.” I pretend to rummage for it in my purse. The housekeeper tires of watching me. “Chance of rain,” she says, a parting warning before she scowls at the gloaming sky and plods back inside.

  I wait until I’m sure she’s gone. My hand reaches up to disengage a hairpin. Then I crouch and fit the pin, jiggering it. A spy can open whatever is locked. I only dare let myself exhale when I feel it click.

  Part of me is exalting. A spirit in turmoil wants to expose a truth, Geist had said, or make a confession. But Will hadn’t wanted to make a confession. No, his unfinished business had to do with exposing his brother’s betrayal.

  The knob turns. I pause a moment. I’ve never been an intruder.

  Darkness makes the furniture unfamiliar and adds to my sense of guilty otherness. I find the matches to light the oil lamp in the front hall. Aware of every creak in the floorboards, I carry it to the sitting room. If Geist had been here, I’d have brandished both my letters in a bittersweet victory. I’d loved Will. It had never been otherwise, despite his brother’s steady poisoning of my memories.

  Quinn’s insinuations and lies had weakened me. Worse, they had eroded my trust in Will’s love. But now I’m frightened. Geist is my only confidante, but when I needed him most, he disappeared. Alone as I feel, I must heed his advice as never before.

  Any consecrated space, Geist had told me. But not a church.

  “And that makes sense,” I whisper aloud. Will hadn’t ever been much for ceremony. And certainly not Pritchett House, where he’d always escaped whenever he was angry with his brother. Geist’s own home is a sanctuary. Devoid of family members and memories, receptive to lost and searching spirits, it’s where Will had knocked.

  I take care as I enter the sitting room. What faint sound there is comes from the two ticking clocks and my own shallow breath. I sit on the edge of my usual chair across from Geist’s, my eyes sweeping the shadows, my hands gripping the seat cushion. Hope is all I’ve got. Please, Will.

  That last summer, Will used to watch me when I napped. I was always lazing away honeyed hours after our picnics by the pond. Stretched out and barefoot, my head crooked in the bone of my arm, my breath soft with salted air, and the faraway slap of the water setting the course of my dreams. I’d sleep long and deep. So careless with our time. Blissfully ignorant of how little we had left.

  Will would observe me, sketch me, then tease me awake with a blade of grass twirled across my cheek. It’s the same sensation that passes through me now, with sun on my skin and a brush across my face as I settle back, relaxing my grip, and open my eyes to find the lamp gone out.

  The figure is slouched opposite me in Geist’s armchair. I stare. He appears like a photograph slowly developing under my eyes. His shoulders are back, and his chin is tipped; his arms are crossed loose at the chest. A familiar position. He is here.

  When I speak his name, his answering gaze on me is suffused in love and sadness. As Will’s image takes full hold, his lips part. As if to say something in return. His eyes are tender and know me a entirely. Then his hand lifts, reaches out, and sweeps across as if to indicate something…

  Later, when I remember and relive and savor this moment, all I can conjure is the memory of my unabashed delight. Exaltation. Here he is, so real I could take his own dear face between my hands.

  I hear my thin breath, but when I open my eyes I hadn’t realized they were closed Will is gone.

  “No!” I inhale sharply, jumping to stand. Dumbfounded. But he was here. Was he here? If he was, he has slipped from the surface. I’m panicked, shocked by the moment, its power and its brevity. No, no, it’s not enough. Not nearly enough, after all that I’ve been through. After all my efforts in trying to find him.

  Something in the room has shifted. A subtle nuance, but the moment dangles, teasing me as I work to solve it.

  Of course. Both clocks have stopped.

  I must stay calm. Will’s presence hums through me like a hymn. When I glance down and see the cat, I jump and scream.

  “Psst! Scat!” The animal has been crouched motionless at the foot of my chair all this time. Was that what Will’s gesture had indicated?

  “Psst!” I hiss again. “Shoo, cat!” It doesn’t move no, it’s not a cat, not a living thing at all. It’s some sort of object.

  And yet…I’m sure it wasn’t here when I first came into the room.

  I drop to a crouch, and my hands scoop darkness until my fingers swipe the cold metal of the buckle and clasp. Locke’s satchel. Yes, that is exactly what it is. I slide closer, unbuckle it, and withdraw its contents. Glass ambrotypes. My fingers count nine in all.

  My heart beats with curiosity and fear. In a scramble, I find the box of matches on the mantel, and I relight the lamp.

  “All right, William,” I whisper. “I know that that you’re here and that you’ve summoned me. Now. What do you want me to see?”

  The light is dim illumination. I unknot my dark shawl and drape it over the back of the armchair. Then I arrange the table lamp to shine directly in front. I prop up the first image.

  It is a drummer boy, not more than ten years old. An innocent.

  In a different dress he could be one of Geist’s cherubs. I set the plate down and set another against the dark fabric. Here is a colonel or possibly a general, all bristling epaulets and waxed mustache.

  Something has changed. The room has gone so cold my teeth chatter. My urge to leave this room is so violent it almost overwhelms me. I’m not sure I can reckon with the truth I might uncover here. But the motions of my body do not listen, and stay mechanical, working smoothly, capably. I exchange the general’s image for another. Fallen soldiers, sprawled in the long grass. It twists my heart. The Wilderness, perhaps? It could be any of the countless, unnamed battles.

  In the end, what does the name or the place of death even matter?

  The next image shows a line of young men. Six in all, but I recognize two. At one end, sitting on the ground, Nate Dearborn. Standing over him is a short, square man with a slack and bearded jaw and a bristle of dark hair, holding the defiant
stance of the leader. Is this Curtis? Must be.

  And there, second from the opposite end, is Quinn. His shoulders defiant, a tourniquet wrapped around his eye. I don’t need the identifying caption at the bottom of the plate to know that I’m looking into the eyes of the Raiders. All dead now, all but one. And William Pritchett is not among them.

  On closer inspection, I see the date scratched in the bottom. July 10, 1864.

  28.

  I stumble from Geist’s. I have no money for a hackney, and the local trains have stopped running. All I’ve got are my own two feet, and the distance is long. It’s dark now, besides, and the night is further obscured by an icy spitting rain. Few travelers or carriages take up the road, and none that pass trouble themselves with me.

  After one too many stumbles, I break the heels off my shoes as easily as snapping chicken bones. They’re ruined anyway, from the muddy gutters. I send the heels sailing into an alley. Good riddance. I’ll never wear heels again for the rest of my life.

  Soon the roads widen and the spaces between buildings open as I leave the city behind. There are miles of darkness before me. I want to rest, but I push on, hurrying and then slowing to catch my breath before picking up pace again. After a while my legs ache with the desire to stop, and it is only my anxious energy that vaults me forward, onward, charged with no greater impulse than to run.

  “Jennie!” The sound of my name slices the night and stops me cold. My skin is a thousand pinpoints of prickling dread. I’d convinced myself to fear neither the dark nor the journey, but his voice is a bullet ripped clean through my body.

  Standing in the shadows by the bridge, he has been watching my approach. Waiting for me. I slow.

  “Where are you coming from? Why did you leave the house? Jennie, you’ve missed everything. The entire dinner, even the baked Alaska, which was a splendid sight. By the time I left, they’d moved onto dancing.”

  “I…had to go.”

  “Go where? You’ve been gone for hours.” Quinn steps forward. His evening clothes are impeccably tailored to his body. Combed and pressed and clean-shaven, the moon reflects him as exquisitely groomed as I’ve ever seen. He is the Quinn I used to know.

  For a split second I’m sorry I couldn’t have witnessed him at tonight’s party. It is easy to imagine him presiding at the table. His princely manners, his tapered fingers balancing the stem of his champagne glass as he raised it in toast. I can hear the gale of laughter that would follow one of his reposts. I can feel the flat of his hand on the small of my back as we might have danced, later. The collective flush of all the other girls’ envy as I sailed through the night on his arm.

  I’ve come to a standstill. Quinn continues to advance. Courtly, cordially, as if he might request a waltz. “Dearest Fleur, if you’d had any trepidation about this party, you might have given me fair warning. As it was, Mother told the guests you came down with a sick headache.”

  “I’ll have to remember to thank her.” My voice sounds girlish and scared.

  Quinn stops close enough that I see the glint in his eyes, silver and uncomprehending. The injured eye, almost healed, has taken on an unfixed and cloudy focus. Quinn had once confessed that it hardly diffuses more than light and dark.

  Suddenly it is this eye that frightens me most an eye gone nearly dead that keeps up a pretense of functioning. An eye that stares at me but sees nothing. I jump back as he takes a step forward. A fresh patter of rain blows in on us, briefly blinding.

  “But I don’t understand. What made you go away? Did one of those absurd Wortleys slight you?”

  “No…” I realize I am too scared to speak.

  “You can’t imagine my frustration to come home and not find you anywhere. Mavis said that when she saw you on the stairs, you looked pretty as a painting. I thought you might be taking a walk around the pond. But your hair, your frock and what’ve you done with your beautiful new shoes?” The concern in his voice has an edge of suspicion now.

  The entire journey from Boston I’d throbbed with fury and outrage. But the confrontation is not so simple. I am besieged by so many conflicting emotions: apprehension, disgust, exhaustion, anger, fear and above all, the rush of need to escape Quinn’s presence.

  “L-let me pass,” I stammer, pushing forward, but he blocks me.

  “Jennie, what’s happened? I’ve been quite heartsick with worry these past hours. And something is undeniably wrong.”

  “Let me pass,” I repeat. “I’m returning to the house to collect the only thing I’ve ever cared about. And then I’m leaving.”

  “Leaving? Why? And why are you looking at me like that?”

  It’s no use pretending. I square myself in his eye, my voice breaking thin from my lips. “The photograph,” I manage. “Locke’s photograph, all six of you. Curtis, Dearborn, you…the one you were looking for last week,” I add.

  Caught off guard, he remains composed. “Yes,” he answers simply after a moment. “Yes, you’re right. You’ve found irrefutable evidence though you know nothing of the context in which that photo was taken.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  His voice is even, neither kind nor unfriendly, and his face is inscrutable his cardplayer’s face. “First you tell me this. What prompted you to go running off into the night searching for an item whose very existence you could have known nothing about?”

  “When I realized that Will’s confession was really yours,” I answer. “Your script changed when you began to reuse your left hand. That’s what had confused me.”

  “Your eyes have gone so cold, Jennie. Why do I feel tried and hanged already?”

  “Why shouldn’t I suspect you?” I cry. “Ever since you came home, you’ve been polluting me with your lies. You lied to Nate that you and I were engaged. You lied that Will was a dishonorable soldier. You invented his role in a gang of thieves and murderers. You’ve come back home wearing your brother’s skin so that you could steal your brother’s life and everything in it. But that wasn’t enough for you, because you even wanted to tamp out the honor of his memory. What a low and filthy thing to do. It is beyond reproach, Quinn. It’s beyond anything I could have conceived, of you or anyone.”

  “Certainly, if that’s how you wish to see it,” he answers me. “Yes, fine, I took on what had been Will’s. I did. But only because he would have wanted it that way. For he knew it’s what I’d wished for so badly.”

  “Nate thought it was you who’d been hanged,” I realize out loud. “He was referring to Will, not you, when he spoke about the ‘stuckup brother.’ It never made sense to me that Nate and Will would have been friends but that’s because they weren’t. Nate was your friend. What I can’t see in this nightmare is why Will is not here, and you are.”

  Quinn stands like a soldier and he delivers his words simply, belying their weight. “I’d written you my last thoughts in that letter. All of it was straight from my heart. I gave that letter to Nate Dearborn, and I told him to find you. I needed for you to know how I felt about you before they killed me.” His gaze seems fixed into another time.

  “But what about Will? What happened to Will?” I am pleading.

  “Enough about Will.”

  “I won’t stop until ”

  “ Will is gone and you refuse to believe ”

  “ until you allow him the dignity ”

  “ Dammit, Jennie, I swear sometimes you nag me worse than Mother.”

  “But I wouldn’t if you didn’t act so furtive and guilty, as if you’ve got ”

  “Enough!” His hand whip cracks my cheek.

  “Oh!” I reel back, my head snapping against the bridge guardrail as I stumble to my knees. Pain shudders and pings down my neck and arms.

  I touch my lips. Blood mingles with rainwater.

  Quinn has moved above me, his temper recovered and in check. “What have I done? Forgive me, please, Jennie. I’m not in command of myself. The morphine…and the wine…” Hands on my shoulders, he pulls me up and tries to pres
s me close. A thought grips me cold: perhaps Quinn is insane. I must reason with him carefully.

  “I want to know,” I say, “so that I might come to my own conclusion.”

  My blood goes cold at his tone. So reasonable, so pleasant, as if he’s worked out every piece of his madman’s logic. “My brother was too moral, too sanctimonious and pious for prison. He was unable to do what was necessary to survive, to thrive. He threatened to turn us all in… I had to do it if I were to stay alive and get out. To come home to you.”

  My image of Will at the poker table, free and insouciant, mists away. Now I see brothers arguing over crimes, a locket lost, a girl back home. “Had to do what?”

  “We fought. I didn’t mean to. But I was angry, he was angry, we hadn’t slept in days, hadn’t had a warm meal or proper bed…I can’t say who started it. I was in a fury how dare he preach morality? How dare he call us traitors? We just wanted to survive. To survive that hell.”

  “What happened?” My voice is a whisper.

  “He lunged at me, pulled a knife on me. I hadn’t meant to finish him, but he’d gouged my eye and I couldn’t see, I couldn’t think, not in the moment. My hands around his neck did more damage than I expected. So there, I’ve said it. In war, Fleur, we are not in our right minds…” Quinn’s fingers are trembling slightly as they brush my bloodied lip.

  I shake him off. The rain is sloshing on my skin and inside my head. “You killed him.” My nightmares, the strangling Will had been warning me. It is all so stunningly, horrifically clear. I step back. “You killed your own brother.”

  “You’re exhausted right now. You’re hearing this story but not the nuances of it. Tomorrow you’ll feel differently. Truly, you could learn to love me. We’d purchase ourselves an entirely new and better life. We’ll refurbish Pritchett House exactly to your liking, for there’ll be plenty of money just as soon as we’re married.”

  “Plenty of money as soon as we’re married…” I repeat softly.

  He flinches.

  “Quinn? What do you mean?” I press. “Do I have money? Of my own?”