Crying Child

by Barbara Michaels

  “We can see what’s on,” Ran said. “I imagine Will will want to get home, but—well, don’t worry if we don’t come right back.”

  “No,” Mary said. “I won’t worry.”

  As we drove off down the road, I felt a qualm which had nothing to do with my concern about Mary. The fog was worse, or else it seemed thicker at night; I couldn’t see anything. Ran didn’t seem to be worried; he was whistling under his breath. After a while I relaxed too. I hadn’t realized until we left it how tense the atmosphere in that house had become. A nice ordinary fog was a pleasure by contrast.

  On the way to town we hashed over our deduction. I told Ran about my experience with the portrait, and my latest discoveries.

  “It seems to me we have two major questions,” he said thoughtfully. “First, who is the child, the boy named Kevin? Second—”

  “What do you mean, who is he? We don’t even know he exists. If the boy who wrote his name in that book is—”

  “Oh, hell, Jo, let’s not be so dogmatic. I know we don’t have concrete evidence for a lot of these points, but let’s face it, we probably never will. I’ve reached the point where I’ll accept a good strong presumption instead of proof. We have a name in a book and the picture of a fair-haired child and a child’s voice that cries—and the name Mary has given to the voice. I’m going to assume that they all fit the same individual, and that his name was—is—Kevin. So we come back to the question—who was he? He wasn’t one of Hezekiah’s children and yet he seems to belong to Hezekiah’s time. He is connected with the woman, not only because of the miniatures, but because of the concurrence of the weeping and the apparition of the woman in black. So let’s do the same thing for Miss Smith that we did for Kevin; let’s assume that all these identities are one and the same. The woman in the black cloak is Miss Smith, who is also the woman in the portrait.

  “And that brings us to question number two. Who was Miss Smith, besides the governess? The miniature is not the portrait of a governess, it’s the portrait of a woman who has the wealth and social position to commission such a work—or who is under the protection of a man who has those attributes. It is in that capacity that she is associated with the child. And yet Miss Smith is undoubtedly a member of Hezekiah’s household staff. I ask again: What was she besides the governess?”

  “All right, I know what you’re thinking. The twin miniatures certainly suggest mother and child. If Miss Smith was the mother, who was the father? Kevin is a common Fraser family name—”

  “And Hezekiah was a well-known lecher. Let me tell you a little thing, my innocent sister-in-law; if I had a girl like the one in that picture hanging around the house all day, I know what I’d be strongly tempted to do. From what we’ve heard, Hezekiah lacked my scruples.”

  “Hmmph,” I said, impressed by his reasoning if not by his point of view. “Yes, but Ran—no wife, particularly a stiff-necked Bostonian like Mrs. Hezekiah, would keep her husband’s mistress and their illegitimate child in her own house. The boy was there, in that tower room, if we can trust the evidence; and Miss Smith was certainly in the house up till the year Hezekiah died.”

  “You underestimate the old boy, and the spirit of the times. Those were the good old days, when women knew their place.”

  We were on the outskirts of town now and I began to see lighted windows and an occasional electric sign through the mist. It made the fog seem less thick; but when Ran stopped the car and opened the door I heard a sound that is one of the most melancholy sounds in the world—the low, mournful wail of a foghorn, out at sea.

  “Where are we?” I asked, looking out the wet-streaked window. The street was a quiet residential street; a single streetlight tried valiantly to shine through the fog.

  “I’m going to see if I can get the key to the library. You won’t be afraid in the car alone, will you? This is the most law-abiding town I’ve ever been in, and if you come into the house it’ll take time to make introductions and all that sort of thing. The ferry is due in five minutes.”“

  “I’d rather wait here,” I said, and watched him disappear along the sidewalk. It was like a disappearance, his tall body seemed to melt into the fog.

  The time seemed longer than it was. As I sat in the misty darkness I could hear the foghorn still, even though doors and windows were closed. I began to feel like a character in one of those gloomy O’Neill plays; I remember one in which the foghorn hoots, with monotonous misery, through the entire second act. It’s an extremely effective theatrical device for creating a mood of utter depression.

  It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, though, before Ran came back, and I knew from his jaunty walk that he had succeeded. He put the car into gear and we started off. I wasn’t really expecting to see Will that night, I couldn’t imagine that anybody would be crazy enough to take a boat out in that fog. The ferry was not only functioning, it was early. When we reached the end of the main street where the dock began, we saw the boat’s lights shining through the mist. Will was already waiting.

  He blinked as the headlights struck him. The glare of the light robbed his face of identity, but it showed his general state of dishevelment quite clearly—his unkempt hair and the awkward way the old raincoat hung off his shoulders. He looked worse than I had ever seen him look; and I was so glad to see him I almost got out of the car and rushed to meet him. The sensation wasn’t new. I had felt it coming on for a long time, but there didn’t seem to be much point in encouraging it; between sexy Sue and brilliant Anne, my prospects didn’t look too good.

  Will got into the back seat of the car; and I thought, See? He doesn’t even want to sit next to me.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  Ran started to talk, but I interrupted.

  “The boy—your patient. How is he?”

  “He’ll be all right.” Will chuckled; it was a funny chuckle, exasperated and yet triumphant. “Damn that woman, she was right. It wasn’t a virus—it was appendicitis. We just got him there in time. The first time in ten years she’s been right, and I don’t imagine she’ll ever let me hear the end of it.”

  “You must be exhausted,” I said.

  Will gave me a funny look.

  “I’m a little tired,” he said cautiously. “What’s been going on this afternoon?”

  “We’ve found out quite a bit,” Ran said. “How about a drink and a steak at the Inn while we fill you in? If you can hold up for an hour or so, there’s something I want to do here in town before I drive you home. Of course if you’re really too tired—”

  “Hell, no,” Will said indignantly. “But I won’t turn down that steak.”

  He was definitely cool to me for the next five minutes; I was being punished for daring to intimate that four or five hours of work and worry could tire him. But he ate with the gusto, if not the table manners, of Henry VIII tearing into a haunch of beef.

  Ran talked the whole time. When Will finally slowed down enough to comment, he remarked, “Seems to me you do better when I’m not around… Jo, if I hadn’t seen the lady in black myself, I’d begin to wonder about you. How come you’re getting all the attention from the ghosts?”

  “That’s what Jed wondered. I don’t like any of the possible answers. As for Hezekiah’s portrait—”

  “Yeah,” Will said. “What about Hezekiah? I had him pegged as a villain, but it’s beginning to look as if he might have been the victim.”

  “Will, I’m not sure,” I said. “That business with the picture… It’s a classic type of hallucination, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” Will said.

  “So maybe that’s what it was. You know,” I said, struck by the idea, “I wonder if that’s why psychic phenomena are discredited. People see one genuine manifestation and it shakes them up so much they start imagining others. Naturally the false manifestations are easy to disprove, so the whole subject gets a bad name.”

  Will grinned.

  “The SPR would love your descriptions. I co
mmend your honesty, Jo, but this time I’ll be the attorney for the defense. Your impression was not that you were being threatened; it was rather a feeling of warning, right? But that doesn’t fit your conscious predispositions about Hezekiah. You thought of him as a villain too. If you had imagined that incident, you’d have seen him baring his teeth and reaching out to grab you.”

  Ran was beginning to fidget.

  “I don’t want to rush you, Will, but if we’re going to spend any time in the library…”

  I used to think of libraries as friendly, cozy places. But they can be eerie on a foggy night, when there are only three people in all the empty spaces. The fog seeped in through closed windows; long pale streaks of it drifted down the shadowy aisles of the stacks. Footsteps echoed in those tunnellike areas. The musty, dusty smell of books, which is usually one of my favorite smells, took on a different significance in the gloom and seeping fog.

  In the 1840’s, the island had not boasted its own newspaper, but Richmond, the nearest mainland town, put out a weekly. Ran explained that it was our best bet. The Portland newspaper might have carried Hezekiah’s obituary, since he was a fairly prominent citizen, but it was unlikely that they would print less important island news— certainly not the news of the death of a servant.

  It was Miss Smith’s obituary we were looking for. Ran had already seen the notice of Hezekiah’s death; the clipping was among the family papers in the museum.

  “I should have thought of a newspaper then,” he admitted in disgust. “But the clipping was separate. Whoever cut it out didn’t even include the name of the paper.”

  We were working with microfilm copies, not originals, but as soon as Ran saw the type and general setup of the pages, he was fairly sure that the notice of Hezekiah’s death had been cut from this paper. We had to go through all the 1846 issues to reach the month in which Miss Smith had passed away, so when Will, who was operating the viewer, found Hezekiah’s obituary, he stopped the machine, so that Ran could verify his assumption. Will and I hadn’t seen the clipping, so we hastily scanned this copy of the obituary. Will is a faster reader than I am; I was still plodding through the names of local dignitaries who had attended the funeral when I heard him burst out with a single expressive expletive. It brought Ran back from his nervous pacing, and at the next moment my slower eyes found it too.

  At the end of the column, the editor named the surviving relatives. There were a brother in Ohio and a sister in Rhode Island. The names of Hezekiah’s wife and children followed. And last on the list was the name that had caused Will’s outburst: “And his adopted son, Kevin.”

  “I swear it wasn’t there,” Ran said in utter bewilderment. “The clipping I saw ended… yes, right there. Third line from the bottom.”

  “Someone cut the last lines off,” I said. “But why? Adopted son… Good Lord, we never thought of that.”

  “It makes sense,” Will said. The microfilm reader was still switched on; the yellow light, shining upward, cast the weirdest shadows across his face. “When did you say Miss Smith first makes her appearance—1840? Suppose she had just had the baby. Hezekiah adopts it and brings it home, from Boston or wherever; and with it he thoughtfully brings a nursemaid-governess.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe it,” I said angrily. “Not even Hezekiah could do such a filthy thing. Why, it—it’s horrible. And there isn’t a scrap of proof.”

  “Proof, hell. I’ve known of people being hanged on less convincing circumstantial evidence. Go ahead, Will. We still haven’t found Miss Smith.”

  Will touched the switch and the pages began to glide past. The next item appeared only a few weeks later, but it wasn’t Miss Smith’s obituary. Will almost missed it. The headline didn’t include a name:

  “Hope abandoned for missing heir.”

  “Wait,” Ran said, and grabbed Will’s arm.

  We read the story together, in fascinated silence.

  Kevin Fraser, missing since Friday night, is now believed to have been swept to sea after falling from the cliff near the Fraser mansion. Young Fraser was last seen on Friday morning heading toward the cliff. A search party, led by Joshua Beale, found the only trace of the boy— his cap, caught on a shrub just below the edge of the cliff. Kevin was the adopted son of Captain Hezekiah Fraser, whose accidental death occurred less than a month ago. The captain’s will named the boy as one of his two principal heirs.

  “Something a little pointed about that word ”accidental,“ don’t you think?” Will suggested.

  Ran was disturbed.

  “My God, the poor little devil… How they must have hated him. They even tried to wipe out the memory of him.”

  “By ”they,“ I gather you mean your ancestors,” I said. “Mercy and her son Jeremiah and all the rest. Ran, do you realize what you’re suggesting?”

  “It fits,” Ran said. “It fits too damn well.” In the reflected light his face was ghastly. “He inherits a large chunk of the captain’s estate and a month later he disappears. Talk about motives for murder…”

  “Not to mention motives for haunting,” I muttered. “Revenge? Oh, no, surely not—not a child… Justice, then? Is that what he wants? No wonder he cries… How do you bring a murderer to justice when he’s been dead for almost a century—even if you could identify him?”

  Will started the machine again.

  “Aren’t you being a trifle melodramatic?” he said drily, without looking up. “If you are willing to admit a disembodied intelligence that survives physical death, you ought to concede the likelihood of a Justice which can cope much more effectively with sin than any human court.”

  “And which is not deceived,” Ran said.

  “All right.” I threw up my hands. “Maybe the child doesn’t want anything except peace. Don’t they say that violent death is a traumatic experience for the spirit? And time is meaningless in eternity. Maybe he’s still in a state of shock—lost.”

  “That,” said Will, continuing to scan pages, “is why I part company with spiritualism. If their benevolent creator can let a victim suffer that kind of torment all those years…”

  “You want logic,” I said angrily. “There isn’t any. None of this makes any sense. But there has to be some point…”

  “Exactly. And so far we haven’t found it. We haven’t even found… Ah, yes. Here she is.”

  “One week after the boy disappeared,” Ran said. “My God, it is like a curse. Isn’t there an old superstition about death coming in threes?”

  “Now you’re being melodramatic,” I said. “It sounds silly, but to me this is almost reassuring. She must have been very close to the boy, whether she was his mother or not. And she must have felt guilt as well as grief. She was responsible for him; a baby like that, she should have watched him more closely.”

  “What makes you think it was suicide?” Will asked.

  “Well, I certainly wouldn’t buy three accidents within a month, all in the same house. What does the paper say? Ah—here you are. Empty glass and a bottle which had contained laudanum on the table beside her. The verdict… Hmmph. Accidental death?”

  “Now wait a minute.” Will was several lines ahead of me. “They didn’t find a note, so they charitably assumed an accident. She mightn’t have received Christian burial otherwise.”

  “You call that beyond-the-pale grave Christian burial? Oh, all right. You’re arguing on my side.”

  “I don’t know what I’m arguing for or against,” Will muttered, scowling at the page. “Those three deaths are too coincidental. They ought to be connected, somehow.”

  “If it were a murder mystery, they would all be murders,” I said, with a lightness I assuredly did not feel. “You know, the thing the police call the m.o. is the same in all three cases—making it look like an accident.”

  Will gave me a warning jab in the ribs and I stopped talking; Ran’s grim face showed that he was taking all this seriously. I think the thing that bothered him most was the vindictiveness his family ha
d displayed in wiping out all trace of the child. It had been deliberate; some record would surely have survived otherwise.

  “Do you mind?” he said. “I can’t take any more tonight. And we’ve been gone long enough; I don’t like leaving Mary this late.”

  Will switched off the machine.

  “We’ve got all we’re going to find, unless we take a lot more time than we have at our disposal right now. Mary isn’t alone, surely?”

  “Of course not, Anne is with her. But it isn’t fair to expect her to cope with Mary if she gets one of her spells.”

  “Funny thing,” Will said casually, as Ran turned out the lights and locked the door. “I ran into a guy today, at the hospital, who used to know Anne in med school. He asked me about her husband. I said so far as I knew she wasn’t married, and he seemed surprised. She was engaged when he knew her, to another student, and it was quite an affair.”