I shudder to relate to you, Dear Diary, the tragic events of the past several hours.
Not long after the dramatic occurrence in the Solarium, and my brief encounter with my husband, did a sense of dread invade me that rivaled the disappearance of my dear child only hours earlier. I knew in an instant that this dread involved Sukeena and that my own intervention was required to spare my sweet friend. I have suffered much infirmity these several years, nearly always cautious in my walking about not to lose balance and fall to the floor like some invalid. Yet on this night the eyes I must have raised with the staff as I ran down the West Wing’s second-story halls and flew down the Grand Stair, my feet barely lighting as I descended. Drastic action was required of me—I knew this without so much as a single thought. My response was born from within me, having little or nothing to do with any kind of thought process—and for this reason I trusted it, I suppose, or at least I followed it without question.
“No, John!” I heard myself calling out in an unfamiliar tone, a tone a wife should never use to address her husband. Especially in public. (I tell you, Dear Diary, it was not my voice at all, but one given to me, just as the quickness of limb was given to me. Just as the voice in the séance was given to me. This, in turn, begs a greater question upon which I hope to expound at a later date: that is, if not my voice, if the voice of Rose Red, as I firmly believe, then why was she speaking through me in an attempt—vain, as it turned out—to save Sukeena? Has this house come to listen to my handmaid? To talk to her? Do they share some connection about which I am previously unaware?) “You let her go!” I roared at him in a voice that was not mine.
John knew that other voice. He is smarter than other men. Wiser. More experienced. He recognized that voice immediately as being the voice of the grand house. Paralyzed, he stood, flat-footed, as I ran—ran!—toward him, my dress rising behind me like a shadow. Two policemen had Sukeena by the arms and were dragging her toward the open door, beyond which I could see a car waiting. The police in this city are a model of corruption and influence peddling. (Mayor Gill, now in his third term, has attempted to change our image by closing the bawdy houses and saloons that people the water frontage. He would not dare touch the police, for they control this town, including the actions of the mayor!) If Sukeena was placed in that car, I knew well that I might never see her again. As I approached my husband at full speed, a thought sparked through me: what if April had not disappeared at all? What if my husband had ordered her removed briefly by one of the loyal staff? What if this evening’s anxiety was nothing more than the result of a deftly scripted act of deceit intended to lay blame on my maid and win her forcible removal from our home? What if his plans called for her beating, her jailing and the pox or other illness that seemed to claim the lives of so many of this city’s jailed? April is removed for one night, and John reclaims the power over his wife and destroys the one person in this house who has more power than him. (Discounting the house itself, of course!) Had my husband tricked me, tricked us all, including the police (whom he may have bought off) in an effort to regain his single authority?
John caught me unawares. He extended his arms in advance of my fast approach and knocked me off my feet, throwing me down onto my behind, where I skidded across the polished wood and came to rest against the wall, directly beneath my own portrait.
“She … heard … her … scream!” he roared. “The only person to claim to hear anything!”
“She heard the house scream,” I cried, for I was quite aware of Sukeena’s firsthand report.
He snorted derisively at me. “It was our daughter, Ellen. Our daughter’s last sounds. And this woman must answer for it.”
“Answer for it? This woman? Does she answer for the disappearances? For your partner’s suicide?” I caught him with my defiance. “It … is … this … house. And you know it!”
“I know nothing of the sort.”
An officer remained in the open doorway. Beyond him, I saw Sukeena violently thrown into a police wagon, her head striking the frame. She glanced back in my direction. It was the last I saw of her. I have not seen her since. John nodded toward the officer—my husband clearly giving his okay—and again my thoughts of conspiracy surfaced. John had a greater hand in this than I thought. The man pulled the door shut.
“No!” I cried out.
“A cop has disappeared, Ellen,” my husband said.
“The woods,” I said, making no mention of the sudden bloom in the Solarium. “There are dozens of them in the woods. One is lost is all.”
“They found a belt—a policeman’s belt—on the floor of the Solarium. Sukeena was in the Solarium at the time. I think it’s time you faced up to the fact that your … what is she exactly? … your friend … grew jealous of your time with our daughter and has brought her harm. Indeed, has removed her from the face of this earth.”
“You bastard, John Rimbauer.”
He bent down and slapped me across the cheek. Tears leaped from my eyes, like beads of juice from an orange slice.
“I’m sorry …,” he mumbled. In our ten years together, my husband had never laid a hand on me in this way.
Perhaps it was the jarring that this blow caused me—my husband unleashing his anger. Perhaps it was simply the right time for me to see the truth, as unadorned as it so often is. For me, that slap of his was like sunlight through a magnifying glass—directed, fierce and intense. A light so bright as to be blinding.
Surprisingly, my husband had it half right. He had nailed it on the head: jealousy. The clarity of that thought! I thought I heard the voices of choirs in my ears. Jealousy. But half right was all. He was wrong about the source of that jealousy—felt over the past two years as I focused my every waking moment on the love and progression of sweet April. Not Sukeena at all. But Rose Red.
She’d grown jealous. And she’d fed off the substantial life force of my child as a way of extending her own longevity and striking out at me all at once. Two birds with one stone. Rose Red has claimed April. She has removed Sukeena as well.
She has me all to herself now. And I shudder at what that means.
20 FEBRUARY 1917—ROSE RED
Horror of horrors, do I dare relate what I know now about the events of the past three days? I know not how much of what has happened was the result of my husband’s instruction, his determination, and how much simply the result of a corrupt and bigoted police force. Naturally, I would prefer to believe the latter, as I must continue through this lie of a marriage to the former, and thereby, perhaps, the blame for it all should be laid at my feet, and mine alone. When I think back now to what I might have done to save my dear Sukeena … Had it not been for fear, had it not been for grief over the loss of my sweet April, perhaps I would have been in the presence of mind to formulate some plan, to articulate my degree of concern, to make demands upon my husband and those clearly under his control.
Sukeena has failed to return from the police station, or wherever it is they have taken her. Three full days have passed since April’s disappearance, and I am teetering on the brink of suicide, haunted by my husband’s continued stalking of this house like a cat after a mouse and his approval when the police hauled off my handmaid late that night in a pitiful rainstorm. Finally, about an hour ago, I received word, through surreptitious means that I dare not go into, not even in your trusted pages, Dear Diary (except to say that one of the staff is close friends with a young woman whose brother serves on the police department, and that through this connection I have been privy to information that otherwise should have never reached my ear). The word is this: Sukeena has been under lock and key in a basement room in City Hall for the past three days and nights. She has been denied food, sleep and even the common decency of a toilet. I am of information that she has been beaten, berated and quite possibly violated in the way only a woman can be violated, while her captors continue to demand and await her confession—a piece of fiction she has quite properly, steadfastly, refused to provide th
em. I am of a state, so wrought with grief and overcome with anxiety that I am in one of my fevers, confined to bed, and only weakly able to make this account in your pages tonight. Immediately upon hearing of Sukeena’s treatment, her predicament, I wrote my husband a brief note upon my personal stationery and had it delivered by Yvonne, a woman I trust implicitly. My note read something like this:
Dear Husband,
It has come to my attention that persons unknown (namely, the police, or persons masquerading as the same) are torturing and mistreating my dear friend and African handmaid in their pursuit of the truth as concerns our dear departed daughter. I am quite aware that you continue to attribute the random spirits of this house to Sukeena, and to place her in the blame for events here. This, despite my many objections to such an attitude. You now apparently harbor suspicions that include the disappearance of our dear April. I beg you to review the events as they stand.
What I hope to remind you of is that Mr. Corbin’s actions predated my even meeting Sukeena by over a year. Furthermore, during the séance with Madame Stravinski, it was Sukeena, and only Sukeena who attempted to stop the events of that evening—to disconnect us all from Rose Red, not to encourage us to listen. On the night of April’s disappearance, only Sukeena heard this wretched house scream.
Your suspicions are incorrect and ill founded, and I beseech you to use whatever relationships with which you are bestowed to return home at once my most senior staff member, be they, these relationships, with the police, the politicians, or with her abductors themselves. If any more harm, any lasting harm, comes to Sukeena, I shall hold you personally responsible, John. Any resulting investigation will, by necessity, include you and your role in her initial removal from this household.
Your wife,
I signed it “Ellen Rimbauer,” as I have found deliberate use of my formal name to be suggestive of a strong attitude on my part and quite a successful technique where negotiations with John are concerned. I licked the envelope, sealed it and wrote his name on the front: Mr. John Rimbauer, all informality gone.
Since that time I have turned to your pages as a means of escape, for I cannot bear the thought of my dear Sukeena in the condition in which she presently finds herself. About the only good any of this has done is to distract me from a mother’s sorrow, however briefly. Sitting here just now, I have heard John’s motorcar depart the property. My heart swells with hope that Sukeena is to be returned! But there is a second sound as well, which I shall now investigate. It comes from inside the walls, and sounds ever so much like the sawing of wood. Perhaps not inside the walls, exactly, but overhead instead. Guest chambers occupy the space directly above my own rooms, and above these, the attic. I shall return to your pages, but first I must find the source of these peculiar sounds, if for no other reason than to put my mind at rest that little April isn’t still to be found here, having been mistakenly overlooked while having gotten herself injured. Hope clings to every branch. I quiver in the wind. I shall dress in pants and a sweater, and I shall explore Rose Red like never before. Damn them all!
4 A.M.
I have always taken your pages in confidence, but never so much as now, as the darkness of this place makes itself so plainly evident. My curiosity drove me to the floor above my own West Wing chambers in search of the mechanical noises that sounded to me like wood being sawed. To no great surprise, I found the chambers above my own unoccupied. However, in a keen search of the hallway there, I found a panel that when pressed upon with both hands sprang open far enough to admit a person. I slipped inside, studied the panel to make sure I knew I could reopen it, and deciding I could, pulled it shut. I entered a dark, narrow passage, no wider than my slim frame, and moved around a corner to where I found myself standing at a cloudy window—yes, a piece of glass, large and substantial—that looked in on the principal dressing room off the guest quarters’ master bedroom. Only then did I realize this piece of glass was the dressing room’s mirror, and that I was on the other side of it. I continued on down the narrow corridor past the next turn, finding a panel that moved out of the way. Climbing up a step clearly intended for same, it allowed me to insert my head into a wooden box and to find my eyes looking out the mouth of one of John’s African game trophies—right at the guest bed itself! Farther down the corridor, another back side of a mirror, this time inappropriately looking in on the sink, toilet and bath. My husband’s fantasies might very well include watching women dress and undress, might include watching the couples invited to stay the night as they are engaged in the most intimate courting rituals. But the idea of my husband, or any man, leering at a woman in the privacy of her toilet made me sick to my stomach. I had heard of such observation stations built into the staff quarters. Having never found one, I had not protested. But locating such a nefarious viewing platform as the mouth of a dead beast, and another allowing study of a woman’s toilet habits—and both directed at our dear guests—filled me with anger.
Worse, this hall of delight did not stop there. I followed it more deeply into Rose’s walls, turning left twice, a fraction of light seeping in through holes I gather were drilled for this purpose. A right-hand turn and then, at my feet, a perfect square of white lines. Light. I knelt, tried to move the square panel there in the floor, and finally made it slide open exactly an inch. I put my head to it, lying on the floor as I imagined was intended.
I was looking down onto my own bed, the electric lamp by my pillow strong enough to turn the sheer suspended over my four-poster into a transparency. I could see clearly enough to read the Holy Bible in gold on the nightstand. I panicked as only a guilty person can. First in anger, then in guilt. Not everything in that bed had been innocent. Not every moment of tender loving in that bed had included my husband. Now I thought I understood his jealousy and anger toward Sukeena. Now I knew, his fantasies aside, he had witnessed me—us—there, and that no matter how it may have excited him, it had repulsed him as well, and he had taken action. For the faintest moment I even allowed myself to believe my husband had done something to little April, or (and I’d thought this earlier) had hired one of the staff to take her away briefly to allow suspicion to fall upon my maid, to satisfy the convenience of the police being in attendance. Perhaps more than one of the staff, perhaps his loyal core of servants—the children’s young governesses had been acting strangely of late. Conspiracy worked hard to replace my own sense of debauchery and unfaithfulness, and I managed to turn my own misgiving into a strong resentment of my husband in no time.
I continued on. Shortly thereafter, the corridor did rise and climb via a set of steep stairs to a padded trapdoor that led directly into the attic. Here were kept many of the dozens and dozens of items collected while on our honeymoon and still not put to good use. Here were sewing stands, pottery and a second set of stairs that, when descended, led directly into the back of the lesser closets in my husband’s primary changing room. This second set of stairs afforded him escape to his rooms if overheard or pursued, or a way to reach from his rooms into the attic, back down to the guest quarters and out into the hallway. I was guessing already that I had missed a secret door leading right into the guest bedroom—a way for John to enjoy the pleasures of our single women guests while escaping attention. A certain opera star came to mind. For a while, a year or so ago, she had lived with us while performing downtown. I sensed she had been performing in my house as well. (When I look at it this way, there is much for Rose Red to be angry about, Dear Diary—we have abused her repeatedly.)
I did not return immediately, for what took my breath away, what startled me to the point of swooning and nearly fainting, had nothing whatsoever to do with John’s philandering, or even his secret passages. I’d come to grips with my husband’s perverted shortcomings years ago. No, Dear Diary, not my husband! It was the fresh board, the steel carpenter’s saw, the horses and the fresh pile of sawdust that caught my eye. A door that I did not remember. I inspected this work. The saw’s blade felt warm to the touch!
The sawdust smelled of fresh cedar. There, a framed door stood in the middle of the attic. Alone, and all by itself. A door to nowhere. Connected both top and bottom. For unexplainable reasons, I picked up the saw, inserted its warm teeth into the sawed slot, and put my hand to it. A moment later, the end piece of wood broke free and fell with a clatter, for I had neglected to hold it, or to catch it.
Someone had been up here working while I lay in my bed trying to pray for Sukeena’s release to freedom. Someone had been building Rose Red. But who, Dear Diary? Who on our staff works this time of night? What carpenter saws in the dark?
And why did I see that board and that handsaw much more as an invitation? Far less mystery than mastery. I am to help build this house—the tower where my captured daughter is said to live and from where she will seek her freedom. A tower that has yet to be built.
I am to help build it. I know this with absolute certainty. To build it in secrecy. Perhaps Adam will help when he’s home from school. He, too, will want to reach April as soon as possible.
Am I losing my mind? As quickly as I’m losing those I love?
I must schedule my day to make room for this endeavor. I must prepare to wear blisters on my hands—to smuggle lumber stolen from our other construction and into the attic late at night when no one else suspects. April, I fear, lives on the other side of that unbuilt door. April awaits her mother.
John has just now returned from his journey into town, and I could wait no longer. I ran—yes, ran!—down the Grand Stair to that very same spot where he had shoved me days earlier, and I pleaded with him for some news of my friend.
“Your friend?” he asked.
“Yes, John. She is my friend.” I practically dragged him into the Parlor, the suit of armor our only eavesdropper. I secured the doors shut and beseeched him, “Dear husband, I beg you for news of my friend.”
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer Page 18
