Then there was Jason, the social worker. He was cute, and Caitlin thought he liked her.
She decided to talk to Jason after he told her that everything she said to him was confidential. She told him that Deck had pushed her down onto the bed, and she was fighting him, and her dad came in, and Deck followed her dad into the other bedroom and pushed the pillow down on her father’s face. The more times she told it, the more real it seemed to her.
Chapter 55
Jack Morrissey had driven Phoebe Baird back to Atlanta to make arrangements for the best criminal defense lawyer money could buy.
She explained to the lawyers about Caitlin’s pattern of stealing, about her wandering off on her own, about her just being incorrigible. She said she had thought Caitlin would be better off with her father, and they had nodded sympathetically. They thought they could probably keep Caitlin in the psychiatric hospital for a very long time.
Finally, she had called Briar Ridge and thanked the headmaster for everything, but said there was a change of plans.
When all the arrangements were made, she flew back to Barcelona.
On that same day, Lucasta Tilling pushed two cats off the sofa to make a place for Hunter and Bethie to sit down.
As the cats scrambled back to their places and settled down again, Hunter handed Lucasta a folder with copies of the old newspaper stories, and the fading letters from the Milledgeville Lunatic Asylum to Mr. and Mrs. Barnard T. McFall regarding their daughter Lillian. Pink McFall had let her go up to the turret room to find the family files that had been put away there years before.
“That one is yours to keep,” she said, and then as Lucasta flipped idly through the documents, Hunter explained what she had learned.
“Lillian didn’t have a love story. She wasn’t engaged to Wilbur Parks. Her sister Martha May was the one who was engaged to him. It looks like Martha May got over her grief after he died, because she married and moved to Alabama a year later.
“Lillian was apparently mentally ill,” she went on. “She had delusions and had an unfortunate habit of stealing. Sometimes she wandered off without telling anybody where she was going. They had her institutionalized for almost seven years, but then she was declared sane, and they brought her home and had a nurse—or you could say a companion—who stayed with her. Apparently, she better but not really cured at all. And then, when she was 25, she contracted the flu and died. That’s the part everybody had right. She died of the Spanish flu on the same day that her mother died.”
Lucasta listened intently and glanced at the contents of the file. Finally, she closed her eyes and tilted her head sideways as if she were listening for something.
Hunter sat back and scratched one of the cats behind the ears, coming up with a flea under the fingernail.
Bethie watched and listened intently.
“Poor Lillian,” Lucasta finally said without opening her eyes. “Even when she was living, she was misunderstood. It’s no wonder her spirit has taken so long to move on to another realm.”
Hunter said, “I think the real point is that there were reasons that people talked about Lillian and that the story of the romance just got mixed up by the next generation. The Parks family moved away, and so did Martha Mae. Lillian’s mother had died, and the rest of the family just didn’t want to talk about her. Everything got mixed up through the years and a ghost story developed fro all that.”
Lucasta opened her eyes and smiled.
“We say ‘spirit’ these days, and no doubt Lillian’s spirit was distressed by the visit of that evil girl and she was trying to let me know. But I have good news because now I understand something. Two women, one younger, one older, came to me in a dream the other night, and they were holding hands. I know now that the younger one must have been Lillian. She said, ‘I’m done with wandering, and I’m going with Mother now.’”
“Now that is a good example of somebody who always has to have the last word,” Hunter said to Bethie when they were on the way home.
“I think she dreamed that dream up,” Bethie said, “But I think she does believe in ghosts, and she was right that there was an evil girl upstairs in the house.”
“I think the better word would be psychopathic,” Hunter said mildly. “Caitlin really can’t help being the way she is.”
“She stopped to steal that compact after she killed her father,” Bethie said. “And she hit an old lady on the head with a brick. I don’t know why everybody makes excuses for her, but, you know, it really is interesting about Lillian being her great-great-great-aunt or whatever. Maybe that sort of thing runs in families.”
They drove on in silence, and just as they pulled into Clearview Circle, Bethie said, “I think I might want to be a psychiatrist one day.”
“Now that’s a possibility,” Hunter said, smiling.
Epilogue
Upstairs at the McFall house, Lillian drifted from room to room, her feet never touching the polished wood of the floor. She was feeling ready for a long sleep again, after being awakened on the terrible Monday by the growing discord in the house, but she still needed to be sure that everything was as it should be.
The strange and dangerous girl seemed to be gone for good, and so was that woman who had screamed over and over when she saw what the girl had done to Barnard’s son.
Lillian could remember seeing the worry in her mother’s eyes, and knowing that somehow she had caused it, but she certainly had never done anything like that.
She swirled through the air and went back to the front bedroom—the one where she had been so sick and burning with fever so very long ago. She never saw that bed without remembering the moment she had floated upward, free of all feeling, light as a feather and had found that she could see everything below her—the weeping nurse, the doctor holding a handkerchief over his face, her cat, Ponce, who had kept guard at the end of her bed, and was now looking up at her.
The doctor and the nurse were looking down at the still, pale body on the bed, not up at her.
The nurse said, “At least her mother went before and doesn’t have to bear this. The funeral director is already on his way. Will you tell her father and the others?”
Lillian had understood then. She had thought of the funeral man with his scraggly beard, his shiny black suit and his mournful manner. She decided not to return to her body. She had never cared that much for it anyway.
Instead, she stayed in the beautiful house her father had built for them on Literary Lane, mostly sleeping and dreaming, but sometimes waking to drift around and check on things.
Now she made her way back to the turret room where she mostly stayed. The woman with the golden curls had disturbed things a little with her poking about, but it felt safe again.
Lillian glanced out the window once, and then, satisfied that all was well, she settled down to sleep and dream.
Other books in the Hunter Jones Series
DEEP SOUTH DEAD
Hunter Jones has recently moved from Atlanta to the small town of Merchantsville, in Magnolia County. She has taken a job as a reporter and photographer for The Magnolia County Weekly Messenger and is living in an upstairs apartment at the home of Miss Rose Tyndale. She is expecting the peace and quiet she needs to write a novel—but things start changing when she goes to interview Mae-Lula Hilliard, the President of the Magnolia County Historical Society and finds the old lady dead in the butler’s pantry of her old mansion. She also finds herself in a bit of conflict with Sheriff Sam Bailey, who wants her out of his murder scene.
DEATH OVER THE DAM
Hunter and Sam, who finally stopped fighting by the end of the first book, are now dating, and that means they’re the talk of Magnolia County. Hunter has hit it off right away with Sam’s daughter, Bethie, but is feeling insecure about the first Mrs. Bailey. The story begins with rain, rain and more rain, as the creeks and river rise and the county is cut in
half by a major flood. Sam and his team keep everybody safe, but there’s a problem when a floating wooden coffin turns out to hold someone whose death wasn’t that long ago. The romance continues and is given a little push by two elderly matchmakers.
WHEN I AM DEAD MY DEAREST
Hunter and Sam are newly-weds, but she surprises the county by keeping her own name. The big story in Merchantsville is that Hill Roland, a novelist who has made a small fortune on vampire novels, has bought his childhood home, and is is moving back with his New York City wife/agent to get serious about a literary novel. Unfortunately, he has a bit of a drinking problem, and a young woman who’s a big fan drives him home from a book signing and winds up dead in his bathroom. It turns out, however, that she ate the poisoned rum balls that were really intended for Hill Roland, and the killer will strike again.
MISSED YOU IN CHURCH
Hunter’s boss retires and she hires Mallory Bremmer—who has just graduated from the Universit of Georgia—to be a reporter, photographer and page designer. Mallory is happy to have the job, and excuse not to spend all of her time being lured into helping with the plans for her younger sister’s big church wedding. Everything begins to spin out of control when Mallory’s stepmother is shot to death on a Sunday morning in their family home, but the wedding invitations have already been sent…
OVER TROUBLED WATER
Hunter is 8 ½ months pregnant when this story begins, and everybody, including Sam and Mallory, wants her to stay at home and rest. Unfortunately, the biggest story of the decade comes along—with a mass shooting of a team of cyclists on the bridge over Foxtail Creek. Three well-known local people are dead, and a fourth is wounded. Things begin to get weird when an anonymous letter from someone called “Abomination” arrives at the paper, and they get stranger still when the son of one of the victims puts new locks on the doors of the family home and won’t let his sister in. The killer gets caught just in the nick of time, and Baby Bailey arrives as the newest character in the cast.
WHO MURDERED MAMMA NELLE?
It was her 60th wedding anniversary celebration and she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren, as well as a few friends from her church. Now, who on earth would hit an old lady like Nelle Hokely over the head and push her off a dock and into a lake? What Sam and Hunter will learn is that it’s probably a wonder that nobody murdered Mamma Nelle sooner, because she had gotten on almost everybody’s last nerve.
Looking for Lillian (Hunter Jones Mystery Book 7) Page 17
