PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “Hello?” I called in my best attempt at English.

  Nothing answered.

  I would have left if not for the footprints. I’d seen traces of them before in my imagination. I’d seen the boots that made them, too, standing by Iago’s back door when I came out of it two minutes earlier.

  Trance-like, I followed the footprints across a creaky floor, pausing mid-way in the heart-shaped trail to study a pair of particularly red footprints.

  She sat in the kitchen with her back to me.

  “Hello?” I said again.

  A fly buzzed by. The air smelled of Welsh whiskey and dead roses, yet the sight of her hair moved me forward. I reached for the long red curtain even as a single thread lassoed my finger, wrapping it until it grew a waxy corpse-white.

  I saw the handle as I came round the chair. Then the ax. Then the place in her face where it was stuck.

  Stumbling, choking, I ran from the house, fell on my hands and knees, and threw up in the yard in the very spot where a pair of oil pumps toiled without cease, raping the land on my behalf in order that I might come to America to marry a stranger named Iago Godwyn.

  7

  On my fourth day at Watersplash, the newspaper read:

  *A THIRST FOR BLOOD *

  ASSAILANT ARRESTED AND MUCH PROSTRATED

  LOVERS’ QUARREL SUSPECTED

  A Welshman’s temper got the best of him Tuesday evening, leaving thirty-two year old Bethan Vevay dead by an ax in her home on Section Nine Road in upper Van Wert County.

  The Welshman, Mr. Iago Godwyn, was asleep at 4 o'clock when police arrived to question him about Miss Vevay's death. Godwyn requested to sleep longer, but was taken to the First Precinct Station where he is now held in custody. Within the hour, the accused was so prostrated with nervous exhaustion, it was necessary to call Dr. Theodore Steadmen, who remained with him most of the day.

  The newly married Mr. Godwyn is known to have a colorful history with the flame-haired beauty. “There’s not a soul with ears that doesn’t know what those two were mixed up in,” said long-time Knockinite, Mr. Willis Brayback of Section Eight Road.

  Godwyn, a saintly-faced, black-haired man of twenty-four, has been linked with a great many affrays over the years and did time in the Ohio State Reformatory for beating a fellow and blinding him in one eye “He’d be locked-up still had Mr. Gruenewald not dropped charges,” said Deputy Ernest Dule, the arresting officer in the case. “I can’t help but wonder if Miss Vevay would be breathing today if Gruenewald had just hung tough.”

  A murder investigation is under way.

  Scarcely had I gotten Iago back, and he was being taken from me once again, his pale face in the back of the police wagon disappearing as they whisked him down the road.

  Very quickly, things had turned from bad to worse. One minute, I was getting sick by the oil well and laboring over how to proceed, the next, a woman with a startling headful of strawberry curls stood over me, screaming at the top of her lungs. Gwendraith Vevay Newcomb. She’d driven in from Pittsburgh on a “whim” only to find her sister dead in the kitchen with an ax sticking out of her face. Before I could rustle Iago from his stupor, she had the police banging on the door.

  “Mark my word, it’s that boy that killed her!” she kept saying. “He killed Meriel, sure as I’m standing here, and he’ll kill me too if you don’t do something about it right now!”

  In jail, Iago was very sick, but they wouldn’t let me see him. “Talk to Hywel Cooper,” the deputy advised. “That’s who the Welsh ones go to when they get themselves in trouble.”

  Mr. Cooper was a lawyer with a shingle down the road. He promised to speak to Iago the next morning. Apparently, he knew Iago from past troubles. Because the distraught Mrs. Newcomb refused to talk to me, I went back to Watersplash to conduct my own investigation.

  My intent was to begin with Old Mrs. Blevens, but she was sick in bed and would not open her door. This left Iago’s coat. It was still on the floor by the bathtub where cold water had been left standing for a day and a half. In his pocket was a book. The title was handwritten, girlish, and smudged:

  Meriel Vevay’s Highly Personal, Highly Secret Mirror Book—Keep Out!

  It was a tattered thing with a lavender cover and a flimsy lock that broke with one whack of a butter knife. Along with the smell of yellowed paper and marjoram, a photograph slid out.

  I saw the names on the back first. By the well in Angelsea ~ From L to R: Bethan, Meriel, and Gwendraith Vevay.

  When I flipped it over, I saw their faces. On the left was a sleek-haired beauty, older than the others, straight of nose and sharp of chin. Her eyes were the sort that photograph clear and colorless but for their tin-type pupils. She held a posy of sweet peas in her slender fingers and stood a little off from the others. This was Bethan Vevay years before someone had seen fit to plant an ax in her lovely face. Beside her was a taller, plainer girl with crinkly hair and a big bow tie. There was something awkward about this one—maybe it was just that she was smiling. The smiling girl was the author of the book in my lap, the other dead sister, Meriel. Last in the line-up was the youngest of the three—a curly-haired, heart-faced creature with huge eyes I recognized at first glance. In real life, those eyes were sea serpent-green and belonged to Mrs. Gwendraith Newcomb.

  Glad as I was to at last meet these budding young redheads with their sweet peas and their too-perfect noses, my heart chugged to a stop. Somehow I sensed that Meriel’s Vevay’s Highly Personal Highly Secret secrets were about to reveal to me what every soul with ears already knew; what my husband and Bethan Vevay were mixed up in before one of them wound up dead. While a truck-load of noisy policemen ransacked the house next door in search of their own clues, I propped the picture against the salt shaker and opened to Page One.

  It began with the giddy words: Bethan has brought home the most spectacular boy. A sketch of an angel with long wavy hair followed.

  I didn’t need any pictures in my head to tell me that the words to come were going to be painful, yet l craved answers. Iago’s life in Knockin was difficult from the onset but something changed when he met the Vevay sisters. The lavender book was the only key I was apt to get, and I meant to make the most of it.

  19 August 1895

  He’s something all right. It’s that one Gwendraith spotted in June hauling barrels of potash over at the ashery. He’s got the sweetest eyes, and everyone agrees he makes Ceiro look like a duck. Anyway, we’ve all sworn to call him Boy so no one gets moony this time.

  Bethan told him he’s to pick turnips and water the horses and we’ll pay him every Friday. That made him happy as a lark. He went up to the barn and unrolled a ratty blanket, singing that old song about coloured lips that goes:

  There's beautiful girls here, oh never you mind

  With beautiful shapes nature never designed

  And lovely complexions all roses and cream

  But let me remark with regard to the same

  That if that those roses you venture to sip

  The colours might all come away on your lip

  So I'll wait for the wild rose that's waitin' for me

  In the place where the dark Mourne sweeps down to the sea

  2 September 1895

  Boy told me today, just as sincere as you please, that he’s got a wife back in Wales. I laughed at that because he’s only just now of marrying age and Bethan claims he’s been scrounging around this stupid old town since forever. I’d never have guessed it, but she swears he’s that same dirty child that used to run about wearing a hat made of rat skins all winter long. Rat Boy, everyone called him back then. I figured Rat Boy died years ago. What makes the poor kid so perfect is that there is no one to care what we do with him. He hasn’t a mum, and there is no wife. I wonder that he believes he does, though. Maybe there’s something wrong with his brain? He drinks the elixir every day and never complains it tastes bitter. He seems grateful for it, in fact. Thinks its goat’s milk. Anyway, who in their righ
t mind wears rats on their head?

  Today was the fifth day we gave him the elixir.

  8 September 1895

  Guess what? Boy has a bible, and he reads it every night, even when he’s dead tired. It’s the William Morgan’s translation with gold acorns on the leather, and he uses a braid of black hair to mark his place. It was Bethan’s idea for me to see what he does when he’s alone, and I’ve watched him three nights running through the spy hole. I thought she would be disappointed about the bible, but she whooped with joy. It’s all the better, she said. She likes a good fight.

  Bethan is acting funny about this one. She’s as bossy as ever—of course she is—but she’s giggly too. Sourpuss that she is, I’d have never thought I’d see her act like this. ‘He looks good with his shirt off,’ Gwendraith was gushing just the other day when we was watching him dig. ‘I had the most wonderful dream last night about his belly button.’

  I thought Bethan would slap her for saying such a silly thing, especially after the way Gweny took after Ceiro, but Bethan surprised me. ‘Perhaps we ought to make him go naked for the rest of his life, eh girls?’

  Eh girls? Like she ever asks us what we think about anything. It’s very odd—is what it is.

  But back to business. From what I can see, the elixir isn’t doing a living thing. Ceiro was getting pretty itchy after a week of it and couldn’t keep his hands off himself. Clearly, this one is too ecclesiastical to give in easily, or maybe I’m just not spying on him at the right times?

  Here’s the spell I’ve come up with to keep him here:

  A circle drawn around a house

  Formed with blood of one white mouse.

  Grape Root to turn a stomach sick.

  Three kisses to make the Grape Root stick.

  A sip of Rose and Madmen’s Cleave

  Ensures a man may never leave.

  5 March 1896

  Moonstone dug up Ceiro’s hand this morning, the stupid mutt. We were certain Boy was going to see it because he was hoeing not two feet away at the time. That dumb dog managed to muddy my best walking dress in the process, too, knocking the pole right out of the ground. I told Bethan it was unwise to bury anyone there, but she thought it fitting after the way Ceiro tore down the clothesline and called us ‘wolves in girls’ clothing.’ I can’t help but think Boy senses something because he keeps rooting around over there. If he saw the hand, I wonder why he’s still looks at us so sweetly?

  8

  The sun outside my window rose and fell and rose again with the turning of the pages. I didn’t notice that a new day had come. I was too lost in days gone by. What Meriel Vevay outlined in her journal was as good a case for committing murder as I’d ever heard. Elixers? Spells? After the entry about the hand, I fetched a shovel and headed out to that clothesline with the ugly stained rug that was not our scarlet flag of old, determined to see if there were body parts buried out there. I would have used it, too, except Deputy Dule rode up just then to tell me that Iago had taken a turn for the worse.

  “Tie up your loose ends,” the doctor advised when I entered the Van Wert County jail an hour later. “There’s nothing more I can do for him.”

  Iago’s cheeks were that mortifying shade of crimson only the worst of fevers can create. As I rushed into the little cell, the deputy halted me. “See if you can’t get a confession from him, will you? I’ve got a woman threatening to skin me alive if I don’t give her some answers soon.”

  I laid a hand on the terrible inferno that was his forehead and knelt down by the cot. “What’s happening to you, Iago?”

  “She put something else in that whiskey, I think. Something besides the foxglove,” he said. “She poisoned me, Lilabet.”

  “With what?”

  The rims of his eyes were bright as flames. “There’s a room behind the kitchen in her house. Will you see if you can figure out what she used?”

  A million questions jammed in my throat in their hurry to get out. Only one made it through. “Why would she want to poison you?”

  His lips twisted with a grim smile. “That woman’s been poisoning me for years.”

  #

  When the deputy drove me back, I read more of the diary.

  27 March 1896

  Tonight, we talked Boy into drinking some whiskey. Bethan said it was time to bring out the big guns, and she laced his share with a bit of vervain and some Grains of Paradise. Boy said one cup was enough, but Bethan got him to drink three. Afterward, he let Gwendraith kiss him for a spell, and then me.

  ‘I better go to bed,’ he said. He sounded very drunk. But Bethan was not about to miss her turn. She is behaving stranger than strange. She keeps saying she has big plans for him, whatever that means.

  Anyway, she rubbed some of the Deerstongue on her lips, pushed him back in his chair, and kissed him good. He liked her kissing him, it was plain to see, because he forgot we were watching and really grabbed her. Afterward, he got embarrassed and wanted to stop, so Bethan rubbed more on.

  ‘What is that?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Oh, what does it matter?’ Bethan said. ‘You like it don’t you?’

  He wanted Gweny and me to leave because he was getting excited. When Bethan said no, he tried to get up, and she made me tie him to the chair.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, but he hardly fought because of the whiskey.

  I did as my sister asked, but there was something about his face that made me sorry for him.

  Bethan opened his shirt and started working her way down, just like with Ceiro, only Ceiro was more greedy and less of a challenge.

  Boy said, ‘I don’t like this,’ and that made Bethan smile because he was panting like a dog when he said it.

  ‘It’s working,’ she said.

  With Ceiro, it was so hard to tell. He would have done anything we wanted, spell or no spell. Bethan kept at it until her mouth reached the buttons of his trousers, then she stopped.

  ‘That’ll do for now,’ she said and she made us leave the kitchen with her.

  Boy was still tied to the chair and gasping and cursing. ‘Come back,’ he cried. We could have made him gnaw off his own hand by that point.

  I didn’t like to go in the house after all that had happened there. The footprints were in that awful house, and the blood, and perhaps even the chair Iago once found himself tied to. Cleopatra’s Needle was Unc Mael’s worst nightmare come to pass. Mine, too. I carried the shovel like a club and snuck in through the backdoor while the deputy waited for me out front of Iago’s house. He thought the medicine I’d come for was the sort a man keeps at his bedside by his collar box.

  From what I’d seen, the place was not in good shape before the policemen searched everything. It was a whirlwind after. A skinny brown mouse sat on the table nibbling molded bread. Another shot over my foot. I hopped tributaries of spilled maple syrup and collected grains of rice on the sticky soles of my shoes. The door to the back room was open.

  Ting.

  The sound of glass clinking against glass cut me to the bone. It seemed unlikely anyone could have come from town on foot, and there was no sign of a carriage outside. Perhaps someone had been dropped off on Section Nine like me?

  Perhaps, a murderer was still on the loose?

  I raised the shovel and tip-toed into what appeared to be a big medicine cabinet of sorts.

  Ting. Ting.

  Someone was there.

  Quick as you please, a man in a black duster spun toward me with a hiss, gripping a knife.

  It wasn’t until after my heart came to a complete stop that I realized the knife was actually a miniature scythe and the hiss, actual words.

  “Oh my!” said Old Mrs. Blevens, who wasn’t a man at all but rather a little woman in a big black coat. She dropped the little cutting blade to the floor with a clatter.

  “Oh my!” I said at the exact same time.

  It took us several minutes to catch our breath.

  Iago had told me his cook was shy a
bout her scars and never left the house. She was very particular about this.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. Why was she rummaging through a closet in Cleopatra’s Needle?

  She blew off a mason jar and peered at the fuzzy pink thing inside. “He’s dying, ain’t he?”

  Old Mrs. Blevens lived in the shadows and hid herself in the over-sized folds of a coat in midsummer just to walk next door. What sort of magic was it that told her a man miles away was dying?

  With her good hand, Mrs. Blevens extracted a single sheet of rolled newspaper from her coat pocket and tossed it on the cutting bench.

  KILLER STRUCK DOWN BY GUILTY CONSCIENCE

  She fetched the dropped scythe from the floor and pried up the lid on a jar that looked to be stuffed with caterpillars, then gave it a sniff.

  Rows of cob-webbed containers sagged the shelves on all four walls, their yellow labels curling around juicy words like Thornapple and Grape Root and Lemon Balm, except Thornapple is not a type of jam.

  Old Mrs. Blevens had a number of herbs put up with her jelly and relishes, so I was not surprised to see she knew a thing or two. Her fingers skipped from Calamus to Oakmoss to Wormwood, before settling on Heliotrope.

  “Don’t be stingy with it,” she said. She pulled the shovel from my hands.

  “I’ll keep this, if you don’t mind.”

  #

  By the time the deputy returned me to the jail, Iago was too weak to notice the Heliotrope. I balled up a piece of bread and pressed the ugly herb inside it, doing my best not to be stingy with it, and forced it through my husband’s lips.

  Dolgelley had never seemed so far away. Unc, my father, that place of snow white petals where a wooden sword could fell all evil and the snap of one red cloth summoned great and endless joy, these things were nothing but a dream now.