A Sound Among the Trees

by Susan Meissner

  “No. This house is not a home. It is a mausoleum. You’ve made it a crypt, Mother. You didn’t mean to, but you did. I couldn’t see it before. I wasn’t well enough to see it before. But I see it now as clear as day. You’re the one who can’t let go of the past. You’re the one with regrets. Not Susannah. Not this house. You.”

  Adelaide staggered back against the wall of the studio as if stricken. “How dare you say that to me?”

  “Because it’s true,” Caroline said gently. “You needed a reason to explain all the bad things that have happened to you. The house became your reason. You found your great-grandmother dead in her chair after she told you things that didn’t make any sense, and that became the image on which you pinned everything. The house and its terrible grudge. A grudge you couldn’t understand because you were too young and then would never understand because you didn’t know about the other letters. If I had known what you had become, I would have shown you long before this. I had no idea. I was too ill to see it. Susannah doesn’t haunt this house, Mother. You do.”

  Adelaide felt lightheaded. Terribly old. Fragile. “Other letters …”

  “Yes. Other letters. Susannah wrote other letters. Letters she never sent to her cousin. She never sent them to anyone. They’ve been here the whole time. Hidden in the cellar.”

  The cellar.

  You walk upon it. We all do.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Adelaide breathed.

  “I know you don’t. But you will. Marielle is reading them right now. And when she is done I want you to read them. And then when Carson gets home tomorrow I want you to tell him to take his family and leave.”

  “I … I can’t do that!”

  “You have to. You have turned Carson into a shadow of what you are. Addicted to the echoes of his past, just like you. You let him choose to live in this funeral parlor of a house where his first wife died, and you let him keep her picture on the stairs with all the other ghosts, and for heaven’s sake, you never insisted he clean up Sara’s studio. Then he asks to bring Marielle here, and you just let him? Do you know you almost had Marielle believing Susannah was out to get her?”

  “But Susannah …”

  “Was innocent! She was innocent. Come up to the house, Mother. Read the letters. And then, by God, you will unbind Carson and Marielle and Sara’s children from this house and let them go.”

  An instant image of every room at Holly Oak being empty and silent pushed itself to the forefront of her mind, and her body trembled at the thought. “You would have me live here alone?” Adelaide didn’t recognize the childlike timbre of her voice.

  Caroline hesitated before reaching out her hand and laying it on Adelaide’s good arm. “Isn’t it time you gave it a try? You’ve never let yourself enjoy this house with just you inside it. Just you and no one else. Never.”

  Adelaide turned her head to look at Holly Oak at the top of the sloping lawn, its windows glistening in the morning sun. A tiny fissure seemed to crack across the fear that gripped her, like a valve letting off pressure—a tiny stream of it.

  She trembled slightly, and her broken wrist sent an aching reminder to her brain that she was presently unable to entertain such a heady thought as enjoying her house with just her inside it.

  “I can’t even tie a shoelace right now,” she said as she turned back around.

  “No, but soon you will,” Caroline said. “And until you can, I will stay here with you.”

  arielle sat on the edge of her bed after she had read the last letter, in awe. Susannah Page was nothing like what Adelaide or Eldora had imagined her to be. She had simply been a young woman in love, a young woman who loved to the point of sacrifice. It was impossible that Susannah haunted the house in search of absolution. She already had that, and in Susannah’s eyes it was the house that had given it to her, not kept it from her. Eldora Meeks was wrong.

  And so was Adelaide.

  Marielle gathered up the letters and rewrapped them in the cloth. Caroline had told her that when she was done there was something she wanted Marielle to do. She couldn’t imagine what it was other than giving the letters to Adelaide.

  Marielle slipped on a pair of sandals and opened her bedroom door. It was nearly noon and still the house was quiet. She wondered for a moment if Adelaide was sick or worse, and she hurried to Adelaide’s bedroom to see if she was still in her bed. But Adelaide’s bed was empty and made. Relieved, Marielle made her way down the stairs. When she reached the bottom, she heard movement in the dining room. Someone was pulling up a chair.

  She walked to the dining room doors. Adelaide was seated at the table, looking a bit ashen. Caroline sat across from her. Both had teacups. Adelaide’s, steaming, had been recently filled.

  “Adelaide, are you all right?” Marielle said.

  “She’s waiting for the letters.” Caroline stood and reached for the bundle in Marielle’s hands. Marielle handed the letters to her. Caroline thumbed through them, setting the postmarked ones off to the side.

  “Those you have read,” she said to Adelaide. She set the unpostmarked ones in front of her mother. “These you haven’t. Marielle, if you don’t mind?”

  Caroline motioned for Marielle to follow her. She led her to the kitchen and then out to the patio. Caroline pulled out a patio chair and sat down. Marielle did the same.

  “So you told Adelaide what you told me—about the letters?” Marielle asked.

  “Yes.”

  “They don’t explain everything.”

  “What is unclear to you?” Caroline said.

  “This whole thing about the house doesn’t make any sense. I don’t see how Adelaide could have thought all these years that the house had some sort of grudge against Susannah. Or why anyone in town would have thought it was haunted or cursed.”

  “No, you’re absolutely right. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “And Eldora Meeks insists there is a presence in that house and that it’s Susannah and her boatload of regrets. I’m not saying Eldora is a fraud, but that doesn’t make any sense either. Susannah didn’t do all those things people have accused her of.”

  Caroline nodded. “No, she didn’t.”

  “So Eldora is a fraud.”

  “I know nothing about Eldora’s capabilities. I would imagine she is indeed more insightful than most people. She knew I’d had an encounter with God at that convent when no one else could see it. So I believe it’s possible that she has been able to pick up on something deep and binding here.”

  Marielle shivered despite the heat of the noonday sun. “Something … evil?”

  “Something strong. However, I think it’s my mother’s incredible fear that Eldora picked up on. The gnawing sense of sadness my mother senses inside Holly Oak is hers. Not the house’s. Just hers. A hard life is difficult enough on a healthy person. But when you throw loss upon loss upon a fragile person, well, it can be too much. I know that better than anyone. We’re not strong people, us Holly Oak women. From way back, it is fairly obvious the illness that stole my life away from me began here with someone else.”

  Caroline’s words were lost on Marielle. “Here?” she asked. “I’m not sure I understand. Susannah wasn’t—”

  “I’m not talking about Susannah.”

  “I don’t … I don’t follow you.”

  “Think about it, Marielle. Who was ill? Ill like I was.”

  And then Marielle understood. “Susannah’s mother.”

  Conjured images of a grieving woman lost in mental illness filled her mind. The inability to deal with truth had started with Susannah’s mother.

  “We’ve all been susceptible to it,” Caroline said. “That’s how mental illness is, I’m afraid. It runs in my family.” She leaned forward. “It runs through my family.”

  “But Adelaide’s not … She’s not …” Marielle couldn’t finish. She didn’t know if she believed what she had been about to say.

  “No, she’s not crazy. We’re not cr
azy, Marielle. We’re unskilled at dealing with reality. Some of us are less so than others. Susannah was more adept than her mother, more adept than I was. And more adept than Adelaide has been. We didn’t all suffer from it in the same way.”

  Marielle thought of Sara’s poems, her thoughts of suicide, her failed relationships, all the things about her that Carson probably didn’t know. “Sara. She … I think maybe she struggled with this.”

  “I think she did, too.”

  “I have her journals,” Marielle blurted, and warm blood rushed to her cheeks.

  Caroline leaned back easily in her chair. “I know you do.”

  Stunned, Marielle whispered, “You do?”

  “I saw them in your hands the night I arrived. I knew what they were. I had read them before. In the studio. Sara kept them there, and I saw them once during one of my epic and short-lived returns.”

  “You … you didn’t say anything about my having them.”

  “I guess I wanted you to read them. The night I got here I didn’t know how I felt about your having them. But then you and I talked, and I got to know you. And I realized you needed to read them.”

  “I needed to read them?” Marielle asked.

  A slight breeze lifted a wisp of hair off Caroline’s neck and toyed with it. “It just seemed very odd to me that you were a happy new bride living in the dead first wife’s house. And yet I saw you trying to hide those journals that night I arrived. That’s what you were doing. Right? You were trying to hide them. You were wondering, maybe without even fully realizing it, if Sara’s fading presence was keeping your new husband bound to her old house, not just his concern for the children.”

  Silence fell across them as Marielle considered for a moment that perhaps Caroline was right.

  “But I don’t know what to do with them now,” she finally said. “I don’t think Carson knows about some of the things Sara thought. Or did. I think if he read these, he would … I think it would hurt him.”

  Caroline smiled. “You’re a kindhearted soul, Marielle, to want to let Carson think only the best things of his deceased wife. I will take them. I will keep them, and I will show them to him when the time is right. Then you will have had no part in his learning what, at some point, he needs to know.”

  “Does he need to know?”

  “For Brette’s and Hudson’s sakes, yes, he needs to know. We’ll need to watch them as they grow, Marielle. I’ll help you. I don’t say that to alarm you but to keep us all from making the same mistakes if the situation presents itself. Perhaps it won’t. We can wait.”

  “All right.” Marielle felt herself begin to relax again. “So now what? What are we supposed to do with these letters?”

  “Nothing.”

  Marielle echoed the word in surprise. “Nothing? How can we do nothing? People think Susannah was a traitor. They think it was her fault her husband was almost killed. They’ve got it all wrong. She had nothing to do with it. We have to do something with those letters.”

  “There is no ‘we,’ Marielle. My mother and I will take care of the letters.”

  Even as Caroline said it, Marielle knew the letters would remain hidden at Holly Oak. “You’re not going to tell anyone about them, are you? You’re going to keep them here without telling a soul.”

  “Susannah never wanted them seen. She lived another sixty-five years after she wrote those letters, Marielle, so she had plenty of chances to set the record straight. She didn’t. It was her wish that no one ever know about the choices she had to make. I think we need to respect that.”

  “And so that’s what you want me to do? Not call the newspapers and the TV stations? You said back in the cellar that there was something you wanted me to do.”

  “There is. But that’s not it.”

  “What? What do you want me to do?”

  Caroline reached out her hand. Marielle hesitated before taking it. “I want you and the children to leave Fredericksburg,” Caroline said. “Move closer to DC. It’s ridiculous the amount of time Carson spends commuting every day. I want you to leave this house. You need to leave it.”

  Marielle had heard every word, but she couldn’t keep herself from saying it. “What?”

  “You need to make your own life, away from this house. Away from everything about it.”

  Caroline’s urgent words flummoxed her. “But you said there’s nothing abnormal about this house,” Marielle said. “It’s just a house, right?”

  Caroline squeezed her hand. “Is a house just the wood and stone that comprise it? Think, Marielle! You know it’s more than that. The perception of Holly Oak is that it is a house of ghosts. Do you think a stack of letters will erase that perception overnight? It’s a house where ghosts are welcomed. Loved. Do you hear what I’m saying? Ghosts are expected here.”

  For several seconds, confusion alone spun in her head. Then clarity fell upon her. She shifted her gaze to the studio at the edge of the garden. “Sara,” she whispered and Caroline nodded.

  Sara lingered at Holly Oak. Not as a ghost but something like it.

  “You need to make a home that is just yours and Carson’s,” Caroline continued. “The kids will be happy wherever you are happy. Trust me on this. You need to leave this house.”

  Tears that had welled as she looked at the studio spilled out, and Marielle wiped her cheeks. Inside, her heart stung. “Are you saying he is still in love with her?”

  Caroline reached out her other hand and covered Marielle’s trembling fingers. “No. He is not in love with her. But he loves her memory. A little too much. That’s what this house is doing to him. To you both. That’s what this house does, because the people living in it have empowered it. It’s us who have made this house what it is. We’ve done this. You must leave.”

  “I don’t think Carson will think this is necessary. He will think”—Marielle swallowed hard—“that I’m being irrational. I don’t know how I’m going to convince him.”

  “You won’t have to,” Caroline said. “My mother is going to ask you to leave. Gently, of course. And when she does, you need to persuade Carson to honor her request.”

  “Adelaide wants this? Can she live alone here?”

  Caroline took a deep breath. “She needs to live alone here. But not while she’s recovering from her fall. I’m going live with her until her arm is better. I owe it to her.”

  “But … but you said you would never live here again.”

  Caroline squeezed her hands and let go. “I know. That was before I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That I could somehow make up for what I did. That I could clean up my terrible mess. I can. I must. God spoke to me at that convent, Marielle. He told me to come home and fix what is broken here. You and Carson and my grandchildren are my future. You’re the reason I came back. You’re my redemption. Susannah found hers here, and I’m going to find mine.”

  Marielle looked up at Holly Oak. “Did she find it? Do you know what happened to the people Susannah loved?”

  “I know Eliza never left Ohio,” Caroline answered. “She married a retired Union colonel. They never had any children. She is buried there beside him. Susannah’s grandmother died here when Annabel was ten, Susannah’s mother died a year after Annabel married. Tessie married in 1873 and moved to Maryland.”

  “And Will?”

  “Well, I can’t really say what happened to Will. He didn’t marry Eliza, I can tell you that. He survived the war; he and John both did. They were both discharged at the war’s end. John married a couple of years later and took over the family lumber mill. Will no doubt married too. I suppose you could find out if you wanted to.”

  “So Susannah never saw him again, never heard from him again?”

  Caroline cocked her head. “I doubt she went out of her way to make that happen. What would’ve been the point?”

  “But if she visited Eleanor and John in the years after the war, then surely—”

  “She cared for an invalid hu
sband for ten years before Nathaniel died of pneumonia. I doubt she ever left the house.”

  “But after he died?”

  Caroline stared at her. “Did you not understand what saved her in the end, Marielle? Those ten years were the years she and Nathaniel learned to love each other. He for the second time, she for the first. That is what saved her.”

  “Saved her from what? What horrible thing had she done that she needed to atone for?” Marielle didn’t hide the disgust in her voice. No one should have to pay the way Susannah had paid. It was senseless.

  Caroline closed her eyes and then opened them slowly. She sighed, as if she were tired. “You don’t get it, do you?” Caroline said. “Susannah was saved from herself. From a lifetime of regret over what might have been and wasn’t. Adelaide had it backwards, all this time.”

  Marielle sensed color rising to her cheeks. She had missed the point. She was still missing it. “Backwards?” she asked.

  Caroline locked eyes with her. “The house, if it indeed could speak, would tell Adelaide—and me—it doesn’t want absolution. It wants to absolve. It doesn’t want to be paid. It wants to give. To be a haven. To shelter and protect. That’s all it has ever wanted.”

  Marielle’s eyes were drawn again to Holly Oak’s stone-and-timber expanse. A sighing in the trees beyond the patio seemed to whisper, “At last …”

  Epilogue

  ards of gray wool lay across the polished surface of the long table in the parlor. Adelaide squinted as she lifted a corner and scrutinized the fabric’s weave. Caroline stood across from her.

  “If you don’t like it, I think you should send it back,” Caroline said. “It’s just new, that’s all. I’m not used to this company. The fabric smells different.”

  “I think it smells like the inside of a car,” Hudson said from underneath the table. “It smells like cars.”

  “Thanks for that insight, Hudson, dear. Can you please tell me why you are under my table?”

  “I’m waiting to scare Brette. She’s going to come in here to ask you if you’ve seen her seashell purse, and I’m going to jump out at her when she does.”