Things like a loft engulfed in flames. My jaw clenched. Making me seem unhinged was the perfect way to cast doubt on my claims about her identity and her attack on Abel, should I ever go public. “She tried to make me, and the Weatheringtons, think I’d lost my grip on reality.”
I glanced at Papa behind me. In his lucid states, he understood that his mind at times betrayed him. He appeared clearheaded right now, leaning forward, the wind whipping his copper hair. “I know who she really is, Verity,” he said. “I’ve seen Miss Maeve several times. I’ve been watching Mr. Lybrand’s home for days, looking for a chance to speak with Lilah.” His eyes darkened. “It took me a while to recognize her, changed as she is, but she’s Mary, without a doubt.” The wounded look on Papa’s face as he said her name was more than I could bear.
I shifted my attention to the grand Lybrand house fading into the woods. “Where’s the horse?” I asked, realizing that Merlin was no longer tied where I left him.
“I let the animal go,” Mr. Lybrand said as the car swung around a bend and the house was lost from sight. “He’s likely halfway back to the Weatherington farm by now. When Miss Maeve comes, we don’t need her to know that you were here.” His lips pressed to a grim line. “And it would help if the law has no reason to think you’ve been at the scene where a body will soon be discovered. I’m still not sure what Miss Maeve plans to do with the corpse, but—”
“She’ll try to set me up, make it look as though I killed Miss Pimsler,” I finished. Papa and Mr. Lybrand exchanged weighted looks.
More questions bobbed to the surface. “I don’t understand how the two of you met, and for that matter, why Mr. Lybrand is helping us at all.”
“I spotted your father lurking in the woods recently, and recognized him,” Mr. Lybrand said.
I shook my head, frowning. “How?”
He shifted uncomfortably on the leather seat. “I’d seen him in New York, many times. At first, I didn’t tell Miss Maeve he was here, for fear of upsetting her. She is … unpredictable when caught off guard. But today, when I found out what she’d done to Miss Pimsler…” Tension radiated from the man, and there was an anguish in his eyes I thought I recognized. Guilt.
“I have been complicit in Miss Maeve’s wrongs for years. I aided in her attempt to harm your father’s mental state. Without my travels to New York to plant her potions and workings, it would’ve been impossible. For that, I will be held accountable by God. But I cannot stand by this time. She’s killed an innocent person, and I fear she will again.”
My blood ran cold. “What do you mean?”
We passed out of the trees. The hot sun beat down without mercy. “This nightmare began, as so many do, with the death of a dream. I was once a husband and father, but a negligent one. I made no time for my family and spent my days traveling for business, gaining money and all the while losing my real treasure,” Lybrand said. “One day, my wife decided to bring my son to visit me, since I was so rarely home. They died in a railway crash on the way.”
The self-loathing in his words was so thick I could almost taste the bitterness. “I retreated to this lonely place, intent on living out my life in solitude.” Gears clashed, and the car picked up speed. “One winter night, I helped Granny Ardith rescue a young woman from the old well in the woods.” I felt my eyebrows lift in shock. Granny Ardith was involved, too?
“I began to see helping the girl as a chance for redemption. During her recovery at my home, she shared a horrible story of how she’d run away from her life, and her true identity,” Mr. Lybrand went on. “Maeve’s grief, her deep loss, spoke to my own anguish. I promised her a home and vowed to protect her secrets. Perhaps for the first time, I felt like a father.” Wind whistled by, and he tugged his hat lower. “Soon, I began to realize she was hiding something.
“One evening, near dusk, I caught her sneaking into the woods. I followed her, saw what happened at eventide…”
A shudder passed through Mr. Lybrand’s body. “She confessed all then, weeping as though her heart would crumble. She told me how a gift from her supposed best friend had trapped her, making her unable to track down the young man who’d left her.” He shot a hard stare at my father. “In despair, she’d tried to end it all, only to find her body pulled night after night back to the well, and her spirit into a terrible, lonely place she called the Hollow.”
Dreadful calm settled over me like a shroud. “I was right, then. She really was dead when I found her in the woods. Then somehow, she came back to life.”
“It happens every night,” Mr. Lybrand said. “The well calls her back each evening at sunset, the time when she died. The universe—or Heaven, or Hell, perhaps—tries to set things right and send her on. But she remains ensnared by the keeping spell. In life, she couldn’t leave its perimeter. And now in death, her spirit can’t depart, try as it might. With the dawn, her spirit returns to her body. The spell has her kept, body and soul.”
We barreled toward a flock of crows squabbling in the dirt lane. I turned toward my father as the birds took flight in a flurry of black wings and croaking cries, their shadows sweeping over his face.
“It’s true that Elizabeth had a bracelet made to keep her dearest friend—her only friend—close, but that was all she intended,” Papa said, his fervid eyes on mine. “Mary was the sole comfort in her difficult life. When Mary told Elizabeth we planned to elope, she was distraught.” Papa’s cheeks went red. “After I left, she didn’t want me to return and take Mary away, so she didn’t send the letters Mary gave her for me. I didn’t know about the baby, and neither did Elizabeth. Mary hid her condition well. After she was … gone … Elizabeth appeared one day on my doorstep in New York, sobbing so hard she could barely speak. She blamed herself when Mary disappeared, and she bore that guilt to her dying day. She’d only wanted her best friend to stay with her. She had no idea Mary would try to end her own life. Elizabeth was young and rash. We all were! She was jealous of Mary for planning to escape Argenta and leave her behind, with no hopes for a future beyond a sharecropper’s life.”
Understanding dawned. “But Miss Maeve thinks it was all a ploy to steal you from her,” I said. “And that’s why she hates me so much. I remind her of my mother.”
“Being with me was the furthest thing from Elizabeth’s mind,” Papa said, wretchedly. “We came to care for each other in that way only after Mary was gone. Both of us, tormented by her loss … it drew us together, in the end.”
I stared at my father, watching the wind tug at his hair. “I can see why Miss Maeve hates you both, Papa.”
His shoulders slumped. “As can I.”
Mr. Lybrand cleared his throat. I had to strain to hear his gravelly voice over the roaring engine. “And no one, of course, had any idea that the keeping spell would increase in strength when she drowned herself in a powerful magic well. I brought Granny Ardith back into the matter once I realized Miss Maeve’s unnatural condition had something to do with the keeping bracelet the old woman had crafted. Year after year, Granny searched for a way to grant Miss Maeve’s request, to free her spirit from its caged state. She felt it her duty to fix the mistake she’d made in working that bracelet for Elizabeth to give Maeve. While Granny Ardith sought to break the spell, I set out to fulfill Miss Maeve’s other deepest wish—to right the wrongs done to her by Matthew Pruitt.”
My fingers tensed around the back of the seat. From Papa’s resigned expression, I realized Mr. Lybrand had already made these same confessions to him.
“I thought I was an agent of justice … taking trips to New York, using Miss Maeve’s potions to cast illusions over your father with spells and conjurework she’d learned from Granny Ardith. The magic destroyed the life he’d built. But over time, as I watched his sanity break, I began to doubt.” The man’s brow creased with agonized memories. “Did anything merit this retaliation?
“Miss Maeve changed, too. With each of Granny Ardith’s failed attempts to free her, Maeve grew more bitter, and more c
unning. She’d taught herself to work magic of a darker sort than Granny Ardith’s.”
“The secret room,” I blurted. “She was working spells in there.” The familiarity of the smells came to me at once. Miss Maeve’s hidden workshop smelled like Granny Ardith’s cabin.
Reuben Lybrand’s grip on the steering wheel tightened. “Everything changed when the Loftis girl died. Miss Maeve encountered the girl’s spirit, trapped in the Hollow.” He slid me a sidelong look. “Miss Maeve told me you came to the schoolhouse after you saw the girl’s shade in the woods.”
I snatched at a wind-tossed tangle of hair that flew across my eyes. “Yes, I did.”
“When Josie drowned in the well and her spirit became trapped in the Hollow, it gave Miss Maeve the missing puzzle piece she needed to understand her own captivity. She’d thought it was the charmed bracelet that snared her, but that was only partly right. When Miss Maeve drowned in the well while wearing the bracelet, the keeping spell mingled with the well’s own power to create a greater force than either source possessed on their own.”
“The well and the bracelet together magnified each other’s powers,” I said.
Mr. Lybrand nodded. “It was the bracelet that allowed her spirit to return to life each daybreak, and the well that called her soul back each night. Their strengths are at once melded together, yet also opposed to one another.” My head spun, and I gripped the polished metal door handle, needing something solid to hang on to.
“Miss Maeve spoke to Josie Loftis, there in the Hollow, and a twisted idea took root,” Mr. Lybrand said. “But you must understand, Verity, I had not an inkling of this at the time. I thought Miss Maeve had turned toward the good. She no longer wanted to destroy Matthew’s sanity or tear his family apart. She had me seek information on Matthew’s health, nothing more sinister, although I was sad to report the years of meddling had taken their toll.”
My gut twisted. “Miss Maeve ripped our lives apart, and you made it possible.”
Mr. Lybrand’s craggy face blanched. “I carried out evil, thinking I was doing good. Even after she stopped sending me with the spells, his decline continued. When Miss Maeve showed remorse for what she’d done to Matthew, I thought perhaps we’d both atone for our sins. And when we learned several months ago that Lilah had been brought into the state’s care, she wanted to take the child in.”
“What about me?” I asked. “Did she have a plan for me all along, too?”
Mr. Lybrand shook his head. “Miss Maeve knew of your existence, naturally. But she never thought they’d send someone so close to adulthood on the orphan train when we arranged for Lilah to come. Your arrival threw her plans into a state of confusion.”
“What plans?”
“I didn’t know what she intended until very recently,” he said, his words tumbling out with feverish heat. “She began talking about wanting Lilah with her always … a daughter of her own kind. She sees Lilah as the cure for her sorrow, the righting of every wrong done to her.” He clenched his jaws, bracing for what came next. “She’s going to trap her. In the Hollow.”
Terrible understanding blazed through me. “She’s going to—” I choked on the words and the bile in my throat. “—drown her.”
I twisted in the seat to face my father’s pale, drawn face. He nodded grimly. “From what Mr. Lybrand has told me, I believe that is Mary’s plan. And we believe it will be tonight.”
“This is the summer solstice, the night when magic is at its strongest,” Mr. Lybrand said. “The boundaries between the here and the hereafter will be thin. She’s made a keeping-spell bracelet for Lilah, so the girl’s spirit will return each morning, as her own does. Miss Maeve has aged at half the normal human rate, given that she is dead from sundown to sunup every day. Lilah will do the same. When it becomes obvious the child isn’t growing into an adult at the usual pace, she’ll hide her away on some pretext of illness, never to leave the house again. Eventually, they’ll retreat completely into a life of solitude. Maeve will cut all ties with the outside world. She plans to keep Lilah in the house by day and the Hollow by night. Should anyone drop by, they’ll have her secret room as a bolt-hole. They’ll live as recluses in our home, never making contact with anyone else.”
He leveled his black eyes on mine. “Lilah will be imprisoned, day and night. Always.”
35
Rushing wind caught my shallow breaths and flung them away. I reached out to grasp the dashboard, trying to steady a world gone sideways. Papa reached forward to place a hand on my shoulder. “Reuben said the keeping spell prevents Maeve from going outside its boundaries, just as it was meant to. She can travel only in a rough fifteen-mile radius from the well during daylight hours. And it forces her to return there each night.”
“I only need to get you three outside the perimeter of the keeping spell, and she can’t follow,” Mr. Lybrand said.
My understanding of reality had unraveled in the few minutes it took us to drive back to Wheeler. As the town drew closer, Mr. Lybrand’s voice grew more urgent. “Both of you need to stay out of sight. I’ll park the car in the alley behind the bank. I believe you know how to drive an automobile, Dr. Pruitt?”
“I do,” Papa said, then ducked into the back foot well. “I took a car when I fled from New York.”
Mr. Lybrand seemed unruffled by the admission of theft. He motioned for me to get down, and since the Model F had no doors in the front, I crawled over the seat to join Papa in his hiding spot.
When we’d entered a shadowy alley, Mr. Lybrand killed the engine. I struggled out of the car. “I’m going to get Lilah.”
He nodded, straightening his tie nervously. “I’ll do my best to distract Miss Maeve, but her attention is never away from the child for long. Get as far from Wheeler as possible before Miss Maeve discovers you and Lilah are gone.” Mr. Lybrand fished in his pocket and pulled out a small bag. “There’s enough money here to get you wherever you’re going.”
I mumbled my thanks and shoved the purse in my pocket, still reeling from the things I’d learned.
Papa clasped Reuben Lybrand’s hand, looking into the eyes of the man who’d carried out Miss Maeve’s crooked schemes, who’d worked for years to unseat his reason and demolish his life. “Whatever wrongs you helped create, you’ve saved my family today, Mr. Lybrand. May God bless you.”
“I will need those blessings a great deal, I think.” His eyes were somber pools under the brim of his hat. “I’ll rejoin the crowd at the courthouse and occupy Maeve’s attention for as long as possible.” He looked at me, and I thought I saw a trace of tears in his eyes. “Verity, be quick. And Godspeed.” He turned on his heel and vanished up the alley.
I watched his progress toward the court square. Then, creeping through the shadows behind the buildings, I crossed to the other side of the square unseen, at last stepping out onto the sidewalk to approach from the opposite direction.
A dance had broken out on the open space in front of the courthouse. Raucous fiddle music set my nerves jangling, and I jumped with every whoop and holler from the dancers. Everyone’s attention was fixed on the couples spinning and reeling at the center of a ring of onlookers. Through the gaps in the standing watchers, I spied Abel’s wheat-colored hair and Della’s raven locks whirling by. A little pinch in my heart acknowledged that this was the last time I’d see either of them, but I couldn’t linger over the emotion. Fear for Lilah drove me forward.
When I laid eyes on her, clapping along to the music, I nearly melted with relief. I edged closer to where she stood with a group of children, then stepped behind a sweet gum tree. Plucking a prickly sweet gum ball, I tossed it at her.
“Cut it out, Cecil,” she said, turning with a playful frown. Her eyes widened with surprise when she saw me, and I put a finger to my lips, gesturing for her to follow. Miss Maeve stood across the circle, conversing with Mayor Ausbrooks. Lilah stepped behind the tree, curiosity lighting her eyes. “What are you doing, Verity?”
I took
her hand and started across the street toward the line of businesses and the alleys beyond. “I’ve got a surprise for you,” I said. “But we need to hurry.” I glanced over my shoulder again and again, praying Miss Maeve hadn’t seen us.
Lilah stumbled a bit, but still I quickened our pace. “What is it?” she asked.
“It’s more of a who.”
Papa sat behind the steering wheel of Mr. Lybrand’s car. Lilah’s wide eyes locked on him, and her lips opened in a startled o. “Papa’s come to visit us,” I said. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
Before she could speak, he flung himself out of the car, wrapping us both in a hug. The rank smell of sweat and fear clung to him, and I felt his shoulders shake with suppressed sobs.
Lilah tensed at my side. She tentatively patted his back, then pulled away. “Can we all go back to the social now, Papa? I’m sure Mama would love to meet you.”
“First, let’s take a ride,” I said. “Mr. Lybrand and Papa are acquainted, and he lent us the Ford. We’ll talk in the car.” I gestured toward the front. “Would you like to sit with Papa?”
Lilah climbed in. She leaned over the seat to where I sat in the back and spoke in a low, rushed voice. “Is he right in the head now, Verity?” Her eyes were earnest and worried.
“Yes,” I said, hoping she’d believe what Papa and I had to tell her.
We drove along the back sides of the row of shops and over an open field, avoiding the crowd at the town’s center until we were far enough away to take to the road. Papa accelerated smoothly, and allowed himself a careful smile. “Come here, Lilah,” he said.
She slid closer, with a tentative movement that was almost a question, before letting her head rest against his shoulder. I imagined I knew her thoughts. Was it worth the heart toll to let herself be close to him, even for a second, knowing he’d soon slip away into madness?
Eventide Page 23
