The Girl in Blue Page 3

  Chapter Four

  She had waited for Creed to leave the house before slipping back to his rooms. They’d parted awkwardly, like two boxers retreating to neutral corners of the ring. She told herself discretion was the better part of valor, but in reality a little time in his presence went a long way…especially since she was determined not to eat him alive. He was indelibly entwined with Scarlet Falls. It was almost impossible to tell where Creed began and the town ended. He was fascinated by its darkness. She feared the lake hadn’t really let him go that day, no matter that she had saved him. Giving in to her attraction to him felt like tempting Scarlet Falls to reach out to claim her, as well.

  She found the photograph where he had placed it back among the eclectic clutter of his collection which seemed to hold everything from the mundane to the macabre. The crow “watched” her when she picked up the old photo and turned it over in her palm. Worse, the button-eyed doll sat—its creepiness magnified by the evidence of its longevity Trinity held in her hands.

  On the back of the brittle paper, “Clara Chadwick” was written in old-fashioned script, the kind children used to practice painstakingly on slates and women used to use in treasured correspondence on precious paper. Beautiful and slanted, such writing was a lost means of communication gone the way of smoke signals and hieroglyphs. It seemed as exotic to her and strange as she deciphered the name.

  She turned the photograph over again, avoiding the doll’s stare in order to examine the other clues to The Girl in Blue’s identity. The dress was a sailor suit style. The curls slightly frizzed, probably from the kind of permanent wave machine that relied on heat instead of chemicals. Her shoes were shiny and black. Her tights white.

  Trinity glanced up at the doll. It was moth-eaten and shabby, but its stitching was fine and the yarn on its head still a vivid red. She shivered as she met its blank button stare. Then she forced herself to move forward to lean down and pick the doll up.

  It was heavier than she expected. Something had been sewn into its hands, feet, head and torso to make them more solid than mere batting would have done. An aged, musty smell rose from its dress made from sewn-together pieces of various sizes and patterns in a patchwork style. Would Creed know its age and where it had been found? Did he know Clara Chadwick’s history or had he collected the doll and photo to silence some whisper without thought to their provenance?

  A shimmer of movement caused Trinity to turn toward the hall. Nothing. Nothing at all. But she was left with the impression that she’d seen a glimpse of blue. She looked back at the ragdoll in her hands. It was grim and silent as the grave, divulging none of its former owner’s secrets.

  But Trinity still placed it back where she’d found it and backed away.

  She hadn’t come home in search of answers. She’d been looking for refuge, as impossible to hope for as that would be. But the matches in her room and the grim possibility that the fire in Boston hadn’t been an accident forced her to act.

  As she left the rooms filled with Samuel Creed’s assortment of history and mystery, she wondered if she might find refuge in answers she’d never thought to seek.

  * * *

  The lake glittered distantly on the horizon reflecting the weak October sun. For as long as Trinity could remember, it had been a black gleam in the distance above town. Unlike other places, where bodies of water became a tourist attraction or a local draw, High Lake was small, cold and uninviting. Fed by a mineral spring with high iron content, it wasn’t home to fish or fowl, and it often sent a biting breeze down from across its surface to rime Scarlet Falls with a metallic fog.

  Trinity walked through such a fog that afternoon after a midmorning rain shower with nothing but a name to guide her steps.

  The Historical Society of Scarlet Falls was housed in the basement of a large Victorian on Elm Street that also was home to Scarlet Falls’ community library in its upper rooms. The trees that lined the rolling sidewalk were already dropping their spotted yellow leaves so that some branches were bare and skeletal reaching into the fog above her head.

  Trinity hugged her coat close, glad for the scarf around her neck as the damp fingers of mist trailed moistly against her cheeks and heavy on her hair. The town was quiet, though within the next hour or so the streets would be filled with traffic as buses and cars and trucks sought to finish their commutes before night fell. Schools in Scarlet Falls traditionally ended their day a full two hours before other schools in the surrounding area. It was never talked about. It just was. The people of Scarlet Falls kept their own hours and their own council, and it was rare to find anyone who balked at obeying the setting sun.

  And yet the early afternoon bustle amid unpleasant fog wasn’t grim. She heard laughter and cheery calls of conversation between neighbors. Many people nodded or waved as she walked by.

  Trinity had her own hands deep in the pockets of her coat because of the chill, but she took care not to crush the photograph as she approached her destination. She slowed, but not because she was putting off her search. Rather, the picturesque building and grounds took her by surprise. She remembered a neglected air the last time she’d seen the place. Crooked shingles, peeling paint andovergrown shrubbery. She found a different view as she drew closer and the fog dispersed.

  The house glistened with freshness—paint, landscaping, shingles—even the pale purple trim had been painstakingly restored, each artistically turned piece of gingerbread softly highlighted in the mist.

  In the midst of a tidy riot of planter boxes and hanging baskets that had probably been changed out from summer impatiens to autumn pansies and mums in the last month or so, a young woman stood at the top of a ladder tending the flowers.

  Trinity came up short and held her breath.

  She hated ladders.

  But the woman was busy and didn’t seem to mind her distance from the ground or that she was presenting the perfect opportunity for something unfortunate to happen.

  People work on ladders every day. Trinity told herself. Even in Scarlet Falls.

  Nevertheless, she moved forward with urgency to survey the scene with a gaze that rapidly catalogued. The ladder was a new aluminum contraption with shiny fittings and sturdy appearance.

  But…

  Trinity saw as she came close that the edge of a rubber gardener’s mat was curled under one foot of the ladder in an unlikely arrangement to have happened on its own unless the young woman had a death wish.

  A startled “oh” above her head caused Trinity to look up just as the ladder wobbled dangerously to the side with a jangle of aluminum against the porch roof. Trinity stepped quickly over the short hedge that bordered the walk to the front door. She grabbed for the tilted ladder and was almost pulled off her feet when its weight overcame her own. Her burnedarm stung as its skin pulled taut, but Trinity didn’t let go. She strained against gravity and held on tight.

  “Careful,” she called through gritted teeth.

  The woman was thin, but still too much weight when combined with the ladder to allow Trinity to smooth the mat. Luckily, the woman was decisive and quick. She came down rung by slanted rung of the ladder as soon as Trinity gripped its sides to stop it mid-fall.

  “I could have sworn I left that mat by the zinnia bed,” the woman said in the slightly breathless, slightly disgruntled voice of a person who has avoided a careless accident. Trinity didn’t assure her that she probably had. For all she knew, the woman was absentminded, but something about her neat denim jumpsuit and the pretty gardening gloves on her hands told a different story.

  “The flowers are lovely,” she said instead, smiling. No one had been hurt. She had swiftly run her gaze over the woman’s appearance and it didn’t look like she’d suffered so much as a scrape, though a fall from that height would have resulted in serious injury.

  The woman pulled off her gloves, returning Trinity’s smile as she pushed tendrils of auburn hair back from a lightly freckled face. She was startlingly beautiful with alabaster ski
n beneath the freckles and bone structure you’d normally see on the pages of a magazine.

  “It’s work I enjoy,” she replied. Then she thrust one of her hands forward. “I’m Maddy Clark.”

  Trinity was surprised to find the other woman’s hand perfectly smooth and manicured, her nails a lavender shellac. No wonder she wore gloves.

  “I’m Trinity Chadwick,” she replied. Maddy didn’t mention the bandages peeking out from Trinity’s coat, but her clasp gentled when she saw them. Trinity appreciated the consideration and the tact.

  “You’re Elise and Roger’s daughter. I’ve helped your mother with her garden from time to time since I moved here last year,” Maddy said. Her mossy green eyes narrowed slightly. Only slightly, but Trinity had to fight the urge to launch into an explanation for her long absence. There was just a hint of Boston brogue in Maddy’svoice. Trinity wondered what had brought the woman to Scarlet Falls. She obviously knew her business. The gardens here and at Hillhaven were as stunning as her face.

  “Well, let’s see about this,” Maddy said. She turned and knelt to extricate the mat from under the ladder. “I couldn’t get it to do this again if I tried,” she continued.

  “Be careful,” Trinity said again, powerless to make anyone careful enough.

  Maddy stood, and while she rolled the mat into a neat bundle and moved to store it in a nearby cart with large, nubby wheels, she looked at Trinity once more.

  “I usually am,” she said. Her smile was still soft and easy, but her forehead had crinkled. And that’s when Trinity realized what was so striking about Maddy Clark. She was as natural as she was beautiful, completely easy with her looks and her world even when something puzzled her in it. It was the kind of ease that came with believing there was a logical explanation for everything.

  Trinity nodded. There was no way of explaining without sounding crazy. Since gardening was primarily a daytime job, the other woman might never have to worry about becoming accident prone in Scarlet Falls.

  It was always worse after dark.

  Trinity moved to step back over the hedge and climb the porch steps.

  “It was nice to meet you,” she called over her shoulder. She left the obviously talented gardener with her horrifying ladder outside as the beveled glass front door opened with the heavy whoosh of well-oiled hinges.

  The fresh scent of lemon polish mingled with older, mustier scents as she stepped inside—books, ink, mothballs. Her boots made her steps seem loud across the pine floors. She walked on the faded Persian carpet rugs wherever she could.

  A vaguely familiar woman sat on a stool behind a cluttered welcome desk. Her perch, her black dress and faded chignon and the gleam of her eyes reminded Trinity uncomfortably of Creed’s beady-eyed crow. Trinity had seen her before, but the helpful volunteer badge she wore above her slightly concave chest supplied her name when Trinity’s memory failed to dredge it up from the past.

  Violet Jesham.

  “Can I help you?” she said in a rusty, but rushed voice as if she rarely got to offer but anticipated the opportunity to such a degree that the wait was worth it.

  Trinity pulled Clara Chadwick’s picture from her pocket.

  “I was hoping to find out more about this little girl,” she said.

  Mrs. Jesham dropped something she was knitting and came forward with several quick steps, so like a bird ruffling its feathers to hop, hop, hop toward bread crumbs in the park. The low heels of her sensible shoes giving off a muffled swish, swish, swish.

  Trinity handed her the photograph and the older woman looked at it long and hard with the aid of reading glasses she lifted from her breast with a jet beaded chain.

  “Ah, yes, I see. ‘Chadwick,’” Mrs. Jesham said. “Welcome home, Trinity. I thought I recognized you. Your mother and I are in the Garden Club together.”

  Trinity forced a smile. Retired or not, she couldn’t imagine her outdoorsy mother socializing with Violet Jesham. In fact, she couldn’t imagine Violet Jesham outside of these almost forgotten walls. Around them, a myriad of old photographs were framed and hung in an eclectic mix of frames—some gilded, some carved—and in every shape and size. Violet Jesham looked very like some of the women in the photographs from centuries ago as if she’d stepped down from one of the frames when she’d heard the door whoosh and it waited for her—silent and empty—to return.

  “I would assume this is from the 1930s or ’40s based on the ‘Shirley Temple’ style of her dress and hair,” Mrs. Jesham said.

  Trinity privately thought “Shirley Temple” by way of “Alfred Hitchcock,” but she continued to smile. She was grateful for the help even if Violet Jesham seemed eerily out of her own time.

  “The original courthouse burned in 1972, but we have quite a few of those old records here,” Mrs. Jesham said.

  She handed the photograph back to Trinity and motioned for her to follow, pausing only to pick up a knitting basket from the desk she’d been perched near when Trinity came in. Trinity followed, trying to silence the echoing of her steps through several rooms until they came into an old parlor lined with filing cabinets and incongruously lit by an elaborate dusty chandelier.

  A large, yellow tabby cat was curled on an embroidered pillow near the fireplace, but Violet Jesham paid no attention to the cat or the room. She went, instead, to a heavy door and turned the skeleton key that was protruding from a curly cued iron panel below its knob.

  “Down these stairs,” she explained.

  Mrs. Jesham reached up and pulled a chain dangling from the ceiling of the stairwell and a lone bulb flared to life with an electric pop. Cool, slightly dank air rushed up from below.

  Trinity stepped toward the opening, but she paused when her glance was caught by one of the framed photographs hung by the door. It was an 8 x 10 of a group of Edwardian women with serious expressions frozen stiff for posterity. A small gold label on the frame identified the group as the Ladies of the Scarlet Falls Historical Society, 1922. They were an intimidating bunch. Dressed all in black with hats as impressive as their crinoline-covered hips and not a single smile among them.

  Their eyes seemed to track Trinity’s movements as she passed by.

  Both her steps and Mrs. Jesham’s echoed and squeaked as they squeezed themselves down the narrow flight of centuries-old stairs that led to the basement rooms.

  At least there weren’t any cobwebs. Or did their absence indicate that the basement wasn’t even a place creepy creatures cared to tread?

  Trinity was glad she’d kept her coat on when she’d come inside out of the mist. Even with the coat, she shivered as the air grew progressively colder the deeper they stepped into the earth.

  They came into a dark room that wasn’t touched by the glow from the ceiling bulb above because of the curve in the stairs.

  Trinity braced herself against the dark and against the utter ignorance of what was in it. She couldn’t catalog or survey to check for anything out of place or dangerous. She could only stand in darkness waiting.

  The black seemed to envelop her in a cool press of thick atmosphere. She instinctively held her breath against it. Her healinglungs loathed to accept the dark dankness into her body.

  Violet Jesham was silent.

  In the absence of light, Trinity could no longer see her guide. She detected a shift of movement. Nothing more. Perhaps Mrs. Jesham had climbed back into her frame to leave Trinity alone in this tomb-like basement?

  Fluorescent ceiling lights buzzed into life above their heads. Trinity released the breath she’d been holding in a soft sigh. Mrs. Jesham had flicked on a wall switch nearby. She stood with her hand still on the switch looking at Trinity’s relief with knowing eyes.

  But the other woman didn’t mention Trinity’s unease.

  “Feel free to go through these,” Mrs. Jesham offered.

  She gestured toward more filing cabinets around the room with one arm while she cradled her basket in the other. The cabinets were raised up off the packed earth floor by
stacks of bricks presumably to keep them dry when wet weather caused the basement to become even damper. Mrs. Jesham took up another perch on another stool, this one placed so that she would be looking down on a nearby table where Trinity would work.

  She placed her basket at her feet and took out a long black scarf and a skein of wool yarn. She placed the roll of yarn in her lap and allowed the scarf to fall to the floor as she began to ply two long ivory knitting needles that were yellowed with age.

  “That’s a nice scarf,” Trinity said, trying to warm the air with friendly commentary. She moved toward the nearest cabinets somehow, not liking the feel of the hard-packed dirt beneath her feet.

  “It’s for the man who paid for the Historical Society’s renovation. A thank you gift,” Jesham said. “He won’t let us thank him publically. He wanted to remain anonymous.”

  So, the society had received a donation to renovate the house and grounds. No wonder it looked much more well-kept than the last time she had been in town.

  The click-click-clickity-click of Mrs. Jesham’s needles set Trinity’s teeth on age, but she braced herself against the constant clicking so she could get to work.

  It took several musty hours before Trinity finally found records for a Clara Chadwick’s birth and death. Mrs. Jesham had watched her like a hawk…instead of like the beady-eyed crow in Creed’s collection. The older woman had hardly moved beyond the busy click of her needles, sitting on her stool, hour after hour, while Trinity dug and shuffled and sorted.

  Born 1935—Died 1944. Clara had died when she was only eight years old.

  “There was a fever that year,” Mrs. Jesham said over her shoulder. Trinity started and looked up into Mrs. Jesham’s uncommonly bright eyes. The woman still held her knitting needles and the scarf, but she had quieted the project in her fist to speak. “If she was a Chadwick buried before 1945, you’ll find her at the Old Stone Church,” Mrs. Jeshamcontinued.“Many children died that winter.” Her sudden interest and animation after hours of silent, motionless observation except for her busy needles gave Trinity chills.