The Girl in Blue Page 4

  “The story was that a traveling salesman came into town with a cough. His car broke down and he ended up spending a cold night by High Lake before someone found him delirious with fever the next day. Every house he’d visited that week with his suitcase of whatever it was he was selling fell ill. Many didn’t recover. Especially the children,” Mrs. Jesham said. Trinity wondered how many historical stories the woman had memorized over her lifetime and how many involved tragedy. No wonder she wore black and jet beads. There was a sense of mourning about her. Perpetual mourning. Did it lighten her load to share the stories once in a while? Or was she steeped in darkness, each and every tale she held in her head heavy on her soul?

  Trinity didn’t argue that she could have found Clara anywhere in town, not just the Old Stone Church. The Girl in Blue didn’t seem to be content to stay in her grave. Instead, Trinity thanked the woman and helped her put away the faded resources. A part of her wanted to rush away, but even in the oppressive atmosphere, she fought against it. Violet Jesham deserved her gratitude. That she made Trinity uneasy didn’t signify.

  * * *

  When the Chadwick girl finally left, Violet continued her knitting, completely unaware that she stood in a corner of the room where the light was bad. It didn’t matter. Her fingers clicked the needles automatically. She stared into a photograph filled with long-dead eyes.

  The Ladies of the Scarlet Falls Historical Society, 1922.

  None of them truly gone.

  * * *

  Once she was outside, Trinity breathed deep cleansing breaths to clear the dust and must from her lungs.

  “I know how you feel,” Maddy said, coming around the corner of the house. She held trimming shears in her re-gloved hands.

  “That basement needs some ventilation,” Trinity said. She didn’t want to talk about Violet Jesham’s odd effect on her nerves.

  “It’s the cat that bothers me,” Maddy replied, moving to place the shears in her cart.

  “The yellow tabby that sleeps by the fireplace in the parlor?” Trinity asked. She couldn’t imagine why a sleeping cat would bother the busy gardener.

  “That cat isn’t sleeping. It hasn’t been awake since 1985 according to Violet Jesham,” Maddy said.

  Trinity gaped. She couldn’t help it. First a stuffed crow and now a stuffed…

  “His name was Gibbons and Mrs. Jesham swears he had nine lives. She swears he lived here fifty years before he died,” Maddy shared.

  “I almost went over to scratch his head,” Trinity said, glad that she’d avoided that awkward moment.

  “I did. Walked right over and crooned to him. That’s when Mrs. Jesham told me…after,” Maddy said, her eyes wide with a remembered macabre surprise.

  They stood a few moments in companionable silence. Trinity had put her hands back in her pockets and Maddy had crossed her arms. The other woman worried her bottom lip in thoughtful consideration of…something. Deceased tabby cats or something else, Trinity couldn’t be sure.

  “The place needs these flowers. You’ve done wonders,” she said. She preferred to change the subject rather than dwell on darkness she couldn’t explain away to a stranger who hadn’t grown up in the town where a beloved pet might be seen as comfort even after its death.

  “It keeps me busy,” Maddy replied. She faced the plantings, but her green eyes had gone distant and vague. She stood beside Trinity, but her mind was elsewhere. Then, after only a second or two, her whole body seemed to shake itself out of reverie to get back to work.

  * * *

  The Old Stone Church had probably been called a meeting house at one time. It was almost as old as Hillhaven, having been built by the original settlement on the river. It was kept up by the Historical Society and the Presbyterians who had used the building back in the fifties and sixties before they built a new church across town.

  Trinity had long since become accustomed to walking everywhere she went at college in Boston, but the hike down to town from Hillhaven and then from the library up to the Old Stone Church reminded her of how uneven everything was in the town. Scarlet Falls had been built in and around an ancient twisting riverbed where water had once flowed before it had settled on its current course. Sidewalks pitched and rolled. Roads snaked and curved and wound around trees and hills. In fact, several roads in town had historic trees that grew right in the middle of them with forks to accommodate this oak where a speech was given or that maple where a criminal was hung. Maybe some passersby found it charming and eclectic, but if they lingered for a little while they’d realize it was off kilter and strange even as it was beautiful.

  When she approached the church, Trinity noted the picturesque worn stone blushing pink in the misty air and the black slate roof gone to green where lichen had taken hold. But she also noted the sag and slump toward the graveyard as if one too many holes had been dug near its foundation, and as the bodies wasted away so had the ground’s support for the church’s heavy walls.

  The hillside of the cemetery was pitted and pockmarked, and rather than the neat orderly rows of graves a visitor would normally find elsewhere, the stones and crypts were staggered and crooked. It had probably been caused by geography and geology, the lay of the land and the hard rock found here and there beneath, but the affect was far from natural and peaceful.

  Rather than a place where souls went to rest, Trinity could far too easily imagine restlessness beneath her feet. Yet, still, she strolled. From stone to stone. From crypt to cross. The matron at the Historical Society had explained that some of the cemeteries in town had been mapped, but that no one had attempted this one because of its age and the wear on the stones of its oldest inhabitants.

  Trinity didn’t bother with the plain stones that no longer showed a trace of what might have been carved into their surfaces for a posterity that had been overcome by wind and rain.

  Instead, she walked and scanned the names of the headstones and raised marble crypts that seemed more likely. She found a section in the far south corner sheltered from the foggy breeze by a steeply pitched hill that seemed to hold many Chadwicks. It gave her a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach to see her own name repeated again and again on stone after stone.

  The fog had thickened and the afternoon sun hung low when Trinity finally found her.

  So far that day, she’d heard no laughter. She’d only seen a hint of blue in the hallway and that had probably been nothing but her imagination. Her whole body went numb then icy when she walked across the grave.

  Clara Chadwick.

  The Girl in Blue.

  Her arm throbbed although the dressings she’d used that morning were light and her skin was healing, pink and new.

  Someone had trimmed the weeds back not too long ago. Trinity knelt to dust dried grass and dead daisies from the base of the head stone.

  Why didn’t she rest? And why was it Trinity she followed and menaced and threatened with matches after years of silent haunting?

  “Do you often borrow things without asking?” a familiar voice interrupted the silence.

  Trinity rose to turn and face him. Had he followed her? Or had he seen her interest in the photograph and remembered it in spite of the mind-numbing kiss?

  “You weren’t home. I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said. The photograph was still in her pocket. She tried to tell herself that the flush on her cheeks was nothing but wind burn and not embarrassment because Samuel Creed had caught her ghost hunting.

  “Mrs. Jesham mentioned you’d been doing some research. I recognized the photograph when she described it. Why the sudden interest in Scarlet Falls’history?” he asked.

  He wore the black scarf Violet Jesham had been knitting wound around his neck.

  Trinity refused to tell him she’d seen Clara Chadwick before. She wouldn’t tell him about her fears concerning the fire in Boston, not when his interest in history seemed macabre, sparked by that dark day by the lake when he had died.

  Creed must have donated a sizea
ble amount of money to the Historical Society for their renovations.

  Of course, the scarf looked perfect against his angular face and the slight dark stubble on his jaw. His double breasted wool pea coat was open. She could see a glimpse of white oxford beneath, filled out far too nicely by his muscled chest.

  Any story she might have made up died on her lips when he reached to pull dried grass from the fringe of her scarf. She immediately remembered his hand wound into the same fabric to pull her to his lips.

  Here, in the late afternoon light, he looked…different. The fog had dampened his coat and his hair and even his skin was moistened by October mist. Out of the house, he seemed almost vulnerable, though with his broad shoulders and tall physique she couldn’t imagine why she thought it. Against his damp hair and dark eyes, his skin was pale. The onyx chip in his left earlobe glittered darkly. Any shadows she perceived couldn’t be blamed on a dimly lit room. And there were shadows. His face was stark and tight. His jaw clenched, but it seemed more a battle against constant tension and less about her. Until his lips softened as if fingering her scarf made him remember and desire. Then his tension seemed very much about her after all.

  “Idle curiosity, then?” he asked. “Dead children. Graveyards. Dust and bones and crooked headstones…all for an afternoon lark?”

  He didn’t believe it. He knew better even if he didn’t know it all.

  She stood there with a man who seemed fascinated with the dead and gone, but she was very much alive. Her hands were meant to heal and save whenever they could. He had been to a watery grave and seemed to bring it back with him again. With his grim fascinations and the lingering death and darkness in his eyes, Creed might prove to be more dangerous than anything she’d ever run from in Scarlet Falls.

  She’d spent her life learning a way to defeat the darkness and he seemed far too willing to embrace it. She had practically run to get away from the photographs, musty files and gloomy stories she’d found at the Historical Society, and Samuel Creed was their benefactor.

  “No,” she said. She didn’t want him digging into her secrets, but she couldn’t pretend that her curiosity was all in fun. “This isn’t a lark,” she continued. She felt sympathy for the poor little girl buried under their feet, dead too soon even though some part of her might still roam intent to bother and burn.

  His dark eyes surveyed her face. Her skin felt fragile in the breeze like glass, as if one more jarring incident would shatter her.

  It didn’t.

  As she looked up at Creed, something appeared at the periphery of her vision.

  The Girl in Blue stood under a blazing maple at the edge of the cemetery. She posed exactly as she’d been posed in the photograph except she clutched empty hands to her chest where the ragdoll should be.

  Trinity blinked.

  She forced herself to breathe.

  She didn’t shatter.

  She absorbed one more oddity in silence. One more. Each and every one weighed on her, but she didn’t buckle.

  “What happens when your whole body stills like the universe is going on without you?” Creed asked. He whispered the words in his whiskey-drenched tones and the query couldn’t have been more intimate even if their heads had been lying on pillows.

  “Nothing,” she lied. The untruth came from numb lips.

  “Your eyes go wide and your breathing stops and then you catch yourself. You make yourself breathe. You make yourself blink,” he continued a play by play of this moment, but also a commentary on so many such moments he’d witnessed before.

  And still she could see Clara Chadwick out of the corner of her eye as if the photograph in her pocket had come to life…if life could describe the hollow-eyed shade of the dead girl who was actually dust beneath her boots.

  Creed reached up. He touched her cheek and the chilled brittle flesh there suddenly became supple and warm.

  She wasn’t fragile.

  That was an illusion.

  She was so strong and resilient that she could stand among the restless dead in a cemetery and desire the touch of a man she should fear while resisting the need to confide in him.

  He stepped closer when she didn’t flinch from his fingers on her cheek. He stepped closer and leaned down and tasted her again. As if this wasn’t their third kiss in seven years, as if he often leaned to taste her, but also much slower, obviously savoring and prolonging a move others would take for granted because they didn’t have to wait or resist.

  “Oh,” she breathed out when his tongue eased in.

  He tasted her, slight and teasing, but she hadn’t expected the sensual deepening of a kiss that should have been brief because it was public. The cemetery was sheltered, but it was outside in the open air where anyone might pass. Creed must not care if the whole town saw him lick into her softly open lips and she met his tongue with hers because, while she cared, her body had a mind of its own.

  She didn’t reach for him. She responded only with her lips and tongue, kissing him back, but not burying her hands in his hair or twining them around his neck. She kept her hands in her pockets, but both of his came up to hold her face so gently she could barely feel the heat from his fingers. And still his tongue dipped and twirled and dueled with hers, showing her the passion that belied the stillness of his body and hers.

  They weren’t alone.

  There were shadows around them that didn’t belong. Along the ground they were cast by nothing discernible against the stones. They shifted and swirled though there wasn’t a sunbeam strong enough to create them. The Girl in Blue stood under the tree. Not laughing or burning. Only clutching empty air against her chest.

  But for long moments Trinity didn’t care about anything except Creed’s Scotch-flavored kiss.

  Then he moved back. Then several strides more. He pushed his hands up into his thick brown hair as if to hold himself together or tear himself apart.

  “Every time I kiss you I feel like I’m coming alive. Like I’m coming up out of that freezing water you pulled me from all those years ago,” Creed confessed. His voice was ragged and raw and shuddering.

  Then his meaning penetrated and chilled away the vestiges of heat his lips had left on hers.

  He was obsessed by his close brush with death. He might as well be soaking wet and shivering in her arms. They were still trapped in that moment and probably always would be.

  “And every time you kiss me I feel like I want to die,” she said.

  He could have easily pulled her into the lake that day. They could have sunk to the bottom, together forever in an icy grave. He hadn’t, but when she saw his haggard face and haunted eyes she knew the danger of it wasn’t past. She’d resisted the gloomy pall that held Scarlet Falls in its clutches. She’d fought against the idea that she had to be afraid of the dark forever.

  But Samuel Creed lived in the abyss. It was crazy for her to play along its edge, contemplating the dive while he dragged her down with him, kiss by heated kiss, disguising darkness with desire.

  Chapter Five

  They didn’t stroll back together through the gathering dusk holding hands and gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes. She left Creed at the Chadwick plot with his lips swollen and his hands in his pockets.

  The Girl in Blue had disappeared, but Trinity wasn’t fooled. Not by Clara and not by Creed. Neither threat was past merely because they were no longer in sight.

  She walked back to Hillhaven alone with nothing but lengthening shadows to keep her company. As their dark amorphous tendrils seemed to caress her skin, she wondered if staying in Scarlet Falls would invite the shadows to come inside and dance on her soul.

  * * *

  Trinity put the old photograph back where she’d found it as soon as she arrived at Hillhaven. The house was echoing and empty around her, but she hurried because she wanted to be out of Creed’s rooms before his return.

  The ragdoll was gone.

  She stood inside the threshold where she’d stopped to scan the room
out of habit. It was only an old toy. A bundle of cloth scraps and musty stuffing and…button eyes. Trinity scrutinized Creed’s collection bit by bit, but couldn’t spot the missing item. Crazily, her instincts caused the hair to rise on the back of her neck and a chill of adrenaline to flow down her spine.

  Creed must have moved it.

  That was all.

  He’d put the doll somewhere else.

  It certainly hadn’t slumped down from its perch to crawl across the floor…

  Trinity forced herself to step forward and put the photograph of Clara Chadwick back in its place. But she didn’t linger. Because if Creed hadn’t moved it and it couldn’t move itself, then maybe the Girl in Blue had come home to play.

  * * *

  That evening Trinity decided to study in her room. Even surrounded by comforting and familiar things, she was on edge. When Creed came home, his movements weren’t loud, but it was as if the house expanded and breathed around her, more full, with more potential for…something.

  He charged the atmosphere by simply being in it.

  Close to midnight, Trinity gave up trying to review coursework she might never have the opportunity to resume. She hadn’t heard Creed in a while and she thought he must have gone to bed.

  Of course, Hillhaven was never silent, but unlike an apartment building full of nursing students there was no concrete cause for the continuous rustling sighs and occasional ambiguous creaks. Unless the age of its timbers was cause enough.

  For all its size and its years, it should sit, dignified and quietly dusty.

  It didn’t.

  It never had.

  Trinity’s father blamed mice behind the baseboards and spent years watching mostly empty traps and untouched baits. Her mother blamed other rodents in the attic, but there had only been one small confused brown bat fifteen years ago to justify the attribution.

  That night, Trinity listened and could only blame Creed every now and then for what she’d heard.

  If Clara Chadwick had manipulated the matches, could she have moved the much heavier ragdoll? And what of other things? Had the ghost she saw become as malevolent as the invisible threats that caused accidents in Scarlet Falls or, worse, had she been part of that phenomenon all along?