The Girl in Blue Page 8

  Creed had already been out of his car by the time she reached the lake. He’d left the family sedan idling while the sun set. She’d seen his striking silhouette against the sky and she’d seen long white grasping arms pull him into the dark waters.

  “What did you see?” Trinity asked.

  “A pale shimmer under the water…like movement, but there aren’t any fish in High Lake….Besides it was too big to be a fish,” Creed said.

  She didn’t ask him why he had driven to the lake in the first place. He couldn’t have seen a shimmer before he’d been standing by the lake’s edge.

  “So you leaned closer and…” she said.

  “I fell in,” Creed said.

  Trinity thought maybe not a fall. She remembered the stones shifting under her feet, but she also remembered Thomas Craig eating the peanut that could kill him as if he was in a trance. She didn’t have time to question his memory because suddenly the seams of the doll’s foot gave way and a pile of Maiden’s Tears fell out into the palm of Creed’s hand.

  The hands and feet of the ragdoll had been weighted with Maiden’s Tears stones from High Lake. It wasn’t really surprising. They were keepsakes for families all over town. Rare enough to be treasured. Common enough to be found. Most children had a jar full by the time they outgrew the desire to hunt for them.

  Still, Trinity felt something akin to horror when the black bits fell free. She remembered thinking she’d grabbed hands full of them near the shore when she’d fallen even though they never occurred in that type of abundance.

  “There’s a story about a Native American mother losing her child in the lake. She cried herself to death at the water’s edge,” Creed recalled.

  “And her tears turned to stone,” Trinity said, remembering the story from some long ago kindergarten circle time.

  “My head knows the stones are remnants of river rock polished by millennia of rushing waters,” Creed said.

  “But they feel like tears,” Trinity replied. Whatever the science, the stones seemed to hint at something deeper than erosion.

  Creed looked at the stones cupped in the palm of his hand.

  “I can’t imagine sewing them into a child’s toy,” he said.

  “Superstition or using what they had readily available to weigh the doll’s hands and feet?” Trinity wondered.

  “The doll and the photo were part of a lot I bought at auction when Eichelman’s Mortuary went out of business,” Creed said. “For some reason, Old Man Eichelman didn’t prepare the body with the doll the way he was asked. There was a note explaining the family’s wishes, and the daughter’s fear of the dark and attachment to the doll. But it was a hectic time. Lots of sick children died that winter. The doll wasn’t buried with Clara. I bought it several months ago, included in a box of other things.”

  “And that’s when I saw Clara in Boston,” Trinity said.

  “Maybe bringing the doll out of storage and taking it to Hillhaven…” Creed began.

  “Escalated my haunting,” Trinity finished.

  “It’s possible the doll might have been moved around previously. Packed and unpacked,” Creed said.

  Trinity wondered if each time the doll had surfaced had been a time when The Girl in Blue grew more…active.

  “So she’s soothing her fear of the dark with flames because she was buried without her doll,” Trinity said.

  “The note is in the box on the counter,” Creed said, squeezing his hands around the black stones.

  Trinity stepped to the box. This time its lid was already open and set to the side. She ignored the matchsticks, but almost buried in their pile was a folded piece of paper. When her hands closed around it and she lifted it to the light, it felt heavier than modern paper. When she unfolded it, she could see variations of weave and color that made it almost cloth-like. The ink was faded, but legible. The script tight and hard-pressed to the page.

  Dear Mr. Eichelman,

  I am sorry that I cannot speak with you in person concerning the impending burial of my beloved daughter. My handkerchiefs are stained with blood and my wife has been lost to demented fever for a week. We are told to keep to our house. I can only be prayerfully thankful that we sent our son to live with my sister in Boston as this hell-spawned illness struck. We have word that he is well. That is our comfort. Our only comfort. I have no doubt that my wife and I will be providing more business for you soon.

  Clara fell sick too quickly for us to send her to Boston. She is gone now to her eternal rest, but this is where I must confess to you that our daughter has been plagued her whole young life by night terrors that leave her unable to sleep alone. My wife sewed the doll I have sent with this letter to your door. It is the only means of holding back Clara’s fear of the dark. While I realize it is the request of a sick and superstitious man, I pray that you will bury my beloved daughter with her doll. If you had ever seen her, beset in the night with wild-eyed torment, I am sure you would understand.

  Sincerely,

  Thomas Ezekiel Chadwick

  Trinity had tears in her eyes when she finished the letter. The faded ink and old paper no longer made the letter’s writer seem ancient and distant. She could easily imagine his fear and his helplessness—a father who was powerless to save his child, but who still tried to help her.

  “It’s like that sometimes,” Creed said. He still held the doll and the stones. “History,” he clarified before he went on. “Sometimes it can become as immediate and urgent as the here and now.”

  Trinity helped him put every stone back into the doll and she held the seams together while he searched for a needle and thread. He knelt in front of her on the floor, once he had found them, sewing—stitch by stitch—a dilapidated ragdoll for a poor little girl long past any logical form of help.

  When he was finished, he looked up at her and Trinity’s heart tightened. She could no longer deny that it was time, and she could also no longer deny that Creed managed to find his way into her heart no matter how tight it became.

  Chapter Nine

  It would have been better if Creed had called her idea crazy. If he had turned from her or tried to stop her, she would finally know the evening by the lake all those years ago hadn’t darkened him forever or left its black mark on his soul.

  He didn’t.

  Though he was as somber as she was, they both moved with the same deliberate slowness that gave the universe time to show them a less macabre solution. To no avail.

  This was Scarlet Falls and solutions seldom if ever involved unicorns and cupcakes.

  He put the tools they would need in the trunk of his sports car. One long-handled shovel barely fit. Moonlight glinted off a newly purchased ax head before Creed closed the boot. For a second, she couldn’t think what the ax was for and then she realized a hundred year old coffin’s metal fittings might be fused shut.

  She pushed it from her mind.

  Since Creed drove, she carried the ragdoll. It was made somehow even more unsettling now that she knew why its hands and feet flopped with dead weight. Its button eyes gleamed in the dashboard lights.

  Trinity looked out the window.

  The town slept as their car glided into it. In the distance, they saw the tail lights from Sheriff Constantine’s SUV, but unless he looked in his rearview mirror precisely the moment they passed the Main Street and Elm Street interchange, he wouldn’t have seen them.

  “I’m going to park behind the church at the base of the hill,” Creed said.

  Trinity nodded.

  The oldest Chadwick plots were completely hidden from the street. They probably could have done what they intended to do at noon and no one would have been the wiser. At midnight, they were safe from the eyes of the curious even if they might face danger from other things.

  Creed pulled the car as close to where the ground started to rise as he could. Well off the street. They both climbed out. The air was crisp and cool. Trinity started with a mew of disgust when she almost caught herself
tucking the ragdoll close against her coated chest.

  Creed retrieved the tools he’d stowed in the back, easily shouldering a shovel and a pick, and carrying the ax in the other hand. He would have been the sexiest grave robber in Massachusetts if they were going to take something from Clara Chadwick’s tomb instead of putting something back into her long dead arms.

  Moonlight illuminated the old path into the cemetery, although too few steps on its surface had left it barely more than an indention in grass.

  Creed waited until they were at the grave to put the tools down and pull a long handled flashlight from his back pocket. He pointed its beam down at the ground and away from the town before placing it on the nearest headstone.

  The first solid thwack of pick ax into dirt made Trinity cringe, but soon the scent of loamy earth rose up around them and the strenuous activity distracted her from the grim purpose of it all.

  They found the grave to be shallow. Her hands and back were relieved, but her heart shrank in her chest and her stomach sank.

  “They must have dug so many graves that summer. One more. One more. One more. They probably became more and more shallow as the fever took its toll,” Creed surmised.

  Trinity didn’t reach for the ax. Nor was she relieved when Creed did.

  All of this because a hundred-year-old ghost was afraid of the dark?

  Only in Scarlet Falls would such a solution seem plausible.

  Trinity had seen the match at Clara’s feet. She’d heard the voice in her head and she’d seen the note Clara’s father had given Eichelman.

  They hadn’t exposed the entire coffin. It was deteriorated badly. Ground water had seeped upward in the soil creating mud. To try to actually pull the coffin from the grave would have been impossible. It was hard to tell where mud left off and oak began, and thick gnarly tree roots from surrounding maples had found their way into rotten wood and other things.

  Creed swung the ax but only a few times before they could see rotten fabric and moldering bones.

  She’d seen the dress so many times in pale but perfect condition. A robin’s egg flash in the corner of her eye or a full-on visitation. To see what was left of it was a horror, but even more so when it came to the little girl who had worn it and died too soon.

  Trinity climbed up from the shallow grave to retrieve the ragdoll she’d left sitting by the flashlight while she’d helped with the digging.

  The graveyard was silent, but it no longer felt empty.

  All the crooked white headstones and lopsided crypts and crosses seemed in limbo, watching and waiting. For several seconds, Trinity held her breath and then she heard it. The same voice she’d heard in her head at High Lake.

  One, two…she’s coming for you.

  Three, four…who’s at the door?

  Five, six…full of tricks.

  Seven, eight…too late, too late.

  Nine, ten…it’s happening again.

  The Girl in Blue appeared beneath the maple tree exactly where she’d been before, but this time she was joined by others less materialized, but they’re just the same and joining in her childish singing—amorphous shadows.

  But it was the silent shadows that truly scared Trinity. Four dour figures stood behind The Girl in Blue. They were indistinct. Their faces a blur. But she recognized the Edwardian dresses and hats from the photograph that had caught her attention at the top of the Historical Society’s basement stairs.

  What they were doing to the grave had caused the restless dead of Scarlet Falls to come out to roam.

  “Now,” Creed said behind her.

  Trinity whirled to face him.

  He wasn’t looking at The Girl in Blue or her shadowy companions. He only looked at her, but somehow he saw them in her tension, her wide eyes and the tears in her eyes.

  “Now, Trinity. Hurry,” he said. He didn’t try to prolong the experience. He wasn’t taking notes or pictures or even asking questions. He seemed to see her distress and he wanted it to end.

  Trinity picked up the ragdoll and stumbled back to the grave. The rhyme sung again and again in her ears, ringing loudly as if it would haunt every nightmare in the sleeping town.

  With a cry, she jumped into the freshly dug hole, crying out again when her shoes sank into the rotten wood, mud and all that lay beneath.

  There was no indication in what was left of where hands and chest would have been. Trinity guessed. She pressed the doll into rotted cloth and called it home when the singing suddenly began to fade.

  Creed came to the edge of the grave and took her outstretched hands. He pulled her up and she allowed herself to stand against him for a few minutes before they took up shovel and pick to cover the grave.

  Chapter Ten

  Trinity threw her shoes and clothes away. She showered. More than once. She also had another visit from Sheriff Constantine.

  He showed up at the cottage by the lake a week after their night at the cemetery. He climbed out of his SUV and even though he looked a little more tired, with a blond five o’clock shadow on his chin and shadows under his bloodshot eyes, he also looked like a golden foil for whatever darkness High Lake could exude.

  She came down the path to meet him, dreading his perceptive eyes and being soothed by him all the same.

  Because whatever was wrong with Scarlet Falls would surely meet its match in what was right with William Constantine.

  “The inspectors are finished at Hillhaven,” Constantine began. He rolled his shoulders and looked at the lake, but unlike Creed, his perusal of the waters there didn’t look contemplative or peaceful. His eyes narrowed and his lips ever so slightly curled.

  She started to ask him if it smelled like blood to him, too.

  She didn’t.

  “You might want to have a look at some things we found behind a wall in the old abutment,” he said. “No telling what was destroyed in the fire, but there was a boarded up fireplace and its stone protected a few surprises.”

  He motioned for her to follow him to his vehicle and in its front seat she could see a couple of objects behind the glass. For some reason, her respiration increased. She thought about ragdolls and Maiden’s Tears and songs from beyond the grave.

  Constantine opened the door. His SUV was so large that the objects on the seat were almost at eye level. There was a thick book stuffed with extra loose papers and other things like dried flowers and swatches of cloth. It was about the size of a standard notebook made several times thicker by the extraneous keepsakes stuffed between its pages. Around the whole of it was bound a thick piece of braided twine.

  “It’s a diary. A journal. Probably from one of your ancestors,” Constantine said. He picked the book up and handed it to Trinity. She promptly put it back on the seat. It was pretty in a shabby chic, vintage kind of way and she hated it from the second her hands touched the pages. If Creed had strengthened The Girl in Blue by unearthing her doll, what would this find unleash?

  If the sheriff was surprised by the rejection, he didn’t do more than arch a sun-kissed brow.

  “But to be honest, it’s the trunk that brought me out here,” he said.

  Trinity didn’t reach for the leatherbound chest. Not after touching the diary. In fact, she crossed her arms and looked back over her shoulder at the house, willing Creed to waken.

  It was large enough that her reluctance might have been seen as the feeling that she couldn’t lift it. Carved of wood and probably used to transport jewelry, money or other valuables back before luggage came on wheels, the chest was scarred, its leather straps cracked and broken. Its rich, dark wood was carved in elaborate scroll work of flowers and leaves.

  “They’re forget-me-nots,” Constantine said, his voice gone soft and low. “The trunk contains human remains, Ms. Chadwick. Dust and bone fragments. We have to hold them for testing, but preliminary estimates are very, very old.”

  “Hillhaven is old,” Trinity said. She backed away from the chest, no longer caring if Constantine thought she was
behaving oddly. She had dealt with her share of bones.

  “The good news is that the rest of the house is sound. You can move back in anytime.” Constantine looked over her shoulder and Trinity followed his narrowed gaze.

  On the deck above them, Creed stood, dark and silent.

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you, Sheriff,” Trinity replied.

  She found she couldn’t look away from Creed even to make a polite show of goodbye. She heard the crunch of boots on gravel as Constantine walked back to his truck.

  The sun at Creed’s back painted his whole face and form in shadow, but she remembered his warm hands pulling her up from the grave.

  * * *

  She joined him that afternoon for his patrol around the lake. Whatever he watched and waited for—or guarded against—she was by his side. It wasn’t an easy companionship. She still worried about the darkness in his eyes, but when he took her by the hand, she worried less.

  “He’s observant. Much more in tune with Scarlet Falls than his predecessor,” Creed said of Sheriff Constantine as they walked.

  “Says one observant man of another,” Trinity noted.

  “Clara hasn’t been back,” Creed said.

  “No. She hasn’t,” Trinity confirmed. Though he would have known as surely as if he could see her himself.

  “I haven’t found any more matches,” Creed said, patting his pockets. “They kept turning up at the oddest times in the oddest places. For a while, I thought you might be responsible for them, but I could never catch you in the trick.”

  Trinity stutter stepped, but caught herself and continued on. She had suspected him. He had suspected her. And all along it had been Clara.

  “So…I’m not haunted anymore,” she said.

  They had come to a small rise that overlooked the whole of High Lake. It seemed familiar, though Trinity couldn’t remember walking in the exact spot before. She looked out at the gleam of black water and remembered its metallic bite on her lips. She remembered pasty white arms reaching for the edge to pull a boy she had followed into murky cold death.