An Untimely Frost (22 page)

C
HAPTER
38

P
rudence Purcell tossed back the hood of the dark cape that dripped water onto the dusty floor. “I might ask you the same, Miss Long. I gave you my answer about selling the house when you came to Springfield. Why did you come back here?”

“Curiosity, I suppose,” Lilly told her, still puzzled by the woman's sudden appearance. “Something didn't seem right, so I thought I'd take one more look around.”

“You know what they say about curiosity.”

A shiver of uneasiness slithered down Lilly's back. “It killed the cat,” she said in a low voice.

“Indeed.” Prudence pulled her hand from beneath the cape. In it, she clutched a small gun.

Lilly stared at the firearm in disbelief. She remembered seeing the small handgun in Harold's collection. Her mind raced, trying to make sense of what she knew and what she'd seen in this house of horrors. Why had Prudence followed her from Springfield, and why was she standing there threatening her with a gun?

Whatever Prudence's agenda could be, and despite her own inexperience, Lilly knew she was in trouble. But how much trouble? She thought of and discarded several ways to overcome the preacher's wife and take the gun from her. Instinct told her to keep the woman talking. “Why did you follow me?”

“I didn't actually follow you, Miss Long. When you came snooping around in Springfield, I realized I needed to return here and tidy up a few loose ends.”

“I believe it's called covering your tracks, not tidying up.”

Prudence gave a negligent shrug. “I had no idea you would come back to Heaven's Gate after I told you I wouldn't sell, so when I got here and saw you digging in the graveyard I was shocked. It didn't take long to figure out what you were doing, but it took me a bit to figure out what to do about it. And here we are.”

She smiled a bright smile, as if they were discussing the advent of spring instead of murder. “I can't let you ruin everything, Miss Long. Not after such a long time. You do understand, don't you?”

Oh, she understood perfectly. Prudence had no intention of letting Lilly go to the sheriff. No intention of letting her leave here alive. Trembling with another quiver of fear, she cursed herself for not putting her skirt back on. Why was it that her derringer was never in the article of clothing she needed it to be in? All she could do was keep Prudence talking on the off chance that she could be persuaded to put down her weapon.

“So you came back to get rid of the bodies,” she said, amazed by the steadiness of her voice. She gestured toward the remains on the cot. “Why don't you tell me what happened, Mrs. Purcell? Exactly what did Harold do to Rachel Townsend?”

Prudence blinked. The surprise on her face was genuine. “Rachel? How would I know?”

It was Lilly's turn to be surprised. “This isn't Rachel Townsend and her baby?”

“Good heavens, no! That's Sarah. Sarah and my grandson.”

Prudence's gaze grew vacant, as if she were staring at some inner place or thing too horrible to contemplate. When she spoke again, her voice was dull, toneless. “She was only twelve the first time, you see. Twelve and so pretty. So very pretty. He liked them pretty. And young. They were all pretty and young. I was pretty when we first married. Like Sarah. Very pretty.”

Gooseflesh rose on Lilly's arms. She was looking into the eyes of insanity, hearing the voice of lunacy. How could she convince Prudence to put away the gun when it was clear that she was mad?

“Who liked them pretty and young, Prudence?” she prodded.
Keep her talking, Lilly. Keep her talking.

The older woman's sharp, angry gaze swung to Lilly's. “Why, Harold, of course.”

Perversion and madness. The Purcell legacy. “Prudence, are you telling me that your husband, a man of God, took sexual liberties with young women in town, and with his own daughter?”

“Oh, yes,” Prudence said, almost flippantly. “But it wasn't just here. It happened other places, too. Everywhere the Lord's work took us.”

“I hardly think seducing young women is what the Lord had in mind,” Lilly snapped, her anger momentarily overcoming her fear of the madwoman with the gun.

“It was on his mind all the time,” Prudence said, her wild-eyed gaze moving to the skeleton of her daughter. “Not the Lord's. Harold's. It was so easy for him. He was so handsome, you see, and had such a silver tongue. All the women thought he was so Godly, so . . . good. But they were wrong. They soon found that out.”

“And you knew what he was doing all along?” Lilly asked, as horrified by that fact as with the truth about Harold.

Prudence looked at Lilly. “I knew, but I loved him. I couldn't help myself. I loved him and I hated him. I hated them, too. All of them.”

Her gaze slid to her dead daughter. “Even Sarah. They shouldn't have been so pretty.” She looked back at Lilly, a bright smile in her eyes, on her lips. “He liked them pretty, you know. Young and pretty,” she repeated.

Her expression soured once more, and her tone of voice turned harsh, accusing. “They shouldn't have laughed at his jokes, Miss Long. They shouldn't have stolen his affection away from me.”

The woman was thoroughly insane. “How could you hate your own daughter?” Lilly asked, her mind refusing to believe what she was hearing. “She was the blameless one. All those girls, all those years, they were all pure. Harold was the one in the wrong. It was his fault, not the failing of the innocent girls he led astray.”

“Don't be so naïve, Miss Long,” Prudence snapped. “Women have been leading men down the path to perdition ever since Eve duped Adam. The sin is passed on from generation to generation.”

Fearing she had inherited her mother's nature, Lilly had discussed this topic with Rose at length. Everyone was a free moral agent, Rose had explained. Choices between right and wrong were made every day by every person. No one paid for another's sins. Lilly was comforted to know she would not bear the responsibility for anything her mother had done, since she figured she would have enough to account for with her own transgressions.

“ ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son,'” Lilly quoted. “Ezekiel 18:20. Regardless of Eve's sin, Sarah was innocent, Prudence, as were all the others. You should not have condoned what Harold did.”

“I did not condone his actions, Miss Long!” Prudence denied in a razor-sharp tone. “I detested them.”

“By not turning him over to the law you were aiding him in his wickedness!” Lilly cried, her anger once again overruling caution.

Prudence gestured toward the valise. “That's what my sister said in her letters. She'd been saying for years that I should tell the authorities, but I was trying to keep my marriage together.”

“Marriage is a holy union. The marriage bed should be undefiled. What you had with Harold Purcell was an alliance with the devil.”

“Who are you to judge me?” Prudence cried, the dullness in her eyes replaced with a sudden burst of anger.

“It's God's word that judges, Prudence, not I.”

“Oh, yes, God's word,” she said with an airy wave of her free hand. Her tone reeked of bitterness. “I certainly heard enough of that. Every time he took his pleasure elsewhere, he quoted scripture to me about a wife's duty to be submissive to her husband. And he told Sarah that children were to obey their parents. . . .”

“He was twisting the scripture to make it fit his own evil desires,” Lilly said. “That's a sin, too.”

“Placing blame doesn't really matter now, does it, Miss Long?”

“I suppose not,” Lilly agreed, the truth of the statement draining her of her anger. “Tell me about Sarah. How did she come to this?”

Prudence drew a deep breath. “When we realized Sarah was expecting, Harold told everyone in town she had tuberculosis and had to be quarantined here at the house. That way no one would see her condition or question why she never came to town. Did I tell you he had a silver tongue?” she queried, her empty gaze drifting to Lilly's once more.

Lilly nodded.

“There had been others in town . . .”

“Rachel Townsend, Eloise Mercer, and Virginia Reihmann,” Lilly supplied.

Prudence looked at Lilly in astonishment, as if wondering how she knew. She shrugged. “Virginia Reihmann? Well, that's a new one on me, but that Eloise always was a flirt. It was easy to see why Harold was so taken with her. Fortunately for him, she married that boy and he saw to it that the baby never saw the light of day. Of course her reputation was in tatters, and her relationship with her father was ruined, but then, these things happen, don't they?” Prudence asked.

Unfortunately.

“Harold managed to be more . . . discreet for a year or so, and then there was Rachel. She never told anyone about Harold either, until she left town, and by then, he was already gone, leaving me here with Sarah. She was getting quite far along by then.”

“Who? Sarah or Rachel?” Lilly asked.

A thoughtful expression entered Prudence's eyes, tempering the madness for a moment. “Why, both of them, I suppose, since it seemed they were due to deliver near the same time. At any rate, Harold had decided it was time for us to leave town, and when Mr. Townsend came to confront Harold, he was already gone.”

Her features took on an expression of exasperation. “I had to lie for Harry—not that it was the first time. I told him we should have left months before we did, but he said Rachel was keeping quiet, and no one knew about Sarah, so he thought he could handle things for a while.” She frowned in thought. “I wonder if Harold made the decision to leave when he found out about Virginia?”

After a moment, she offered Lilly a bright smile. “Oh, well, it hardly matters now, does it? Anyway, I was making preparations to leave when Sarah went into labor. Perhaps it was the stress that brought it on,” she said with a shrug of nonchalance. “At any rate, he left me here to clean up his mess—as usual. I truly didn't know he'd taken the money, Miss Long,” she added as an afterthought.

“So Harold left by train,” Lilly prompted. “And you were here with Sarah, delivering the baby.”

“Yes, she had a really hard time of it. I grew so tired of hearing her scream I stuffed rags in her mouth. It took nearly sixteen hours for the baby to be born. He was fine,” Prudence said with a proud smile. “So perfect. But he was big for a first baby and Sarah hemorrhaged terribly. Nothing I did stopped the bleeding.”

Prudence gave a breathless little giggle that sent chills down Lilly's spine. “I was in quite a pickle, as you can imagine. I was supposed to bring Sarah by wagon to meet Harold so that no one would know we'd left town for a few days, but she was in no condition to travel. I knew she would never make the trip by wagon, and I couldn't take her by train, so I wrapped up the baby and put him in the valise where I kept the letters from my sister. I helped Sarah up the stairs to this room. My room.”

“Your room?”

“Yes, mine. Harold had it built especially for me, a place where he put me while he was having relations with all those girls. No one knew it was here, of course, so I thought it would be years before anyone found it . . . or Sarah, and by then we would be nothing but a bad memory to the people in town.”

Lilly swallowed back the bile rising in her throat. “So without a qualm, you just brought your daughter and grandson up here to die?”

Prudence cocked her head in a considering manner. “Actually, by the time I got myself cleaned up and drove away, I began to see that it made a certain kind of sense. We all pay for our sins, and Sarah paid for hers. Perhaps you think I acted wrongly, and perhaps to most people I did, but believe me, I've paid for my sin these past twenty years, just as Harold did. The way things have worked out is a sort of poetic justice, if you will.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, I believe that it was our penance that Harold and I have had to live together all these years with me knowing what he'd done to those young girls and our daughter, and him knowing I'd left Sarah and his incestuous baby, the son he'd always wanted, to die. It seemed . . . fitting, somehow.”

“What do you mean you both had to live with that knowledge all these years? You told me Harold died.”

“Of course I didn't!” Prudence scoffed. “That would have been a lie. I said that the life he loved ended. You see, Harold had a series of strokes not long after we left here, Miss Long. He's been confined to a wheelchair ever since. He doesn't walk or talk. I take care of him, and I don't have to share him any longer.”

There was no brother, Lilly realized. The man in the wheelchair was Harold. “You told the neighbor he was your brother. That was a lie.”

Prudence backed through the doorway, a gentle, indulgent smile on her face. “A small fib, Miss Long, since technically we are all brothers and sisters in the Lord. Besides, we do what we have to do, you know.”

There was no doubt now that Prudence intended Lilly to die. While Lilly was weighing the wisdom of rushing the older woman, Prudence whirled and fled the room, slamming the door closed and shutting Lilly in with the ghosts of the Purcells' past. Her cry of surprise drowned out the scrape as Prudence turned the latch.

Knowing that she had just been sentenced to the same end as Sarah Purcell, Lilly stumbled to the door, kicking it with her booted foot as she pounded on it with her sore hands and screamed for Prudence to let her out.