Ghost Letters (8 page)

“I hope the food's all right,” said Lenore. “I don't know what your grandfather has been feeding you.”

“It tastes great,” said Gil. Then after chewing a bite he asked, “Can you really tell a person's future?”

Lenore laughed. “Of course I can.”

“Or so she says …,” Prescott added with a wink.

“Your grandfather is the biggest skeptic in the world,” said Lenore. “He doesn't believe in anything that lies beyond the end of his nose. I've tried to read his fortune several times, but he refuses. Maybe he's just scared to find out the truth.”

“Or maybe I'm just sensible,” said Prescott, leaning back in his chair.

“How can you tell someone's fortune?” Gil asked, feeling curious and cautious at the same time.

“Mostly, I look at the lines on the palm of a person's hand, or I read the tea leaves in their cup,” said Lenore. “I also interpret horoscopes. My grandmother taught me everything I know. She was a full-blooded Gypsy.”

“Maybe you should tell Lenore about the hand,” said Prescott, half teasing.

Gil was just getting up to help clear the plates. He could see that Lenore shot his grandfather a glance.

“What sort of hand?” she said.

“Ask Gil,” said Prescott. “I didn't see it.”

Lenore gave Gil an encouraging look.

“It was a skeleton's hand … I guess,” he said. “We found it in an old mailbox at the town dump. But when we went back, it was gone.”

“Just a hand?” asked Lenore.

“Only the bones,” said Gil. “The fingers and thumb. It was cut off at the wrist.”

“Did it have a bad smell?” Lenore asked with a serious expression on her face. “Like rotting flowers?”

As soon as she said this, Gil felt as if a bucketful of ice cubes had just been poured down his spine. “How did you guess?”

“It wasn't a guess,” she said, pushing her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose. “Despite what your grandfather thinks, I do have a certain clairvoyance for these kinds of things.”

“Have you ever seen the hand?” Gil asked.

“No, but I've heard about it …,” she said mysteriously. “Come help me clear the table.”

Gil followed Lenore into the kitchen. He rinsed the plates as she filled the dishwasher.

“Do you know whose hand it is?” Gil asked. “Was it someone who was murdered?”

Lenore shook her head and smiled.

“Nothing as awful as that. Of course, there are a lot of stories around here about ghosts and spirits, from pirate shipwrecks and that sort of thing. Most of them aren't true.” Lenore's voice
sounded perfectly normal, as if she were talking about the weather. “But the spinster's hand—that's what it's called—belonged to a woman who died years ago, unmarried … alone. A sad sort of story.”

“Is the hand dangerous?” said Gil, imagining the bony fingers strangling his throat.

“No, I don't think so,” said Lenore with a shrug. “The hand belonged to a woman named Camellia Stubbs. She was in love with your ancestor Ezekiel Finch, who built the Yankee Mahal. Of course, that's not a story your grandfather would have told you, is it? He doesn't believe in these sorts of things. They say the spinster's hand is still searching for her lost lover. Camellia's bony fingers will never rest until she finds Ezekiel's grave, so she can finally clasp his cold, dead hand in hers.”

Gil nearly dropped the plate he was rinsing. The thought of two skeletons holding hands creeped him out.

When they returned to the glassed-in porch, Prescott had shifted his chair around to look at the sea. The sky had darkened and the horizon had almost disappeared, but there was one faint speck of light in the sky.

“Look,” said Lenore, pointing. “There's Mercury.”

Gil could barely see it, a distant glimmer.

“When's your birthday, Gil?” Lenore asked.

“September eighteenth,” he answered cautiously.

“So you're a Virgo,” Lenore said with a frown, as if she were calculating things in her head. “Your star sign is governed by Mercury, which is in retrograde.”

“Don't believe a word she says,” Prescott warned him.
“Mercury's just a planet, nothing more. There's no truth in astrology!”

“Come on, don't be so cynical,” said Lenore, putting a hand on Prescott's shoulder. “Poets are supposed to be sensitive to the mysteries of the world.”

“We also try to tell the truth,” Prescott muttered.

“Isn't Mercury the messenger?” Gil asked.

“That's right,” said Lenore.

Gil leaned forward. “Like that symbol you showed me, Grandpa. The one that's carved in the basement of the Yankee Mahal …”

“Sure,” said Prescott. “But that's ancient mythology, stories that someone made up centuries ago to explain the mysteries of nature before scientists discovered the facts about the universe.”

“Who knows what's really a fact or not,” said Lenore. “Why can't the future be written in the stars?”

“Because it's superstition,” said Prescott, waving his hand as if to shoo away a fly.

“What does
retrograde
mean?” asked Gil.

“For the next three weeks, the planet moves backward. If Mercury is in retrograde, it means that things are unsettled and unpredictable,” Lenore explained.

“Nonsense,” Prescott said. “Mercury isn't moving backward. It's still orbiting around the sun, in the same direction it's gone for millions of years. This business of being retrograde is an optical illusion created by the rotation of the earth. It just looks as if it's going in reverse.”

Lenore smiled at him patiently. “Everyone's free to believe what they want,” she said, turning to Gil. “How about you? Do you want me to read your palm?”

He hesitated, glancing out the window at the flickering planet. When he nodded, Prescott threw up his hands in dismay.

Pulling her chair forward, Lenore gently took Gil's hand in hers. She turned it toward the light and pressed his fingers together to make the lines and creases stand out more clearly. For several minutes, she studied his palm intently.

“So, what do you see in his future?” Prescott asked with a chuckle.

“We're certainly not going to tell you,” said Lenore, “since you're such a cynic.”

After a few more seconds, she closed Gil's palm. Then leaning over and cupping one hand around his ear, Lenore whispered what was written on his hand.

Hornswoggle Bay

Sabbath, December 2, 1840

My Dearest Ezekiel,

I do not know where or when this letter will find you. Perhaps in India, if it ever reaches you at all. My only hope is that these pages make their way into your hands and my words can soften your heart. I dare not ask for your forgiveness, or even your understanding. All I can do is try to explain the terrible confusion and loss I have felt since the day you sailed away. From my window, I watched you standing on the deck of the Moorish Queen as the crew cast off. When the clipper's sails filled with the wind, I felt my breath go out of me.

At that moment, I regretted every churlish word I spoke to you these past few weeks.

You must hate me for it, but please know that when I said I could not marry you, because my parents had chosen another man, it was a naive girl who spoke—an innocent, reckless child, who destroyed the very thing she cherished most. I know it will offer no consolation, nor ease your revulsion for me, but I have broken off my engagement to Edward Muybridge and told my parents that I will never accept any other suitor but you. This I know will be impossible, dear Ezekiel, for I have hurt you deeply and unjustly.

You are the only man I can ever love, but in my foolishness I did not realize it until the moment you set sail for India. My only hope is that someday you will return, so that I can see you riding down the street again. I long for another glimpse of you, as on that first day I saw you arriving at church in your blue serge coat and buckskin boots. How could I have let the disapproval of my family and friends blind me to your love?

Every night I pray that I shall wake up the next morning to see you standing on the foredeck when the clipper returns. But there is no reason I should hope for any such miracle.
When you swore that you would stay away from Massachusetts for the rest of your life, I felt as if a door had been shut upon my heart, a heavy oak door that will outlast us all.

Beloved Ezekiel, I have cut a lock of my hair and placed it between these pages, so that you may remember how you twisted it gently between your fingers that day last spring, when we rode out to the ice pond near your home. Do you still recall that morning, or have you cast all of our precious memories into the sea?

I do not hope for a reply to this letter, even if it reaches you in that far-off land. But know that I will love you forever and that no other man shall ever take this hand of mine in his.

Farewell, my darling,

Your one true love,

Camellia

More than 150 years after it was written, this letter remains unopened, these tragic words unread. The handwriting is perfect, each letter clearly formed, but Camellia's plea is never answered because her letter fails to reach its destination. The sheets of paper that she folded so carefully, and kissed with trembling lips, remain inside the stiff, unyielding envelope that also contains a curl of her chestnut brown hair, tied with a ribbon cut
from her dress. If only the letter had been delivered to Ezekiel he might have changed his mind, understanding her pain, even as he suffered his own anguish. Reading that she had broken off her engagement, he might have returned to Massachusetts and reclaimed his love.

Instead, the letter is lost. When Camellia hands it to the captain of the
Bride of Capri
, another of Ezekiel's clipper ships, he promises to deliver it to his employer in India. Sadly, the letter disappears during a hurricane off the Cape of Good Hope. Though the captain kept it safely in one of his chests, the violence of the storm overturns his boxes and baggage. The contents spill out onto the floor of the cabin and the letter slides across the polished oak boards that lean and sway with the tumult of the waves. Camellia's letter slips through a gap in the floorboards and drops into a crevice between the ship's hull and the cargo hold, which is filled with blocks of ice covered in sawdust. Though the captain remembers his promise and searches for the letter after the storm, he cannot find it. With every intention of confessing this to Ezekiel, he sails on to Calcutta. A week after reaching port, however, he falls victim to virulent cholera and dies a sudden, delirious death.

These tearful words, which might have reversed the course of love and brought Ezekiel home from India, are entombed within the
Bride of Capri
, which later sinks off Nantucket in 1865.

Yet, the envelope is eventually retrieved—not by scuba divers who search the wreck years later, not by the schools of cod and halibut that feed on scullery scraps from the
Bride of Capri
, nor the lobsters that feast on her crew. Instead, it is recovered by a
disembodied cluster of bones that scuttles along the sea floor like a minstrel crab and plucks the letter from the shattered hull. Quick as pincers, the macabre fingers grab Camellia's letter and carry it to shore, where the unknown postman waits. A melancholy figure in his gray blue uniform, he watches with sad eyes as the hand emerges from the receding tide, carrying Camellia's unopened letter.

A fetid whiff of putrid flesh, combined with the scent of lilacs and the briny smell of the sea, accompanies the gruesome hand as it drops the letter in the mailbag. Lifting himself onto weary legs, the aged postman continues on his way. His shoulders slump under the weight he carries, a sack full of dead letters, the heavy burden of messages unread.

Hi Sikander,

I wish I could do something to help rescue your friend. Maybe, if I climbed inside this bottle, I might be able to travel back in time and help you hunt for Lawrence. But, of course, I can't.

India seems so far away from here. And when I think that you're living a hundred years ago, Ajeebgarh feels even farther away, like another planet in a different galaxy. I keep forgetting that in your time there are so many things that haven't been invented, like television and computers. Of course, living with my grandfather right now, I don't have any of these things myself.

Sometimes I feel as if this bottle is a kind
of instant messenger. Of course, you probably don't know what that is, and I'm not sure if I can explain it. I also can't explain how this bottle works. Do you have any idea why it carries our messages back and forth?

Write again soon.

Gil

Dear Gil,

I got your letter a few minutes ago and am replying immediately. It doesn't seem to take any time at all for this bottle to travel from here to there and back again. I don't know what makes this bottle work, except maybe it's some kind of magic.

We still don't have any news about Lawrence and I don't want to imagine what has happened to him. His kidnappers are vicious men, and if they don't get a ransom, who knows what they will do. I keep wishing we hadn't gone fishing that day. None of this would have happened. But you can't go back and change things, can you? Of course I know
there's nothing you can do to help. By the time you get this letter, a hundred years from now, all of us will probably be dead.