Louisa and the Crystal Gazer (20 page)

Before parting, Constable Cobban told me, upon my request, that Mr. Barnum had taken rooms, during his Boston visit, at a boardinghouse on Arlington Street. Why hadn’t I noticed this before? He was just seven houses away from Mrs. Agatha D. Percy’s home! I must not have been paying close attention when Constable Cobban took our names and addresses. Of course, having just discovered a body, I was reasonably distracted, but this proximity of his address to the victim’s surely was of significance. How easily he could have slipped from his rooms, attacked Mrs. Percy, and returned home without even as much as a half hour passing. And wasn’t it Mr. Barnum who had showed us how to lock a door from the inside, even though one was standing outside the door? Had he been boasting of his deed?

I dreaded the visit with him. To delay it, I stopped in
front of Mrs. Percy’s house. Had the front door finally been locked? I walked up the unswept steps and tried it. It was. I walked around back to the kitchen door, passing the windows that Mr. Phips had broken to gain admittance to Mrs. Percy’s preparation room. It had been boarded with planks, but not well enough to keep the snow from seeping in. Again, I thought of that beautiful parquet floor being ruined. There were old footprints in the snow by the back door, old enough that they had melted into a larger shape than the original and then filled in again with new drifting snow, so that I couldn’t tell if they had been large or small, man’s or woman’s. The kitchen door had been forced open by someone else and swung easily in my hand, and there on the floor, where it had been hastily removed and accidentally dropped, lay a solitary man’s glove. I picked it up.

I paused there on the doorstep, a sudden thrill of fear making me hesitate. What if someone were inside? The murderer? My chest felt hollowed out; my head was light. Yet I knew I would go in.

The kitchen was dark, because all the curtains had been pulled. Remembering the lucifers in my pocket, I lit a candle I found on a side table. There were wet footsteps on the wooden floor, steps leading to the doorway that connected the kitchen with the pantry, which led into the hallway, which was as dark as night, since Mrs. Percy, for her activities as a medium, had shut out as much light as possible by removing or covering windows.

As I walked, slowly as possible to avoid creaking boards and bumping into furniture, I thought of who might be in the house, and why. Constable Cobban or one of his policemen
would have lit a lamp for their work. This person preferred darkness.

Barely breathing, I made my way through the hall, bending low so that the candle might illuminate the floor and I could follow those wet footprints. They led to the circular staircase, and there they stopped, for the staircase had been carpeted.

The house seemed very still. The air was so cold my breath frosted before me. No fires had been lit here since Mrs. Percy’s murder. Who was there to light them? Suzie was in jail, the cook had fled and was in hiding, and Mrs. Percy’s stepbrother, Eddie Nichols, was being escorted back to Ohio for trial.

Or was he? Had Eddie Nichols avoided a second capture, and was now upstairs, going through his stepsister’s possessions, taking anything of value he could discover? Mrs. Percy would have had hiding places, of course, for her good jewels. All women did. Perhaps he knew those places.

A noise, something between a cough and a curse, sounded beneath my feet from under the floorboards of the hall. A cellar. I held my breath for a long while, aware of him below. I did not wish him to be aware of me. When I moved, it was as slowly as in a dream. Candle wax dripped on my hand and I pressed my lips closed against the pain.

There was a door behind the stairs. It was slightly ajar and I could see a gleam of lamplight underneath it.

Moving even more slowly than before, I made my way down the stairs one step at a time. The sixth step squeaked as soon as I put my foot on it.

Quiet was no longer necessary. We were aware of each
other. I moved quickly down the stairs, wishing I had thought to bring a fire iron with me, or even a large pot from the kitchen, for I realized I was completely defenseless and moving toward a person who might be a murderer.

Or it’s just a thief, or even one of Mrs. Percy’s clients come out of curiosity, I reassured myself. Just a thief, I thought. A thief would be interested in this place, for at the bottom of the stairs I saw that Mrs. Percy’s cellar was a bare dirt floor with several impressions in the dirt, as if things had been buried, and the walls were dry stone without mortar, easily removed and replaced. A single rustic wooden door separated two parts of the cellar; the other section, I supposed, was for coal.

Before I could see more, the cellar went dark. The lamp the other person carried had been extinguished and I was alone in the dim circle of light provided by my single candle. Not alone. I heard someone breathing behind me. Pain, a sensation of falling a great distance. And for a great while, nothing.

W
HEN
I
CAME
to, I was in complete and total darkness without even my candle to comfort me. I sat up and stretched my arms before me. There was a wall just two feet away. I turned and stretched the other way. Another wall, this time perhaps three feet away. And so I turned in a circle, my panic growing as I realized I was locked into a space that was only five feet long by four feet wide. The ceiling grazed my head, and scratchy cobwebs fell onto my face.

Where was my candle? Wherever I had been felled, still
on the ground, I supposed, for it was quite clear by smears of stiffened mud on my clothing and the ache in my wrists that I had been dragged to this place.

The door was at my right side; I found the latch, pulled and twisted it. The latch moved freely, but the door did not budge. I kicked the door. It held steady. I flung myself at it. It did not even shake on its hinges.

Slowly, I ordered myself. Breathe slowly. Think of sweetgrass blowing in the breeze. Think of my special hiding place when I was a child, an ancient wagon wheel half buried in a Concord meadow that I could lean my back against and stare up into the huge blue sky, as curious free-flying birds swooped overhead. Space is infinite, and a silly wooden door could not cut me off from the world that easily.

But reader, I was terrified! I knew cellars of this kind, so thick-walled that I could scream and shout for weeks without a passerby hearing. And I knew doors of this sort, old and ancient but cut from hardwood thicker than a man’s wrist, a door meant to last for generations. No one would think to come looking for me here, since no one knew I had come.

Think. What are your resources? I quizzed myself. Lucifers. The matches were still in my pocket. You may light one. Just one. Conserve them.

I lit the match. The room was even smaller than I had thought; my measurements had been optimistic. I could take no more than two strides in either direction. The ceiling beams were thick, the stone walls completely intact. Panic made me dizzy. The match burned my fingertips and then went out.

My head ached. There was a bump growing under my hair where I had been hit in the attack. What had he hit me with? That does not matter, I told myself. All that matters is to find a way out.

But I knew there was none.

H
OW MANY HOURS
passed? Strange that without light one can still feel the passing of time, the day’s tingling shift from afternoon to evening, that lugubrious march into the dusky hour that a French tutor once described as “the hour between dog and wolf.”

Strange that one can be overwhelmed by the worst panic imaginable, and still remember that there is such a thing as time.

Repeatedly I reached out in the dark and touched those dank walls, willing them to move away from me, though they did not. Repeatedly I put my hand to my breast and willed my heart to cease racing, and it did not. Repeatedly I forced my imagination, my inner eyes, to “see” the huge horizon over Boston Harbor, to feel the largeness of that place and the freedom of the birds in the sky following the fishing fleet, but I could not. The large, open skies of my childhood in Concord had instilled in me a dislike of closed spaces; now that dislike
had turned to fear. My breath came only with difficulty, as if I had run a great distance, and I grew light-headed.

By the hour of the wolf I had consumed the half dozen toffees from my pocket, not because I was hungry but because the activity of unwrapping paper and chewing distracted me for a few seconds. By the hour of the wolf I had hoarsened my throat from shouting, and bloodied my fists by banging against that stubborn, relentless wooden door. And I was no closer to freedom.

I forced myself to whistle for comfort, knowing that Lizzie would not mind that my promise to her had been broken for this purpose. Lizzie. How I longed to see her, and Auntie Bond, and Sylvia. Even Cobban. His freckles had started to become endearing, though I did wish he could be weaned from that passion for bold plaids. Maybe Sylvia could convince him to venture into the more visually pleasing lands of gray flannel or blue wool stripes. The thought of Sylvia’s romance lightened me, but a moment later I felt the walls move closer once again.

My stomach rattled; my head ached. My eyes would tear, even though I sternly warned myself that self-pity would be more useful when I was out of the mess, not while I was still in it. I needed my wits about me.

To do what? the child in me yelled back. I can’t break down the door. I can’t make myself heard to a passerby. What exactly can those fine wits accomplish? I wanted Marmee’s strong, comforting arms about me. I realized I might never see her again, and the thought made me shout with anger and disbelief!

“Hello?”

The voice was thin, distant. Had I really heard it?

I shouted again. This time I was rewarded with the sound of a board creaking overhead.

“Down here!” I shouted, hoping to be heard through the thick, tightly fitted floorboards. More footsteps overhead, then silence.

Tears started again. Had I not been heard? Was I abandoned?

No! Minutes later I heard shouting again, much closer. A man’s voice, in the cellar. “Hello!” it called. “Where are you?”

“Behind the door!” I yelled back, pressing my mouth close to the grimy door, the better to be heard.

“Hold tight! I’m coming!”

Oh, bless Constable Cobban and his plaids and freckles, for by then I had recognized his voice! A minute more, the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor, the latch lifting, the door groaning open, and a flood of light from Cobban’s lamp.

“Miss Louisa!” he said, distress plain on his open face. “What has happened? What are you doing here?”

“Help me upstairs, and I will explain,” I said, for at that moment more than anything I wanted fresh air, openness, a view of the sky, or at least of the stars in the sky if it was even later than I thought.

“You were locked in? The door must have fallen shut behind you,” he said. “Terrible coincidence, terrible. The slamming of the door must have loosened that rafter.” He pointed out a thick beam, the wood that had barred my door so effectively that he had had to drag it away to free me.

Coincidence? I did not think so. Leaning heavily on the
young man’s shoulders, almost swooning I am afraid I must admit, I made my way out of that dark and damp place with him, back upstairs, to the front porch, to air and light.

It was not yet dark. I had been imprisoned only an hour or two, though I had thought it was many hours. A setting sun cast slanting beams against white snow-covered trees, passing black carriages, the red scarf of a little boy dashing home, and the spotted fur of the dog that ran loyally beside him. The world glittered as I inhaled so deeply my shoulders lifted and my chin tucked; how wonderful to breathe fresh air! How beautiful the late-winter afternoon was!

“I am a little afraid of close spaces,” I said to Cobban. “And that space was very close,” I answered in response to his question of whether I was quite ill or not.

“How did you come to be there?” He tenderly brushed cellar dust from my sleeve. I began to see what Sylvia saw when she looked at him, or at least to appreciate his friendly freckles a little more than I had.

“Curiosity,” I confessed, taking another deep breath, letting the cold, fresh air do a better job of revivifying me than smelling salts could. “How did you come to be here?”

“Mr. Barnum sent an errand boy to find me. Said he had been coming home and passed Mrs. Percy’s house, and heard strange noises. Said we should investigate before the neighbors started to claim the place was haunted.”

“Mr. Barnum?”

“None other. You look strange again, Miss Louisa. I think I should get you home. Shall I send for Sylvia—I mean Miss Shattuck—to sit with you?” Constable Cobban was fussing, brushing snow off my shoulders, chafing my wrists,
shifting his weight back and forth on his large feet as boys do when they are trying to be polite but wish to run off. His pale blue eyes shone with anxiety.

“I am fine,” I insisted. “I’ll walk home myself and you can get about your business. First, though, you might do another check of Mrs. Percy’s house and see if anything has been disrupted or disappeared, since I am certain someone else was there before me.” Someone who had lured me downstairs and then locked me in a very small space, I did not say. Why? Obviously I was searching where one of Mrs. Percy’s acquaintances, perhaps her murderer, did not wish me to search.

I had been warned. But who had sent that warning: the same man who arranged my freedom, Mr. Barnum? Could he wish me harm? If he were guilty of a crime, he could, my imagination answered back.

“Before we leave, Mr. Cobban, would you do me a favor?” I asked. “Go back downstairs to that cellar, and yell at the top of your voice.”

He sighed as men do when they think women are being flighty and moody, but did as I wished. Five minutes later he was standing beside me again on the porch, in the snow, breathing loudly from exertion.

“I didn’t hear a sound,” I told him. Nor, then, had Mr. Barnum heard me shouting.