Nightwing (8 page)

“Ifs bigger, blacker and bold as hell.”

“Sounds like another Raven I know,” Willie quipped.

“Biting the hand that heals you, Will.”

“Not without just cause.”

Frank helped her carry the dishes inside and rinse them. Through the window above the sink, Willie could see the raven still perched in the peach tree watching the other birds. She told Frank about Dr. Raven’s offer to stop by and check her ankle and asked him what he thought of it.

“Why do you do this?” Frank asked. “Why do you ask me this kind of stuff?”

“Because you’re my friend.” Willie squeezed out the dish sponge and shut off the water. “I value your opinion.”

“How come you never pay any attention to it?”

“‘Cause you’re always wrong.”

“Then I repeat my original question. Why do you ask me?”

“If it’s such a big deal, Frank, never mind.” Her voice sharper than she intended, Willie turned quickly away to wipe up grease spatters, but not quickly enough.

“Did something happen you’re not telling me?”

“No,” she lied. “I just wondered what you thought.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you what I think. I think Raven’s very interested in you.”

“Of course he is. I’ve got Beaches and he wants it.”

“I think he wants more than Beaches, Will.”

“Oh, Frank, c’mon.” Willie rolled her eyes at him over her shoulder. “Think with something other than your gonads.”

“See? It happens every time. I tell you what I think and you tell me I’m crazy.”

“I’m sorry I asked.”

“Do you want me to drop by tonight?”

“No. I can handle Raven.”

“If you change your mind, call me. See you later.”

Prank left. Willie tossed the sponge into the sink, went to the French doors and watched him go, his stiff-legged stride screaming bent male ego. She’d never known Frank to be so touchy. Maybe the heat was getting to him. Maybe she should have kept the air conditioner on. Or her mouth shut.

She knew the perfect way to make it up to him. Coq au vin and lemon meringue pie for Sunday dinner. She needed lemons, mushrooms and burgundy, as well as cat food, litter and a cat box with a lid for Callie. Standing at the counter by the window, she made a list. At the top of it she wrote
“Find out about the guy in the riding boots and breeches.”

The big question was how. Willie considered it, clicking the pencil she’d found in the junk drawer against her teeth. The raven cawed in the peach tree. She glanced up and saw its gleaming blue-black head cocked at the window. One shiny onyx eye blinked at her, and then it flew away.

“Go shit on Frank’s car,” she muttered, and glanced down at her list.

Why had she written
how
with two question marks? She knew how—the Stonebridge Historical Society Museum. If she couldn’t find the guy in the boots and breeches there, she wouldn’t find him anywhere. Except in her mirror, maybe. Willie tucked the list in her purse, turned on the air conditioner and locked the house behind her.

The digital time and temperature board outside East Cape Savings and Loan said it was eighty-two degrees and 10:12 a.m. as Willie crossed the street and climbed the steps of the Stonebridge Historical Society Museum. It was housed in one of the oldest shingled saltboxes on the Cape. The curator, Lucy Pulver, dressed in a colonial gown with an apron and a lace-trimmed cap, smiled when Willie asked what she had on the Raven family and where she’d find it.

“Front parlor,” she said, nodding at the low, square doorway to the left of the entry hall.

The slanted floor creaked as Willie stepped into the room. A wooden settle sat in front of the fireplace. Cane-backed chairs and spindly tables holding oil-wick lamps and candlesticks were scattered across a faded rag-braided rug.

Over the mantel hung a framed portrait of Horace Raven. A gold plaque beneath it said he was a patron of the Stonebridge Arts Council. He’d died of pneumonia in 1947 while touring castles in England. It didn’t say that on the plaque; Nancy Crocker had told her. He had Raven’s dark eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, a grim expression and a receding hairline. Give his great-nephew thirty years, Willie thought, and he’d be a dead ringer for old Uncle Horace.

There were other photographs inside a display case built along the wall opposite the windows. Willie turned on the shaded fluorescent tube above the glass top, leaned her elbow on the wooden edge and bent forward to study them.

Most of the photos were grainy and faded with age. Still, she had no trouble recognizing the dark eyes she’d first seen by the glow of the luminarias on the terrace. He stood smiling in a sepia-tinged photograph on the steps of a house, his right elbow bent on the banister, his left arm slung around the shoulders of a man a good head shorter than he was, with bristly muttonchops. There were two brief lines typed on a slip of white paper pinned beneath the picture.

Jonathan Raven and Theodore Gorham, the first two Harvard graduates from Stonebridge. Photo taken June 1877. Both men murdered in Egypt, at Thebes in the Valley of the Kings, August 1878.

“Oh, my God,” Willie murmured, a slow chill crawling up her back.

His hair was shorter, he wore a tweed suit and brocade waistcoat, a high collar and elaborately tied cravat, but it was him. The man she’d seen in her mirror. He not only looked enough like Dr. Jonathan Raven to be his twin, he had the same name.

Only he’d been killed—no,
murdered—
117 years ago.

Chapter 8

Willie stood, stunned and staring at the photograph until her purse slid off her shoulder and hit the floor with a thunk. Startled, she swooped it up by its strap, her heart pounding, and glanced at the doorway. Lucy Pulver stood there, her head cocked curiously to one side.

“You okay, Willie? You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine. Just surprised,” Willie admitted. “I didn’t expect to find another Jonathan Raven here. Especially one who looks enough like Dr. Raven to
be
Dr. Raven.”

“You did?” Lucy cocked a dubious eyebrow. “Where?”

“Right here.” Willie tapped her finger on the case.

Lucy took her glasses out of her apron pocket, put them on and peered at the photograph. “Oh, this one,” she said with a shrug. “There’s a resemblance, I suppose.”

“Clean your glasses, Lucy, and look again.”

“I’ve seen this picture a hundred times, Willie. Every day when I polish the case. You’re seeing things.”

I know that, Willie wanted to shout. Instead she asked, “Isn’t it kind of gruesome to tell people he was murdered?”

“Heck, no. The tourists love it. The stocks and the dunking chair on the common are our biggest attractions.”

“Do you know how he died?”

“Of course I do. That’s why I’m curator.” Lucy winked and tucked her glasses back in her apron. “Real sad story. Johnny Raven and Teddy Gorham were born and raised in Stonebridge. Went to Harvard together, then off to Egypt with the Boston Museum when they started finding all the mummies and such. Teddy was a curator, too. Now, this Dr. Raven—”

“Whoa.” Willie flung up one hand.
“Which
Dr. Raven?”

Lucy tapped the glass. “This Dr. Raven.”

Willie blinked, another dull crawling through her.
“He
was
a doctor, too?”

“Runs in the family. So does the name Jonathan. This one—” Lucy tapped the glass again “—was medical officer for the expedition. He was killed by grave robbers, Teddy by Nile pirates. They saw Raven’s coffin on the boat crossing the river, figured it was a pharaoh’s mummy and attacked. That’s when Johnny’s mother, Rachel, lost her mind, when she found out the boat was sunk and she wasn’t gonna get her boy’s body back to bury. He was killed in August. She died in January. Froze herself to death out there at Beaches, rocking on the porch in a no’theaster with nothing but a shawl on, muttering ‘He isn’t dead, he isn’t dead,’ over and over till she couldn’t mutter no more. Got so bad the other boy run off. Just before Christmas, as I recall.”

“Other boy?” Willie blinked again. “What other boy?”

“Her youngest. Named Samuel. Terrible winter that year. Early frost killed most of the crops. Fodder was so scarce the deer came right into town. Brought the wolves right behind ‘em. We had wolves around here, then. Some say we still got bobcats. Anyway, Stonebridge lost near a dozen folk that winter, ‘tween the cold and the wolves and—”

“Some other time, Lucy. Thanks for your help.”

Willie flung her purse over her shoulder and raced out of the museum. Her hands didn’t stop shaking until she’d clamped them around the Jeep’s steering wheel, closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against it. The hard vinyl circle was hot, almost sizzling, but it helped chase the chill that had swept through her as she’d listened to Lucy.

Granma Boyle had died at Beaches, too, peacefully in
her
sleep. She hadn’t rocked herself to death in a gale, hadn’t driven her only surviving child away with her madness.

The story Lucy had told her wasn’t sad. It was weird and creepy. Straight out of Edgar Allan Poe, Willie thought as she raised her head and saw the raven perched on a low branch of the elm tree growing in front of the Jeep. The bird was watching her as Lucy had, its head tilted to one side.

There were ravens everywhere. Willie knew that now, realized she’d been mistaking them for crows until Frank had pointed out the differences. If you’ve seen one raven, Willie told herself, you’ve seen ‘em all—with the possible exception of Dr. Jonathan Raven and his lookalike ancestor. Yet she couldn’t quell the certainty she felt, or the shiver it gave her to know that the raven peering at her from the elm was the same one she’d seen in the peach tree.

The odds against it were astronomical, but so were the odds that Beaches was haunted. Yet it had to be. It was the only logical explanation for what she’d seen in her mirror— which had to be the ghost of the first Dr. Raven, dressed in riding boots and breeches. If you could call such things logical.

Or coincidental. But that was what it had to be. Pure coincidence that the ghost of Johnny Raven, murdered in Egypt in 1878, had shown up in her mirror at the same time his descendant with the same name, the same face—and the same profession, no less—had shown up in her life.

As for the raven peering at her from the elm tree, it was just a bird. A noisy, nosy, car-crapping bird. No more the same one she’d seen in the peach tree than she was the same Willie Evans who’d snuck out of New York to avoid her father’s I-know-what’s-best-for-you bullying.

“Bye-bye, birdie.” Willie started the engine and gunned it, startling the raven out of the tree with a squawk.

Watching it flap away gave her an idea. Lucy said she was seeing things. Willie didn’t think so—not the way Lucy meant. But there was a simple way to find out. Not cheap, but simple.

The glimpse she’d had of Johnny Raven on the porch was so fleeting she’d thought it might have been too many daiquiris. She
knew
she’d seen him in her mirror, though she didn’t know how it was possible. She knew mirrors were expensive to resilver and you can’t see vampires in them because they don’t cast reflections. How a ghost did she hadn’t a clue.

But if she could catch him again in one of the two-dozen mirrors she bought on her way home—along with the stuff for Callie and the ingredients for Sunday dinner—she could at least prove to herself that she was seeing things. She might even make paranormal history. If she didn’t scare herself silly.

It took Willie the rest of the afternoon to set up her ghost traps, rearranging the mirrors she already had with the ones she had bought—at six different shops in Stonebridge so she wouldn’t raise eyebrows. Or questions. She didn’t stop for lunch, just munched Oreos and drank a glass of milk while she set up one large mirror in every room of the house and aimed smaller ones at them from the corners.

She thought about calling Zen, but decided the last thing she needed, let alone wanted, was the parapsychological research club Zen belonged to crawling all over Beaches with cameras and microphones. Nor did she want to look like a fool if the ghost of Johnny Raven turned out to be nothing more than her overactive imagination. Or underused libido.

The mirrors worked well, except for a few blind spots she figured she could cover with the gold compact mirror she tucked in her pocket. When Callie came into the dining room to lie in a sunbeam, she froze and arched her back at the five images of herself hissing back. Willie knelt and scratched the cat’s ears until she started purring, then she opened the curtains to give her more sun, and went out to get the mail—deliberately, with only a moment’s flicker in her pulse rate, via the front door and the porch where Rachel Raven had frozen to death.

It hadn’t fazed Willie to redo Betsy’s bedroom and make it her own. She had only happy memories of bouncing Granma awake in her lumpy old four-poster, and of rocking away purple evenings in the porch swing listening to the whales sing and high tides boom on the beach. No ghost and his crazy mother were going to take those away from her.

It was almost five-thirty, the sun a blistering orange ball sinking below the dunes. A gusty wind sent sand and gravel dust into Willie’s eyes as she walked down the driveway to the road and the rural mailbox. On the way back she picked up
The Stonebridge Chronicle
from the lawn, unrolled it, tucked the mail under her arm and read the front page.

The unseasonable heat wave blazing into its sixth week was big news. The lead story claimed income from tourism was up 40 percent from last year, always good news in Cape towns like Stonebridge. The latest unemployment statistics from Washington rated smaller headlines.

So did world news: peace talks here, economic negotiations there, an outbreak of sudden and bloody civil war in a tiny Central American country Willie had never heard of and couldn’t pronounce, and cattle mutilations in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.

Tomorrow’s
Boston Globe,
which she took on Sunday for the comics, would probably tell her the former was the work of the CIA and the latter the work of aliens. Why ETs would grind up cows in pastures at midnight Willie couldn’t figure. If they were smart enough to find their way to earth, surely they were smart enough to find their way to McDonald’s.