The Fate of Mercy Alban (34 page)

I was squeezing Matthew’s hand so tightly that it was turning white. I couldn’t take my eyes off Carter. He looked so earnest that I knew he believed everything he was saying to be true. Based on what Jane had said earlier—Mercy was dead, and then she wasn’t—I knew she believed it, too.

I didn’t know what I believed. I could tell Matthew was feeling the same way.

The only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to hear the rest of the story. I’d reserve judgment until then.

“Go on, Carter,” I urged him. “We’re listening.”

He lifted his glass to his lips with shaking hands, swallowed, and cleared his throat. “It started with animals,” he whispered. “Thomas would find them in the yard, in the garden. Even on the patio. Squirrels, birds, chipmunks. Even the odd duck or two.”

My whole body went cold. “You’d find them dead?” I choked out the words, not quite believing I was saying them.

He nodded, lifting a hand to his forehead and rubbing his brow. “We had no idea what was going on at first,” he said. “But then I saw it myself, child. One afternoon, I was in the carriage house and, through the window, I saw Mercy in the yard. She lured a chipmunk to her with a handful of peanuts and then, quick as a wink, grabbed it and snapped its neck. And then she laughed. She dropped its poor little body, turned around, and saw me looking at her through the window. And she laughed again, locking eyes with me. I’ll tell you, it gave me a chill.”

I snuggled closer to Matthew.

“And then the accidents started happening,” he went on. “Workmen would be on the roof and their ladders would go missing, stranding them there. Knives would be buried, blade side up, in the dirt to cut the hands of the gardeners. Tires on the cars would be slashed.”

“She was trying to intentionally hurt people?” Matthew asked. “What did you—or more appropriately, her parents—do about it?”

Carter nodded. “Mr. Alban saw it right away, he knew. But Mrs. Charity wasn’t having any of it. She was blind to what was going on, and nobody could make her see. But then Mercy tried to drown her sister in the lake, almost taking Johnny with them in the bargain.”

He dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief. “We heard it, all of us. Fate’s terrified screams, Johnny’s shouting. The splashing. We ran to the lakeshore, me from the carriage house, Thomas from the gardens in back, Jane and her mother, along with Mr. and Mrs. Alban from the house, and we found Mercy holding her sister underwater, with Johnny trying everything he could to stop it. She turned on him, then, pushing him under …” He shook his head, remembering. “It took all of us to get her off of them. She was just a child, but it was like she had otherworldly strength.”

I unfolded myself from the couch to grab the scotch decanter and refilled Carter’s glass. “Then what happened?” I asked as I poured.

“Later that day, once Fate had been tended to and Johnny had calmed down, I heard them arguing about it, Mr. and Mrs. Alban. He wanted to send Mercy away. Initially, she would hear none of it. But she couldn’t deny that the girl had tried to hurt her other two children. She realized Mercy was dangerous and something had to be done.

“Soon enough, I was sent to collect the family doctor, who had been administering to the Albans for many years. He was sworn to secrecy—nobody was to know Mercy was alive. The world thought she was dead and buried, and by Mr. Alban’s decree, it was going to stay that way. The doctor prescribed something for her, sedatives, I imagine. And Mr. Alban moved Fate and Johnny downstairs and locked Mercy away on the third floor. She was to live there, in captivity so to speak, away from everyone, until he and Mrs. Charity could agree on what to do.”

“That’s when he must have built the wing on the facility in Switzerland,” I offered, shooting Matthew a look. “The doctor there told me it was built when Mercy was still a child.”

Carter nodded.

“So what? She was locked in her rooms on the third floor for years?” I asked, shaking my head.

“She was,” he said. “Charity tended to her, kept her company, fed her, and even, at night, took her outside. Mercy never interacted with anyone, except her mother, again. Or so we thought.”

Another chill ran through me.

“Nobody knew that she had discovered the passageways. They had been locked, but she was able to unlock them. They became her world. She would creep about, watching us, watching her family, her sister especially.”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “If nobody knew that, how do you know it?”

“I shouldn’t say ‘nobody.’ There was one person who knew. Charity. When Charity discovered that Mercy had been using the passageways, she encouraged it. She was torn up about her child, you see, having to be locked away. It was guilt she felt because of her part in it. She knew her husband would send Mercy away if the child didn’t remain sequestered and hidden, but even so, she wanted to give Mercy, evil as she was, some kind of life. And that’s how the passageways became her world. Mercy began to live through her twin sister, imagining it was her out there in the main part of the house, doing whatever it was Fate was doing. Mercy became Fate’s shadow.”

I shivered and glanced at all four walls in the room. Was Mercy in the passageways right now, watching us? Did she have the nurse with her, or worse?

“Of course, nobody knew about this until much, much later,” Carter went on. “And the household gradually returned to normal. Years passed. Fate met your mother at school, dear Adele, who brought so much light and love and laughter into this household. She became part of the family very quickly. Mrs. Charity especially took to her, and I think Fate looked upon her as the sister she no longer had. All of us began to exhale, believing the situation was handled for good. We didn’t know something much, much worse was brewing.”

Carter, do you know for sure what happened to David Coleville that night?” Matthew asked.

Carter held up one hand, and in the firelight it cast a monstrous shadow on the wall behind him. “Back up, Vicar. You’re getting ahead of yourself. There’s part of the story you don’t yet know.” He paused to take a sip of scotch and leaned back in his chair. “I haven’t talked about this in so many years, and yet I can remember every detail as though it were yesterday.”

“Traumatic situations are like that,” Matthew said, squeezing my hand. “Sometimes they don’t recede.” After a moment, he added, “Go on, Carter.”

“We all thought Mercy had disappeared a full year before that ill-fated party happened.”

“Disappeared? But—”

Just then, I heard a clattering in the entryway.

“Mom?” Amity appeared, dressed in a rain slicker.

“Honey!” I rushed to her side and wrapped her in my arms. “What are you doing here?”

She scowled at me. “What do you mean? We got a call at Heather’s house that it was safe for me to come home. The police told Heather’s mom you were expecting me.”

The police hadn’t even arrived yet, so obviously they hadn’t called to tell Amity it was safe to come home.
Then who …?
As that thought occurred to me, a sense of terror, the likes of which I had never known, took hold of me. The last thing I wanted was to have my daughter here. But she was standing right in front of me, smiling, and I didn’t want to frighten her.

“Good, honey,” I said to her, helping her out of her slicker and leading her into the living room, my hand firmly around her arm. The more people around my daughter at that moment, the better. “Carter is just telling us a story.”

I settled Amity onto the sofa between Matthew and me as Carter went on. “Come to think of it, the journalist was here that summer also. The four of them, Johnny, Fate, David, and Adele, were thick as thieves, always playing croquet or sailing or just having drinks on the patio. I’d drive the four of them into town for movies or a night out.” He smiled, thinking back. “It was then Mercy disappeared, just before the summer solstice party. Charity discovered she was gone, and as you can imagine, she raised quite the ruckus with her husband, but she had to do it quietly because, remember, nobody outside the family, not even Adele, knew Mercy even existed.”

“My grandfather took her to the hospital in Switzerland, then, without anyone knowing.”

Carter shook his head. “Back then, we, the staff, were not told anything, other than that she was gone and wasn’t coming back. And frankly, we didn’t care if she was dead, locked up, or if she simply went back to whatever evil had made her. All we knew was she was gone. And we were free of her.”

I cut him off. “But … just a moment ago, you said you didn’t realize ‘something much, much worse’ was brewing. That doesn’t sound worse to me. That sounds like the solution.”

“He hasn’t gotten to the best part yet.”

The voice was coming from behind us. Matthew and I snapped our heads around toward the archway and saw Mercy standing there, smiling, holding a ream of paper that I could only assume was the manuscript. “It’s all in here. Haven’t you read it, Grace?”

Matthew was on his feet in an instant, a look of terrible calm on his face. “Miss Alban! So nice to see you again.”

She took a few steps into the room. “I asked Grace a question. Haven’t you read it, my dear? You’re the one who found it after all this time. Both of you.” She smiled at Matthew.

Her stark lucidity, her complete control of herself, sent a shot of icy dread through my veins. She certainly was not the fanciful old woman I’d met at the funeral who thought she was at a party in 1956, nor the confused, rumpled lady dancing in circles around the girls. I wondered if the lack of her medication had caused that strange, deluded behavior, or if it was all an act, designed to shock and deceive.

“I knew he loved me,” Mercy went on, coming closer still. The garish makeup she wore to the funeral was gone. Her hair was neatly pulled back, and she was wearing a simple blouse and slacks. She looked more like a fit, active seventy-year-old who had spent a lifetime exercising and eating right rather than someone who had languished in a drug-induced haze at a mental hospital for fifty years.

She set the manuscript on the table before us, and as she did so, I saw that she cradled a large kitchen knife, red with blood, in one hand.

“I knew he loved me,” she said, smiling a radiant smile. “He titled this book for me. Why, it’s all about me!”

“You were the girl in white,” Matthew said, taking my hand and leading me and Amity across the room, putting a table and a sofa of distance between us and Mercy. He nodded his head slightly to Carter, who made a show of refilling his drink but joined us.

“Of course I was, you silly man. Who else? The story frightened you; I know it did. You looked positively ashen when she was reading it to you.”

“You were watching us,” I said. “In the walls.”

“As Carter just said, the passageways were my world,” she said, shifting her focus to rest upon him. “My, haven’t you gotten old. You were always so handsome.”

And then she turned her attention to me. As she held my gaze, her face suddenly seemed very close to mine, and I became transfixed by her eyes—so dead, so lifeless, as though I were looking at a mannequin or into the eyes of a cobra hypnotizing its prey.

“Where is the nurse?” I said finally, my voice wavering.

“She didn’t see me until it was too late.” Mercy giggled. “It’s so easy to catch people unaware. Lucky thing for the rain today, isn’t it? You wouldn’t want to have to clean up that much blood. Such a bother.”

While Mercy was talking, I saw Matthew slip his phone off the table and hold it behind his back. I could only assume he was dialing 911, and I spoke up, so the police could hear what I was saying.

“So you’re telling us that the nurse is dead?”

Mercy smiled. “Aren’t we all, my dear?”

My stomach tightened as her grin widened, and as it did so, her face seemed to morph and change—her eyes glinted a bit too brightly, her mouth was contorted like an evil clown’s. In that moment, I became convinced that everything Carter had said, the whole fantastical story, was true. This thing standing before me wasn’t alive, not really.

“You killed the nurse, Mercy?” I repeated, for the police’s benefit, hoping they were listening on the other end of the line. “Is that what you’re saying to me?”

“I’m afraid it was necessary,” she said, moving over to the sofa and sinking down onto the cushions, crossing her legs. “I’m not going back there. Now that I’m off those ridiculous medications, I can see clearly. It’s no fun there. No passageways, no people to spy on. Nothing to do. No, I’m staying right here. This is my home, after all.”

“And Jane?” I said, a bit louder than I had intended. “Jane Jameson? Did you try to kill her, too?”

Mercy shook her head at me and laughed. “Who else, silly girl? I hardly think Carter here would have done it. He’s loved her his whole life. Isn’t that right, Carter?”

I turned to him in time to see his face go ashen white, and then redden. “That’s okay, Carter.” I smiled at him. “We all love her.” A tear escaped one of his eyes and he brushed it away with his hand.

“She intended to put me back on those horrible, mind-numbing medications,” Mercy said. “That just wouldn’t do. Not at all.”