The Revenant (19 page)

Chapter 26

W
E RETURNED TO THE SEMINARY
to find Jimmy rolling up carpets and mopping the floors. He stared at our wild hair and rumpled clothing.

I turned to Toomey, hardly knowing what to do with him. “You look dry enough now. Why don’t you wait in the parlor?”

“What do you mean to do?” His face drooped with confusion.

“I’m going to clean this mess I helped make.”

After walking wearily up the stairs to change clothes and tidy myself, I returned to the first floor and took a mop to the vestibule floor. The stench of the water made me a little sick and shivery, but the work helped numb the fear … and the sense of impending doom as I waited for Miss Crenshaw to return. There would be no reprieve—I knew that. I was about to lose everything, and I’d brought this fate upon myself.

Jimmy stood in the doorway, frowning. “That’s not proper work for a teacher, miss.”

I paused to wipe my face with my sleeve. “I’ve a feeling I won’t be a teacher much longer.”

He shrugged and went back to mopping the corridor.

I worked in quiet. Odd how the seminary felt so peaceful when only an hour ago it was erupting with rage. The building stank of dank water, but at the same time it felt
cleansed
. I set my mop against the wall and walked toward Jimmy. “Do you still feel that strangeness?” He stared at me blankly—a little too blankly—so I tried again. “You told Olivia and me you’d seen ghosts before, but this time it was different.”

He nodded. “The anger was thick in the air. That’s what it was, you know. That’s what all this is.” He gestured at the water on the floor. “Wrath. I felt it, tasted it on the air, smelled its stench. I thought it smelled like death, but it was more like … 
blood.
”

“Do you still smell it?”

He sniffed the air and looked thoughtful. “Nah. I don’t smell it no more. I smell that filthy water, but we’ll get rid of that. The rest is … gone.”

I threw my back into the work after that, grateful for the distraction. When Miss Crenshaw finally appeared at the front doorway with Toomey behind her, I set the mop down and made to follow her to the office.

She shook her head. “Your stepfather has made himself known to me. I will speak with him first.”

She certainly knew how to stretch my nerves to the breaking point. I couldn’t bear to mop the floor any longer, so I sat on the edge of the settee in the parlor—a room now warm and peaceful like ordinary parlors, but very lonely. Not even a ghost to keep me company.

Finally, the office door opened with a creak and Toomey’s footsteps echoed in the corridor. He appeared at the parlor door, his eyebrows raised.

“My turn?” I asked.

He nodded slowly. My stomach sank with dread as I walked past him.

Miss Crenshaw looked gray and shrunken behind her enormous desk. She studied my face for a moment before speaking. “Perhaps we should find Nurse Gott and have her take a look at you?”

I shook my head. “I’m only bruised—there’s no need to send for her. Where’s Eli?”

She frowned. “Once he told me what happened, I sent him to the sheriff. He was to give his testimony quickly and return to the male seminary.”

“He saved my life,” I murmured.

“For that, I am grateful. It seems we all should be grateful to you and Mr. Sevenstar. Had you not intervened, we’d never have known how Ella Blackstone and Cale Hawkins died, and Miss Bell might well have married a murderer.”

I must have looked surprised, for she raised an eyebrow and smiled faintly.

“Did you think I could not see how she fancied him? I may seem ancient in your mind, but I assure you I’m not blind.”

I lowered my head, knowing that her smile—her brief flash of humor—would be the last sign of kindness I would get from her.

“However,” she continued with a sigh, “I have never before been so utterly deceived by anyone in my entire life. Your stepfather has explained everything—how you impersonated one of your classmates and ran away.” Her eyes flashed with anger. “What were you playing at? How could you lie and insinuate yourself into our school? Our lives?”

I thought of home and my mother—of how hopeless and confining it all seemed, but how to explain that without sounding like a selfish brat? “I was so desperate to get away, Miss Crenshaw.”

“Why? Because your family needed you at home for a while? Your first duty should always be to your family!”

“Miss Crenshaw, how did my stepfather find me?”

“He can tell you that.”

“But I want to hear it from you. Was it Fannie Bell?”

She clasped her hands on top of the desk. “She suspected you weren’t who you said you were, so she wrote to the Columbia Athenaeum. They, in turn, wrote to your parents.”

You won’t feel so kindly later
, Fannie had said. And she’d almost looked repentant. I knew exactly when she’d mailed that letter. We’d started rehearsals for the play after that, and though I doubted she’d ever feel affection for me, I knew a grudging respect had replaced her loathing. The irony did not amuse me.

“I can’t say I should never have taken you on,” continued Miss Crenshaw, “or that I should have let you go the night you were out with Mr. Sevenstar. I can’t say those things because of the role you have played in uncovering the truth about the doctor. But I will say that you must leave this place immediately. You cannot say goodbye to the students or teachers, not even Miss Adair, and don’t you dare ask again about Mr. Sevenstar. You must pack your things and go straight to the sheriff, and after that I expect Mr. Toomey will take you home. But his plans for you are not my affair.” She pulled an envelope from her desk drawer and passed it toward me. “I’d not yet paid last week’s wages, but now you may consider our account settled. I care only that you are gone from here before the others return from the picnic.” She heaved a sigh. “I can barely stand the sight of you.”

I stared at her through the tears pooling in my eyes. From the first moment I’d met Miss Crenshaw, she’d been steely-eyed and invulnerable—not a mere woman but a battleship in skirts. Now I could see how the past few months had taken their toll. The lines on her face had deepened, and her body seemed on the verge of crumpling, as if my deceits had sapped her last ounce of strength. It was terrible to behold.

I shoved the cursed envelope in my pocket. “I’m sorry I failed you, Miss Crenshaw.”

She held silent, not even nodding a farewell as I turned to leave the room.

I’d half expected a Wild West lawman with silver badge and menacing mustache, but the sheriff was a quiet man in ordinary clothes. He spoke to me first, separately from Toomey. I told the story in a straightforward manner, leaving out the ghosts, of course. I’d found an incriminating letter. The doctor realized what I’d done and confronted me. When I tried to get away, he knocked me unconscious and carried me to the river. When Eli and Toomey came upon us, the doctor panicked. And so on.

The sheriff wasn’t harsh and accusatory, as I’d feared. In fact, he hardly asked any questions at all. Nor did he register surprise as I spoke, for he’d heard the same details from Eli. It seemed he accepted this version of the story—that the doctor, fatigued from having carried me to the river, lost his footing during the struggle—and never once considered that
I
might have become the aggressor. Which I hadn’t, really. Whatever happened at the river, it wasn’t me who pushed the doctor under the water.

He frowned and chewed his lip when I drew the doctor’s note to Ella out of my bag. His brow furrowed as he read it. I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed in me for keeping it or disturbed that I’d read something so unseemly. Either way, he looked at me intently as I explained how I’d found it. Then he told me to sit on the bench outside his office while he spoke with my “father.”

He took a long time with Toomey. While I waited, two men with grim faces knocked at his door and stepped inside. Several minutes later, they came out again. They would not meet my gaze. When I saw my stepfather’s face afterward, I half expected to be locked up for fraud, but the sheriff asked only that we stay in town for a night in case he had further questions.

I gave Toomey a questioning look as we walked away from the station.

“The body’s washed up already,” he said.

I shivered. “Do they need me to identify it?”

“No.” His tone softened. “They’ll find someone else to do that.”

“Did you tell him … what I did? How I deceived people?”

“I told him I came for you because your mother was ill. He didn’t ask for specifics.”

I nodded, grateful to him and more than a little ashamed of myself. I wondered what Eli had told the authorities about me. It couldn’t have been much, for we’d had so little time to discuss why Toomey would be looking for me by a different name. Miss Crenshaw would surely keep my true identity hushed up for the time being—she being so keen on reputation. But it would all come out soon enough. My heart panged at the thought of never seeing Olivia or Eli again—of never having the chance to explain why I ran away to Indian Territory in the first place. The students would be shocked, their pleasure at the success of our play spoiled. They would all think me a horrible, deceitful person, and there was nothing I could do about it.

We took cheap rooms in town that night with the intent of catching the stage to Gibson Station the next morning, if the sheriff allowed. I insisted on paying for supper and the rooms with my savings, and Toomey did not argue. In fact, he didn’t say much at all.

Papa would have railed at me until I was weeping and his anger had dried up. Then he would have behaved as though nothing had happened, and I would have gone back to acting as I always did. It was different with Toomey. I thought to get a tiresome lecture at the very least, but he merely ate in silence, devouring every morsel on his plate and carefully sopping up the last dribble of gravy with his bread. The longer the silence continued, the more I felt myself shrinking, as though the clock had turned backward and I was getting younger by the minute. Soon they would have to bring me a bolster so that I could see over the edge of the table.

I’d been a teacher, earning a decent wage and taking care of myself for several months, but now I felt like a shunned child. The maddening silence made me want to leap out of my skin, to scream, to shake Toomey until some sound came out of him.

“You got the money I sent?” I finally asked.

“Yep.”

The pall of silence fell over us again.

“I’ve been fine, you know,” I continued. “I’m good at taking care of myself.”

He wiped his mouth with tedious precision. “I’ve no doubt about that.”

“So … you didn’t need to come all this way.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

Finally, he looked at me. “Well, for one thing, you damn near died. But more importantly, your mother has been sick with grief and worry.” He slammed his fist on the table, making me jump. When he spoke again, his voice was low and even. “I couldn’t bear to see her so sad. You broke her heart, Willemina.”

Part III
Revenant

April 1897

Chapter 27

W
HEN
I
SAW THAT HOUSE ON THE RIDGE
, its patched roof and drooping eaves, I felt like a revenant haunting my own past. I had returned, but not from the dead. Rather, I’d returned from life—a real, honest-to-God life—to a
place
that seemed dead. I slowed down and glanced behind me, considering the options if I were to run in the opposite direction. Toomey, on the other hand, stepped up the pace as though eager to see his wife and children.

No one waited on the porch. This was to be no sentimental homecoming. As we walked through the front door, I could hear the usual noise in the kitchen, smell the beans warming on the stove and the freshly baked bread cooling on the table.

Toomey took my bag out of my hands. “I’ll run this upstairs. You go through and say something to your mother.” He started up the stairs, and then paused on the third step. “Be gentle with her, Willemina. She’s been hurtin’.”

Stomach roiling, I made my way to the back of the house. Mother stood at the stove before a steaming pot, her back to me. I hovered in the doorway to get my bearings. Her brown hair was tidy, her dress clean, but she looked thinner and more stooped than when I’d last seen her. The twins sat under the kitchen table, playing with toy soldiers. Freddy and Hal were much bigger now, past the stage of soiled diapers and baby drool. They were nearly four years old and exploding with noise and energy. So absorbed were they in their war game they didn’t notice me standing only a few feet away. I looked past them to the bassinet standing near the table.

The baby. I’d forgotten the thing that started all my troubles. I had no idea when it had been born.

At that moment one of the twins, I think it was Freddy, mimicked the sound of a cannon explosion. He did it so authentically that the baby set to crying. My mother wiped her hands on her apron and, after scolding Freddy in a soft hiss, walked over to the bassinet to make soothing noises. That was when she saw me standing there. She started so violently I thought she might scare the baby into another screaming fit.

“Willemina!” Her face paled. “I didn’t hear you come in. Is your—Is Gabriel with you?”

She’d been about to call Gabriel my
father
.

“He’s taking my bag to the attic,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes. “What on earth happened to your head?”

My hand went to the bruise on my temple. In the mirror that morning, I’d noticed it darkening to purple. “It’s nothing.”

She looked at me a long time, as though uncertain whether to launch into scolding or take me in her arms. She did neither, waving me toward the bassinet instead. “Well, come and meet your sister.”

Sister?
I hadn’t imagined sturdy old Toomey would sire anything so delicate as a girl. As I crossed the kitchen toward the bassinet, the twins frowned at me as though I were a stranger. I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at them for staring.

The baby was red-faced from crying but otherwise free of deformity. She had quite a thatch of dark Toomey hair on top of her head, but I decided not to hold that against her. She stopped fussing when she saw me, her eyes widening at the sight of a strange face.

“When was she born?” I asked.

“December twenty-sixth,” replied Mother. “We named her Christabel, what with her being born so soon after Christmas.”

“Little Christabel,” I murmured, reaching down to her tiny hand. How could I not smile when she wrapped all five fingers around my own?

“We’ve been worried about you, Willie.” Mother still looked down at the baby.

“You needn’t have. I was fine. Toomey told me you were getting the money I sent.”

“And it was appreciated, but we’d rather have had you with us, safe and sound.”

“I suppose my labor was worth more to you than the money?”

She sighed. “You’re here a few minutes and already spoiling for a fight, I see.” The baby began to cry again. Mother stroked her cheek and then lifted the blanket to check her diaper. “Well, it’s going to have to wait. We’ll not discuss this in front of the children.”

So I helped set the table, my heart sinking as I took the plates out of the cupboard and arranged them along with cups and cutlery. It was odd to do such mundane work, and yet at the same time it felt as though I’d never left. How long would it take me to forget the person I had become at the seminary? How many settings of the table before Miss McClure’s triumphs and perils faded to a ghostly memory?

I dreaded another supper eaten in deafening—and damning—silence, but my brothers made things lively. They practically wriggled with delight to see their father. After pelting him with questions, they told tales of the adventures he’d missed while away. They did not speak to me, still shy of my other-worldliness, but that didn’t stop them from staring.

After supper was cleared away and Christabel was settled once more into her bassinet, Toomey took the boys to their bedroom and I dried the dishes that Mother washed.

She didn’t turn to look at me. When I risked a glance out of the corner of my eye, I saw her stiff shoulders and tight mouth curved downward. I dried and dried, waiting for her to speak. Waiting for her to say the words that would stoke the flame of my anger.

But Mother did not speak. And I wasn’t about to open my mouth first.

So when I’d dried the last dish and placed it on the table, I threw the rag down next to it and went to my room.

• • •

The stalemate continued for days. I did my chores in silence and then retreated to the attic to avoid Toomey’s drooping face and Mother’s coldness.

After supper I’d crawl into bed and dream of the river, my mind flashing with images of the doctor’s face, pale and streaming with water. In these dreams I had him by the throat, pushing him deeper and deeper into the river. Invariably, I woke up with a start, heart pounding and body soaked in sweat. For the rest of the night, I’d toss and turn, wondering how my dream self remembered what my waking mind couldn’t.

The days crawled by. Rain drummed on the roof each night, making the attic air heavy and damp. But I refused to go downstairs unless absolutely necessary, for the twins paced the house like caged animals while Toomey stared out the window. The longer it rained, the more the house felt like an asylum for the mentally unfit.

Finally, even the sun grew tired of the gloom and decided to blast the clouds and rain away. On the first dry morning, Toomey took the boys outside, and Mother perked up enough to actually speak to me.

“Gabriel will be turning the earth for spring planting this morning. He’s already milked the cows, but you’ll need to feed and water all the animals.”

Tempting as it was to throw a fit over such a blunt request, I actually was pleased to get out of the house. It had been years since I tended the livestock, and Papa never countenanced too much rough work for his girl. But I was so eager to breathe some fresh air that I tied on my bonnet and marched out to the barn without a word of protest.

The cows were more curious than I remembered, nuzzling me with slimy noses and blowing their sour cud breath in my face. Their rolling eyes and long tongues were monstrous, and they nearly knocked me over when they mistook me for a scratching post. The chickens were small but raised a racket of clucks and squawks. My heart nearly rose to my throat when they descended upon me, for I feared they’d peck me to death as I spread the feed. By comparison, the pigs were downright gentle and merely grunted appreciatively as the slop splashed into their trough. Their muddy beds raised an unholy stench, however, and it nearly gagged me.

At least none of the animals talked back or poked fun at my clothes.

By the time every creature was fed, I was filthy and damp with perspiration. The flies were taking notice. So I washed the sweat away with trough water and climbed the ladder to the barn loft. The air was fresh and the hay smelled sweet—a perfect spot for a nap. I fluffed up some hay and settled down where I had a view out to the orchard.

Just as my eyelids were growing heavy, I heard it.

Purring.

I sat up and began to root around in the hay. A few paces away in the corner of the loft, I found a skinny cat with six kittens pounding away at her belly as they nursed. The poor mama looked exhausted and didn’t even mew in protest when I stroked her handsome head. I leaned in to get a closer look at the kittens. Plump little bodies and wide-open eyes. They’d be weaned before long. When one detached for a moment, I reached in and gently lifted it to my chest. I swear the mama cat looked relieved.

Before long I had three kittens in my lap. I took turns bringing each to my face and breathing in their smell of sweet hay and clean fur. Their deep, rumbling purrs brought a warm tingle to my belly. I leaned back and let them crawl all over me until they curled up together and fell asleep on my chest. Their warmth soaked into my very bones.

In my drowsy contentment, I imagined Eli’s arms around me, his hands tangled in my hair. No one had touched me since that day at the river when he pulled my body from the water. It occurred to me that before the night we’d embraced under my window, no one had held me for years. Once Papa died, Mother’s arms were busy with Toomey, and soon thereafter, the twins.

It was enough to make me wonder—how long could one live without the warmth of human touch?