The Seeker A Novel (R. B. Chesterton) (13 page)

Amon thought I was stuck-up, and he told me so. I tried to walk past him, and he pushed me down. He snatched my bag of groceries and stomped the coconut into the dirt, laughing as I fought and cried.

After Amon left, I picked the strands of coconut out of the dirt and took it home, wondering if I could wash it somehow. The hopelessness of the situation sent me into a fit of tears, and by the time I got home, I was completely out of control.

Granny washed my face with a cool cloth and held me against her, stroking my hair until I went to sleep. It was the last time I remembered such a touch.

Until now.

“Aine, I’m so sorry.” Joe smoothed my hair and rubbed my back the way a mother would put a baby to sleep. “I thought Karla was gone. I had no idea she’d doubled back here to attack you.”

I burrowed deeper into the padded nylon of his coat. My body temperature rose, and my breathing stretched and relaxed.

“We have to report this to the police.” He put the truck in gear, but my hand stopped him.

I sat up. “No. I’m already the talk of the town.”

He turned the interior light on and examined my face. “I don’t want to be an alarmist, Aine, but we need to at least go to the hospital to get you checked over.”

“I’m not hurt. She hit me a couple of times with a club, but she missed the vital places.”

He punched the steering wheel. “You said you bit her. Karla was doing drugs. What if she has an illness? We need to get you checked for Hepatitis C.”

I hadn’t considered that Karla’s blood might be the ultimate revenge. “It’s too early to test for Hepatitis C or AIDS.”

He leaned his forehead against the steering wheel. “Everything I touch suffers.”

He was talking about me, but also the child. “What happened to Mischa?” I asked. Sitting alone in the dark cab of his truck was as good a place as any to have this conversation.

“I was going to tell you about Mischa tonight. I should have told you sooner.”

“Yes, you should.” I sighed. “I should have had the choice to say yes or no. You should have told me, and so should Dorothea.”

“You have every right to be angry.” His left hand tightened on the steering wheel. “I wanted you to know me as a person before I told you. I didn’t want to scare you off, but I see that wasn’t fair to you.” His fingers made tiny sounds of protest, he clutched the wheel so hard. “I tried to call you last night, and again today. To tell you. But I knew I should have told you before we made love. And I was ashamed.”

I put my palm on his cheek. “There are things I should tell you about me, too.” If I confessed about Patrick now, he might forgive me. He might understand that he’d hurt me and I’d sought any comfort I could find. If I told him.

He kissed my palm. “Mischa was a third-grade student at Middlesex Elementary, where I taught. She was a bright child, happy. Well-loved by her parents and family. I foresaw a tremendous future for her. She absorbed knowledge.” He paused. “We developed a relationship. Teacher-student, nothing more. I encouraged her to read and learn and ask questions. We played kickball afternoons with the other children in the neighborhood.”

The strain of his words cracked his voice and he cleared his throat.

“One October afternoon she left her books at home after school and went back outside. I’d taken several of the kids to Walden Pond the previous Saturday for a nature walk. Mischa had great curiosity about the natural world. Insects fascinated her. She called it a secret world. A couple of the other children asked where she was, but I wasn’t concerned about her absence. I assumed she was tramping around the woods.” He quit talking.

“But she wasn’t, was she?” I prompted.

“No. She went into the Walden woods. Footprints led into the trees for a ways. Then they just stopped. No obvious signs of a struggle. But that was it. No trace was ever found. She was gone. A beautiful, bright intelligence was simply gone.”

“Was she a blonde?” I asked.

“Yes, long blond curls. Blue eyes. Like a doll.”

My mouth was suddenly dry. “Did she like dolls?”

“It was the only childish thing about her. She had Barbies and some other dolls she’d collected.” He rubbed his eyes. “She said she would grow up to design fashion. She liked dressing the dolls in different outfits. Her mother was an exceptional seamstress and made clothes for the dolls.”

Fear held me in a vise. “How old would Mischa be now?”

He leaned back in the seat. “I don’t know. Eighteen or nineteen. If she’s alive.”

“But she isn’t, is she?”

He grew still. “I don’t think she is, Aine. I’ve never stopped looking for her, but I don’t believe she’s alive. I think someone took her and killed her.”

“Did she live near here?”

“There’s a neighborhood not far from Walden Pond. I lived there with my fiancée.”

“Karla?” I couldn’t believe he’d been engaged to such a trashy person.

“No, Amanda. She broke the engagement a few months after Mischa disappeared. It was too hard. The accusations, the suspicions. I withdrew from her and everyone.” He fell silent.

“Why did they think you hurt the child?” I had to ask.

“She liked me. Nature and biology excited her. She told her mother I was taking her for a nature walk. When she didn’t come home, her parents assumed she was with me. Very quickly it began to sound dirty and awful.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“I can hardly bear to think about it. I believe she was abducted and taken away. I’ve come to conclude she’s dead.”

My mouth tasted of ashes. “Do you believe the dead can visit us?”

A long silence stretched between us. “As in ghosts?”

“Ghosts or spirits or wraiths. Some essence of a person left here that’s visible to the human eye.”

He twisted my shoulders so he could look at me. “Why do you ask?”

“I’ve seen a child in the woods. Remember the doll? What if it wasn’t Karla? What if is was … someone else?” My thoughts were too terrible to pursue.

“No. I don’t believe that. Why would Mischa come to you? That’s crazy, Aine. You’re upset and not thinking clearly.”

What I was thinking made more sense than a crazy ex-girlfriend leaving Barbies in the snow. “You reacted when I showed you the Barbie.”

“I did. It shocked me.”

“Because Mischa had a similar doll.”

“She did. The photograph they put in the newspaper when they were trying to find her. She was holding that doll. One like it.”

I didn’t respond. Joe would have to come to the conclusion on his own. As for me, I’d already begun to put the pieces together. What I had to ask myself was why the spirit of a dead girl came to me. What did she want? Spirits, like regular people, always had an agenda.

My dream of Granny’s visit had been prophetic. At last I’d been given the glimpse of what the Cahill Curse would mean to me. I would communicate with the spirits of departed people. I’d seen them as a child, and Granny had warned me not to speak with them. She’d made me believe it was my imagination. She’d conveyed her fear of them to me, so that I stopped seeing them. But this was my gift.

The little girl, Mischa, would be my first true encounter.

18

Joe couldn’t stay with me. He left me behind in the truck while he removed the doll. He put her in a plastic trash bag and hauled her out.

“I’m sorry, Aine,” he said. “I’ll take care of Karla once and for all. I’ll find her and make certain she never bothers you again.” He was determined that Karla was behind the dolls—felt she’d been stalking us even before we encountered her in Bayside Bill’s—and he meant to find her and put an end to her mischief. To be honest, I felt more than a little awkward. The tumbled bed told the wicked story between Patrick and me. Joe didn’t linger in the cottage, and I wondered if he knew, if he could tell that intimacy had occurred only hours before.

When he was gone, I checked my shoulders and back. There were bruises below my shoulder blades and across my right shoulder, but no real damage had been done. I could only hope Karla suffered from the wounds I’d inflicted on her.

Unable to settle down to work or read, I paced. At last I got out my computer and did some basic research.

The Concord Journal
covered the little girl’s disappearance without sensationalism, a fact I could appreciate even if those involved might not. The story was straightforward and on the front page of the Oct. 30 edition.
LOCAL CHILD MISSING
. The article matched the details Patrick had given me. Mischa Lobrano had disappeared after school. I studied the school picture of the little blond girl. She could be the child I’d seen in the woods, but I couldn’t be certain. If it was her, had she come to tell me what had happened to her? To warn me? To exact revenge?

I knew that stray spirits were not always benevolent or merely lost.

Gradually the stories in the paper grew shorter and shorter. Until at last, Mischa dropped from the news. As Joe told me, no trace of the child was ever found. An unnamed “person of interest” had been questioned; no arrests were ever made. Joe’s name was never mentioned. But in a community as small as Concord, his career as a teacher had been destroyed. Yet he had come back here to serve as a ranger at Walden Pond when his mother grew ill and needed him. To me, that spoke of his innocence.

I poured a glass of wine. When I checked the time, it was after midnight. I was exhausted, but my brain refused to slow down. I took another sleeping pill and prayed for dreamless slumber. Tomorrow, in the daylight, I would search for answers about the little girl I’d seen at Walden Pond. Now, though, I pulled the quilts over my head and sought the escape of sleep.

My aunt Bonnie had endured dreams foretelling Thoreau’s death. In hindsight, they were clearly prophetic. One in particular came to mind as I drifted in that drugged state of paralysis that preceded sleep. She’d happened on handkerchiefs spotted with blood all around Walden Pond. She’d recounted vivid squares of white, the red, red blood staining the cotton fabric, the way they lay so stark against a tree stump or cluster of leaves. She’d found them in all seasons, from the riot of fall colors to the greens of spring. As she’d walked around Walden Pond in the span of the dream, she’d experienced snow and the kiss of summer sun. The only constant had been the bloodstained handkerchiefs. Bonnie couldn’t have known it, but Thoreau would die of tuberculosis.

And what of Bonnie? How did she die? I left my questions behind and trod the path at Walden Pond, littered with bloody handkerchiefs, before I stepped into the black void of sleep.

I awoke in the pink light of a cold dawn. At first I couldn’t be certain what had pulled me from a deep sleep, and then I heard it. A child singing. The song was plaintive, a familiar old English ballad. Voice high and true, the child sang, “Oh Mother, Mother, make my bed. And make it deep and narrow. Sweet William died for me today, I’ll die for him tomorrow.”

I knew the story of scorned love resulting in the death of two young people, hard-hearted Barbrie Allen and lovesick William. And I knew without looking that the singer was the child I’d seen at Walden Pond. She’d found me again, and now she waited for me to wake up.

The cabin was freezing, the fire long dead. I slipped from the bed, dragging several quilts after me and wrapping in them as I made my way to the window. It wasn’t even six o’clock and sunrise teased the eastern edge. Staring out the window, I saw her.

In the fringes of the trees, her red coat was a splotch of bright color in the monochrome forest. She watched the cabin. Was I meant to help her or suffer at her hands? I couldn’t say, but I accepted the futility of trying to hide from her.

I dressed as quickly and warmly as I could. The day lightened as I stepped onto the porch and walked to the place I’d last seen her. It was time to talk with her. No more games. No more hound and hare. Whatever she wanted, I meant to find out and resolve it.

She was gone, of course, and no footprints marred the snow. But she’d left me a present, and this time it wasn’t a doll. In the gloom of the woods I picked up the old tintype. It showed a handsome woman with chestnut hair and pale eyes, her jawline as square as any Cahill in the family tree. Her right hand rested on a child’s shoulder. Only a bit of lace collar and a rich velvet sleeve remained of the child—the jagged edge of the tintype told me the youngster had been deliberately cut away.

My heart ached, and I realized it was exultation, not fear. I had discovered no information about Bonnie Cahill in the historical record, but perhaps I’d stumbled on a means of connecting with her. My gut said this was her photograph, and it was possible that the excised child might be none other than Louisa May Alcott. If I could prove that, I would prove Aunt Bonnie had been here in Concord and that she did indeed have a connection with the Alcotts. It was one step closer to putting her in the cabin at Walden Pond.

I gripped the evidence of my aunt’s existence in my hand. It could be no one but Bonnie. Now I had to prove that it was her.

19

Instead of working, I walked into town and rented a car. Once on the road that skirted Walden woods, I turned off my cell phone. My quest demanded solitude, and the temptation to keep checking for a call from Joe was too distracting. At Wayland I took Route 27 and followed it south to 95. The once-thriving whaling port of Warren, Rhode Island, was my destination. This was where the Cahills had settled in the mid-1700s.

I hoped to find some record of Bonnie Cahill. While her branch of the family roamed in the traveler tradition, their central hub had been the New England states that bordered the ocean. This was as good a place as any to search.

I tried to imagine her in Warren as I walked along the downtown area. I had no success. If Bonnie had traveled the routes I now covered, she left no echoes.

The scent of salt water slowed me. The smell carried life and also death, the undercurrent of rot and decay. The waves entranced me with their rhythm, the tidal pull. Here the water was calm, but on the far horizon where the brackish bay waters mingled with the saltier Atlantic, the ocean showed her power. I was generations removed from the whalers, but the open water still called to me. I understood in a way I hadn’t before.