The Seeker A Novel (R. B. Chesterton) (21 page)

The result was that I had no clue how to control it. There was only one place where I might find help. Bonnie’s journal. In recent readings, I’d found several passages where she’d hinted at darker spirits. Those troubled me, because I had no recollection of reading them in the past. Had I forgotten them because my dissertation committee would find them irrational? Bonnie’s credibility was vital to my plan. Or was it merely my encounters with Mischa that had opened my eyes to the darker level on which Bonnie wrote?

I put more wood on the fire and picked up the journal and a thick quilt. I shifted my chair closer to the licking flames. The temperature was rising, but the cabin was cold. Snuggling in the folds of the quilt, I found the passage I sought.

Late October, evening. Henry has gone into town to dine with his family. He finished surveying Mr. Emerson’s property today, and he carried the maps into Concord to register them. He was proud of his work, happy to have completed the task for his benefactor.

I am here alone, but not quiet. There are others here. Those who would like to speak but have no voice. I avoid looking to the west when darkness has settled over this small cabin. If I am alone, they gather at the window, looking in, wanting … what? They tap with their cold, dead fingers, and I pretend it is the beaks of birds. At times, I think they merely want my help, to send a message or attend to business left incomplete. There are some, though, who want more. They demand what I cannot give them.

My mother called them the Sluagh, the spirits of the dead trapped between this world and the next. She said they flew together as a flock of birds. She said to beware if someone was dying and to close all the windows and doors, because they would capture the soul and steal it away.

At times, when Henry has one of his coughing fits, I’ve heard the tapping of a beak at the west window. When I pulled the curtains back, nothing was there. Still, I am wary. I’ve seen them flitting among the shadowy trees. The child troubles me most. She knows things.

The journal slipped from my hand and fell to the floor. I remembered the passage about the birds, but the last line hadn’t been there. I’d memorized most of the journal, and those words were new. They hadn’t been there a month before.

I picked up the book and bent over it, turning it so the light from the fire illuminated the page. I expected to find the ink fresher, the handwriting different. But it was the same fluid script of my aunt, the ink fading slightly with age.

But the last two sentences hadn’t been there before. I would swear it.

The fire popped and crackled, and I sat, unmoving. Afraid to even think, because the thoughts that tried to force themselves into my head terrified me.

At last I closed the journal in my lap. What was this child to my Aunt Bonnie? What was she to me? I wasn’t certain I wanted an answer to those questions. A little girl who spanned the decades, who assumed the identify of a missing child, who watched from the shadow of the woods, who left me alone in the snow to freeze. What did she want?

My fears spun wildly until dizziness made me grasp the chair and close my eyes. At last the spinning stopped, and I let the fire flush my cheeks with warmth. Exhaustion was playing tricks on me. I was seeing things in the journal that didn’t exist. It was my imagination, putting my fears on the page as if my Aunt Bonnie had written them.

I let the journal slide to the floor as weariness held me in its grip. I slumped in the chair. The warmth from the fire was seductive, pulling me toward sleep. What could an hour’s nap hurt? I’d been up since dawn. I was safe in front of the fire, and I allowed myself to yield to unconsciousness.

In the dream, for I knew I was dreaming, I strolled along a path. Leaves of red and gold filtered down on me, soft and gentle and silent. My feet scuffed through them, making a delicious shushing sound. I could smell a wood fire on the crisp air and it made me hurry. I was headed home toward a table laden with my favorite food.

As I walked I saw my boots, topped with a fleece collar. Shiny and black. They were expensive. I wore thick tights. My red jacket was snuggly buttoned. From behind a grove of aspen, a young girl stepped out. She, too, wore a plaid skirt and red jacket. She came toward me. “Want to play?” she asked.

“I’m going home. I’m hungry.”

“You should play with me.”

“My mother is waiting.” I was afraid, though I didn’t know why. No one else was near. I was alone in the woods with this other girl. She stepped toward me.

“You should play with me.”

I backed away. She stepped forward. The hood of her jacket concealed her eyes, but not her blond hair, which fell nearly to her waist. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Names don’t mean anything.”

The red and gold leaves shook free of the trees and fell to the ground, revealing bare branches reaching into a sky that changed from blue to gray. Heavy clouds massed, and snow began to fall.

“I have to go home.” I was suddenly freezing.

“You have no home to go to.” The girl came toward me. Her hood slipped back and revealed eyes of solid black.

I turned to run, but I couldn’t move. The snow, so thick, trapped me, rising in a high wave to crest over me and wrap me in cold white.

29

For two weeks I wrote like a madwoman. My project involved mapping the months Bonnie spent at Walden. Her journal hadn’t been written to document her life. It was more intimate, her thoughts and emotions as much as factual information. Her focus was the life she shared with Thoreau. I used mentions of holidays and blooming plants to pinpoint dates as best I could. These I overlaid on the dates associated with Thoreau’s writing. It was slow and tedious work that left my shoulders aching and temples throbbing. Still, I was far from producing the documentation that would be necessary for my dissertation.

And then there was the journal itself. I’d read it numerous times and even committed much of it to memory, but I had difficulty finding passages I clearly remembered. I simply couldn’t locate them. In numerous passages, the words had shifted from what I recalled. Was my memory that faulty, or did my new perspective of Bonnie give some references meaning I’d never seen before? In addition to the passage on the Sluagh, there were half a dozen mentions of Bonnie’s attempts to connect with departed spirits that I would have sworn were new.

When I’d first read the journal, I’d been caught up in the romance between the two. My current examination revealed other, darker things. As I learned more about Bonnie and her association with the little girl in the woods, her written words took on a new interpretation.

Thoreau’s interest in my aunt’s abilities left me wondering about his motives in regard to her. Did he love her, or was he more interested in her talents than a romantic liaison? There were indications that he didn’t approve of her attempts to call up the dead, but then she would write of his desire to communicate with his brother, or with a dead poet or writer. The results of these sessions were aggravatingly vague. But much worse than that, they prompted me to doubt myself and my reading of the journal.

The process frustrated me.

Dorothea, and even Patrick, respected my desperation and left me in my solitude to write. Joe called each day after he got off work. We spent the nights drinking wine and making love. My passion for him was quick and dangerous, consuming me when he walked into the cabin. We made love like people drowning, clinging and gasping. Though I knew the dangers of being swallowed by need, I couldn’t stop myself, and neither, it seemed, could he.

When he was gone, my thoughts returned to my work. Rigid control kept me from seeking Mischa. I couldn’t afford to follow her down the rabbit hole she offered, and I doubted her truthfulness. At times I wondered if she was a creation I’d conjured simply to keep me away from my work. Fear of failure posing as a murdered child. Such would fit my family heritage. We were masters of self-sabotage.

Joe and I seldom talked—about anything. Our relationship was not about chitchat, yet I gleaned some information. Little progress had been made in Karla’s murder. While Joe might be a suspect in Karla’s death, he wasn’t the only one. Joe told me that a young man named Anton Dressler was the prime suspect. He sold meth and crack on the outskirts of Boston, and was rumored to be Karla’s dealer.

He’d been seen in Concord the day she died, and he was known to have a violent temper. Those who dealt with him did so in fear. His ruthlessness impressed even an addict.

So far Chief McKinney hadn’t broken Dressler’s alibi—four of his associates testified Dressler was at Trader Mike’s bar in a backroom high-stakes poker game that didn’t end until three Wednesday morning. The medical examiner put Karla’s time of death at Tuesday evening. The weather made it impossible to get an accurate time.

Neither the chief nor Joe believed Dressler. His alibi witnesses were thugs, pimps, and dealers, but they never changed their story during intense interrogation, and there was no real physical evidence to tie Dressler to the murder. In fact, the murder scene was remarkably clean. McKinney’s hands were tied.

Joe blamed himself for Karla’s death, though that was ridiculous. He tried to hide his guilt, but without success. It crept over his face in the quiet moments of exhaustion before he fell asleep. I did what I could, but I knew from my own family that outside intervention wouldn’t work. If Joe wanted to punish himself, he would, no matter what I said.

Ten days before Christmas, I woke unable to face the computer. Sun streaked through the windows of my cabin illuminating the quilt pattern with vivid colors. The snow was gone, and I felt as if I’d been in a deep sleep for weeks, in a world that was monochromatic, agonizingly slow, and composed of computer screens and books. I had to get out, to walk in the shadowed trees. Walden Pond called to me. I hadn’t been to the pond since before Karla’s death. The pond and surrounding woods were my muse. A visit might spark the creative flint that would ignite my writing again.

The day was glorious, and I hiked along, buoyed by the blue, blue sky and the sunshine. It was a day that alluded to the future hope of spring, though the browns and grays of trees and lawns let me know winter still gripped Concord. While it might be December, I could still dream of April.

For the first time in weeks, I was warm. Since my adventure in the deep snow, I’d been cold. My own skin felt corpselike, though Joe never complained. I realized these fancies stemmed from my imagination. My flesh was no colder than anyone else’s. Winter had slipped into my bones, and it came from Mischa, not the weather.

I deliberately turned my thoughts from the macabre and focused on life. I passed the dress shop I loved and continued on. Dorothea was planning a lavish Christmas Eve dinner at the inn. A troupe of players performed an annual comedic Christmas play involving literary icons: Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Thoreau, and Emerson, as well as Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was literary theater I was eager to sample. The event was a fundraiser for local charities, and everyone who was anyone in town showed up.

Dorothea had been babbling about the dinner for days, and I’d finally consented to attend. I had the beautiful green dress I’d bought the day I fought with Karla. An extravagance far out of my normal expenditures, the dress begged to be worn. This was the perfect occasion. In truth, I wanted Joe to see me in something other than jeans and sweats. There was enough girlishness left in me to long for admiration in his eyes.

I’d even agreed to help Dorothea bake desserts. Granny Siobhan, a fabulous cook, churned out breads and cakes and cookies, and she’d taught me to make many of her specialties. Dorothea had been so kind to me, helping me through my illness and generally caring for me, the least I could do was spend a day or two helping her prepare for the party. Besides, I was sick of my own company and my contrary writing that moved forward by minuscule fits and starts. No matter how much thought and elbow grease I applied, my prose remained lifeless and boring.

I’d found it harder than I’d imagined to link Thoreau’s writing to Bonnie’s journal. The man was infernally distant. He wrote down every tiny thought he had, but not a single emotion. Nothing at all about a woman who loved him and cared for him. Nothing about a helpmate who made hot soups on blustery February days, or who chopped and brought in wood to keep the tiny cabin warm.

I’d begun to resent Thoreau for his cavalier treatment of my aunt. He presented himself as this solitary virgin, a man who loved the quiet and sought it so he could relate to nature. To my horror, I couldn’t help but now view him as something of a charlatan. The man who craved solitude had kept a mistress. He’d excised Bonnie from any record of his life, and I knew why. His reputation was more important to him than accuracy, and that I found dishonest. He should have married her if he was ashamed to “live in sin” with her.

Deep in thought, I passed Chief McKinney without seeing him. He called my name and I met him with a smile.

“Glad to see you’re all recovered, though you are a mite pale,” he said.

“I’ve been working too much.”

“So Joe tells me. He says you’re a woman possessed.” He fell into step beside me as we continued down the street. I’d journeyed into town to buy binder clips and more Post-it notes before I took a jaunt around the pond. My intended purchases were just an excuse to get out in public, though. I was happy to stroll along with the Chief and chat.

“Any progress on Karla’s murder?” I asked.

He tucked his chin and kept walking. I didn’t press. McKinney now had two unsolved cases. Mischa Lobrano and Karla Steele. A disappearance and a brutal murder. The ten-year span between the two meant nothing to him. For all the cases he closed, these two would devil him.

At last he sighed. “I don’t understand why Karla was in the woods near Walden Pond. It doesn’t make sense as a place for a drug deal. The area is patrolled regularly. There are other places where privacy would be easier to come by.”