The Seeker A Novel (R. B. Chesterton) (31 page)

I skipped ahead and began to read again. A sharp clack at the window startled me. The hair on my neck stood straight up, and I feared to turn around. The noise came again. Clack. Someone was demanding admittance.

My hands trembled as I turned the page. The brittle paper buckled and half a sheet drifted to the floor. My aunt’s spidery handwriting—black ink across the yellowed page—stared up at me.

The Sluagh haunt the woods of Walden. Since the trees have all been cut in Concord proper, the birds have no home but the woods. The young man, Henry, is building a cabin in the midst of the stand of trees. Near the pond. He tells me he intends to live here for two years, two months, and two days. He wants to learn the value of solitude. I fear he will learn something else, something dangerous.

There is a child in the woods who watches him. Perhaps she longs for a father, or a brother. Yet when my blood pounds harshly in my veins, I think it is something else she wants. She knows I see her, and she has no fear of me. I am not a threat to her ambitions.

This had never been part of the original journal. Glass shattered. I turned slowly to see the windowpane beside the front door had been broken. Pieces scattered the cabin floor. Perched on a jagged edge of glass was a crow. He stood tall, cocking his head from side to side as if assessing me.

“Shoo!” I waved a hand at him, but he ignored me. Any moment, he’d enter the cabin. The idea galvanized me to action, and I dropped the journal and ran at the bird. He held his ground until the last minute, when he lazily fluttered to the edge of the porch. He confronted me, head tilting to the left. His eyes, so black and shiny that they reminded me of stones, reflected my own image back to me.

Desperate to keep the bird out of the cabin, I jammed a piece of cardboard in the place of the broken glass. I would call a glazier to repair the damage when I went to the inn.

When I returned to the rocker and the book, I couldn’t bring myself to lift it. The pages might contain wisdom, but the price for it would be dear.

It was becoming hard to ignore the parallel between Bonnie and Henry and me and Joe. A cabin in the woods near Concord. And a little girl with ulterior motives. My aunt had ended up murdered by her lover, if Patrick and my visions could be believed. The dead were liars, and I didn’t know how trustworthy my visions were. Still, as I’d seen this morning, Joe’s attitude toward me had changed greatly. No longer was he the tender lover. He’d become cold and accusing.

Much as Thoreau had done to Bonnie, according to Patrick. In Patrick’s version of history, my aunt had ended up stabbed and buried on a rocky hillside.

I doubted Joe would stab me, but he would pin a murder on me if he thought me guilty. No matter how absurd the accusation, he would believe I was guilty if evidence was found. To that end, I had to find the wine bottle and glasses. Had I been thinking clearly, I would have washed the glasses and bottle and simply put them away in the cabin. Now Mischa had them. They could reappear at any time.

I couldn’t afford for that to happen.

I found a plastic bag I’d tucked under the sink and put it in my pocket. The day outside was bright and sunny, a winter day with no sharp wind. It would be a good day for walking, and I knew exactly where to go. Walden Pond. If Mischa was up to planting evidence, that would be the place.

42

The roadblock into Walden Pond was up—today was an official holiday. Since I was on foot, it was easy to duck under it. I did so and followed the main road in. There was no snow, and I checked behind me to be sure my footprints were not distinctive. The hard ground barely registered my passing.

At the cabin, I stopped long enough to pick up a shovel from the little tool shed. I knew the combination to the lock. Joe had shown me once, and I had a good mind for numbers. I meant to be prepared if I happened upon the missing evidence.

I followed the trails to the place where Karla had been murdered. The yellow crime-scene tape fluttered in the wind. No one had taken it down. It remained strung between the beautiful oaks, catching the wind with a gentle flapping sound.

At first I didn’t see anything, but when I shifted, the sunlight glinted off the glasses. They’d been left on a fallen tree as if someone had set up a picnic—the two glasses, the bottle, and a small bouquet of leaves.

Before I approached, I searched for her. This was too easy.

If she was near, I couldn’t see her or sense her, and I set to work. The place I chose to bury the bottle and the glasses was near a small shrub. There were no stones there, and I dug swiftly, down two feet. I put the two glasses and the empty bottle in and filled the hole. Gathering debris and leaves, I covered all traces of my work.

I scattered a few more leaves, checking to be sure I left no trace of my visit. Picking up the shovel, I turned. Mischa stood some thirty yards away, watching. Her smile was superior.

“Stay away from me,” I said. I couldn’t let her spook me into a hasty mistake.

“Up to no good, are we, Aine?” She came forward, her hood low over her eyes, revealing only the curve of her cheek and her smile.

“You set me up, but I figured it out.”

“Poor Patrick. He does like to talk, doesn’t he?”

The urge to kill her was overwhelming. “He was a harmless young man. You didn’t have to poison him.”

“He talked too much, and he had things he meant to tell Joe. I explained this to you. I acted to protect you.”

“The same reason you killed Karla. To protect me.”

“You aren’t as dumb as you look,” she said, swishing back and forth like a child.

“Don’t do that. You’re not a little girl.” I started back to the tool shed to replace the shovel.

“Better wipe off your prints.”

I froze. I’d taken my gloves off to scatter the leaves and then picked up the shovel. She was right. I dredged my gloves from a pocket and put them on. Using the bottom of my coat, I wiped down the handle.

“You have questions. Go ahead and ask. Maybe I’ll answer them.”

“Why Bonnie? Why Thoreau? Why me?”

“You know the answer to that, silly.” We hiked in tandem. “It’s the Cahill Curse.” She burst ahead of me and twirled around before she faced me, walking backward. “
I’m
the Cahill Curse.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Think about it, and it will.” She giggled. “Shall I give you a hint? I’ll give you a hint.” She galloped ahead, spun and stopped, a finger to her lips as if to shush me. “I’m your Moby Dick.”

Before I could ask her what she meant, she ran off through the woods. Her red coat flashed through the bare black and gray trunks, and then she was gone.

A deep exhaustion bored into my bones as soon as I entered my cabin. My actions had cost me Joe, and there was no undoing it. I’d come to rely on him, on his presence during the dark nights, the weight of his body a wall against fear and danger.

Depression fell upon me like a suffocating blanket. Sleep, the joy of escape, beckoned me, but I was afraid. Patrick haunted my dreams, and I didn’t know if my heart could take a second go-round with him.

I picked up the crumbling journal and stowed it under the bed. Just in case Joe came back, though I knew he wouldn’t. Why I wanted to hide the journal from him, I couldn’t say. I’d hoped, what seemed like a million years ago, to build a life on my aunt’s writing. I’d viewed the journal as solid gold, a key to the kingdom of academia. Such thoughts were laughable. Now I couldn’t think about my future. I doubted I had one.

My sense of duty said I should go to the front desk of the inn and make sure the messages on the answering machine were returned and business attended to. But I couldn’t. My muscles had no strength.

I opened a new bottle of wine, topped off a glass, and drank it too fast. I poured another glass and went to the medicine cabinet in the tiny bathroom. The prescription sleeping pills were there and I shook two into my palm. If I slept deeply enough, I could avoid Patrick. I sought unconsciousness. I hoped to embrace near-coma, not dreams.

Even though it was only mid-afternoon, I took the medicine, finished the second glass of wine, and crawled into my bed. The sleeping pills tugged at me almost instantly, but when I yielded to sleep, it was Morpheus who courted me, and the lid to the Devil’s toolbox opened. I found myself reliving memories of the time when my mother was alive and my father delivered the mail at Coalgood.

My mother wore red lipstick, and she moved with quick, sure energy. She was like a butterfly, here and there, so beautiful in the mountain sunlight. She’d planned to be a nurse, but she’d married Daddy and gotten pregnant with me and then my brother. She said having us was better than wearing white stockings and ugly shoes and wiping peoples’ bums. She said that I made her life complete, but several times I found her thumbing through catalogues for nursing school.

I remembered the house in Coalgood. Every memory was filled with sunshine. My room was purple and white, and my bedspread had Tinker Bell on it. We picked berries and wild plums and swam in the cold creek not too far from town.

I saw my mother standing in the yard in her cut-off jeans and a red T-shirt that matched her lipstick. Her dark hair curled down her neck and she laughed at me, beckoning me to follow her to the creek. More than anything I wanted to walk beside her, to feel her hand on my shoulder or stroking my hair.

She carried a bucket for the dewberries we would pick for jam and pies. I loved for her to bake. She sprinkled scraps of piecrust with sugar and cinnamon and baked them like cookies for me. And when the pies were cooling, she’d make homemade ice cream to melt on top of the cobblers.

“Let’s pick berries,” she said.

I ran after her into the woods, needing nothing more than to be in her presence.

As soon as I entered the shadow of the trees, she disappeared. So did the sunlight. The green of the forest faded to black and gray. I was alone. In the distance I heard a low roar. A waterfall? Whitewater? I realized I was lost. Not a single landmark told me anything about my surroundings.

“Aine!” My mother called to me, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. “Run, Aine. Don’t stay there. Run! She’s coming!”

Fear propelled me forward, and I was no longer a child. I was grown, my tennis shoes grabbing the rocks and roots of the trail as I hurried downhill, toward the dull roar.

“Mama!” I called to her, but there was no answer. So I ran harder.

The trees thinned and the water sound grew louder. It came in waves, a loud crash with a shushing whisper. I broke from the trees into acres of wild rose bushes. There was no help for it. I had to go through them.

Thorns tore at my clothes and skin. Blood drops rose along the path where the stickers pierced me. Tiny drops of blood covered my arms and legs with thin whip lines. But I could see the water, and I wasn’t far from the strip of sand that marked the edge of the ocean. Somehow, I’d made my way to the place where life began.

At last I gained the sand and a pier that reached far into the ocean. My sneakers slapped the boards as I sprinted down the endless pier. At the end, I stopped, heaving for breath. The small wooden platform was miles from shore. The waves rose around me, mountains that crested and fell in all directions, but none swamped the tiny platform where I stood.

“Come home, Aine.”

I heard the voice from the depth of the water. “I’m not of the sea,” I replied. “I’m a mountain girl. The land.”

A giant eye blinked at me beneath the blue water. Terror filled me, but I didn’t retreat. “Who are you?”

The eye rose to the surface and I saw that it was part of a huge whale. A white whale. “I’m your past and future,” the whale said.

“Moby Dick.”

The whale’s laugh was merry. “No such creature ever existed.”

“I never harmed you,” I pointed out.

“It’s in your blood.” The whale was pensive now.

“No.” I shook my head. “I never harmed you at all. I wouldn’t. That was a long time ago.”

“Blood stains your hands.”

“No.”

“I could swallow you.” The whale opened its mouth and the sun and sky were obliterated. There was nothing but the darkness of its maw.

I knew then that darkness was my destiny. Sucked into the belly of a whale. Like Jonah.

“Out of the darkness ye shall rise,” the whale said as it slowly sank back into the ocean. “Remember, the dead never rest.”

43

A hard knocking at my door woke me from the dream. For a moment I felt as if I were being held underwater. When I broke the surface, I called out and the knocking ceased. I’d gone to bed in my clothes, so I straightened them as best I could and went to answer the door.

Chief McKinney stood on the small porch, his hat in his hand. “Miss Cahill,” he said. “May I come in?”

I checked behind me to be sure the journal was put away and then stepped back. “I was asleep.”

“Sorry to disturb you.” He followed close behind me and I imagined his breath on my neck.

I considered asking him if Joe was too afraid to come for my arrest, but I didn’t. I pointed to the desk chair and the rocker before the dead fireplace. Without Patrick or Joe to bring in the wood and keep the fire stoked, I’d let it go out. “I should get some wood,” I said. Dusk had fallen and the tiny warmth the sun gave had disappeared. It would be freezing cold in another hour.

“Not on my account,” the chief said. “I won’t be long.”

I couldn’t read intention in his expression, but his next words made my heart thud.

“We’re worried about you, Aine. Joe’s expressed his concern, and Dorothea, even distracted as she is, thinks you’re under too much stress. Since the night I found you in the snow, you’ve been … peculiar.”

“How so?” I folded my hands in my lap to still their trembling. The cabin was cold, and I shivered. My quilt had fallen to the floor earlier, and I picked it up and spread it over my lap.

“Since you’ve come to town, we’ve experienced two murders—”

I didn’t let him finish. “And you think I’m responsible for Karla’s and Patrick’s deaths?” My voice rose. “You think I’m a killer?”