Widow's Tears (23 page)

And Rachel had survived. She had lived into her nineties, another sixty-some years, with no life outside this house, with nothing to do but weep and refuse to be comforted, with only Hazel to keep her company and a caretaker to manage the chores. Perhaps that was why her ghost haunted this place. Perhaps Rachel could not bear to leave the house where all she had loved in the world had lived and died. She wanted to go on grieving, to go on possessing this place until the end of time, to go on bringing white roses to this lonely cemetery, touching harp strings, ringing bells. That's why she had included the odd stipulation in her will, requiring the person who inherited the house to live in it and keep it up—and if they didn't, it would be torn down.

Somewhere nearby, thunder growled. Nearer at hand, the mockingbird offered a staccato barrage of skeptical chirps. Of course, Ruby thought, the situation might be entirely different. Perhaps Rachel's spirit, her ghost, was actually
stuck
here. Maybe she wanted to leave, would leave if she could, but the house—the crooked, misaligned, misshapen house—held on to her and refused to allow her to go. Ruby remembered what Claire had said a little earlier: that it would be the purest hell to be trapped inside a time or a place, to keep repeating something over and over, forever and ever, for all eternity. Was Rachel's ghost being held a prisoner, drowning in an overwhelming grief from which there could never be any rescue? Or was it the other way around? Was she voluntarily, willfully, stubbornly holding on, refusing release?

Ruby shivered, hearing those questions pounding on the walls of her own heart. She knew how it felt to grieve, yes. She still grieved for Colin.
But would she want to grieve for dozens of years, for decades? To grieve for the rest of her life, and beyond? No. No, of course not. She couldn't want that. It had already been too long. She wanted to stop grieving now, and get on with the rest of her life. Maybe she needed to let Hark pull her out of her own stuck place. Or pull herself out. Either way, she didn't want to let herself stay stuck.

She wrapped her arms around herself. It might be her imagination, but the air seemed colder. Nervously, she glanced over her shoulder. She had the feeling that someone else was here in the graveyard with them, standing not far away, listening to what she and Claire had been saying, listening to what she had been
thinking.
She raised her voice.

“Are you there, Rachel?” she asked tentatively. She felt a little foolish, talking to a ghost, talking to something she couldn't see. “Rachel, if you're there, tell us—tell me—what you want? Do you want to stay or go?”

For an instant, Ruby thought she heard a soft sob, the faintest sound of anguished weeping, coming from a distant place. But the mockingbird chose that moment to set up a cheerful, noisy chatter, and when he stopped gossiping, the weeping was gone, or perhaps it had never been, or had been only in her mind.

Still—Ruby cast an apprehensive glance over her shoulder and was absurdly relieved to see that the iron cemetery gate stood open, propped by the solid rock Claire had put there. She comforted herself with the thought that it would take a hefty ghost to move that rock, although maybe the undead weren't bound by the same physical laws that held the living.

But then her eye was caught by something lying on the brick walk a few paces away from the open gate, a white silk handkerchief maybe. That's odd, she thought—I don't remember seeing that when we came in. She went back along the walk to pick it up and saw, to her astonishment, that
it was a perfect white rose, so fresh that there were crystal drops of dew, like tears, on the petals. She was holding it in her hand, staring at it and hardly daring to breathe, when Claire called out to her.

“Ruby, I've found Aunt Hazel's marker.”

Ruby went toward her, carrying the rose in her open hand. “Claire,” she said shakily, “Claire, tell me that you dropped this when I wasn't looking.” She held it out.

“Dropped that rose?” Clair shook her head, frowning. “No, of course I didn't. I've never brought any flowers up here. I—” She looked up and saw Ruby's face. “Why are you asking? Where did you find it?”

“Lying on the brick walk, just inside the gate. I'm sure it wasn't there when we came in—or when we went back to keep the gate from closing.”

“It wasn't.” Claire's voice was flat and matter-of-fact. “
She
dropped it, Ruby. Rachel. She left it for us, so we'd know she was here.”

Ruby bit her lip. She herself had seen Rachel's ghost this morning, carrying a basket of roses. It shouldn't be hard to believe that Rachel had followed them into the cemetery and left the rose for them to find. No, it wasn't
hard,
it was unsettling, unnerving. Just another small testimony to the frightening strangeness of this place.

Ruby bent over and laid the rose at the foot of Augustus Blackwood's cross.
There you are, Rachel
, she said silently.
I've left it for him. I hope you approve.

She straightened up. “You found your aunt's marker, you said?”

“Over here,” Claire said, taking her arm. “No wonder I didn't see it right away. It's totally buried in green stuff.”

The three stone crosses lined up in a row along the back fence were almost completely hidden in a tangle of weeds and widow's tears, its blue blooms spilling everywhere.

“Mother always said she didn't want to leave Aunt Hazel here alone,”
Claire said quietly. “She thought it was a lonely place.” She turned to look at the row of Blackwood graves. “But now I'm not so sure. Hazel loved old Mrs. Blackwood, and this place—especially the woods.” In a lower voice, she added, “Maybe she loved Rachel's children, too, and her husband, even if they died before she came here.”

The first of the three crosses stood at the head of what was still a visible gravesite. It bore the name
Hazel Penland
but no date.

“Hazel wanted her marker to look like the others,” Claire said. “I didn't understand that, then. Now I think I do.” She pointed. “That's the family, there—all seven of them. These three, they're the servants, or helpers, or whatever. Aunt Hazel didn't like to think of herself as a servant, but I suppose that's what she was. And that's probably what Patsy and Colleen were. Servants.”

Those were the names on the remaining two crosses: Patsy Hill and Colleen O'Reilly. Both names were barely legible, the stones battered by the elements and covered with lichen and moss. Colleen O'Reilly's cross bore something else, but whatever it was, it was so weathered that it could not be read.

Colleen O'Reilly. Ruby frowned, feeling an odd tug at her memory. Gram Gifford's mother, Ruby's great-grandmother. Her name was Colleen, wasn't it? Or was it Corinne? No, Colleen, it had been Colleen. And her last name might have been O'Reilly. But it had been a long time since Gram had mentioned it, and Ruby couldn't remember for sure. Kids don't pay a lot of attention to family history. Perhaps it had been O'Ryan. Of course O'Reilly (O'Ryan, too, for that matter) was a common Irish name, as common as Jones or Smith. And Colleen—well, every Irish family had to have at least one Colleen among the girls. Still, the longer Ruby stared at the cross, the more certain she felt that her great-grandmother's name had been Colleen, not Corinne. Colleen O'Reilly.

Anyway, Gram had told her once that her mother had been carried out to sea in a great storm and drowned, when Gram herself was so young that she barely remembered it. Gram and her grandmother, whose name Ruby had never heard or didn't remember, had lived through the same storm. After that, the two of them had moved to San Antonio, where her grandmother had done her best to bring her up, working at two jobs so Gram could go to college, back in the day when a young woman was only encouraged to get married. But Gram's eyes always filled with tears when she talked about the last time she saw her mother, going bravely back out into the storm to help someone she cared for. Ruby, still a little girl, hadn't wanted to make her favorite grandmother unhappy, so with a child's tact, she had never asked for the whole story.

Maybe the story was here, Ruby thought.
But how could that be?
Colleen O'Reilly was lost at sea, not buried in a lonely Texas graveyard.
She stood very still, looking down at the cross. The graveyard, which had been full of birdsong a moment ago, suddenly seemed to go silent. She felt colder, more remote. She was beginning to feel a shimmer. There was something about the cross, something that pulled her, something that could tell her—

“Ruby,” Claire called. “I've found something, here on the angel. Come and take a look. I can't quite read it. Maybe you'll be able to make it out.”

Ruby felt the shimmer disappear—for the first time, regretfully. Claire was kneeling down, examining the pedestal. Then she picked up a stick and began scraping away some of the moss.

“What is it?” Ruby asked, going over to her.

“Don't know,” Claire replied. “The carving is almost worn away. All I can make out are two words. Looks like
My Angels
.”

“My angels?” Ruby repeated.

“Yeah. There's more engraving, but I can't read it. Can you?”

Ruby bent over and peered at the rough-cut stone. She could decipher
the shapes of letters and some numbers, but not clearly enough to know what they were. “Sorry,” she said, straightening up. “All I can make out are those two words.'”

Claire stood up. “Now I'm really curious. I think if I bring a knife or a paint scraper or something like that, I can get some more of this stuff off. There might be a date under all this moss. And if we knew the date, we might be able to figure out what—”

Claire's words were obliterated by a simultaneous, blinding flash of lightning and a teeth-rattling, ear-splitting clap of thunder. About fifty yards away, along the edge of the woods, a tall pine tree was split by a bolt of lightning. It exploded like a detonating bomb, hurling showers of sparks and huge chunks of broken, splintered wood in every direction. The iron fence around the cemetery seemed to vibrate, and the air was filled with the smell of smoke.

For a second, Ruby and Claire froze. “Holy cow,” Claire breathed. Her eyes were huge and staring in her white face. “Ruby, I've never seen anything like that before. That was
close
! We could have been killed!”

Ruby's ears were ringing and her heart was pounding like a trip-hammer. “Come on, let's run,” she said urgently, heading for the gate. “If our ghost is throwing thunderbolts, I'd rather be a moving target.”

The sky remained ominously dark and threatening, especially toward the east and south, where heavy gray clouds were dropping sheer curtains of silvery rain. There was another lightning strike on the other side of the creek, another flash and loud crash. But only a few large, warm splatters came down on Ruby and Claire as they ran to the house, and they managed to get back without getting very wet.

Ruby picked up her bag from the kitchen and Claire showed her to her
room upstairs. After the grandeur of the rooms on the main floor—and the ghostly presence—Ruby didn't know quite what to expect. Something dark and frightening, maybe, or somehow misaligned in its dimensions, like the outside of the house. In which case, Ruby had decided, she would suggest that she and Claire sleep together, for company, and comfort.

But there was nothing out of the ordinary about the room, and nothing very personal about it, either. There were no pictures on the wall, nothing to indicate who might have slept here. It was simply a large, high-ceilinged bedroom pleasantly wallpapered in light blue flowers above a white-painted beadboard wainscot, a pair of twin beds spread with blue coverlets against one wall, and a blue rug on the polished wooden floor.

“Nice,” Ruby said approvingly, looking around. The room was furnished with an old-fashioned white-painted dresser and mirror, a chifforobe, and a rocking chair with a blue print cushion. The chair sat in front of a tall, white-curtained window, which looked out over the creek running through the green meadow at the foot of a long, low wooded hill.