Widow's Tears (30 page)

“I think,” she said slowly, “I think we're here because Rachel is ready to let go of all this.” She spoke as if she were hearing the words, weighing and measuring them, wondering, even as she spoke them, if they were true. “She's ready to leave—if she could. But she can't.”

Once more, for the record, I do not believe in spooks, and the rational, legal-eagle part of me—if I'd let her—would have jumped straight out of her chair, announced that she had heard enough of this mystical claptrap (to use one of McQuaid's favorite phrases), and stalked out of the room. That's exactly what I would have done if this were anybody else but Ruby.

But the fact of the matter is that I believe in Ruby. Which means that I believed that she believed in what she was saying—that she wasn't imagining it or making it up. For her, Rachel was real, which made her real for me, as well. (And then, of course, there was that inexplicable bell and that writing on the menu board, neither of which were produced by the power of suggestion.)

I waited for her to go on. When she didn't, I prompted her with a question. “Why can't she leave?”

Ruby didn't answer for a moment, and in just that narrow space of time, I felt the temperature in the room drop by several degrees. There seemed to be a draft coming from someplace, eddying around us. My bare arms broke out in goose bumps. I shivered—and not entirely from the cold. I'm the kind of person who likes to know what's happening, and right now, I didn't have a clue.

Ruby's fingers were laced tightly together as if she were praying. Her knuckles were white and in the lamplight, her face was strained and intent.
“She wants to leave but she can't because she's held on too long, too tight, too…”

Her voice trailed off, blurred, as if her lips had gone numb. She pulled in a ragged breath, then let it out in a lengthening sigh. “She built this house to indulge her grief. She wanted to create a place to live with it. And now she's a prisoner of it.”

“A prisoner of this house?” I asked.

“Yes.” Ruby drew out the word in a long sigh.

Claire was frowning. “Really, Ruby, I don't understand any of this. How could a house
indulge
her grief? What about those graves? Her kids, her husband? Did she have something to do with their deaths? And how do you know all this, Ruby?”

There was a silence, as if Ruby were asking herself these questions. At last, she shook her head. “I don't know, Claire. I don't know. I just—” Her voice was now low and uninflected—the voice of a sleepwalker, trance-like, not Ruby's voice at all. Her shoulders were slumped, her hands loose in her lap, her eyelids half-closed. She looked and spoke as if she'd been hypnotized.

“Ruby?” Obviously frightened, Claire started to get up. “Ruby, are you all right? What—”

I put out my hand to stop her. I couldn't even pretend to guess what might be happening here, but I've occasionally seen what Ruby can do when she puts her mind to it—or rather, when she connects with the intuitive part of herself, the knowing part that doesn't have anything to do with her mind. Before, I had seen it happen with the help of her Ouija board or as she read the tarot cards. Once, I even watched her read a Honda Civic in a parking lot in the little town of Indigo—and what she learned led us to the body of the car's owner, hidden in the basement of an abandoned
school. It was happening again but without any help, except perhaps from the entity that Ruby thought of as Rachel.

And while there's not a wisp of the psychic in me (and a very healthy hunk of the cynic), I knew that if I were to ask Ruby, she would say that the three of us were not alone in this room. Rachel, or whatever collection of energies wore the name of Rachel, was with us, speaking to us.

And Ruby was giving her a voice.

Galveston
Night, September 8, 1900

At St. Mary's Orphanage, three miles west of the city, the sisters and their charges sang and prayed while they waited for what was about to happen. The boys' dormitory was completely gone now, and the front of their building was going, too, devoured in huge bites by the ravenous waves and the roaring wind. The windows were blown in, the roof fell in pieces, one brick wall after another collapsed with a thunderous roar, and at last all was swept into the churning maelstrom.

The three oldest boys, left untethered to fend for themselves, were flung through a window and survived by clinging to a tree that was lodged in the
masts of a four-masted wooden schooner, the
John S. Ames
. “The sisters were very brave,” the boys said later. Their bodies, still lashed to their children, would be buried where they were found.

*   *   *

S
ISTER
Elizabeth would likely have been no safer had she listened to Mother Gabriel and stayed at St. Mary's Infirmary, on Avenue D in Galveston. This imposing brick building, another one of Nicholas J. Clayton's fanciful designs, was no match for the winds. Once the windows and roofs were gone, the brick walls were next. Of the many, perhaps hundreds, who had taken refuge there, just eight survived.

Only a few blocks away, another of Clayton's projects was coming to pieces. The fantastic Victorian towers and turrets and chimney pots of John Sealy Hospital were raining down in showers of brick and slate. The nurse letter-writer added one last frantic paragraph to her note:

“Darkness is overwhelming us, to add to the horror,” she wrote. “Dearest, I reach out my hand to you—my heart—my soul.” Her letter was unsigned.

Nicholas Clayton declared bankruptcy three years after the hurricane. He never received another major architectural commission.

*   *   *

A
T
Twenty-fifth and Q, Weather Bureau chief Isaac Cline and his family—his heavily pregnant wife, Cora; his daughters Allie and Rosemary, twelve and eleven; and six-year-old Esther—had taken refuge on the second floor, together with a large group of refugees who had banged on the front door, pleading for entry. The water had risen to the height of the ceilings of the first floor, but Cline still believed that his house was built high and strong enough to survive any amount of battering by wind and wave—and he
might have been right. He did not, however, reckon with the mountain of debris that was being shoved north and west through the city like a gigantic scraper blade, demolishing every structure in its path.

Joseph Cline no longer shared his brother's confidence. As assistant weatherman in the Galveston Bureau, he remembered and resented Isaac's self-assured prediction that the city would never be inundated by a storm surge, and was now certain that the house was no secure refuge, either. As Joseph later told the story in his book,
When the Heavens Frowned
, he urged Isaac and the others to gather in a room on the windward side, the Gulf side, so that when the house tipped over (as he was convinced it would), they would not be trapped beneath it. The best hope, he said, was to jump out of the building as it went over and grab and hold on to whatever pieces of debris could be found.

And that is what he did. The moving mountain of debris, topped by a long section of broken trolley track, finally reached Q Avenue. It struck the two-story Cline house so hard that the house was knocked off its piers. For a few terrifying moments, the building listed sharply to leeward like a stricken vessel, as the people and the furnishings in the room slid down the sharply tilting floor to land in a heap against the opposite wall. As Joseph told the story, he seized the hands of his nieces, Allie and Rosemary, and lunged backward through the front window, crashing through casement and glass and storm shutters and landing on the outside wall of the capsized house, now lying on its side.

It was dark now and the wind was still a wild gale, lashing the waves into a seething frenzy. But the clouds had broken and the moon's fleeting glimmer was enough to show Joseph and the girls that they were alone. None of the others in the room with them had managed to escape when the house went over. The raft on which they rode, it seemed, was also a floating coffin.

*   *   *

O
N
the other side of Q Avenue and a few doors up from the Cline house, Augustus Blackwood's house was still standing firm, a bulwark in a black expanse of wind-tossed water. The wind still shrieked like a banshee and the waves thundered against the house, with the occasional reverberating crash of a large piece of wreckage like a cannonball against a wall. But it seemed to Rachel, listening to the deafening din with the ears of hope, that the storm was at last abating.

When the water reached the second floor where the children could see it, they were frightened and began to cry. So Rachel and Colleen took them with Patsy to the third floor, where they all cuddled together on the bed in the back bedroom, on the side away from the Gulf. It was night now and late, although Rachel was so dizzy with fatigue that she had no idea of the time. Outside the window, the moon was beginning to flicker through the clouds, shining fitfully on the plunging seas and pitching wreckage around their refuge. But inside, in their small oasis of a room, there was the warm glow of the kerosene lamp that Colleen had brought upstairs, along with the plate of sandwiches and cake left from the party and even a jug of lemonade. The wind had blown out the windows in most of the other third-floor rooms and was shrieking madly through the hallway and pounding against the closed door so hard that it would have buckled and burst open had it not been for the chiffonier wedged against it. But even though she could feel the walls shuddering around her, this room felt safe, and she let her mind drift to tomorrow and the work that would have to be done when the storm had passed. She knew that some of the slates were gone from the roof, because she could see large damp spots in the ceiling and the plaster was beginning to sag. But let it fall, she told herself. When this was over, a little fallen plaster could be easily mended.

The children had eaten the rest of the sandwiches and cake and then, exhausted by the excitements of the day, had fallen asleep, Ida and Matthew close against Rachel, Angela in her arms, and the twins in Colleen's lap. Their sleep was a blessing, Rachel thought, smoothing the damp golden curls from Angela's forehead. When they woke to the bright sunshine of a new day, all these nightmare horrors would be gone. After a little time, they would forget—especially when their father managed to get home from the bank (surely one of the most secure buildings in the city) and they were all together at last. She was glad that she had forced herself to follow Colleen's example and stay calm, keeping the little ones busy. Even Patsy, hardly more than a child herself and terrified at the thought of never seeing her parents and sisters again, was dozing now. The lamp cast shadows on their peaceful faces. Somewhere, there was a crash of glass. Another window had gone.

“'Twon't be long now,” Colleen said softly, and reached for Rachel's hand.

“I'm sure it won't,” Rachel replied, almost giddy with relief at the idea that this ordeal would soon be over. “The storm has to pass soon and the winds will die down. And then the water will recede.” She had faith in the house that Augustus had built for her. Now, more than ever, it felt like a dear and constant friend, a sturdy sanctuary in the center of an unimaginable hell of wind and water. It sheltered her and the children within its loving walls, and even though the stone lions at their door were underwater, they still stood watch.

Of course, there would be a terrible mess when the water went down. Augustus would be appalled when he got home and saw the damage to their beautiful home. The first-floor furnishings and draperies and carpets were doubtless a complete loss and would have to be replaced, and the carpets and some of the furniture on the second floor. The Tiffany windows were utterly smashed, she was sure, and the Steinway and Ida's
harp and Augustus' favorite leather chair were ruined, although the crystal chandelier in the dining room might be salvaged. But whatever had been lost could be replaced, and replaced exactly. It was just a matter of money. They would all be together, she and Augustus and the children. And Colleen, too, of course—what would she have done if kind, strong Colleen had not come back to help? Rachel wasn't sure she could have managed. No, she was quite, quite sure that she could
not
have.

Smiling, she began to rock Angela, holding the child's warm, sleeping body against her breast.
“Sweet and low,”
she sang. It was the sweet, soothing lullaby that the children always begged for when they were sick or very tired.
“Sweet and low, wind of the western sea. Low, low, breathe and blow, wind of the western sea.”
She touched the tip of Angela's sweet, turned-up nose and smiled at Matthew and Ida, close beside her. They were all together now, and safe—except for Augustus, who would be with them when the storm had passed, soon now, very soon.
“Over the rolling waters go, come from the dying moon and blow, blow him again to me. While my little ones, while my pretty ones, sleep.”