Widow's Tears (34 page)

Rachel Blackwood could not rebuild her home—not then, and not there. After the storm, she went to stay with her sister in Houston, where she remained for some time, virtually a recluse, overwhelmed by her grief and unable to confront life in the world without her husband and children. Early the next spring, despairing of her ability to recover on her own, her doctors sent her to an asylum in the mountains of Colorado, where she lived until 1905. Her treatment was paid for by the return on those highly speculative mineral rights that Augustus had purchased a few days before he died. The property was located near Beaumont, Texas, at a place called Spindletop, which blew its first gusher on January 1, 1901, just four months after the hurricane. The great Texas Oil Boom would change the world and reward everyone who had invested in it.

But all the money in the world could not heal Rachel or fill the empty
place that had once been her heart. She had buried Augustus and knew where he lay, but the bodies of her children, and of Colleen and Patsy as well, were never found. Unburied, her grief remained with her, a constant and corrosive companion, enveloping her in a dark and bitter depression. Her doctors felt a sympathetic affection for this profoundly troubled woman who had lost everything precious to her in the world and could not find a way to go on without it, and they gave her a great deal of fatherly advice for the recovery of her spirits. One of them told her straightforwardly and with the deepest consideration that she would never be healed of her grief unless she busied herself with a worthy project, preferably one that would require her full attention for the rest of her life. She might, for instance, volunteer at Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago, where she could devote both her time and her wealth to a good cause—a fitting memorial, he suggested, to the loved ones she had lost.

But Rachel, who mourned not only for her husband and children but for the house in which they had all lived so happily together, had a different idea for a memorial. She went to look at the land Augustus had bought the week before he died, fifteen hundred acres in Fayette County, some hundred miles inland from the coast and safely (she thought) out of the reach of hurricanes and tropical storms. It pleased her as well as any, although, to tell the truth, no place on earth could have pleased her unless her husband and children were with her. She built a house on the land, as nearly as possible like the house Augustus had built in Galveston. She lacked access to the plans and (at that time) even photographs, so she drew the house from the remembered images that were carved in her heart by grief. The builder did his best to correct her worst errors, but he could only go as far as Rachel would allow—and she would not allow him to go very far, because she had the courage of her convictions and was very sure that she had it right. The result, understandably, was not quite the house that
the original had been. It was, as Ruby Wilcox would later notice, a visibly
crooked
house.

But since Rachel did not often view her house from a distance (she mostly stayed indoors), it pleased her, and she went about furnishing it to resemble the house in Galveston—as it was on September 7, 1900, the day before the hurricane changed her life forever. She became obsessed with this effort, and as time went on, her imagination filled the house as it had been filled before that awful day, with the sounds of Colleen's kitchen, Matthew's flute and bouncing ball, the haunting melodies of Ida's harp, the twins' noisy play, and the comforting scent of Augustus' pipe tobacco. She lost herself in the pleasure of these haunted imaginings. She lost herself, too, in the accumulation of as many photographs, newspaper clippings, and accounts of the storm as she could find, thinking that she would make herself sit down and write about the experience that had robbed her of every happiness. But each time she tried, grief rose up and seized her pen, and finally she put it down and gave up the attempt.

Of course, there were other things that had to be done to attend to the practicalities of life in the country. Rachel built a small but comfortable cottage nearby and hired a young man and his wife—Will and Ellie Daily—to serve as caretaker and cook-housekeeper, positions they held for many years. When a young woman named Hazel Penland appeared on the scene, Rachel took her on as her personal companion, with the idea that Hazel, a bright if uneducated and exceptionally shy young lady, might be able to serve as her secretary and do the writing that she could not. She hired an attorney in La Grange, Wilberforce Bissonet Hoover, Sr., to oversee her financial and legal affairs. Mr. Hoover outlived her by several years, and his son, Wilberforce Bissonet Hoover, Jr., continued to act on behalf of the estate.

If Hazel, the Dailys, and the Hoovers (Senior and Junior) thought Rachel
a little mad, they did not speak of it, for they, like her doctors, felt an affectionate compassion toward her. She was, after all, a very nice person who'd had the misfortune to survive an unspeakable tragedy and was condemned to live out the rest of her life with a loss that was larger than life itself. In the end, she gave up—almost—the idea of writing her story and settled for simply living in her grief, contained as it was in the house she had built to remind herself of her life before the hurricane destroyed everything.

When Rachel died, she left the house to Hazel, who was by that time no longer young. Hazel lived quite companionably with its ghosts until her death, when the house went to Ruth, and then to Claire. And that is when…

And that is when Rachel discovered that she might at last have found someone who could tell her story.

“
Fire!”

Two urgencies drove me as Ruby's shrill scream sliced the dark. One was to put out that licking, hungry tongue of flame before the fuel-fed fire could kindle the wooden floor of a room that was crammed to the ceiling with old books, in a wood-frame house that was over a century old. The other was to stave off the attack of the hulking figure staggering
toward us across the room, a sharp-pointed spear raised over his head, poised to strike at Ruby.

Not that I thought all this out logically, of course. I acted by instinct, stamping swiftly on the darting flicker of flame, shoving Ruby out of the assailant's way, and aiming a clumsy diving tackle at the creature's knees.

And missed, of course. It was dark and he—the
thing
—wasn't where he'd been when Claire dropped the lamp. I ended up cracking my head against the half-open door and seeing a burst of colorful stars cascading like a dying Roman candle through the blackness. Ruby ended up, from the sound of it, falling against the table that held our plates and cups. I heard her sharp “Ow!” and the noisy cascade of dishes to the floor. At least she was out of the way, although as I scrambled stupidly to my feet, I couldn't see where she was, or where Claire was.

Or where
he
was. The dark was absolute. Where was the lightning when we needed it?

But if I couldn't see our attacker, he couldn't see us, although I could hear him stumbling violently around the room, as he knocked things over, whacked the furniture with his wickedly pointed spear, and mumbled, moaned, groaned—terrifying nonhuman noises, the brutish sounds of an animal in agony. And then I heard him topple, full length, the heavy, floor-shaking thud of a falling body.

The thud was followed by a moment's silence, then another noise, the thump of a piece of furniture—one of the wingback chairs?—going over, and a half-muffled “Damn!”

The
damn
came from Claire, I thought, blundering panic-stricken around the room, trying to keep away from the guy's swinging spear as it slashed through the air. But if he was already down and out—

“Claire, Ruby stop,” I said loudly. “Just
stop
where you are. Let's figure out what's going on.”

Ruby was muttering something under her breath, almost like a prayer.

“Ssshh, Ruby,” I said urgently. “Listen for him.” I could hear a gurgling wheeze and the scrabbling of fingernails on the floor. Was he trying to get up? Where was he? Mentally, I mapped the room, trying to come up with a weapon I could use to bash the man's head and keep him down on the floor until—

Until
what
? Our cell phones weren't working, the cars were out of commission, and there was no hope of any reinforcements until Claire's caretaker and his wife got back the next day. We'd have to tie the guy up, which meant that we had to keep him flat on the floor until we could find some rope. But we couldn't go groping around this place in the dark. We needed
light.

Ruby was still muttering. I couldn't make out what she was saying until I heard the whispered words, “
Please, Rachel
.” In the stillness, I heard an answering whisper. It sounded like a long, sibilant
yesssss.

Then something entirely unexpected happened. I felt a faint hum in the floor beneath my feet and a distinct vibration in the air, as if molecules were bumping together. The table lamps in the room began to come on, first with an uncertain, flickering glimmer, and then with the kind of brief, dazzling, blue-white brilliance that comes when you get a power surge somewhere on the line. A bulb exploded with a loud
PING!
and then the lamps in the room settled down to a full, steady glow. The shadows ebbed into the darkened corners and died. Ah, light!

“Thank you,” I heard Ruby say. I was too busy looking around for our assailant to ask her who she was thanking, but I could guess.

Blinking in the unaccustomed bright light, I saw the man halfway across the room, flat on his face on the floor, unmoving. His head was turned to one side, his face mostly hidden by his dark hood. His right arm was folded awkwardly under him. His left arm was stretched out to one
side, his hand clasping the spear. But it wasn't a spear. It was the twisted rod of a wrought-iron fence, with a sharp-pointed finial on the business end. The mistake had been an easy one for me to make, given the surprise of his appearance in the doorway in the guttering light of Claire's oil lamp. And if he'd aimed to use it as a spear, what was the difference?

Ruby stumbled around the fallen chairs and stood beside the man on the floor. “What
is
it?” she asked fearfully, looking down at the sprawled form. A puddle of blood seeped from under one cheek. “Is it…is he
dead
?” The bloody fingers holding the spear twitched and splayed, and Ruby stepped back, eyes widening. “No, he's not!” she whispered. “He's alive!”

Claire was bending over the figure, putting out a trembling hand toward the unmoving shoulder, then drawing back. “I think…” Her voice quavered. “I think it's…” But she couldn't bring herself to touch the body.

I skirted the broken glass and spreading patch of lamp oil and went to kneel beside the man. A warning kindled inside me, but I steeled myself against it and, with difficulty, rolled him over onto his right side, then his back.

Then wished fervently that I hadn't. It wasn't a man. It was a woman, her dark hair rain-soaked and bloody from a cut across her forehead. Someone—or something—had sliced the skin from the left half of her face from cheekbone to the point of her jaw, opening a gaping, meat-cleaver slit down the left side of her neck, exposing her collarbone. The right side of her face was deeply abraded and raw, like freshly ground meat, and her right eye was…

I swallowed. The right eye was probably gone. Welling blood pooled in the socket. It looked as though her right arm might be broken, and her sweatshirt was sodden and bloody. Her jeans were soaked as well, as if she'd been swimming, and the denim of the right leg was ripped open
from thigh to ankle. She wore only one sneaker, on her left foot. The right foot was shoeless and turned outward at an impossible angle. It occurred to me then that she might have picked up the iron fence piece to use it as a support, like a walking cane.

Beside me, Claire gasped when she saw the woman's face. “Kitty!” she cried. “It's…this is Kitty Rawlings!”