Heart Murmurs (10 page)

****

“Are you sure I can't get you anything?” Beth hovers at the guest room door. “You're all set for the night, then?”

I can hear her husband, Edward, finally home, messing around in the store area. Beth's hands fidget.

“For goodness sake, Beth. I'm fine! He's finally home — go! I'll get you if I need you.”

Edward appears, stooping to miss the light, but his tousled hair brushes it anyway. He smiles brightly. “Miss Mia. I've missed you, girl.”

I smile back. “Me too.”

I shoo them away.

“You'll behave — right Mia?” Her voice has the same reluctance as when she told my parents I could spend the night while they traveled on business. All the way to California for a cardiac conference.

“Promise.”

She shuts the door and I hear their footsteps head upstairs. I listen intently for any sound of Morgan. He disappeared the moment we arrived at Orchard House.

The night is silent except for the call of the cicadas. An occasional hoot of a barn owl strays in on the night air.

I open a drawer, poking around. Inside the chest is an array of 19th century attire. I smile. I love getting dressed up. It's a fun perk of the job.

I wriggle out of my jeans and blouse, slipping the white chemise over my head. I stare at myself in the full-length mirror. Now I match the bedroom perfectly.

I stare, taking it all in. It's simply furnished in early 19th century decor. I wander over to the bookshelf, letting my fingers gently brush against their old spines. They look expensive — and ancient.

Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Bronson Alcott, Hitchcock and I laugh at the last — Stephen King. And a leather-bound book at the end, with very small, silver wording at the top.
Conductor
's Ledger
.

I feel my eyebrows draw together. These do not seem like Beth's reading tastes. More like mine. She's much too airy and light for these authors.

Authors.

I remember and hurry over to my overnight bag, pulling out the book Morgan gave me.

A Long Fatal Love Chase
by A.M. Barnard.

I pull my laptop out of my overnight bag, and type the title in the search engine. My eyes scan the results and I click on the first one.

A.M. Barnard was a pseudonym for Louisa May Alcott. She wrote these books in desperation, trying to make money for her father's failing household. She worked to help the family from a very early age. Morgan's voice, dripping with contempt, echoes, “He couldn't keep his family above the poverty line.”

“Some mystery.” My voice breaks the stillness. It's. So. Quiet.

Too quiet.

I flip through its pages, deciding to read till I fall asleep. There are few televisions in Orchard House, and none in this guest room.

I flip to the front of the book, and my breath catches. It is signed in an untidy scrawl.

“
To my only brother. May you find your heart's desire and find enough love to heal your soul
.
”

Lou

“What does this mean? Is this the secret?” My stomach lurches with the impossible idea. “No, that isn't… possible. Is it?”

I slip the book back into my overnight bag. And zip it. Trying to close the Pandora's Box I've unwittingly opened. My mind stutters up a memory. Of Morgan's fumbled words. He'd said, “Lou,” before correcting himself, and saying, “Louisa.”

I shake my head. It's just a coincidence. I'm fabricating clues.

But my new heart is beating hard under my hand, and in my mind's recesses, I hear the banished whispers, trying to find a way around my mental barricade. They're almost panting.

Am I onto something?

More and more, the whispers and I are merging — like my heart has grown, expanded to accommodate them. Where they used to feel alien and intrusive, they now feel like an extra conscience. One more bold and confident than I had before the surgery.

My mind takes off to the place I've been avoiding. I eat foods I never liked before, can sing, when I was once tone deaf…

“Stop.”

Admitting it, even in my head, feels too crazy scary.

Suddenly I can't sit still — the possibilities will drown me if I don't move. I slide out of bed and pace in front of the open window, where the battlefield is bathed in the moonlight.

“What does it mean?”

I wish, not for the first time, that Morgan had a cell so I could text him. He doesn't have a cell. I remember the look he gave mine, like it was something to fear.

“Stop it. That proves nothing.”

I think of texting Claire, but it's football Friday again. Plus — I know she loves me—but I don't think even she could wrap her head around all this. She'd chalk it up to my ‘author imagination.'

I stare at the crammed bookshelf. I'm drawn to the center shelf. A pull, a now familiar compulsion. Like someone inserted a fishhook around my spine and is yanking me forward through my belly button.

I take a deep breath and reach up to the shelf. My hand is shaking like mad. There are three leather-bound books, sitting in a row. Titles are burned into their leather spines:
Couriers,
Conductor
s, Literati
.

I pluck the middle one off the shelf and sink back onto the bed.

I crack it open.

A bell tolls. Loud, like it's right beside the bed.

My stomach lurches and I gasp and drop the book with a ‘thwump.'

I sit perfectly still, waiting. But all I hear are the owls, hooting outside my window. Then, their low resonant voices grow frantic, calling back and forth across the barnyard. It sounds like a mantra, ‘the bell has rung, the bell has rung!'

A huge screech owl takes to the wind, swooping past the window. I back away and loose the drapery, breathing hard.

My whole body trembles like I'm having a seizure, and I pick the book back up, wiping the sweat from my palms on my shift.

The first page says,

‘The Conductors: A Guidebook'

Recollection sparks in the back of my mind. The people who helped slaves escape on the Underground Railroad… they were called Conductors.

Is this from the Civil War?

I turn the page and my blood goes cold. Erasing any thoughts that this bound volume was written for abolitionists.

My eyes scan the words, handwritten in a neat script.

“'The Conductor will assume responsibility for their tunnel, and continue in perpetuity until a suitable heir can be found. Suitable heirs are easily identifiable by their butterfly-shaped markings. These have been known to fade and reappear over time.'”

Three words echo in my mind, clanging inside like the tolling bell.

Continue in perpetuity. Forever?

My new heart flutters as I turn the page again. My insides liquefy and slosh as if my organs have been swapped with ice-cold water, and gooseflesh erupts on my arms.

“'The tunnels are not to be used, under any circumstances, for personal gain. The plan assigned by the Literati should be executed in a timely fashion. Should one succumb to greed or cowardice, using said tunnels for personal wish fulfillment, consequences will ensue.'”

My eyes drop to the bottom of the page. The names on the page match the names of the authors on the shelf before me.

Except one.

Instead of Louisa May Alcott — it says — Beth Alcott.

 

Heart In My Mouth

 

I wrench open the door, tiptoeing across the hardwood floor, cringing as the floorboards creak. Beth and Edward are upstairs, blissfully oblivious to anything I am doing. And Morgan… his rooms are through a door behind the sweets counter. But there's no sign of him.

My head whips back and forth around the store, trying to take in everything at once. I have no idea what I'm looking for — but it's like seeing the place with new eyes. This is no ordinary house. Beth… may not be ordinary either.

I swallow.

Morgan is most likely not… what?

What I thought? Likely not from Gettysburg? Likely not from this
bleeding
' century?

Suddenly his behavior makes perfect sense. How he's above ridiculous gossip. How he seems to treasure the most mundane things — like nature. If he's from the time of the Civil War — they had nothing and worked for everything.

I decide to do something I've never done before.
Snoop.

I walk quietly to Beth's study, which I've never had reason to enter. My mind resurrects a memory of Beth locking this door. I always assumed it was where she kept the store money in a safe.

“Maybe she locks it for other reasons.” My whisper gives me chills.

I jiggle the ornate doorknob, and it swings open. She was careless tonight in her joy over Edward's return home.

Her office is bursting with antiques… which don't look like replicas. An old-fashioned, headless mannequin stands in the center of her room, showing off a beautiful, striped, nineteenth century dress.

Birdcages hang from open rafters, alongside dried flowers of multi-colored sizes and shapes.

Framed black and white photographs cover the walls.

My heart skips a beat, and the whispers goad me on. I walk toward them as if on a slow-motion conveyor belt.

I somehow know if I look at them, everything will change.

I don't know if I want everything to change. But my feet keep propelling me toward the wall.

I arrive, my breath quickens in time with the balloon of panic, expanding through my chest, closing off my throat. I'm gasping like after the other night's careless sprint.

I slowly raise my head.

Six pairs of eyes stare back from a black and white family portrait of the Alcotts. I instantly recognize Louisa from the portraits in Orchard Hour and the Internet. My eyes flick down, flying across the bottom of the picture, where their names are engraved in sequential order.

Beth Alcott's name is second in the queue. The Beth who died in
Little Women
, whose character was modeled after Louisa's very real sister. Her death almost broke Louisa's heart beyond repair.

My eyes bore down on the names, not wanting to return to the painting; they lift so slowly, I'm dizzy.

My eyes quickly sweep the faces and jerk back in a violent beat. A cold sweat breaks on my brow.

Beth's,
my Beth's
, round, happy face stares back at me from the portrait.

The world upends. I collapse to the floor, keeping the lurching portrait in my sight.

“Beth is a… Conductor? What does that mean? She's 152 years old?”

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump
.

“No, not now.”

A new fear slams my chest.

Atrial fibrillation, and I'm alone, without my phone, on the floor.

The room is getting smaller, like Alice again, but this time the circular blackness pulls tighter and tighter, like a mental drawstring. I reach out my fingers to the remaining pinprick of light.

It extinguishes, like a puff of breath to a flame.

I finally wake, and sit up too quickly. Stars and bursts of light pop around my head, just like a cartoon. I squint my eyes at the window. It's still dark outside.

I hear a loud
thump
out in the store. I pull myself up and force my quivering, jelly-filled legs to walk forward. It's as if my brain is a puppet master to my badly wired marionette body. There's a lag time between my brain's commands and my limbs' responses.

The shop is so still — it's quiet as a tomb. A weird blue light seems to lick the walls; as if someone's left a computer screen glowing. The same blue light I saw from my window the other night.

I search frantically for the source — but there is no computer in sight. Beth only has one, a laptop, and it's probably in her room.

The light becomes brighter, casting shadows up behind the sweets counter, crawling up to the ceiling.

My mouth goes dry. I take steadying in-and-out breaths; I don't want to pass out again.

Morgan's door is ajar. It most definitely wasn't when I passed it a few hours ago. Has he gone down into the tunnel?

I walk to his room and push open the door. “Morgan?”

There is a tiny trail of mud… leading to the trapdoor.

The sapphire blue light bleeds around the four corners of the door, providing the undulating lightshow on the walls.

The whispers ignite.

He's down there. I know it
.

I bite my lip. Before, with my other heart, my other soul, I would've run.

A resolve fills my chest — a burning thirst for the truth. I hoist the trapdoor open.

The light is blinding. I fumble around, feeling on top of the sweets counter till I find them. Beth's sunglasses.

I slide them on and hurry down the ladder, dropping to the ground.

I stumble backward as I look around, hitting my head on the ladder. I'm momentarily disoriented while my brain dissects what it expected to see from what's in front of me. Like it's some bad optical illusion.

Before me are catacombs; myriads of tunnels — almost like the sewers beneath a large city.

The bright blue lights flicker and glimmer, and disappear. The whole of it is now bathed in a thick, black light. On the ground, strange orange and green fluorescent flowers wriggle and stretch, as if sniffing my leg.

In and out of the tunnels — people, or what appear to be people, are passing, gliding, from one tunnel to the next.

They brush past each other without a glance. They look like faded photographs.

Every century of dress, Edwardian, Civil, modern — a boy in a faded T-shirt looks completely lost as he wanders past, carrying a skateboard into the tunnel next to me.

I have no idea where Morgan went. “What is this place?”

The flowers at my feet bloom wider, as if smiling.

I shudder as a cold chill scurries up my back.

The flowers light up in a distinctive linear path, straight in front of me. A weird, weathervane-type rooster is planted in the center and swings despite the lack of breeze — to the directions, North, South, East, West.

It flips around and holds at North. Toward the tunnel where the flowers light the path.

I take one last look at the trapdoor, and plunge headlong into the tunnel, weaving through the photograph-folk.