Authors: Barbara J. Hancock
The house glistened with freshness—paint, landscaping, shingles—even the pale purple trim had been painstakingly restored, each artistically turned piece of gingerbread softly highlighted in the mist.
In the midst of a tidy riot of planter boxes and hanging baskets that had probably been changed out from summer impatiens to autumn pansies and mums in the last month or so, a young woman stood at the top of a ladder tending the flowers.
Trinity came up short and held her breath.
She hated ladders.
But the woman was busy and didn’t seem to mind her distance from the ground or that she was presenting the perfect opportunity for something unfortunate to happen.
People work on ladders every day.
Trinity told herself.
Even in Scarlet Falls.
Nevertheless, she moved forward with urgency to survey the scene with a gaze that rapidly catalogued. The ladder was a new aluminum contraption with shiny fittings and sturdy appearance.
But…
Trinity saw as she came close that the edge of a rubber gardener’s mat was curled under one foot of the ladder in an unlikely arrangement to have happened on its own unless the young woman had a death wish.
A startled “oh” above her head caused Trinity to look up just as the ladder wobbled dangerously to the side with a jangle of aluminum against the porch roof. Trinity stepped quickly over the short hedge that bordered the walk to the front door. She grabbed for the tilted ladder and was almost pulled off her feet when its weight overcame her own. Her burnedarm stung as its skin pulled taut, but Trinity didn’t let go. She strained against gravity and held on tight.
“Careful,” she called through gritted teeth.
The woman was thin, but still too much weight when combined with the ladder to allow Trinity to smooth the mat. Luckily, the woman was decisive and quick. She came down rung by slanted rung of the ladder as soon as Trinity gripped its sides to stop it mid-fall.
“I could have sworn I left that mat by the zinnia bed,” the woman said in the slightly breathless, slightly disgruntled voice of a person who has avoided a careless accident. Trinity didn’t assure her that she probably had. For all she knew, the woman was absentminded, but something about her neat denim jumpsuit and the pretty gardening gloves on her hands told a different story.
“The flowers are lovely,” she said instead, smiling. No one had been hurt. She had swiftly run her gaze over the woman’s appearance and it didn’t look like she’d suffered so much as a scrape, though a fall from that height would have resulted in serious injury.
The woman pulled off her gloves, returning Trinity’s smile as she pushed tendrils of auburn hair back from a lightly freckled face. She was startlingly beautiful with alabaster skin beneath the freckles and bone structure you’d normally see on the pages of a magazine.
“It’s work I enjoy,” she replied. Then she thrust one of her hands forward. “I’m Maddy Clark.”
Trinity was surprised to find the other woman’s hand perfectly smooth and manicured, her nails a lavender shellac. No wonder she wore gloves.
“I’m Trinity Chadwick,” she replied. Maddy didn’t mention the bandages peeking out from Trinity’s coat, but her clasp gentled when she saw them. Trinity appreciated the consideration and the tact.
“You’re Elise and Roger’s daughter. I’ve helped your mother with her garden from time to time since I moved here last year,” Maddy said. Her mossy green eyes narrowed slightly. Only slightly, but Trinity had to fight the urge to launch into an explanation for her long absence. There was just a hint of Boston brogue in Maddy’svoice. Trinity wondered what had brought the woman to Scarlet Falls. She obviously knew her business. The gardens here and at Hillhaven were as stunning as her face.
“Well, let’s see about this,” Maddy said. She turned and knelt to extricate the mat from under the ladder. “I couldn’t get it to do this again if I tried,” she continued.
“Be careful,” Trinity said again, powerless to make anyone careful enough.
Maddy stood, and while she rolled the mat into a neat bundle and moved to store it in a nearby cart with large, nubby wheels, she looked at Trinity once more.
“I usually am,” she said. Her smile was still soft and easy, but her forehead had crinkled. And that’s when Trinity realized what was so striking about Maddy Clark. She was as natural as she was beautiful, completely easy with her looks and her world even when something puzzled her in it. It was the kind of ease that came with believing there was a logical explanation for everything.
Trinity nodded. There was no way of explaining without sounding crazy. Since gardening was primarily a daytime job, the other woman might never have to worry about becoming accident prone in Scarlet Falls.
It was always worse after dark.
Trinity moved to step back over the hedge and climb the porch steps.
“It was nice to meet you,” she called over her shoulder. She left the obviously talented gardener with her horrifying ladder outside as the beveled glass front door opened with the heavy whoosh of well-oiled hinges.
The fresh scent of lemon polish mingled with older, mustier scents as she stepped inside—books, ink, mothballs. Her boots made her steps seem loud across the pine floors. She walked on the faded Persian carpet rugs wherever she could.
A vaguely familiar woman sat on a stool behind a cluttered welcome desk. Her perch, her black dress and faded chignon and the gleam of her eyes reminded Trinity uncomfortably of Creed’s beady-eyed crow. Trinity had seen her before, but the helpful volunteer badge she wore above her slightly concave chest supplied her name when Trinity’s memory failed to dredge it up from the past.
Violet Jesham.
“Can I help you?” she said in a rusty, but rushed voice as if she rarely got to offer but anticipated the opportunity to such a degree that the wait was worth it.
Trinity pulled Clara Chadwick’s picture from her pocket.
“I was hoping to find out more about this little girl,” she said.
Mrs. Jesham dropped something she was knitting and came forward with several quick steps, so like a bird ruffling its feathers to hop, hop, hop toward bread crumbs in the park. The low heels of her sensible shoes giving off a muffled swish, swish, swish.
Trinity handed her the photograph and the older woman looked at it long and hard with the aid of reading glasses she lifted from her breast with a jet beaded chain.
“Ah, yes, I see. ‘Chadwick,’” Mrs. Jesham said. “Welcome home, Trinity. I thought I recognized you. Your mother and I are in the Garden Club together.”
Trinity forced a smile. Retired or not, she couldn’t imagine her outdoorsy mother socializing with Violet Jesham. In fact, she couldn’t imagine Violet Jesham outside of these almost forgotten walls. Around them, a myriad of old photographs were framed and hung in an eclectic mix of frames—some gilded, some carved—and in every shape and size. Violet Jesham looked very like some of the women in the photographs from centuries ago as if she’d stepped down from one of the frames when she’d heard the door whoosh and it waited for her—silent and empty—to return.
“I would assume this is from the 1930s or ’40s based on the ‘Shirley Temple’ style of her dress and hair,” Mrs. Jesham said.
Trinity privately thought “Shirley Temple” by way of “Alfred Hitchcock,” but she continued to smile. She was grateful for the help even if Violet Jesham seemed eerily out of her own time.
“The original courthouse burned in 1972, but we have quite a few of those old records here,” Mrs. Jesham said.
She handed the photograph back to Trinity and motioned for her to follow, pausing only to pick up a knitting basket from the desk she’d been perched near when Trinity came in. Trinity followed, trying to silence the echoing of her steps through several rooms until they came into an old parlor lined with filing cabinets and incongruously lit by an elaborate dusty chandelier.
A large, yellow tabby cat was curled on an embroidered pillow near the fireplace, but Violet Jesham paid no attention to the cat or the room. She went, instead, to a heavy door and turned the skeleton key that was protruding from a curly cued iron panel below its knob.
“Down these stairs,” she explained.
Mrs. Jesham reached up and pulled a chain dangling from the ceiling of the stairwell and a lone bulb flared to life with an electric pop. Cool, slightly dank air rushed up from below.
Trinity stepped toward the opening, but she paused when her glance was caught by one of the framed photographs hung by the door. It was an 8 x 10 of a group of Edwardian women with serious expressions frozen stiff for posterity. A small gold label on the frame identified the group as the Ladies of the Scarlet Falls Historical Society, 1922. They were an intimidating bunch. Dressed all in black with hats as impressive as their crinoline-covered hips and not a single smile among them.
Their eyes seemed to track Trinity’s movements as she passed by.
Both her steps and Mrs. Jesham’s echoed and squeaked as they squeezed themselves down the narrow flight of centuries-old stairs that led to the basement rooms.
At least there weren’t any cobwebs. Or did their absence indicate that the basement wasn’t even a place creepy creatures cared to tread?
Trinity was glad she’d kept her coat on when she’d come inside out of the mist. Even with the coat, she shivered as the air grew progressively colder the deeper they stepped into the earth.
They came into a dark room that wasn’t touched by the glow from the ceiling bulb above because of the curve in the stairs.
Trinity braced herself against the dark and against the utter ignorance of what was in it. She couldn’t catalog or survey to check for anything out of place or dangerous. She could only stand in darkness waiting.
The black seemed to envelop her in a cool press of thick atmosphere. She instinctively held her breath against it. Her healinglungs loathed to accept the dark dankness into her body.
Violet Jesham was silent.
In the absence of light, Trinity could no longer see her guide. She detected a shift of movement. Nothing more. Perhaps Mrs. Jesham had climbed back into her frame to leave Trinity alone in this tomb-like basement?
Fluorescent ceiling lights buzzed into life above their heads. Trinity released the breath she’d been holding in a soft sigh. Mrs. Jesham had flicked on a wall switch nearby. She stood with her hand still on the switch looking at Trinity’s relief with knowing eyes.
But the other woman didn’t mention Trinity’s unease.
“Feel free to go through these,” Mrs. Jesham offered.
She gestured toward more filing cabinets around the room with one arm while she cradled her basket in the other. The cabinets were raised up off the packed earth floor by stacks of bricks presumably to keep them dry when wet weather caused the basement to become even damper. Mrs. Jesham took up another perch on another stool, this one placed so that she would be looking down on a nearby table where Trinity would work.
She placed her basket at her feet and took out a long black scarf and a skein of wool yarn. She placed the roll of yarn in her lap and allowed the scarf to fall to the floor as she began to ply two long ivory knitting needles that were yellowed with age.
“That’s a nice scarf,” Trinity said, trying to warm the air with friendly commentary. She moved toward the nearest cabinets somehow, not liking the feel of the hard-packed dirt beneath her feet.
“It’s for the man who paid for the Historical Society’s renovation. A thank you gift,” Jesham said. “He won’t let us thank him publically. He wanted to remain anonymous.”
So, the society had received a donation to renovate the house and grounds. No wonder it looked much more well-kept than the last time she had been in town.
The click-click-clickity-click of Mrs. Jesham’s needles set Trinity’s teeth on age, but she braced herself against the constant clicking so she could get to work.
It took several musty hours before Trinity finally found records for a Clara Chadwick’s birth and death. Mrs. Jesham had watched her like a hawk…instead of like the beady-eyed crow in Creed’s collection. The older woman had hardly moved beyond the busy click of her needles, sitting on her stool, hour after hour, while Trinity dug and shuffled and sorted.
Born 1935—Died 1944.
Clara had died when she was only eight years old.
“There was a fever that year,” Mrs. Jesham said over her shoulder. Trinity started and looked up into Mrs. Jesham’s uncommonly bright eyes. The woman still held her knitting needles and the scarf, but she had quieted the project in her fist to speak. “If she was a Chadwick buried before 1945, you’ll find her at the Old Stone Church,” Mrs. Jeshamcontinued.“Many children died that winter.” Her sudden interest and animation after hours of silent, motionless observation except for her busy needles gave Trinity chills.
“The story was that a traveling salesman came into town with a cough. His car broke down and he ended up spending a cold night by High Lake before someone found him delirious with fever the next day. Every house he’d visited that week with his suitcase of whatever it was he was selling fell ill. Many didn’t recover. Especially the children,” Mrs. Jesham said. Trinity wondered how many historical stories the woman had memorized over her lifetime and how many involved tragedy. No wonder she wore black and jet beads. There was a sense of mourning about her. Perpetual mourning. Did it lighten her load to share the stories once in a while? Or was she steeped in darkness, each and every tale she held in her head heavy on her soul?
Trinity didn’t argue that she could have found Clara anywhere in town, not just the Old Stone Church. The Girl in Blue didn’t seem to be content to stay in her grave. Instead, Trinity thanked the woman and helped her put away the faded resources. A part of her wanted to rush away, but even in the oppressive atmosphere, she fought against it. Violet Jesham deserved her gratitude. That she made Trinity uneasy didn’t signify.
* * *
When the
Chadwick
girl finally left, Violet continued her knitting, completely unaware that she stood in a corner of the room where the light was bad. It didn’t matter. Her fingers clicked the needles automatically. She stared into a photograph filled with long-dead eyes.