The Widow's House Page 9

  For a moment I thought I did, a scent so heady and sweet it made me dizzy. I had to put my head down on the table to steady myself. When the scent was replaced by the maple syrupy smell of old paper, I opened my eyes. I read the short article through and found that Mary Foley was engaged to one Ernst Jackson.

  Oh, I thought with a shiver, we were almost related. Only Mary was never going to bear any Jackson children and even if she had they wouldn’t be my blood relations. I looked through the faces again and found a bashful looking young man, looking uncomfortable in a plaid suit, who had the same square jaw and wide-set eyes as my father. Ernst Jackson was Mildred’s son. My father’s father. I remembered Monty’s story. Mary’s father had married her off to the neighboring farmer’s son—to my grandfather. He must have remarried eventually and had my father, but surely the story of his first wife, who killed herself and abandoned her child, would have been passed down in the family. I must have heard it when I was little and hiding under the kitchen table eavesdropping on my mother and her sisters talking.

  I put the newspaper aside, meaning to make a copy of it before I left, and picked up the file for 1929–30, counting nine months in my head as I did. January 1930—unless the baby had come early . . . I flipped through stories about the local quilting bee and church socials and advertisements for farms for sale and used farm equipment until I found the story in the January 13 issue of the Gazette. No picture this time. Just two inches of newsprint.

  Tragedy struck last night as a local farmer’s wife and infant fell victim to the worst ice storm of the decade. Mrs. Mary Jackson, formerly Foley, was found frozen to death on the Montague estate, River House, by the estate caretaker, Albert Finley. Mr. Finley, who has worked for the estate since he was a boy, said he found her when he came out in the morning to check on the damage caused by the storm.

  “She looks to have slipped off the spillway bridge,” Mr. Finley told this reporter. “But I don’t know what she was doing out in such a storm. The poor girl must have been mad.”

  An even more gruesome and tragic discovery was made by the housekeeper when she opened the front door. An infant, presumed to be the child of Mrs. Foley, was found frozen to death on the doorstep. Dr. Herbert Melchior, who was at River House attending the confinement of Mrs. Montague, examined the mother and child, but declared that they were both beyond his help. “One can only hope they are in heaven together, the poor souls,” the housekeeper averred.

  I was surprised to find tears in my eyes, as if I’d been standing on the steps with the housekeeper waiting for the doctor, hoping he might perform a miracle. How on earth could she have thought the frozen child could be revived? And hadn’t Monty said his mother had found the child on the doorstep? I read on—

  Mr. Montague was not available for comment as his own wife was in confinement, but he sent a message through the estate caretaker expressing the family’s deepest sympathies at the regrettable accident. “In the future,” he wrote, “the estate will be gated off to avoid any further misfortunes.”

  The horror I’d felt last night rose up again, replacing my tears, but now the horror was laced with anger. As if that had been all that was needed to avert the tragedy of Mary Foley killing herself and her newborn child! I flipped through the rest of the paper looking for some other mention of Mary Foley, perhaps some public outcry at her death. But who would speak up for her? Her father, who had bartered her for a hundred acres of apple trees? Her lover, Bayard Montague, who had seduced and abandoned her to marry another woman? Her husband . . . ?

  What about her husband?

  I looked back at the awkward figure in the May Fair photograph. Although twice her size, he looked like he was cowering in Mildred Jackson’s shadow. He’d married a girl who had run off with another man and who was carrying that man’s child. Had he gone along with the marriage because it had been arranged—a deal between neighboring farmers to merge resources and land? Or because he still loved Mary?

  I looked through the next few days of the Concord Gazette. Three issues later I found a two-line notice announcing a memorial service for “Mary Foley Jackson, who left behind her husband, Ernst Jackson.” There was nothing else.

  I remembered that in my junior year of high school one of my classmates, Tracy Van Dyke, had died of leukemia. Her picture had been plastered around the town for months. The Gazette had run a full-color spread on her short life, featuring baby pictures, shots of Tracy in the school production of Our Town, playing lacrosse, at the junior prom. Local merchants had kept a can with her face on it to collect for the Leukemia Fund. Her class had planted a tree in her honor in front of the high school and a big poster with her picture hung in the front lobby next to our trophy for winning the basketball championship in 1984. Girls would lay down teddy bears and cards that read “Love you Forever, Trace!” under it. I remember getting almost tired of seeing her face everywhere, her dead girl’s eyes watching reproachfully as the rest of us went on with our lives—went to prom, made out with our boyfriends, graduated—did all the things she would never get to do.

  But now I wondered if the town of Concord had done anything to remember Mary Foley.

  I looked up from the reading table, now strewn with issues of the Concord Gazette, to the glass bookcases and spied the familiar gold apple logo on the spines of row after row of tall red volumes of the Concordian—Concord High School’s yearbook. I got up and knelt in front of one of the cases. They were arranged by year, from a spindly 1901 edition to last year’s much thicker tome. I plucked 1929 from the shelf and—unable to resist—1995. I put the newer yearbook on the edge of the table and sat back down to look at Mary Foley’s senior year. The cover of the book was stamped with a picture of the old high school building framed by apple blossoms. Underneath was a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.” The same quote that they still put on the yearbook in my year.

  I began paging toward the class pictures, but I didn’t have to go that far to find Mary Foley. She was in the Latin club and the glee club, the 4-H club and the debating society. It was clear that she was a star student even before I got to the picture showing her receiving the award for class valedictorian. She was glowing even more than in the Apple Blossom Queen crowning. It was hard to believe that in less than a year she would be dead.

  My eyes burning, I pushed the 1929 yearbook away and pulled the 1995 one to me. I opened it to near the end, half surprised it didn’t fall open to the page my own copy always opened to, but soon found the picture of my own valedictorian award. It had been announced at the end of the year award assembly after all the other awards. I could still remember the buzzing in my ears when my name was called and how for half a second I wondered if I’d imagined it. But then Dunstan was nudging me, his own face beaming with pride, and telling me to “get on up there, Clary, before Charity Jane takes it from you.” Charity Jane Pratt had been the girl whose grade point average had hovered next to mine since the eighth grade.

  I looked back at the picture of Mary Foley. Did she have someone in the audience cheering for her the way Dunstan had for me? Ernst Jackson, perhaps?

  I flipped forward to the senior class pictures and looked under the J’s, but didn’t find him. Maybe he was older—or maybe he’d left school early to help with the farm like a lot of farmers’ sons.

  I went back to the Gazette issues, shuffling through them for the last week of May. The Gazette always dedicated a whole issue to the high school graduation. I scanned the pages quickly for the valedictorian, but found another name listed, a boy named Edmund Hilary Canning. Mary must have lost the valedictorian award after she ran off with Bayard Montague. In fact . . . I looked through the whole list of graduates. Mary wasn’t on it. So she hadn’t even been allowed to graduate!

  I turned the page, wondering if any mention had been made of her, and found a short sidebar with a photograph of a young man, hair parted on the side and slicked back, heavy glasses dwa
rfing his narrow face and close-set eyes. “Mr. Edmund Hilary Canning to receive scholarship to Bailey College,” the caption read, and then below: “Mr. Canning will take the place formerly awarded to Miss Mary Foley since the young lady has decided to marry instead of attending college. Mr. Canning intends to study religion . . .”

  I had to resist tearing the page to shreds. Poor Mary Foley! Not only had she lost her place as valedictorian and her high school diploma, she had lost her scholarship to Bailey. And all because Bayard Montague had taken a fancy to carry her off for a brief dalliance! And all that happened to him was to be shipped off to New York City to be paraded in front of a bunch of debutantes—

  Well, that might have been pretty awful too. Especially if he had cared for Mary—and who wouldn’t? She hadn’t just been beautiful; she’d been smart and hardworking. Who knew what she would have made of herself if she had gone to Bailey?

  I pulled the 1929 yearbook to me again and stared at Mary Foley’s face as she received the award for valedictorian. I was still staring at it when the door cracked open and I heard someone behind me. I wheeled around, half expecting Mary Foley herself come back from the grave to command me to right the wrongs committed against her, but it was only the librarian, fiddling with her geek-girl glasses.

  “Hey,” she said with a strained smile. “Sorry to disturb your research, but we’re closing early because of the storm.”

  “The storm?” I repeated, staring at her blankly. I could see my own reflection in her glasses. At some point I’d screwed my hair up into a sloppy knot that listed to one side of my head, giving me a slightly off-kilter manic look.

  “Can’t you hear it?” Her eyes rolled upward. At first I thought she was actually rolling her eyes at me and the anger I’d felt simmering all morning nearly erupted, but then I realized she was only looking toward the ceiling, against which rain was pattering. I could also hear now the low moan and shriek of the wind.

  “Oh wow,” I said. “I was so immersed I didn’t notice.”

  She cast her eyes down on the scattered Gazette issues and yearbooks. For a moment I thought she would roll her eyes at me. Who got so caught up in old local newspapers and yearbooks that they failed to notice the roof was rattling like it was about to be torn off? But she only picked up the 1995 yearbook and smiled. “Yeah, sure, that happens to me all the time. But you’d better get on home. The weather service has issued a flood warning and the bridge over the Saw Kill could wash out.”

  How did she know I had to cross the Saw Kill to get home? I wondered, starting to neaten up the newspapers.

  “Leave those,” she said sharply. Then in a more modulated voice, “I’ll put them back in the morning. Let’s get out of here.”

  I closed the 1929 Concordian, sorry to lower the cover over Mary Foley’s hopeful face, and got up. My legs felt stiff. “How long have I been in here?” I asked, looking at my watch. It read 3:36, but that couldn’t be right.

  “Six hours,” she said. “I peeked in to make sure you hadn’t, like, gone to sleep. But you were so engrossed you didn’t even notice me.”

  “Crap, I’m sorry,” I said, shaken. How had that much time passed?

  “It’s all right,” CJ Brennan said, flicking off the light switches as we crossed the main lobby to the front door. Now that we were in the front of the library I could see the rain lashing the windows, the sky outside dark as night. I didn’t have a raincoat, just the Bailey sweatshirt. I pulled up the hood and strapped my bag crossways over my chest, making sure it was closed securely to keep my notebook from getting wet. “No one expected the storm would be so bad. It was supposed to pass us, but a change of wind drove it right into the Hudson Valley instead. The weather here—”

  “Plays its tricks,” I finished for her.

  She gave me her first genuine smile. “Yeah, my dad always said that . . .” And then, tilting her head to one side, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Crap. “You look familiar,” I said, feeling awful. “Were you at Bailey?”

  “No,” she said, turning away from me to take her raincoat down from a hook by the door. “We were in high school together, but I don’t blame you for not recognizing me. I had braces, weighed fifty pounds more, and went by my maiden name, Pratt.”

  “Charity?” I said tentatively. “Charity Jane Pratt?”

  “Yeah,” she said, flipping her hair over the collar of her bright yellow slicker. “I married Dean Brennan. I know it’s pretty retro to change your name but I always hated Pratt.” She blushed and I remembered that kids had called her “Charity Twat.” I also remembered how crushed she had been when I won the Bailey scholarship and not her.

  “Well, you look great!” I said sincerely. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. We were in Honors English together.”

  “And AP History and—well, all the APs.”

  “You were salutatorian,” I said. And only one-tenth of a point away from being valedictorian and winning the Bailey scholarship for herself. We were standing in the doorway. Outside the sky was dark as night, the rain coming down in sheets. I could only make out the shimmer of CJ’s glasses and the yellow glow of her coat. Her expression was unreadable, but I guessed she was thinking about the same thing. “I remember how much you loved books,” I said to make up for not recognizing her earlier. “Wasn’t Wuthering Heights your favorite?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “And yours was Jane Eyre.”

  Had it been? My Freshman Lit professor had convinced me that Wuthering Heights was the superior book.

  “Well, it’s great you’ve become a librarian!”

  “Yes,” she said. “When I didn’t get the Bailey scholarship I went to SUNY Albany. They have a good library program. And you . . . I guess going to Bailey worked out for you. You ended up working as an editor in New York, right? And of course, you married that writer.”

  I was glad the doorway where we stood was dark so she couldn’t see my face.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I’ve been working on a book. That’s why we’re back up here.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, I told myself. Jess had turned down the Brooklyn College job because he thought I’d go back to writing up here—and I was working on a book now. “That’s what I was researching today.”

  “Ah,” CJ said, “no wonder you lost track of time. Well, I’m glad things worked out for both of us . . .” She hesitated, biting her lip, then went on. “You know I hated you for a while, right? I mean, I was so sure I was going to win that scholarship. I even had the principal retally our averages. But it turned out that I’d messed up the final exam in English. I must have gotten the order of the questions wrong, because I remember knowing all the answers, but when Mrs. Ramsey fed the test into the Scantron my answers were all wrong. Anyway.” She turned away and punched in a code on the alarm pad. “I got over it. SUNY Albany was fine, probably better than being with all those snobs at Bailey.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, wondering if she meant that I was a snob, “those kids were pretty pretentious. Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off going somewhere else too.”

  She gave me a peculiar look. “But then you wouldn’t have married Jess Martin and come back here to live at Riven House—which clearly has inspired you . . . only . . .” She hesitated.

  “Only what?” I asked.

  “You’re a braver woman than me. All those stories about the house . . .”

  “You mean those things they print up in the local haunted legends books?” I asked. “I don’t think you can put much stock in those.”

  “No,” she admitted, “but my aunt worked for Mr. Montague when he first came back and she told some stories that would raise the hair on the back of your neck. She said she used to find wet footprints on the steps of the main staircase every morning. She thought it was one of Monty’s hippie girlfriends traipsing up and down after skinny-dipping in the pond, but then she opened up the house one morning after it had been closed for a week and the footprints were still th
ere. Wet footprints going all the way up the stairs and into the old nursery. She said that’s when she knew it was the ghost of that girl come back to find her baby. She quit that day. Didn’t even go back to collect her pay. Said she’d never set foot in that house again. Mr. Montague never could get anyone from the village to work there after that. Word travels fast around here.”

  I thought of the accumulated grime in the kitchen that I’d scrubbed away. I thought of the cries I’d heard in the night, that bell ringing in the dumbwaiter, the figure on the weir. “My father always said the villagers made up stories about the river folk because they were bored with their own lives.”

  Charity turned to me, the overhead lights reflecting off her glasses, lips thinned. “Sure, that must be it. Us poor village folk, we’ve got nothing better to do with ourselves.” She switched off the lights and opened the door.

  “I didn’t mean—” The slap of rain and shriek of the wind cut off the rest of what I was going to say. Which was just as well because I wasn’t sure what I had meant.

  Chapter Nine

  I replayed CJ’s remarks while I dashed through the pouring rain and flung myself, drenched and shaking, my bag still strapped across my chest, into the car. As I thought of those wet footprints leading to the nursery a drop of cold water dripped down my neck and I shuddered. It was only a story town folk made up because they were jealous of the rich people who lived in the big houses on the river, I told myself as I drove back. Charity Jane had told it to me because she was jealous of me, always had been. She’d always been high-strung and sensitive about her name. Everyone got called names (“Jack-off,” Ryan Moser had called me until he fell flat on his face one day when he was doing it and everyone had laughed at him). I’d always been nice to Charity Jane, never calling her “Charity Case” or “Charity Twat.” It wasn’t my fault she’d screwed up her final exam. Imagine asking the principal to retally our GPAs! I remembered her bent over her test, penciling in the circles so hard she kept breaking the tip of her pencil. No wonder she’d lost track of the order when she had to keep resharpening her pencil. And no wonder she’d told me that awful story—wet footprints on the stairs, the ghost of that drowned girl come back to find her baby—