The Tale of Halcyon Crane (26 page)

I looked at Will, incredulous. I had had no idea.

“I know.” He took my hand. “It startled me when I read it, too.”

“I stopped speaking? Do you remember that?”

“I was thinking back, Hallie, and I don’t remember ever seeing you again after the death of that child. I’m not sure about it, but I’ll bet my parents never let me come back to your house. I can ask them.” He refilled our wineglasses.

I was beginning to think things were starting to make a kind of perverted sense. “That would explain why I don’t remember anything of my life here,” I mused. “Witnessing the death of a friend is certainly a severe trauma.”

“It makes me wonder what you saw that night.”

“I wonder, too,” I said, and went back to reading the article.

The final blow to the investigation came with the deaths of Noah and Halcyon Crane. “He was our only suspect in this murder, and we were in the process of building our case against him,” Norton confirmed. “His death, and the death of the only witness to the crime, puts an end to that.”

Although they acknowledge it’s pure speculation, police
believe that Noah Crane killed himself and his daughter to escape the consequences of his actions.

Madlyn Crane declined to be interviewed for this article, but through her lawyer she issued a strong statement in defense of her husband. “The idea that Noah Crane murdered that child—and his own daughter—is a macabre, disgusting fabrication put forth by an incompetent police force in order to create a murder out of what was clearly an accident in both cases. To accuse my husband of this is a desecration of his memory, and I will not tolerate it.”

I laid the article back on the pile and wiped the tears from my eyes. “You gotta love my mother for saying that. I wonder how the islanders treated her.”

Will stood up and wrapped his arms around me from behind. “Like I said, I don’t remember a whole lot about those days, but my parents tell me people looked at Madlyn as another victim. They didn’t blame her, not really.”

“What about Frank and June Sutton?” I asked him. “I wonder how she made peace with them. They lived here on this same small island for thirty years with Julie’s death hanging between them.”

“They had both lost daughters, remember,” Will said quietly.

Of course they had.

I began sifting through the police file, which was woefully incomplete. A sketchy incident report described the scene of the crime. My father had made the call to police. I was a witness. My mother had been out of town. Nothing I didn’t know there.

The report also included notes of an interview with Frank and June Sutton. June had dropped Julie off at our house that morning to spend the day playing with me. My father was supposed to take her home after dinner. Other than the part about me not speaking again, it was all pretty benign stuff, nothing I didn’t know or suspect.

Then I came to a photograph of the crime scene, and everything changed. It was the third-floor nursery, the one in which I had found the boxes of pictures the day before, and the police report was correct. The room was in disarray: lamps knocked over, comforters pulled from the beds, books lying everywhere. Obviously, there had been a fight.

I began to feel something at the moment I saw the photograph: a hand, tightening around my throat. I started coughing, first softly, then violently. Someone was choking me, constricting my airway. I stood up, knocking over my chair as I did so, and stared at Will, wide-eyed.

“Hallie.” He stood up and took me by the shoulders. “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

I couldn’t breathe. I felt a tremendous pressure on my chest, as though I were an undersea diver whose air tank had sprung a leak. I was gasping for air but unable to fill my lungs. I was going to die, right there in my mother’s kitchen.

And then, nothing. Everything stopped.

“My God, Hallie,” Will said, frantic. “Should I call a doctor?”

I shook my head and sat down. “I felt like my throat was closing up,” I croaked. “It was like somebody was strangling me. I couldn’t breathe. I literally could not get any air.”

Will crossed the kitchen and poured a glass of water for
me. “Here,” he said, thrusting it in my direction. “How do you feel now?”

I drank the water in one gulp. “I’m okay. I think.”

“You know,” Will said, slowly, “you were looking at the photo of the crime scene when your throat closed up.”

I nodded.

“Whatever happened there that night, you saw it all, and it traumatized you to the point where you couldn’t speak. And now you felt as though your throat was closing. Seeing this photo might have brought some of that back to you. I think we had better just close this file for now.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Whatever’s in here, I have to see it all.”

That decision may have been a mistake, because I came upon a photo of the dead girl, taken as her body lay in a heap on the ground beneath that all-important third-floor window. I recognized her.

It was a girl in a white dress. She had long braids, one still tied with a white ribbon.

As I dropped the photo and it fluttered to the floor, I put my hands over my face and turned toward the wall, my mouth open but making no sound. I don’t know if I would have simply stayed in that suspended state of reality had Will not been there with me, but he wrapped his arms around me again and held me tight. Somewhere far away, I heard him saying my name.

“Hallie, what is it? What’s going on?”

But I could barely say the words. I had been trying so hard to shield Will from all of Iris’s fantastic stories, her tall tales,
the ghosts. But at that moment I didn’t care any longer. “It’s her.” I said it over and over.

“You recognize Julie. You were a witness to her death. Are you remembering her?”

I shook my head. “No, Will, that’s not Julie. That’s the girl I saw outside my window the other night. That’s the girl I saw at the inn. I’m certain of it, right down to the white hair ribbons.”

Will bent down, picked up the photo, and studied it. “What ribbon?”

“Tied to one braid,” I said.

He shook his head, holding out the picture. “Hallie, there’s no ribbon here. And no braids.”

I took it out of his hand, confused. I was looking at the image of a small, vaguely familiar girl—Julie Sutton—who lay on the ground, arms and legs splayed every which way. Her hair was curly and shoulder-length. She was wearing Levi’s and a T-shirt. Her eyes were open. Blood was pooling near the back of her head. No white dress. No white ribbon.

I slumped to the floor, holding the photo close to my chest, and began to shake.

W
ill took me upstairs, ran a hot bath, and sat with me as I soaked in the water. I was a mess; there’s no other way to describe it. I couldn’t stop crying. Seeing that photograph—both of them, really, the shot of the crime scene and the one of the dead girl—had clicked on a switch inside me that had been in the off position for thirty years.

My shoulders shook as I tried to pull myself together. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” I blubbered between sobs.

“Shhhh,” Will said, rubbing my back. “Don’t worry about it. You’ve had a series of shocks.”

I sniffed. “I’m so sorry about this.”

“You had an unspeakable trauma when you were a child, so bad you couldn’t remember anything about it. And now you’re seeing it again. Anyone would be shaken by that.”

His voice was soothing and I began to breathe a little easier. He went on.

“Of course you’ve been seeing that poor little girl’s face all over this island ever since you got here. Your memories of that night are coming back on their own.”

My mind began to review everything that had happened to me since coming to the island. Could repressed memories really be the explanation for it all?

“You’re back here in this house where the trauma occurred. A girl—
your friend
—was killed, on purpose or by accident, and you saw it. It was so horrible, you stopped speaking for a while and blocked it out of your mind. And now here you are, confronted with all this stuff again. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the girl you’ve been seeing and the girl who was killed are one and the same.”

I must’ve looked confused, so he continued.

“It’s your mind, Hallie. You’re remembering bits of what happened, piecing it all together. You’re remembering
her
.”

“No, Will. The girl I’ve been seeing isn’t Julie Sutton. The girl I initially saw in the photograph . . .” My words trailed off. How could I explain seeing another girl’s face in that photo?

He shook his head. “Doesn’t it make sense that something psychological is going on here? Flashes of memory coming to the surface as a result of being back, for the first time, at the scene of a crime?”

It did make sense, in a confusing, muddled sort of way. I wasn’t sure about any of it. “So what do I do now?” I asked him.

He considered for a while. “You don’t have to do anything, not right away. But if it were me, I’d be thinking about seeing someone for a few rounds of regression therapy.”

“You mean like hypnosis?”

He nodded. “A psychiatrist can take you back to that night. Uncover what really happened. It might give you a
sense of closure. Hey, you might even begin to remember your childhood here on the island and get some bona fide memories of your mother out of the deal.”

That sounded good to me.

“We’ll have to find a psychiatrist on the mainland who does that sort of thing,” Will mused. “Jim Allen—the doctor here on the island—can probably recommend someone.”

It was settled, then. Everything that had happened to me since I came to Great Manitou was the result of repressed trauma. I wasn’t seeing or hearing ghosts. I didn’t have a haunted house. It was just my mind that was haunted, by the spirit of a girl I had seen fall to her death. I put the incongruity of my first and second impressions of the girl in that photograph out of my mind. It didn’t matter. A wave of calm came over me, and I sank low into the water, enjoying it.

The feeling did not last long.

After I climbed out of my bath, I went to bed, quickly falling asleep in Will’s arms. I awoke with a start to discover myself alone. Groggily, I eyed the clock, its fuzzy symbols slowly jelling into numbers as I squinted. Nearly 2:30. Where was Will? The bathroom, surely. I waited for a few minutes, nearly drifting back into a light sleep. “Will?” I called out softly. No response. I sat up and looked around the room, but he wasn’t anywhere in the suite. That’s when I noticed the open door.

I crept out into the darkened hallway. “Will?” Again, no response.

Moonlight was streaming onto the wood floor from the windows at the end of the hall, creating a river of light that seemed to vibrate with a life of its own. And then there
she was: a little girl, standing in the corner next to the windows. The white dress. The braid tied at the end with a ribbon. And then she dissipated, as though she were nothing more than fog burning off in the midday sun.

Just at that moment, I heard a sickening crash and knew immediately what had happened. I ran down the hallway toward the front stair, screaming Will’s name, and saw him lying in a heap at the bottom. I flew down to his side.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” I was muttering. “Please be all right, please don’t be dead.”

Will groaned and clutched his head.

“Thank God!” I said, intensely relieved that he was alive, breathing and groaning. “Are you all right?” I helped him to his feet.

“I’m not sure,” he said, groggy. “That was some fall. I hit my head pretty hard.”

I helped him into the kitchen, turning on every light as we went, sat him down at the table, and poured him a glass of water. Then I started opening cabinets; I knew I had seen pain reliever around somewhere.

“Take these,” I told him, handing him some Motrin. “Should we call the doctor?” I wasn’t sure what to do. I was afraid he had had a concussion, but I didn’t know the signs or symptoms.

He shook his head. “I didn’t pass out or anything. I don’t think we need to wake Jim in the middle of the night for this.”

“What happened? Why did you get out of bed?”

“I thought I heard something,” he told me. “It was the weirdest thing. Something woke me up, I’m not sure what it
was. You were fast asleep. Snoring, I might add.” He grinned at me. “As I was closing my eyes again, I heard—I know this sounds crazy, but I thought I heard my name.”

“Your name,” I repeated.

“So I got up,” Will continued. “When I got into the hallway I realized nobody was there, but I was still hearing voices. Talking. Chattering.”

“What kind of voices?” I asked him, but I already knew the answer.

“Children’s voices,” he admitted. “I must have been dreaming somehow, still in a sleep state—you know, sleepwalking. My mind was full of that story about the dead girls you told me the other night, and maybe I was dreaming the whole thing. I don’t know. But whether I was awake or asleep, I followed the voices to the edge of the stairs and stood there with my hands on the railing, listening. The voices seemed to be coming from the living room.”