Widow's Tears (31 page)

Beside her, Colleen bent over the twins, cradling them in her strong, freckled arms, dropping kisses on their sleeping faces. “Sleep well, my angels,” she whispered. “'Twon't be long now.”

And at that moment, the mountain of wreckage that had toppled the Clines' house hit the Blackwoods' with an implacable force, jolting it completely off its foundations. The house tilted sharply to one side and began to topple, the bed and the chiffonier and Rachel and her children and Colleen and Patsy sliding with it. And in that one last, eons-long moment, Rachel realized with a burst of bone-freezing horror what Colleen had known all along.

'Twon't be long now, my angels.

'Twon't be long now.

“Do you think she's all right?” Claire whispered apprehensively, looking at Ruby.

I nodded (although I wasn't so sure myself), and Claire sank back down in her seat.

Ruby sat silently, her eyes half-closed, her head fallen a little to one side against the chair's wing. Outside the window, a wild quicksilver flash lit up the sky and an almost-simultaneous crash seemed to reverberate in the floor beneath my feet. Startled, Claire and I both flinched. Ruby didn't move. Wherever she was, she wasn't with us—at least, not entirely.

We sat, silently watching her in the flickering light, while the wind howled like a mad thing around the house. Claire and I seemed united in a strange and heightened awareness that was centered on Ruby, as if all three of us had slipped into a world of different dimensions than our own, a world that had shrunk to our small circle of chairs around the flickering lamp. Ruby's eyes were completely closed now, her breathing almost imperceptible. Her carroty hair was disheveled, her face as still as carved marble and so white that each sandy freckle stood out distinctly.

“She wants…” Ruby said. Her voice was flat and low, whispery, almost inaudible, and I remembered my thought: she was giving voice to Rachel. There was another long silence. Then: “She's been waiting. Waiting a long time. Waiting for…” Her voice died away, as if the energy that powered her was waning.

Claire cast a questioning look at me. I read her glance and nodded. Somebody needed to ask a leading question or two, and Claire knew a great deal more about this situation than I did. I wouldn't know where to start.

Claire leaned forward. “What's she been waiting for?” Her voice was soft and neutral, and I nodded my approval.

Ruby shifted in the chair as though the question made her uncomfortable. Her answer came slowly and with a frightened reluctance. “For…me.”

Claire and I traded startled glances. It wasn't the answer that either of us expected.

“For
you
?” Claire asked. At my slight head shake, she gathered herself together and smoothed out her voice. “Why was she waiting for you, Ruby?”

“Because of…because of Colleen.” When she spoke the name, Ruby turned her head a little and her muscles tensed, as if the sound of the name puzzled her, or perhaps troubled her. “Colleen.” She murmured it again, testing, questioning, probing. “Colleen. Colleen.”

I leaned toward Claire. “Who's Colleen?” I asked in a low voice.

Claire was frowning, trying to make the connection. In an answering whisper, she said, “Colleen O'Reilly. She's buried in the graveyard at the edge of the woods. We saw her gravestone this afternoon. We were thinking that she might have been a servant in this house back in old Mrs. Blackwood's day, but we really don't know who she is.”

Ruby, or Ruby/Rachel, had heard us. “Not in
this
house,” she replied indistinctly. “The house in Galveston. The house Augustus built.” She sighed, and there was a musical jumble of words, in what sounded to my untutored ear like Gaelic. Then, clearly and distinctly and almost in wonderment: “Colleen O'Reilly was my grandmother's mother. Gram Gifford's mother.”

Now I was really surprised. I knew about Gram Gifford, Ruby's favorite grandmother. She had lived in nearby Smithville, and Ruby and Ramona had stayed with her during the summers until Ruby was ten and her parents divorced. But I had never heard Ruby mention her great-grandmother's name, and I couldn't even begin to guess why Colleen O'Reilly was buried in the private cemetery here. Obviously, Ruby's connection to this place went very deep into the past, perhaps even deeper than Ruby herself could comprehend. And what was this about a Galveston house?

“But I don't understand.” Claire was frowning, puzzled. “You're
saying—” She took a breath and corrected herself. “Rachel is telling you that Colleen O'Reilly was your
great-grandmother
? The same Colleen who is buried up there by the woods?”

Shadows from the flickering lamp washed across Ruby's face. “Yes. Colleen had a little girl named Annie. Gram was Annie.” A broken sigh, as if Ruby—or perhaps it was Rachel—despaired of conveying to us all that she knew or felt. “Colleen took care of Rachel and her children for many years. Rachel loved Colleen and needed her. But Colleen isn't buried here.”

There was a long pause, and tears seeped silently out from under Ruby's closed eyelids. Her voice was raw and unsteady, so heavy with anguish that it sounded like someone else's voice. “She was carried out to sea…in a great storm.”

A great storm. The Galveston Hurricane? Ruby's great-grandmother had drowned in the 1900 hurricane? Perhaps the others, the children, the husband, had drowned as well. But not Rachel Blackwood, apparently. She had lived to build this house. She had lived in it until she died, in her nineties. And lived in it still—a prisoner, if I were to believe Ruby.

“But the
grave
!” Claire shook her head, not understanding. “Colleen's
grave
is here! I
saw
it, Ruby.
We
saw it, just this afternoon. It's here, with the childrens' graves, the whole family.”

“Empty,” Ruby said, her voice a little louder. The word had a bleak, hollow sound. “Empty, empty.” She shivered, and I did, too. Before, it had been cold in the room. It was even colder now, and in the silence the low, grieving wail of the wind filled the air.

Claire turned to me, wide-eyed. “Empty graves?” she whispered in dismay. “Did somebody steal the bodies? What
happened
to them?”

I was beginning to understand—a little, maybe. Beginning to understand what Rachel Blackwood might have been about all through the
unending, inescapable years after September 8, 1900. And beyond, if I could accept what Ruby was telling us.

“Just because there's a marker on top of a grave, it's no guarantee that there's a coffin and corpse underneath,” I told Claire in a low voice. I was remembering a case I had read about some time ago, where friends of a man who they thought was deceased had held a closed-casket funeral, interred an empty coffin, and were dismayed to find, two years later, that they had been the victims of an elaborate fraud.

There was no fraud here, I suspected, and no intent to deceive others. But there
was
delusion and self-deception: a grieving Rachel pretending to the end of her life that all those she loved lay safely inside the fence of that little graveyard beside the woods. Or more likely, pretending until she convinced herself that they did, and that she could not leave them. And now she couldn't, Ruby was saying. Now she was a prisoner of her grief, contained in the house she had built to indulge it, in the graveyard where she had buried her heart.

Claire turned back to Ruby. “But what about my great-aunt Hazel?” she asked, bewildered. “And Mrs. Blackwood? Those graves are real, aren't they? I'm positive that Aunt Hazel is buried there. My mother saw it happen.”

The lamp flickered, and I darted a look at it, hoping it wasn't about to run out of oil and leave us in total darkness. Somewhere in the house a door slammed. Behind us, around us, the shadows danced and swirled like silken scarves.

“Yes,” Ruby said. “Your great-aunt is buried here. And Rachel. And Augustus.”

Augustus. The husband, the children's father. So he hadn't died in the storm, after all. Had he lived here, too?

Claire still wasn't getting it. “But I don't understand, Ruby—the
children, all
five
of them? And the servants. If they're not buried here, where are they?”

I knew the answer to that one. “The hurricane,” I said.

Ruby let out a long sigh, and in it I heard an unspeakable, inconsolable grief—Rachel's grief. “The hurricane,” she said. In a low, sad voice, she sang a snatch of haunting melody that I remembered from my own childhood.
“Low, low, breathe and blow, wind of the western sea…”
The words slid like clots of foam down the slopes of the eddying cold.

Into the silence, I said, “But Augustus survived. He lived here with her, then?”

“No, no.” A listening pause. “He died in the storm.” There were tears in Ruby's voice. “He died in the storm, but elsewhere. His body was found under the rubble of a collapsed building, and buried. She—Rachel—brought him here, afterward.”

“So she came here and built this house,” Claire said wonderingly, “after the hurricane. And reburied her husband here.” She paused, frowning. “Wait a minute. Aunt Hazel said that Mrs. Blackwood built this house as a
copy
—although not a very good one—of a house that had been destroyed. So the original house, the Galveston house, was destroyed in the hurricane? Is that it?”

“Yes. Gone, in the hurricane, with the children, with Colleen and Patsy.” Ruby's voice was ghostlike. There seemed to be a dim glow around her, embracing her. “Swept out to sea, all of them. She built this house for them. For Augustus.” The glow brightened, then softened, and the scent of violets lay warm across the chill air. “Their home.”

“Oh, now I see!” Claire exclaimed, scooting to the edge of her chair. “The music room, the nursery, the playroom! They must be…reconstructions! She furnished them as nearly like the Galveston house as possible!” She stopped, then shook her head. “No, not just those rooms, but the whole
house. The kitchen, the dining room, the drawing room, this library—everything. As much like the Galveston house as she could make it. I understand now. Eighteen chairs around the dining room table, enough dishes and linens for a huge household, way too much stuff for one woman or two, living alone. Now it makes sense!”

Did it? Did it make sense? Perhaps—but a certain kind of blood-chilling, spine-tingling sense. Rachel, still a young woman, had exiled herself to this remote place and attempted to replicate the life she had lived before the storm, imagining her husband and children and servants with her in this house until imagination created a kind of reality and the encircling reality of her grief bound her to this place.

But she'd had help, of course. Claire's great-aunt Hazel, for one, who had also come here as a young woman. I couldn't help wondering how Rachel had managed to persuade (or entice or perhaps even intimidate or manipulate) Hazel Penland into joining her in her nunlike life of suffocating grief and sadness. But we would probably never know Hazel's story, at least not for certain—unless her ghost appeared and let us in on why she had joined Rachel in her futile and crazy effort to capture and contain a moment in time, or unless she had left a journal of her life in this house.

But for all its psychotic grotesquerie, Rachel's story wasn't unique. People have gotten stuck in the past and acted out their sense of loss and grief in many obsessive ways, in life and in literature—Miss Havisham, for instance, in
Great Expectations,
who stopped all the clocks in her decaying mansion at twenty minutes to nine, the moment she learned that her fiancé had jilted her. Rachel, it seemed, had stopped her life on September 8, 1900, even though she had continued to live until well into her nineties. The rest of it, the life beyond the end of life—well, that wasn't something I could understand with my rational mind, and I didn't care to try.