I could not forget the derision and bitterness in John's eyes, in his voice, as he spoke of David. And just now I had seen Owen Markham speak of him, with different words but the same emotion. And the expression, the ownership, I had seen in John's eyes for one brief moment was the same I had seen in Owen's eyes. Or had I? God! Was it possible?
I cranked my car into a protesting start and urged it up the hill, not allowing myself to think again until I passed through the rusted iron gates and again confronted the house.
This was real. I was here. I fought against the memories of the morning and reached for the house keys on the passenger seat. Memories? Or fanciful imagining? Whatever. This was my home now. And it would be the home that it was obviously built to be. It would be.
I looked for the path through the weeds. It was gone; the weeds were gone, chopped close to the ground and lying in scattered clumps, drying in the weak afternoon sun, while dust hovered heavily above. With the underbrush cleared, I saw stones marking a drive, and what had appeared to be a vine-covered stump a few yards from the front entrance had been sheared of its briars and now revealed the graceful lines of a small fountain in a circular bed.
I tapped the horn once, hesitantly, as I started uneasily along the drive. McCollum couldn't have done this, not this soon.
A gray tractor sat parked at the gate to the terrace, and Martha stood beside it, talking with a tall young man. As my car approached, she waved, and I parked in front. I walked the short distance to them, studying the young man.
Here was the Indian of my imagination: tall, erect, with straight black hair framing his face, high cheekbones, skin tinged with bronze, and a knowledge of himself that showed in the way he held his head, his shoulders, his entire body. He and Marie LeFlore. Two. Two alone in all the faces I had seen in Richards Spur and Fairview. Two left of the nation David Richards had known.
Martha's entire face creased with her smile. "My nephew, Mack Wilson," she said, pride gilding the simple words and telling me of her affection for him.
"Thank you, Mack," I said, extending my hand. He looked at it for a moment before wiping his on his jeans and taking it. His grasp was as confident as his posture, and I felt instinctively that Martha was justified in her pride.
"It wasn't much," he said. "Things are kind of slow at my place now anyway." He scraped a worn boot over the ground. "You've got good grass. It won't be as hard to get it back in shape as I first thought." He nodded toward the terrace. "That's going to be a little tougher. I can do some now, but I'd like to wait awhile on the rest, until it greens up some and I can see what I'm doing."
His words were matter-of-fact, a farmer talking about something he knew, but there was an expression on his face, a strange blending of reluctance and determination, which seemed to suggest some inner conflict.
"You don't have to do this unless you want to," I told him. "Do you?"
"Sure," he said. A smile broke across his face as he apparently resolved his conflict. "Sure. My father told me there was always a Wilson or a MacDougal with Colonel Richards, and I guess it's my place to do what I can." He draped an arm over Martha's shoulder, giving her a gentle hug. "Besides, with Aunt Martha and Marie LeFlore both after me, I figure it has to be the right thing to do."
He cast a quick glance at the sun. "I'd better get going or my wife will start worrying, but I'll be back in the morning."
Martha smiled up at him, and I glimpsed a faint glint of moisture in her eyes. "Give my love to Joannie."
He bent his head to her. "Take care of yourself," he said softly. "And thanks for lifting the ban on visiting you."
Martha and I watched the tractor disappear through the gates. I wanted to question her on all that had just happened, but I couldn't find words that would ask without prying.
"Well," she said, sniffing surreptitiously as she straightened her shoulders and started toward the rear of the house.
I stopped her. "Not this time." I reached into the box of keys I held. "This time we go in the front."
With anticipation and a now familiar emotion that still I refused to acknowledge as fear, I fitted the key into the lock, turned it, and pushed open the massive, complaining doors. Taking a deep breath, I stepped through the doorway and crossed the great hall to the stairs. There I turned, looking out the open doors to the fountain, the lawn, the stone wall, and beyond that to the blue of the mountains.
Martha stood silently for a moment before closing the doors, and then, as though reading my thoughts, she asked softly, "Do you want me to go upstairs with you now?"
I shook my head and started up the steps.
"Miss Richards?" She forced a troubled smile as I looked back at her. "I'll be in my room if you need me."
"I'll be all right, Martha," I said, reassuring her, if not myself.
I unlocked the padlock, opened the gate in the hateful grate, and wound my way up the staircase. Here, too, I found boxes and crates piled carelessly, leaving only a narrow path.
The door to the tower room was open, as I had left it. I followed the beam of light falling through it. What would the room hold for me in the daylight? Nothing, I hoped. Or did I?
Gone were the dustcovers and rolls of carpets and mattresses. Gone was the gray, replaced by rose, faded but still delicate. I recognized Martha's apron beside a small box of cleaning supplies and sent her a silent blessing. The graceful rosewood furniture glowed, the delicately carved mantel showed fine veins of marble, the rugs gleamed like silk against the dark floor, and the brighter squares of color against the lighter walls had been covered with paintings. Except one.
A wing chair sat near the drapeless window, and I sank into it, looking over the valley. As I sat there, loneliness overcame me, stealing upon me, enveloping me before I realized what was happening, loneliness so intense it seemed to drive the desire for life from me. The valley lost its beauty. The one bright spot on the wall mocked me. My eyes, dry and burning, sank back into my head, and I felt old, so very old, weak and defeated. I could not fight it. I felt no desire to fight it. I surrendered, drawing back into the chair, back into myself, feeling the weight of countless disappointments, countless empty years bearing down on me.
Thoughts of death came then, inexplicably, but they did not frighten me. They brought glimmers of hope, of release from the pain of loneliness, and I welcomed them to me.
"Miss Richards!"
The spell shattered. I turned, dazed, to look at Martha's contorted face.
"Why, Martha, what is it?"
Her face relaxed, but her lips remained fixed in a frown. "You shouldn't sit there by that broken window. You'll catch your death in this cold."
She turned, tied on her apron, and busied herself with the cleaning supplies. "It's for sure you're not going to be able to sleep in here for a while. This is the coldest room I've ever been in."
I followed her across the room and put a hand on her shoulder. "That isn't the reason. You were frightened. Won't you tell me why?"
She avoided looking at me and walked to the window, taking care not to touch the chair. "It must be the silence of this place getting on my nerves," she said slowly.
I took her hand and led her to the bed, where I urged her to sit beside me.
"That didn't bother you yesterday. It must be more than that."
She looked steadily at the fireplace but didn't speak.
"Martha, ever since I came here, I've sensed that something is being kept from me. Yesterday, you started to talk about it, but you really only hinted around the edges of what you wanted to say. If you know something, don't you think I have a right to know it, too?"
She bit her lip and nodded. "Of course you do," she said hesitantly, groping for words. "Yesterday it was just rumor, silly superstition that I had grown up with, half believing, half accepting, but never sure. Today . . . today when I came into the room and saw you sitting in that chair, you looked so different, so not yourself that I—I . . ."
She twisted her hands in her apron and still would not look at me. "I'm not a superstitious woman—never have been. I haven't had the time for that kind of thing. But I haven't done one thing today because I wanted to. Not that I wouldn't have wanted to make it nice for you, but it was as if something was inside me, making me do it.
"When you left this morning, I started unpacking your things and putting them away in a room in the quarters, but this something, whatever it is, wouldn't let me finish. Before I knew what I was doing, I was in here with my cleaning stuff.
"And when I saw that I couldn't do it all by myself, that same something told me to go get Mack. Not just anyone—Mack. So I went and fetched him. I told him it was to knock down the weeds, but that wasn't the only reason, or even the main reason. It was to work in this room.
"And he came, and beat the rugs, and carried the feather bed out in the sun to fluff up, and arranged the furniture. And he felt it, too. He didn't say anything; he wouldn't want to scare me. But I could tell.
"And then, when we were finished in here and glad to be leaving, he stopped at the door and looked back at that chair. It was over against a wall. He went over to it, and moved it to the window, and straightened it, and—"
Her voice broke. One worn hand formed a fist.
"And when I asked him why he'd done it, he didn't know. Mack's too young to have heard, and most other folks, if they did hear, have forgotten. But I heard. And I remember. They said . . . they said David Richards died in that chair, in front of that window. He was very old, but not sick. They said he just got up one morning, sat down in that chair, looked out over the valley, and died."
Ghosts. For the second time in two days, Martha had brought up the subject. The first time had caused merely a tingle of anticipation, but that was before so many other things had happened to me. Was what I was experiencing the effect of ghostly intervention? Somehow it didn't seem so. And for the first time I wished I had listened to some of the New Age beliefs that had been so prevalent on the campus of the University of Ohio while I was there. But like Martha, I had never been superstitious—I hadn't had the time for it. And Gran would never have allowed any reference to it, or study of it, in her house. An English degree with a teaching certificate had been my goal on campus, and I stuck to it with dogged determination, because with it, ultimately, would come my emancipation.
I took Martha's hand in mine, unclenched it, soothed it. I had to work to speak around the catch in my throat. "And you think he may still be here?"
"I don't know!" she cried. "I don't know what to think anymore."
I spoke carefully. "I can't tell you that there is nothing here. I don't know, either." But how I wished I did. "I can tell you that superstition and rumor and coincidence feed on themselves. If you had not already heard the stories and had a seed of doubt planted in your mind, what happened here today might seem strange but not frightening, and you would either forget about it or search until you found a reasonable explanation."
"But if it's true?" she whispered.
"If there is a . . ." I stumbled over the word, "a spirit here—Oh, look around you, Martha. The man who built this house was sensitive and caring and appreciative of beauty. Could someone like that possibly wish to cause us harm?"
Although I had no desire to leave the room, I clasped her hand and rose to my feet. "Come on. We'll finish in here later. Right now, I need a cup of coffee."
She jumped to her feet, either instantly solicitous or seizing on any excuse to leave the room. "Have you eaten today?"
I admitted that I hadn't.
"Whatever am I thinking of? You come right along with me, Miss Richards."
I almost laughed. Although the walls were not yet crumbling around us, here we were in a vast mausoleum with no utilities, no running water, no indoor plumbing, and she was treating me like the lady of the manor. And we had been through too much together for me to allow that to go on.
"Martha?"
"Yes."
"I'd really like for you to call me Elizabeth."
The days raced by. With Martha in tow, I explored room after room, taking delight in each new wonder I found. In jeans and boots Mack's sister had left behind when she moved to Tulsa, I prowled outbuildings and the woods nearby, never seeing the vicious rattlesnakes or silent, deadly copperheads that Martha constantly warned me about. Sometimes I would jump in my car, fly down the hill, and sit for hours at Marie LeFlore's feet while she told me stories of David Richards's successes with the orchard, the railroad, the coal mines—stories I had read in the few weeks since finding my book and before coming to Oklahoma but now needed to hear from someone who had known him.
The workmen came, hesitant at first, but my exuberance must have been contagious. I watched enthralled as they erased the scars of time from the house.
Mack came every day, and his ready laugh rang through the halls as he helped me prowl through boxes and make plans for arranging the treasures I found, while Martha watched over us, and fed me, insisting that I make time for rest, for fresh air, for sleep.
True, there was one locked door I refused to open, unwilling to learn what was behind it; true, Mack's smile faded when I asked him to bring Joannie to the house; true, alone at night in the spare white bedroom where I would sleep until the heavy work was completed, I would awaken, listen but hear nothing, look but see only the familiar shapes of the furniture around me. But I was happy. For the first time in my life, I was truly happy. Except—except for those unexplained occurrences the first days of my arrival. Except for the niggling little feeling I forced to the back of my mind that something was not quite right.
I was in the larger of the stone barns, digging through bins of orchard equipment, most of which I couldn't recognize, crawling over the cultivators and mowers to get to the spring-seated wagons, when I heard a persistent horn honking as it came up the hill. I worked my way to the barn door in time to see Martha's car appear through the gates. I waved at her, and she sped toward me.
"Where's Mack?" she yelled as she braked to a stop.
"He had to go into Fairview. What's the matter?"
"They're cutting the pines."
The giant pines that lined the drive up the hill. The pines David had planted for Eliza. I didn't even ask who. I jerked open her door and motioned for her to get out, then slid behind the wheel. "If I'm not back soon, go for the sheriff. My keys are upstairs."
I was gone before she could protest, tires squealing as I hit the roadway, and driving much too fast for the hill.
There were four of them, rough-looking and unshaven. One yanked at the starter cord of a chainsaw. I skidded to a stop behind their flatbed truck and was out of the car and in the middle of them before they realized what was happening—before I realized what was happening. I grabbed for the saw, and the man holding it, in his surprise, let it go.
"Get off my land," I said, brandishing the saw in front of me.
They recovered. The man reached for his saw, but I held on to it, dodging his reach. "I said get off my land."
He threw his chest out and strutted toward me. "I've got a lease that says I can cut all John Richards's timber I want," he said, "and if you ladies will just stay where you belong, that's what I intend to do."
He reached for the saw again, and I sidestepped him, trying not to think about his bloated face, his overweight, unwashed body, his ham-sized hands. "I am where I belong. Now, you take your lease and find some trees that belong to John Richards, because these don't." I walked to the truck and threw the saw on it. "And if so much as one branch is cut, I'll have you all in jail."
Three of them had scattered, climbing in and onto the truck. The one held his ground, glowering at me from rheumy eyes. I was terrified, but I knew I couldn't show it—not if I wanted to survive this encounter intact. He was probably another version of McCollum, rougher, probably more physically vicious, but it appeared that he, too, took his orders from John Richards. But I wouldn't be bested by him, either. I stiffened my back, jutted out my chin, hooked my thumbs over my jeans pockets, and glowered back at him. His eyes finally slithered to focus somewhere left of my shoulder. Still I stared.
"I'm going to get Richards and straighten you out," he threatened.
"Get anyone you want," I said evenly. "But don't come back."
He swaggered to the truck, muttering something about "meddling women," and, grinding the gears, tore off in a cloud of dust.
I reached for the support of a pine and leaned against it, watching my hand tremble. I thought I felt the forest breathe a sigh of relief but knew the sigh must have been mine.
John Richards again. I didn't want to think about him. I wouldn't think about him. Not in these woods. This property was not his, would never be his. If it had been intended for him . . . A curiously shaped stick lay on the ground at my feet, and I reached for it idly, my headband snagging hopelessly on a briar as I did so. I slipped out of it, leaving it hanging there for the moment, and shook my hair free.
Did David Richards haunt this hill? Had he grown up here, wandering through these woods in his youth? I could almost see the young David beside me as I took aim at a pine cone and with a twist of my wrist sent the stick sailing toward it. I could almost hear his laughter echoing with mine as the stick struck the cone and knocked it from the tree. I could almost feel his presence as I wandered more deeply into the timelessness of the forest.
I picked up another stick and was aiming at a broken branch when the sound of a car drew me back from fantasy into responsibility. I hurried back toward the road, expecting to see Martha in my car. Instead, a new pickup truck blocked the road going uphill, and a tall figure in jeans and a suede jacket stood by Martha's car. He honked the horn and called out.
"Martha! Mrs. Wilson, are you all right?"
I stepped back into the shadows when I recognized him. John Richards. What was he doing here? Resentment welled up within me but faded as I looked at him. From this distance I could allow myself the painful luxury of . . . of what? Of pretending that he was David?
He left the car and glanced at the road in front of it, the weeds beside it. He followed the broken grass to the tree where I had stood, studied the ground, and started into the woods. My headband waved from the briar in front of him, and his face darkened when he saw it. Snatching it from the briar, he stared at it intently for a moment, then called out.
"Elizabeth! Where are you?"
I could put it off no longer. Reluctantly, I stepped into his view. He scrambled through the brush to me and caught my shoulders in his hands. "Are you all right? Did they hurt you?"
For a split second his eyes, searching for any sign of injury, seemed almost crazed but then I realized he was merely examining me as he would any possession that had somehow been threatened.
I shrugged loose from his hold. "Well, Cousin," I said, forcing myself to adopt the casual bantering he had used in McCollum's office, "have you come to finish what your men started?"
"My men? They don't work for me.:
I twisted the stick in my hand. "They might as well, Cousin; they had your lease."
"Is that what they told you?"
"You know it is."
"No," he said. "I don't. What I do know is that I wouldn't let scum like that on my land to kill snakes."
I aimed the stick at a pine cone and missed.
"Be honest with me, John. They left to go get you, and now you're here." I walked on ahead of him, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm.
"I was talking with Louise Rustin at the store when I saw them barreling down the road from this direction, and I knew that whatever they had been doing up here meant trouble. That's the only reason I came."
I felt as though the breath had been knocked from me. I fought to keep from sagging against him. "Then they really were timber thieves?"
He nodded. "And from the looks of things, you protected your sacred pines with nothing but a stick and righteous indignation."
"I didn't have a stick," I said weakly. "I took a chainsaw away from one of them."
He looked at me strangely and then his laughter rang out. Before I knew what he was doing, he had his arm around me, hugging me close to his side. "Oh, Cousin," he said, "these woods really must be hunted for you to have managed that."
I tried to free myself, but he tightened his arm around me and guided me to the road. I was only human—how else can I explain the flush that started deep within me, growing until it forced out even the January chill? And no one could deny that John Richards was an attractive man. For the moment, he even seemed . . . companionable, with a trace of a smile softening what only days before had seemed a cold, harsh face.
Companionable. Not intimate. Not passionate. Not anything to explain the need I felt to have him tighten his hand on my shoulder, turn me in his arms, and hold me safe. Safe at last.
I slipped from his grasp and escaped instead into the safety of Martha's car, aching with the tension of not letting him know just how vulnerable—to him—I had suddenly become. He leaned against the open door, his smile still playing across his features as I tried to start the car and the engine refused to catch.
"We're going to have to talk, you know."
"Are we?" I tried the key again, pumping the accelerator. "Is that one of the requirements I haven't heard about yet?"
"No. Just everyday family courtesy."
Who was he kidding? Nothing since my arrival had been of the "everyday" variety, and I certainly hadn't seen anything to indicate the Richards family even knew what courtesy meant.
The engine still refused to catch. John reached across me and turned off the key. "Now you've flooded it. You'll have to wait awhile."
I sat there in silence, staring through the windshield.
"Are you cold?"
I shook my head but felt him close his hand over mine. I tried not to flinch, to give him any indication of the unexpected and unwelcome, although not unpleasant, physical sensations that casual touch caused.
"You're like ice," he said, tugging on my hand. "Come and sit in the truck where it's warm."
I started to pull away from him and then realized how childish that would seem. He couldn't possibly know. Unless I struggled. Unless I made more of a scene than the situation warranted. I allowed him to lead me from the car and to his truck. I slid across the seat and leaned against the passenger door.
He started the engine, and heat poured into the cab. I hadn't realized how cold I really was until that moment. I eased my toes in my boots and held my hands to the warmth flooding from the dashboard.
John stretched his long legs across the center hump, leaned back against his door, and looked at me.
"It would be better if you didn't mention our encounter today to Mack."
That was the last thing I had expected him to say, and suspicions darted through my mind. "Oh? Better for whom?"
He grimaced. "I'll take care of the problem in my own way and in my own time. Mack has a tendency to be overprotective, at least where some persons are concerned. He doesn't need any more trouble than he already has."
"Can't anyone in this part of the country make a simple, declarative statement?" I asked. "Why is it that you people act as if life is one big secret that I'm not entitled to know anything about?"
"Maybe if you stopped thinking of us as you people you'd know the answer to that. But that's not going to happen, is it, Elizabeth? Because, in spite of ties of blood and birth, you are the outsider here."
"That's . . . that's feudal," I protested.
"It may be feudal, but it's a fact. It's the way things have been since this territory was settled, and it's the way they'll continue to be until long after our lifetimes.
"And I'll win, you know."
The smile was gone from his face, the chill was back in the truck, and we had arrived at what he had wanted to talk about all along.
"What do you mean?" I asked, forcing him to be the one to continue the subject.
"You'll never inherit the house. I've planned this too carefully and for too long. I would have had it by now if you hadn't shown up."
I turned to him, puzzled. "But the trust—"
"Can be broken."
He studied me for a moment and then spoke slowly. "I've seen enough of you to know you've got the Richards stubbornness, but I think you've also got more than a share of common sense. I've given you time to see the problems up there; now I have a proposition for you. If you won't fight my breaking the trust, I'll split the trust lands and money with you." He stopped, looking into my eyes, which I knew held nothing but questions. "Half or nothing," he said levelly. "I'll even let you have the hill."
"If?" I managed to ask. There had to be a catch to this outrageous proposal.
"If I can have the house."
I looked away from him. Was this man ever going to do or say what I expected of him? "I don't understand. How could you have let the house fall into such disrepair if you care for it so much?"
"Care for it?" The harshness in his voice shocked me. "You wanted to be let in on the secrets around here. This is one of mine." He continued in a calm, controlled voice, emotionless except for the content of his words. "I want to destroy that house. I want to watch while a demolition expert blows it to rubble. I want to watch that rubble covered by a bulldozer. I want to watch while briars and underbrush take over again, until there is nothing left but wild land no different from thousands of other hills."
"But why?" I asked.
"So that in a few years, when anyone thinks of—if anyone thinks of—David Richards, it will be only his financial successes they remember. They won't be idealizing a man who betrayed a nation to gain those successes. They certainly won't be thinking about crazy old King David and his castle.
"And maybe, just maybe, I can get out from under his shadow."
The only sound in the truck was that of the fan motor churning out stale, heated air. How awful it must be to hate a man, a dead man, so intensely. Especially when one carried that man's name, his blood, his face. And how mistaken John was in his hatred. I searched for something, anything to help. John? David? I didn't know who. I only knew I had to speak.
"David was a strong man. He spent his life helping his people, because he believed in them. He wouldn't have betrayed them. Not for personal gain."
"You haven't read the same history books I have, Elizabeth. That won't wash. If you were right, he wouldn't have turned from them at the end. He wouldn't have worked so hard at bringing in the railroads and coal mines, things he had fought before, things he knew would ultimately destroy the sovereignty of what you so devotedly call his people. They weren't his, he was theirs. He failed them, and he knew it. You can tell by looking at what few pictures there are of him late in life. And that house is a symbol of his failure."
He put the truck in gear. "To hell with the car. I'll send someone back for it."
Suddenly I understood. "Why, John Richards, you feel guilty because of that failure."
"Do I?" He shifted gears and concentrated on the roadway. "Perhaps," he admitted. "Does it really matter now? What Choctaw blood I have has been so diluted it wouldn't even have gotten me on the tribal rolls." He shook his head and stared straight ahead. "But he could have had it all. He was strong enough, and popular enough, and vocal enough that he could have made a difference. And the council that chose him to act as delegate to Washington again and to stand for principal chief could have seen him elected. He was too strong, had too many depending on him for him to have thrown it all over because of a woman. No. There had to be some deeper flaw in him."
This was important to me, so very important, and I had to keep him talking no matter how much I hated what he was saying. "What woman?"
"Your books didn't tell you that, did they?" he asked. "No. I suppose they wouldn't. After his involvement with her had ruined his political career, and with it any real chance for the survival of the Choctaw Nation, he kept her a carefully guarded secret." He glanced at me, then back at the narrow road. "The family kept the secret."
No, my books hadn't told me anything about her, and my part of the family hadn't lived long enough to do so; the only thing that had told me about her was myself.
"So he wasn't a god, is that what you're saying?" I asked tightly. "He was a man. He fell in love."
We passed through the gates. Martha stood on the terrace, watching for me. Her face relaxed only slightly when she saw me, and who I was with, and she went back into the house before we came to a stop.
"Love?" John went on mercilessly. "He loved her so much that when she came crawling to him, pregnant, he wouldn't marry her to give her bastard a name."
A child. There had been a child. Nothing could have told me that.
We were stopped now. John reached over and caught my jaw in his hand, forcing me to look at him while he looked deeply into my eyes. "And she loved him so much that she abandoned him and her son. And only later did guilt, or shame, or God knows what force him to acknowledge the child was his."
"David had a child. . .." my voice broke, "a son who—"
"It doesn't seem fair, does it? Heroes are supposed to be perfect, strong and brave and larger than life. And their children are supposed to be the same. But I'm telling you what it was really like. David was no hero. And his son was an idiot, brain-damaged from birth."
"No," I whimpered. There was no way I could have known about Eliza or her pregnancy, but I did. And I didn't want to know what John was telling me. But there was proof of that, too, within myself, within the one remaining locked room in the house. How, how did I know? "No."
"Elizabeth? What's wrong?"
I shook my head, breaking the contact of his hand against my face, fumbled behind me, and opened the door. Not speaking, I jumped from the truck.
"Elizabeth!"
I heard John calling my name, saw Martha and the workmen staring at me as I burst into the hall, and ran up the stairs. I bumped into a packing case in the upper hall, knocking tools in all directions, but that didn't stop me. The keys. The keys were in the tower room. I snatched them from the chest and raced back into the hall.
The door was as formidable, as frightening as it had been when I first saw it, but now I had to see what it hid. The lock was different, higher than the others, and my hand trembled as I lifted the ring of keys to it. John's words and my own futile denials rang inside my head. None of the keys fit. I threw them to the floor and ran back to the pile of tools, clawed through it, and grabbed a pry bar. He had to be wrong; I had to be wrong, I prayed as the bar bit into the door and facing, sending splinters flying. The bar finally caught the lock, and I pushed against the door, stumbling into the room as it gave.
The pry bar dropped forgotten from my hands. Metal restraints in the form of lightly wrought circus wagons barricaded the windows that ran the length of the room. Not one pane of glass remained; they lay in shards on the floor and furniture. A branch had crashed through the center window and its bars, and lay rotting across the remains of a tiny crib. A miniature lion's cage sat in the center of the room, its doors open, and it was to there that I felt myself drawn. A bed. A twin-sized bed completely enclosed by bars, the covers still on it, mildewed and rotten. I knelt beside it.
"I can't know this," I heard myself saying. "This isn't real." I touched the crumbling linens. "Not real." A gray, shapeless lump lay beside the pillow, and as I picked it up, I saw a strip of unfaded orange before it crumbled in my hand releasing mats of red down.
I must have cried out, because Martha reached out for me, lifting me to my feet, cradling me against her. She smoothed my hair and rocked softly with me before turning with me, still holding me close. I saw the shocked and questioning faces of the workmen clustered outside the nursery door. John Richards stood in front of them, looking even more stunned than the others.
Martha put herself between him and me as we entered the hallway. "Haven't you done enough for now?" she hissed at him. "For God's sake, leave."
She knew without my telling her that I wanted to go to the tower room. She closed the door behind us and helped me to the bed.
"Something else has happened, hasn't it? One of those things between you and this house. One of those happenings that if I search hard enough, I can find a logical explanation for."
I choked back a sob and gave a quick nod.
"Do you want to tell me what it is?"
"I . . . I don't think I can."
"Elizabeth, let me take you to Mack and Joannie's. You can stay there. Give up this house. Whatever is happening isn't natural. It can't be worth it."
"I think it's too late." Too late. The secrets of the living were still hidden from me, and most of the secrets of the dead. But not the big one. How could I remember Eliza and her love and her pain? I had been Eliza; I was Eliza. And for some reason I might never understand, I was here again, reliving that life. I had loved David Richards; I had given birth to the child who existed in that travesty of a nursery—for how long? How many years?
"Elizabeth, are you safe here?"
The horror of the tiny jail struck me again, and I twisted away from Martha, ignoring her question as I gestured impotently toward the nursery. "I want it gone. All of it. Burned, buried, I don't care. I don't ever want to see any of it again. Will you tell them, Martha? Now?"
"Can you do that? Won't Stanley make trouble for you if you destroy trust property?"
"I don't care. I just want it gone. Please, Martha."
She put her hand on my shoulder, sighed, then rose and left the room. When she returned, I raised eyes that felt bruised, then watched her face, concentrating on the errand I had asked of her in an effort to force all other thoughts from my mind. "Did you tell them? Will they do it?"
She nodded and held out her hand. Two pills rested in her palm. "Take them."
I shook my head. The picture of the nursery swam before my eyes, and thoughts I couldn't yet let myself accept swirled through that picture. Martha held the pills closer. I took them.
She sat beside me until the medication took effect, and with that came loss of my control of my thoughts. Scattered through my visions of David caring for a child who would never know him, I have vague memories of her removing my boots and covering me, softly repeating the question I still couldn't answer. "Are you safe here?"