A Widow's Curse (23 page)

“Stop it.” Andrews roused himself. “So—dinner?”

I glared in disbelief.

“You're still hungry?”

“You're not?” He tapped the cross. “You think you have to do something with this right
now
?”

“Yes.”

“No.” He reached for his cell phone. “I'm calling Crawdad.”

“Hang on.” I rubbed my face. “I was thinking of trout.”

“That'll take forever! Cleaning and boning—”

“How about some of the leftover duck?” I shot back.

“It's days old!”

“We'll put it in a cassoulet, add some sausage, double-cook it, slather bacon on top.”

“I guess.”

“Rugby players don't care about food poisoning.”

“Right,” he agreed, “but English professors do. I stride two worlds.”

“Do you want the cassoulet or not?”

He sighed heavily.

“Good, you get out the duck,” I instructed, “and I'll get this cross out of the way, put it someplace safe.”

He went to the refrigerator.

“The bacon's in here somewhere?”

“In the meat-keeper drawer on the bottom,” I assured him.

He mumbled something.

I picked up the Cherokee cross and headed for the living room. Before I knew what I was doing, exactly, I'd grabbed a light jacket out of the coat closet beside the door and stumbled out onto the porch.

I was in the truck with the engine running, cross beside me on the passenger seat, before Andrews appeared in the front doorway. He was yelling something, but I couldn't hear it. I turned the truck sharply and ground a rut into my yard getting to the dirt road that led down the mountain.

Adairsville was at least an hour away, but that's where Barnsley Gardens was, and that's where I was going.

So that's how I came to be standing in the moonlight in the middle of Barnsley Gardens on an odd September night.

What was left of the estate rose into view as I walked up the hilltop. A full moon made the mansion a skeleton, something from a grotesque animal more than remains of an antebellum home: a vision to match the story of its curse. A razor of wind cut across my fingers and kicked up leaves; I thought they might have been footsteps following behind me.

I'd parked my truck near the business office but hadn't found anyone in it. The only other vehicle parked in the lot was a rented Mercedes, and I wondered how the place could make any money with only one guest.

I half-expected to be stopped by some sort of security guard as I wandered past the guest cottages onto the road that inclined toward the mansion, but I saw no one.

There were big open fields on either side of the road, and in the darkness and moonlight, all that open space seemed alive. Several deer were grazing so casually that they didn't even lift their heads as I passed by. Fireflies, crickets, tree frogs, bats, and night birds all made their presence known. The wind gusted suddenly, hard enough to scramble the smaller pebbles in the road behind me, and it did sound like someone was following me.

But the silence in between all the noise was where the true menace lay, I figured.

Up the road and into a more wooded part of the land, I ran into a maze of dwarf boxwoods. In each open part of the design, different mass plantings had been established: roses, white gardenias, tall cleome and shorter cockscomb. The path twisted through the plantings enough to slow my progress, even if I hadn't been fascinated by the flowers.

Once through the maze I was faced with stone steps, a pathway, and the front of the ruins. Only brick walls were left, no roof, no doors—an American Parthenon. But the places where windows had once been made it clear that the mansion had been comprised of several stories, and some of the windows at the front of the house had obviously been placed to overlook the maze and the steps, allowing residents to assess all visitors as they approached.

The air bit harder, and I completely gave over to the presence of Barnsley ghosts, my distant cousins. I carried the Cherokee cross in my right hand, but I had no hope that it would ward off any evil. It was an instrument of evil; it might even attract foul spirits. Leaves swirled on the ground around me, and for the third time I had a sensation that I was not alone, that someone was close to me in the shadows.

I stood staring up at the house, one more visitor the ghosts could evaluate, suddenly wondering how I'd gotten myself to that black moment, and, yes, I found myself in the middle of a very basic ontological dilemma: Who was the man standing in the dark garden holding on to a Cherokee curse?

I began to imagine myself standing in the upstairs window of the derelict mansion, looking down on myself. How did the man down there, I wondered, get to that desperate garden, wanted by the police and pursued by a murderer?

I moved slowly toward the house, replaying in my mind the whole history of the doomed Barnsley family, lamenting their great sadness as if it were my own.

Just as I stepped onto the stone stairs, I thought I saw something moving inside the mansion. I froze.

Wind batted tree limbs; here and there, it drove more leaves to the ground. Tree frogs and crickets had gone silent. The moon was suddenly bound by black clouds and the night was plunged into a deep well.

Just as I was considering walking very quickly back to my truck, I saw it again: a shadow moving in the shadows, a rustle of footsteps in the ruins.

I took a few steps as soundlessly as I could in order to get a better view just as the moon was released from its bondage. Light broke forth, poured into the mansion, and I saw, quite clearly, a woman in a neck-high aubergine dress, folds flowing in the wind. She was walking past one of the huge fireplaces.

I thought she must be an employee of Barnsley Gardens, a historically dressed figure who would lead tours and ooze charm. What she was doing wandering around in the dark at that hour, I had no idea—though I didn't know what time it was. But I thought she might at least direct me to the springs that had once provided the mansion with its water.

“Hello?” I called.

She did not pause, heading toward the rear of the ruins.

“Sorry to bother you,” I stammered, taking a few more steps in her direction. “I was wondering—”

My plea was interrupted by a strange sound. I stopped, listened. The woman was crying.

“Are you all right?”

She paused, and I thought she'd heard me.

I made it to the front of the house before she moved again. I stood where the door would have been, holding the Cherokee cross; the moon was bright in the house, and she turned my way.

It was Eloise Barnsley.

She looked away quickly, tears in her eyes, and moved toward the back of the ruins.

I stood, baffled, for a moment before I followed, telling myself that the good people who ran the Barnsley Gardens Resort had out-done themselves in research and commitment to accuracy. The woman looked almost exactly like the portrait of Eloise Barnsley I had just seen.

“I'm trying to find the springs,” I called out.

She disappeared down some steps at the back of the house.

I followed her as best I could through the house, but the moon didn't reveal everything. I tripped over stray bricks in the shadows, darker corners hid huge wisteria vines blocking doorways, and odd hidden steps jolted me downward twice. It all combined to make it more difficult to navigate through the ruins. By the time I reached the back of the house, she was nowhere to be seen.

The hill sloped down again behind the house. To my left, there was a gazebo and a rose garden. The wind filled the ruins with their scent, so rich that I closed my eyes for a second, taking it in.

Below me, down the hill, there were several outbuildings and what might have been a stream. To the left, there might have been a marsh. I let my eye wander in that direction and spotted what looked like might be a well house.

I was certain that the woman had gone the other way, but if the water for which I was searching was to the left, what was the point of following her? I told myself that she was going back to the office to change and go home.

I walked along the path that led to the gazebo behind the house. Huge blue hostas lined it on one side, and a perfectly manicured lawn bounded it on the other. I had a momentary vision of the grandeur of the place in its prime: stunning gardens, hilltop view, hot and cold running water in a time when most people didn't bathe. Nothing but a very strong curse indeed could cause such beauty to come to such desolation.

The gazebo may have been a more modern touch; it looked to be in very good shape, but it was hard to tell in the moonlight. Beyond it, there were steps that descended to a large reservoir and an old stone building—clearly, the well from which the house had once gotten its water.

As I made my way down the stone steps toward the well house, I was certain I heard someone else in the surrounding woods. In a sudden shift of cloud and wind, the moon revealed a moving shadow in the trees. I moved more cautiously, hyperalert to every sound around me and every motion in the corner of my eye.

By the time I was standing on the rim of the water, every muscle in my body was tense.

I paused for a moment, feeling the crush of my heartbeat, hearing how loud my breathing sounded, wincing at the thump of blood in my temples. I had no idea what to do with the cross.

The sudden snap of a twig not ten feet away from me made me whirl around, and I saw the man in the darkness between two trees. I couldn't see a cricket bat, but I was certain I knew who was there.

My lungs exploded with an involuntary noise, and my first reaction was to get to a more tenable position for a confrontation—one where I wasn't backed into a black pool of water.

I leapt across a small channel and down onto a docklike walkway that led to the stone house. I thought if I could find a big loose stone, I might have something to threaten the man with.

I was holding so tightly to the cross that my hand started cramping. The pounding of my feet on the wooden walkway thundered. I thought I heard the man mumbling something, but I couldn't understand what it was.

I made it to the well house just in time to turn and see him coming down the slope toward the water. The moon backed him, so he was only a silhouette, but he was moving fast.

Light on his feet for such a big frame, I thought giddily.

I looked around for a rock or a branch, anything to use against him, but the place was tourist-clean. There was a cast-iron plaque on the well house that likely told its story. I stepped inside.

It was black as pitch. I could smell the water, not an unpleasant scent, almost verdant. I thought perhaps I could hide from the man, but as my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, I realized it was a dangerous place to be: little foot room and lots of water in which to drown. There was an exit on the other wall, and I made for it.

I could hear the man on the wooden walkway outside just as I cleared the exit and began to run into the woods.

The way sloped up again, and there was a path, both sides of which were incredibly lush, and I realized it was a woodlands garden. I couldn't make out anything but the ferns and hostas, but it was so thickly planted on both sides with specimens I didn't recognize that I couldn't help but think how much attention had been paid to it. I remembered Andrews's strange revelation that one of the Barnsley sons had been murdered while he was on an expedition to find exotic plants for these gardens.

I was sweating, despite the chill in the air, and I was beginning to tire from running uphill. The path went through a darker part of the wood, through tall trees, and I destroyed three spiderwebs, feeling their sticky irritation on my face, fearing their poisonous residents.

But I kept running.

At last, I came to the top of the slope. It opened onto a small family graveyard.

Ten or twelve grave markers stabbed through the mossy earth, reaching for, but failing to gain, the sky. There was a bench at the end of the path, and another plaque that clearly said
BARNSLEY
. I thought that perhaps a spot of more open ground might provide more light, and that I could see my attacker.

I set the cross down on the bench and looked around for a weapon. If I could have pried loose one of the sections of rusty iron fencing that surrounded the cemetery, I would have done that, but I was afraid it would take too long.

I frantically cast my eye about for a sturdy branch. I suddenly caught sight of a shovel leaning against a tree close by. It didn't even occur to me that this would be the second time in a single night I would use the grave digger's tool to fight for my life. I merely raced for it.

Surely, I thought, no one has been buried here in over fifty years. This must be an gardening implement.

Dizzy from the running, a parallel occurred to me, a warning about my state of mind: Plant a seed, grow a flower; plant a body, grow a ghost.

Just as that thought was boiling in my brain, I saw the man lumbering up the path toward me. He didn't seem to see me.

I positioned myself in the darkest shadow I could find near the top of the path, hoisted the shovel over my shoulder, and waited. I was afraid that my gasping would give my position away, so I concentrated on slow breathing.

The man was grumbling in such an incoherent manner that it removed any doubt from my mind. This was not a security guard. This was the man who had murdered someone in my house and had just tried to kill me. He'd waited in the shadows behind my house and followed me to this spot.

I bent my knees, tensed my forearms. A strange rage, born of terror, clamped my chest, and I realized I was capable of killing the human being who was coming my way. That realization only added to my madness.

The man drew nearer, and I could barely hear his babbling for the pulse pounding in my ears. Thorns of sweat burned my hairline, and my fingers began to shake.

At last, he gained the top of the path, and with an explosion of breath I swung the shovel directly at his head.

Effortlessly, he ducked, my shovel flew from my hands, and the man rushed me, palm to my chest, foot behind my right ankle. I went down on my back with a bellowing thud.

Before I could scramble up, eyes squinting to see his next move, I realized he was calling me by name.

“Fever!” It was his third attempt to engage me. “God damn it, what the hell are you doing?”

I blinked. The buzzing cloud of berserk adrenaline that had rampaged my brain began to dissipate. I strained to confirm that the face matched the voice I fancied I'd heard, but it was the Hawaiian shirt that gave him away.

“Dan?”

He reached out his hand to help me up. I took it.

“You could have killed me.” He was breathing hard. “That shovel. It could have took my head right off.”

“I thought—”

“I know what you thought.” He grasped my hand and got me to my feet. “You thought I was the man who murdered that Mr. Shultz in your house the other night. I don't blame you. But didn't you hear me calling your name?”

“All I heard was some kind of incoherent mumbling.” I made it to my feet. “What was that?”

“Yeah, that would be
prayer,
” he chided. “You don't recognize the sound of praying, you heathen?”

“You're calling me a heathen?” I couldn't stop shaking. “What were you praying about?”

“I was scared!”

“So what are you doing here, exactly?”

“Me? I came straight here after you left my house. I've been waiting for you. You looked so weird when you left, I could tell you'd figured out where the water cross needed to go. I was pretty sure you'd come here tonight.”

“How did you—wait, how did you know about Shultz's murder?”