Hall of Secrets (A Benedict Hall Novel) (21 page)

She was settling Adelaide, whose sobs were subsiding into a steady, irritating whimper, onto the edge of Allison’s bed. Adelaide was still in her dinner dress, and she had torn the hem of it. She looked down at her legs and moaned something about having laddered her stockings, but Margot ignored this. Loena appeared, and Margot said, “Loena, good girl. Stay with Mrs. Benedict while I change, will you? We’re going to the hospital.”

Loena’s eyes were as wide as Ruby’s, but she looked more excited than alarmed. “Yes, Miss Margot,” she said. She crossed the room and stood beside the bed, but Margot noticed she didn’t stand close enough to touch Adelaide. “Oh, gosh,” she exclaimed, gazing down at Aunt Adelaide’s arm. “That must hurt like blazes!”

Adelaide groaned. Margot was on her way out of the room, saying, “I’m sure it does, Loena. Just keep Mrs. Benedict from falling off the bed, will you?”

“Yes, miss. Gosh!”

Margot was used to dressing quickly. In moments she had on a skirt, sweater, stockings, and shoes. She ran a comb through her hair without bothering to look in the mirror, and went back down the corridor. She encountered Dick in the doorway of Allison’s room. He was frowning, obviously reluctant to go in. He turned with an expression of relief when he heard her step on the hard carpet. “Margot, what’s happened?”

“I’m not sure yet, Dick, but I’m going to have to take Aunt Adelaide to the hospital. Her arm needs setting, and I can’t do it here. Uncle Henry’s gone to call Blake.”

“Ramona’s awake, of course—I’m sure everyone is!—but I told her she shouldn’t get up.”

“That’s right. There’s nothing she could do. Blake and I will manage. I expect Father and Mother are up now, too, and everyone else.”

He nodded and was gone in an instant. Glad, she thought, to get away from Adelaide’s whining. She wished she could. She said, “Loena, I’ll take over now. Could you go to Mrs. Adelaide’s room and find her coat?”

She had been right about everyone being awake. The only person missing, as she maneuvered Adelaide down the corridor and onto the staircase, was her mother. Even Ramona had given up trying to sleep. She stood at the bottom of the staircase, wrapped in powder-pink flannel and wearing knitted slippers. As Margot shepherded Adelaide down the stairs, Ramona said, “The Essex is waiting in front, Margot. I saw it from my window.”

“Good. Thanks, Ramona.”

“Here’s Hattie. I’ll ask her to make some cocoa, calm everyone down.”

Margot cast her sister-in-law a look of admiration. Ramona behaved as if handling a frantic household were just what she had been born for.

Loena, Leona, and a surprised-looking Thelma were gathered in the hall, hugging themselves against the chill. Hattie stepped forward to meet Ruby just coming in. “Did you find Miss Allison? Oh, that poor child!”

Ruby shook her head. “I don’t know what to do now.”

Margot and Adelaide had just reached the foot of the stairs. Margot said, “Get dressed, Ruby, and keep looking. Ask Mr. Dick to help you.” Adelaide cried out as Margot draped her mink coat over her shoulders, but Margot said only, “You need your coat. It’s cold outside.”

Henry was searching the dining room and the two parlors for Allison, but with no success. They all stood in the hall, a shocked audience in dressing gowns and overcoats, as Margot and Adelaide, who was moaning steadily, moved out the front door, across the porch, and down the steps to the gate.

Dickson followed them. He said, “Shall I go with you, daughter?”

“Thanks, Father. Blake and I can manage. I’ll take Aunt Adelaide to the accident room. We should be back in an hour or two.”

Blake held the car door and assisted Margot to seat Adelaide, then went around to the driving seat. Margot, as she climbed in herself, said, “Father, Allison is outside somewhere, all alone.”

“I’ll call the police,” her father said.

Uncle Henry said, from the porch, “No! No police.” Dick, standing beside him, gave him an odd glance.

Dickson scowled but didn’t comment. He closed the automobile door and was back through the gate and up the walk before Blake pulled away from the curb. Margot sat on Adelaide’s right side, and did her best to ignore her aunt’s groans and gasps. She spent the fifteen-minute drive calculating how much codeine phosphate she dared inject into a woman who probably weighed no more than ninety pounds.

 

His patience had paid off. His instincts must be as sharp as they ever were, which was pretty damned sharp. In the face of a dearth of other things to take pride in, that bolstered his resolve and strengthened his self-respect.

After a revolting dinner at the Compass Center—greasy soup and a roll so stale it could cost a man a couple of teeth—he had felt the tug of his obsession, that intuitive call to come here again, to stand in the cold fog. He had lost count of how many nights he had spent this way, wrapped in his hand-me-down coat, charity scarf obscuring his face, gaze fixed on the windows and doors of Benedict Hall. Waiting. Waiting for his chance.

At first he thought he might have made a mistake. It seemed like any other night, except for having to endure watching Margot and her one-armed cowboy on the front porch. They could at least have had the decency to go to the back if they were going to carry on that way, but Margot had never had the slightest sense of propriety, or even a modicum of consideration for the family name. It had been tempting to follow Parrish down the street, but that wouldn’t serve his purpose at all.

Instead, he lounged against the cold bricks of the tower and waited. He didn’t know what he was waiting for, exactly, but he had a feeling, and despite the chill of the December night, it energized him, kept him rooted there, watching.

His reward came an hour after Parrish left and Margot went indoors. Someone, someone whose voice he didn’t recognize, set up a god-awful caterwauling. It caused lights to flick on in nearby houses and doors to slam at Benedict Hall. He knew what a cry of pain sounded like, of course. He had plenty of experience with pain. These shrieks were caused by pain, but intensified, he was certain, by outrage and resentment. Something dramatic had happened in Benedict Hall, something that had set the house by its ears.

Whatever it was, it was precisely what he had been waiting for. It propelled the young cousin straight out of the house. Pretty little Allison, hatless, coatless, running as if pursued by the devil, flew out the front door, leaving it open to the cold. She dashed down the walk and out the gate, leaving that standing open as well. Hair askew, flimsy dress rippling around her, she barreled across the road.

Straight into his waiting arms.

C
HAPTER
19

The radiographs confirmed for Margot what she had already observed, but there was more. Aunt Adelaide’s arm was fractured, the two bones of the forearm snapped cleanly in two. Margot also saw, studying the image, that Adelaide Benedict’s bones were shockingly fragile, a condition that could only show on the radiograph if it were already far advanced. It would have taken very little strength to break them.

Adelaide, even after being given a hypodermic, wept and complained throughout the setting of her arm and the application of plaster of Paris. She rolled her head to and fro on her pillow, and the nurses in the accident room raised their eyebrows at one another.

“Dr. Benedict, do you have other orders?” The night nurse stood close beside the bed, keeping watch that Adelaide’s antics didn’t cause her to slide right off the edge.

“Yes,” Margot said wearily. “She’d better have a sedative. Four ccs of valerian tincture, Nurse. I’ll stay with the patient while you prepare it.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Margot bent over the bed. She was tempted to just strap the woman down and leave her, but she forced herself to speak kindly. “Aunt Adelaide. Your arm is set now, and you’ve had a good dose of codeine phosphate. You shouldn’t be in pain.”

“She broke my arm,” Adelaide whimpered. “She threw the spoon at me, and then she broke my arm!”

“Spoon?”

“Yes, the spoon! I gave her one just for herself, but she won’t use it, and she—she—”

Margot said, “Never mind, Aunt Adelaide. Never mind that now. Here’s the nurse, and she’s going to give you something to help you relax. I’m going to telephone to Benedict Hall to see if Allison is all right.”

“She has this filthy pamphlet on her dressing table, this obscene thing, and she said—”

“All right, Adelaide,” Margot said, feeling her temper fray to the breaking point. “I’m the one who gave Allison the pamphlet. There’s no need to be angry at her about that.”

Adelaide glared around the accident room as if looking for someone who would listen to her complaint. “She
broke my arm,
” she cried in her piercing voice. “My own daughter!
My arm!
”

Margot took a slow breath through her nostrils and stepped back from the bed. The nurse gave her a questioning look, and Margot nodded, not trusting her voice. When Adelaide had swallowed the valerian tincture, grimacing at the bitter taste, she lay back on her pillow, seeming a bit calmer already. Margot didn’t trust this sudden change, and she motioned to the nurse to resume her position on the other side of the bed.

“Aunt Adelaide,” she said. Adelaide stared at the ceiling, her thin lips pressed so tightly together they almost disappeared. “Aunt Adelaide, the X-ray of your arm shows your bones are very weak. The condition is called osteoporosis, and it may have come about because you’re so thin. If Allison even bumped your arm, the bones could have broken.”

“She didn’t
bump
me,” Adelaide grated. “She threw the spoon at me. I picked it up, and told her to use it, and she pushed me! She broke my arm!”

“What was she supposed to do with the spoon?”

The valerian began its work, and Adelaide’s eyelids trembled and drooped. “She’s getting fat,” she said. “I let her come to Seattle—”

Margot’s resolve evaporated. “You forced her to come to Seattle, Aunt Adelaide. She didn’t want to.”

Adelaide spoke with her eyes closed. “She had to. Everyone’s talking about her. She’s ruined.”

“Why?” When there was no answer, Margot spoke more sharply. “Adelaide, why is Allison ruined?”

“Naked,” Adelaide mumbled. “She was naked. God only knows what else . . . Everyone’s talking.”

The nurse put a hand to her mouth to hide her smile. When it was clear Adelaide had fallen asleep, Margot said, “I didn’t understand a word of that, did you?”

The nurse dropped her hand and bent to smooth the pillow beneath Adelaide’s head. “It may not mean anything, Doctor. She won’t remember saying it, either.”

Adelaide’s sleeping face looked pitiful, the layers of cosmetics like a film of dust settled across her gaunt features. Automatically, Margot took a clean washcloth from a nearby basin and began to wipe away the rouge and powder. The nurse held out her hand to relieve her of the cloth. “Let me do that, Doctor.”

“Thank you. I think I’d better admit her. It would be hard to get her home in this condition, and I’d like to bring in our family physician, ask him to do a thorough examination.”

The nurse nodded, dropped the cosmetic-stained washcloth into the basin, and set off across the accident room to call for a gurney. Margot stood where she was, gazing down at Adelaide. Her aunt’s slight body barely made a silhouette beneath the brown hospital blanket, and her face, in repose and free of paint, more resembled that of a starving child than an ill-tempered middle-aged woman. “What’s going on with you?” Margot whispered. “Why are you all so unhappy?”

Adelaide exhaled a long, relaxed sigh, and slept on.

 

Allison gasped a lungful of foggy air. She wanted only to escape, to flee from her mother’s accusing shrieks, to evade Ruby’s restraining hands. She didn’t stop to close the door or to latch the gate. The mist enveloped her and softened the raised voices from the house. She dashed headlong into the street and across it without so much as a glance left or right.

The cold air shocked her out of her incipient hysterics, but one of the Louis heels of her evening shoes caught on the far curb. She lost her balance, stumbled, and began to fall, throwing out her hands to catch herself on the concrete of the sidewalk.

What her hands encountered was the bulk and heat of a man’s body, swathed in some stiff, slippery fabric. Her hands gripped the material without meaning to. Her face, propelled by the momentum of her fall, collided with his chest.

Strong arms encircled her before she could push herself back. Hard hands gripped her close, as if in an embrace, but it wasn’t one of safety or of desire. The moment she felt the encircling pressure of his arms, she knew there was danger. He squeezed her against him and blew sour breath down the back of her neck.

He hissed, “At last!” in a hoarse voice that made her blood—so recently running high and hot—turn instantly to ice.

Her tears of fury cooled swiftly in the night air. She choked, “Let me go! Sir, please!” She beat at his shoulder with her hands and tried to scrabble away with her feet. The heel she had tripped on broke off and dangled precariously from her shoe.

His laugh was more a growl than a sound of amusement. He loosened his grip, but kept hold of her wrist with one hard hand.

Allison drew back as far as she could and stared at him. This new threat jumbled in her fevered brain with what had just happened in Benedict Hall.

She had struck her mother. She hadn’t done it on purpose, but it had happened just the same. Adelaide had been brandishing the spoon, threatening to stick it down Allison’s throat with her own hand. Allison batted it away, with no more intent than if she were swatting at a buzzing hornet, but something had snapped. She heard it break, and so did her mother. They both froze for one horrible instant, gazing at Adelaide’s forearm, and then Adelaide began to scream.

Allison might have tried to help her mother, might have gone in search of Cousin Margot to set everything right, but she didn’t trust herself to do it. What really drove Allison out of Benedict Hall was the impulse that swept over her, the nearly irresistible urge she felt to put her two hands around her mother’s bony neck and squeeze until the shrieking stopped.

She had fled from that awful impulse, and now—

The man’s breathing rattled as if he had something stuck in his throat. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she made out a limp wide-brimmed hat, a drab overcoat of canvas or something like it, and a dark wool muffler. His eyes glinted pale blue, but the rest of his face was hidden, the scarf pulled up over his nose and wound around his neck.

She twisted her arm, trying to loosen his hold.

“Don’t bother,” he said. There was something wrong with his voice, though his accent was cultured. “We’re just going to take a little walk, you and I together.”

“No,” she cried and tried again to jerk free.

He grabbed the back of her neck with his other hand. She felt the pinch of his long nails and shuddered. “You might as well relax,” he said in that awful voice. “I’m going to need you for a little while. When I’m through, I’ll probably let you go.”

“Need me for what?”

“Why don’t you wait and see?” The tone might have seemed conversational if his voice weren’t so ghastly. It was more than just hoarse. It sounded—broken. Shredded.

“No!” she said again. “I don’t want to!”

He gave her a shake, as if she were a recalcitrant puppy. “Used to getting what you want, aren’t you? Spoiled little rich girl?”

“That’s not true!”

“I think it is.” His grip on her neck tightened. “But it doesn’t matter. Let’s go.”

“I’m not going!” She pulled back on both heels, one intact and one broken, and pushed at him with her free hand. He wasn’t tall, but his body was as hard as stone, and she might as well have pushed a brick wall. He shook her again, harder this time, and she gasped at the pain in her neck. “What do you want? Why are you—”

“The more you fight me,” he grated, “the worse it will be.” He loosened his grip just a little, but she still felt the bite of his fingernails at the base of her skull. “I mean that, by the way,” he added offhandedly. “If I have to hurt you, I will enjoy every moment. Seems only fair to tell you that, little cousin.”

“Cou—cousin?”

Another hideous laugh. “Yes indeed!” He pushed her ahead of him, forcing her deeper into the park, down the curving sidewalk lined with dark shrubbery. She fought him at every step, kicking, struggling to loosen his grip on her neck, to turn her head to bite his hand. None of it did any good. She stumbled onward, limping on her broken shoe, her fear rising as they approached the water tower. The top of it was lost in fog. Below the park, only a few streetlights glimmered through the mist. The bay was invisible, but a freighter’s horn blasted its bone-piercing call from somewhere out on the water.

None of it seemed real. The hideous scene in the bedroom, the reckless flight from the house, her mother’s shrill screams, and now—in the rolling fog, with the brick tower looming above her—this man! Was he—whoever he was, whatever he wanted—was he truly going to hurt her?

His breathing was terrifying, each breath rattling in his chest as if it were his last, but his fingers were as implacable as iron claws against her tender flesh. They were as cold as iron, too. Everything was cold, her bare arms, her feet in the thin shoes, her hands, the tip of her nose. She began to shiver and stammered through chattering teeth, “I’m not your c-cousin!”

“Oh, but you are! Allison, isn’t it? Miss Allison Benedict, I believe, debutante of San Francisco.”

“But—who are
you?
” She twisted again, trying to see his face.

He pushed her forward, and she almost tripped. He said, “Preston Benedict, at your service. Cousin Preston to you!”

She could barely speak for the sheer outrageousness of the idea. She breathed, “No! That’s not possible.”

“And yet”—another push—“here I am!”

“No, no! You’re
dead!
There was a funeral. There’s a grave, and a tombstone—everything!”

“Sentimental, isn’t it?” He laughed, then coughed. His coughing made a fearsome tearing sound, as if his lungs were ripping apart. Their progress slowed as he fought for breath, and they paused at the foot of the granite stairs leading to the tower entrance.

When he could speak again, he rasped, “They buried an empty coffin, you know.”

“Wh—what?”

“Wh-what?” he mimicked, a bizarre echo in his ruin of a voice. “Didn’t tell you that, did they? There are no bones in that grave. There can’t be, because those bones are right here.” He slapped his chest. “Nothing under that headstone but an empty box.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why should I care? Now, go.”

Allison, her head spinning, limped up the steps. Ahead, past the curving wall of the tower, the glass walls of the Conservatory shimmered through the fog like the walls of a fairy-tale palace. She could no longer see the lights of Benedict Hall. When she faltered at the last step, he gave her a vicious shove, and she fell to her knees on the landing. Her silk stockings tore, and she heard the beads from the hem of her frock scatter across the granite.

All at once she was angry, and it felt much better than being afraid. She was furious at this person, whoever he was. He was no better than Papa and Mother and Dr. Kinney, all of them doing their best to control her, not one of them caring how she felt or what she wanted, all of them using her to get what
they
wanted. This man was exactly the same.

Rage cleared her spinning head. “You’re a liar!” she cried, still on her knees. “I’m not your cousin! My cousin Preston is dead!” She jumped to her feet, and with a swift motion, yanked the muffler away from his face.

For one sickening moment they stared at each other.

Allison’s fury died away under a swell of profound pity. This man, whoever he was, had been rendered monstrous. The skin below his eyes was puckered and blurred as if it had dissolved. His mouth was a slash, what was left of his lips distorted, pulled to one side and down. His chin and neck ran together as if the skin had melted and then frozen again into thick, reddened ridges of flesh. His eyebrows were gone, and his eyelashes, too.

No wonder his voice was so awful. He had been in a fire. He must have breathed flame and smoke, destroyed his voice, scarred his lungs.

She realized her mouth was open in horror, and she closed it. He said, “Pretty, aren’t I?” and lifted the muffler again to hide his disfigurement.