Lost Among the Living (17 page)

I
t was a surprise to no one that Cora and Martin emerged from their walk in the woods engaged. In the jubilation that followed among both sets of parents, I kept the news of Mother's death quiet, privately asking Dottie for time off to travel to Hertford for her funeral and to sign the papers from the hospital.

Dottie had been distracted as I spoke, but when I came to my reason for the time, she turned her gimlet eyes on me with perfect focus. “That is a shame, Manders,” she said. “You may have the day. Take the motorcar and driver.”

“I will, thank you.”

“Are there any financial concerns?”

It took me a moment to realize she was asking if I was capable of paying for Mother's funeral. “The hospital is burying her in their chapel yard,” I said. “It's where many of their patients go. The expense is modest.”

“They'll bury her properly, then,” Dottie said. “Make sure they do. If any of the arrangements are unsatisfactory, have them telephone me.”

She was awful—she had granted me only a single day off, and in a moment she would forget about me altogether as she planned Martin and Cora's engagement party—but my eyes stung with embarrassing tears. She had buried Frances properly and had likely had to fight to do it. She was willing to fight the same fight on my behalf for Mother. Why Dottie made it so hard to befriend her, I would never know.

“Thank you,” I managed.

“Eight o'clock Thursday morning, Manders,” she said in reply. “Look sharp, as we'll be busy. I detest maudlin emotions.”

“Yes, Dottie.”

As it happened, the hospital did bury Mother properly. Their chapel yard was calm and green, well tended, with a view over the rolling hills. They gave her a small stone, with her name and dates, and the simple word BELOVED. Aside from the hospital's chaplain and one nurse on behalf of the staff, I was the only one in attendance.

It was on the ride back in the motorcar, as I half dozed beneath a headache of grief, that I suddenly realized I would no longer be paying Mother's hospital bills. The expense that had burdened me for so many years—that had driven me to work for Casparov, and therefore meet Alex and change my life; that had driven me to work for Dottie, and to change my life again—was gone. I would still have to support myself, but I now earned enough to put a few pounds into savings. The relief was so hideous that I wept in horror at myself, with no witness but the silent driver. By the time we arrived back at Wych Elm House, I was myself again.

•   •   •

T
he engagement party was to be grand, the first social affair Wych Elm House had seen since Dottie's father had bought it for her. The bride's parents had offered to host it, as was custom, but Dottie had insisted; she used the excuse that Martin's health prevented him from
traveling, which was accurate, but the truth was she wanted badly to show off.

The arrangements were many: flowers, china, additional servants, champagne, music, food. Dottie and I were kept busy morning and night, and though it was dull work, it was a blessing, because there was no room to think of anything else.

Though Martin and Cora were the feted couple, they had nothing to do with the arrangements. I rarely saw them. Martin had taken a turn for the worse again, as if the effort of courtship and proposing had taxed him, and Cora took to reading to him in the back study as he lay on the sofa with a blanket over him. Her voice was grating, her pronunciation terrible, and her reading hardly expert, but still he lay there hour after hour, his eyes closed, as she read on.

Though I was no longer on chaperone duty, I had been tasked with occasionally satisfying propriety and checking on them. The first time I did so, Martin saw the look on my face and took my hand. He gave it a brief squeeze and shook his head once in silent communication. He was not back on morphine, then. I squeezed his hand in return.

Robert, now freed from the work of courting the Staffrons, fled the house in his motorcar. He spent evenings at the neighbors' again, though he sometimes stayed home for dinner and curbed his all-night assignations. He never looked at me or spoke to me, for which I was grateful. As soon as the ink was on the marriage certificate, we might never see him again.

Life went on. I slept as little as ever; my nightmares were vivid and horrible. I watched the pageant before me, made lists of linens and silverware, flowers to be ordered and invitations sent and responded to, and at night I paged through Frances's sketchbook, looking at the shadows she'd drawn over the town I visited and the house I lived in, staring at the face she'd drawn in the window of my bedroom. Twice I ventured to the upper gable again, standing and waiting, hoping
Frances would tell me how it had happened, who had done it. I lived separate from the family, alone in my visions and dreams. I wondered if I was suffering from what Mother's doctors had politely called “nervous exhaustion.” I vaguely realized I had begun to let go of my life, to let it march without me.

And then the morning of the party dawned, and I decided to take out my camera again.

•   •   •

I
hadn't planned to do it. After the encounter with Robert—I could still remember the shock of seeing the figure of Frances past his shoulder—I had packed the camera away and left it. But I lay awake as dawn broke one morning and remembered that Frances had placed the camera on the floor of my room that day. And when I had taken the camera out, she had appeared. It was the last time I had seen her.

I could feel her somewhere close to me, watching, waiting. Perhaps the camera was the key.

I rose and dressed quickly, putting on layers to keep warm. Thick stockings, the plaid skirt Dottie had forbidden me to wear, and both a blouse and a sweater over my chemise. I twisted my hair back in an unkempt bun. Then I took Alex's camera from its case and, shoeless, crept out my door into the hall.

The corridor was silent; there was no sound behind Cora's closed door, or from her parents' room down the hall. The servants would be up soon, so I moved quickly.

Downstairs, I padded through the kitchen to the back door. In the vestibule there, I pressed the small button for the electric light and looked at the array of outerwear hanging from hooks and lined in rows along the floor. I did not own shoes that were warm or thick enough for November in the countryside. Setting down the camera, I rifled through the belongings of the Forsyth family, looking for something that fit. I ended up with a slick black mackintosh that was tight in the shoulders—Dottie's, perhaps?—and a pair of large, ungainly
rubber boots that fit my feet perfectly and came halfway up my calves. I contemplated the boots as I wiggled my toes in their chilly interiors. I could not imagine Dottie wearing rubber boots even at knifepoint, and they were too small to be Robert's. It was quite likely that they had been Frances's.

I found a mismatched green woolen scarf, tucked it around my neck, and set out.

It seemed that morning that I had the world to myself. The air was pungent with cold, frosted leaves, and my breath plumed in the air. Dawn had lightened the sky just enough so I could see the knobbed trunks of the trees and the path as it wound into the early-morning mist before me. The night's chill fog still shrouded the woods, so that the trees seemed to vanish upward into unseen eternity, and cries came from invisible birds. The few leaves left on the trees dripped water with a persistent wet sound, and the loamy path sponged frostily beneath the soles of Frances's rubber boots.

I had not brought the tripod with me. I carried only the camera as I traveled the path, my boots sliding in the mud. Thick, cold water trickled down my mackintosh, the droplets catching the light. I could feel my own damp breath on the edge of the scarf that touched my lips. I headed for the lookout where I'd read Mother's letter the last time, settling into a strange state of meditation as I walked, watching and listening. On some level I was afraid, but on another I was excited, alive with almost painful anticipation.

At the lookout, the fog blurred the edges of the view. The sea was a deep, hollow roar, its churning faintly visible through a layer of mist; the Ministry of Fisheries was a ghostly outline of walls and right angles. I stood for a moment, drinking the salty air, feeling the wind brush my damp cheeks, and then I fumbled with the camera.

I sank to one knee on the rocky ground and placed the camera on my other knee to steady it. I took off the cap, advanced the film, and bent to the eyepiece, framing the misty ocean in my view. I snapped a
photograph, then moved back to get a wider shot, knelt again, and took another.

“Where are you?” I shouted into the wind.

I changed my angle as the wind rose in the trees behind me. The dawn light was just perfect, making the edges of everything soft, the mist diffusing the rising sun. A single boat on the ocean drifted into my line of vision, and I bent to the eyepiece again, watching the dark speck move on the lonely expanse of ocean, placing my finger over the button.

Something moved on the path behind me.

I straightened, the hair on the back of my neck prickling. “Frances?” I called.

There was no answer. Slowly, my clenched muscles protesting, I twisted my body and looked back over my shoulder at the path into the woods.

There was nothing there.

As I gripped the camera and stood, pain stung my knee where it had been pressed into the hard ground. I turned and faced the path, my back to the water now. Still there was no sound, no movement, but I
sensed
her watching me. I took a few cautious steps, my breath held in my chest, my boots quiet against the damp ground.

She was not on the path. I had nearly reached the first bend when it occurred to me to raise the camera to my eye and look through it.

I held the camera unsteadily to my face and squinted through the eyepiece. I saw the path, the woods around it, the tatters of mist. Nothing else appeared. Slowly, I pivoted on my heel, my damp, icy hands gripping the leather of the camera, my arms shaking as I held it in place at my eye. My breath was loud in my ears as I swiveled carefully, my lens taking in the pattern of tree trunks, turning back to look at the clearing and the water. The wind kicked up, and I heard the rustle of dead leaves.

She was there. Standing where I had just been, her skin the color
of parchment, her eyes watching me from their dark recesses, staring, the hem of her dress unnaturally still in the rising wind.

I made a strangled sound in my throat and jerked my face back from the camera, my slick hands nearly letting go. I blinked and stared at the space I'd just seen through the lens, my vision clearing. There was nothing there.

“Frances?” I whispered.

Before I could lower my eye to the camera again, the leaves in the clearing kicked up in the wind, swirling. I stood hypnotized as dead leaves funneled up from the ground and down from the branches overhead, moving like motes of light. It was beautiful and terrible, unnatural. The icy wind howled.

High over the trees, shrill and imperious, came a long, unearthly whistle.

I turned on the path and ran.

I pounded over the muddy path, my clumsy boots slipping. I still carried the camera, held close to my chest in both hands. My fingers struggled to keep their grip and my breath came in gasps as the camera banged clumsily against my body.

The whistle sounded again—it split my brain, like a long-ago train whistle had on the worst day of my life—and a bolt of panic shot down my spine.
She is calling him,
I thought. I changed direction and left the path, scrambling down an incline tangled with brush, no longer aware of my direction or which way led back to Wych Elm House. I hit the bottom of the incline, the thorns of something in the underbrush tearing my stockings above the top of my boot, and kept running.

Far behind me in the woods, the birds went silent, as if they sensed something coming.

I staggered down another incline and found myself on a dirt path, wide and flat, bordered by thick brush. I could see no distance either up or down it—the fog was too heavy. In the spin of my panic I
realized this was the same path I had stood on the morning I had met Robert. I was at the other end of it, far on the opposite side of the woods that spanned the Forsyths' property.

I jogged along its easy length for a moment, feeling the jagged pinch inside my rubber boots and a trickle of blood warm on my calf. Cold rain had begun, dripping in the trees and spattering my mackintosh. My breath was sawing in my lungs, and cold sweat slicked down my back beneath my layers, but I did not stop. If I could take the road far enough to get back toward the house, to familiar ground—

Something moved in the trees far behind me. Without thinking, I ducked off the road, struggling through sticky underbrush again. My hands slipped on the camera, but I did not let it go. I slid down an incline into a valley of dead leaves, then scrambled up the other side.

From the road came a heavy scrabbling sound of claws in the dirt. There was a rushing overhead—the birds, this time, still silent, flying upward en masse. The entire woods denuded of birds in a single, soundless exodus. Over the roar of my own pounding heart in my ears, I heard something breathe—the harsh rasp of panting, deep and throaty.

My foot in its clumsy boot slipped, and I fell, bumping and careening into a low, wet ditch, the mackintosh acting like a slick toboggan. I came to rest on my back in a puddle of cold water, staring up into the rainy trees.

There was no time to escape, not now. I froze by instinct, going still, my breath stopping, like a mouse or a shrew when it feels an owl fly overhead. My legs clenched; my mind went white. All thought stopped, all motion, as I lay and waited.

The smell came first. An overpowering rotten stench, damp and greasy. The bushes shifted and tore as something large came through them, up the rise, the heavy grind of paws gaining purchase in the loamy earth. There was a gasp and a growl, and the thing hit the top of the rise and launched itself over me.