Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (8 page)

I saw the truth before I saw the hollowed eye-sockets.

I lost myself for a moment; when my mind cleared, I was digging in the bank as frenziedly as any small animal who hears the cry of a hawk. The bones were jumbled together. I found two more skulls in close proximity to the first, along with a scattering of vertebrae and small bones that I thought were probably phalanges, and then sat back on my heels, realizing I was panting, dripping with sweat, that I’d torn all my nails back to the quick, and that the appropriate thing to do was return to the house and call the police. When you find human remains on your property, you aren’t expected to exhume them yourself.

Human remains,
I thought.
Ashes, ashes,
cried the voices.

And Martin knew something, something he did not want to know.

I knew in that moment that I did not want to know, either. This secret, buried like bones, was a terrible threat, like the rot that had weakened the tree roots here until the bank collapsed. I wanted to pretend ignorance, to cover these poor bones again and return to the house, to let Martin take me to Dr. Baines and be prescribed bed-rest and pampering. But as I reached out for that first handful of loose dirt, I thought,
What about our child?
What would I be condemning our child to? Growing up among lies and shadows, taught to fear and never told why, lest she, too, begin to hear the cold, pale voices that whispered ’round my head.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down
 . . .

I straightened my fingers, let the dirt sift back. I touched the skulls again, gently, in apology for my cowardice. Then I pushed myself to my feet, wincing at the pain of my cramped knees and ankles, and began slowly and cautiously to make my way back to the house.

I saw it even before I was clear of the trees, all the lights blazing. As I started up the steps, the door was flung open; Martin stood outlined against the spill of light, a looming shape like a troll in a fairytale, and for a moment I was afraid he would deny me entrance.

Then he was rushing to help me, trying almost to carry me into the house. I could not at first pick words out of what he said, only the overwhelming wash of his concern and fear. I pulled away from him as soon as we were inside. “I need to call the police.”

“The
police
? Are you—”

I interrupted him ruthlessly, before my cowardice could keep me from saying the words at all: “There are three skeletons in our woods. Three dead children.”

His hand, reaching out for me, froze an inch away from my arm. “Dead children?” he said in a dry whisper.

“Who are they, Martin? Who
were
they?”

“It can’t be,” he said, his face ashen, and slumped sideways against the wall.

I followed him, catching his shoulder, shaking him. “What do you know?”

“She said it wasn’t true,” Martin said, his voice thin and dreamy, his eyes very wide. A child’s eyes, like the child’s rhyme that had been echoing in my head for days.

“Who?” I said, more gently. “Who said?”

He looked at me as if he did not recognize me and said, “Grandmother Louise,” and then slowly folded up, sinking down the wall to sit with his head against his knees and his arms wrapped around his shins. “Call the police.”

I dialed with shaking fingers. And all the time I was on the phone—and it took a remarkably long time to convince them that I meant it when I said I had discovered human remains in the woods behind the old Shoemaker place—Martin did not move.

The silence in our house was as thick and choking as a London fog for the next week. The police exhumed the bones and took them away; the officer in charge promised that she would let us know what they learned. She could tell we were upset, but I suppose that anyone would be; she did not press us for explanations, accepting at face value my story of falling over the bones while out walking. My battered state lent credence to a tale that I myself found woefully implausible. But if any of the police officers heard voices in the woods, they did not mention it.

We waited for the officer’s return like defendants waiting for a verdict, both of us shying away from each other when our paths crossed. Martin did not sleep in our bed; I stayed out of the living room and study. I seemed to spend half my time crying; he spent hours on campus, and I did not know what he did there.

It was Friday afternoon when the officer called and said she had something to tell us, if we would let her stop by after work. I said,
Of course,
assured her that six o’clock was a perfectly acceptable time, hung up the phone, my heart hammering in my chest.

Calling Martin was the second hardest thing I’d ever done.

The officer was prompt; I’d made coffee—though anything else seemed too social, too much like it belonged in an Addams cartoon. We sat in the living room, the officer in the armchair, Martin and I at opposite ends of the couch like semi-cordial strangers, all of us cradling our mugs in our hands as if for warmth, although the house was well-heated and well-insulated. The officer stirred cream carefully into her coffee, then looked at us and said, “You’ve helped us solve the three oldest missing persons cases on our books. Thank you.”

“Then you know . . . ” Martin stopped, cleared his throat. “Then you know who they are.”

“There was never much doubt about it. Especially once we got the bones dated. Those are the Three Lost Children of 1922.” Martin put his mug down, but not quite quickly enough to hide the fact that his hands were shaking; the officer continued, sympathetic but implacable: “Charles Weatherby, Marianne Bolton, and Alma Shoemaker.”

“My grandmother’s sister,” Martin said. “Thank God she never had to know her sister was . . . ”

“Yes, sir.” She looked at me and saw I was still in the dark. “Alma Shoemaker disappeared in March of 1922, Marianne Bolton in June, and Charles Weatherby in October. The two girls were twelve years old, and the boy was eleven. In December, a thirteen-year-old girl named Juliet Laroux was assaulted, but she managed to escape. She identified her attacker, without hesitation, as Roderick Shoemaker.”

“My grandmother’s favorite uncle,” Martin said thinly. “She swore he was innocent, you know.”

“He never confessed to the murders of the other three, and he never came to trial.”

“Lynched,” Martin said, still in that same faint, faraway voice.

“And so no one ever found out what he had done with the bodies. Did he ever live in this house? Do you know?”

“No, he never lived here. But he visited. He was quite noted for . . . for his way with the children. Excuse me.” He left the room in a rush. The police officer and I sat, holding our mugs, not speaking.

After a time she said, “Even if Roderick Shoemaker
was
innocent, ma’am, whoever did this is long dead. And there’ve never been any other disappearances like those. You don’t need to worry . . . ”

“Thank you,” I said. “I know.”

I managed to smile at her, but it felt as fragile as blown glass. And although I did not want to, I said, “How did they die?”

“We don’t know, ma’am. We don’t have enough to go on.”

“No, I suppose not.”

But I knew, although I did not think I would tell the police officer so. I remembered those cold, breathless voices, and like any child, I had sung that selfsame doggerel. He had strangled them: garotted them probably, making his own meaning out of a nonsense rhyme.

“Ashes, ashes,” I murmured, and the police officer nearly spilled her coffee.

“Ma’am?
What
did you say?”

“I was thinking of the children’s rhyme. You know. Ring around the rosies—”

“Why?” Her eyes were wide, and she looked less like a police officer and more like a frightened little girl.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The man who attacked Juliet Laroux. That was how she knew who it was. Because he was singing ‘Ring around the rosies,’ and she recognized his voice.”

“Oh God,” I said. “Oh dear God.” And I am sure my eyes were as wide as hers.

“How did you know?” she whispered.

“You did hear them,” Martin said from the doorway. He was white-faced but composed. “You heard them singing their murderer’s favorite song.”

“
Heard
them?”

“It was how I found the bones,” I said. “I . . . followed the voices. Charles and Marianne and Alma. ‘Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.’ ”

The officer drained her coffee in a gulp, as if she wished it were something much stronger. “I don’t think I’ll put that in the report, if you don’t mind, ma’am.”

“Not at all,” I said faintly.

“And I think I’d best be going.” She stood up, nodded to both of us. “Thank you for the coffee. Sir, ma’am.”

Martin let her out and then came back, hesitating a moment in the doorway. I was afraid he would turn and leave, that this house would again become the separate territories of two frightened and hostile creatures. I stretched out a hand toward him. He crossed the room, slowly, and sat down beside me, this time close enough that our thighs were touching. A hesitation, and he put his arm around me. I leaned into his embrace, and some of the tension ebbed out of our bodies.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For not believing . . . for trying to make you not believe.”

“Martin—”

“She told me so many stories about him. She told me about playing Ring Around the Rosies with him, about the way he’d sing it coming up the drive. She was fifteen when he . . . when Alma . . . She had a crush on him, I think, and of course no one told her anything. I think she told herself so many times that he was innocent that she simply
believed
it, even when she knew the evidence. The truth.” He managed a small, infinitely painful laugh. “I guess now I know why she hated Juliet Laroux so much.”

“Martin, you don’t—”

“I don’t think she ever talked about him to anyone but me. I was her favorite grandchild, her only male descendant. She told me once I looked like her Uncle Roderick.” He pressed his free hand against his mouth, as if to steady it. “You don’t think . . . ”

“No. And even if you do, it doesn’t matter.”

We were silent for a while, but peacefully. He said, “Do you want to move?”

“Move?”

“This house . . . you can’t want to live here knowing—”

“It isn’t the house’s fault. And whatever happened here happened a very long time ago. I’d rather stay and push the darkness back.”

“Beloved,” he said, and his arm tightened around me. And after a time he began to speak of other things, the day-to-day realities of the life we were building, and I was able to relax, to believe what I had said. This was our house now. It did not belong to the past.

And yet. The woods behind our house are beautiful, but I do not want our child to play there. I do not want to think about what might be watching.

At night the tigers pace. In the hall outside the little boy’s bedroom, they pace like patient, vengeful angels. They are pale green, like luna moths; their eyes are lambent milky jade. They are cold and silent; when he has to go to the bathroom at night, the tigers stare at him with their pale pale eyes, and sometimes they open their mouths, as if they were roaring, but they make no sound. Their breath is like the aftertaste of brandy and the cold sting of snow. They never come near enough to touch. He wants the tigers to like him, but he is afraid they don’t. They brush against the walls with a distant shushing noise, and even in his room he can feel the soft, relentless percussion of their padding feet. The moonlight shining through the hall windows streams straight through them.

No one else can see the tigers.

The house is always cold. His desire for warmth causes his father to brand him a sissy-boy, a weakling. At night he hugs himself, because no one else will, and dreams of escaping this loveless house, these cold tigers.

Years later, his father dies. He goes back because he must, leaving behind lover, friends, work, passion—his adult life like a treasure, locked in a chest for safekeeping. The house is unchanged, his mother petrified in her harsh condemnation of the world and its inchoate yearning for love. She puts him in his old room at the top of the house, as if he had never left at all.

That night, he hears the tigers, the patient rhythm of their feet marking off the seconds until Doomsday. “You aren’t real,” he whispers to them, lying stiff and cold, afraid to close his eyes because then he might be able to hear them more clearly. But the tigers, unheeding, continue pacing until dawn.

She went down to the beach in the early mornings, to walk among the cruel black rocks and stare out at the waves. Every morning she teased herself with wondering if this would be the day she left her grief behind her on the rocky beach and walked out into the sea to rejoin her husband, her sisters, her child. And every morning she turned away and climbed the steep and narrow stairs back to the fortress. She did not know if she was hero or coward, but she did not walk out into the cold gray waves to die.

She turned away, the tenth morning or the hundredth, and saw the child: a naked, filthy, spider-like creature, more animal than child. It recoiled from her, snarling like a dog. She took a step back in instinctive terror; it saw its chance and fled, a desperate headlong scrabble more on four legs than on two. As it lunged past her, she had a clear, fleeting glimpse of its genitals: a boy. He might have been the same age as her dead son would have been; it was hard to tell.

Shaken, she climbed the stairs slowly, pausing often to look back. But there was no sign of the child.

Since she was literate, she had been put to work in the fortress’s library. It was undemanding work, and she did not hate it; it gave her something to do to fill the weary hours of daylight. When she had been brought to the fortress, she had expected to be ill-treated—a prisoner, a slave—but in truth she was mostly ignored. The fortress’s masters had younger, prettier girls to take to bed; the women, cool and distant and beautiful as she had once been herself, were not interested in a ragged woman with haunted half-crazed eyes. The librarian, a middle-aged man already gone blind over his codices and scrolls, valued her for her voice. But he was the only person she had to talk to, and she blurted as she came into the library, “I saw a child.”