The Fate of Mercy Alban (17 page)

“And that’s all you know?”

Jane nodded. “That’s all I know, child. As I said, I was just a girl myself. If anyone in the household had known anything else, it would have been your grandfather’s man, Hamilton. He handled everything for Mr. Alban back in those days.”

And he was long dead, I knew. I had never met the man.

Changing the subject, Jane said: “The doctor from the hospital in Switzerland returned your call while you were out.”

“On a Saturday?” I wondered if Swiss doctors kept different hours from their counterparts in the States.

“He said he’ll call back,” Jane said. “He’s not going to be available tomorrow, so it’ll have to be Monday.”

“Damn it!” I whispered under my breath. Another whole day would go by without my talking to him, and I needed information about my aunt’s condition, sooner rather than later. I was worried my aunt was supposed to be on medications that she wasn’t taking, and that her care was being compromised because of Harris Peters’s rash action of taking her out of the facility and bringing her here. I thought about Matthew’s suggestion that I sue him or make it a police matter—a kidnapping charge certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility—but my first action needed to be to secure her care. Then I’d deal with Harris.

I made a mental note to wake up early Monday morning (or stay up very late) in order to call the doctor during his workday, some seven hours earlier than it was here in the Midwest.

“How has Aunt Fate been doing today, Jane?” I asked. “I haven’t been to see her myself, I have to admit. I know I should just go and talk to her but I …” I didn’t quite know how to explain the fact that I’d been avoiding my aunt. Jane must’ve seen the guilt on my face because she did her best to absolve it.

“With all that you’ve got on your shoulders right now, miss, you don’t also have to be dealing with a sick, old woman,” she said. “I am taking care of her. It’s my place, not yours. I’ve known her since she was a girl, remember, and I can deal with her care now until things get sorted out with her doctor. Miss Fate is tired and confused—the journey alone must’ve taken it out of her—and she needs her rest. When she’s back on her feet, then you can have a nice long chat with her.” Jane cast her gaze up to the ceiling. “I must confess that I’ve been keeping her suite locked on the third floor.”

I bristled at the thought of it—it sounded rather Dickensian to me. I didn’t know if I liked the idea of keeping the woman locked up. “But—” I started to protest, but Jane cut me off.

“It’s for her own safety,” she said, straightening her apron. “I can’t be watching her all the time, not with everything I have to do. Until we get a care nurse for her full time, or whatever we do with her, she needs to be where she’s safe. I don’t want her wandering outside and getting lost or hurting herself on the stairs.”

She took a deep breath in and let it out. “Not that there’s much chance of that,” she continued. “Miss Fate seems more than content to stay in her childhood rooms on the third floor. She looks out the window, reads some of her old books, and even watches a little television. It’s where she’s always felt the most safe, so it is.”

“Still, I don’t relish the idea of keeping her locked up,” I said. “Use your discretion, Jane, but maybe we could just lock the doors at night?”

My head began to pound at the weight of everything I was dealing with.

“Do you ever wish for the bliss of being bored with nothing to do?” I managed a weak smile and ran a hand through my hair. “I’m not sure I even remember that feeling.”

“Aye.” Jane nodded. “That’s what it is to be the head of Alban House. Always has been.”

I supposed she was right.

“Your mother took things one at a time,” Jane went on. “Got one crisis off her plate, then on to the next. It’s the only way.”

I smiled at her. “Good advice.”

As I made my way up the steps to the second floor, I looked around and thought of the proposed retreat that I very well could be running here the following year. I imagined artists painting outside in the garden and writers with their heads bent over their manuscripts … just as my mother and Coleville had done all those years ago. And then it hit me—she not only wanted to honor the man, she wanted to re-create what they did here together, making the house a sort of shrine to their relationship. How she must have loved him.

My heart began to ache for her, for what she lost that night at a summer party fifty years earlier.

“What happened that night, Mom?” I said aloud. “If the Albans killed the man you loved, how in the world did you end up here, with them?”

With Jane being a stone wall, I realized that if I wanted more information about what had happened, there was only one place I was going to find it: Coleville’s lost manuscript. It wouldn’t tell me about the night he died, obviously, but it would provide the background for his death and, if it was as inflammatory toward my family as he said it was, perhaps even the reason for it. It also wouldn’t tell me how and why my mother had married my dad, but at least it was a start.

My mother had kept his letters. I couldn’t imagine her not keeping the manuscript, too. It had to be here in the house.

But where?

I opened the door to her bedroom and put the packet of papers from the lawyer’s office into her desk. Then I began rummaging around—the desk, the nightstand, the armoire. I scoured her bookshelf, riffled through the closet, and peered under the bed. I opened her wall safe. Nothing. And then I remembered there was another wall safe downstairs in the library.

My mind flipped back into the past as I hurried down the stairs, and I gave a small, internal cheer when it hit on the crucial bit of information I was trying to remember: the combination. My mother had changed it years before to my brothers’ birthday—01-27-19-73—and had told me about it at the time.

In the library, I carefully took one of her paintings off the wall, the one I knew concealed the safe, and, with shaking hands, dialed in the combination. The safe opened with a
chock
. It was as easy as that! But as I drew out its contents—cases of old jewelry that I knew belonged to my great-grandmother, legal papers, even an ancient-looking pistol (loaded, I noticed)—I realized the manuscript wasn’t among them.

“Where did you stash it, Mom?” I said to her, my mind running in several directions at once. But as I sank into one of the armchairs, I wondered if anyone could ever find something that was deliberately hidden in this house of secrets.

I spent the rest of the day scouring every place I could think of where my mother might have hidden that manuscript for safekeeping—I riffled through bookshelves in the library, opened dresser drawers, peered under beds and in the backs of closets. I even sifted through the attic, picking through relics from my family’s past. Nothing.

Defeated, I tramped back down to the main floor, wandering into the library and realizing my search was at its end.

Just then, the phone rang, and I snatched it before Jane could pick it up, hoping it was the doctor in Switzerland calling back.

“Hello?” I said. “This is Grace Alban.”

“Hello, Grace Alban,” said a familiar voice. “This is Matthew Parker.”

Hi,” I said, a little startled to hear his voice on the other end of the line.

“I know we left it that you were going to call me if you needed to talk to somebody,” he began, and I could hear him clearing his throat. “But even though we extend the offer, people don’t always follow it up. So I thought I’d just give you a quick call to see how you were doing.”

I smiled. “I had a meeting with my mother’s lawyer today,” I told him, crossing the room and settling into an armchair. “She wants me to turn Alban House into a retreat for writers and artists during the month of June every year. She wants it to be named for David Coleville.”

He was silent for a moment. “What a marvelous idea. What do you think about it?”

“I’m not quite sure,” I admitted. “It will be up to me to administer it—to run the program, in other words. I’m to choose the participants from a pool sent to me by the university.”

I could almost see him nodding. “Is it something you’d want to do?”

“The more I think about it, the more I like it,” I said, looking around the room, imagining a group of artists and writers gathering for drinks before dinner.

“It’s fraught with meaning, all of it,” he said, and I could hear him pouring something into a cup. Coffee? “In terms of the timing, I mean.”

“How so?”

“She wants it named for Coleville, and June is the month in which he died, at the very house where this retreat is to take place. She wants her one remaining child to spend at least part of her life dedicated to honoring his memory.”

I shifted in my seat. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” I hesitated before continuing. “Obviously, she loved the man. The more I think of it—his death, I mean—the more I don’t like the conclusions I’m coming to. I really don’t think there was any way it was suicide.”

“You’re thinking that whatever is in that manuscript …”

“I turned the house upside down this afternoon looking for it,” I admitted.

“And you didn’t find it, I’m assuming.”

“No. I looked everywhere I could think of—safes, secret drawers, under beds, in the attic. It’s not here, unless my mother had another secret hiding place, which, when you think about my family, isn’t out of the realm of possibility.”

Matthew was quiet for a moment. “Oh, Grace. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.”

“Think of what?”

“What you said just now, about another secret hiding place?” he said. “This might turn out to be nothing, but I think I might know of one.”

“You think you know where the manuscript might be?”

“I’m not sure, but I’ve got an idea. Are you busy right now?”

I looked around. Amity was off in the gardens; dinner wasn’t quite ready. “I guess not.”

“I’ll pick you up at Alban House in ten minutes.”

I jumped into the passenger side of the green Volvo, and Matthew pulled out of our driveway. He surprised me, just a short ways down the road, by turning into the church parking lot.

He raised his eyebrows at me, his face lit up with a grin, and he hopped out of the car. By the time I climbed out of the passenger seat, he was already fumbling with his keys at the side door of the church. He opened the door and held it wide, beckoning me inside.

“Is this a ploy to get me into the church for some kind of secret ritual?”

“As delightful as that sounds, no.” He smiled and closed the door behind us. “I know something you don’t know, and I can’t believe I haven’t thought about it before now.”

His eyes were shining so brightly that I couldn’t help getting caught up in his enthusiasm. “And what do you know that I don’t know?”

“This church has an archive vault,” he explained, leading me down the dark hallway, our footsteps echoing in the emptiness. “Generations of parishioners, especially people who lived through the Great Depression and didn’t trust banks or safety deposit boxes, have stored important items there for safekeeping.”

He opened the door to the basement and flipped on the light. “Maybe your mother came to Chip Olsen, who was the minister back then, with the manuscript—”

“To avoid having it destroyed!” I finished his thought. “If my grandfather had thought it was inflammatory enough to have killed for it, he certainly would have wanted to get rid of it.”

“And since she loved Coleville, your mother definitely would have wanted it saved,” Matthew said as we descended the stairs toward the basement. I noticed the air was getting colder and colder, the smell of stale earth stronger and stronger.

“Chip would have absolutely kept her confidence about it,” he went on. “She could’ve brought it here with nobody else knowing where it was.”

I could imagine my mother doing just that, saving the last work of the man she loved.

When we reached the bottom, Matthew flicked on the light, bathing the room in a yellowish hue. I gasped when I saw several stone sarcophagi, worn white with age, lined up in a row. This wasn’t just a church basement—it was a crypt.