The Fate of Mercy Alban (36 page)

“What is it?” I asked her. “What’s the matter?”

She looked at me with wide eyes. “Oh, Mickey, thank goodness!” she said, smiling warmly and touching my arm. “I’m so glad to see you up and around. We were all getting quite worried about you.”

Whatever was she talking about? “Up and around?” I asked her, looking at my watch. “Am I late for breakfast?”

She smiled again, that beautiful, warm smile. “About four days late,” she said, gently. “You were down with a terrible fever. The doctor has been here. I could’ve killed Flynn for that ridiculous prank, plunging you into the lake like that. I was terrified you had caught your death.”

My head swam. I had lost four days?

“I don’t understand,” I began. “I—”

“So there you are, Rip Van Winkle!” I turned to see Flynn running up the patio steps, his eyes shining. “Back in the land of the living!” He encircled me in a great hug. “I was so afraid for you, my dear friend,” he whispered into my ear, his voice wavering.

He pulled back and looked at me, and I could see his eyes brimming with tears.

“Mother! Father!” he called out in the direction of the garden. “He’s awake! Mickey is awake!”

I went through the motions of breakfast with everyone but couldn’t quite grasp what they were saying to me. Four days lost? But … how? The last I knew, I had spent a fitful, sleepless night in my room after a frightening encounter on the lakeshore. Was everything I experienced some dark and feverish dream brought about by illness? A hallucination, then? It was the only explanation that made sense, and yet it felt wrong somehow.

Lily and Flynn and his parents chattered away, filling me in on the happenings of the past four days. But Pru was notably silent. She stared across the table at me with a strange glint in her eyes that I hadn’t before seen.

Any comments she would make were harsher than her usual, flirty banter, picking at both Lily and Flynn in a way that was decidedly unlike her. Finally, Flynn spoke up.

“Whatever is the matter with you, Pru?” he asked. “You’re positively gloomy, and you’ve been this way for days. And here we are with something to celebrate—Mickey’s recovery. Lighten up, will you?”

She turned to me then, and in her face I saw something ghoulishly familiar. “I am sorry.” She smiled, but as she did so, her eyes didn’t light up the way they usually did. “I was just so worried about Michael. I guess I’m overwhelmed with relief that he’s all right.”

We dropped the subject then, but I noticed Lily and Flynn exchange a glance that told me more was going on than met the eye.

After breakfast, I planned to do some writing in the garden, so I hurried up to my room to get my writing pad and pencil. I found Prudence waiting for me, sitting on my bed, when I opened the door. She rose and was at my side in a moment, draping her arms around my neck.

“Alone at last,” she whispered into my ear, and kissed me, forcefully and hard. I pushed her away.

“Prudence,” I started, fishing my handkerchief out of my pocket and wiping my mouth with it. “This is hardly appropriate.”

She laughed and moved closer, backing me against the wall. “I couldn’t care less about that.” She smiled. “I know how you feel about me, Michael. We have a connection. I’m wondering what you’d like to do about that.”

“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered. “But—”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You must realize that if you marry me, all of this will be yours.”

“Listen to me, Prudence,” I said to her. “I’m flattered by your attention, I truly am. You’re a wonderful girl and any man would be lucky to have you. But my heart belongs to another. I think you know that.”

She batted her eyelashes at me. “We’ll see,” she said, kissing my cheek. And then she took her leave of me, closing the door behind her.

Later, I happened to walk into the garden where Flynn and Lily were talking in low tones, their heads together.

“Oh!” Flynn said a little too loudly. “Mickey boy! I didn’t see you there.”

Lily’s eyes were brimming with tears. She tried to brush them away with her sleeve, but I took her hand in mine.

“This is the second time I’ve seen you crying today,” I said to her, glancing at Flynn. “Something’s going on. Please take me into your confidence, both of you. Maybe I can help.”

Flynn sighed. “It’s Pru,” he said, turning Lily. “I think he should know.” She nodded quickly in response. “She hasn’t been herself for days.”

“I noticed at breakfast she was rather snappish,” I offered. “Is that what you mean?”

“That and more,” Lily said. “It’s as though she has developed a kind of hatred for us, all of us, overnight.”

“I had an unusual encounter with her earlier,” I confessed, but I wasn’t about to let on what it was.

I locked eyes with Flynn, and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing. This had something to do with the girl in white. Just then, I heard giggling from behind us, and we turned to find Prudence there, holding a croquet mallet and smiling.

“Anyone up for a game?” she asked, slowly swinging the mallet. “I’m dying to have some fun.”

“A little bedtime reading?” It was Matthew, poking his head around the door. “I couldn’t sleep and was about to head downstairs to get something to read when I saw the light under your door.”

“I couldn’t sleep, either.” I smiled.

He eyed the manuscript in my lap. “You’re looking for answers.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Guilty as charged. What Carter said earlier was really nagging at me. ‘Something much, much worse.’ I couldn’t sleep until I knew what it was.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked, yawning and running a hand through his hair. He looked exhausted.

I put the manuscript down and kissed his cheek. “You bet I did.” I turned off the light and led him back into his bedroom. The answers to this mystery could wait.

The next week went by in a blur. Jane came home from the hospital, moving more slowly than I’d ever seen her move, but on the mend and doing fine, her husband hovering around her like a mother bear. I had to wrestle her apron from her hands more than once and tell her in no uncertain terms that Amity and I were going to be waiting on her for the next few weeks until she was fully back on her feet, and finally, she grudgingly accepted our help.

After talking it over with Amity, we agreed to put the house on Whidbey up for sale and move back to Alban House permanently. We’d travel back there later in the summer to box up our things and let a realtor deal with the rest. I think Heather’s friendship sealed the deal for my daughter, and for that, I was grateful, even though Matthew’s description rang in my ears—the girl from down the lane and the girl from the manor house. It sounded chillingly like my mother and Fate, and that’s one bit of history I didn’t want to repeat.

The decision to stay in town led me to call the university and make an appointment to start preparations for the David Coleville Retreat for Writers and Artists. If we hurried with a call for applications, we could have the retreat up and running by the following June. It felt like the right thing to do, fulfilling my mother’s vision. I knew she’d be happy about it, and likely was. But there was one more stone I needed to turn, one more piece of the puzzle I needed to solve, before I could dive into that project headfirst.

And that was how I came to be sitting at the patio table one balmy July evening with Jane, Mr. Jameson, Carter, and Matthew. Amity had helped me prepare dinner for everyone—chicken on the grill; red potatoes roasted with rosemary and onions; a crisp salad with goat cheese and balsamic vinaigrette dressing; and warm French bread, right out of the oven. But then I sent her out for a pizza with Heather. My daughter had heard about and seen enough of Mercy for several lifetimes.

When Heather’s parents had pulled out of the driveway with Amity waving to us from the backseat, I filled everyone’s wineglasses and cleared my throat.

“This dinner is to thank all of you for your service to my family over the years and to celebrate your continued service now that I’m coming back to live at Alban House,” I said, raising my glass and nodding to Jane, Mr. Jameson, and Carter. “You have helped this family through both everyday life and unimaginable trials. One thing from you, among many, that we’ve always counted on is your discretion. And that’s not going to change. Except for tonight.”

I saw Jane eye her husband, and he squeezed her hand. “Before I go ahead with the retreat, I need to know what happened here at Alban House the night David Coleville died. If we’re going to be honoring this man’s memory, I want to do him the justice of at least knowing how he died. I think all of you know more than you’re saying.” I looked from each person to the next. “Now is the time to tell this story, just as my mother was going to do on the day she died.”

I thought about Harris, and part of me wished he were here with us tonight, but I didn’t quite know how to explain the Mercy part of the puzzle to him. My daughter and I had fought this monstrous woman for our lives, and I wasn’t about to tell him the full extent of what had happened. He might be family, but he was still a stranger who had stirred up all of this, and he was going to speak to my mother the day she died. I still didn’t completely trust him.

“Carter,” I went on, “something you said the other night stuck with me. You said that despite all the strange and terrible things Mercy did as a child, there was something even worse that you hadn’t told us. You said it happened the summer before Coleville died. That’s when Mercy burst into the room, laughing and agreeing with you. She said it was all in the manuscript and asked if I’d read it. Now I have, and I’ve got a theory about what the ‘something much, much worse’ might be. But I’d like to hear from you all, who were here at the time, before I tell you what I think it is.”

Turning to Jane and her husband, Carter nodded and cleared his throat. “She’s right,” he said to them. “It’s time this comes out. We’ve lived with it for far too long. Frankly, I just don’t want to carry the burden of it anymore.”

Jane locked eyes with me. In them, I saw resignation mixed with loyalty. “All right,” she said, her voice wavering. “Your mother was indeed going to speak of this to the journalist the day she died. As a way of honoring her memory, I’ll speak of it now.”

A sip of wine cooled my throat as I slipped my hand into Matthew’s and settled back to hear Jane’s tale. With the candles flickering, the lake lapping softly on the shoreline, and the sunset bathing the patio in a purplish hue, she began.

“It was the first year the writer was here,” she said. “I had initially been afraid to have someone outside of the family come and stay for the whole summer, but Charity convinced me that young Adele was here often enough and none the wiser about Mercy. I had been worried that a writer’s imagination would be sparked, that he’d discover her, but as it turned out, he was much too interested in Adele to see anything beyond her beauty and charm.” Jane chuckled, remembering. “We could have been hiding an elephant between the walls and he wouldn’t have noticed.”

I stole a glance at Matthew—we both knew that wasn’t quite the case. His imagination had indeed been sparked by what he saw and heard at Alban House that summer.

“But midway through the season …” Jane hesitated and twisted the napkin in her lap.

“Go on, dear,” Mr. Jameson said to her. “It all right now. She’s full and truly dead and gone.”

“She went missing,” Jane said finally. “Mercy. It was Charity who discovered her gone. She rallied the staff and called her husband and children in, too, and told us what she knew—Mercy was gone.”

She closed her eyes for a moment before continuing. “Remember, now, the world outside of this household thought Mercy was dead and had been for years. And we had the writer in our midst, so your grandfather couldn’t call the police or conduct a massive search. We had to pretend like nothing was wrong. But he had people, shall we say. And those people searched for Mercy for the rest of the summer—the house, the grounds, the lake, even the town. They checked the airline’s logs, train logs. But they turned up nothing.

“We all believed—the family and all the staff—that Mercy had fled her confinement, so to speak; that she tired of living like a prisoner here in Alban House and decided to strike out on her own. Until—”

She shot a look at her husband. Taking a sip of the whiskey I had poured for him, he finished her thought. “Until I discovered the bones.”

Matthew put an arm around my shoulder as we waited for Mr. Jameson to go on. “It was during the late spring of the next year, once the ground had thawed. I was digging up a new section of earth near the cemetery—Mrs. Charity had wanted a garden planted there to honor the Alban dead—when I came upon the skeleton. Someone had dug a shallow grave and covered it with not only dirt but driftwood and other debris.”

He dabbed at his eyes with his napkin. “Of course, the body was completely decomposed. Mercy had gone missing almost a year before. But the white dress she wore was still intact. There was no doubting who it was.”

Jane put a hand on her husband’s shoulder and took up where he left off. “Mrs. Charity was inconsolable, as you might imagine. But in a way, deep down, I think she was also relieved. Mr. Alban certainly was. The staff definitely was. Mercy was gone, that evil was gone from our household. We didn’t ask any questions about who might have put her into that grave—I always suspected Mr. Alban but I never said a word about it. We had a private family funeral, laid the bones to rest in the crypt, and were just glad that the horrible time in this family’s history was over.