The Haunting of Maddy Clare (33 page)

“Go away,” he whispered.

I edged closer to him. “Are you all right?”

“Ssh.” He looked up at me for the first time, and I saw his eyes were sunk into his head with exhaustion. “Shut up and go away. She’ll hear you. I thought you were her. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”

I crouched down, closer to him, my heart hammering in my chest. “Who will hear me?”

He looked at me. “Do you think I believe you don’t know? You’re the one who brought her.”

My hand flew to my mouth. We had been right, then. Maddy had come. Still, I did not feel her presence, nor did I notice any metallic smell—except for the rifle in Roderick Nesbit’s lap. I waited for my breath to come back, as I let all the implications come to me. “So it was you, then. You were one of them.”

He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, leaning it against the woodpile, and said nothing.

“You’re in danger,” I said. I put my hand on his arm. I would take him to Constable Moores, and we would finally close the case on Maddy Clare. “Come with me.”

He did not move or open his eyes.

“Mr. Nesbit.” I shook him. “You don’t understand. The danger—”

A sound came from him then, a low humorless laugh. “The danger, ah yes. It’s what she wants, isn’t it? For me to run. To
think for a moment that I have any hope of escaping her.” He opened his eyes, stared tiredly into the distance. “She came to me last night. I thought I heard something during supper. I looked up, and—Mother of God—” He raised the hand not holding the rifle to his face, scrubbed it over his eyes. “I don’t know. All night. I knew it was her as soon as I saw her. Jesus God, I’ve tried everything. Confessing, apologizing. I begged on my knees. I wish to God she’d just say something, anything, instead of looking at me with those eyes.”

“Mr. Nesbit, you have to leave. She wants revenge.”

“She can have it, then.” His fingers curled over the rifle in his lap. “But she’ll have to come and take it. Maybe she can’t be blamed, but I’m not running like a scared rabbit. I came out here after midnight when I couldn’t take it in the house anymore, but I decided not to run. Where would I run that she can’t follow? I’m here, but she hasn’t come out, not yet. When she does, I’ll be ready for her.”

I was squatting next to him, and I eased my legs forward to kneel, feeling the muscles unknot. I tried to think. He was a little unhinged; I couldn’t use force. He was armed and needed soothing, placating. Besides, what force did I have, a woman, next to him? My only hope was to fetch Constable Moores and bring him back here before it was too late. It would be another wild tale to tell the skeptical policeman, but I didn’t care.

The other option was to draw Maddy away. And hadn’t she told me herself how to do that?

“Mr. Nesbit.” I kept the tremor, mostly, from my voice. “I can help you. It isn’t just you Maddy wants. There’s something she’s looking for, something she can’t remember from…that day.”

He looked at me then, his eyes widening. “She spoke to you?”

“Yes.” I touched his arm again. “On that day, you…buried her. Where? Where is that grave? If I could find it, I might be able to draw her away…. I’ll bring the constable to you.” It was a wild, unlikely scheme, and I forced myself not to think of its impossible aspects, like how exactly Constable Moores would be able to protect anyone against Maddy Clare. My only hope was to placate Maddy with what she had asked, and hope that protection would not be necessary.

He was not following. His eyes had glazed at the memory of the grave. “God, yes. We buried her. It wasn’t my idea—you have to understand that. None of it was my idea. It never was. Not with
them
. Bill Jarvis was a bully—I knew the type from school. God, the way he’d laugh at me.” A small, terrifying smile crossed his lips. “Well, maybe he’s not laughing now, wherever he is. That’s one thing.”

I listened, silent. I didn’t want to hear it, but in a way I knew I had to. I needed to hear it at last.

“We found her in the woods,” he said as he stared into the distance, into his memories. “We were out hunting, and there she was. Taking a shortcut through the woods, down the path by the stream. We’d hardly shot anything all day. And we’d been drinking, of course. I had to keep up with them, always keep up with them, or they’d laugh at me. I was nearly sick with it. And she came along, this pretty girl with long dark hair. No one, really. A servant girl. A bit of sport, they said. Who would she tell? Who would believe her? And so she was—” He faltered, put a hand over his eyes for a brief moment, as some kind of terrible pain wrenched through his body. “It got out of hand in the end. I didn’t want to
do it, I swear. I think, when she saw us, she had an inkling of what we were thinking. She tried to run, but she didn’t get far. She had a small bag of belongings that she dropped when she ran. We never found it. It was the only thing she had on her. I went back into the woods, at night, in the years after, looking for it. I don’t know why. But I never found it.”

He took a deep breath as the pain wracked his body again, but he had started now, and he meant to continue. “It wasn’t me that killed her. It wasn’t. It was completely unexpected; even Bill was a little shocked, I think, in that thick head of his, as we watched it happen. But he strangled her, he said, to shut her up. She kept screaming and screaming. And when she was still, he said we had to bury her.”

I swallowed my horror. “Who was it?” I said as softly as I could. “Who was the third man? And where did you bury her?”

That humorless smile crossed his lips again. “I thought you knew. It was Tom Barry that killed her, Tom Barry we followed all the time. And we buried her in Tom Barry’s woods, six feet from the well behind his house.”

My stomach lurched. “No. It isn’t possible. It wasn’t there. It was somewhere else. The chimney…”

“What chimney?”

“Where Maddy was buried. There was a redbrick chimney, visible through the trees. But Tom Barry’s chimney is gray.”

He looked at me for a moment, and something that was almost wonder came into his face. “You really do speak to her,” he said. “You really are what they say. Tom had his chimney rebuilt five years ago, along with the other renovations. The old one was crumbling and rotted through.”

The cold, icy bands on my arms throbbed sharply. “And the old chimney was redbrick,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied. “It was.”

Evangeline’s husband was the third man. And Matthew was there even now, at Tom Barry’s house. Did he know? Had he put it together yet? Was he in danger?

“I hate him,” Roderick Nesbit said almost dreamily. “I hate him so. But I’ve always been there when he calls me, one of his acolytes, Bill and I. There’s something about Tom that makes you do what he says, even if it’s repugnant to you. Even if he insults you, says you’re a queer and a fairy-boy and a coward. You still do what he says. I enlisted because of him, you know. After what happened in the woods that day, I couldn’t stand it. I was thinking of killing myself. Instead I enlisted, to get away from him, and because he couldn’t. He had those bad knees. I got the satisfaction of saying I was going off to fight while he was staying home. Who was a fairy-boy then? But I saw things over there that seared my soul, burned it away to ashes. I came back with nothing inside me. And he was still here, throwing around his money and playing his foolish games.”

Things were falling into place in my mind, so fast I could barely register them. “You saw her,” I said. “It was you. You saw her last year, at the Clares’ house.”

“My God.” A dry sound came out of him. “After all that. I’d been suffering, I’d put myself on the cross, and she wasn’t dead! I went to fix a broken windowpane for Mrs. Clare. She said she’d be out, Mrs. Macready would be out, to simply fix it while they were away. I came around behind the house and there, on the path between the house and the barn—there she was. She had a metal bucket in her hand. She saw me at the same time I saw her, and the look on her face—like she’d opened a door and seen something inside that tore her heart out.”

“We think she had memory loss,” I said. “She could feel the effects of the trauma, but she couldn’t remember it.”

“Is that so?” He looked up, as if pondering the blue June sky. “That would explain it, then. She never left the house in all those years. None of us had seen her, and she hadn’t seen us. And we didn’t note the comings and goings of servant girls, of course. Not when we believed she was dead.”

“But that day—when she saw you…”

“Oh, she remembered. She most certainly did. Everything came back to her clear as day when she saw me, and I watched it on her face.”

“Did she seem angry?”

“God, no. She dropped the bucket and fell to the ground—it was like her legs gave way under her. She looked at me with such utter horror. Some sound came out of her, almost a high-pitched scream. I was just as terrified, myself. I think I said something stupid—like ‘Sshh, sshh’—like a fool. And then she was gone. She got up and ran into the house as if the devil were after her. I left, too. I didn’t even fix the damned window.”

“Did you tell the others what you had seen?”

“Yes. Bill wanted to see for himself. Tom—I could tell that Tom was already thinking ahead, to what could be done. He was worried she would go to the police. But by the next day it was news that the Clares’ maid had hung herself, so she was truly dead then. But I was wrong again, wasn’t I? Because she may have been dead, but she still was not gone.”

“Mr. Nesbit.” My voice was pleading. “You really should come with me. I’ll find the constable. This can all be over.”

But he was grim now. He tightened his grip on the rifle in his lap. “You go, young lady. It’s best. She’s teasing me now, but she’ll
be out soon. She can have her revenge, but, by God, she’ll have to fight me for it. I’m not going anywhere.”

I stood. I had no more time to waste. Matthew was in trouble, and I needed to find Constable Moores. I looked around me, at the peaceful, quiet, weedy yard. It seemed a somnolent afternoon like any other, the bees buzzing in the straggling wildflowers. I still saw no sign of Maddy.

“I’m sorry,” I said, before I turned to go.

“We all are,” he said to my back. “All of us.”

T
here was no one on High Street in Waringstoke at this quiet time of day. No matter. I nearly ran to the post office; after an agonizing decision, I determined that I needed to call Constable Moores before doing anything else. The post office had the nearest telephone in town.

Evangeline Barry exited just as I approached the door. She stopped when she saw me, her expression filling with alarm. “Miss Piper, is everything all right?”

I stopped in my tracks. She was as beautiful, as immaculate, as ever; her hair had been freshly marcelled, and she wore a soft, casual, achingly expensive shawl tossed over a short-sleeved dress of dark bohemian gray. I thought of her approach to me in the change room, the panic in her voice.

“Tell me,” I said. “Did you know?”

She parted her lips and said nothing.

“All this time,” I continued, “did you know? Would you even tell me the truth if you did?” My voice rose and I knew I should
fight to control it, but somehow I had lost the will. “How could you not have known? Your own husband? How could you have let her suffer so? Did you think she was dead, like everyone else?”

Her eyes were wide with alarm now, and something that looked like fear. “For God’s sake—be quiet.”

“My God, you did know,” I said, shocked, for despite myself I had hoped it wasn’t true. “Perhaps you were even there.”

“Be quiet!” She grabbed my shoulders in a tight, painful grip. “Please, for God’s sake! Someone will hear, and they’ll tell him. He’ll kill me if he thinks I know. You don’t know him. He’ll kill me. I swear to God he will.”

I stared at her, uncomprehending.

She pulled me aside, down an alley next to the post office, and dropped her grip. When she looked at me, her face was filled with despair. “Tom did something to that girl, didn’t he?” she said. “Something terrible.”

I watched her eyes, her face, but if she were not sincere, then she was a better actress than Greta Garbo. “He attacked her in 1914,” I said cautiously. “He and Bill Jarvis and Roderick Nesbit. They—” My throat nearly closed on the word. “They raped her in the woods and left her for dead. Roderick Nesbit just confessed it all to me.”

Her head dropped forward and she cradled it in her hands, her palms over her eyes. “Oh, my God,” she said softly, and then, as if she could not stop, “Oh my God, oh my God. Oh my God…”

“You suspected something,” I said.

“Not until a year ago,” she said into her hands. “When she killed herself. He grew so strange after that. He started to terrify me.”

“That’s because, until that day, he thought she was dead,” I said. “But Roderick Nesbit saw her at the Clare house, and told your husband she was alive.” I took a step away from her, remembering
Nesbit and his rifle, remembering Alistair and Matthew. We had no time. “Your husband is a monster, Mrs. Barry. You can claim you don’t know it, but he is.”

She dropped her hands. “I don’t claim any such thing.” The pain in her eyes was real when she looked at me. “You have no idea, young Miss Piper. You simply have no idea what a hell my marriage has been.” She wiped the dampness from her cheeks. “In the fall of ’fourteen, I was at my mother’s house. I told Tom I was going for a visit, but I never intended to come back. I stayed there for over four weeks. But my mother convinced me I was being unreasonable, and sent me back home to him.” She looked blankly over my shoulder. “That must have been when it happened. I hated my marriage even then. From the first week, I hated it. But since you and Alistair arrived in town, it has all started to change. I’ve realized that I simply can’t take it anymore, no matter what my family says. And Tom…” She shook her head. “Tom laughed at first, when he heard you had come to exorcise that girl’s ghost. He said you were fools and charlatans. And then he got angry, and said you should be stopped.”