The Haunting of Maddy Clare (36 page)

“Where are the birds?” I asked.

“Birds? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Tom Barry killed Maddy Clare,” I said over Matthew’s head. I could feel the beating of Matthew’s heart under my hand. “Matthew came to question him about it. Tom Barry killed Maddy Clare with Roderick Nesbit and Bill Jarvis.”

“That’s what Mrs. Barry said. Her own husband.”

“She was away at her mother’s. She didn’t know.”

The constable huffed through his nose. “Well, Nesbit is dead,” he said, almost conversationally. His steps moved away to the window. “Shot himself with his rifle, though it must have been damned difficult. I’ve just come from there. Bill Jarvis had some kind of seizure in the woods. Do you mind telling me where Tom Barry went?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and it was the truth. “I came for Matthew. Barry found me, took me to the cellar, hit me with his gun, and locked me in.”

“Well, something happened in here.” His voice told me he didn’t quite believe me, but I didn’t care. He was quiet for a long moment, and then he said, “There are tracks outside.” His steps came closer to me again. “Will you stay here, or will I come back to find you gone?”

I looked up at him. “Are you mad?”

He looked at Matthew and me, his tired, hooded gaze taking
us in. If he thought I would leave Matthew, he was very much mistaken. He would have to tear me away from Matthew with his bare hands, a fact I watched sink into his mind. “Well, then. Just sit tight and don’t move, and for God’s sake don’t touch anything.” He turned and left the house.

Matthew shifted in my lap, sighed faintly. His eyelids fluttered. I smoothed the hair back from his forehead and watched his eyes open, his gaze blurred and confused.

I bent down, kissed his cheek, the corner of his mouth.

“Sarah,” he breathed.

“It’s me.”

He looked at me now, his gaze starting to focus. I watched as he saw the injury on my cheek, which I could feel swelling. I had dried blood on my skin. He raised one hand, touched the fingertips gently to the side of my face, his gaze darkening even as I shook my head.

“I’ll kill him,” he murmured.

“Hush. I’m fine.”

He closed his eyes. “I’ll kill him.”

“No. It’s over, Matthew.”

“Sarah.” I felt the moment he slipped out of consciousness again. I pressed his hand to my face, kissed his palm. His blood was soaking my skirt, and I didn’t care.

“I love you,” I said to him.

And then, I felt Maddy behind me.

I can’t say how I knew she was there. I simply knew. She was standing behind me, where Constable Moores had been only a moment ago. I waited for the crackle of rage, the jolt of fear that always accompanied Maddy, but they did not come. Instead, I heard the quiet shuffle of bare feet on the floor.

I looked back. It was agony to turn my head, and my puffed cheek obscured some of my vision. I saw bare feet, impossibly white, the hem of a simple serge skirt. My gaze traveled up to a cheap white blouse under a bolero jacket that I knew, with sudden certainty, had been the smartest thing she owned. She had worn her best jacket that day—to make an impression, she hoped, when she asked the women of Waringstoke for work.

The face above the bolero jacket was young and elfin, under a mass of long, black hair that fell nearly to her waist. She watched me with big, dark eyes, her arms limp at her sides. I realized I could see, behind her, the open front door through her translucent skin.

“Maddy,” I said softly. “Go.”

She didn’t seem to hear me; she made no response for a long time. Finally she spoke, though I never saw her lips move. But it wasn’t the terrifying voice inside my head any longer. She sounded like a nineteen-year-old girl.

“I didn’t want to,” she said, and her voice was an exhausted sigh. “I’m so tired.”

“I know,” I told her. “Go.”

I peeled my gaze away from her and turned back to Matthew. I was surprised to find his eyes were open again, and he had turned his head to watch Maddy.

He brought his gaze back to me. “She’s gone.”

I caught a flash of movement from the window, and when I looked up, I saw her briefly, walking away from the house. She was headed toward the woods, the wind lifting her long hair from its heavy place on her back. There was such a pretty sway to her walk, the way her arms swung carelessly, the way her hips moved. A pretty young woman, walking on a sunny day. As I watched, Constable Moores came from the other direction. Her elbow could
have brushed his—he passed so close to her—but he passed her without turning his head, without seeing a thing. If he felt a shiver up his spine, he didn’t express it.

I turned back to Matthew. “The constable will be back soon,” I said to his upturned face. “He said he’d bring a doctor.”

“He got me in the back of the head with the butt of his gun. I nearly had him, though. I nearly did.”

“I know.”

He raised his hand to my cheek again. “He got you, too.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” I said, and he laughed a little, then winced.

He turned serious again. “Don’t tell them about Maddy.”

“There’s nothing to say now.”

His fingertips slid over my cheek. “Do you really love me?”

I kissed the corner of his mouth again. “Yes.”

We sat for a long moment, his cheek against mine, his hand still cradling my cheek. I felt his breath and knew I would feel every one, down the years, until I felt his last.

“Good,” said Matthew finally. “That’s good.”

C
onstable Moores wasn’t happy with any of it. We could tell. He tried his best to put the pieces together, this way and that, to implicate one of us, but he never managed it. Still, he always knew there was something he was missing, and that we somehow held the key.

Tom Barry was dead. There were queer tracks outside the house, and even queerer ones at the edge of the woods—tracks that looked, to the police who saw them, like the twin lines of a man being dragged. But the angry half-moon marks of heels digging into the dirt indicated this was no unconscious body being dragged into the woods, but a live man, with a size 10 shoe, kicking and, quite possibly, screaming.

The tracks stopped shortly after the edge of the woods. Over a hundred feet away, Barry’s rifle was found in a thicket, dropped and unfired. There was blood on the butt of the gun. Scent dogs eventually found Tom Barry at the river’s edge, facedown, his head under the water. He’d drowned, but there was no mark on
him, just like Bill Jarvis. If someone had held his head as he died, the person had left no sign.

I had been locked in the basement, and Matthew had been unconscious, and no one had been there to hear a thing.

No, Constable Moores did not like it. He thought it was too neatly done. Still, it made no sense. I myself could not have abducted or killed Tom Barry. I was far too small to drag a full-grown man struggling into the woods, and there was no way I could lock myself in the basement afterward. Matthew was, perhaps, strong enough to do it; but for him to somehow dispose of Tom Barry, then knock himself grievously on the back of the head with the rifle, drop it, walk back to the house, and pass out face forward, even Constable Moores could not credit. The constable toyed briefly with the idea that we had been coconspirators, working as a team; but that meant Matthew had also locked me in the basement before passing out, and when the doctor gave his report on the seriousness of the blow Matthew had suffered, he could not make it work.

Still, he made us stay in town until he could reluctantly finish his investigations—for he was still also working on the death of Bill Jarvis, though by all appearances it was an accident, and the suicide of Roderick Nesbit. I had been to Nesbit’s house, after all, and had been the last one to see him alive. Nesbit had died alone, sitting on the ground in the yard behind his house, shot with his own rifle. The constable had heard the shot himself as he came through the front door of the house. He would have loved to point suspicion for it at either Matthew or me—to point a rifle at oneself and pull the trigger is almost impossibly difficult, though people have managed it—but he had to admit that I had long left and we must have been already at Tom Barry’s house by that time, and
when he ran through the house and arrived at the scene only seconds after the shot had been fired, all he saw was a few ugly crows on the fence and a puff of blue smoke.

In the meantime, as the constable’s frustrations mounted, and he and the others interviewed us over and over, we stayed at the inn, with Alistair.

Alistair had returned to us.

He was groggy, ill, and impossibly hungry and thirsty; he had a scruffy growth of beard; but he was unmistakably Alistair. Within a day he was washed, changed, cleaned up, and cracking jokes as if nothing had happened, though he was still weak. Nan stayed on and nursed him, and he let himself be nursed, though he told her good-naturedly that she was trying to kill him with an excess of beef broth. A haunted look at the edge of his expression gave him away. Maddy had gone, as quickly as she had come, but she had left a mark in his bad dreams.

My own injuries were relatively slight, though my face looked awful. The doctor shook his head and said I was lucky my cheekbone was not broken, and gave me a salve for the swelling. I was black-and-blue, and sore, but I was happy to be alive. The marks on my arms had disappeared.

I nursed Matthew myself, as much as he would let me. He needed frequent rest, and his wound healed slowly, though he hated to admit it. He had frequent headaches at first, though he took the medicines the doctor prescribed, and recovered with the gradual sureness of a big, vital, powerfully healthy man.

He had been through injuries so much worse. Though he hated being sick, it never truly dragged him down. He could be gruff all day, but at night when I climbed into his narrow bed with him and kissed him and ran my hands gently through the soft darkness of
his hair, he would lean into me and put his arms around me. At first he would drift helplessly off to sleep as I held him, but after a few nights he would stay awake, and eventually run his hands up under my nightgown and over my back, and kiss me back hungrily, and we would make love with a pleasure so quietly feverish I felt the bed and the entire room should catch fire.

Though we lived in a kind of limbo of waiting, those days at the inn were strangely peaceful. We spent many hours, the three of us, talking, going over everything that had happened. Alistair wanted to hear everything, of course. He talked little about his own experience, though I felt it weighed on him. He and I spent many a quiet hour, reading and saying nothing at all; sometimes I’d look up and see him staring out the window, his mind far, far away.

One day, Alistair found a map, and the three of us pored over it. It was impossible to know, of course—but there was a train station four miles from Waringstoke. If Maddy had come from there, it was possible she had come through the countryside, from village to village, looking for work. No one would remember, so many years later, a girl—one of many—who had knocked on a servants’ door and asked about a position. No one would remember turning her away, watching her walk off into oblivion. No one would now regret not letting her in.

We sat around the map, looking down at it in silence. “We could still do it,” Alistair said softly. “We could still see if there is something to find.”

“The train station is a dead end,” said Matthew. “She could have come from anywhere in the country. We’d never be able to track it down.”

“Would she even want us to?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Alistair. All of the old obsession, the old
avidity, was gone from his voice. “I don’t know whether this is the right decision, or the wrong one. But I think I need to leave off ghost hunting for a while.”

“No book?” said Matthew.

Alistair shook his head. “Maybe when I’m eighty, I’ll write the book. Maybe then I’ll be able to think about it.”

So we rolled up the map, and put it away.

Mrs. Clare visited us only once, and briefly. She was quiet and withdrawn. We would have told her the details of all that had happened, but she made it clear she did not want to hear it. Maddy was gone from her home, and all was at peace again; she didn’t want to know more than that.

But I did insist that she listen to my theory on the suicide note. It had come to me after I had seen Maddy that last time.
I didn’t want to,
she had said so sadly. And the words in the note—
I will kill them.

I told Mrs. Clare what I thought. The day Maddy had seen Roderick Nesbit at Falmouth House, she had remembered everything. And it had created an anger in her, a murderous desire. She had killed herself, she believed, to stop herself from killing those men. But she had not been able to stop herself, even after death. The murderous desire had lived longer than she had.

Mrs. Clare heard me out. Her face was empty now, empty of anger, empty of grief. She said nothing. Soon after that, she left, and we never saw her again.

One night, unable to sleep, I slipped from my warm bed with Matthew, tied on a robe, and tiptoed to the dark, warm kitchen for a cup of milk. I was just heating it on the stove, stirring as silently as I could so as not to wake the sleeping inn, when the kitchen door snicked open and Alistair came in from outside.