The Mill River Recluse (2 page)

Now, ninety-two pounds lighter, Claudia examined her reflection with approval and headed to bed. She had a new wardrobe in a size ten. She had a teaching job in a school in a new town where people didn’t know her former fat self. She was alive. A single ready to mingle. She would get over her social awkwardness. She wouldn’t get flustered when she saw an attractive man. She wouldn’t avert her eyes. She was no longer ashamed of herself.

That night, Claudia fell asleep smiling.

~~~

It was well after midnight, but Jean Wykowski couldn’t sleep. Her husband, Ron, lay snoring beside her. His shift at the police station would begin at seven, and he was oblivious to her tossing and turning. But Ron’s snoring rarely bothered her, and it was not the reason that she experienced insomnia now. Finally, she slipped out from under her covers and tiptoed out of the bedroom.

On her way to the kitchen, she paused at her sons’ room. Jimmy and Johnny, ages nine and eleven, took after their father where sleep was concerned. Both were out cold, their breathing slow and rhythmic. Jimmy looked just as she had left him at bedtime. He lay on his back with the covers pulled up to his chin. Johnny, though, was turned around with his feet on his pillow and his head very close to falling off one side. How he had managed that Jean didn’t know, but she was able to coax him back under the covers in the proper direction without fully waking him.

Jean continued to the darkened kitchen, wincing every time the floor creaked. She poured herself a cup of milk and put it in the microwave. While the microwave hummed, she smiled to herself as she remembered how the boys had done the dishes that night, Johnny washing and Jimmy rinsing, each using the pull-out spray nozzle as a microphone to impersonate his favorite singer.

The microwave, too, was special, having been Ron’s present to her this last Christmas. It wasn’t the most romantic gift, of course, but it was functional and something the whole family could enjoy. She stopped the microwave, before it sounded its final loud
beep,
and removed her cup of milk.

She was lucky to have such great kids. They were stout little buggers and full of life, not like most of the miserably ill people she saw each day. Her husband of thirteen years was loving and loyal. He and the boys were the reasons she continued her emotionally draining work as a home health nurse for Rutland County.

Her patients were paraplegics, people recovering from surgery or major accidents, and the terminally ill. She watched them struggle and suffer, day after day. With her help, and that of doctors and therapists, some got better or at least learned to live again. But many didn’t, and it was the face of Mary McAllister, the patient to whom she was currently assigned, that kept sleep from her tonight.

She spent most of each shift with the old woman. Mrs. McAllister had only days left, maybe a week. Today, Jean had hardly been able to look at her. The cancer had left Mrs. McAllister withered and jaundiced, and pain medication ensured that she slept most of the time. Jean had given her a sponge bath, changed her garments, and tried her best to make her comfortable. It wasn’t much, but it was all she could do. And tomorrow, Sunday, there would be no visit because she had the day off.

Attempting to console herself with those thoughts, Jean set her empty cup in the sink and walked back down the dark hallway to her bedroom.

~~~

In the parish house next to his church, Father Michael O’Brien was in his office, packing. Not books or files, only spoons. Father O’Brien was obsessed with spoons. He had accumulated close to seven hundred spoons in his eighty-six years. No two were alike. Tenderly, he lifted each one from a tattered cardboard box, examining it before placing it into a sturdy shipping box on his desk.

He collected the spoons in violation of his vow of poverty, and for this he felt guilty. When he thought about how he had obtained the spoons, he felt even worse. Still, there was something about a spoon--silver or stainless, elegant, frilly, or plain--that comforted him. He needed them. He had never been able to part with them.

Until now.

From his top desk drawer, he retrieved one final spoon. He placed it, a shiny silver teaspoon, in the shipping box. For a moment, he looked at it resting atop its box-mates, and then retrieved it. He would not part with this one. On the back of the spoon an inscription read, “
To my dear friend, Love, MHM.
”

The one person who knew of his collection, who had been his closest friend for more than sixty years, had given this spoon to him. It would not be a sin to keep this one spoon.

He eased himself into the chair at his desk. It was late, and his arthritis was acting up. He set the spoon on the desk and put on his reading glasses. There was a small package wrapped in brown paper on his desk, accompanied by a sealed envelope. He didn’t know what was in the package. As for the envelope, he knew that there was a letter inside, written on fine linen stationery. He longed to read the letter, but it was not for him to read...yet. With a sigh, he picked up the envelope and pressed it to his chest.

He looked out the window toward Mary’s mansion on the hill. The darkness and the whirling snow prevented him from seeing the big marble home, but he knew it was there, overlooking Mill River as it had for decades. He closed his eyes. He knew the history of that house, the joy and the suffering, especially the suffering, which had taken place and still took place within it. He knew Mary was there, and wondered if she were sleeping, as he had left her, or awake looking down upon him. Maybe her soul had already departed.

“Dear girl, may you finally be at peace,” he whispered, and looked once more into the storm toward the mansion on the hill.

Chapter 2

They were flying.

On a bright Saturday morning in June 1940, the refined drone of a Lincoln Zephyr coupe compromised the serenity of Vermont’s Green Mountains. After a few minutes, the black, sleek source of the noise appeared. The engine of the car powered it effortlessly along the winding country road. The wind whipped through the open windows of the car, through the blond hair of father and son, Stephen and Patrick McAllister.

The calmness of rural Vermont was in stark contrast to the events occurring in other parts of the world. Across the Atlantic, the Axis powers were bound by a common goal of world domination. Nazi armies had overrun Europe, forcing France into submission. Britain was evacuating soldiers from European countries at a frenzied pace. But these events were an ocean away and, for the moment, even farther from the thoughts of the men in the Lincoln coupe.

The father and son were the second and third generations of a family established in Vermont some seventy years earlier. The vast mineral deposits of the state, especially the exceptional white marble, had lured a steady stream of immigrants to quarries in the Green Mountains. Hungry for jobs and new opportunities, Italians, Swedes, Finns, Scotsmen, Irishmen, and others followed newly-constructed railroads north to West Rutland. They eagerly took on the exhausting and dangerous work of cutting marble.

One of those immigrants had been Patrick’s great-grandfather, a young Irishman named Kieran McAllister. He had crossed the Atlantic in cramped quarters in the belly of a Cunard steamship and had endured working as a quarry laborer for two years without serious injury. With decency, common sense, and a little luck, he had earned the respect of the quarry owner and a promotion to the position of foreman. The increased salary had enabled him to join a group of men in opening a new quarry. Eventually, he had established a marbleworks in Rutland, where quarries could have blocks of marble cut or carved before their shipment to buyers.

The marbleworks had been good to the McAllister family. Having been the first of its kind in the area during the most prosperous days of Vermont’s marble industry, the business had made Kieran a wealthy man. Through fifty years, World War I, and the Great Depression, the demand for marble had remained steady and had even increased at times. Now, Kieran had been gone for two decades, but the McAllisters still enjoyed the fruits of the prosperity that he had sown, as evidenced by his grandson’s penchant for new automobiles.

Stephen looked over at Patrick and grinned. “She handles beautifully,” he said, patting the steering wheel. “V-12 under the hood, hydraulic brakes. She’s a keeper.”

The new Lincoln was only the latest in a long line of expensive automobiles that Stephen had purchased. He had five at the moment. When he tired of a particular model, he traded it for whichever new car caught his eye. On Saturdays when Patrick was home from school, Stephen and his son took a car from his current collection and drove through the countryside southeast of Rutland County. Now that Patrick was through college, he looked forward to their outings as routine weekly escapes.

“Maybe I’ll see for myself how she handles on the way back,” Patrick hinted.

“What, you mean you don’t want to ride your graduation present home?” Stephen asked.

Stephen glanced at Patrick and was overwhelmed with pride.
His
son, a Harvard graduate, capable, refined, a true gentleman. Some day, after Stephen retired, Patrick would assume the helm of McAllister Marbleworks. Until then, they would work side by side to ensure the continued success of the family business.

On this morning, their drive was more than a leisurely jaunt. Stephen and Patrick were headed to a farm on the far side of the town of Mill River to select a horse as part of Patrick’s graduation present. Mill River was located about eight miles southeast of Rutland, where Kieran had established the Marbleworks. While Rutland had become a bustling center of commerce, thanks to the marble industry and the railroad, Mill River remained a sleepy, quaint throwback to the early days of New England.

The winding road finally cleared the green hills and straightened out, and Stephen turned the Lincoln down the main street of the town. They glided past a number of small houses, a hardware store, a post office, a beauty salon, and the town hall. A stone church stood at the end of the street on the right. The road curved sharply, then passed through a covered bridge that spanned the river for which the town was named.

Stephen couldn’t understand why his son found horses so alluring. He did know that Patrick had taken up riding when he arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts his freshman year and that many of his son’s classmates, some from the most respected families in New England, were avid equestrians. To Stephen, horses were dirty, unpredictable, and more trouble than they were worth. Certainly, a horse could never compete with any car in his personal collection.

Still, he had never denied his son anything and was not about to deny him the thing that he seemed to love most. When Patrick arrived home after his senior year, Stephen had surprised him on a drive just outside Rutland. Stephen had purchased several acres of pasture. The contractors he hired had just put the finishing touches on a stable on the property. All that they needed were some horses. Patrick would select them, of course. He had told his father that first he wanted a Morgan and a Thoroughbred. They would select the Morgan this morning.

“Look, there it is,” Stephen said, pointing. Ahead was a small sign by the side of the road that read, “
Samuel E. Hayes. Morgans
.” An arrow on the sign indicated that they should turn right, and he swung the black car onto a narrow dirt road. After a mile or so, the road opened into a clearing surrounded by sugar maples. An old pickup truck was parked beside an enormous weathered red barn. Acres of pasture enclosed by a split-rail fence stretched beyond the barn. A footpath faded up a hill toward a small farmhouse.

Stephen and Patrick stepped out of the car, frowning. “What a dump,” Patrick muttered as they looked around at the run-down farm. A small herd of horses grazed at the far end of the pasture, and a short whinny echoed from the barn, but any human inhabitants of the farm were nowhere in sight.

“Well, we’re here, anyway,” Stephen said. “When I called yesterday, Hayes said it’d be fine if we came by this morning. Wait here. I’ll go up to the house.” He put on his hat and snapped his suit jacket to straighten it, then started up the footpath. He looked rather out of place, a man dressed in a fine three-piece suit and wingtips walking up a dirt path toward what was little more than a shack.

Patrick walked over to the fence and crossed his arms over the top rail. A gate in the fence was padlocked. The barn door was open and inside he could see long rows of stalls. He looked up at his father, picking his way along the path to the house, and grew impatient. He was eager to see if there were actually any decent horses in such a shoddy structure, and it was a simple matter to climb over the fence.

Patrick stepped tentatively into the barn. The familiar smell of horse manure and hay hung in the air. It was dark, especially coming in from the bright morning sun. Still, Patrick could see the rafters and the loft stocked with bales of hay. An occasional creaking came from above his head, and Patrick grew nervous at the thought of the old roof collapsing. A pitchfork and wheelbarrow leaned against another stack of straw bales at the end of the barn. The wooden walls and beams were rough and unfinished. The ancient barn was hardly the neatly painted stable at Harvard, but at least the smell was the same, and it reassured him.

Two bright blue eyes watched him from a small crack between the straw bales at the end of the barn.

There was a tack room immediately to his left. The three saddles inside were well-oiled, but worn. An assortment of bridles and halters hung from pegs on the walls, and several brushes and curry combs rested on a shelf.

Across from the tack room was a large area filled with bags of feed and bales of hay. A large Mason jar containing sugar cubes was nestled on top of an open bag of oats. Patrick unscrewed the lid and shook a few cubes into his hand.

The stalls at the front of the barn were empty, but he could see several horses in stalls toward the rear of the barn. As he walked down the aisle, he heard a low nicker. A horse in a stall immediately to his left pushed its head over the door of a stall, perked up its ears, and snorted. The horse was young,
maybe about three
, Patrick thought, but its build already evidenced pure bloodlines. He walked closer. The horse tossed its forelock out of its eyes and eagerly accepted the sugar cubes. It was a blood-bay with fine, straight legs and deep shoulders. Its rich, red coat blended gradually into black legs and contrasted sharply with a thick black mane and tail. The horse nuzzled Patrick’s hand for more sugar, and, finding none, snorted again and struck its front hoof against the stall door. “You’re a feisty one,” Patrick said, and rubbed the colt’s forehead. He smiled grudgingly to himself. The old barn certainly belied the value of this inhabitant.