The Winslow Incident (26 page)

The cat cast a baleful glare at
her before he darted beneath the bed.

Rummaging through her
grandmother’s armoire, all Hazel came up with for the girls to wear were Sarah’s
formal gowns from long ago, when she’d been on the petite side. With an
uncharacteristic pang of nostalgia, Hazel recognized them as the same dresses
she and Patience used to play in. Patience had always loved to play dress-up.
Perhaps because Hazel had no mother to emulate, it didn’t interest her as much.
Sometimes she’d play along as a bribe to get Patience to go with her to explore
the ponds or the mines afterward. But once everyone started making a fuss over
how
beautiful little Patience is
, dress-up stopped being any fun at all for the
freckled and weedy Hazel. After that, no matter how much Patience begged, Hazel
refused to play it anymore.

Maybe I should look for
Patience
, crossed Hazel’s mind.
Maybe I
was too hard on her.

It would have to wait. She needed
to sort things out. Her impulse was to lay low until everything died down. Only
things weren’t dying down; things were ramping up. The clamor rising out of the
ballroom below reminded Hazel of the crashing sounds in the dining room the
night Lottie Mathers died. The din also made her think of the shrieks she’d
heard coming from riders in the cars ahead of hers the first time she rode
through the House of Horrors, warning her that surprisingly scary things lay
just around the bend. Suddenly her stomach felt slippery and loose . . . an
upset feeling she hoped was due to disagreeable memories and not the sudden
onset of the mystery sickness.

Shaking off her anxiety-induced
stupor, she tossed the dresses onto the bed and returned to the bathroom to help
the sisters wash their hair.

When she saw their narrow
shoulders and skinny arms, Hazel thought,
Nothing bad can happen to you.
Nothing.
Their biggest worries should be over losing at hopscotch or their
Otter Pops melting too fast—not getting sick, not getting soaked in
blood.

While the girls splashed each
other and sang a silly song, Hazel rinsed their hair and again wondered where
Melanie and Zachary could possibly be without their young daughters.

Realizing she was not too clean herself,
Hazel wiped her face and then her armpits with the wet washcloth. Thus
freshened, she pulled the girls out of the tub and toweled them off, their red
curls drying quickly in the warm air pushing through the bathroom window.

After ushering them into the
bedroom, Hazel held up first one then another sleeveless dress. “Green or
blue.”

“Blue,” said Violet. Patience’s
favorite too.

“Blue!” said Daisy.

“I’ve only got one blue.”

“Daisy can have it.” Violet placed
a protective arm around her sister’s shoulders.

Hazel smiled at Violet. “You’ll
look better in green anyway.”

She helped the girls into the
gowns, which hung long and loose on their tiny frames. Standing back to assess
her work, she declared, “Lovely.”

“What about jewels?” Violet asked.

“Why not?” Hazel retrieved a
rosewood box from the top shelf of the armoire and decked them out in her
grandmother’s rhinestones.

Leaving the girls to admire their
reflections in the mirror, Hazel went into the bathroom and searched through
the vanity cupboards. “Thank you, Grandma,” she said when she spied the bottle
of Percocet. Her grandmother always kept something around for pain because
Winslow had neither doctor nor pharmacist. Once Sarah had frowned at Hazel and
told her that you just never know what you might need until you need it, now do
you?

Hazel popped a Percocet into her
mouth and stuck her head under the running faucet. After the pill and water
splashed into her hollow belly, she thought,
I need to eat something soon.

Then she realized how unbelievably
stupid she was. Unbelievably. Stupid.

The water. Owen. That rusty old
tank on top of Silver Hill.

Too exhausted to contemplate it
further, she collapsed onto the pink chaise lounge beneath the window and
willed the drug to kick in.
Please stop the throbbing long enough so I can
think . . .

The painkiller quickly worked its
way through her empty stomach and into her bloodstream, and she finally felt
some relief when the insistent throb became a less demanding ache. All she
wanted was to pop another and sleep for a while. But she knew she must
disengage herself from that cozy chair and try to figure out why and what next.

Hadn’t her grandmother started to
explain something last night? Before Honey went after Jinx?

She pocketed a few pills before
dragging herself back into the bedroom and telling the girls, “I have to go
find my grandma. You stay up here and lock this door behind me—don’t let
anyone
in except me or my grandma. Okay?”

They didn’t answer. Daisy wasn’t
even paying attention, dazzled instead by the sparkling red of the garnet pinky
ring she wore on her thumb.

“I’ll bring back something to
eat,” Hazel said, having no idea what that could safely be.

Violet wagged her small finger at
Hazel in a scold. “Daddy says don’t eat any bread.”

“Why not?”

“It’s moldy.”

Daisy made a face. “We don’t like
moldy bread.”

“Nobody does,” Hazel agreed. “I’ll
find some cookies and we’ll have a tea party, okay? You’re safe up here.”

It sounded reassuring and she hoped like hell it
were true, especially with the way Violet was looking at her, unconvinced. Even
Boo looked skeptical.

“
B
enjamin Mathers came round again,” her
grandmother informed her.

“Ignore him,” Hazel said. They sat
alone at the small oak table in the nook off the kitchen, but she could hear
Honey Adair making a racket at the stove to the accompaniment of Samuel’s
incoherent grumbling. The smell of broiling meat made Hazel’s stomach growl. “Ben
Mathers is the least of our problems,” she added.

“Perhaps.” Sarah sighed. “We’ll
see.” She leaned closer to Hazel. “Did I ever tell you about the afternoon
Sadie Mathers drowned in the deep pond?”

“No,” Hazel said, though she could
picture the pond Sarah meant. There were three ponds on The Winslow’s grounds
and she’d been warned to stay away from all of them ever since she could
remember, especially the deep pool next to the family plot. Now she understood
why, as she imagined the puffy body and pasty white face of poor Sadie Mathers
floating below the surface of the still water. “You never told me but I’m not
sure now is the time, Grandma.”

“It was July the eleventh.” Sarah
began in that slow, formal way she began every story. “The first Prospector’s
Day, 1889. Your great-great-grandfather, Evan Winslow, was in love with Sadie
Mathers.”

What does this have to do with
anything?
Hazel thought. “This isn’t the
best time—”

“Of course that was before Ruby
was in the picture.”

Hazel gave up. There was no
stopping her grandmother once she got started. “Did Sadie love Evan?” She
couldn’t imagine it: a Winslow and a Mathers. Impossible.

“That’s something people disagree
on. But on this particular day Sadie accompanied Evan here while the
celebration was ongoing in the park. The house was still under construction and
he wanted to show her the frescoes newly arrived from Europe.”

“The dining room ceiling?” Hazel
asked.

“Yes, now stop your interrupting.”

Hazel sat back and just listened.
She was surprised she’d never heard this story before and wondered if Patience
knew it.

“By several accounts,” her
grandmother went on, “they were standing in this very room when one of the
workmen, a stonemason from Norway, confronted Evan over plans the architect had
revised, whereupon the furious architect stormed in and an argument erupted.
Naturally wanting no part of it, Sadie whispered to Evan that she was going back
to the party in Prospect Park. ‘Wait, I’ll escort you,’ he told her. Before he
could, he was again distracted by the hysterical Norwegian and Sadie slipped
away from him.”

Sarah paused, looking pensive, and
Hazel wanted to scream,
Then what?

Finally, Sarah said, “It wasn’t
long after they realized she’d gone missing before her brother Sterling found
her drowned in the pond.”

Hazel briefly wondered if her
grandmother was losing her mind too—why else tell this terrible tale? Of
course now she had to know the ending. “What happened to Sadie?”

“Nobody knows. Aside from being
drowned, of course, her body was unscathed. No signs of violence or a struggle.
Speculation ran wild: accident to suicide to witchcraft even. But Sterling
maintained that Evan murdered Sadie in a rage born of unrequited love. And the
more Sterling persisted, the more certain Evan became that
Sterling
had
killed his beautiful sister for quite the same reason. Evan’s name was cleared
as soon as his workmen attested to the fact that he’d been with them the entire
afternoon. Sterling refused to believe it, would never let it go. And several
years later, out of unrelenting grief or implacable guilt, Sterling Mathers
took his own life with a Colt forty-four to the temple at the edge of that same
damned pond.”

Hazel cringed. How many people had
died out there? Were there other bodies hanging around in the deep pond, hair
tangled in tree roots? And besides that, how much decomposing bodily fluid had
seeped into the pond over the years from the overgrown family plot above, the
unofficial—and likely illegal—graveyard that had held the bones of
every dead Winslow since the late 1800s?

Shaking her head to try and dispel
the images, she remembered Patience’s nightmare where Sadie invites her to come
into the pond.
“I don’t know how to swim,” Patience tells her. “Neither do
I,” Sadie says.
So Hazel realized that Patience must know the story. “Why
are you telling me this, Grandma?”

Sarah tucked back into place a
lock of silver hair shaken loose during her animated yarn. Then her expression
turned even graver, bright eyes darkening. “Bad blood is flowing again.”

Hazel felt dread moving in for a
long stay now—thick and deep. “What do you mean?”

“Blame will be placed.”

“But nobody even knows what’s
wrong.”

“That never stopped them before.”

Hazel didn’t want to hear anymore.

Sarah folded her hand over
Hazel’s. “Worst part is, once placed, right or wrong, blame is hard to shake.”

Unease chilled Hazel to the bone
when, for the first time in her life, she saw fear in her grandmother’s eyes.
Suddenly Hazel felt as though the world were washing out from under her. That
if she made a move to get out of the chair she’d be swallowed whole because she
had no leg left to stand on.

“You must leave,” Sarah said.

“How can I?” Hazel indicated her
arm in the t-shirt sling.

“Find a way.”

I
t didn’t take long for Hazel to pinpoint
exactly where the high-pitched whine of the dirt bike had terminated. When she
spotted the motorcycle parked next to the porch of Ben Mathers’ mansion on Park
Street, disappointment skidded through her: It wasn’t Sean’s Yamaha; it was Tanner’s
Kawasaki.

She was halfway up the walk to
Mathers’ porch when Tanner came out the front door, not bothering to close it
behind him. He carried a paper sack, which Hazel guessed to be their joint
venture. Every summer since Jay Marsh first introduced them to Cyclone Clyde,
Hazel, Patience and Sean could count on the carny to bring them decent weed.
This time Tanner had gone in with them on a bag and they’d stashed it here
because even if Ben Mathers found it, he wouldn’t know what he was looking at.
Samuel Adair would, her dad definitely would, and pity Tanner if their Uncle
Pard found it: he’d have his ranch hands draw and quarter his nephew in the
center of Prospect Park. Over the past few days, Hazel had been so preoccupied that
she’d forgotten all about the ounce they’d hidden in Mathers’ basement.

Tanner paused on the top step with
a
busted
look on his face, blond hair tangled from riding the bike. Then
his usual smirk returned.

At least he looks normal
, she thought.

He tucked the bag into the
waistband of his shorts and continued down the steps. “Thought I’d better
retrieve it for safekeeping. You know Patience’s old gramps is gonna find it
and smoke himself silly.” Looking her over, his face tightened in apparent
disapproval.

Self-conscious, she glanced down
at herself: shoes covered in dirt, legs scraped, knees pasted with bits of
leaves and gravel, sling encrusted with dried blood. “I look sick.” She returned
her eyes to his. “But I’m not.”

His grimace held. “Good for you.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I’m getting the hell outta
here—there’s seriously weird shit goin’ on.”

“Are you splitting now?”