The House of Memory (Pluto's Snitch Book 2) Page 15

  He nodded. “Before their time, but, no, they weren’t murdered, if that’s what you mean. The business with the horse was strange—I’ll give you that. But neither girl was murdered.” Bernard’s smile slowly faded, and for the first time, he really scrutinized me. “Zelda said you’re a writer. What kind of writer? You don’t work for the newspaper, do you?”

  “Not the paper. I’m a writer of sensational fiction. My first story will be published in October in the Saturday Evening Post.”

  “Congratulations. That’s an accomplishment.” He studied me a bit longer before he focused on Reginald. “What are you two really up to?” He held out his glass to Zelda, and she went to the kitchen to replenish his drink.

  I was caught short. For a man devoted to the bottle, Bernard West still retained his wits.

  “We’re private investigators, and we’ve come to help Camilla Granger.” Reginald told the truth, because he sensed, as I did, that Bernard would sniff out anything less.

  Zelda handed Bernard a fresh drink. “Camilla’s mother is going to have her brain sliced and stirred with some experimental surgery.” She used her finger in a very graphic illustration. “I hired them”—she nodded at us—“to help figure out why Camilla went round the bend. It’s serious, Bernard. Camilla is at Bryce.”

  Bernard’s eyes widened. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. Well, maybe one or two people.”

  I had to smile despite the sad truth. “It’s a tragic place. Camilla doesn’t belong there.”

  “What happened with her?” Bernard asked, and it wasn’t idle curiosity or a desire for gossip.

  Zelda relayed the story of Camilla’s attacks on her fiancé. And I added that we hoped that somehow Roswell House was influencing her.

  “The house influencing her?” Bernard let his skepticism show. “How?”

  “Reginald and I are private investigators, but we explore strange happenings, hauntings, cases where a supernatural element is involved. We believe Camilla is under the influence of something or someone at Roswell House.”

  Bernard was flabbergasted, and he didn’t try to hide it. “You’re serious?”

  “We are. Camilla isn’t crazy. She’s . . . being controlled by something in that house.”

  “Surely—” He stopped himself. “You believe this?” he asked Zelda.

  “I hired Raissa and Reginald. I do believe it. And time is running out for us to prove it. Mrs. Granger is going to have Camilla operated on. To make her docile. So she can marry David and bear his children.”

  “Dear God.” He put his drink down. “Maude should never have been allowed to have children, much less raise them. She’s never been able to put anyone ahead of herself and her own selfish desires and her misbegotten idea that somehow she was cheated in life.” He clenched his fist. “I remember Camilla as a young girl in the church. She was in front of me and my wife, a perfectly behaved little girl. After an hour she began to squirm in her seat. I thought Maude would inflict permanent damage. I just remember Maude hissing, ‘You sit still or you’ll be sorry.’ I believed Maude would punish the child. Poor Camilla had to jump a very high bar to rise to Maude’s exacting expectations.”

  “Maude is a bitter, selfish, greedy lizard of a bitch.” Zelda didn’t mince words. “If we can’t figure out what’s happening to Camilla quickly, it will be too late.”

  “So you ask about Roswell House because you think there is a ghost or spirit or influence there from some past event?”

  “Yes.” I said it simply. “And I pray we’re correct. Her behavior must be explained and stopped or she’s going to submit to the surgery.”

  “I told you everything I know about the house,” Bernard said. “But I will study the matter more—I promise. Zelda, would you bring me some of the food Minnie sent? If I’m going to poke around in the past of Roswell House,” he told Reginald and me as Zelda went to the kitchen, “I’ll need my strength.”

  “Thank you, Bernard.”

  While I knew the strange powers the dead sometimes had, this was the first time I’d seen a man who’d given up on life return to the land of the living. Bernard had an abiding love for Zelda and Camilla, it seemed. Or maybe he simply sought purpose.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he said.

  “We appreciate your taking us seriously,” Reginald said. “Seriously enough to offer to help us. That deserves thanks.”

  “I drink a lot. Sometimes I see things. Most folks would say it’s the whiskey, but sometimes, on those rare occasions when I see something that gives me a bit of comfort, I want to believe it’s not the liquor. For Camilla, I’ll believe the same. She’s a gentle girl whose fate so far has been cruel. Maude for a mother . . . I knew Maude’s mother, who also felt that life had cheated her of things that were her due. Maybe Camilla’s future can be better.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The hot sun drove us back to the Sayre home to wait for the midafternoon zenith to pass. As we parked beneath a shady tree, I had visions of my airy bedroom dancing in my head. I’d done nothing but ride and talk and eat, yet I was exhausted. A nap would be the perfect thing.

  I’d barely put my feet on the grass when the front door burst open and Tallulah ran across the lawn, her long legs flashing in the bright sun. She waved something in her hand and almost bowled Zelda over as she hugged her.

  “A telegram. From Camilla. It’s marked urgent.”

  Dread almost made me grab the envelope from Zelda’s hand, but Reginald put an arm around me. To support and to restrain me, I presumed.

  Zelda tore open the note and drew out a single page. “She says her friend Joanne Pence has disappeared from Bryce. Camilla and Nurse Brady have searched everywhere, but there is no sign of the young woman. Camilla’s distraught. She thinks her friend has been abducted. And she says Dr. Perkins is returning on Monday.”

  For a single sheet of paper, it had a lot of information packed in. I could feel Camilla’s worry and dread.

  Zelda looked from Reginald to me. “She asks if you’ve found Connie Shelton safely with her uncle.”

  I told the group about Connie Shelton, another of Perkins’s patients who I was sure was dead. “I don’t know what to do about Joanne. Zelda, maybe you could call Nurse Brady and ask.”

  “I can do that. Perhaps mention my father is looking into missing girls in the state.”

  “That’s a good idea.” Reginald paced the lawn, wiping sweat from his forehead. “We have to focus on Roswell House and what’s happening to Camilla there, but since David is still out of town and he’d be most helpful, why don’t we look up that uncle? James Patrickson, I believe his name is. I’ll run by the sheriff’s department and ask if they can call up to Decatur to be sure Connie is safely there. While I’m there, I’ll ask them to call the Tuscaloosa authorities and find out if they have any leads on who ran us off the road.”

  Action was the cure for the heavy burden I carried. “I’ll go to the courthouse here and research the land records for the Roswell property. I know that Camilla’s problem and these missing girls are connected somehow. I don’t understand how, but Camilla’s the link. We need to take action on both fronts, though I fear we’ll find only heartbreak about Connie.”

  Zelda motioned us toward the house. “Take the car, Reginald. I’ll telephone Bryce from home. I want to spend some time with Mother and Tallulah before I have to return to New York. It’ll go smoother for you in the courthouse if I’m not there.” She grinned. “I’m not the probate judge’s favorite person.”

  An understatement, no doubt. “Thanks, Zelda. It’s best if we head on, because if I make it inside, the bed will call to me. Let’s go, Reginald. No time like the present.”

  Reginald was a surprisingly smooth driver who seemed to have filed a road map of Montgomery in his head. He navigated the town without any difficulty. While Reginald went to the sheriff’s office, where a man’s inquiries would meet with more respect than a woman’s, I perused the land records for the
Roswell property. A very nice clerk helped me locate the legal description of Roswell House and put me in a stack of musty books that held recorded deeds.

  As Bernard West had said, Oscar Roswell of Devondale, California, had sold the property to David Simpson a year ago. At one time the Roswell tract had been huge, but I found the deed with which Wick Roswell had purchased the high ground from a Tommy Peebles.

  Camilla had told me most of this. I hadn’t discovered anything earthshaking. But I had asked my helpful clerk about the Peebles family. She wasn’t familiar with the history of the parcel, but she told me that often those with a yen for land and adventure would come in the first wave of settlers, buy up property, then sell it and move west.

  “The pasture is always greener,” she said. “It’s an illness with some—that need to move on, to see what’s beyond the horizon.”

  “Would there be any place to check if the Peebles family lived here after he sold the property?”

  “I can check, but it’ll take some time.”

  “It would be very helpful.”

  “Come back Friday,” she said. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  I didn’t have high hopes, but at least I’d put the quest in motion. If there were answers in the past, I’d turn over every rock to find them. I thought of one of my mother’s favorite sayings about a hard task: “You have to turn over a lot of rocks and pick up a lot of grubs to find what you most desire.” That saying was usually coupled with: “You’re short on patience and long on wants.”

  “Thank you.” I wrote down the Sayres’ address. “I’m staying with the Sayres this week. If you should turn up something sooner, would you call?”

  She pushed the slip of paper back to me. “I know Judge Sayre. I’ll get to this as quickly as I can.”

  “I do appreciate your help.”

  I stepped into the hallway, wondering how Reginald was faring at the sheriff’s office. I wanted badly to join him, but I lingered in the cool hallway instead. Movement at the end of the corridor caught my eye. Someone was going upstairs to the courtroom. It looked like a young girl.

  Because I had nothing better to do and time to kill, I decided to explore the courthouse myself. Above me I heard the slap, slap of leather soles on the floor. I climbed the stairs and stopped at a landing with an open window. A cooler breeze lifted the hair from around my face. As much as I loved the short bob, long hair was cooler in the summer because I could pull it back. A woman paid a terrible price for fashion, and I was determined to be a modern woman.

  Staring out at the lethargic traffic of downtown Montgomery, I sat on the windowsill to access as much breeze as possible and thought about the story I’d been writing. I hadn’t had as much time to pursue my literary interests as I’d hoped, but I couldn’t shake the image of the slain twin girls at Roswell House. I wanted to tell their story, even if I had to fill in the details. What could have happened to those children? There’d been a number of Indian skirmishes in these parts; and also river outlaws, land pirates, and renegade soldiers from both armies. Brutality could arrive in many different guises.

  My imagination could supply a number of reasons why the girls had died, and some would make a whooping story of bloody revenge, but I knew instinctively those details weren’t right. Those girls had died brutally, and at the hands of someone without emotion. Or perhaps too much emotion. Their severed heads spoke of swift, unhesitating action.

  In every fairy tale I’d ever read, the wicked stepmother was to blame. The female figure in the window of Roswell House, flies buzzing all around—had she murdered her stepchildren? Or her own children?

  I allowed myself to drift back in time, back fifty years, when the isolation of rural homesteads was a permanent situation for all but a handful of families who’d gathered in towns. The settlers, primarily farmers, braved the wilderness and hacked out homesteads far removed from other white settlers.

  I could see it clearly, the wood-frame house with smoke rising from a chimney made of baked clay bricks, the stumps of trees still scattered in the vegetable garden, waiting for fall when they’d be pulled out by a mule team. I watched those girls playing with their cloth dollies, mimicking the things their mother did as she cooked and ran the household. It was a hardscrabble life of toil, but the reward was a tract of land they owned, property that belonged to them, and the chance to build a better life.

  And they had died at the hands of someone who should have loved them.

  The story I’d woven was certainly grim. Shaking my head, I stood and descended the stairs. I was almost down to the first level when I heard a voice. It was so plaintive, so confused.

  “I’ll be good.”

  I stopped. I’d seen someone go upstairs, and it was one reason I’d stopped at the window. The courtroom was there, but court wasn’t in session. I’d assumed whoever it was sought solitude, and I’d decided to wait until she came back down. Now, though, step-by-step, I climbed back up the stairs, passing the window and moving up to the courtroom door.

  I touched the doorknob, and a chill penetrated my body. I forced the door open and stepped into the empty courtroom. In front of the judge’s dais, the young woman I’d seen at Bryce Hospital, the elusive Connie Shelton, floated in the air on her back. Her hair fell in a tumble of curls; the skirt of her yellow dress hung low. She looked as if someone were carrying her in his arms, but there was no other person there. She was suspended in air.

  “Connie?” She turned to me.

  “I’ll be good,” she said with a sob.

  But it was too late for that. She was dead. Whoever had checked her out of the hospital had done a terrible thing. They had taken her and killed her. “Who took you?” I asked.

  “Put me down, please.”

  I had no clue to whom she was speaking, but foreboding set in. “Connie, who took you?”

  She began to weep, her sobs broken by the phrases “I’ll be good” and “I won’t tell.”

  And then she was gone.

  I turned, and Reginald stood in the doorway. “What did you see?” he asked.

  “The girl from Bryce, Camilla’s friend, the one you were checking on. She’s dead.”

  “I suspected as much. I got in touch with the Decatur police. They knew James Patrickson. They went to his house to check. He denied having a niece or ever going to Bryce Hospital. Apparently, someone used his name. Patrickson is something of a recluse, so if we hadn’t asked specifically, chances are no one would ever know the girl disappeared.”

  “It was all a lie. She didn’t disappear. She was taken and killed. I’m worried sick about Joanne.”

  Reginald smoothed his mustache, a twitch he rarely gave in to. “Zelda spoke with Nurse Brady. There is no sign of Joanne. She’s disappeared.”

  “Just like the young girl from Autaugaville. And now another girl is missing, too. The one Judge Sayre mentioned. And there are the others our driver mentioned, from Marthasville. Someone’s abducting young women, little more than girls. And killing them. This is why they tried to kill us. Because they assumed we were investigating the girls.”

  Reginald frowned. “It might be worse than just killing.”

  “Worse?”

  “These young country girls are fresh and unspoiled. They would be . . . sought after by certain types of men.”

  The young girl in the restaurant in Tuscaloosa came back to me. That she was a prostitute I didn’t doubt. That she might have been forced into the work hadn’t occurred to me. “I’m so naive.”

  “Never feel badly that your mind doesn’t work in such ways. It’s sickness. But I’ve seen it before. New Orleans is a city known to provide flesh for many appetites. Some mothers sell their children into the sex trade.”

  I was honestly too shocked to say anything. That a mother would do that—and then I thought of Maude Granger. She would do worse. She would mutilate her daughter for the prospect of a “good” marriage. Maude wouldn’t risk that Camilla might maim or kill David in a “fit.
” The scandal would be too much for her to bear. But she was perfectly willing to risk her daughter’s health to an experimental surgical procedure in the hopes of gaining control of Camilla and rendering her a tractable wife.

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  Reginald took my arm. “What can we do? Camilla has to be our focus. Then we can go to the authorities if we find any concrete evidence about the girls.”

  He was right. Camilla took priority. We had only a few days before Dr. Perkins returned, and I had no doubt he’d resume his surgery schedule immediately.

  “I want to check the census records before we leave the courthouse.” When I explained why, Reginald was eager to help me look. We went back to the 1840 census, but we could find no trace of twin girls belonging to any member of the Roswell family. Perhaps they’d been visiting neighbor children. It was a puzzle I couldn’t resolve by looking at old deeds and records.

  We left the courthouse and stepped into the sunshine, blinking like owls. The heat rose up from the paved road in waves. I longed for Caoin House, for the beauty and serenity that reigned there now that the criminal elements and the past had been put to rest. This case threatened to overwhelm me, and even though Reginald was stalwart, I knew he, too, felt the pressure. We needed to find Zelda and regroup, but the only path I saw before us would hold danger for everyone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  When we returned to Zelda’s house, we found that Judge Sayre had left for work, Tallulah was gone, and Minnie was napping. Reginald, Zelda, and I gathered on the front porch amid the birdsong and heat. On the drive from the courthouse, Reginald and I had formulated a plan.

  “We all agree that Camilla’s in danger at Bryce, right?” I looked at Zelda, who nodded. “Dr. Perkins’s patients are disappearing: one drowned and two missing or dead so far. And someone tried to kill Reginald and me.”

  “Agreed,” Zelda said. “A thousand times agreed! But how can we spring a patient who refuses to leave under her own power?”