A Sound Among the Trees (24 page)

Marielle stood too. She took Carson’s hand. “I think we’ll be okay, Carson. Caroline and I can take care of it. And then it will be done.”

His hand was limp in hers but gradually he took hold of her palm. “You’re probably right.” He turned to her. “Sorry I won’t be there. It can’t be helped.”

“We’ll be fine,” Caroline said. “Now, I say we order Chinese. Who’s hungry?”

She didn’t wait for an answer.

Carson was quiet but congenial the next two days. He seemed genuinely happy when Marielle said she wanted to call the children after they’d finished plates of szechwan beef and vegetable lo mein. And Friday morning, as he packed his suitcase for Texas, he kept apologizing for the lousy timing of a business trip that had the audacity to fall on a weekend. He lingered over breakfast and pulled her into his arms three times before he left, assuring her he would call her when he landed in Houston.

After he left, Marielle was keenly aware that the house was empty except for the three of them. Adelaide. Caroline. And herself. And yet the house didn’t seem empty. Quiet, yes. But definitely not empty. It was a queer sensation, as if the house was marveling at the turn of events that had ousted everyone but the women.

Saturday dawned misty and humid. Marielle dressed in old jeans and a faded T-shirt a decade old. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and took off her wedding ring. For a second she considered slipping it back on. But she turned from it, leaving it on her dresser where it would be safe from the dirt and debris in the studio. Then she went down the stairs, taking them quickly, her eyes on her sneakered feet.

It was early and the house was quiet. She wondered if Caroline would be up soon or if she would have to wait long for her. As she entered the kitchen, she saw that coffee had already been made and a cup sat in the sink. She touched it. Cold. Marielle moved to the door that led to
the garden. Unlocked. She opened it, walked onto the patio, and looked toward the studio. Caroline was already there. Four large trash cans were placed at its entrance, one already full, and Caroline was tossing boxes out of the entrance as if she were in a great hurry. Or angry.

Marielle walked quickly across the patio stones. She reached the grassy knoll and began the gentle descent, the toes of her shoes quickly becoming moist from the dew on the grass. When she reached the studio steps, Caroline appeared at the entrance with an armful of curling magazines. She tossed them into one of the trash cans. Hurled them in. She nodded to Marielle and went back inside. Marielle followed her in. Clouds of dust swirled about Caroline’s ankles.

“Why didn’t you wait for me?” Marielle said.

Caroline, breathless and already sweating, pushed away a lock of hair that had worked itself loose from her hair clip. “Why in God’s name were you waiting at all? How could you have lived here all these weeks with all of this in here?”

Caroline grabbed a wooden bolt of rotting twine. She heaved it outside. It landed on the stone steps and broke in two.

Marielle, stunned for a moment, found her voice. “I didn’t think it was my place to make demands, Caroline. Especially about this room.”

“Your place? You didn’t think it was your place? For Pete’s sake, you’re his wife!” She grabbed an armful of tiny gift boxes, gray with age and misuse. She tossed them into the nearest trash can.

“So you think I should’ve told him he can marry me when this room is cleaned up.”

“You got that right.” Caroline stopped and put her hands on her hips. “Did you really think you were doing him a favor by letting him keep this room like this?”

“I …” Marielle didn’t finish. She suddenly felt naive. Foolish.

“What is wrong with you people?” Caroline shook her head, her eyes narrowed in pitiable frustration. “It’s like the minute you step inside that
house, you fall under its miserable, godforsaken spell and you start letting the dead—the dead!—tell you how to live your lives.”

Marielle shuddered. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve fallen for it, you have.” Caroline pressed her lips together. Emotion roiled across her face, and her eyes grew misty. “Just like all the rest. God, help us.”

Tears sprang to Marielle’s eyes as well, surprising her. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Caroline leaned back against Sara’s art table and raised a hand to her forehead. She rubbed the flesh there as if to rub something out. “And people wonder why I left.” She laughed without mirth. “People wonder why I went crazy. Good Lord, it’s this hell of a house. I thought it was me. But it’s this house.” She turned her head to look at Marielle. “And now you’re getting sucked into it just like I was. Just like we all were.”

Two tears slipped unchecked down Marielle’s face. It occurred to her in a random thought that she’d never realized that fear could make you cry.

And she was definitely afraid.

“Is this house haunted?” she whispered. “Am … am I not safe here?”

Caroline stared at her and then looked away and sighed. “No one is safe here.”

Marielle swallowed the lump of dread in her throat. “Is it … is it Susannah? Does she haunt this place? Is she going to try to hurt me?”

Caroline brought her gaze back to rest on Marielle. “Sweet Jesus,” Caroline murmured, incredulous. “Is that what you’re thinking? That this house is haunted by a ghost desperate to be absolved for her many sins? Is that it?”

“I … I don’t know,” Marielle stammered.

“You believe it all, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to believe!”

Caroline said nothing for a long moment. Then she grabbed Marielle’s arm. “Come with me.”

Caroline trudged up the hill toward the house with Marielle in tow. At the patio stones she grabbed a heavy garden shovel leaning against a small shed, then kept walking.

“Where are we going?” Marielle tried to wrench her arm away from Caroline, but the woman held her fast.

Caroline continued past the patio table, the french doors, the kitchen door, and turned toward the little door that led to Marielle’s office. But then she stopped. In front of them were the wooden cellar doors, locked and pitched at an angle that seemed to invite intrusion.

Caroline let go of her arm. “Stand back.”

“There’s a key in the garage—,” Marielle began, but Caroline raised the shovel even as she said it. She brought its strong metal head down on the hinged lock, sending a resounding whack across the stillness and the pieces of the hinge scattering.

She tossed the shovel clanking to the patio and lifted the doors wide. A yawning darkness appeared.

“Go get a flashlight,” Caroline commanded.

“I don’t want to,” Marielle whispered, childlike fear clutching at her voice. Eldora said she had sensed something in the cellar the time before. The Yankee soldiers buried there?

“Fine. If I break my neck trying to find the light switch, I don’t want gladiolas at my funeral. I hate those.” Caroline disappeared down the first couple of steps even as Marielle yelled a protest.

Seconds later, Marielle heard a click, and a sallow light emerged from the open cellar doors.

“Caroline?” Marielle bent down and peered into the gaping opening. She saw wooden stairs, an earthen floor, and shelves of dark boxes and dusty jars.

“Come down here, Marielle.”

“Please, Caroline. I don’t want to.” Her voice sounded juvenile in her ears. “Not until you tell me why,” she said with forced authority.

Caroline’s face appeared at the opening. Her features had softened. In her hand she held a key on a ring. Webs hung off the metal and dangled from Caroline’s fingers. “I need to show you something.”

“I don’t want to see where those soldiers are buried,” Marielle said, closing her eyes to the thought of traipsing across the bones of dead men.

Caroline said her name gently, and Marielle opened her eyes. “There are no Yankees buried down here.”

“But Adelaide said—”

“There were. A long time ago there were. But they were reburied ages ago, properly and in a cemetery, I promise you. There are no ghosts down here.”

Marielle hesitated and then crouched to her knees and dropped a foot onto the first step.

Part Four
THE CELLAR

arielle eased her body down the wooden steps, her sodden sneakers turning brown with subterranean dirt and dust. Remnants of an ancient handrail offered no support, so she took Caroline’s outstretched hand to make it safely down the last few steps.

A heavy dampness clung to the air, which smelled of age and darkness. The humid morning air that had followed her down whisked its way back out, unable to compete with the weighted chill inside the cellar. Utility shelves lined one wall, and two wooden benches lined another, blankets wrapped in plastic covering them. Carson had told her if there was a storm advisory when he was at work and she was instructed by the weather channels to take cover, she was to bring Adelaide and the children here. She shuddered now at the thought. Being inside the cellar was like being inside someone’s grave.

“Over here.”

Caroline had walked away from her and was now in another section of the cellar. Marielle followed the sound of her voice. Shelves of old Mason jars and garden decor sat along a wall of foundation stone. It was even cooler in this section. A large, metal trunk sat in the corner. It looked old. And its size seemed incongruous to the size of the room, as if the cellar had been built around it. Caroline was kneeling at it. She inserted the key into the lock and turned it.

“This trunk has been here since the house was built,” she said. “Everyone thinks it’s empty and that the key is missing. But it’s not. I found it.” She held it up. “A very long time ago.”

Marielle took a step forward. “Why does everyone think it’s empty?”

Caroline looked up at her. “It looks heavy. But it actually doesn’t weigh that much. It doesn’t make a sound when you rock it. It sounds empty.”

She opened the chest. On the underside of the lid, welded to the metal, was a mesh pocket about the size of a casserole pan. Caroline reached inside and withdrew a package wrapped in plastic sheeting. She looked up at Marielle.

“Susannah Page isn’t the person you think she is, Marielle. She wrote letters. A lot of letters.” Caroline began to unwrap the bundle. Marielle knelt to the floor next to her.

“Adelaide told me about these letters. She told me she gave them to you when you were a teenager. She thinks you threw them away or sold them for—”

“For drug money; yes, I know. She wanted to think that, so I let her. And I didn’t care. I brought them down here to hide them from her, actually, because I was mad at her and I wanted her to think they were gone for good. I had found the key in the old slaves’ quarters—what you call the studio. But that’s not what Susannah called it. I didn’t know the key belonged to this chest. I just decided to give it a try. When it worked, I found that I wasn’t the first person to decide to hide letters inside it. There were others already there.”

Caroline let the plastic fall away, revealing a length of dark cloth which she also unwrapped. In her hands were letters, yellow with age. Some were loose, and some were bound with a blue ribbon that now fell in pieces to the dirt floor.

Caroline held up the loose letters. “Susannah was very close to her cousin Eleanor Towsley in Maine. Susannah wrote to her often after her
father died and she and her mother moved back here. Holly Oak was her mother’s childhood home. And the loss of Susannah’s father was devastating to her mother. She never quite recovered from it.” Caroline handed the loose letters to Marielle. “Those were all written between 1860 and the middle of 1862. After that Susannah couldn’t mail any more letters north because of the war. Eleanor kept these letters, long into her adult years. She didn’t keep any of Susannah’s letters written after the war, even though I’m sure there were others. They both lived into their eighties. Before Eleanor died, she asked that these be sent back to Susannah, which they were. My great-grandmother had them in her escritoire. My mother found them there after Annabel died. And when my father died, she gave them to me.”

Marielle fingered the delicate, aged paper and studied the flowing script and the ancient postmark. The letters felt warm to the touch despite where they had been slumbering. Marielle looked at the other stack in Caroline’s hands, the one that had been bound by the ribbon.