Blackwood Farm (25 page)

“ ‘Fearless squatters,' I thought, and, as I noted that the door contained a big rectangle of leaded glass, glass that was clean, I was outraged. But I also had the strong sense that no one else was in this house.

“As for the room before me, it was perfectly circular and its unbroken surround of arched windows appeared to be bare of any covering at all. A stairway to the far left led to the floor above, and to the far right was a big heavily rusted iron fireplace, rectangular in shape with a rising chimney pipe and open folding iron doors. It was chock-full of half-burnt wood and ashes. The ashes were spilt out on the floor.

In the center of the room was the most surprising thing: a great marble desk upon an iron frame and a Roman-style chair of leather and gold. The style I mean here is what people today call a director's chair. But it's a style as old as Rome.

“Of course I went immediately to this configuration of marvelous furniture, and I discovered modern pens in a heavy gold cylinder, a nest of tall thick candles all melted together on a gold plate and a casual heap of paperback books.

“I fanned out the books and perused their covers. They ranged from what we so arrogantly call popular fiction to books on anthropology, sociology and modern philosophy. Camus, Sartre, de Sade, Kafka. There was a world atlas and a dictionary and several picture dictionaries for children, and also a pocket-size history of ancient Sumer.

“I checked the copyright dates in a few of these books. And I also glanced at the prices. This was all recent, though most were now swollen and soft from the humidity of the swamp.

“The wicks of the candles were black and the pool of wax that surrounded them on the gold plate argued that they had been burnt down quite a ways.

“I was shocked and intrigued. I had a squatter who came here to read. I had a squatter who warmed himself at a fireplace. And the gold chair, how handsome it was, with its soft brown leather seat and back, and its crossed legs, and its ornately carved arms. One little test with my knife assured me that its simple frame was genuine gold. Same with the plate and cylinder which held the pens.

“ ‘Same as the mausoleum outside,' I whispered. (I always talk out loud to myself when I'm confused.) ‘I have a squatter who likes gold.'

“And then there was the dark multicolored marble of the desk, and the simple iron frame that bore the marble's weight.

“A squatter with taste, and intellectual interests! But how did he or she get here, and what had this to do with the attacks of dizziness I had felt as I proceeded? What had this to do with anything but trespassing, as far as I knew?

“I gazed about me at the open windows. I saw the stains of rain on the floor. I saw the flickering greenery. I felt faint again and batted at a mosquito that was trying to drive me mad.

“ ‘Just because this character has taste doesn't mean he's not upstairs waiting to kill you,' I reminded myself.

“Then, going to the interior stairs, I called out:

“ ‘Hello the house!'

“There was no sound above. I was convinced the place was deserted. If the mysterious reader had been here the books would not have been so swollen.

“Nevertheless, I called out again, ‘Hello, Tarquin Blackwood here,' and I went up slowly, listening for any sound from above.

“The second floor was much smaller and tighter than the first, but it was made of the same firm planks, and light came in not only from the barren arched windows but through the cupola above.

“But those details I scarcely noticed. Because this room was markedly different from the one below it in that it contained a loathsome and hideous sight.

“This was a set of rusted chains attached to the wall opposite the chimney, chains which obviously had no other purpose than the chaining of a human being. There were handcuffs and ankle cuffs on these chains, and beneath these idle witnesses to some abomination there was a thick dark syrupy-looking substance and the remnants of a human skull.

“I was disgusted beyond imagining. I was almost violently sick. I steadied myself. I stared at the black residue, this seeming tar, and at the skull, and then I made out what seemed like the disintegrating whitish powder of other bones. There was also the evidence of rotting cloth in the morass, and something glinting brightly though it was caught in the dark viscid tar.

“I felt a cold stubborn rage. Something unspeakable had happened here. And the perpetrator was not on the premises, and hadn't been for several months, but might at any moment return.

“I approached this tarlike substance. I knelt down beside it and I picked out the glinting fragment and discovered it with no surprise to be one of the earrings which Rebecca had worn when she came to me. Within seconds my trembling fingers had found the mate. And there, in the nauseating substance, was the cameo Rebecca had worn at her throat. I collected this too.

“I was paralyzed with excitement, but that didn't keep me from seeing that a fifth chain, a chain quite separate from those which must have once bound wrists and ankles, also dangled from the wall, and at the end of it was a hook. This hook was caught in the dark filth, and the dark filth contained fragments of fabric and fragments of hair.

“It was this fifth chain that horrified me more than anything else.

“Chills ran over me. My head was swimming and I suffered a loss of balance, and a sense again of Rebecca speaking to me, Rebecca whispering to me, Rebecca crying; and then her voice rose, distinct in the buzzing silence of the house:
You can't do it, you can't!

“ ‘Not Rebecca,' I whispered. But I knew that she had died here, I knew that for a century her bones had moldered here, I knew that even now, before my eyes, the tiny creatures of the swamp were eating at what was left of her—I could see them at work in the ugly residue—and soon there would be nothing at all.

“She had sent me here. I had a right to touch the skull, and as I did so it disintegrated before my eyes. It was no more now than a heap of white powder along with all the other bones. I should never have touched it! But it was too late.

“Quite suddenly I flew into action. I stood up. I secured the earrings and the brooch in my pocket. I pulled out my hunting knife—the kitchen knife was in the pirogue—and I spun round to face the stairs. No one had come, that was obvious, but at any moment someone might.

“And who were they, or who was he, I should say, who could sit at a desk and read by the light of candles when such a horror existed on the floor above?

“This had been a house of torture, this place, and surely it had been my great-great-great-grandfather Manfred who brought his victims here, I reasoned, and here it was that Rebecca had met her end.

“Who was it now who knew these things and did nothing about them? Who was it who had brought a fine marble desk here and a golden chair? Who was it that was buried in that doorless mausoleum? The whole pattern was overwhelming to me. I was shaking with sheer exhilaration. But I had to determine certain things.

“I went to the windows and was amazed to discover how well I could see over the swamp. And there, way far away, I saw Blackwood Manor very distinctly on its raised lawn.

“Whoever lived in this place, whoever visited it, could spy upon the house if he wanted to; he could see—among other things—my very windows and the windows of the kitchen as well. If he had a telescope or binoculars, and I saw neither one here, he could have studied us all very well.

“It was chilling to see this clear view of the house, but I used it to check my compass. I had to get home and fast.

“The voices threatened again. The dizziness came over me. I reeled. The wild cries of the birds seemed to mingle with Rebecca's voice. I was near to fainting. But I had to resist this.

“I went down the steps, through the big room and down onto the island and explored every inch of it that I could reach. Yes, the cypress trees had created it and anchored it, and from the west and the north they were so thick that the island itself must have been invisible. Only the eastern bank, where I had come ashore, was the way of access.

“Regarding the strange structure of granite and gold, I couldn't discover anything more about it, except that when I cut back the wisteria the graven figures were as beautiful there as anywhere else. The worth of the gold must have been staggering, I reasoned, but no one had ever stolen it; no one—it seemed—had ever tried.

“But I was so hot now, so coated in sweat, so bitten up by the mosquitoes and harassed by the lonesome cries of the birds and the way that they mingled with the half-heard voices that I had to get out of here. I had to get safe.

“I jumped into the pirogue, caught up the pole, pushed off the bank and headed for home.”

12

“JASMINE WAS WAITING
for me at the landing, in a perfect fit over the fact that I hadn't told anyone where I was going, and she was losing her mind with worry; and even Patsy was here and Patsy was worrying because Patsy had had a dream that I was in danger and she had driven in from New Orleans just to see if I was all right.

“ ‘Aunt Queen's here, isn't she?' I asked impatiently as I made my way to the kitchen with her. ‘And as for Patsy coming in from New Orleans, it's probably because she needs money, and we'll be in for a big argument tonight. But I don't have time for this. I have to tell you what I found out there. We have to call the sheriff right away.'

“ ‘The sheriff? For what!' Jasmine demanded. ‘And yes, your Aunt Queen is here. She arrived about an hour ago, and nobody could find you, and the pirogue was gone,' and so forth and so on for a straight three minutes.

“No sooner had she stopped her harangue than Aunt Queen appeared, and she threw her arms around me, dirty though I was from the swamp. She was her usual elegant self, right to the perfect curls of her white hair and her soft green silk dress. With Aunt Queen, it's silk or silk, that's about the extent of it, and I can't think of embracing her without thinking of silk.

“Patsy also came into the kitchen and sat down opposite me as I settled at the table, with Aunt Queen taking the chair to the right of me and Jasmine putting a beer down in front of me and then sitting to my left.

“I pulled off my dirty garden gloves and drank half the beer in one swallow, and Jasmine shook her head but got up to get me another.

“ ‘What is this about the sheriff?' Aunt Queen asked. ‘Why do you want the sheriff?'

“I laid out the earrings and the brooch, and I told them all about everything I had seen. I told them about the skull just disintegrating, but that I knew the sheriff could get the DNA from the white powder left of it to prove it was Rebecca's, and that for a DNA match there was hair in the brush that Rebecca had used, upstairs in the trunk that bore her name. There was hair in her comb too.

“Aunt Queen looked at Jasmine and Jasmine shook her head.

“ ‘You think the sheriff of Ruby River Parish is going to run DNA tests on a pile of white powder!' Jasmine declared. ‘You're going to tell this cockamamy story to the sheriff of Ruby River Parish? You, Tarquin Blackwood, dedicated buddy of Goblin, your spirit duplicate? You're going to call the sheriff? I don't want to be in this kitchen when that conversation takes place.'

“ ‘Listen to me,' I insisted. ‘This woman was murdered. There's no statute of limitations on murder, and—'

“When Aunt Queen spoke, she was very soft and reasonable-sounding. ‘Quinn, my darling, I don't think the sheriff will believe this story. And I don't think he will send anyone into the thick of the swamp.'

“ ‘All right,' I said, ‘I see. No one cares about this. No one believes it.'

“ ‘It isn't that I don't believe it,' said Aunt Queen, ‘it's that I don't think the outside world will believe it.'

“ ‘Yeah, that's it,' chimed in Patsy. ‘The outside world is going to think you're a crackpot, Tarquin, if they don't already from all these years of your talking about that damned spook. Tarquin, the more you carry on about this, the crazier everybody thinks you are.'

“At some point while all this was going on—my valiant struggle to get them to believe and investigate and their pleading with me not to make a fool of myself—Pops walked in and I reiterated the whole story for him.

“He sat at the corner of the table listening with his dull eyes, and then said under his breath that he'd go back there to this island with me if I wanted, and when I said I did want this, that it was exactly what I wanted, he seemed surprised.

“All the while, Goblin stood over by the sink listening to this conversation and looking from one to another of the crowd at the table as this or that one spoke. Then he came over and started pulling on my right shoulder.

“I said, ‘Goblin, get away, I've got no time for you now.' And with a profound will I pushed at him mentally, and to my amazement he was gone.

“Then Patsy imitated my voice and what I'd just said, making fun of me, and gave a low sneering laugh. ‘Goblin, get away,' she repeated, ‘and now you're telling us there's a marble table out there and a gold chair.'

“I fired back at her that those details were of the least importance and then I positively demanded to see the sheriff and tell him what I had seen.

“Pops said No, not until he'd gone out there with me, and that if this woman had been rotting for over a hundred years a day or two wouldn't matter now.

“ ‘But somebody's living there, Pops,' I said. ‘Somebody who must know these chains are up there and must have seen the skull! We have a dangerous situation here.'

“Patsy snickered. ‘It's a damned good thing that you believe yourself, Quinn, because nobody else does. You've been crazy since you were born.'

“Aunt Queen did not look at her. It struck me for the first time in my life that Aunt Queen didn't like Patsy any more than Pops did.

“ ‘So what was your dream, Patsy?' I asked, trying not to bristle at her insults. ‘Jasmine told me you came home today because you had a dream.'

“ ‘Oh, it can't compare to your story,' she said ironically and coldly, her blue eyes hard as glass. ‘I just woke up all scared for you. There was somebody who was going to hurt you, and Blackwood Manor was burning, and this group of people—they had you and they were going to hurt you, and Virginia Lee was in the dream and she told me, “Patsy, get him away.” She was real clear, she was sitting with her embroidery, and you know all the embroidery we still have that she did, and there she was in the dream, embroidering, and she put it aside and told me what I just said. It's all fading now. But Blackwood Manor was on fire. I woke up scared.'

“I looked at Pops and Jasmine. They hadn't told her anything about Rebecca or the oil-lamp scare, I knew by their faces. I looked up at Goblin, who was standing in the corner to my far left, and Goblin was looking at Patsy, and he seemed thoughtful if not a little scared himself.

“At this point, Aunt Queen called for the end of the Kitchen Committee Confab. We did have guests coming in, supper had to be prepared, Lolly and Big Ramona were waiting for us to clear out, and Aunt Queen wanted to talk to me later in her room. We'd eat supper in there, just the two of us.

“Nobody was calling the sheriff until Pops had gone to the island with me. And Pops said he wasn't feeling very good, he had to go lie down. The heat was bad and he'd been working on the flower patches in the full sun; he didn't feel good at all.

“I insisted on placing the earrings and brooch in a plastic bag so that any residue of tissue clinging to them could be analyzed, and then I went up to my room to shower, realizing I was starving to death.

“It was maybe six o'clock when I sat down to supper with Aunt Queen. Her room had just been redone in golden yellow taffeta, and we were at the small round table against the back windows of the house at which she frequently took her meals.

“We devoured one of her favorite dishes—scrambled eggs with caviar and sour cream, along with her favorite champagne.

“She was wearing silver spike heels and a loose-fitting silk-and-lace dress. She had a cameo at her throat, centered perfectly on her collar—Jasmine must have helped her—and we had the earrings and the cameo brooch from the island with us.

“The brooch was ‘Rebecca at the Well,' the earrings were tiny heads, as is usually the case with small cameos.

“I began by telling her all about Rebecca's trunk in the attic, and then Rebecca's ghost and what had happened, and then I went over again everything that was on the island and how perfectly strange it was out there, and that there was clear evidence of murder on the second floor of the house.

“ ‘All right,' she said. ‘You've heard many a story of Manfred, and you know now that after Virginia Lee died and left him a widower he was considered a madman in these parts.'

“I nodded for her to go on. I also took note that Goblin was right behind her, some distance from her, just watching me with a kind of abstracted expression on his face. He was also leaning against the wall kind of casually, and something about that struck a bad note with me—that he would present such an image of comfort, but my mind was really not on Goblin but on Rebecca and Aunt Queen.

“Aunt Queen went on with her tale.

“ ‘But what you don't know,' she said, ‘is that Manfred brought women here to Blackwood Manor, always claiming they were governesses for William and Camille, when in fact they were nothing more than playthings for him—starry-eyed Irish girls he got from Storyville, the red-light district in New Orleans—whom he kept for as long as it suited his purposes, and then from the picture they were abruptly erased.'

“ ‘God, you're telling me he killed more than one of them?' I asked.

“ ‘I don't know that he did any such thing,' said Aunt Queen. She went on. ‘It's your story about this island that has put it in my mind that perhaps he did murder them. But no one knew what became of them, and it was an easy thing to get rid of a poor Irish girl in those days. You simply dropped her down in the middle of New Orleans. What more need be done?'

“ ‘But Rebecca, did you hear tell of Rebecca?'

“ ‘Yes, indeed, I did,' said Aunt Queen. ‘You know I did. I heard plenty tell of her. And I'm telling you now. Now let me go on in my fashion. Some of these Irish girls were kind to little William and Camille, but in the main they didn't bother with them one way or another, and so they don't come down to us with any names or faces, or even mysterious trunks in the attic, though that would have been a significant clue.'

“ ‘No, there were no other suspicious trunks in the attic,' I interjected. ‘But there are clothes, heaps of old clothes, clothes museums would pay for, I think. But only Rebecca's trunk.'

“ ‘Slow down and let me talk,' Aunt Queen said with a little graceful exasperation. ‘Quinn, you're overexcited and it's a marvelous thing to see,' she said, smiling, ‘but let me talk.'

“And talk she did.

“ ‘Now, while all of that was going on,' she said, ‘Manfred was up to his famous tricks of riding his black gelding over the land, and disappearing into the swamp for weeks at a time.

“ ‘Then came Rebecca. Now Rebecca was not only more beautiful than the other women, she was also very refined and passed herself off for a lady with a gracious manner, which won everyone over to her side.

“ ‘But one night when Manfred was off in the swamps she got to cursing Manfred for his absence, and in the kitchen she got drunk on brandy with Ora Lee—that was Jasmine's great-great-grandmother—and she told Ora Lee her story, of how she, Rebecca, had been born in the Irish Channel in New Orleans and was as “common as dirt,” as she put it, in a world “as narrow as the gutter,” she declared, one of thirteen children, and how she had gotten raped in a Garden District mansion where she'd been working as a maid, and the whole Irish neighborhood knew about it, and when her family wanted her to go into the convent on account of it she went downtown to Storyville, instead, and they took her into a house of prostitution as she had hoped. Now, Rebecca was pregnant from the rape, but whether she lost the child or got rid of it, this part was unclear.

“ ‘To Ora Lee, she said flat out that being in an elegant and fine house in Storyville, with the piano always playing and the gentlemen being so gracious, was far superior to being at home in a miserable shotgun house at St. Thomas and Washington by the river where her Irish father and her German grandmother used to beat her and her brothers and sisters with a strap.

“ ‘But Rebecca did not want to end her upward climb in Storyville, so she started to put on the airs of a lady and use what she knew of manners to make herself more refined. She also loved to do embroidery and crocheting, which had been beaten into her at home, and used her sewing abilities to make herself fine clothes.

“ ‘Wait a minute,' I interrupted her. ‘Didn't Patsy say something about the embroidery in her dream, that Virginia Lee was embroidering? That's important. And you should see the embroidered things upstairs in that trunk. Yes, she knew embroidery, Rebecca—they're confused in Patsy's dream, but you know about the oil lamps and what I almost did.'

“ ‘I do know, of course I know,' said Aunt Queen. ‘Why do you think I came home? But you need knowledge to arm you against this cozy lovemaking ghost. So listen to what the story was.

“ ‘The other prostitutes in the house in Storyville laughed at Rebecca, and they called her the Countess, but she knew that sooner or later a man would come who would see her attributes and take her out of that place. She sat right in the room where the women congregated for the man to make his choice, and she embroidered as if she was a great lady, and gave each gentleman her lovely smile.

“ ‘Well, Manfred Blackwood was the man of her dreams, and the tale came down in Jasmine's family that he had actually and truly loved Rebecca much in the same way that he had loved Virginia Lee. Indeed it was Rebecca, petite Rebecca with her brilliant smile and charming ways that finally took his mind off the grief.

“ ‘He was obsessed with giving her jewelry, and she loved it, and she was gracious and sweet to him and even sang old songs to him, which she had learned growing up.

“ ‘Of course, in her first weeks here she was all honey and spice to little William and Camille, but they didn't fall for it, or so the story says, just waiting for her to disappear like all the rest.

“ ‘Then Manfred and Rebecca went to Europe for a year, the two of them, and it was rumored they spent a very long time in Naples, because Rebecca loved it so, and they even had a villa for a while on the famous Amalfi coast. If you saw that coast, and you will someday, Quinn, you'll understand that it is one of the most beautiful places on earth.