Seduction: A Novel of Suspense (11 page)

Yesterday afternoon she visited our séance once again, talking
of eternity, infinity and the sentence she was serving for her crime. Afterward I retired to my room and spent several hours transcribing her conversation, hearing her voice in my mind and writing down all the details she shared. As I worked I became more and more heated and uncomfortable. I opened the windows to let in the breeze, but no sooner had I done so than that infernal barking started up. The noise was a terrible distraction. But when I shut the window, I found myself almost unable to draw breath.

Throwing down the pen, leaving the paper on my desk without putting it away, I fled down the stairs and out the front door. Gulping fresh air, I raced to the beach. I needed to be by the sea, far away from the Lady’s smothering soul and the sound of the hellhound.

I had walked for only fifteen minutes when I heard a man call out to me.

“Monsieur Hugo?”

I turned to find the head man of the honorary police force, the
connétable
Jessie Trent. His silver-tipped baton caught the moonlight and gleamed.

“Good evening, Connétable.”

Trent was a tall, fit man with deep lines around his eyes and perennial frown lines crossing his forehead. I ran into him often during my nocturnal rambles, and over the last two years we’d talked about everything from the political problems on the island to the difference between sons and daughters. His first wife had died in childbirth three years before, after delivering their fifth son. He had remarried; his new wife had recently given him his first daughter. He always struck me as an unusually responsive father: there was always a child’s plaything sticking out of one of his pockets to bring home to his brood, and that night was no exception. I noticed a bit of red cloth tied in such a way that it resembled a dog.

“Have you been out walking long, sir?” Trent asked.

“Not more than a quarter of an hour. Is there a problem?”

“Did you hear that infernal racket?”

“The hounds? Yes. Why?”

“There’s a child that has gone missing. Her mother said there was a
dog barking near the house. It has everyone nervous. You know islands like ours are full of fool legends. We’re out looking for the little girl.”

I’d heard a lot of the folklore about the dogs on Jersey. The most often repeated involved a black dog that roamed the cliffs of Bouley Bay in the parish of Trinity. Walkers who have encountered the hound claim he circles them at great speed and then simply disappears.

“Whose child is missing?” I asked.

“Tom Meecham’s. Do you know him?”

“The fishmonger?”

Trent nodded. “Lilly is a pretty thing. Just ten years old last week.”

He spoke about her as if he knew her and he probably did too. If I was correct his oldest was about that age.

“How long has she been missing?”

“We can’t be sure. Lilly went to bed along with her two sisters around seven o’clock when Mrs. Meecham settled down to do mending. About an hour later she heard a dog barking outside the cottage. It didn’t sound regular to her. Or to her dog, she said. He started pacing by the windows and growling. It was disturbing enough for her to get up and go around closing up. When she reached the room where her children sleep, their window was open and Lilly’s bed was empty. First she searched the cottage. Then the garden and the lane. Lilly’s a good girl, and very attached to her mum. If she had heard her calling, Lilly would have come out. When she didn’t, Mrs. Meecham sent one of the boys to the tavern to tell his father. Meecham came straightaway to me. Children don’t go missing often in St. Helier. Of course we have our runaways who stow away on boats, but never as young as ten, and boats don’t leave port at night.”

“Is it possible that Lilly just went out to find the barking dog? She might be especially sensitive to how distressed that hound sounded. I know I was.”

“I do think exactly that. But the question is, was the hound distressed or vicious? And while looking for him did she venture too close to a cliff? Or the sea? Did she fall? Is she hurt?”

“If there’s a search party under way, Trent, I would like to volunteer my efforts and those of my sons if need be.”

“And I’ll gladly accept,” he said. “If my men don’t find her tonight we’ll knock on your door at sunrise.”

“No, please at least let me help tonight. I wouldn’t be able to sleep now anyway, knowing what you’ve told me.”

Trent found me a stick that would work like a baton and said he was glad to have me. “If that dog’s rabid, it’s better if I’m not alone. I’ve split all the men up in teams, but we were an odd number.”

We set off down the beach.

“I know there’s crime on the island,” I said. “Fights, drunken brawls, thievery, but are there many unexplained crimes here? Have there been many murders?”

“She’s a missing child, Monsieur Hugo, not a dead one.”

But I had a feeling—one I wished I didn’t have—that she was dead. Or was soon going to be dead if we didn’t get to her.

“Don’t be letting your imagination get ahead of you,” Trent continued. “A man such as yourself who writes fine books and plays might think of the most dramatic scenario, but this is probably just a little girl gone missing while searching for a dog she heard barking.”

The island’s honorary police force of one hundred and fifty-seven men was divided into twelve parishes. St. Helier, having a robust population of over twenty thousand people, had almost thirty police. All of them and others, men like myself who’d heard about Lilly’s disappearance, were walking the roads, searching fields and forests, climbing the rocks, exploring the caves on the beach, all calling out the little girl’s name.

Lilly . . . Lilly . . . Lilly
 . . . The chant filled the air and became a solemn refrain. Sometimes sounding like a hymn to hope. Other times a funeral dirge.

The night grew chilly around us. We walked for a long time, making a huge circle, and then returned to St. Aubin’s bay. Elizabeth Castle was in sight. The castle can only be accessed by foot at low tide and we’d missed that. We looked out and wondered aloud if the little girl might have gotten across the sandbar earlier. The ruin is impressive during the day and foreboding at night. Especially that night. The fog was rolling in, diffusing the moonlight. But within ten minutes we lost
sight of the castle as a dense mist descended. Trent insisted we curtail our search and resume in the morning. There was really little choice. We could no longer see one foot in front of the other. If we took a step too far we could go off a cliff or fall into a crevice.

The fog was so heavy that within minutes we had lost all sense of direction. “There’s no use trying to find our way back,” Trent said in exasperation. “We’re too close to the rocks. In this soup we could come to great harm.”

“What do you propose?” My face was dripping with condensation. My hair was soaked through as if it were raining.

“We need to try to get away from the sea and inland just a bit.” Trent stood still and breathed in deeply. “To the right up here, there’s a field of some kind, I think. I can smell the cow dung. We should be safe enough.”

I could smell it too, the scent of land as opposed to the salty treacherous sea.

We followed our noses toward the earthy odor until we found the field. Trent looked like a blind man with his hands out in front of him, taking baby steps, being careful. I must have looked the same.

“There’s a wall over here, Monsieur Hugo,” he called out. “It will provide some shelter. Come, follow my voice.”

Once we had settled down and were safely tucked into a turn of the stone wall, protected a bit from the wind, I asked him to tell me what he knew about the castle. I’d seen it often enough but hadn’t explored it yet. Was it a place a child might hide? Would she be safe there overnight?

“Elizabeth Castle was named after the queen and built in 1590. It sits on the site of the hermitage where our patron, Saint Helier, lived in the sixth century. Our history books say it was first inhabited by Sir Walter Raleigh when he was governor of Jersey and then later by the future Charles the Second himself, who was seeking refuge during the English Civil War. There have been quite a few accidents since I’ve been a policeman. Tourists who aren’t fit enough get brave and try to climb the turrets or battlements. But if she’s there she should be safe enough.”

“As long as there aren’t any ghosts?”

“Monsieur Hugo, this isn’t a night for talk of that kind of thing.”

“Actually it’s a perfect night for it.”

“A well-educated man like yourself,” he said, “you don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”

I almost answered with the truth and told him that a few weeks ago I would have said no, of course not. But not anymore. “There are many things, Connétable, about which we cannot be certain.”

“In any case, I should think you’d be the one telling me the stories.”

“But I know all my own stories.”

He laughed. It was a pleasant enough sound for the moment, but then an odd thing happened. It seemed to ricochet off the wall and echo back. But now it was hollow and pensive and full of worry. I’m sure he heard it as well as I did. But neither of us said anything. Instead he apologized for not being able to entertain me.

“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know any ghost stories to tell.”

I’m not sure why I didn’t believe him. Was there a hesitance in his voice? But I was certain gothic tales were hiding in the castle’s stones, waiting to be exposed. Convinced you’d find one behind each granite rock you pulled out of the façade.

With both of us silent, the night’s noises, almost inaudible minutes ago, became raucous. Waves crashed on the rocks, owls hooted, far-off dogs howled, crickets screamed and a lonely wind did battle with every structure in its path. While the symphony of sound assaulted me, Trent fell asleep.

Men who work as hard as he does sometimes develop the knack of dropping off swiftly regardless of where they are and how uncomfortable their surroundings. I was not as blessed, so I sat back against the damp stones, listening to noises of the night, straining to hear a young girl’s cries and imagining her parents’ terror.

To be a decent writer you must have both empathy and imagination. While these attributes aid your art, they can plague your soul. You don’t simply suffer your own sadness, experience your own longing and worry about your own wife and children, you are burdened with experiencing the emotional states of multitudes of others you don’t know.

I have only to learn about someone else’s misfortune and I run, stumbling into their mind, buffeted by their pain, assaulted by their ills. Their turmoil becomes mine to bear. Their worry becomes my burden.

For me, escape is hard-won and most often found only in a woman’s arms. In that very different kind of fog, I can give up, let go, become lost in the pleasure that wipes out all else.

Oh, for the distraction of a woman’s smell or touch, I thought as I sat in the dark, suffering a melancholy spell that I feared would keep me in its grip till morning. It was difficult for me to remain sitting against the rocks while the night picked at my sleeve and tempted me the way a vixen might. I shut my eyes, trying to force myself to relax, to put myself to sleep. But with my eyes shut, my hearing became even more attuned. The barking dog seemed suddenly closer. His yowling more urgent. More specific. As if there was a precise communiqué in his baying. Was this the same dog I’d been hearing for days? What was he trying to say?

And then suddenly I felt a presence nearby, and I smelled smoke and incense and something else that reminded me of ancient objects that had not been disturbed for a long time. It was an odd aroma to smell outdoors so near the sea.

Thoughts of you, Fantine, came to me then. I meandered through the story about your family’s perfume business as if it were a warren of streets. I peeked into windows and saw scenes you had only hinted at. Meeting your lover for the first time. You working in the perfumerie. Your father dying. Your uncle casting you out. What it had been like, to be a woman suddenly adrift, alone after a lifetime of security.

A sudden urge to see you seized me. Why at that moment? What about your story was so compelling to me? I didn’t know then. But I think I do now. It was your emptiness that attracted me and made me so curious. I had never met a woman who was as empty emotionally and accepting of it as you were. Who was as dead inside and so at peace with it.

When I only know one part of someone’s story, the missing pieces can plague me. I yearn to fill in the gaps. And so it was for me with you.
Who was your lover? Why had he abandoned you? Had he known you were with child?

I wanted more. I wanted all the details, wanted the entire tale. It seemed more than idle curiosity. My need was urgent. But why?

You want to possess her soul so you can heal your own.

It was not my thought, but I heard it in my mind. An idea planted there by someone or something else. It surfaced the same way the words of the spirits do when they speak to me.

“No,” I argued back, but silently in my mind. “I have no desire to possess anyone’s soul. I am no monster.”

Ah, but you are. All men are. Accepting that is the first step.

“To what?” His response had been so real, I’d answered aloud this time.

Trent was sleeping lightly, and hearing me, woke quickly.

“Has something happened?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No, I dozed off too,” I lied, “and fear I was talking in my sleep.”

I was afraid, but of something much more serious and alarming. Had one of the spirits from the séance followed me out of the house? Had some entity called up by our parlor games not returned to the netherworld but remained with me? Had he just engaged me in a conversation so real I had responded?

Most people would have found the room in the Webber Inn welcoming. The walls were covered with cabbage rose and ivy vine paper, slightly faded but in the most charming way. The wicker furniture’s cushions were covered in a matching fabric that gave the room a cozy feeling. The Victorian bed offered thick down pillows and a comforter, and the floor was covered with a plush forest-green carpet.