The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (17 page)

This is the text of the remarkable document that appeared with scarcely a whisper on the bare wooden floor inside my door. I was standing in my chemise at the washstand, patting my neck and shoulders with the hand towel, and I was momentarily startled by the manifestation of the envelope. My first thought was that it must be a message from the management. I listened for the sound
of departing footsteps, but there was nothing save the rustle of the curtains in the evening breeze, carrying the muted voices of a few late-night guests returning from the lake. I hung up my towel, and, crossing the room, took up the envelope. The note was written on hotel stationery in an open, leftward-slanting script. I read it over twice, noting that the word “blessed” had been struck out and replaced by the word “idyllic.” A telling revision, though what it told, I couldn’t say. Taking the curious page to the writing table, I seated myself and read it over a third time. I thought it playful and daring, yet studied and designed to disarm. The careful dissembling of the author’s true intentions in the formulas of acquaintance-making and welcome, the puerile enthusiasm for sweets, the consciousness of possessing an element of drama and urgency in the manner of delivery, the final titillating, seductive wink (“Can I tempt you?” said the serpent, proffering the … doughnut), and the schoolgirlish closing, all fascinated me. No expectation of a negative reply was alluded to, no precise time was set, though presumably, I had best arrive in time for the doughnuts. Chocolate and doughnuts, I thought, a child’s breakfast. I wondered if the gentleman of the night before would be in attendance.

And I wondered who was paying for the suite with the charming balcony.

And why the “powerful clairvoyant” so seriously in demand was eager to make my acquaintance. What did she know about me?

I put the missive aside and climbed into my narrow bed, where I slept tolerably well, rising at six, as is my habit. Once dressed, I found I had time for a stroll to the lake. Wanting to be alert for my meeting with the clairvoyant, I stopped in at the dining tent for a cup of coffee, which I drank at my ease, gazing out at the amusing miniature steamboat drifting on its anchor chain above its rippled reflection in the calm water.

At a quarter past eight, I presented myself at the door of Room 204. Before I could raise my hand, the door flew open, and Violet Petra, dressed in a filmy white muslin gown heavily embroidered with tiny violets and embellished by a gold satin sash at the waist
and a froth of old lace at the sleeves, her masses of dark hair loose and curling over her shoulders, her full lips rouged and parted, her clear gray eyes fixing tightly on my face, greeted me with the breathless affirmation of her own psychic powers. “I knew you would come,” she declared.

“How did you know?” I asked.

She ignored my question, her eyes flickering over my plain blouse and dirndl skirt, as she stepped back into the room, inviting me to follow with a wave of her hand.

Near the open doors to the balcony, a round table with a good linen cloth was laid for two. Between the plates an ornate china pot crouched above a plate of doughnuts covered by a screen cage. On a side table, next to a beige silk upholstered chaise longue, I noticed a copy of
Godey’s
and the daily camp news bulletin. The Boston paper, much rummaged, was scattered across the carpet. So our clairvoyant kept up with fashions and current events. Violet pulled a chair from the table and bid me take it. “We have much to talk about, I think,” she said.

I let her stand a moment as I appraised her offer with a purposefully mystified eye. I wasn’t willing to play the game of instant intimacy, which she evidently had in mind. As she apprehended my reluctance, for she was an adept at reading the subtlest changes of mood in her audience, her brows drew together thoughtfully. “You must think me very forward,” she said.

I advanced to the chair, maintaining my puzzled air as she took her seat across from me. “I admit,” I said, “I wonder how you came to know my name.”

She fussed over the pot, which had a candle beneath it to keep the contents warm, and poured the fragrant beverage into the cups. “Oh,” she said lightly, as if my naïveté was amusing, “everyone knows your name. Or everyone who reads the register, and many do. We’re a close community here, you’ll find, and you are a newcomer. There’s a great curiosity about you.”

“I see,” I said, lifting the cup and sipping the chocolate while she served us each a doughnut. She smiled at me so candidly that, as I
set the cup back in its saucer, I decided to drop my defensive manner. “It’s very good,” I said, nodding at the chocolate.

“It is,” she agreed. “I never drink it at home, but when we’re here, I want it every morning.”

I remarked the plural pronoun, presumably not the royal “We.” “Are you here with your family?”

She lowered her eyes to the plate and said, with just the right vibration of regret, “I have no family. They’ve all passed away, some years ago now.”

“Then the gentleman you were dining with last night was not your relative.”

“Mr. Babin is my sponsor.”

“Which means?”

“He arranges things for me, introductions, appointments, things of that sort. Sometimes I have speaking engagements, but only for small invited groups. He sees to all that.”

“He’s your manager.”

Her spine stiffened; she fixed me in an icy glare. “I’m not an actress, Miss Grant.”

Her hauteur made me smile.

She looked down, picked at her skirt, failing to entirely suppress an answering smile flickering at the corners of her mouth. “Really,” she said. “You are a most exasperating person.” Then she helped herself to an unladylike big bite of her doughnut.

“I haven’t had chocolate since I was a girl,” I said.

She managed to smile through her zesty chewing, then swallowed hard. “Of course,” she said. “You drink coffee, and lots of it.”

“Why do you say so?”

“Don’t all journalists drink lots of coffee?”

“What makes you think I’m a journalist?”

“I don’t think you are a journalist. I know you are.”

“Really?” I felt rattled to have been unmasked so early in my investigations. “And how do you know that?”

She dropped the uneaten fragment of her doughnut onto the
plate and patted her lips with a napkin, her eyes mischievous, almost gleeful at my discomfiture. Carefully she opened the square of cloth and laid it across her skirt, lowering her eyes to her preoccupied hands. “Oh, I know things,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?”

“What? People’s professions? Is that clairvoyance?”

As she lifted her cup, her eyes still lowered, the martial strains of a band striking up near the lake jauntified the quiet atmosphere of the room, but when Violet looked up again, her expression was mirthless, even sullen. “No,” she said. “It didn’t require clairvoyance to know who you are. I read the Philadelphia papers, and I’ve a good memory for names.”

“I see,” I said, which was true. I did see quite a long way, but not far enough, as it turned out. I saw only what she wanted me to see: that she was a very pretty, frank, ambitious little woman. Nothing she said or did would be of any importance to me personally; she would not, she could not make a difference to me, yet I believed there was more to her than met the eye. Above all, I believed she was a charlatan, and as such, no matter how she might admire me, no matter that she might actually feel affection for me, someday she would be driven to deceive me and then to despise me for having failed her, for having been deceived by her. I determined to interest myself in her because I wanted to expose her. To do that I would have to catch her off her guard, and what I most clearly observed at this first interview was that her guard was very high, remote, and impressively fortified. She was innately cautious, perversely noncommittal. She presented what she knew was presentable. What was not, she kept to herself.

I also observed that she wasn’t suspicious of me. Her desire to know me was entirely a product of her self-interest. She thought I might be in a position to advance what she would have called her “cause.”

Her defensive mood had veered abruptly back to gaiety. “Are you disappointed?” she teased. “Is it just too ordinary of me to take note of a byline?”

“Not ordinary at all, in my experience,” I replied. “Most people don’t notice the names of journalists, unless they happen to be famous, which I decidedly am not.”

“Not yet,” she agreed. “But you might be. I thought your articles about that murder trial in Uniontown were first rate.”

I sipped my chocolate, raising my eyebrows over the rim of my cup, stupidly flattered and knowing I was stupid, but unable to help myself. I was particularly proud of the series she named.

The accused in the Uniontown trial was a young, handsome, charming, and promising lawyer named Nicholas L. Dukes, who was engaged to marry a wealthy young woman named Lizzie Nutt. For reasons no one could explain, including Dukes himself, shortly before the wedding day the future husband sent several outraged letters to his fiancée’s father, Captain A. C. Nutt, alleging that Lizzie was known to have been “criminally intimate” with a number of men and that he must therefore withdraw his proposal of marriage. Captain Nutt, mystified and incensed at the offense to his daughter’s honor, arranged a meeting with her accuser. During that confrontation, Dukes produced a pistol, and shot his future father-in-law to death. Dukes claimed to have acted in self-defense, as the older gentleman had threatened to strike him with his walking stick.

Captain Nutt was a prominent citizen and the community was much agitated by the trial, which was a long one. At last the fatherless Lizzie appeared to testify against her suitor. There was a hush when she entered the courtroom, for Lizzie was a woman of great beauty, poise, and distinction. She expressed her bemusement at her fiancé’s bizarre letters to her father. “If he didn’t want to marry me,” she explained calmly to the prosecutor, “he had only to say so. Why send slanderous messages to my father? I don’t understand it.”

I couldn’t understand it either. Surely this elegant, lovely, and wealthy young woman would have no difficulty finding another suitor, and it was equally clear that she was unlikely to be showering her favors upon the butcher or the postman. But Dukes was not on
trial for slander, and in the end, to the fury of the mob in the street outside the court, he was acquitted of all charges.

Violet leaned back in her chair, pressing her fingertips to her lips, her eyes searching my face intently with an unwavering solicitude that unnerved me. “You drew those characters so clearly,” she said. “You must see all manner of cruelty and violence in your work.”

What was she imagining? That I followed murderers down dark alleys? That I frequented squalid tenements? “Not really,” I said. “I tend to see the consequences of cruelty and violence.”

“Those articles were so well written; it was like reading a story.”

“Thank you,” I said, taking up a doughnut. In the hopes of closing the subject of my profession I asked, “Do you live in Philadelphia? When you’re not here?”

“When I’m in Philadelphia, I stay with Mr. and Mrs. Babin,” she said.

“And where is your home?”

“I don’t, strictly speaking, have a home,” she said mysteriously. Outside the band, audibly on the move in the direction of the hotel, broke into the refrain of “Oh, My Darling Clementine.” Violet smiled, gazing at the balcony. “You are lost and gone forever,” she sang in a clear, high voice. “I like that song.” Turning back to me, she said, “Do you?”

I nodded. The marchers had paused beneath our window, and the music was so loud I didn’t attempt to speak over it. The voices of two men standing on the wide side balcony broke out raucously, “In a cavern, in a canyon …” while Violet and I sat smiling blandly at each other. I finished the doughnut, a heavy, sweet, chewy wad covered in fine sugar, which cascaded over my dark skirt. I dusted the powder away with my napkin while the band played on. At last, with applause above and shouts below, the marchers turned away, taking Clementine back to the lake where they had found her.

“They do that every morning,” Violet informed me.

“Surely not the same song?”

“No,” she said. “They have a repertoire.”

“How entertaining.”

She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, her chin in her palms, studying me closely as if trying to determine what sort of animal I was. “Have you come among us as a skeptic or as a seeker?” she asked.

“Neither,” I assured her. “I try to maintain a professional objectivity at all times. Though I can’t deny I’m curious about what goes on here.”

She nodded, pursing her lips thoughtfully. Then her eyes brightened and she stretched her hand toward me, tapping her fingers conspiratorially on my arm. “Are you ‘on assignment’?”

I laughed at her eagerness. “I’ll be doing a short piece about the attractions of Lake Pleasant,” I said. “The charm of the setting, the comforts of the hotel, that sort of thing.” This wasn’t entirely a lie. I had a longer piece in mind, but my editor’s charge had simply been: “See what’s going on over there,” and he was giving me only four days of room and board in which to carry out that quest.

Violet was downcast. “It’s not just a resort, you know,” she said.

“I know that,” I replied. “But what I find odd is how much it does
feel
like a resort. Everyone seems so determined to have a good time.”

“Why shouldn’t we enjoy ourselves?” she replied. “The spirits of our loved ones are among us.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

“Of course, what?” she asked gently, as if she suspected that my mind had wandered.

“The spirits,” I said, wagging my fingers at the air, where, presumably, they hovered.

“Which you don’t believe in.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Have you never had an experience of …” She paused, searching for the word that wouldn’t offend me. “Communication?” She paused again. “With someone you know is not …” Another pause.

“Alive?” I concluded for her. “No. I must say, I have not.”

She closed her eyes, touching two fingers to the bridge of her
nose. It was the briefest of gestures and appeared to be entirely involuntary, so much so that I congratulated myself for having noticed it. In the next moment she rested her chin back on her hand. As her eyes, calm and solicitous, recommenced searching my face, she asked, “Not even on that night, in that cold, dark little room, when your mother died?”