The Old Willis Place (14 page)

Chapter 17

I found Georgie in the cave with Nero, huddled under a pile of blankets, his dirty face tear-streaked.

"Georgie, Georgie." I threw myself down beside him and held him tight. "What did you see? What did you hear?"

He cuddled close to me, as much in need of comfort as I was. "They came outside with the gurney," he whispered. "They'd zipped us—our bodies—into black bags. Oh, Diana, the bags were so small. I guess all they found were—"

"Hush." I covered his mouth with my hand. "I told you not to watch."

Georgie pushed my hand away. "You have to hear this part, Diana. It's about Miss Lilian."

I lay back, propped on my elbows, and let him go on.

"The police were talking," Georgie told me. "One said it might've been an accident, but the other said the door was bolted from the outside. That meant someone had locked us in, he said—and who else could it have been but that crazy old woman?"

"It's a shame nobody figured that out sooner" I said. "Miss Lilian got away with killing us. She never went to jail, she was never punished."

"It's not fair." Georgie scowled. "It's not fair, Diana!"

I pulled the covers up under my chin. The fading light of day shone through the cave's opening, barely illuminating the darkness around us. "Did the police say anything else?" I asked.

Georgie shifted his position to see me better. "Mother and Daddy are dead," he said in a low voice. "But I'd guessed that already. Hadn't you?"

"I always hoped they'd come back for us someday," I told him. "I guess that's silly, but, well, I wanted it to be true, so I—" I pressed my lips together and tried not to cry.

"They're going to bury us with Mother and Daddy," Georgie said, as if to console me. "We'll all be together, Diana."

I wasn't consoled. I wanted to be with Mother and Daddy again, but not in a graveyard. I wanted them to be here on the farm, the way we were before the bad thing happened.

Outside, twilight darkened into night. The wind blew harder, soughing in the treetops. Far away, from the direction of the house, came the faint sound of a piano. Miss Lilian's favorite piece, the
Moonlight
Sonata, floated through the darkness, eerie, distorted, out of tune. I pictured her at the piano, back in the days when its mahogany gleamed and every note was true. Her hands struck the keys, her head moved to the music's rhythm, her thin body swayed. I stood in the doorway, watching, hearing her mistakes, yearning to push her aside and play the piece properly. She looked up and saw me. Her face twisted in anger, and she slammed the piano lid shut. "Get out!" she yelled. "Get out!"

Pushing the memory away, I burrowed deeper under the covers, hoping to block the sound of the piano. Beside me, Georgie slept quietly, Lissa's bear clasped to his chest. Nero came closer, turned around once or twice, and curled between us, purring as if he hoped to comfort us. But there was no comfort without Mother and Daddy.

The next thing I knew, Georgie was shaking my shoulder. "Diana "he whispered. "Something's outside the cave."

I rose to my knees, listening for sounds in the darkness outside. I heard nothing, but Nero's back rose and his tail puffed to twice its normal size. The cave filled with his eerie growling song.

"It's her." Georgie clutched my arm, his nails biting into my skin. "It's Miss Lilian."

We crept to the cave's entrance and peered into the night. The wind shook shadows across the snow, confusing my eyes.

Then I heard what Georgie had heard, a voice calling, rising and falling with the wind. She was in the woods, not far away, coming toward us.

"Run," Georgie whimpered. "Don't let her get us!"

I would have taken his hand, but he was clutching Alfie. The two of us darted out of the cave and slid down the snowy bank into the creek. She must not trap us again.

Through the woods, across fields and streams, uphill and down, we ran and she followed, calling us again and again. Our names echoed from bare trees, bounced back from the snow, became unrecognizable. Deer fled from the sounds of the chase, bounding through the snow in fright. A fox barked from a boulder and vanished into a thicket, fearful for his own safety.

Georgie and I came out of the woods behind the house. It sat on the hill above us, a dark shape crouched against the moonlit sky, its crooked chimneys rising like broken fingers from the roof. We ran across the snowy lawn spiked with dead weeds. I looked back. She was behind us, running as only the dead can run, tirelessly, her white hair wild and loose in the wind, her gray dress fluttering.

"Diana, Georgie," she cried, as if she knew no words other than our names. "Diana, Georgie!"

"Not there!" I grabbed Georgie's arm to steer him away from the house.

He looked at me, glassy-eyed with fear, as if he didn't know where he was or what he was doing.

Still holding his arm, I skirted the house and ran down the drive. The tracks of the police car and the hearse cast shadows in the snow. Like a ghost himself, the albino deer stood at the edge of the trees. He watched us for a moment and then vanished into the shadows.

Behind us Miss Lilian called, "Diana, Georgie! Diana, Georgie!"

On we ran. On she came.

At the end of the driveway we realized we could go no farther. We'd come to the fence between us and the rest of the world. I yanked Georgie to the right, planning to run along the fence, but he slipped in the snow and fell by the gate, pulling me down with him.

We scrambled to our feet, but we were too late. Miss Lilian had us trapped between the fence and a thicket of bushes and vines heaped with snow.

She was close enough for us to see her clearly. She was old, she was ill, she was thinner than ever. She stretched her bony hands toward us and chanted our names, "Diana and Georgie, I have you now. Don't try to escape. I've chased you more than enough!"

I thrust Georgie behind me. She mustn't get him, she mustn't hurt him. I'd protect him this time. "What do you want?" I cried. "Haven't you done enough to us already?"

She lunged at me, seized my arm, and pulled me close. Her cold fingers pressed my skin, chilling me to the bone. "You've given me no rest, no peace. Not while I was alive. Not after my death. And now, now—"

"Leave my sister alone." Still holding Alfie, Georgie tried to pull me away from Miss Lilian. "You hurt us, you made the bad thing happen!"

"You!" She turned to Georgie, her face filled with fury. "You were always the bad one. Making faces at me behind your mother's back, teasing and tormenting me, stealing my things. Why, you have my bear right now. Give him to me!"

Georgie drew back, clutching Alfie. "This is my bear, not yours! Lissa gave him to me."

"Let us go," I begged her. "We can't harm you now."

"Oh, no." Miss Lilian held us both, her grip too strong to break. "I can't let you go. Not yet. We have old accounts to settle, the three of us."

Georgie and I clung to each other in dread. What accounts? Tweaking Miss Lilian's skirts, knocking pictures off the walls, breaking knickknacks, slamming doors, hiding her jewelry, taking her money—small things compared to what she'd done to us.

"Just look at you," she said suddenly. "Hiding on my farm like fugitives, one of you dressed in my clothes and the other wearing almost nothing but feathers in his hair. Filthy. Rude. Stealing and lying. You're a disgrace to your parents. To my parents. To society itself."

"Its your fault we're here!" Georgie cried.

Miss Lilian stepped back as if he'd struck her. "My fault? How dare you say such a thing? Nothing is my fault. Nothing!"

"Liar" Georgie retorted. "You know what you did."

"What happened was your own fault," Miss Lilian went on. "You deserved to be punished. Someone had to teach you a lesson. Your parents never raised a hand to you. They let you run wild. So the duty fell to me."

Too angry now to be afraid, I thrust my face into hers, daring her to harm me. "You chased us into the cellar and locked us in that room, and then you left us there—"

"To teach you a lesson," she repeated. "That's all I meant to do."

"A lesson?" I stared at her in disbelief. "You killed us!"

She released us then and began fidgeting with the string of pearls around her neck. "No," she whispered. "It was an accident. An unfortunate accident. Surely you realize I didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't mean to!"

Georgie brushed me aside and walked right up to Miss Lilian, storming with anger. "You're a murderer!" he shouted. "You should have gone to jail. They should have executed you!"

"I had a stroke," Miss Lilian shouted back. "A stroke! You upset me, my blood pressure shot up, I collapsed at the top of the cellar steps. Your mother found me on the kitchen floor, unconscious. Your father called an ambulance. They put a tube down my throat, they put something over my mouth. How could I tell anyone where you were? I was more dead than alive."

Miss Lilian smoothed her dress, touched her hair, wrung her hands nervously. "I was in the hospital a long time. Weeks, months, I can't be sure. I couldn't speak. Couldn't move. It's a wonder I didn't die." She toyed with the pearls, sliding them between her fingers one by one as if she were counting them.

She peered at Georgie and me, her eyes sharp. "When I finally recovered, what happened in the cellar seemed like a dream, a nightmare—not something I'd really done."

I stood in the snow, almost mesmerized by the soft
click, click
of the pearls, and tried to understand what I'd just heard. Miss Lilian hadn't meant to kill us. It was an accident. She'd had a stroke and gone to the hospital. While she was there, unable to speak, we'd died, Georgie and me.

"Why didn't you tell someone when you could talk?" I asked her.

Miss Lilian's hands strayed from her pearls to her hair and then to her dress, smoothing, twitching, tweaking, never still. "What good would it have done? You were dead by then."

"Our parents—" I began, but Miss Lilian interrupted, her voice shrill.

"I would have been arrested. Me—Lilian Eleanora Willis, the daughter of Judge John Willis, the granddaughter of an attorney, the descendant of one of the oldest families in Maryland. Can you imagine the disgrace?"

She touched her hair again, smoothed her dress, opened and shut her mouth, grimacing with the effort of finding the right words. "I lived to be almost one hundred years old," she went on slowly, close to tears now. "Every year was more miserable than the one before. All I wanted was to die and be done with it. But ten years after my death, I'm still here on this farm, as unhappy as ever. No rest, no peace. I've been punished long enough. I want to move on. Its time. Past time."

The old woman took a deep breath and looked toward the empty road beyond the gate, her face filled with longing. The moonlight fell on her gaunt face, darkening her eyes.

"Now you know the truth," she said. "Don't stand there like ninnies. Speak up. Say what must be said. Or, or—" Her voice dwindled and she began to fidget with her pearls again.

Words crowded into my head. I knew what must be said, I knew what must be done. But it wasn't easy.

While Georgie stood there, hugging his bear, I forced myself to take Miss Lilian's hand and look into her eyes. Her hand twitched as if she intended to draw it away, so I held it tighter, pressing the bones in her fingers.

"We've been angry with you for a long time," I told her. "Afraid of you, too. But now I think we must forgive you. And you must forgive us."

Georgie snorted in surprise. "Why does she need to forgive us? What did we ever do to her that she didn't deserve? Everything's been her fault. Even before the bad thing, she was mean."

Without releasing Miss Lilian, I grabbed one of Georgie's hands. "Stop blaming her. She's old. Let it go. All of it. Everything."

Clutching Alfie with his free hand, he tried to pull away, his face sulky. I squeezed his hand. "If we don't forgive each other," I said, "we'll all be here forever. It's the last rule, Georgie. Can't you feel it?"

Georgie didn't look at me or Miss Lilian, but his hand went limp in mine. I watched the anger leave his face. Cautiously I placed his hand in Miss Lilian's. He didn't yank it away. Like Miss Lilian, he stood quietly.

"I'm sorry I locked you in the storeroom," Miss Lilian said to Georgie and me. It cost her a lot of effort to add, "And before—I shouldn't have treated you the way I did. Even though you—"

"I'm sorry I teased you and took your things," I said quickly, before she ruined her apology.

For a moment Georgie didn't speak. I squeezed his hand again, worried he was about to doom us to an eternity at Oak Hill Manor.

"I'm sorry, too," he finally managed. But he didn't look at Miss Lilian. He held Alfie tightly, as if he expected the old woman to snatch the bear away.

The farm was still. No owl hooted, no fox barked, no wind stirred the trees. Beyond the fence, the highway was deserted. Something was about to happen. We could sense it in the silence.

Slowly the moonlight brightened. It cast ink-black shadows across the brilliant snow. Half blinded, we drew closer together, unsure, a little afraid.

"Diana," Georgie whispered. "Look."

He pointed at the road. Two people walked slowly toward us, their faces indistinct, their forms shadowy despite the blinding light. Georgie pressed himself against me, and Miss Lilian held my hand tighter.

"Who are they?" Georgie asked. "What do they want?"

"It's Mother," I whispered, "and Daddy. They've come for us at last."

Georgie and I broke away from Miss Lilian and shoved the gate open. We ran out into the road, free at last from the farm and its rules.

Mother and Daddy hurried toward us, calling our names, eager to hold us once more. Georgie sprinted ahead. As he flung himself at Mother, I heard Miss Lilian cry, "Don't leave me! Take me with you!"

I came to a sudden stop halfway between the gate and my parents and looked back. The old woman stood at the edge of the light, her arms stretched out to Mother and Daddy. "Please," she cried, "please, forgive me."