The Clarrington Heritage Page 6

  This was better than watching, for the old couple who owned the house had nothing much to do to occupy their days. Each tenant was responsible for his own housekeeping arrangements, so the two discussed every person walking down the street. Most local automobiles were intimately known, for Myrtle was a cul-de-sac, and each one that moved along the street was described, its possible destination surmised, and its driver dissected as to character, profession, and possible flaws.

  Sitting in the grim room he had rented, he had heard his landlady tell her husband, “The Trustee is late this month. He usually goes to see the Widow about the tenth, and here it is the twelfth and he hasn’t been yet. I just know she doesn’t eat enough, there alone. That boy hasn’t come with her groceries, either. You don’t suppose she’s died in there, all by herself, do you?”

  “Now, Ellie, if she had we’d have seen some kind of activity going on. They’ve got to check on her regularly, and we’d have seen police cars or an ambulance, I’m sure and certain. No, she’s all right. And don’t think about going over there to inquire about her health. You remember how short she cut you off the last time.”

  The cracked voice said, “Well, I still think it’d be the neighborly thing to do. You know, she’s still a handsome woman, or was a year ago. It’s odd, because you’d think that living alone like she does she’d let herself go. But no, she’s still got the figure of a girl. Her hair’s the prettiest pale blond, clean and shiny, though all done up in a knot on top of her head.

  “She doesn’t wear a smidge of makeup, but I have to admit she doesn’t need it. Skin like cream. You’d think all she went through would have left her looking like a beat-up old woman, but it hasn’t. Makes you wonder....”

  “Ellie, if the police and the District Attorney and the sheriff, all together, couldn’t find any reason to suspect her, you know damn well there was nothing to suspect. Let it alone. The poor woman has lost everybody she ever had and didn’t even have any kin of her own.

  “I don’t blame her a mite for just shutting herself in and letting the world go to hell. I’d like to do the same myself, from time to time, if I could afford to.”

  At that point they moved away and left him to ponder what he had heard. So she still looked the same, did she? And she was still forthright to the point of bluntness.

  That was interesting. Eventually, she was going to make his long wait worth while. If, of course, he ever found a way to get into that solid stone fortress of hers.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Father Clarrington’s Study

  As Marise moved about the house on her regular cleaning rounds, she found herself assaulted continually by bits and pieces of the past. No matter how securely she bolted the doors of her mind, from time to time a sudden glimpse of a room, the odor of leather or lemon polish or disinfectant could send her back in an instant, into those grim years that followed Hannibal’s death.

  At least once a year she cleaned faithfully, from the rooms that had been used on the third floor, right down to the basement. The first floor took most of her time, for she used the kitchen and the library, and she liked to keep the parlor nice for the Trustee’s visits, as well as the monthly deliveries of the young clerk who brought her supplies. She always served them cookies and tea or coffee there.

  The second floor was not quite as well kept, and she frequently felt guilty about that. When cleaning there, she always began with Father Clarrington’s room, for it still felt like home to her. She had sat there with him every day, after his stroke. She read to him, wrote letters to his old associates, clients, or distant kin, took notes for the guidance of the Trust that was assuming partial control of Clarrington Enterprises.

  The corporation was too much for Ben, even with her help. She had turned over much of the management of the farm to a young ag school graduate she had hired soon after taking over, though she still kept the overall planning firmly in her own hands. But the Trust managed the business end of the corporation, leaving Ben free to work with his beloved trees.

  Days and weeks and months overlapped in that room. Every time she went into it she was assaulted with many images. Father Clarrington sitting in the deep chair, smiling as she brought Benjie in for a morning visit, before Hannibal’s death brought the stroke and devastating old age upon the old man. The high bed they had installed to make caring for him easier still sat in its corner. So many things....

  * * * *

  She’d tapped lightly on the white-painted door. “Come in,” he said, his tone thin and light as that of a ghost. “Oh, Daughter, come sit beside me and talk a bit. I’ve worn out my patience with my book.

  “Don’t let them bring me any more bestsellers, will you? Those idiots can’t write! To somebody who cut his teeth on Faulkner and Wolfe, this is nothing but drivel. I have no interest in the personal problems of a brainless advertising executive.”

  She laughed as she took the abused book. “I do agree. I’ll bring you Watership Down. That’s one of your favorites, even if it bears no resemblance whatsoever to Faulkner. Or perhaps it does, in a way.” She had a sudden thought.

  “Would you like to reread Dickens? I think he might suit your mood, for he had such a gritty sense of people and the world they lived in.”

  He reached for her hand and his thin fingers tightened about it. His black eyes, gazing up from a pillow that was only just paler than his face, thanked her for her cheerfulness and apologized wordlessly for his predicament. Neither spoke, but he managed a smile.

  She had gone away to pick out a stack of books to amuse him; most of those she read aloud to him, when he became too weak to hold them in his trembling hands. She’d been reading aloud on the day Benjie went exploring onto the third floor.

  The child’s light steps hadn’t broken into her concentration, but her father-in-law seemed to have preternatural senses when it came to that part of the house. He broke into her reading. “Marri, someone has gone up the stair and down the third floor corridor. I think it must be Benjie. Will you look?” He was paper-white.

  “I don’t want him to come to any harm, and I don’t want him troubled by...anything out of the past. Besides, the floor is getting to be spongy up there. Hildy told me.”

  She dropped her book and hurried up to see. She had no wish for her son to ask any questions about that unused part of the house, any more than her father-in-law had wanted it when she asked for herself. The thought of the horror story he told her still haunted her at times, though her sound and sturdy child belied any hint of abnormality.

  Whatever happened in the last generation but one was over and done with, she was certain. But still she wanted no dark memories dredged up from the past.

  Marise peered down the corridor, which was dark, because the bulbs were out in the tulip lamps that should have lit it and the draperies were closed over the window at the far end past the angle. No small figure was to be seen. That meant Benjie, if it was he, had gone down the cross passage, and she had never been down that way.

  Hildy’s warnings and her own promise had kept her from exploring this part of the house, particularly after she heard the old tales. She dreaded the thought of her bright, sunny-natured child poking about in those musty depths.

  Marise hurried over the dusty carpet without looking at the doors on either side. The cross passage went the depth of a single room to her right, and she checked that before examining the long leg of the passage to the left. At the end of the way she could see movement, almost invisible in the shadows.

  “Benjie?” she called. She moved toward the small shape in the shadows. “Come to Mama, dear. You shouldn’t be up here alone. Hildy says there are spiders.”

  He came, but very slowly, stopping once to look back at the door that was part of the dead end of the corridor.

  “Come on, Sweetheart. We’ll go visit Grampa. He was asking for you.” She held out her hand.

  He
moved then, rushing along the passage to bump his head against her side like a young calf. “It’s dark up here, Mama. Why do they keep the curtain closed? Why are all the doors locked? It’s sort of scary up here.”

  She gathered him against her in a hug. “You are getting tall,” she said. “Well, Ben, we don’t need all these rooms. It would cost a lot of money to fix them up and keep them clean. What would be the use of doing that, just to please a lot of spiders and mice?

  “Nobody wants to look at dusty carpets and cobwebby ceilings, so we keep the curtains closed so they won’t show if anyone comes up so far. See?” She was rather proud of her spur-of-the-moment invention.

  That had seemed to be the end of it, yet something about her son’s visit to those forbidden passages had disturbed her and given her nightmares that lasted, intermittently, for years afterward. Indeed, they had recurred until the ultimate horror that ended it all.

  She shook herself and returned to the present to take up her dust mop. The hospital bed loomed against the wall, and she ran the mop along the edge of the hardwood flooring beneath it. A thin coat of dust had settled there since her last visit. But she still felt chilled, for the thought of her nightmare persisted.

  The first night after her son’s climb to the third floor she had dreamed hideous things. A voice, distant but very clear, had spoken to her. Hideous things. Hateful, hating words.

  “You don’t belong here,” it had said. “I will not have you here! I tried to show you that, when you first came, and you didn’t understand. This is my family. This is my house. You are an intruder, an outsider. You’re not a Clarrington, with your fair hair and blue eyes.

  “Even Hildy makes a fuss over you, and Father and Mother Clarrington do, too. Ben does, and Hannibal did. Oh, yes, Hannibal did! But I fixed him, or made him fix himself, which is the same thing.”

  The voice had gone on and on, thin and whining and terrifying, while she had struggled to wake. But she hadn’t been able to, try as she might. The worst had come at the end of that nightmare.

  “I’ll get the child. I like children. You can’t take him with you when you go, but you will, oh, you will go!”

  At last she was able to shake off sleep and get to her feet, there in the round bedroom she shared with Ben. He slept deeply, exhausted by his hard work in the woods and the mills. But she stood there, soaked with sweat in her damp nightgown, listening. She strained to hear, as if she might go on hearing that demonic voice, even while awake.

  Strangely enough, even at the time she had not felt fear. It had not been one of those dreams that makes you afraid of falling asleep again because it might continue. No, she had been angry.

  Nobody, real or imaginary, was going to force her out of her home and away from the family that had become hers as truly as if she had been born into it. And nobody was going to get her child!

  She had gone back to sleep quite peacefully and dreamed no more that night. But it had returned with some regularity from then onward. For years it came intermittently, leaving her angry every time. It had come, she remembered, on the night before Father Clarrington died.

  She’d been reading aloud that evening, with Benjie tucked up in her lap, though he was getting to be a bit large for her to hold. He had been seven, already in school, but he still loved to sit and listen to Shakespeare and Dickens and Thoreau, while she read to his Grampa.

  It had been a warm evening, and the windows were open. Though he had become very weak, Father Clarrington had seemed to feel rather well, his eyes twinkling at the funny passages. He had reached out, from time to time, to touch his grandson’s bare knee.

  They read until Ben came in from the woods. Then she kissed the old man good night and took Benjie away to his room. After that she went to take Ben’s late supper out of the warming oven, for Hildy tired more easily, now, and she needed more and more help with her work.

  Ben was in high spirits. The mills were busy, and his theories on replanting the selectively cut forests were proving to be sound ones. The two of them had talked far into the night and they fell asleep at last, between sentences.

  But after a few hours she waked. This was not a dream, she felt certain, though nobody ever seemed to believe it afterward. The voice was there, that same hateful voice and the same hateful words.

  This time Marise was not disoriented with sleep. She knew someone was speaking to her, standing on the landing outside her sitting room door. There had been no doubt in her mind as she threw on a robe and clattered down the six steps into the round room below.

  It took a moment to unfasten the bolt on the door, but she hurried as much as possible. Yet when she looked out into the dim-lit stairway, there was no one in sight. She stood there, panting, shaking with fury, and listened intently. Perhaps it had been at that point her mind began playing tricks on her.

  She did not sleep well the rest of that night. Something besides the abrupt waking troubled her, and she rose early, leaving Ben to sleep late. Hildy, too, was late, so Marise prepared breakfast for herself.

  As Hildy still didn’t appear, she made those for the rest of the household, too, putting food for Mother Clarrington and Miss Edenson into the warming oven. Then she took the tray with milk toast, weak tea, and jam and went up the stair to Father Clarrington’s door.

  Her tap was not answered, so she opened the door gently to see if he was still asleep. At first she thought he was.

  “Father? Are you awake? I’ve brought your breakfast,” she had whispered.

  Setting the tray carefully on the bedside table, she turned and bent over the still shape on the bed. His eyes were closed, quite peacefully, and one pale hand lay outside the covers. She could see the tracks of needles marking the thin arm, and she thought of all the shots she had given him for his pain. The cyanosis dyeing his skin was clear.

  Tears came to her eyes, and she pulled the sheet over his face before realizing that this unattended death must be investigated by the Coroner. So she put things back as they were and stepped back.

  This time she behaved like a professional. No vaporings, no numbness, as she had experienced with Hannibal’s death. Yet the pain was no less real. And she knew she must call Ben at once.

  He had been devastated. She had known how close he felt to his father, but she hadn’t quite realized the depth of his feeling, particularly since Ben lost his brother. Yet her husband pulled himself together, called the doctor, the coroner, and did everything right. All the time she could see him bleeding quietly inside.

  Together, they went to see his mother, which had been the most painful thing she had ever had to do, up to that time. As they moved up the stair, Ben touched her shoulder.

  “Did you give Dad a shot last night?”

  She thought backward. Sometimes it was hard to recall whether she remembered if it had been that night or a week ago, so regular was the routine. Then she called to mind the chart, which she kept as meticulously as if she had been working in a hospital.

  “No,” she said. “He seemed to be fairly free of pain, for once, and I just gave him his sleeping pill. No shot. Why do you ask?”

  “I found this on the floor. I almost stepped on it, in fact. Is it the kind you’ve been using?” He held out a syringe with a disposable barrel, still attached. There was the residue of something sticking inside the barrel.

  Marise took it and held it to the nearest lamp. “It’s an extra from the cabinet,” she said. “I always dispose of the empties after I use one. With a child in the house, it’s the only safe thing to do.” Then the impact of his question hit her.

  “Ben, nobody could have...would have....”

  He was pale, his black eyes burning. “There’s something we must talk over, later. I didn’t think it would ever be necessary, but now I know better. There is someone who would and could, if there was an opportunity.” He groaned softly and put his arm about her shoulders
.

  “We should have told you, right off. We just hoped...like a bunch of ostriches. We hoped the problem would never come to light or that it would...go away. You’ll understand later, when I tell you.”

  Miss Edenson had just finished brushing Elizabeth Clarrington’s hair for the morning, and the invalid was sitting upright in her own hospital bed, her back propped, her knees elevated to help her circulation. She looked like a doll that some child had arranged and then gone away and forgotten.

  When she looked toward the door and saw the two of them coming, she went even paler than usual. Edenson’s glance followed her patient’s, and the nurse went quickly to the woman’s side and turned to face them. She seemed ready to protect her charge from some sort of attack.

  “Mother.” Ben took her hand and touched her hair. Then he looked questioningly at the nurse. “Mother, I have something sad to tell you. Dad’s gone. In the night.

  “Marise found him just a few minutes ago, when she took his breakfast in. We’ve called everyone necessary, and you don’t have to worry about anything except staying well yourself.”

  Elizabeth Clarrington closed her eyes tightly for a long moment. Then she opened them and said, “Was it a...natural death?”

  Marise jumped. That was a strange question, knowing how ill the old man had been for so long. It was not a question she would have expected from her mother-in-law, particularly at such a time.

  Ben’s answer was even more of a shock. “I don’t think so, Mother. I found a needle on the floor. There was something still in the barrel, and I’m going to have Mark get somebody in the lab to analyze it.”

  Mrs. Clarrington let out a ragged breath that sounded almost like a death rattle. “I’ve known for years she could get out, Ben. Not always, and we never knew exactly how she manages to, but she does get out.