The Seeker: A Mystery at Walden Pond Page 14

  “And the boy, Patrick? Do you like him, too?”

  “Not in the same way.” I didn’t mind her curiosity about my life. She’d been cheated out of hers. Why not share a little? “Patrick is fun. Joe is serious. There are days when I’m lonely, and I just want to laugh and feel good.”

  “I know how that feels.” All life drained from her face. “I’m lonely all the time. Until you came.”

  I had the strangest urge to comfort her. She might be a ghost with too much knowledge, but she was also a little girl who’d died before her life had even begun. “I tried to befriend you at Walden. You ran away.”

  “I couldn’t be certain what you’d do if you realized what I am. I’ve tried so many times over the years and failed. People are afraid of me, but you’re a special person, Aine.”

  “I had a lonely childhood, so I can empathize.”

  “You want a child, don’t you?”

  She had the uncanny ability to read me. “Maybe once I get my doctorate.”

  “You want a little girl. Like me. A blonde.” Her smile hinted at things she shouldn’t know.

  “No. A boy.” I spoke too quickly.

  “No, you don’t. You want a girl. To replace the one you killed.”

  Her words ripped at me. I raised my hands in self-defense. How did she know? She couldn’t know. It was impossible. Even if she was a ghost, she’d have no way to know my personal history.

  “It’s okay, silly,” Mischa said. “You were only a kid. You couldn’t have a baby. Everyone knows that.”

  My hand found the latch and I eased it open. Before she could protest, I yanked the door open and ran out into the darkness. Stumbling over a loose board on the porch, I hurtled into the snow. I went down on my knees and scrambled to my feet, lurching forward, gasping for air.

  When I turned back to look at the little shack, I could see the glow of the oil lamp through the open door. The day had disappeared, and while I’d been inside the shack with Mischa, night, so perfectly still and silent, had slipped over me. I’d lost hours of time.

  Standing alone in the woods I could hear the snow falling. I’d never felt the world so hushed and shut down. Had I been inside the cabin at all? Standing knee-deep in snow, I couldn’t be certain. I couldn’t even find my footprints. The snow obliterated them.

  The light visible through the open door, though, reassured me that I hadn’t imagined the encounter. I hadn’t. She was in there. A little dead girl’s spirit. An angry child who had every right to be furious. Someone had taken her life, stolen her future. She knew things she shouldn’t, but perhaps that was a compensation to the dead for all the pleasures of life they’d never know again. I couldn’t run away from her. She held the answers about my aunt. Answers I needed.

  Even though I didn’t want to, I shook off the snow and started back to the porch.

  Without warning, the door slammed shut.

  25

  When I made it to Route 126, the major road skirting the forested land around Walden Pond, I knew I was in serious trouble. Within a few minutes of leaving the cabin, I was lost. Somehow I managed to stumble in the right direction.

  I’d thought finding 126 would solve my problems, but that wasn’t the case. Once I reached the ribbon of clearing that had to be the road, I got a better picture of what I faced. Everything familiar had vanished under a covering of soundless white. Heavy clouds obscured the starlight and the white cold obliterated my senses. It seemed I’d gone deaf and mute and blind. I was completely alone. Everyone with good sense was indoors. There would be no passing cars, no help from strangers. I was stranded in a world absent of everything except snow.

  My years in Kentucky hadn’t prepared me for this kind of snowfall. I’d been a fool to wander so far away from town, and I had no explanation for what had happened to the daylight hours. It had been afternoon and then night. Granny Siobhan had taught me to read the clouds and hear the whisper of the leaves. Mother Earth gave warnings of her intentions for those who listened. I’d witnessed the pregnant sky, swollen and gray, and the jittery warning of the wind in the trees—and hardheadedly pursued my own agenda. No matter that I’d assumed I could call for help—a cab or Joe or Patrick. My cell phone was useless. I’d ignored nature’s plentiful signals and continued on, driven by the unsolved murder of a child.

  Not an innocent child. She might have been naïve once, but Mischa Lobrano was far from blameless now. Death had taught her many things a young girl shouldn’t know. And at least one trick. She possessed a keen ability to read the past. My past. How, I wasn’t certain. All I knew was that she could discern my secrets. That was not a comfortable thing for me.

  The snow piled up to mid-thigh and I floundered forward, afraid to stand in one place too long. I’d heard it said that people who were caught outside during blizzards often grew too weary to keep moving. They were found curled in a ball in the snow, dead. They gave in to weariness, to the desperate need to stop and sleep.

  Would that be such a terrible death? It sounded peaceful enough. The cold was biting, but that wouldn’t last long. Numbness would set in. Already the cold pulled at me, promising a rest would refresh me. But I remembered Pauley Cahill, a cousin who got lost hunting in the mountains during a frigid February.

  That winter had been an anomaly. The snow had come down fast and thick, like now. Pauley was an experienced woodsman. All of the Cahill boys were taught to hunt and kill before grade school. Pauley knew his way around the forest, but he’d slipped and sprained his ankle. Unable to do anything more than hobble, he’d gone as far as he could and then curled up under an overhanging rock to rest and wait for help.

  When they found him, he was almost dead. They should have let him die. They took his feet above the ankles. A week later, they severed his hands just below the elbows. He lost both ears and his nose. What was left of Pauley was barely human, and he burned with a fury more terrifying than his noseless face over what had been taken from him by the cold. He was in charge of making sure the Oxy buyers paid their bills. He showed slackers the same compassion the cold had shown him.

  That image got me moving. Pumping my legs as hard as I could, my feet slipped off the edge of the blacktop and I nearly twisted my ankle, which would have been a harsh irony.

  The landscape ended ten feet in front of me in a curtain of white. It was impossible to see anything. The inn was a good three miles away, and without landmarks I couldn’t be sure I was moving in the right direction. It would take everything I had to get there, but the alternative was to stop and freeze to death. The denim pants I wore were soaked and icy. I pushed myself forward, thinking about the little girl in the cabin.

  Mischa Lobrano, if that was who she really was. She’d never answered my question about her name. In fact, she’d told me nothing about herself, and she knew a lot about me that no one should.

  My abortion was a secret I’d shared with no one except the father, Bryson Cappett, and he hadn’t told anyone. I’d been a kid. Sixteen, away at boarding school without anyone who cared about me. The girls at school hated me. They took every opportunity to show it, too. Bryson was the best-looking and most popular boy at school. When he asked me out, I thought it was a joke. I figured Kimmie, one of the popular girls who made it a point to torment me, had put him up to it to humiliate me. I declined his offers of dinner, skating, hockey games, and parties.

  He worked on me relentlessly for three weeks, telling me that he was sorry the other girls were so mean, that he thought I was beautiful, and that he liked my accent and how it made me unique. He was kind and gentle and interested in me, and he made it clear that I was his number one priority.

  Three months later he was telling me how much of a stupid hick I was because I hadn’t been on the pill. It had never occurred to him that I wouldn’t know enough to use protection because I’d never needed it—until him.

  Struggling against the snow, my stomach cramped at the memory of the whole sordid mess. I’d been such a rube. I’d
swallowed his lies and basked in his compliments. He made me feel so special. And I’d given in to his demands for sex, not because I couldn’t control myself, but because I was afraid if I didn’t let him, I would lose him.

  Who would have thought a privileged young man with cars and boats and money for entertainment would wage such a long and single-focused campaign to have sex with a girl he didn’t even like?

  In the end, abortion was the only answer. If I’d gone home pregnant, it would have broken Granny’s heart, and my unbalanced relatives would have hunted Bryson down and killed him. He wasn’t worth that price.

  Also, if my pregnancy had become public knowledge, I would have been kicked out of school. So would Bryson, which is why he gave me the money for the abortion and kept his mouth shut about the pregnancy. A week later, he was killed in a skiing accident.

  I never told a single soul. Not one. And Bryson wasn’t a fool. He’d died with my woeful past untold.

  Yet Mischa knew. A child dead for years knew my darkest secret.

  The puzzle was so intriguing, I wanted to sit down and reason it through. I couldn’t figure it out while I was slogging through the snow. It required too much energy to walk and think. If I could rest for a little while, I would be stronger.

  The temptation to take a breather, even for a moment, was great, but I beat it down. I would die in this snowfall and never understand who had killed Mischa or how she knew my secrets. A part of me didn’t care, but another rebelled. I couldn’t just quit. I had to keep fighting.

  Far in the distance I heard a motor. I remembered the racket of the trucks my male cousins drove, glasspack mufflers echoing across the valleys so that it was impossible to tell if they were near or far away. The snow had something of that effect.

  Or perhaps it was just an aural mirage, a manifestation of my desperate need to hear help on the way.

  My foot slipped and I landed facedown into the snow. My feet were completely numb, my leather boots worse than useless. Needles of pain prickled my feet and lower legs. How much easier it would be to stay down, just for a little while.

  The vehicle seemed closer. I forced my body up to my knees and turned around. Headlights approached, and the noise of a big motor reverberated off the snow. Not a car but a snowplow. As it crept forward, the blade scooping, rolling, and parting the snow, the danger struck me. If I didn’t stand up and move, I’d be buried by manmade snow mountains. I struggled to my feet.

  “Aine!”

  I continued to thrash away from the dangerous machine.

  “Aine Cahill.” A hand gripped my shoulder.

  I spun to confront Will McKinney. His mouth, moustache, and nose were covered by a muffler, but I recognized his eyes beneath a heavy winter hat. “What in the hell are you doing out here?” he asked.

  “Freezing,” I replied.

  He hustled me toward the snowplow, but my feet refused to work properly. I couldn’t make them move. He picked me up and carried me to the cab. In a moment I was sitting in the passenger seat with hot air blowing over me. Funny, but it was colder in the heated cab than outside.

  “You could have died from hypothermia,” he said when he was behind the wheel. “Do you realize how lucky you are that I came along? I don’t normally run the plow, but the snow came down so hard and fast we didn’t have time to get emergency crews in.”

  I closed my eyes and my head flopped against the seat. I could hear him, but I didn’t care what he said. There were no answers to explain what had happened to me at the cabin in the woods. I didn’t care. I only wanted to sleep.

  26

  My recollection of the next few days was limited. Strange dream images tormented me, and I remembered struggling against the heavy covers, pushing them aside from my sweating body, only to take a chill and beg for warmth. I didn’t know the people caring for me, and I cried out for Granny Siobhan and even for my father.

  Joe was there at times. And Patrick. And women who bathed my forehead with cold cloths and forced medicine into me, even when I fought them. They told me their names, but I couldn’t remember.

  At times, I sauntered along the green-canopied trails of the Kentucky mountains. Sunlight warmed me, and I could hear the gurgle of a running creek. The beauty of my surroundings saddened me, and I couldn’t remember why I’d left.

  Other times, I was in the forest at Walden Pond. I saw the blond child. She watched me from the safety of the thick trees. “I know your secrets,” she said. “I know all the things you wish to hide.” Her dark eyes seemed to absorb the light. “I know things you wish to know.”

  “Who killed you?” I asked her. “Tell me.”

  “I know secrets,” she said. She taunted me and darted away whenever I tried to talk to her.

  I woke up, a swimmer held underwater and struggling for air, with two strong hands holding me down in the bed.

  “For god’s sakes, let’s take her to the hospital.”

  I recognized Joe’s voice. I tried to reach for him, to put my hands on his face, but he grabbed my wrists and held them so tightly that my fingertips went numb. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t feel my feet. Had they been amputated? For a moment the dream blizzard howled around me. I saw the blackened lumps that had once been my feet. Frostbite. They had taken them off.

  No matter how I screamed and thrashed, I couldn’t get away. Exhausted, I drifted into sleep.

  Dorothea told me my fever spiked on Thanksgiving Day at 104.5. Afterward, I began to feel better and think more clearly, and was greatly relieved that all of my limbs were intact. I realized the women caring for me were nurses monitoring drips and medicines prescribed by Dr. Wells, who had visited me several times each day. Instead of sending me to the hospital, Dorothea had taken it upon herself to make sure I had the best medical care. She and Joe and Patrick and her friends.

  “You were like a woman possessed,” Dorothea said as she fed me chicken soup after she’d helped me into clean pajamas. “We had to hold you in the bed. You were all upside down about some girl in the woods. You kept talking to her, asking who killed her. You were convinced she knew secrets and you had to ask her questions.”

  I watched her expression and saw no sign that I’d blurted out my past. “It was a dream,” I said. “What else did I say?”

  “Most of it was gibberish. You cried for your grandmother. And your dad. And you talked about Kentucky. I think you’re a little homesick, Aine. Do you want me to call anyone for you?”

  “No. There’s no one to call. Granny is dead, and my dad too. He had a strong fondness for the whiskey. Took out his liver. The males in my family tend to die young, either from drink or dangerous miscalculations.”

  Dorothea closed her eyes and her lips moved.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, concerned by her strange conduct.

  “Just saying a prayer of thanks for you, girl. You scared me. I was afraid you might not come back, but you sound like your old wicked self.” Dorothea put the backs of her fingers against my cheek. Her cool hand felt wonderful. “I should call Joe. He sat with you during the nights. He’ll be relieved to hear you’re coherent.”

  “How long have I been sick?” Looking out the window, I saw snow on the ground and bright sun.

  “Two days.” She smoothed the covers. “You missed Thanksgiving, but I saved turkey and dressing for you.”

  I tried to sit up. “It’s Friday?” I’d gone to Yerby Lane on Tuesday. I’d lost two complete days.

  “It is indeed. You’ve missed nothing except acres of snow, so don’t try to jump out of bed. You need to get your strength back.”

  Panic flooded over me at the thought of all the things I hadn’t done. For all practical purposes, I’d lost a week of work on my dissertation. “Would you hand me my computer?”

  “Aine, you need to rest.” She offered the soup to me so I could feed myself. “What were you doing so far from the inn? Chief McKinney said he had no idea where you’d come from.”

  Though I wasn’t hun
gry, I focused on the soup while I tried to compose an answer. She wouldn’t be the only person asking that question. Had any of the events really occurred, or was I already sick, my imagination fevered, before I found the shack and the child?

  “I was looking for a building where an artist used to live.”

  “Out off Yerby Lane?” Dorothea’s expression said it all.

  “Roger Brent. Have you ever heard of him?” Dorothea knew the merchants of the town, she might know the artists.

  She took the soup that had grown cold and placed the tray on my desk. Her back was to me when she answered. “I never heard of a Roger Brent, and I can tell you there’s been no one living on Yerby Lane for the past fifty years. How did you come upon his name?”

  I told her about the shopkeeper. I almost showed her the scrimshaw tooth, but the tooth was between Mischa and me. Perhaps it was nothing more than a lure to get me to Yerby Lane. But it might also be a clue.

  “So that’s what you were doing way out there. Why didn’t you call me or Patrick to come after you?” She sat in a chair someone had placed beside my bed.

  “No cell phone reception. And the snow started coming like someone had unzipped the clouds. It got bad before I realized it. By then, there wasn’t anything to do except start walking.”

  Dorothea picked up my hand and held it between her own. “What did you hope to find, Aine?”

  “Evidence of what happened to Mischa Lobrano.”

  Dorothea reeled back in shock. “What kind of evidence?”

  “Of who might have harmed her.”

  “You think this artist, this Roger Brent, is responsible for Mischa’s disappearance?” Hope lit her features. “No one even brought up his name in the investigation. What makes you suspect him?”

  Caution ruled my answer. The tooth was impossible for me to explain. What if Mischa had stolen it from the museum? I would look like the guilty party. No one would believe a dead girl had committed theft and I somehow ended up with the stolen object.