The Seeker: A Mystery at Walden Pond Page 16

  “You’re leaving?” He couldn’t leave. He’d only just arrived.

  “I’m upset and you’re still recovering. I think it’s best if I go. I’ll be by tomorrow.”

  I grasped his hand. “Don’t go. Please.”

  His gaze met mine and then slid away. “I bring trouble to people. Look at Karla.”

  “She’s dead because she was a drug addict. I grew up around them, which is why I don’t have much sympathy. Their whole world becomes finding the next fix. They don’t care who they use or hurt or destroy, and they view those who care about them as marks and victims.”

  For an answer, he drew me into his arms and held me tight. For the longest time, we stood there in silence.

  By Saturday at noon, the snow was melting and the sun warmed the day to a cozy forty-two. I bundled up and went into town. My first purchase was a pair of waterproof boots. My second was another rental car. In five minutes I was coasting out of town toward Walden.

  The park was closed. Crime-scene tape blocked the entrance, a deterrent to the curious. And to me. Karla and I had exchanged blows. She’d managed to taint the very core of my thesis, Walden Pond. Now I couldn’t afford to be seen poking around the murder site. I slowly turned around.

  Joe had gleaned some details of the murder investigation, and I learned that Karla had been struck in the head with a blunt instrument, probably a hammer. She’d lain in the snow until Thanksgiving Day, when she’d been discovered by a hiker walking his dog. They estimated the time of death was Tuesday.

  Though I wanted to, I didn’t duck under the tape and examine the scene. McKinney hadn’t asked me any more questions about Karla, and Joe wasn’t forthcoming with a lot of detail. Patrick, though, was a wonderful source. Dorothea was hooked into the gossip vine in Concord, and Patrick knew what she knew.

  The police hadn’t found the murder weapon, which made the law officers view the killing as premeditated. Who went to a nature retreat with a hammer? Not likely to be an erstwhile carpenter. If the murderer took the weapon into the woods with him, then he meant to hit someone. There was a tool shed behind the replica of Thoreau’s cabin, and the hammer could have come from there, but Joe didn’t know, and he looked uncomfortable when I asked, so I dropped it.

  The police hadn’t ascertained why Karla was in the woods. That was a question demanding an answer. Judging from appearances, Karla wasn’t the kind of girl who enjoyed a woodland romp or went looking for bugs or birds. She was scoring drugs if she was doing anything. I could only hope McKinney would turn his investigation toward her supplier and the criminals in her life.

  Catching up to the speed of traffic, I merged onto 126 and drove toward Yerby Lane. This time I wouldn’t be caught on foot. This time I would be smarter. I didn’t expect Mischa to be there waiting on me. The very idea made my stomach flutter and my mouth go dry. If she was, at least I could make a getaway in the car. But she wouldn’t be there, and I could examine the old shack. Strange, but I couldn’t remember anything about the décor or what was in it. Not a single detail except the lamp on the table, the way it had glowed so brightly just before the door slammed and locked me out in the freezing weather.

  I couldn’t drive all the way to the shack, so when the path narrowed too much, I left the car and set off walking in my new heavy-duty boots. The snowmelt had made the ground slippery, and I took my time. In truth, I was apprehensive. What if she was still there? An underlying malevolence made me fear her. Perhaps she was merely a little girl angry that her life had been cut short. I’d read and heard stories of unhappy ghosts who lingered for revenge or to guard something they cherished, and some poor confused souls who simply died so abruptly they hadn’t been able to adjust to their own deaths. Mischa was angry. And she could crawl inside my head and my past. Those were dangerous talents. The possibility that she was something more than a disgruntled spirit couldn’t be ignored.

  Mud sucked at the soles of my boots as the path became little more than a deer trail through the trees. That I’d found my way out of there in the snow was a miracle. Slogging forward, at last I came to the small clearing. I stood for a long time, unable to comprehend what I saw.

  The small cabin, or what had once been a cabin, was completely destroyed. The roof had fallen in and the tiny front porch I remembered was wrecked. When I forced my way onto the porch, I used extreme caution. On the third step, the boards gave way and I almost fell. The front door was askew, and I lunged into it, pushed it inward, and peeked through the crack.

  Dirt and water covered everything. Leaves had blown in through the roof and littered the small table that centered the room. A filthy lamp sat upon the table. Beside the fireplace where sunlight pierced through chinks in the bricks was a worn rocker. Teetering on the rotted boards that had once been a floor, I looked around in disbelief. This wasn’t the cabin I had been in. I remembered the way the lamplight reflected on the soft shine of the wooden walls. These walls were planks of unfinished lumber. Rough, rotted in places.

  Relief that I’d told no one about being inside the cabin was my first reaction. If Chief McKinney or Joe had come here to search, they would have thought me a complete liar. Whatever else the child was, she had the ability to create a cocoon of her own making around her. And she’d pulled me in, letting me see what she’d wanted me to see.

  My fingers sought the scrimshaw tooth in the pocket of my jacket. The temptation to hurl it was strong. Best to be rid of the evidence. Either I was losing my mind or this strange child had bewitched me.

  Fear struck hard, squeezing my heart until I thought it might rupture. When I calmed enough to breathe, I leaped from the porch and ran back toward the car. I wouldn’t be tricked again by the child or Karla or anyone else.

  28

  The temperature rose, and the drip, drip of melting ice accompanied my diligent reading and writing. The books were a sensory delight—the feel and smell, the typography, the binding. One day, if I found the documentation necessary to prove my aunt existed, my dissertation would be bound, a physical reality.

  I reread all of Thoreau’s essays and his daily account of life at Walden Pond. I linked the influence of Emerson and Bronson Alcott to Thoreau’s meditations. The economy of the mid-1800s impacted Thoreau tremendously. What had once been deep woods was now open fields and clear-cut abandoned lands. The forest had fallen to the axe as the town of Concord grew. This ravishment of the natural world was like a wound for Thoreau. I understood. I’d seen the same things with coal mining in the Appalachians, the destruction of forests and creeks, the pollution that washed down streams, sickening everything it touched.

  I made a timeline of the two years, two months, and two days Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, and I penciled in what I knew of Bonnie’s life lived in Thoreau’s company. The more points between the two I could match, the better for my thesis.

  While Bonnie often wrote passionately about Thoreau and his daily activities, his writing was impersonal. She gave the tiny domestic details that enriched my picture of their life. He lived only in his head. I wondered if he truly cared for her. No matter how I searched, there was no mention of my relative, or of any relationship. But he also failed to mention how he often ate lunch with his parents in town—an accepted biographical fact and an oversight that spoke of his nature and his unwillingness to share any personal revelations in his writing.

  From what I could deduce, Thoreau and Bonnie lived separate lives, except for the nights they spent together, the walks and discussions Bonnie documented, and the meals they shared in the evenings. I was more than familiar with Bonnie’s essays about soups and bread baked during the cold winter, about her worry over Thoreau’s cough or the long hours he spent tramping around Walden in bad weather.

  During this pass at the material, I avoided Bonnie’s journal. I’d read and reread it numerous times, but I needed to hammer in the pegs of Thoreau’s literary output to see if I could track Bonnie’s presence. So far, I had found no physical evidence to prove h
er existence at Walden Pond—or even in Massachusetts, a fact that gave me terrible anxiety. Because of that, it was up to me to show her influence on Thoreau’s life in his own words.

  None of this would matter, though, if I didn’t get down to work. Completing my dissertation and securing a job for the coming school year was the priority. My near-death experience and the high fever had set me back. Like the snow, weeks had melted and slipped away. I had to complete my research and first draft to meet with my thesis committee in January, only a month away. So I gritted down and worked from the moment I rose until I fell into bed exhausted.

  It wasn’t just work that kept me sequestered. Fear held me captive in the cabin. I left for only one reason—to seek meals at the inn. But never in the dark. In the daylight I could keep my worst anxiety at bay. With my gaze on the ground I could traverse the lane from the cabin to the inn and back. I didn’t look toward the woods.

  At night, though, I knew the child watched me from the edge of the trees. I felt her draw closer. She wanted something from me, but I wasn’t certain what. If I ventured out, she might approach me, so I stayed within the bolted door and got Dorothea to give me curtains for the windows so I could close them. My last encounter with the child, when she’d been willing to let me die in the blizzard, had made me wary of her motives. I’d been more than ready to try to solve her murder, but that hadn’t pleased her. Had angered her, it seemed. Now I only wanted to avoid contact with her.

  Patrick and Dorothea were kind enough to bring supper to me because I pleaded exhaustive work. I’d failed to cool Patrick’s ardor, and he was hurt that I rebuffed his advances. I’d wrongly assumed that once he’d slept with me, he’d tire of “an older woman” and date a girl his own age. Instead, he’d developed a crush that was becoming difficult.

  Joe, too, was busy with his job. Karla’s death troubled him. Though he never spoke of the details, I think he blamed himself. He was also busy hunting for her killer. Several leads on drug dealers hadn’t panned out, but he hadn’t given up and consulted with Chief McKinney whenever he had a new idea.

  On occasion Joe brought takeout, and we shared a bottle of wine and made love with the light of the fireplace dancing on our skins. Those nights I slept soundly. He knew I was afraid of something in the dark night, and while he niggled at the edges of it, he didn’t press too hard. The solidness of his body in my bed, the scent of woods and man he left on the sheets gave me the only moments of peace I could count on.

  The impulse was strong, but I couldn’t tell him about Mischa. It wasn’t fair to burden him with the guilt that might come if he believed the child’s spirit was roaming the area, looking for justice. But at the heart of it, I didn’t trust how he’d take my confession that the ghost of a child long-murdered had dark designs on me, and now I believed that Mischa wanted something from me. She’d singled me out, sought me in the woods at Walden Pond. To what purpose? I couldn’t say, but I had my suspicions.

  I rued the Cahill Curse. I hadn’t grasped the full impact of it, and I was aggravated that Granny Siobhan hadn’t prepared me, choosing instead to pretend that my imagination gave me vivid visions. Bonnie had suffered from it. Now, generations later, I, too, was a seer, a medium, a person who could probe beyond the veil of death. Bonnie’s journals and her life spoke to me because I shared so much with my long-departed relative. My gift, though I didn’t view it as such, had come to me whether I wanted it or not.

  And no one had taught me how to use it properly.

  Granny, doing what she thought best for me, had taught me to repress this ability. But I’d sensed entities in the shadows of Granny Siobhan’s house. Even now, I could recall the woman in a severe dress who wavered in the corner of the parlor beside the old phonograph. I’d described her, from the chestnut bun at the nape of her neck to her black dress and piercing gray eyes. Granny had assured me it was only my imagination, a trick of poor lighting in an old house.

  Roaming the woods, I’d imagined a presence slipping silently between the aspens and poplars. At times, I’d been certain I’d caught sight of a real Indian. Once I’d found a clay bowl crafted with strange symbols in the bottom. It had been left sitting beside a stream where I often played. When I’d suggested that the Indian left it for me, Granny had insisted the water had washed it up from the bed of the stream. She refused to consider any other possibility, and the bowl disappeared.

  When I was nine, I walked home from the store with a tall, bearded man who spoke with a funny accent. Later I saw his photo and learned he was a great-uncle, dead in a shootout with revenuers during a whiskey run.

  “An active imagination” was what Granny said when I’d relate one of my adventures. She’d been worried, though. She kept no pictures of dead relatives out in the open, and she warned my aunts not to encourage me “in such mental foolishness.” She’d wanted to spare me this “second sight,” as some called it. She’d ignored it, hoping that time and boarding school would kill it.

  The result was that I had no clue how to control it. There was only one place where I might find help. Bonnie’s journal. In recent readings, I’d found several passages where she’d hinted at darker spirits. Those troubled me, because I had no recollection of reading them in the past. Had I forgotten them because my dissertation committee would find them irrational? Bonnie’s credibility was vital to my plan. Or was it merely my encounters with Mischa that had opened my eyes to the darker level on which Bonnie wrote?

  I put more wood on the fire and picked up the journal and a thick quilt. I shifted my chair closer to the licking flames. The temperature was rising, but the cabin was cold. Snuggling in the folds of the quilt, I found the passage I sought.

  Late October, evening. Henry has gone into town to dine with his family. He finished surveying Mr. Emerson’s property today, and he carried the maps into Concord to register them. He was proud of his work, happy to have completed the task for his benefactor.

  I am here alone, but not quiet. There are others here. Those who would like to speak but have no voice. I avoid looking to the west when darkness has settled over this small cabin. If I am alone, they gather at the window, looking in, wanting … what? They tap with their cold, dead fingers, and I pretend it is the beaks of birds. At times, I think they merely want my help, to send a message or attend to business left incomplete. There are some, though, who want more. They demand what I cannot give them.

  My mother called them the Sluagh, the spirits of the dead trapped between this world and the next. She said they flew together as a flock of birds. She said to beware if someone was dying and to close all the windows and doors, because they would capture the soul and steal it away.

  At times, when Henry has one of his coughing fits, I’ve heard the tapping of a beak at the west window. When I pulled the curtains back, nothing was there. Still, I am wary. I’ve seen them flitting among the shadowy trees. The child troubles me most. She knows things.

  The journal slipped from my hand and fell to the floor. I remembered the passage about the birds, but the last line hadn’t been there. I’d memorized most of the journal, and those words were new. They hadn’t been there a month before.

  I picked up the book and bent over it, turning it so the light from the fire illuminated the page. I expected to find the ink fresher, the handwriting different. But it was the same fluid script of my aunt, the ink fading slightly with age.

  But the last two sentences hadn’t been there before. I would swear it.

  The fire popped and crackled, and I sat, unmoving. Afraid to even think, because the thoughts that tried to force themselves into my head terrified me.

  At last I closed the journal in my lap. What was this child to my Aunt Bonnie? What was she to me? I wasn’t certain I wanted an answer to those questions. A little girl who spanned the decades, who assumed the identify of a missing child, who watched from the shadow of the woods, who left me alone in the snow to freeze. What did she want?

  My fears spun wildly until di
zziness made me grasp the chair and close my eyes. At last the spinning stopped, and I let the fire flush my cheeks with warmth. Exhaustion was playing tricks on me. I was seeing things in the journal that didn’t exist. It was my imagination, putting my fears on the page as if my Aunt Bonnie had written them.

  I let the journal slide to the floor as weariness held me in its grip. I slumped in the chair. The warmth from the fire was seductive, pulling me toward sleep. What could an hour’s nap hurt? I’d been up since dawn. I was safe in front of the fire, and I allowed myself to yield to unconsciousness.

  In the dream, for I knew I was dreaming, I strolled along a path. Leaves of red and gold filtered down on me, soft and gentle and silent. My feet scuffed through them, making a delicious shushing sound. I could smell a wood fire on the crisp air and it made me hurry. I was headed home toward a table laden with my favorite food.

  As I walked I saw my boots, topped with a fleece collar. Shiny and black. They were expensive. I wore thick tights. My red jacket was snuggly buttoned. From behind a grove of aspen, a young girl stepped out. She, too, wore a plaid skirt and red jacket. She came toward me. “Want to play?” she asked.

  “I’m going home. I’m hungry.”

  “You should play with me.”

  “My mother is waiting.” I was afraid, though I didn’t know why. No one else was near. I was alone in the woods with this other girl. She stepped toward me.

  “You should play with me.”

  I backed away. She stepped forward. The hood of her jacket concealed her eyes, but not her blond hair, which fell nearly to her waist. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Names don’t mean anything.”

  The red and gold leaves shook free of the trees and fell to the ground, revealing bare branches reaching into a sky that changed from blue to gray. Heavy clouds massed, and snow began to fall.