I was released from the hospital a few days after Christmas. Marika came up to drive me home. She wanted to take me back to the city, but I pointed out that I had to be close by for the police investigation. Then she suggested that she book us rooms at the Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck, but I told her that was ridiculous when Riven House stood empty a few miles away.
“I don’t know how you can stay there,” she said when she drove me back in her rental.
“It’s not the house’s fault,” I told her as we parked next to the toppled apple tree. I’d have to call Devon Corbett’s tree removal company to come remove it. Luckily the only damage that had been done was to Monty’s apartment in the addition and I was beginning to think that I might get rid of that.
“Are you sure?” Marika asked, looking warily up at the house. “The place looks haunted.”
“It isn’t,” I told her, adding to myself, at least not anymore.
Marika stayed a few days but I could tell that she was uneasy in the house and anxious to get back to the city and Duma for New Year’s. I placated her by returning with her to the city and spending New Year’s Eve and Day at their apartment in Park Slope. They had a little party on New Year’s Day with lots of prosecco and organic lentil and kale dishes and vegan cupcakes and a few dozen friends, many of whom I knew from my days in publishing. They all hugged me and told me how sorry they’d been to hear about Jess and tried to pretend they weren’t dying to hear all the gory details. A few asked me if I was going to write about what had happened.
“I haven’t thought about it yet,” I said. “First I’m going to finish the novel I started this fall.”
“About the apple blossom girl?” Yuriko asked me. “That story you told at your apartment last summer?”
“The night the table cracked?” Abe asked.
“Yes, I suppose that was an omen.”
There was a surprised gasp of laughter from a few guests. Yes, I had that story to tell too, I thought, noticing that Ansel was looking at me. Before he left he told me that he’d love to see what I’d written. I told him I’d be in touch.
I took the train upstate the next day against Marika’s protests. Dunstan met me at the station and drove me back to Riven House, arguing about my staying at the house the whole way. “I’ve got a separate apartment at my place,” he told me when we pulled up in front of the house. “I used to rent it out to Bailey students but I got tired of their noise and their attitude. You could stay there. I wouldn’t . . . it wouldn’t mean . . .”
I cupped my hand around his face and kissed him. His mouth was so much wider than Jess’s that it felt strange for a moment and then when his lips pressed back against mine it didn’t feel strange at all. We could have been nineteen, making out in his old pickup parked under the apple trees. When we separated I was looking straight into his eyes—eyes the blue of summer sky glimpsed through apple branches.
“Come on in if you’re so worried about the house,” I told him. “You can give it your professional going over to make sure it’s . . . secure.”
He came in with me, but we didn’t spend much time going over the house. We didn’t even make it past the boot hall.
Before he left, though, he went around checking windows and doors and complaining that none of the locks worked. The next time he came back with his toolbox and put locks on all the windows and on the boot hall door. We spent our third “date” replacing the library glass doors. It felt good to work with my hands—and to watch Dunstan’s large capable hands moving over the surfaces of the house, recaulking clattering window panes, tightening loose washers, scraping old paint off rotting window frames, replacing broken light fixtures. The house seemed to sigh with contentment at his ministrations. This was what Riven House needed. To be mended.
In the second week of January we drove into town, stopped at Cassie’s for coffee, and walked over to the police station, where I gave a full account of the “hauntings” to a young police officer. Luckily I’d written down each “sighting” in my notebooks. Dunstan had been right that the sightings often correlated to a communication between Jess and Katrine. On the day Jess and I moved into the caretaker’s cottage, Jess had called Katrine, no doubt giving her the signal to don her shawl and stand on the weir in the rain and drop down behind it to hide underneath the weir. He’d called her on the night I’d awoken to the sound of crying and went to find its source.
“She must have spent a lot of nights standing out there in the cold while you were warm in bed,” the nice young officer, whose name was Andrew Brennan and who turned out to be CJ’s brother-in-law, helpfully pointed out.
Warm in bed beside my lying, cheating husband.
But I smiled at Andrew Brennan, unable to explain how particularly galling it was to find all this damning evidence on Jess’s cell phone when he couldn’t ever be bothered to pick up the phone when I called. Perhaps Officer Brennan sensed my growing discomfort because he took down the rest of my statement without providing the corresponding texts or emails, maintaining the polite silence of a lab technician taking scans that would be “read” later by an expert. And it did feel like I was pouring out all the symptoms of a long disease—the scratches on the wall, the overflowing bath, the blood on the handkerchief.
I saw poor Andrew Brennan furrow his brow at that one and I told him that it wasn’t really blood—only ink.
“Of course,” he said, looking embarrassed. “None of it was real, was it?”
“No,” I said, feeling like I was the one reassuring him. “None of it was real.”
DUNSTAN DROVE ME home after the interview.
“You did good,” he said, reaching across the car seat to squeeze my hand.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I was watching the whole thing on the remote and following along with my own transcript of the texts . . . What’s wrong?”
“I just didn’t realize you were watching,” I said, reviewing all I’d said now for anything I might not have wanted Dunstan to hear. Dunstan was quiet, but I could feel his gaze on me as I looked out the window. It had begun to snow, but only flurries. The local radio station, which I’d started leaving on in the kitchen so the house wouldn’t be so quiet, didn’t predict any significant accumulation. The flakes danced in the air, weightless as apple blossoms. When we pulled up at the back of the house he put his arm over the seat and turned to me.
“I’m sorry, Clare. I should have told you. I should have realized that after all you’ve been through it would feel creepy to have someone watching you.”
“Not when it’s you,” I said, cupping his clean-shaven jaw in my hand. “And I’m glad you think I did all right.”
He smiled, blue eyes vibrant in the pale wintery light. “We should always have writers for witnesses. You had a record of every incident we found on the cells and then some.”
“And then some?” I asked.
He shrugged. I could feel his jaw tense under my hand. “All the ‘ghost’ sighting were accompanied by a call or text from Jess to Katrine, but some of the minor incidents you mentioned—the scratches in the plaster, the flooded tub, and the stained handkerchief, the bell in the dumbwaiter—have no corresponding record. But that makes sense. The scratches could have been made at any time, they could have left a time-delayed tape recorder in the dumbwaiter, and Jess could have gone upstairs and turned on the tub.”
I tried to remember where Jess had been the two times the tub overflowed. “He could have done the first, but not the second—”
“No, that would have been Katrine. Maybe she came up with it on her own. Only . . .”
“Only what?”
“After that incident Jess texted Katrine ‘bath?’ and she texted back three question marks. Jess responded with the initials PG.”
“PG? What does that stand for?”
“I think,” Dunstan said, taking my hand off his face and holding it in both of his, “that it means poltergeist. Jess writes about it in his supposed novel. The
husband character has this idea that his wife has the power to make things move or break—tree branches, cups, tables—”
“Tables?”
“Yeah, he’s got this preposterous scene in which their dining room table cracks in two because the wife’s mad at something.”
“Oh,” I said, wondering if I should tell Dunstan about the Bend Becker, but then that had happened before we got to Riven House—
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you about it, Clary. I think it just shows how jealous he was of you—to invest you with so much power.”
“Able to bend iron bars with the raw power of my mind,” I joked. “If the whole writing thing doesn’t work out maybe I can go on Amazing Psychics.”
“Yeah.” Dunstan smiled, relieved that I wasn’t upset. “That’s my Clary. I can be your sidekick. Shall I come by later to practice our act?”
I told him I’d like that and kissed him good-bye. As I was getting out of the car he said, “Just remember what Andy said.”
“What was that?” I asked, leaning down to look back at him.
“None of it was real.”
Chapter Thirty
I let myself into the boot hall and locked the door behind me, took off my winter boots, slipped into the sheepskin slippers I’d left there, and shuffled into the rotunda.
“None of it was real,” I said aloud, and then listened for any contradictory echoes. Any bells ringing or babies crying. But there was nothing. Even the snow gathering on the oculus was the quiet kind. There was only the sound of my own padded footsteps as I walked into the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea and then my own footsteps as I took my tea into the library to sit at the octagonal desk. Since Dunstan and I had fixed the glass doors I’d taken to spending my afternoons in the library. It had the best light. I’d thought I might have to get rid of the desk because of the blood, but Katrine had bled out on an ancient leather blotter that had soaked up all her blood. When the forensics lab removed it, there wasn’t a spot of blood on the desk. All I’d had to do was polish it with a little Old English lemon oil and the desk gleamed in the late afternoon light—even on a snowy day like today. I put my teacup down next to my laptop and leaned back in Monty’s old chair to look out the glass doors. The river was a deep slate gray. The mountains across the river were indigo fading to pale blue to white where it was snowing more heavily, the light the color of old tarnished silver.
“None of it was real,” I told the river and the mountains, which looked back at me placidly as if to say, But we are.
“But that’s just the problem, isn’t it?” I said aloud again. I wondered what Dr. Schermer would make of me talking to myself. But I wouldn’t be seeing Dr. Schermer anymore, nor would anyone else—at least not in a professional capacity. His license was being revoked for leaking a confidential file to his cousin, Katrine Vanderberg. I wouldn’t have been likely to go back to him at any rate, but still it would have been good to have had someone to talk this out with.
“You see,” I said aloud again (after all, there was no one here to report back that I’d taken to talking to myself), “that’s the problem. None of it was real. But what does that make of my life? When did my life stop being real? From the day I met Jess? Was that look of awe he’d given me when I read my story aloud real? Or what about Jess sitting beside me in the hospital holding my hand? Or the day he got the first copies of his novel and he showed me that he’d dedicated it to me. ‘To Clare, who makes all things clear.’ Hadn’t that been real? So when had things stopped being real?”
I took out the notebooks I’d brought to the station and laid them on the desk, aligning their edges with the edge of the pile of typescript that sat beside the laptop. The Apples of Discord, the novel I’d started to write in September, was nearly done. I’d sent it to Ansel last week and he’d been as excited as it was seemly to be in front of a newly widowed author whose husband had tried to kill her. He was already getting interest from editors—the word having spread from Marika’s New Year’s Day party.
“The truth is that even if it weren’t a great piece of writing it would sell because of all the publicity surrounding Jess’s death. But it is a great novel, Clare. You should be proud of it. You did what artists have always done—salvage something beautiful out of something godawful.”
I’d thanked Ansel and gotten off the phone then before he started to cry. Learning about Jess’s duplicity had been a tough blow for him and I suspected that he felt that representing my book would provide a way of working through his own feelings of betrayal. Good, I’d thought, but I didn’t need to hear him weeping on the phone. And I didn’t need him to tell me how good the book was. Monty’s theft had accomplished that. He wouldn’t have stolen it if it weren’t good. Still, when I laid my hand on the pile of typescript all I could think was None of it was real.
So instead of turning to my book now, I turned to Minnie’s book. The last one that I’d found in the dumbwaiter. Although it was in a scrapbook album it didn’t contain any more of Minnie’s crazy collages. It was a diary of her last months, part confession, part suicide note. In it she explained, most rationally, how she had “come unmoored” after giving birth and how she had arrived at the decision to kill her husband. Most disturbing was her account of being haunted in the months after she killed Bayard. I’d read it several times now, but still there was something about it that nagged at me, something that Jess’s poltergeist theory had reminded me of. I opened it and read it again now, my chair angled so I could see out the window when I looked up and watch the snow falling.
On the night of January 11, I began having labor pains even though the baby was not due for another six weeks. Dr. Melchior was summoned but he was delayed because of the icy roads. Fortunately our housekeeper was here and she and my husband, Bayard, were able to deliver the baby safely. I quickly lost consciousness due to exhaustion from the labor. I awoke sometime in the night to the sound of a baby crying. The sound seemed to be coming from the dumbwaiter in the closet. I got up and listened to the sounds of the poor piteous infant, wondering why they did not bring it to me. I went in search of the child, first in the closet, where I listened at the dumbwaiter chute, but then creeping down the circular stairs of the rotunda quiet as a mouse into the library, where my husband stood at the doors to the terrace and an apparition in white handed to him a child in swaddling clothes. Of course I had heard the rumors, heard the kitchen maids and the parlor maids whispering when they thought I couldn’t hear them about my husband’s dalliance with the girl from the apple farm down the road—and here she was giving him her child! But where was my baby? The crying I had heard before had stopped. I had to find him. But when I tried to go back up the stairs I found I was too weak. The stairs were slippery with blood—my blood! The last thing I recalled was Bayard leaning over me and behind him our housekeeper, her face screwed up like a wrinkled old apple.
“Take care of it!” Bayard shouted, handing something to her. Something wrapped in a pink blanket. Which was strange, I thought, because I had purchased only yellow for our baby . . . but then I thought no more. I must have fainted.
When I came to it was morning. I was in my bed, in a clean nightgown, and the baby was beside me in the lovely yellow bassinet Mama had sent me from B. Altman’s. But when I looked at it I knew it was not my baby because if it were my baby then I would have loved it right away and I didn’t. It belonged to that farm girl down the road. Later I heard the maids whispering that her baby had been found on the steps of our house frozen to death, but I knew that wasn’t true. I knew that Bayard had put our own child out to die so he could raise that whore’s child as his own. Because he loved her more than he loved me. But no one would listen to me. When I told them I saw the girl’s ghost standing on the terrace they thought I was crazy.
Of course they did, I thought for not the first time reading over the sad account. And as I always did when I got to this point, I lifted my head to look out the doors—
And saw a figu
re standing on the terrace.
But it was a male figure, one I instantly recognized from the expensive cut of his suit as Cortland Montague.
“I’m sorry if I startled you,” Cortland said when I opened the door for him.
“You didn’t,” I said, not wanting to give him the satisfaction. I had picked up a distinctly suspicious vibe from Cortland since Monty’s death—a result, I guessed, of him having to hand over a huge family estate to a complete stranger. Also, I think he was genuinely disappointed that pretty, leggy Katrine was gone. All in all, I didn’t blame him for resenting me, but I didn’t have to like it either. “But in the future you can come in through the boot hall. I’ve had the doorbell fixed there.”
His smile barely hid the twitch in his jaw muscle. The same tic that had given Jess away in the barn. He should learn to control it.
“I did mention that no repairs or home improvements begun before the final settlement of the estate would be reimbursed should the estate revert back to—”
“Yes, you did,” I said, cutting short the long legalese explanation he was about to embark on. “And I told you I was happy to pay for these repairs out of my own pocket should the estate revert back to . . . who exactly? Oh, to you, right? Is that what you’ve come to tell me? Are you the new owner of Riven House? Because if you are, I should go over with you some peculiarities in the wiring.”
“That won’t be necessary,” he said, not bothering this time to mask the twitch in his jaw with a smile. “Although it will take another few weeks to go through probate, there should be no problem with Monty’s most recent will being upheld.”