The Siren and the Specter Page 19

  “She’s telling the truth,” Ralph said.

  David glowered at him. “You’re as treacherous as she is.”

  “More self-importance,” she said.

  He scooted his chair forward so their knees touched; Jessica didn’t pull away. “The other night, you sicced the sheriff on me even though I’d done nothing wrong.”

  “You do have a habit of showing up unannounced,” Ralph put in.

  David ignored that, glared at Jessica. “Then, all of a sudden, we’re buddies. You’re nice to me, eager to help with my….” He gestured inarticulately.

  “Situation,” she said.

  “…and then you go on a date with me? Visit all those art shops and the bookstore, and….” His mouth opened wider. “How much of what I told you did you already know?”

  “I don’t know Chris and Katherine,” she said. When he made a scoffing sound, she said, “Or I barely know them. Chris was at Anna’s funeral.”

  David flashed a grin. “Did you two date?”

  “Don’t be petty, Davey. It’s unbecoming.”

  David’s grin curdled. He glanced at Ralph, who was watching him with good humor. “What?” David demanded.

  “She’s right,” Ralph said. “It is unbecoming.”

  “As for Katherine,” she said, “I’ve only met her in passing.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “I don’t give a damn what you believe.”

  He grunted. “You always able to do that? Flip your emotions on and off?”

  “Maybe you should ask yourself what you’re so angry about.”

  “Are you serious? The two of you have been deliberately withholding information from me.”

  “We’ve spent a day and an evening together. I’ve hardly had time to withhold much of anything.”

  “You had plenty of chances.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that it’s painful for her to talk about?” Ralph asked.

  “But it’s—”

  “And you were the one who came to me,” she reminded him. “It’s not like I lured you over there.”

  An image flickered across his mind, barely glimpsed but in some way momentous. He faltered, grasping for it, but when Ralph spoke again, it flittered away.

  “To my way of thinking, Miss Green is showing a lot of kindness, given the way you treated her sister.”

  David’s arm muscles hardened. “I moved away after college. Quit acting like I murdered someone.”

  “It’s that easy,” she said, and he was alarmed to hear the emotion in her voice. “It’s that easy to talk about Anna.”

  It’s the opposite of easy, he thought. It’s eating me alive.

  He said, “I better get you home.”

  “I can take her,” Ralph said.

  Jessica nodded. “It’s fine, Ralph. I have a few more things I need to say to him.”

  “We’re done,” David said, rising.

  Ralph got up too, said to Jessica, “If you don’t want to go with him—”

  “Thanks, Ralph,” she answered. “This is how it has to be.”

  Ralph eyed her bleakly but didn’t otherwise protest. David went out, had moved through the side yard and was almost to the lane when he heard her voice call, “You’re omitting some things.”

  He angled toward the Alexander House.

  “I could tell earlier,” Jessica said, hustling up beside him. “You’re not being forthright.”

  He shone his flashlight into the woods. “I’ve got to hand it to you. You were a damned good actress. Extracting information, pretending you knew nothing about the house…. You should have been a spy. You could have bedded foreign dignitaries, learned state secrets.”

  “Tell me what else you saw.”

  “I told you everything.”

  She aimed her flashlight beam at his face. He shielded himself with an upflung arm. “Don’t do that.”

  “You’re a crummy liar,” she said.

  They soon reached the Camry, and without further discussion, he drove her down the lane, past Ralph’s, onto Governor’s Road, neither of them speaking. They made the highway, cruised past The Crawdad, which was dark.

  “How much are Chris and Katherine paying you?” he asked as they buzzed over the bridge, the bugs catching the headlights and splattering over the windshield.

  “Have you seen Anna’s ghost?” she asked.

  David nearly swerved off the road.

  “She moves on the water,” Jessica explained. “She prefers a veil of mist, but sometimes she walks on land.”

  Stop talking, David wanted to say, but he was afraid his voice would betray his disquiet. The woman on the water…that first night…had she looked like Anna?

  My God, he thought. She had.

  They’d turned onto Old Bay Road and were nearing Jessica’s house when she said, “You’ve treated me almost as coldly as you did my sister.”

  David’s throat was dry. “Your name’s Green…why was hers Spalding?”

  “Different fathers. She was my half sister, but her father left when she was so young. They never went through the legal adoption process, but she considered my dad her real one. Is that really the only question you want to ask me?”

  He pulled into the drive, coasted to a stop. Cut the engine and heard Sebastian’s eager bark within the yellow ranch. She reached for the door.

  David looked around. “Why here?”

  Her fingers on the handle, Jessica glanced at him.

  “Why this house?” he asked. “Why this area? Anna and I only came here a few times. Sure, it was special to us…the island, the park….”

  Her expression had changed.

  “What?” he asked.

  She shook her head wonderingly. “You didn’t even look into what happened to her, did you? That’s how self-centered you are.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I knew you even before you devastated Anna.”

  He gritted his teeth. “I didn’t— For Christ’s sakes, I was twenty-two!”

  “We all knew,” she said. “My dad, my brother, everyone. We knew from the way Anna talked about you. It was only a matter of time before you screwed her over.”

  “Stop.”

  “It was just a game to you, but to my sister, you were the whole world.”

  “Get out.”

  “You were everything, and you ripped it all away from her and you didn’t even have the guts to do it with any grace.”

  “Get out of the car!”

  “You want to know why I live here?”

  David’s face twisted. “I don’t care, I want you—”

  “Anne killed herself in the Alexander House.”

  David’s body turned to stone. He stared at Jessica.

  “You didn’t even know,” she said. She shook her head. “My God, you didn’t even know.”

  He could scarcely breathe.

  “And you know what else?” she said.

  He opened his mouth to answer, but her fist shot toward him, caught him in the jaw. The blow rocked his head back. His vision swirled.

  “That’s for my sister,” she said.

  Jessica got out, slammed her door, and disappeared inside the house.

  Part Four

  The Siren

  Chapter Thirty-One

  David barely registered the drive back to the Alexander House. He couldn’t believe how blind he’d been, how oblivious. As a professor and author, he relied on research, on facts. Now, in what he suspected was the most vital case in his career, he’d been willfully ignorant, a sleepwalker instead of a scholar.

  In the driveway of the Alexander House, he shut off the engine and gazed through the windshield at the dormer of the long bedroom. What if, he asked himself, Jessica wasn’t in le
ague with Chris and Katherine?

  Another question, unavoidable now: did he really want to spend another night here?

  Hell yes, he thought, climbing out. He closed the Camry door and listened, but if Harkless’s officers were still combing the woods, they’d moved on to other parts. The only sounds he heard now were the chirring of the crickets and the subtle lapping of the Rappahannock.

  No, he was certain the search had been called off for the night. A thick mist had settled over the peninsula, and they’d never find anything until it lifted in the morning.

  He started for the house. Maybe Jessica didn’t know about Chris and Katherine’s plot to make him look like a fool, but could there be any doubt she wanted revenge on him for what she believed he’d done to Anna?

  What you did to Anna.

  He entered the house and pulled the door shut behind him. The question was, how did all this relate to Ivy? Had she learned something about the Alexander House and paid for it?

  That was preposterous. She was a little kid. What could she have possibly discovered?

  It was much likelier she’d gotten sick of her parents’ behavior and decided to run away. His only hope was that she’d headed inland.

  He shivered, not wanting to consider the possibility of drowning. On his list of fears, drowning was foremost. Many were the nights he’d been plagued by nightmares of his car plowing through a bridge guardrail, of the frigid waters closing over his hood, his windshield, the sky replaced by darkness, the door refusing to budge while the water swallowed his legs and torso—

  He reached for the light switch but paused, thinking.

  No. No more flooding the house with illumination. No more trembling at shadows and listening for raps on the walls. There was too much evidence of a hoax and too little proof of the supernatural.

  David went to the Camry, lugged in the athletic bag full of his research. If he wanted to awaken before dawn to join the search for Ivy, he’d need a few hours of sleep to recharge. Maybe after a couple minutes of reading, he’d be able to nod off.

  Grateful to have a sense of purpose, David slid into bed, arranged the covers over his chest, and opened the book. Skipping through Hartenstein’s smarmy interlude, David began on a Weir section:

  I confess to not recording my thoughts for nearly a week. The reason for my silence is ignominious, but were I to withhold it from my own journal, I should be guilty of the selfsame hypocrisy I have many times leveled against my critics. I refuse to relate only what supports my beliefs and to omit those facts that do not. The true scholar must not quail at the confounding; he must confront all information with equal disinterest.

  Therefore, I confess to experiencing a pair of terrible frights, one this morning, the other nearly a week past. These events have disoriented me and for the first time made me feel my age. I do not possess the stamina or, though I’m galled to admit it, the same mettle I did as a younger man. Oh, to be thirty again! Thirty and married and possessed of the brashness that allowed me to blaze a career in the field of letters and the revelation of truth!

  But that youthful crusader is gone, and in his place sits a feeble, skittish old man, bereft of fire or steel. In years past I possessed the fortitude to dismiss the occasional nervousness and remain fixed on my purpose.

  Yet now….

  Look at me! Look at my hand, shaking like an April leaf.

  It’s that damnable Judson Alexander.

  Although Alexander died early in the nineteenth century, I can still imagine him peering out of his third-story lair, absorbed in his infernal vigil.

  I might as well confess it now, dear journal. This was the first inexplicable event: six days ago I saw Judson Alexander watching me from the uppermost dormer.

  Had I not beheld the bald, mountainous figure with my own eyes, I would have laughed at such an assertion. Men dead for over a century do not suddenly appear alive and whole. Nor do they gaze bloodlessly down at houseguests who blink and rub their eyes to expunge the sight.

  I have ruminated on the problem since then, and have yet to reach a satisfactory explanation.

  I had taken breakfast in the kitchen, bathed, and completed my morning constitutional. It was perhaps half past nine when I strode down the steps with the intention of walking the countryside to clear my head. I had nearly reached the lane when, unaccountably, I was overcome with the sensation of being watched. I surveyed the forest, yet I knew that was not the direction from which the interloper watched me. I swiveled my head to take in the western view, but the Rappahannock remained as blameless as always. When I continued my revolution, I noticed nothing. The Alexander House was as I had left it: silent, inanimate.

  Only when my eyes crawled up its pallid surface did I discover the enormous figure watching me.

  It could only have been Judson Alexander. Or some unaccountable approximation of him. I admit now that my reading and my overstimulated senses might have conspired to conjure the apparition, but there could be no doubt that a man powerfully resembling Judson Alexander gazed down at me from the third-story dormer. No pictures of Judson were taken after his twenty-third year – the year of his exile – yet there exist numerous drawings of the man as he’d been in his later years. And as he’d been depicted in these sketches, the man in the window was gigantic, Judson’s size imbuing him with an appalling vigor, an impression of inexhaustible virility. As I watched, the bald figure grinned at me and beckoned me toward the house.

  I allowed superstition to overmaster logic. I fled. True, I made a poor job of it with my temperamental knee and my old birch cane, but still I fled from the house gripped by the certainty that Judson – the ‘Governor,’as he is still ghoulishly referred to in these parts – was charging toward me, his vast muscles writhing like vipers.

  Panting and perspiring, I reached the end of the lane before I chanced a look behind me. Nothing had pursued me, of course, yet I could not shake the feeling that I had narrowly averted calamity. Indeed, I was sure that if I’d remained near the Alexander House one minute longer, Judson would have claimed me as he claimed so many other victims.

  I must here confess the true state of my physical infirmity. In public I essay the role of the venerable yet well-preserved scholar. Many are the days when someone comments on my upright posture, my youthful physique.

  But alas, it is all artifice.

  My stomach, I fear, has grown too large for my belt, and only with an effort can I keep it drawn in while in the presence of others. My chest and arms are gradually withering, and I rely more and more on the birch cane that has been in my family for four generations, an aid I once used as an affectation but must now rely upon as did my forefathers before me.

  Here, I think, lies the root of my alarm. The figure in the window may merely be a fleeting, illusory representation of my own lost virility. For isn’t it his potency for which Judson was renowned? That and his madness?

  I admit here how captivated I am by Judson’s exploits. When I last wrote in you, my faithful journal, I related the tale of young Judson and the doomed slave, and although any wrongdoing on the part of the six-year-old was left unspoken at the time of the incident, Judson’s later behavior sheds an unflinching light on the truth: that Judson was the individual who asphyxiated the fallen slave with soil.

  During Judson’s twelfth year another incident occurred, this one also unwitnessed yet no less dreadful.

  Because Judson and Theodore’s mother died attempting to bring a third son into the world (the child too died in childbirth), their father, the ignoble Zacharias (who was now in his late thirties), took as his wife a girl not yet seventeen. This young woman, whose name was Angelica, soon bore Zacharias a child, a healthy baby named Sarah.

  As one would expect from a tobacco baron of Zacharias’s stature, little Sarah was given every advantage: nannies, wet nurses, and frequent visitations by local doctors. Angelica doted
on her daughter, as did young Theodore, who took an especial shine to the infant. Even Zacharias, in his own saturnine way, evinced an unaccustomed affection for the child, and in this manner, the family’s felicity swelled to a level previously unknown.

  Then Baby Sarah died.

  The suddenness of her passing devastated not only her mother, but the entire estate. Though the succession hadn’t been made public, many in the community had considered it likely that Sarah might one day help shepherd the family’s agricultural empire. It was widely known that Zacharias was grooming his youngest son for a career in politics, and Judson’s strangeness made him a poor fit for the mantle of family leadership.

  Perhaps Judson surmised in Sarah a rival, for he never displayed affection for his sister, and when she was discovered blue-faced and lifeless in her crib, Judson was the only family member who evinced no sign of grief.

  No one can know what precisely happened in that upstairs nursery of the Alexander plantation. All that is known are the following facts:

  On the night of Sarah’s death, the nanny assigned to the infant’s care between the hours of ten p.m. and five a.m. received an urgent letter informing her of a family emergency two counties away. The nanny rushed to the hostelry, where the night watchman volunteered to convey her, via a coach, to her parents’ homestead. As it was already three a.m., the nanny was loath to awaken her employers, and because young Sarah was sleeping soundly, the nanny believed the child would continue to rest peacefully until the wet nurse appeared for the predawn feeding.

  When the nanny arrived at her parents’ homestead some hours later, her mother and father were dumbfounded by their daughter’s state of agitation. The letter the nanny received was proven to be a forgery, as neither her mother nor her father admitted to having authored it.

  These facts are public record. And though the following information might be apocryphal, the evidence suggests it contains at least traces of veracity, despite its macabre nature.

  A governess, fired abruptly after the infant’s death and afterward unwilling to speak to anyone about the incident, accused Judson of killing young Sarah. The governess produced sketches Judson had made of the most unspeakable atrocities. “Drawings that would make Hieronymus Bosch shriek in fright,” the governess declared. When Zacharias, red-faced, condemned the implied connection between Judson and the recently deceased Sarah, the governess then produced a sample of Judson’s handwriting, which matched in every detail the counterfeit letter given to the nanny.