Blackwood Farm Part 18

"Quite suddenly I flew into action. I stood up. I secured the earrings and the brooch in my pocket. I pulled out my hunting knife --the kitchen knife was in the pirogue --and I spun round to face the stairs. No one had come, that was obvious, but at any moment someone might.

"And who were they, or who was he, I should say, who could sit at a desk and read by the light of candles when such a horror existed on the floor above?

"This had been a house of torture, this place, and surely it had been my great-great-greatgrandfather Manfred who brought his victims here, I reasoned, and here it was that Rebecca had met her end.

"Who was it now who knew these things and did nothing about them? Who was it who had brought a fine marble desk here and a golden chair? Who was it that was buried in that doorless mausoleum? The whole pattern was overwhelming to me. I was shaking with sheer exhilaration. But I had to determine certain things.

"I went to the windows and was amazed to discover how well I could see over the swamp. And there, way far away, I saw Blackwood Manor very distinctly on its raised lawn.

"Whoever lived in this place, whoever visited it, could spy upon the house if he wanted to; he could see --among other things --my very windows and the windows of the kitchen as well. If he had a telescope or binoculars, and I saw neither one here, he could have studied us all very well.

"It was chilling to see this clear view of the house, but I used it to check my compa.s.s. I had to get home and fast.

"The voices threatened again. The dizziness came over me. I reeled. The wild cries of the birds seemed to mingle with Rebecca's voice. I was near to fainting. But I had to resist this.

"I went down the steps, through the big room and down onto the island and explored every inch of it that I could reach. Yes, the cypress trees had created it and anch.o.r.ed it, and from the west and the north they were so thick that the island itself must have been invisible. Only the eastern bank, where I had come ash.o.r.e, was the way of access.

"Regarding the strange structure of granite and gold, I couldn't discover anything more about it, except that when I cut back the wisteria the graven figures were as beautiful there as anywhere else. The worth of the gold must have been staggering, I reasoned, but no one had ever stolen it; no one --it seemed --had ever tried.

"But I was so hot now, so coated in sweat, so bitten up by the mosquitoes and hara.s.sed by the lonesome cries of the birds and the way that they mingled with the half-heard voices that I had to get out of here. I had to get safe.

"I jumped into the pirogue, caught up the pole, pushed off the bank and headed for home."

105.

12.

"JASMINE WAS WAITING for me at the landing, in a perfect fit over the fact that I hadn't told anyone where I was going, and she was losing her mind with worry; and even Patsy was here and Patsy was worrying because Patsy had had a dream that I was in danger and she had driven in from New Orleans just to see if I was all right.

" 'Aunt Queen's here, isn't she?' I asked impatiently as I made my way to the kitchen with her.

'And as for Patsy coming in from New Orleans, it's probably because she needs money, and we'll be in for a big argument tonight. But I don't have time for this. I have to tell you what I found out there. We have to call the sheriff right away.'

" 'The sheriff? For what!' Jasmine demanded. 'And yes, your Aunt Queen is here. She arrived about an hour ago, and n.o.body could find you, and the pirogue was gone,' and so forth and so on for a straight three minutes.

"No sooner had she stopped her harangue than Aunt Queen appeared, and she threw her arms around me, dirty though I was from the swamp. She was her usual elegant self, right to the perfect curls of her white hair and her soft green silk dress. With Aunt Queen, it's silk or silk, that's about the extent of it, and I can't think of embracing her without thinking of silk.

"Patsy also came into the kitchen and sat down opposite me as I settled at the table, with Aunt Queen taking the chair to the right of me and Jasmine putting a beer down in front of me and then sitting to my left.

"I pulled off my dirty garden gloves and drank half the beer in one swallow, and Jasmine shook her head but got up to get me another.

" 'What is this about the sheriff?' Aunt Queen asked. 'Why do you want the sheriff?'

"I laid out the earrings and the brooch, and I told them all about everything I had seen. I told them about the skull just disintegrating, but that I knew the sheriff could get the DNA from the white powder left of it to prove it was Rebecca's, and that for a DNA match there was hair in the brush that Rebecca had used, upstairs in the trunk that bore her name. There was hair in her comb too.

"Aunt Queen looked at Jasmine and Jasmine shook her head.

" 'You think the sheriff of Ruby River Parish is going to run DNA tests on a pile of white powder!' Jasmine declared. 'You're going to tell this c.o.c.kamamy story to the sheriff of Ruby River Parish? You, Tarquin Blackwood, dedicated buddy of Goblin, your spirit duplicate? You're going to call the sheriff? I don't want to be in this kitchen when that conversation takes place.'

" 'Listen to me,' I insisted. 'This woman was murdered. There's no statute of limitations on murder, and --'

"When Aunt Queen spoke, she was very soft and reasonable-sounding. 'Quinn, my darling, I don't think the sheriff will believe this story. And I don't think he will send anyone into the thick of the swamp.'

" 'All right,' I said, 'I see. No one cares about this. No one believes it.'

" 'It isn't that I don't believe it,' said Aunt Queen, 'it's that I don't think the outside world will believe it.'

" 'Yeah, that's it,' chimed in Patsy. 'The outside world is going to think you're a crackpot, Tarquin, if they don't already from all these years of your talking about that d.a.m.ned spook. Tarquin, the more you carry on about this, the crazier everybody thinks you are.'

"At some point while all this was going on --my valiant struggle to get them to believe and investigate and their pleading with me not to make a fool of myself --Pops walked in and I reiterated the whole story for him.

"He sat at the corner of the table listening with his dull eyes, and then said under his breath that 106.

he'd go back there to this island with me if I wanted, and when I said I did want this, that it was exactly what I wanted, he seemed surprised.

"All the while, Goblin stood over by the sink listening to this conversation and looking from one to another of the crowd at the table as this or that one spoke. Then he came over and started pulling on my right shoulder.

"I said, 'Goblin, get away, I've got no time for you now.' And with a profound will I pushed at him mentally, and to my amazement he was gone.

"Then Patsy imitated my voice and what I'd just said, making fun of me, and gave a low sneering laugh. 'Goblin, get away,' she repeated, 'and now you're telling us there's a marble table out there and a gold chair.'

"I fired back at her that those details were of the least importance and then I positively demanded to see the sheriff and tell him what I had seen.

"Pops said No, not until he'd gone out there with me, and that if this woman had been rotting for over a hundred years a day or two wouldn't matter now.

" 'But somebody's living there, Pops,' I said. 'Somebody who must know these chains are up there and must have seen the skull! We have a dangerous situation here.'

"Patsy snickered. 'It's a d.a.m.ned good thing that you believe yourself, Quinn, because n.o.body else does. You've been crazy since you were born.'

"Aunt Queen did not look at her. It struck me for the first time in my life that Aunt Queen didn't like Patsy any more than Pops did.

" 'So what was your dream, Patsy?' I asked, trying not to bristle at her insults. 'Jasmine told me you came home today because you had a dream.'

" 'Oh, it can't compare to your story,' she said ironically and coldly, her blue eyes hard as gla.s.s.

'I just woke up all scared for you. There was somebody who was going to hurt you, and Blackwood Manor was burning, and this group of people --they had you and they were going to hurt you, and Virginia Lee was in the dream and she told me, "Patsy, get him away." She was real clear, she was sitting with her embroidery, and you know all the embroidery we still have that she did, and there she was in the dream, embroidering, and she put it aside and told me what I just said. It's all fading now. But Blackwood Manor was on fire. I woke up scared.'

"I looked at Pops and Jasmine. They hadn't told her anything about Rebecca or the oil-lamp scare, I knew by their faces. I looked up at Goblin, who was standing in the corner to my far left, and Goblin was looking at Patsy, and he seemed thoughtful if not a little scared himself.

"At this point, Aunt Queen called for the end of the Kitchen Committee Confab. We did have guests coming in, supper had to be prepared, Lolly and Big Ramona were waiting for us to clear out, and Aunt Queen wanted to talk to me later in her room. We'd eat supper in there, just the two of us.

"n.o.body was calling the sheriff until Pops had gone to the island with me. And Pops said he wasn't feeling very good, he had to go lie down. The heat was bad and he'd been working on the flower patches in the full sun; he didn't feel good at all.

"I insisted on placing the earrings and brooch in a plastic bag so that any residue of tissue clinging to them could be a.n.a.lyzed, and then I went up to my room to shower, realizing I was starving to death.

"It was maybe six o'clock when I sat down to supper with Aunt Queen. Her room had just been redone in golden yellow taffeta, and we were at the small round table against the back windows of the house at which she frequently took her meals.

"We devoured one of her favorite dishes --scrambled eggs with caviar and sour cream, along with her favorite champagne.

"She was wearing silver spike heels and a loose-fitting silk-and-lace dress. She had a cameo at her throat, centered perfectly on her collar --Jasmine must have helped her --and we had the earrings 107.

and the cameo brooch from the island with us.

"The brooch was 'Rebecca at the Well,' the earrings were tiny heads, as is usually the case with small cameos.

"I began by telling her all about Rebecca's trunk in the attic, and then Rebecca's ghost and what had happened, and then I went over again everything that was on the island and how perfectly strange it was out there, and that there was clear evidence of murder on the second floor of the house.

" 'All right,' she said. 'You've heard many a story of Manfred, and you know now that after Virginia Lee died and left him a widower he was considered a madman in these parts.'

"I nodded for her to go on. I also took note that Goblin was right behind her, some distance from her, just watching me with a kind of abstracted expression on his face. He was also leaning against the wall kind of casually, and something about that struck a bad note with me --that he would present such an image of comfort, but my mind was really not on Goblin but on Rebecca and Aunt Queen.

"Aunt Queen went on with her tale.

" 'But what you don't know,' she said, 'is that Manfred brought women here to Blackwood Manor, always claiming they were governesses for William and Camille, when in fact they were nothing more than playthings for him --starry-eyed Irish girls he got from Storyville, the red-light district in New Orleans --whom he kept for as long as it suited his purposes, and then from the picture they were abruptly erased.'

" 'G.o.d, you're telling me he killed more than one of them?' I asked.

" 'I don't know that he did any such thing,' said Aunt Queen. She went on. 'It's your story about this island that has put it in my mind that perhaps he did murder them. But no one knew what became of them, and it was an easy thing to get rid of a poor Irish girl in those days. You simply dropped her down in the middle of New Orleans. What more need be done?'

" 'But Rebecca, did you hear tell of Rebecca?'

" 'Yes, indeed, I did,' said Aunt Queen. 'You know I did. I heard plenty tell of her. And I'm telling you now. Now let me go on in my fas.h.i.+on. Some of these Irish girls were kind to little William and Camille, but in the main they didn't bother with them one way or another, and so they don't come down to us with any names or faces, or even mysterious trunks in the attic, though that would have been a significant clue.'

" 'No, there were no other suspicious trunks in the attic,' I interjected. 'But there are clothes, heaps of old clothes, clothes museums would pay for, I think. But only Rebecca's trunk.'

" 'Slow down and let me talk,' Aunt Queen said with a little graceful exasperation. 'Quinn, you're overexcited and it's a marvelous thing to see,' she said, smiling, 'but let me talk.'

"And talk she did.

" 'Now, while all of that was going on,' she said, 'Manfred was up to his famous tricks of riding his black gelding over the land, and disappearing into the swamp for weeks at a time.

" 'Then came Rebecca. Now Rebecca was not only more beautiful than the other women, she was also very refined and pa.s.sed herself off for a lady with a gracious manner, which won everyone over to her side.

" 'But one night when Manfred was off in the swamps she got to cursing Manfred for his absence, and in the kitchen she got drunk on brandy with Ora Lee --that was Jasmine's great-greatgrandmother --and she told Ora Lee her story, of how she, Rebecca, had been born in the Irish Channel in New Orleans and was as "common as dirt," as she put it, in a world "as narrow as the gutter," she declared, one of thirteen children, and how she had gotten raped in a Garden District mansion where she'd been working as a maid, and the whole Irish neighborhood knew about it, and when her family wanted her to go into the convent on account of it she went downtown to Storyville, instead, and they took her into a house of prost.i.tution as she had hoped. Now, Rebecca was pregnant from the rape, but 108.

whether she lost the child or got rid of it, this part was unclear.

" 'To Ora Lee, she said flat out that being in an elegant and fine house in Storyville, with the piano always playing and the gentlemen being so gracious, was far superior to being at home in a miserable shotgun house at St. Thomas and Was.h.i.+ngton by the river where her Irish father and her German grandmother used to beat her and her brothers and sisters with a strap.

" 'But Rebecca did not want to end her upward climb in Storyville, so she started to put on the airs of a lady and use what she knew of manners to make herself more refined. She also loved to do embroidery and crocheting, which had been beaten into her at home, and used her sewing abilities to make herself fine clothes.

" 'Wait a minute,' I interrupted her. 'Didn't Patsy say something about the embroidery in her dream, that Virginia Lee was embroidering? That's important. And you should see the embroidered things upstairs in that trunk. Yes, she knew embroidery, Rebecca --they're confused in Patsy's dream, but you know about the oil lamps and what I almost did.'

" 'I do know, of course I know,' said Aunt Queen. 'Why do you think I came home? But you need knowledge to arm you against this cozy lovemaking ghost. So listen to what the story was.

" 'The other prost.i.tutes in the house in Storyville laughed at Rebecca, and they called her the Countess, but she knew that sooner or later a man would come who would see her attributes and take her out of that place. She sat right in the room where the women congregated for the man to make his choice, and she embroidered as if she was a great lady, and gave each gentleman her lovely smile.

" 'Well, Manfred Blackwood was the man of her dreams, and the tale came down in Jasmine's family that he had actually and truly loved Rebecca much in the same way that he had loved Virginia Lee. Indeed it was Rebecca, pet.i.te Rebecca with her brilliant smile and charming ways that finally took his mind off the grief.

" 'He was obsessed with giving her jewelry, and she loved it, and she was gracious and sweet to him and even sang old songs to him, which she had learned growing up.

" 'Of course, in her first weeks here she was all honey and spice to little William and Camille, but they didn't fall for it, or so the story says, just waiting for her to disappear like all the rest.

" 'Then Manfred and Rebecca went to Europe for a year, the two of them, and it was rumored they spent a very long time in Naples, because Rebecca loved it so, and they even had a villa for a while on the famous Amalfi coast. If you saw that coast, and you will someday, Quinn, you'll understand that it is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

" 'Imagine it, this poor girl from the Irish Channel in the dreamland of southern Italy, and think what it meant. It was there that Rebecca cultivated a love of cameos, apparently, as she had quite a collection when she returned, and it was then that she showed them off to Ora Lee and Jerome and their niece, Pepper, explaining all about "Rebecca at the Well," the theme that was named for her, she exclaimed --poor creature. And ever after that she wore a cameo at her neck and earrings such as those you've found out there.

" 'Now, speaking of out there --right after their return from Naples Manfred took to spending more time in the swamps than ever before. And within months there came all the workmen from New Orleans and the deliveries of lumber and metal and all manner of things to make the notorious Hermitage on Sugar Devil Island --this place you've now seen with your own eyes.

" 'But as you know, Manfred paid off the hirelings when the secret place was completed, and he took to spending weeks out there, leaving Rebecca at home to fret and cry and pace the floor while my poor father --William --watched the woman change from pretty girl to banshee, as he put it to me later on.

" 'Meanwhile, it had become the scandal of the parish that Manfred kept Rebecca in his own bedroom --and that was your room, Quinn, the room with the front parlor to it; it became your room as soon as you were born. Pops, as you know, wants the back room upstairs so he can see out the back 109.

windows and keep an eye on the shed and the garages and the men and the cars and all that. So you inherited that front room.

" 'But I digress, and it will probably happen more than once. Now, let me see. We left Rebecca, with a cameo at her neck, in her fancy clothes, pacing the floor up there crying and murmuring for Manfred, who was gone for as long, sometimes, as two weeks.

" 'And, happy with his new retreat, he often took expensive provisions with him, while at other times he said he would hunt for what he ate.

" 'Now, it couldn't have been a worse time for her to do it, but Rebecca wanted Manfred to marry her --make her an honest woman as they used to say in those days, you know --and she told everyone that he would. She even got the priest up here to accost him on one of his rare visits home and talk to him about it, how he ought to do it, and how Rebecca was a proper wife for Manfred no matter what her past.

" 'But you know, Quinn, in those days, what man was going to marry a prost.i.tute from Storyville with whom he'd been living for over two years? Bringing the priest proved a terrible mistake, as Manfred was ashamed and annoyed. And the rumor spread that Manfred beat Rebecca for doing it, and Ora Lee had to interfere to make him stop.

" 'Somehow or other they made it up, and Manfred went back out into the swamp. Thereafter, when he came back from these forays into the depths of the bog he often had gifts not only for Rebecca, to whom he gave lovely cameos, but gifts of pearls and diamonds for Camille, and even fine stickpins and cuff links with diamonds for William to wear.'

" 'So he was meeting someone out there in the swamp,' I said. 'He had to be. How else could he come back with gifts?'

" 'Precisely, he was meeting someone. And his absences from the house grew longer and longer, and his conduct at home reclusive and peculiar, and when he was gone, William (my father) and Camille suffered downright meanness and heavy abuse from Rebecca, who grew to hate them for what they were part of a family to which she did not legally belong.

" 'Imagine it, the poor children, now adolescents, at the pure mercy of this young stepmother, all left alone in this house with only the colored servants, the devoted and loving Jerome and Ora Lee and their niece, Pepper, trying to interfere.

" 'Rebecca would pyroot through their rooms whenever she wanted, and then came the incident of her finding Camille's poetry in a leather-bound book, and reciting the poems at dinner to taunt poor Camille, wounding Camille all but mortally so that Camille threw a hot bowl of soup in Rebecca's face.'

" 'I have Camille's book,' I told Aunt Queen. 'I found it in Rebecca's trunk. But why didn't someone else find it when the trunk was packed? Why were there cameos in the trunk? I know everything was thrown in there but still --?'

" 'Because the woman disappeared under violent circ.u.mstances, and it was Manfred who grabbed up her things and heaved them into the trunk. And besides, the old madman had been absent when the affair of the poetry took place, and who knew how much he knew? He didn't see the book, or care about it, that's plain enough, and he didn't bother to save the cameos you found in the trunk, either, though he did save five cameos as I'll explain.'

" 'How did Rebecca disappear? What were the violent circ.u.mstances?' I pushed.

" 'She tried to set fire to this house.'

" 'Ah, of course.'

" 'She did it with the oil lamps.'