In the Shadow of Blackbirds (30 page)

Gracie flinched, and an avalanche of curdled milk sloshed down my throat. I gagged on the stomach-souring awfulness and braced my hands against the table to keep from retching.

Aunt Eva reached out to me. “What’s wrong?”

I gulped down the guilt-soaked flavor with a grimace. “I’m fine. Just a moment …”

“Are you going to get sick?” asked Aunt Eva.

“I’m fine.” I cleared my throat with a deep, uncomfortable sound. “Um … all right … let me be more specific, Gracie. When you helped Julius at his studio, did you ever see him cheat?”

Gracie shook her head, and the sour taste softened. “I didn’t ever go into Julius’s darkroom with him, but I was there when Mr. Darning came to investigate him one time.”

“What did Mr. Darning do?” I asked.

“He marked his initials on blank photographic plates to make sure Julius wasn’t switching them with used ones. And Julius passed all his tests, which seemed to puzzle Mr. Darning. There were reporters there and everything. Oh, and look.” She popped open a silver locket dangling around her neck below her flu mask. “Here’s a photo Julius took of me and my mother’s spirit.”

I leaned in close, but I saw only a fuzzy streak of light behind a somber image of Gracie, who was seated in front of Julius’s black background curtain. “I just see a blur.”

“That’s probably her.”

“Oh.” I sank back in my chair and furrowed my brow. “So. He seems an honest man to you, then?”

Gracie snapped the locket shut. “I don’t know about that.” She bowed her head. “He wasn’t always nice to Stephen.”

“What did you see him do to Stephen?”

“I know …,” said Gracie, scratching the back of her neck. “He sometimes stole Stephen’s photographs off the wall and burned them.”

Aunt Eva’s jaw dropped. “He burned his brother’s photographs?”

Gracie nodded. “Stephen was worried that all of his work would be gone by the time he returned from the war, so he packed up most of his pictures and negatives and hid them about a week before he left.”

I leaned forward. “Do you know where he put them?”

She shook her head. “He wouldn’t even tell his mother what he was doing with them. He was probably afraid she’d slip and mention their whereabouts to Julius. She thought he might have purchased a safe-deposit box in a bank or a post office and stored them there.”

“Why did Julius destroy Stephen’s photographs?” asked Aunt Eva.

Gracie’s eyes moistened again. “My cousins always fought like a pack of wild dogs, and their fights turned vicious after Stephen’s father passed away. Aunt Eleanor considered asking Julius to move out, but she always favored him a little, even if she never said so out loud. She and Julius escaped her terrible drunk of a first husband together. She always felt sorry for him starting life with a bully for a father.”

I traced my fingernail along a scratch in the tabletop and pondered the missing photos. “Stephen gave me two of his pictures before he left for training … but the rest must have already been stored away. He never mentioned anything about hiding the others, but we didn’t have all that much time together … I don’t think that’s why he’s troubled. I don’t know …” I looked to Gracie. “I met one of his friends from his battalion at the Red Cross House yesterday.”

Gracie hunched her back the same way her brother had when I questioned him about Stephen’s condition.

“What that friend told me about Stephen’s last days in France was upsetting and confusing to hear,” I continued. “May I mention what I heard?”

She gave a nod that was more a quiver of her round chin.

“He said Stephen didn’t die in battle.” I hesitated a moment, for the air was thickening. “He said he lost his mind over there in the trenches. The army tried to help him in a field hospital, but he just got worse. They had to send him home.” A searing pain clogged my lungs, but I breathed through it and forced myself to keep talking. “Did you know about his discharge?”

Gracie’s lips shook. Her eyes watered until a flood of tears ran down her cheeks. “We were supposed to keep it a secret.”

“Why?” I asked.

“All the Emberses’ friends boasted about their boys receiving medals, or they could at least say their sons died in combat, fighting for liberty.” She sniffed. “None of their young men were sent home in shame. Aunt Eleanor … she worried Stephen would be viewed as a coward … and a traitor. She even blamed herself for the way she raised him. Stephen was always so quiet and artistic. I can’t even imagine a gun”—Gracie squeezed her face into a pained expression as the flow of tears streamed harder—“in that boy’s hands.”

I held on to her wrist. “He made it back to Coronado, didn’t he?”

She sniffled and attempted to steady her voice. “His mother had to fetch him from a hospital on the East Coast. A nurse went with her. They found him sitting in a bed, not speaking, shaking, just staring with eyes that looked like he was watching Death breathe in his face.”

I winced.

“They brought him home sedated,” she continued, “and hid him up in his room. Aunt Eleanor investigated the nearest asylums, but she said they all used barbaric water treatments. Patients were chained to beds. The doctors wanted to sterilize them all so they couldn’t transfer their madness to future generations.” She stopped and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief tucked inside the black sash of her dress. “Aunt Eleanor insisted on keeping him at home, waiting until he came out of his shock enough to go to some of the places offering to help recuperating servicemen.”

I lifted my face. “How did Julius feel about that decision?”

“Well …” Gracie sniffed. “He said he didn’t like it, but Stephen didn’t make any noise during the first week. None of Julius’s customers knew he was up there. Julius told us to keep saying Stephen was still overseas. This was all around the time Mother died from the flu, and I didn’t know what to do. Julius said if Stephen got bad enough we should just tell people he’d gotten shot in combat and put him away.”

A profound sadness settled in my bones. I wanted to lower my head and cry for everything I’d ever lost in my life, but I pushed my arms against the table, elbows locked, to keep myself upright. “What happened after the first week? Did he start making noise?”

“Yes.” Gracie sniffed again. “He started to wake out of his fog a little. He wasn’t yet talking, but he started yelling whenever he heard certain noises—the buzz of the doorbell,
the telephone ringing, the flashlamp, the Naval Air Station planes. Anything loud and sudden panicked him. He even kicked his mother in the stomach once when one of the planes flew over the house. Julius had to take her to the hospital to make sure she didn’t have any internal damage.”

“That was the day we were there for my most recent photograph,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Did you see Stephen when he was up in his room?”

“No, I stayed away from him. I didn’t want to see him that way.”

I rubbed my eyes, which throbbed and burned with phantom smoke. “Stephen says he often sees creatures watching over him while he’s strapped down. No one tied him to his bed, did they? Either in that East Coast hospital or at home?”

“Oh, heavens. I don’t know. He may have been chained to that hospital bed. I didn’t ask Aunt Eleanor how they were keeping him calm after he kicked her.” Gracie tugged my hand away from my eye with a firm grip. “Is he here? Does he know what I’m saying?”

“I think he’s trying to come, but I don’t want him to get any closer until you answer the most important question—the one that may help him rest in peace.” My throat and mouth ached from the smoke and the fight to hold back tears. I realized the cause of his death, spoken aloud, might make him disappear from my life, so selfishly I let a few more seconds tick by before I asked my question: “How did he die, Gracie?”

Gracie’s face contorted again. She tried to hold on to my hand, but her tears ran down to the bodice of her black dress at such a rate, she had to let go to wipe them. My aunt just sat there, stunned and mute.

“What happened?” I asked. “Please tell him. He needs to know.”

“Stephen …” Gracie lowered her eyes. “My poor cousin … You shot yourself.”

My head slammed against the table. My neck simply refused to hold up my skull any longer, and I found myself lying there with my cheek pressed against the wood. A terrific headache erupted in my left temple.

“Are you all right, Mary Shelley?” Aunt Eva grabbed at my shoulders. “I told you not to do this. Sit up. Sit up, and tell me you’re all right.”

“How did he get a gun?” I somehow found the strength to ask.

“Julius kept one to protect the house from intruders,” said Gracie.

“Where was Julius?”

“He slept at our house that night. He rode over from Coronado on the last ferry and showed up at our door after getting a drink in the city. He said he needed a break from taking care of Stephen.”

“What time was that?”

“I don’t know—maybe eleven o’clock. He’s always coming over to stay the night so he can be in the city.”

“And he was there all night?”

“Well … he was in San Diego all night, I know that for sure. I went to bed shortly after he arrived, and I found him lying on our living room floor early the next morning. He was … he and Grant … they sometimes …”

My eyes widened. “They sometimes what?”

“They sometimes go to—please don’t tell Grant I’m telling you this …”

“Where do they go?” asked Aunt Eva for me. “Please just tell her so she’ll sit up and act like a normal person again.”

“I’ll wake up in the morning,” said Gracie, “and find them passed out in various parts of the house, and their eyes don’t look right. They’re like pale sleepwalkers who can barely move. Grant says he’s only been smoking pipes in that den with Julius since our mother died—he says it helps him with his grief. Please don’t call the police on him. I know it’s opium, but he’ll stop using it soon. I swear he will.”

I tried to piece the timeline together in my head. “So … after you found Julius on the floor that morning, Grant must have driven him home to Coronado. Aunt Eva and I saw Grant drop him off when we were waiting to pick up my picture.”

“Yes.” Gracie nodded. “Then Grant drove straight back to our place. Julius didn’t feel like opening the studio that day.”

“Why not?”

“More and more people were hearing Stephen upstairs. Customers got frightened. Some of them left before sitting for their photos.” Gracie pressed her handkerchief over her
eyes and exhaled a long sigh. “Julius telephoned—later that Monday morning. He was in tears. He said their mother had found Stephen, dead, with the gun in his hand, and there was blood everywhere. The police had to come. My aunt hasn’t been the same ever since.”

I massaged my temple and kept going. “Where is Mrs. Embers now, Gracie?”

“In a local sanitarium … one of those health resorts with fresh springwater and relaxation treatments. She probably needs more care, but we couldn’t imagine putting her in an asylum. Not after she fought so hard to keep Stephen out of one.”

“Is she any better?” asked Aunt Eva, now clinging to my shoulders as if her safety depended on it.

Gracie shook her head. “I’ve gone to visit her every day. She grabs my hand and mutters something about poison and a gunshot and her strong sleeping pills. Other times she’s quiet and looks like a lost little girl. I wish I could help her. I don’t know what I can possibly do to make her come back to us.”

I knitted my brow. “Why is she talking about poison?”

“I don’t know.” Gracie mopped her face with her cloth. “Maybe Stephen tried poisoning himself first.”

“You’re sure no one else was in the house when Stephen died?” I asked.

“I’m positive. Grant and Julius were in San Diego.”

“They couldn’t have gone to Coronado after you went to bed?”

“No. The ferries were closed for the night, and the drive around the bay is too long and risky in the dark. The peninsula leading to Coronado is just a thin strip of land.” She wiped her tears again and knocked her wig off center. “The police confirmed it was a suicide, but Julius paid them to keep quiet so he could keep insisting Stephen had been in France the whole time. The undertakers were so overwhelmed by the number of funerals for flu victims that we delayed his burial by more than a week. That allowed Julius time to tell people we were waiting for Stephen’s body to come home. It was all so horrifying.” Gracie balled her cloth between her hands. “To lose a loved one at such a young age is unthinkable, but then to have to lie about the circumstances and watch his mother go out of her mind with grief … I don’t know what to do, Mary Shelley. Is Stephen here yet? Will he speak to me and forgive me for going along with the war hero charade?”

I closed my eyes and drew in a deep breath of the smoke working its way into my lungs and under my skin. An exhausting weight curled around my back and pressed against my spine.

“Stephen,” I whispered to him, feeling my aunt’s fingers pull away from my shoulders. “I know this all must be disturbing for you, but now you know what really happened. Is there anything else you need us to do to help you rest? Is there anything you want me to tell your cousin before—”

Rage singed my tongue. Without warning, violent tremors seized my torso and legs, and the window behind me rattled
in response to my movements. Every object hanging on the walls—from the cuckoo clock to the spice rack—soon clanked and shuddered and sounded like a living creature struggling to break free from its nails, and there was nothing I could do to stop the shaking.

Gracie whimpered. “Stephen?”

“I don’t believe it,” he growled, so close to me—so very, very close. “And I know exactly why my mother’s talking about poison.” His anger churned in my veins, and his voice took on a raspy tone that didn’t even sound like him. “The blackbirds pour it down my throat.”

“Stop it, Mary Shelley,” begged Aunt Eva.

“Stephen?” asked Gracie. “Stephen, I’m so sorry we couldn’t help you. I’m so sorry.”

“Tell her, Shell,” said Stephen over the cacophony of rumbling glass and gas pipes groaning at their seams. “Tell her I didn’t kill myself. Tell her someone pours poison down my throat. They’re killing me. They won’t stop killing me.”