Louisa and the Crystal Gazer (7 page)

Reluctantly Suzie led us down the dark hall, her feet in their high-heeled boots leaving wet imprints on the parquet floor. Now why, I thought, are her boots wet, if she has been napping?

In the waiting room, which seemed as dusty as she had promised, she turned and glared at Lizzie. “Who are you, miss?” she rudely demanded.

“Miss Alcott’s sister,” said Lizzie in a trembling voice.

“Don’t have no notice to set a chair for you in the circle,” Suzie said crossly. “Did you send a card asking to be invited?”

“She did not.” I spoke up. “Since Mrs. Percy herself predicted my sister’s arrival last week, I did not think she would object to Lizzie’s attendance.” I was feeling very uncomfortable. Things were not as they should be, and that was saying a lot, since things are never as they should be in a crystal gazer’s sitting room.

“Not allowed,” Suzie insisted. “No invitation, she can’t join the circle. She’ll have to wait here.” The maid crossed her arms over her chest and glared.

Mr. Barnum and I exchanged glances. Mrs. Percy could not “prepare” for unexpected participants by garnering the gossip—the newspaper announcements of births, deaths, and
betrothals, the private household information purchased from upstairs maids and laundresses—that was the lifeblood of her business. So, Lizzie would be excluded.

“I don’t mind,” said my sister. “Really, I don’t, Louisa. There are some finger exercises I want to practice, and I do feel a little queasy after all that cake. I will wait here.”

“Haruumph,” said Mr. Barnum, his silvery side-whiskers twitching.

Another thought occurred to me. At our first séance, Mrs. Percy had given a similar glare to Amelia Snodgrass and demanded, “There is no one here for you. Why have you come?” Had Miss Snodgrass also arrived uninvited? And if so, why had Suzie allowed her into the séance room?

“Even so,” I protested, “please ask your Mrs. Percy if she might let my sister sit with us.” I made my voice imperious, imitating Marmee’s tone when she had to deal with factory owners who fired a girl for getting in the family way, or a cook who beat the scullery help, for Marmee knew how and when such a tone is useful.

Suzie’s glare faltered and she murmured, “Yes, miss.”

She returned just moments later, so quickly, in fact, that I wondered if she had really spoken to Mrs. Percy at all, or just pretended to. “Mrs. Percy said no,” she grumbled. “Told you she would.” Suzie had grown pale as well as rude, and she trembled.

Lizzie would be content, but I felt as queasy as if I had also eaten three pieces of cake, thinking of timid Lizzie alone for an hour in this very strange house.

Some minutes after we arrived, Mr. Phips was shown into the sitting room.

“Aha, Miss Louisa,” he greeted me warmly. “We return for more messages from the dear departed. Most amusing, most amusing.” He handed his hat and coat to Suzie, who bobbed a curtsy and left us again, after giving me a long glare.

“Nasty weather,” said Mr. Phips, striding to the fire that Suzie had reluctantly lit for us in the grate and chafing his hands.

“You should have seen the snow blow over the Scottish moors, sir,” said Mr. Barnum in his booming voice. “When I traveled there with Tom Thumb it snowed to beat the band. Almost buried us, the general’s carriage being no more than three feet high. I dug him out myself. He was so cold he had rolled up into a snowball.”

I understood by then that Mr. Barnum was as much an admirer of fiction as myself, and often “extended” his stories with hyperbole and even a little fantasy.

“I remember newspaper accounts of your travels in Europe,” said Mr. Phips, carefully smoothing a crease in his lapel. “Wasn’t it Scotland that taxed you four thousand dollars for income even though you didn’t live there?”

“They got five hundred, the robbers,” Mr. Barnum said. He seemed disinclined to tell more stories after that and paced nervously.

A few minutes later, Mr. and Mrs. Deeds arrived. She was as overdressed as on the first occasion, with diamonds on her ears and wrists and ermine draped over her shoulders. Her husband seemed even meeker, constantly clearing his throat and giving his expansive wife glances that suggested he sought her opinion even before taking a deep breath.

“Mrs. Percy keeps us waiting once again?” asked Mrs. Deeds in her shrill voice.

“She does,” answered Mr. Phips. “Promptness does not seem to be one of her virtues.” He did not look at us but slowly removed his gloves and put them in his waistcoat pocket.

“Well,” said Mrs. Deeds, after Suzie Dear had once again taken away coats and hats. Mrs. Deeds enthroned herself in the only remaining armchair, leaving an uncomfortable-looking ladder-back chair for Mr. Deeds. She arranged her voluminous velvet skirts and retied the lace bow at her throat. She was not wearing the heavy pearl collar she had worn the week before, the one at which Mrs. Percy had pointed and shrieked, “The necklace!” rather like a character from a Poe story…or one of my own “blood and thunders.” Women shriek often in “blood and thunders.” It is a sign of the genre.

“Mrs. Deeds,” I greeted her. “Looking so well in that green velvet costume. I had hoped to have another glimpse of that lovely pearl necklace.”

Mrs. Deeds compressed her mouth into a very thin line, then forced a gay smile. “It has been returned, for the time being,” she said.

From his shadowy corner, Mr. Deeds coughed. “A fortune. A king’s ransom, that’s what Mrs. Percy was asking. Mrs. Deeds wore it on loan, and it was returned,” he spoke up in his thin, high-pitched voice.

The necklace was owned by Mrs. Percy? How had she acquired such an expensive piece?

“We’ll discuss it later, dear,” his wife said darkly, and then returned to her gay tone. “Miss Snodgrass is not here? Who
is this newest member of our circle?” She looked with great interest at Lizzie.

“I am not of the circle.” Lizzie spoke up. “I accompany my sister, Miss Alcott, only this far, to the waiting room.”

“It is unfair not to include you more fully,” said shy Mr. Deeds.

Lizzie studied her boots and did not answer.

“Well,” said Mrs. Deeds again, “I do not suppose any of you here attended the Cotton Cotillion last evening?” Indeed, I had not. The cotton factors had too pronounced a sympathy for slavery for me to have attended such an event. But Mrs. Deeds obviously had no such moral dilemma, and proceeded to recount the prior evening—the foods on the buffet table, the flowers, the dances, the clothing, the speeches—in great and misery-causing detail for those of us who would have preferred to sit and wait in silence.

Sylvia took a little book from her pocket and pretended to read. I could not help but notice the title:
Reminiscences of the Summerland: My Journeys Among the Dear Departed
, by Mrs. Agatha Percy. So our crystal gazer was an author, as well? I could not help but think a little more highly of her, though I wished she had been truthful enough to admit to writing romances rather than memoirs.

Half an hour passed. Suzie Dear stuck her head in to inquire whether we needed anything. She plucked nervously at her skirt and gulped. I wouldn’t have thought it, but the brassy young woman seemed nervous and even fearful. I thought, at the time, that this change in behavior had been caused by a sharp reprimand from her mistress.

Mrs. Deeds asked for hot tea and sandwiches, but Suzie Dear never brought them. When Mrs. Deeds asked a second time, Suzie answered, “The cook is gone.”

“Is she, now?” asked Mr. Phips with interest. “Gone where?”

“Wouldn’t know, sir,” said Suzie. “Somewhere else, I suppose.”

I rose and walked down the dark hall and found the half flight of stairs leading into the kitchen, Suzie dogging my heels in angry protest. “Can’t go in there, miss!” she said, trying to block the kitchen door with her own body.

Gently I pushed her aside and entered the kitchen. The cook had indeed gone, in the way that a fair day can be said to be gone when a storm arrives. Drawers had been pulled out and emptied on the floor; the large worktable was littered with chopped carrots, beef bones, and dirty butcher knives; a cold pot sat on a fire that had gone out. The cook had left without finishing the stew. The door that opened into the little room where the cook slept was ajar. It was a breach of privacy, I admit, but I peered inside. The bed had been rested upon, but not slept in. The pegs on the wall were bereft of garments, the drawers bare. There was not a single item to indicate a person had once inhabited this room.

“She were a nervous person,” explained Suzie. “I heard her quarreling with Mrs. Percy the day before.”

That seemed only half an explanation. Judging from the gleaming pots suspended from the ceiling, the sparkling cleanliness of the windows, and the scrubbed whiteness of the plank floor, the cook had been a tidy woman, proud of her
work, yet she had left the kitchen in this state. Why? My uneasiness grew.

“Well, there’ll be no tea in the front parlor today,” I agreed with Suzie. I returned to the others, certain that other strange events were to follow.

Another half hour passed in desultory fashion. It was growing dark outside, as dark as it can grow on a late-winter afternoon when snow falls in great white sheets. Mrs. Deeds rose from her comfortable chair and began to pace in front of a window that overlooked the street.

“Isn’t that Miss Snodgrass?” she exclaimed with some surprise, pausing and drawing the curtain farther back.

It was. Even from my chair she was quite visible over Mrs. Deeds’s shoulder, her height, her slenderness, that strange brown costume and extremely old-fashioned bonnet she had worn the week before identifying her. I thought she would come up the sidewalk and ring the bell, but she passed by the house. She kept walking, never once looking over her shoulder. She seemed in a hurry.

How strange. From whence had she appeared?

Fifteen more minutes passed.

“Unacceptable,” said Mr. Barnum, rising. He reached for the bell rope next to the hearth. Suzie returned five minutes later, her hair disarranged. She was breathing with difficulty, as if she had been running.

“Tell your mistress we await her,” said Mr. Barnum in a clipped, impatient tone of voice.

“Yes, sir,” said Suzie, bobbing another curtsy. But she stayed in the doorway.

“Well?” roared Mr. Barnum.

“She ain’t feeling well, I suspect is why she’s delayed,” Suzie said. “Perhaps you all should just go home. She’ll send your money back to you, I’m sure.”

“How not well?” I asked, standing.

“She didn’t eat no dinner. Least, she didn’t put the tray back in the hall for me to take away,” Suzie said. “It were a good dinner, too, mashy potatoes and beef.”

“I will go see her,” I said.

“Can’t,” said Suzie Dear, gulping. “Her door is locked. Bolted, as well.”

“Is there a window?” asked Mr. Barnum.

“Yes, but never used and painted shut for all I know,” said Suzie.

“Oh! Oh! I sense an evil presence!” shrieked Mrs. Deeds. She swooned to the floor in a heap of purple velvet and black lace.

“Suzie, fetch water and smelling salts,” I instructed, much put out with Mrs. Deeds. Swooning is such a dreadful distraction, and I felt a tremendous urgency to see what was inside Mrs. Percy’s preparation room. After Mrs. Deeds had been revived and propped up against the red-striped paper of the hall wall, where she fanned herself vigorously and moaned repeatedly, Mr. Barnum, Mr. Phips, and I had a whispered conversation on how to proceed.

Even as we talked, I took note of where everyone was at that moment: Mrs. Deeds sitting on the floor, her husband next to her, Lizzie standing at the end of the hall, watching us, Sylvia standing next to Lizzie, her arm about her. And
Amelia Snodgrass, missing. The hall was dark, illumined only by dim gas lamps turned low, and our shadows played eerily against the red wallpaper.

“Which room is it?” asked Mr. Phips of Suzie, who leaned against a wall, her hand playing nervously with a little ribbon tied around her throat.

“Last down the hall, sir,” she said, “the far corner room.”

“I will go outside and climb in through the window,” said Mr. Phips. “If it does not open, I will break the glass.” He held up his hand and explained that the glove was thickly padded. “It will take but a moment.”

“Call us as soon as you are inside,” I said. “Unshoot the bolt of the door.”

Mr. Phips went out the front door and all was quiet for a long while, except for the heavy, snorting breathing of Mrs. Deeds. There was a trellis on the west side, I remembered, where that far corner room and its window would be. Perhaps Mr. Phips had to pull away rose canes. Mrs. Deeds, still fanning herself with great energy despite the swooning fit, tried to rise to her feet but could not. Perhaps, I thought with little sympathy, it was the weight of all those jewels and heavy chains.

Eventually we heard glass shatter and heavy footsteps. The bolt shot back and Mr. Phips opened the door and we beheld Mrs. Percy’s red-wallpapered sitting room. It was stuffed with vases of peacock feathers and stands of ferns.

Mr. Phips stood ashen-faced and trembling next to the shattered glass panes of the French door, for in his nervousness he had broken several to find the one opposite the lock.

Behind a bamboo-and-velvet screen we found Mrs. Percy,
prostrate on her chaise longue, her right arm hanging limply over the side so that her hand grazed the patterned carpet. One pillow was bunched up under her head; a second, which proclaimed in bright embroidered letters
SCENIC NIAGARA FALLS
, had fallen to the floor. Her face was turned away from us, and there was a sickly sweet odor in the room.

“Opium!” exclaimed Mr. Barnum in outrage. For all his showmanship and eccentricity he was, underneath it all, quite a conservative person.

“Opium, indeed,” said Mr. Phips. “It smells like one of the Canton dens in here. Evil habit.”

I walked to the other side of the chaise longue, so that I might see Mrs. Percy’s face. The use of opium was said to cause strange dreams, and I wished to see if those exotic fantasies played on her features.

It was a face I would not soon forget. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, and never had I seen eyes so bloodshot. They were painful to behold. There was a strange set to her thin mouth, as if she wished to speak. But no hint of breath made her chest rise or fall; no sigh or mumble stirred her lips. What she saw was not the plaster molds of roses and painted vines overhead, but a vision of eternity. Mrs. Percy was dead. It is so shocking, mortal reader, to expect an amusing hour with a personage and instead to discover them dead on a chaise longue, the smell of opium heavy in the air—