Read More Than You Know Online
Authors: Beth Gutcheon
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Romance, #Contemporary
ing . . .
I thought about the thing we saw, Connie and I, down in the
yard behind where the house had stood. What was it wearing? Some-
thing black, a cloak, or shawls. I didn’t know. I knew I couldn’t de-
scribe it, it hadn’t been that kind of . . . I could hear that grotesque
weeping and feel the ache in my throat. I was afraid that recalling the
ghost would, literally, recall it. Call it back to me.
I tried to stop thinking. I tried to recite poems. “The Wreck of
the
Hesperus.
” “The First Snow-Fall.” A strange choice in summer,
but it kept starting up in my head: “The snow had begun in the gloam-
ing, and busily all the night . . .”
Suddenly I knew that Whitey was awake. He was listening to
something in the hall outside the door, something I couldn’t hear. I
heard a soft growl.
It was out there, preying, waiting for an opening. I went clammy
with fear. I pulled all the blankets off my bed and went and sat in the
chair by the window with my back to the wall. I sat up in the dark
and looked out at the sliver of bay I could see from there, and waited
for the moon to set.
1 8 6
Spring 1886
Mercy didn’t go back to the Haskell house to sleep. She
wasn’t used to the kind of raw conflict she had witnessed, and she didn’t
want to be under the same roof with it. She was afraid it would somehow
explode and besplatter her. She wanted to go home.
She spent the night upstairs in the schoolhouse. She would later
testify that in the morning, which was fine, she took a long walk around
the corner of the island to visit her Aunt Gott, but when she got there,
she couldn’t go in. She couldn’t shake off a feeling of worry and sickness,
she said. Finally, mindful of the open weather and the laundry that never
dried in the wet, she said she walked back and went down to the wash-
house in the Haskells’ yard, which was, by agreement, hers to use on
Sunday mornings. She said she was in the yard when she saw Sallie run
out of the house and off toward the schoolhouse. Mercy said she left her
1 8 7
B E T H
G U T C H E O N
wash in the tub and followed. Why? she was asked, over and over. Because
it was her schoolhouse. She was the schoolmistress.
When she got to the schoolhouse she saw smoke coming from the
chimney in the upstairs front room. She went up and found Claris and
Sallie sitting together. Sallie looked up. Claris didn’t. Claris had the iron
stove poker in her hand, and she was knocking it rhythmically on the
floor as she rocked in the chair, as if it soothed her.
Mercy stared at her, then looked at Sallie again. She suddenly won-
dered what was in the stove; it didn’t smell like firewood alone. There
was a scorching smell, the same smell as when you leave a hot iron on
the cloth too long. Also something animal, and metallic, like blood. Mercy
opened the door to the stove and then shut it again. There was a dress
in the fire.
“My father’s dead,” Sallie said. Mercy sat down on a stool.
“Somebody killed him.” Sallie looked at Mercy calmly as she
said it.
Danial, they meant. Danial was dead now.
“Now she can marry Paul,” said Claris.
Mercy turned and looked at her. Sallie merely said, “Paul’s gone,
Mother.” To Mercy she added, “They’re looking for him.”
Looking for Paul? But why? Paul had gone yesterday, or the day
before. As she understood it.
Sallie added, “Now we’re helping Mother.”
Mercy sat still on the stool and watched them.
“Where were you?” Sallie asked Mercy suddenly. Her voice had an
odd quality, loud and flat, as if she’d gone deaf overnight.
“I spent the night here, on the cot. This morning I went for a
walk.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“Did you meet anybody?”
1 8 8
M O R E
T H A N
Y O U
K N O W
“No.”
Mother and daughter looked at Mercy.
“It will be best not to talk about it,” said Sallie.
These people think I can read their minds, thought Mercy. That’s
the way they carry on. Maybe if you treat each other like that, you get
to where you actually can. Maybe she could. They were thinking, If none
of us will talk about it, nobody can do anything to any of us. We live
in our own bubble, we make our own rules. It’s nobody else’s business
anyway.
The two Haskell women were looking at Mercy, and she suddenly
saw that they knew all about her feeling of sickness in the morning, and
what it meant. What if, when the police finally came about Danial, mother
and daughter turned to her and pointed?
1 8 9
I know Edith wanted me sent away, home toBoston,orany-
where else, but apparently it was impossible. Father was working harder
than ever; there would be nothing to keep me from running wild at
home. Boarding schools were not in session, and it was in all ways
too late for summer camp. Typical. When I was low and upset and
wanted to go, she wouldn’t let me. Now, loving Conary, I was des-
perate to stay. Edith said if I must stay with her, I had to have a job.
Someplace out of the house, where I could be watched. I said I would
rake blueberries when they started hiring. Edith said no; she suspected
that outdoors with no one much watching me, side by side with a lot
of Micmac Indians, I would find a way to see Connie, and she was
right. Not only that, raking was miserable work but it paid real money.
Money bought freedom. Nobody thought I should have any of that. In
the end, I designed my own prison; Dot Sylvester took me on to help
1 9 0
M O R E
T H A N
Y O U
K N O W
her with the switchboard mornings when she scheduled her fittings,
and I persuaded Mrs. Pease and Mrs. Allen to let me volunteer at the
library in the afternoons. They were glad to have me; there were pe-
riodicals unarchived going back years. There were books to mend and
shelve. I knew enough of the Dewey decimal system to be useful.
Everyone in the village seemed to know that Connie and I had
gotten into some kind of trouble. The first week Edith would walk
with me to Dot’s in the morning and come back to the village at five
o’clock to walk me home. Sometimes when girls my age came into
the library, girls who had grown up with Connie, they would find
excuses to hang around the front desk until they could get a look at
me. I didn’t like it. But I discovered something that surprised me and
gave me some courage. Mrs. Pease did not like Edith. Not at all. She
had heard somehow that Edith had tried to tip Mr. Crocker for bringing
me home, and it got her back up.
Sometimes in the evenings at home, the phone would ring. Edith
always answered, and several times she found the line dead. One night
I said, “It’s the ghost, Mother.” Edith shot me a poisonous look, but
not before I saw a flicker of discomfort in her expression. A phone
that rings when no one is on the line is an eerie thing. Stephen stopped
eating and looked at me.
“I found an article in a magazine I was filing yesterday,” I said
to Stephen, sounding helpful, informative. ‘Do the Dead Make Phone
Calls?’ was the title.”
“Do they?”
“Yes,” I said. “Quite nasty ones. They send telegrams too . . .”
“Stop it, Hannah,” Edith snapped at me. “You’re scaring him on
purpose. I’ve never seen such horrid behavior.”
“You’ve led a sheltered life,” I said. I couldn’t seem to help
myself. I was full of foul humor, and it was stronger than I was. I
didn’t
want to scare Stephen, but I knew I was doing it.
1 9 1
B E T H
G U T C H E O N
“Leave the table,” said Edith, and I did. I went upstairs. I knew
perfectly well that it was Conary calling me, and it made me wild that
he couldn’t reach me. Where was he? At the pay phone outside the
drugstore? I shut my door and thought about Conary being here, right
in the front room. With another girl, but I didn’t care about that. I
wished he were with me. I knew that I was the girl he’d been looking
for, and that he of all the souls in the universe was for me. I thought
about the expression on his face when I obediently left him to get into
his father’s boat. I wanted to tell him I would never do that again.
One day when I was at the library shelving novels, I saw a girl
of about fifteen come in. She and Mrs. Pease spoke pleasantly to each
other, and then she made her way over to me. At first she pretended
to look for a book, but she soon saw Mrs. Pease was busying herself
with something else.
“Hannah,” the girl said softly to me.
I looked at her, surprised. I hadn’t seen her before, but once I
saw her light eyes, I knew who she was.
“I’m Mary,” she said. Conary’s sister.
“Is Conary here?”
She shook her head. “Dad hardly lets him out of the house. He’s
on a tear.”
“Is there any way I can see him?”
“He was afraid they’d sent you away. He tried to call you the
other night from the Jellisons’.”
“I know. Could I come down to your house?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” she said. “Don’t worry, he’ll get
out. He always does.”
A woman in overalls came into the library, and Mary turned
away from me very suddenly and took a book from the shelf and
1 9 2
M O R E
T H A N
Y O U
K N O W
opened it. After a moment, she turned her back to the room, and she
whispered, “I thought that was Aunt Etta. I don’t know why; she can
hardly read.”
I looked at the woman in the overalls. It was the painter from
the Colony; I’d seen her out with her easels, painting things she
thought were picturesque, like Bowdoin Leach working.
“Connie said we should choose a book. When he has a plan, the
book will be pushed in on the shelf, and that means there’s a note in
it for you.”
We both looked at the book in her hands; it was
A Christmas
Carol
by Charles Dickens.
“That one,” I said. “Nobody’s going to check that out in August.”
Mary nodded and put the book carefully back on the shelf with
its spine aligned with the other volumes. Then she left me and went
to browse in another section, and I went back to putting the Jalna
books in order. When I looked up, she had left the library.
I probably checked that book ten times a day after that. Finally,
about a week later, on my fifth visit of the day, I found it stuck back
on the shelf inches deeper than the rest of the Dickens. I hadn’t seen
Mary or Connie come in, but someone had.
The note said, “Come up to the Indian Burial Ground as soon
after five as you can get there.”
There was no signature. And I didn’t know where the Indian
Burial Ground was. I spent about an hour fretting about it and prowling
in old memorabilia about the town. Finally I figured it out; I could
ask Bowdoin. He would know, and, better, he wouldn’t care why I
wanted to know.
At five o’clock I hightailed it up to the blacksmith shed, and I
thought my heart would stop when I saw it was closed and dark. I had
1 9 3
B E T H
G U T C H E O N
no backup plan. I stood in the yard staring at the door, as stupid as a
turkey in the rain. Just as I was about to despair and go, the kitchen
door opened and Bowdoin came painfully out of the house.
“Miss Gray,” he said. He had seen me and was coming out to
see what had brought me.
I knew it was going to seem odd, but I was wild to be away. I
just baldly asked him my question.
“Why that’s an interesting thing,” he answered. He stood look-
ing toward the village, thinking. “When the first fathers chose a
place for a cemetery, they didn’t put it beside the meeting house,
like you’d expect. I suppose that they had need of a burial place be-
fore they had a meeting house. They certainly did before they had a
settled minister. In those days, in fact right up to when I was a boy,
the Indians had their summer camp down there on the shore this
side of the Neck. Where the summer people put their golf course.
Them and the settlers lived cheek by jowl together and were a great
help to each other, and it must have been natural to share the Indi-
ans’ burying ground. Anyway, they did. All the earliest folks of the
town are up there.”
“Where is it?”
He took a good look at me.
“What do you call that haircut, now?” he said, instead of an-
swering.
“I thought it would be easier in the heat,” I said, wanting to
scream. He saw at once I wasn’t in the mood for teasing and let it go.
“You know where the Pottery is?” I did.
“You go right up past there, maybe quarter of a mile. It’s on the
left, where the old road came into town before there was a bridge over
the falls.”
“Thank you.” I took off. If Bowdoin wondered why I wanted to
know, he never asked me, and I was grateful.
1 9 4
M O R E
T H A N
Y O U
K N O W
*
*
*
I went as quickly as I could; I didn’t dare run, for fear it would