The Fate of Mercy Alban Read online

  My hands were shaking as I picked up my wineglass. I took a long sip and continued.

  “But as it turned out, it was one of those deceptive, sly November days here on Lake Superior. The weather changed. Lake Superior is like that, you know. Murderous when it wants to be. It wouldn’t have blown up a storm when we were safe in our own bay, not then. It waited until we were far away from shore. We should have known better. I should have known better. But we hadn’t noticed the clouds building up, or if we did—kids that age. They think they’re invincible. We certainly did. But when the wind shifted and the rain started, we realized we were in a lot of trouble out there.”

  My eyes were unfocused, staring back into a moment in the past that I had all but blocked out of my mind. I could feel the spray on my face, the stiff wind tangling my hair.

  “We sailed for hours against that wind, trying to get back to shore. The waves were so huge and the rain was just beating down on us. The boys were expert sailors, but this was too much. If we had just taken the larger of our boats, we might have been all right. But we weren’t. And it was my fault. I was the eldest, I should have gotten us to shore sooner.”

  I saw his lips moving: “It wasn’t your fault,” but I could barely hear him, so deeply was I caught in the story that was unraveling.

  “The boat capsized,” I went on. “All of us tumbled into the water and then it was a frenzy—grasping for the side of the boat, flailing around in the water. I saw a huge wave—to me it looked three stories tall—bearing down on us. And everything went an icy black. I was clinging on to the side of the boat, but my brothers … they were gone. Just gone. Taken by the lake, both of them.”

  Matthew shook his head and closed his eyes.

  “I hung on to the boat until the Coast Guard arrived. I never saw my brothers again.”

  I could see the image of my father watching the Coast Guard vessel, with me on it, pull up to our dock. His eyes were bright, his face expectant—his children were saved!—but then he saw me alone coming toward him, still wearing my life vest, wrapped in a blanket. He ran past me and onto the boat, looking everywhere, calling the boys’ names. “Where are they? Where are my sons?” And when the reality hit him, he staggered onto the dock and collapsed onto our beach where he let out a wail that seemed to have no end—an ancient primal keening that pierced my soul with its power.

  Jane led me into the house, into my mother’s open arms, where we, too, collapsed onto the floor and wept for those impish, devilish boys whom we loved more than anything.

  I swallowed hard and continued. “My father sent out a fleet of boats to look for the boys, but their bodies were never found. He was never the same after that. His grief for them, it consumed him. The man he had been, the father I had known, was gone—his humor, his wit, the sparkle in his eyes—taken just as swiftly as the boys were taken by the lake.”

  I could see him, then, standing in the pounding rain, raging at the lake itself. He was in the water up to his waist when Mr. Jameson and some of his groundskeeping staff reached him and pulled him back onto land. Jane called our family doctor, who hurried to the house and sedated him, and my mother and me, too.

  “After that day, my dad started drinking heavily and just withdrew. He was angry, despondent, and crushingly sad all at once. I never heard him speak another civil word, not to anyone. And he never looked at me the same way. Before that day, I had been his little princess. But I could tell he blamed me. Losing Jake and Jimmy—it killed him. Literally. Not long after they drowned, he took his own life. He walked out into the lake to be with them, forever.”

  “Oh, Grace,” Matthew said, his eyes brimming with tears. “I’m so sorry. I …” He let out a long sigh. “There are no words.”

  And then I told him what I had never told another living soul, not my mother, not my husband, not anyone. “The last words he spoke to me were: ‘Why couldn’t it have been you?’ ”

  I had finally said it out loud, I had told a man I’d just met hours before what I had been too ashamed to reveal to anyone for more than twenty years.

  “You know he didn’t mean that,” he said, fishing a handkerchief out of his pocket and handing it to me. “It was the grief talking. Not your dad.”

  As I dabbed at my nose and eyes, the minister did what he does best. “Lord, please grant this woman peace.” Looking toward the ceiling, he added, “Right now would be good.”

  This brought a slight smile to my face. “A little demanding, aren’t we?”

  He smiled back. “I wanted Him to know I was serious. No fooling around, God. Peace for Grace Alban. Now.”

  I tried to hold on to that smile but it faded as quickly as it came. I was shivering deep inside my core. I was as cold as I had been in the middle of the lake that day.

  “I felt like my mother blamed me for all of it—she never said as much, but I know she did,” I said. “I blamed myself. Her husband and sons were dead because of me.”

  He shook his head. “Not because of you. None of it was your fault. You must know that, Grace.”

  “I could never get away from it here in this town,” I told him. “Everywhere I went, people knew I was the Alban daughter who had been on the boat that day. The stares, the whispers. Their pitying faces—or it might have been scorn, I really wasn’t sure. Everyone knew what had happened. Another in a long line of Alban tragedies. I couldn’t stand being at the center of it.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t scorn,” Matthew said, his face earnest. “I think you know that, too. People don’t know how to react to tragedies like the one you experienced. It’s their worst fear come to life. They don’t know what to say, what to do. They can be awkward and even cruel without really meaning to.”

  Somewhere deep down, I knew he was right. But when I was young, I just couldn’t see it that way. I took a long sip of wine and continued. “A few months passed, and I had turned twenty-one and was in college at the time, and I began thinking of transferring to a school out west. Somewhere, anywhere away from here. When my mother had no objections to the idea, I did it. I moved out to Seattle. And slowly, in that environment of anonymity, I began to heal. Nobody had any idea or, for that matter, cared about who the Albans were or who I was. Nobody knew I was on a sailboat that day with my brothers. They didn’t even know I’d ever had any brothers. Or a father who killed himself because of me. Even now, most of my friends out there don’t know. It was liberating, in a way. I loved that people didn’t know anything about Grace Alban, because it meant I could pretend I didn’t, either. I could pretend I was a different person. And eventually, I became that person.”

  Just then, Jane came into the dining room with our main course, a platter of roasted chicken and vegetables. She set it down and cleared our soup dishes, eyeing me darkly. I had no doubt that she heard and objected to my airing our family’s dirty laundry, but I didn’t care. It felt good to talk about it.

  “I can understand how you felt,” Matthew said when Jane had left the room after serving us each some sliced chicken and roasted tomatoes, onions, and asparagus. “You went to a place where the slate was wiped clean.”

  “That’s right. And then I met Andrew, who grew up out there, and before I knew it, we were married and Amity was on the way. I never really made a conscious decision to stay away from Alban House, but the more time that passed, the less reason I found to come back. I had built a life elsewhere, a life I loved. I was happy for a long time. I really was.”

  He chewed a bite of chicken and considered this. “You said ‘was.’ You were happy. What happened?”

  “Another woman.” I sighed. “I guess my husband got tired of the person I was pretending to be.”

  “You’re divorced, then?”

  I nodded. “It’s been nearly a year. He’s remarried and has another child already. He hasn’t seen much of Amity since.”

  Matthew and I locked eyes. “It’s not my place to criticize Amity’s father, I’m sure he’s a fine man”—he shook his head slig
htly—“but he’s also a blind son of a bitch.”

  I let out a laugh. “Such language, Reverend!”

  “Just calling it the way I see it.” He grinned and took another bite of his chicken. “If you have a daughter like that girl upstairs and a wife like you, you thank God every day for your good fortune.”

  We smiled at each other and I felt a sizzle, an electricity wrapping around us and charging the air. I shook my head and pushed away the feeling—that was the last thing I needed right now.

  “So,” he said, breaking the silence, “what’s it like finally being back here after all this time?”

  I looked around the room. “I was dreading it. I knew it was going to dredge up memories that I had tried very hard to forget. But just being here, I know it’s going to sound a little crazy, but I feel so close to my brothers, and to my mom and dad for that matter. I’ve heard the boys’ laughter and smelled my mom’s perfume. I really feel their presence in this house. It makes me realize how much I’ve missed them.”

  My eyes brimmed with tears.

  “That doesn’t sound so crazy to me,” Matthew said. “I deal with the supernatural on a daily basis, you know. I have no doubt that you can feel the spirits of your family here.”

  He took a sip of wine and continued. “So what’s next for you? What happens after the funeral?”

  “I really don’t know,” I admitted to him as I bit the top off an asparagus spear. “Amity and I had a great life out in Washington—our house is on Whidbey Island, which really is quite beautiful. But I’ll be honest. Ever since her father left us last year, things have gone downhill and it has been pretty lonely for me out there. That’s his hometown and all of our friends were his friends first, and they basically got him in the divorce, if you know what I mean. I’m off the dinner party list. He’s got a new wife and baby now and we’re completely out of the picture. And it doesn’t help that everything about the place reminds me of our life together. He introduced me to it all.”

  For the first time, this occurred to me: “I really wouldn’t mind leaving there for good.”

  “And Amity? What does she think?”

  I thought out loud about how a move might affect my daughter. “She doesn’t see her dad very much as it is, so moving across the country wouldn’t change that. Actually, it would provide an excuse for why she doesn’t see him, other than the fact that he’s an ass and much too busy with his new family to care about his old one.”

  The more I talked about it, the more it seemed to make sense. “Amity has been coming here during the summers for years,” I went on. “She loves it almost as much as I did at her age. And back on Whidbey, this next school year she’s got to change schools—redistricting, it’s quite annoying—and she’s going to have very few friends at her new school. If we were going to make a change, now is a good time.”

  He smiled a broad smile, his eyes shining. “So are you saying that you’d consider moving back here to Alban House?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “It’s funny. This house and my family’s legacy haven’t meant much to me for a couple of decades, but now that my mom’s gone and I’m basically the head of the Alban family, I do feel a certain—I don’t know. A sense of responsibility, I guess. I feel it especially strongly when I’m here inside the house. Albans have been leaders in this town for a hundred and fifty years. Without me here, what will happen to that legacy? And what will happen to this house? I hate to think of it withering and dying or becoming a museum. This is my family’s home and a part of this town’s history. It’s important to me to uphold it.”

  At that, I distinctly heard a loud exhale. I didn’t know if it was Jane in the butler’s pantry eavesdropping on our conversation or the house itself breathing a sigh of relief.

  CHAPTER 11

  After Reverend Parker had gone home, I sat in the parlor until the fire settled into embers and then I retreated to the master suite, where I found Amity already asleep on the daybed in my mother’s study. I locked the door behind me and stole over to her bed, tucking the covers up around her neck and giving her a soft kiss on the cheek. She’d be perfectly safe here with me, intruder in the house or not.

  I felt my way behind the tapestry and checked the hidden door—locked tight. A quick look in the closets turned up nobody lurking. I peered out the window and saw two uniformed officers sitting on folding chairs near the side door, a small flame burning in a fire ring between them. I hoped they weren’t too terribly cold out there as I slipped into my mother’s bed and pulled the quilts around me.

  Jane had lit a fire in the fireplace and, as I burrowed under the covers, I watched it burn in the darkness, its flames casting wild shadows that looked like trees with gnarled and leafless limbs, witches reaching out from behind them toward me. That image sounds rather macabre but it felt just the opposite—I was content and comforted there among my mother’s mountain of pillows and down quilts, listening to the crackling fire and watching the shadow play on the walls.

  Several days passed with the police turning up nothing in the way of an intruder—perhaps Jane was right and it was my imagination working overtime—and finally Friday arrived. I awoke to rain on the day of my mother’s funeral. Not a delicate, whisper of a rain like I had been used to in Washington but a good, old-fashioned Minnesota downpour with electricity crackling through the sky. As Amity and I walked hand in hand down the main staircase, a booming clap of thunder shook the house so hard that the stained-glass window quaked and rattled its displeasure.

  I had been moving through a dense fog for most of the morning, relying on my familiar routine—showering, drying my hair, applying makeup, pulling my dress over my head—to guide me. I smiled at Amity, who was looking so grown-up in her black skirt and blouse. I squeezed her hand, trying to put on a strong façade for her. But the truth was, I was splintering inside.

  My mind drifted back to the day of my brothers’ funeral, when my mom and I walked down these stairs hand in hand, just as I was now doing with my own daughter. Mom had turned to me as we stood on the second-floor landing, her face a mask of grief and pain, and managed a smile. “We’ll get through this together,” she said, her voice wavering. She was always a tower of strength, even on what was undoubtedly one of the worst days of her life. I hoped I could be half as strong for Amity.

  Jane stood at the front door, her mouth in a tight line, her eyes reddened. I could feel the tension radiating from her. I wanted to run to her and throw my arms around her, tell her how much she had meant to my mother over the years, how completely my family had relied on her, and how grateful my mother had been for her steadfast presence in this house. But I knew that if I said anything of the kind, her false display of strength would crumble to the ground right along with mine.

  So instead, I was all business: “You’ll be one of the first ones out after the service, and you’ll be back here before anyone else to supervise the catering, right?”

  “That’s right, miss.” She nodded tightly, her gaze fixed on the wall behind me. “Mr. Jameson and I will sit in the back and slip out during the last hymn. The car’s waiting for you now.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, putting my arm around Amity’s shoulders and trying to smile at her. “It’s time to go.”

  Jane had arranged for Carter to bring the car around to the front of the house to take Amity and me to the funeral—she wouldn’t hear of riding with us herself, stickler for protocol that she was—and although the church wasn’t more than a mile away, my stomach tightened as I saw the thundering downpour outside. I wondered if old Carter could keep the car on the road.

  Jane opened the door onto the patio, where Mr. Jameson stood in the deluge holding an enormous black umbrella. He ushered Amity and me down to the waiting silver-and-black Bentley, the same car, I thought with a pang in the pit of my stomach, that had brought David Coleville to this house all those years ago. He opened the back door for us and we slid in.

  “Miss Grace.” Carter smiled at
me from the driver’s seat, the years evident on his impossibly kind face. He looked the picture of a driver—black suit, white shirt, black tie and hat. I had never seen him wear anything else. “So good to have you back at Alban House.”

  I smiled back at him and nodded, holding his gaze for a moment before my eyes began stinging. Amity handed me a tissue and I held it to my face, trying to hold back the flood of grief.

  He cleared his throat and pulled away, and I watched as the rain distorted Jane, her husband, and the house behind them into an Impressionist painting.

  Just a turn here and a turn there down the road and we would soon arrive. But we were crawling at a snail’s pace as the rain beat down onto the windshield and the wipers flew back and forth in a frantic attempt to clear the way.

  As we inched along, I thought about how I’d always loved this tree-lined street. Maples and elms arched over the roadway on either side as though they were trying to grasp one another’s hands. It made for a beautiful scene in the fall when their leaves were ablaze, but on this day, with their branches shaking violently in the wind and lightning crackling through the dark sky, it seemed sinister and foreboding, as though we were creeping through a haunted wood.

  We were nearly at the church. I turned to smooth a stray curl off Amity’s forehead when I felt the car jerk to a stop, my head hitting the back of my seat with a thud. Carter gasped aloud and I looked out the front window to see a woman standing in the roadway. She was wearing a long black dress and a black hat with an extremely wide brim, and was holding a large black umbrella. Obviously, she was there to attend the funeral. She had been looking down at the car, but then she raised her head and stared right in at us, and a slow smile crept across her face.

  “Oh my God,” Amity gasped, her mouth in a grimace. This woman was made up like something out of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Heavy black eyeliner and mascara, bright red lips with the lipstick applied rather … haphazardly. A wrinkled, ghostly white face with violent streaks of blush on her cheeks. She was elderly, but I couldn’t quite tell whether she was my mother’s age or much older.