“I think I’d like to eat downstairs today. I need to get up and about more. Keep pace with you young people.”
Harriet smiles and wraps the blood pressure cuff around Marguerite’s arm, tightening the leather straps and placing a stethoscope lens on theinside of Marguerite’s elbow. She pumps the bulb a few times and listens, head cocked to the side as the dial jumps and then settles. “One-twenty-five over seventy. Perfect as usual.”
“We’ve always had strong hearts in this family,” Marguerite says proudly. “Not a heart problem to be found.”
Until Mama. Her heart problem had lain in wait, hidden for years—a tragic arrhythmia that none of us knew about until it was too late. I look out the window, where the leaves blow gently in the breeze. I can’t be sure whether Marguerite even knows about Mama’s passing. Perhaps she was told, and she’s forgotten. Surely Aunt Grace phoned her or sent a telegram ...
“Would you like to help me dress Miss Thorne for breakfast, Miss Halloran?” Harriet asks, clearing her throat delicately.
“Of course. And you can just call me Sadie,” I say. “Truly. I don’t mind.”
Harriet gives me the faintest of nods and moves to open a window, letting in a rush of cool morning air. “Her underthings are in the top drawer of the bureau. Bloomers and a camisole.”
“No corselet or brassiere?” I ask.
“No,” Marguerite says. “I haven’t worn one in years. Do you know, in France, I spent almost the entirety of one summer in the nude? It was divine.”
I see Harriet stifle a laugh as she pulls back the sheer curtains.
“What? The French are much more relaxed about that sort of thing.” Marguerite unties her nightgown, and it slips off her shoulders onto the floor. “I’m an artist. I’ve no issue with the human form.”
“I can see that.” I bring a pair of silken underpants and a camisole from the bureau, and help Marguerite into them, sliding the silk over her soft skin as I avert my eyes. For her day wear, she chooses a lace tea gown in prewar style. Harriet and I button up the back, and then Harriet excuses herself to go downstairs.
I guide Marguerite to the vanity and begin brushing out her tangled locks, first with my fingers, and then a boar-bristle brush I find in one of the drawers.
“Where did you get your training?” Marguerite asks, sighing with pleasure as I use the bristles to gently massage her scalp.
“My training?”
“As a ladies’ maid.”
“Oh. I’m not . . .”
Go where she is.
“In Kansas City,” I say. It isn’t really a lie. I have a knack for hairstyling and cosmetics, and often helped style the cabaret girls at the Pepper Tree before their dinner shows.
“That’s where I grew up,” Marguerite says. “In Brookside. Our house had seven bedrooms.”
“I know it well.” Aunt Grace still lives in the handsome three-story redbrick house, with its Greek Revival portico and ornate gardens, built by my great-grandfather, who made a fortune in overland shipping before the Civil War. I finish my brushing and begin braiding Marguerite’s long hair in a loose, single plait. “What brought you here?”
“Papa sent me here when I was eighteen,” she says, closing her eyes. “I was in poor health, and he wanted me to take the waters. Eureka was little more than a pioneer camp back then, but I fell in love with the light. The landscape. There were artists here, even back then, so I fit in. After my travels with Iris, I came back in 1882 and bought this house for a song. It wasn’t finished, on the inside, but the murder was the real reason no one wanted to live here.”
I pause plaiting her hair. “Pardon me?”
“Oh, you’ve never heard about Lucy Blaylock?”
“I don’t suppose I have.” Suddenly, the cheerful birdsong outside the open window seems to diminish. “There was a murder?”
“Well, theysayit was a murder. They put her husband away for it, at any rate. Lucy fell from one of the attic windows. A neighbor boy passing by saw her struggling with someone shortly before she fell. Mr.Blaylock was a wealthy businessman. Kept a mistress on the side. That sort of thing never goes well for either woman, I’m afraid.” Marguerite laughs under her breath. “Sometimes I see her. Lucy. She’s still here, but she’s not the only one. This old house holds many ghosts, my dear. Some of them are mine.”
I’m held speechless by Marguerite’s words—partly because of the strange sounds I heard in the attic, and my brother’s childish ghost story, but mostly because of my own affair with Ted. In Lucy’s situation, it was the wife who ran afoul of her philandering husband. But how many times has the mistress been on the wrong side of a man’s ire and met a similar fate?
I remember an argument Ted and I had, late in our relationship, when I’d grown impatient with his ambivalence. He’d pinned me beneath him, his weight heavy as a boulder, and grasped my chin so roughly I bore the outline of his thumbprint there the next day. His overexcitability when we made love often frightened me. With his strength and size, he could have easily snapped my neck. Or choked me. And no one would have known where I was or how to find me. My mother never even knew where the boardinghouse was because Ted forbade her to visit me. He was paying my rent, after all. He paid for everything, so he made the rules.
Now here I was, alone. Abandoned like so many mistresses—and wives—before me. But better to be alone than dead. Because despite Marguerite’s chilling words, a house full of ghosts frightens me far less than a man’s rage.
Chapter 5
