Barbara Michaels - The Walker in Shadows

"Well, we know what happened to him, don't we? I mean, Mr. Friedrichs, all this is Monday-morning quar-terback stuff. I'm just trying to explain how I- we-figured it out in advance.

"I kept thinking about the fact that all this happened in Maryland. Not so far away from here, really. And I thought, suppose it was me. I'd try to make it home if I was hurt." He looked at his mother; and although she knew quite well that Mark was deliberately working on her emotions, her eyes grew moist. "I mean," Mark went on pensively, "care of the wounded in those days was grim, even in regular hospitals, and the Confederates were on the run. They piled wounded men into springless wagons and bumped them along those muddy roads… Maybe, even, Peter was cut off from his men and couldn't get back. So-he started home. He knew about the tunnel, and the secret room, and Mary Jane's work with the spy ring. He'd figure he could get back to his unit via that route, after he had recovered. Can you picture that journey? It must have been terrible for an injured man. But he made it -into the arms of his loving sister… who killed him."

"Wait a minute," said Josef, after he had recovered his breath. "This isn't history, this is straight out of Sophocles or Euripides. How do you know the poor kid didn't simply die of his wounds?"

"He did," Mark said. "I never claimed she actually murdered him. She let him die, when she could have saved him-or at least made a good try at saving him. Oh, for God's sake, it's so obvious! If she didn't have something to hide, why did she brick up the hidden room, with his body still in it? They didn't hang enemy corpses over the city gates, the way they did in the Middle Ages. Peter would have been buried properly, in the family graveyard with his father, and with the conventional religious rites. That sort of thing meant a lot to people back then. It would have meant a lot to Mary Jane. She could have raised a big corny gravestone over him, with some sloppy epitaph on it. Yet she left him on the bed where he died like a-a dead animal. She shoveled the dirt over the trapdoor-it had to be her, there was nobody else to do it-and ordered the slaves to lay the brick floor. Why? Why would anybody do a thing like that, much loss Pe-ter's adoring big sister?"

Mark paused, as if waiting for an answer. Neither of the adults had anything to offer, and Kathy, smiling smugly, remained silent.

"All right, let's get back to the ghost," Mark said. "If Hiram's story can be believed, Mary Jane had appeared before, but it took Kathy to rouse her to furious activity. Kathy still can't see any resemblance between her and Susan Bates-although it was strong enough to strike Jay. Remember when he said she reminded him of somebody? But Kath has to admit that the circumstantial resemblances are considerable. She's the same age, the same coloring, and she-er-"

"Was emotionally involved with the boy next door," said Kathy calmly. "What Mark means is that the emotional atmosphere was similar to what had gone on over a century earlier in these two houses. I don't mean you, Mrs. Robbins, you've got good sense. But Dad acted like a nineteenth-century heavy father, and Mark-well-"

"How about you?" Stung, Mark forgot his manners and his tact. "It wasn't me that broke down in tears when he said we couldn't go out."

Kathy blushed. "That is irrelevant. The point is that our behavior stirred up the old hate. That, and the fact that Mark found the diary. But that-oh, well, Mark, we might as well tell them. We don't think that was an accident."

"Peter?" Pat asked.

Mark nodded. "On several occasions we were conscious of another presence, one that was trying to help us. It was relatively feeble and ineffectual much of the time, but it laid a couple of clues on us that we were too stupid to interpret."

"You were," Kathy said. "I knew it all the time."

"Oh, well, she kept insisting Peter wouldn't hurt the girl he was in love with," Mark said. He added disgustedly, "I told her that wasn't evidence."

"People who live in glass houses," Josef remarked, "should not criticize other people's logic. So you- Kathy-decided that the constructive force was Peter?"

"Obviously," Kathy said. "Last night, when Mary Jane was rampaging through our house, he led her off. The trail ended in the hall-at the basement door. He was trying to tell us to look in the basement."

"But the real giveaway was the message I got with the automatic writing," Mark said, seeing that this last statement failed to carry conviction. "We completely misinterpreted it. It wasn't a threat. It was a quotation-from Peter's dying words. He had fought his way back to her, through incredible pain and suffering. When he was dying and delirious, he called for her. He wanted her to know he had tried to come back to her. And that is why his sister let him die, instead of trying to get help for him.

"Help was available. It was only eighty feet away. After reading Susan's diary, you know her parents weren't cruel, vindictive people; can you imagine them refusing their nephew the medical attention that might have saved his life? Peter was in uniform, he wasn't a spy; the worst that could have happened was that he'd have been interned as a prisoner of war. But with Mr. Bates being a big wheel in the government, he could have gotten the best-possible medical care.

"When Mary Jane realized that her brother was dying in that damp little room, all she had to do was walk across the yard and knock on the Bateses' door. She didn't. We know she didn't, because he's still there."

"Maybe he was on the verge of death when he got there," Pat said. "Maybe she didn't have time-"

"She had time to help him undress and put him to bed," Mark said inexorably. "He had time to babble and plead to see his sweetheart. Even if Mary lane couldn't have gotten help in time to save his life, she could have heeded his dying wish and brought Susan to hold his hand and say good-bye. The vindictiveness, the awful jealousy, that kept her inactive then drove her insane after Peter died. She couldn't even share him after he was dead. That place in Poolesville that Cordelia nun tioned-there was an insane asylum there, one of the first in the state. Read Cordelia's epilogue again, with that in mind. Cordelia wouldn't mention the word, nice people didn't go crazy, they suffered from melancholia or went into a decline. Mary Jane was crazy. She died insane. It's no wonder her spirit couldn't rest. It was caught, like a fly in a spiderweb, in a single moment of time-the hour of Peter's death. Alive or dead, she hated Susan Bates and blamed the girl for her own crime, the way guilty people do. She got her revenge on Susan, all right. The girl must have died a thousand times during those years, not knowing what had happened to her lover, hoping against hope he'd come back… When she finally gave up hope, she married that creep Morton. She didn't live long, luckily for her."

"I hope it's true," Josef said, after a period of appalled silence; Mark's passionate description had affected them all. "I'd hate to think you could invent a story as gruesome as that."

"I didn't invent it," Mark insisted. "We can probably prove the bones were Peter's, if you want to dig them up again. Personally I'd fill in the hole and plant a cross or something on the top and leave well enough alone. He wouldn't care. He wasn't bothering anybody. Mary Jane was the ghost, and she's gone. I took care of her."

They let this egotistical statement pass, for varied reasons; Kathy because she didn't want to jar Mark's male ego any further, Pat because she was reluctant to state what she really believed: that Peter Turnbull had finally found strength enough to deal with the threat to his sweetheart.

Pat never knew why she chose that moment to speak. Now that the emergency was ovee-and her own instincts, even more than Mark's assurances, told her that it was-there was no need for hasty decisions. She had meant to prepare Mark for the step she planned to take in slow, subtle stages, giving him time to appreciate Josef's good qualities-and getting him enrolled in a college some distance from home. Instead she blurted it out, interrupting Mark in the midst of his self-glorification.