William Lashner - Bitter Truth

So engrossed were we in the pictures that we didn’t hear the front door open or the creak of someone walking through the parlor and the kitchen and the dining room. So engrossed were we that we didn’t hear a thing until we heard the soft even footfalls rising up the stairs.

I STUFFED THE PHOTOGRAPHSback into the box and the box into my pack and clicked off the light. Darkness covered us. And in the darkness an uneven wiggle of shadow impressed itself upon the air around the door. A candle? Yes. I grabbed hold of Caroline and whispered in her ear, “Absolute silence.”

The footsteps continued to climb, step by step. The light causing the uneven shadows became ever more prominent. The intruder reached the top of the stairs and hesitated.

Slowly Caroline and I crawled together off the mattress to a corner of the room where someone glancing in the doorway wouldn’t so easily spot us. I crouched into a ready position and hefted the flashlight in my hand. It was as heavy as a billy club. We waited.

Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. I heard something and was about to tell Caroline to be quiet once again when I realized it was my breath, coming out in gulps. Sweat blossomed on my forehead, sweat trickled down my sides. I couldn’t stop thinking of what Kingsley Shaw had said, that his mother was alive in the Poole house and waiting for him. Was it she holding the candle, rising up the steps? Whoever it was, I was certain, whoever had climbed those stairs was the murderer who had been stalking the Reddmans. And now Caroline and I were cowering in the corner like two targets. My heart jumped in my chest. I willed whoever was coming to turn around, to step down the stairs, to just go away and leave us alive.

And then the steps began again. Toward us. The uneven flicker of light growing. The intruder stopped at one door for a moment and then moved on and stopped at another and then stopped before our own.

I grabbed tighter to Caroline and held my breath. Go away, I thought, we’re not here, nobody’s here.

A hand with a white candle slid through the doorway and then the arm, black-sleeved, and a man’s shoe.

I clicked on the light as soon as the head appeared, aiming the beam at the figure’s face. It whited out for an instant before we could recognize who it was.

“Franklin?” said Caroline.

“Get that out of my face,” said a calm Franklin Harrington.

I scrambled to my feet and sent the light sprawling against the far wall. His face, now lit only by the candle held below it, flickered in ominous shadow.

“Jesus, Franklin, what are you doing here?” asked Caroline, now also standing.

“I saw you go out the back of the house and I was worried about you,” said Harrington, “so I followed. Little did I know you were coming here to tryst with your new boyfriend. And in our old room, yet. Trying to bring back the magic?”

“Shut up,” said Caroline. “You’re being a bastard.”

“So what are you two up to?” he asked.

“Archaeology,” I said.

He turned his attention to me, his eyes dark sockets of shadow in the candlelight. “Digging for mummies?”

“No,” I said. “Pooles.”

He stared at me for a moment before smiling. “Curiosity,” he said, with a lighthearted warning in his voice that wasn’t lighthearted at all. “What is it about the Pooles you want to know, Victor?”

“Mostly,” I said, “I want to know if there are any still alive.”

“And so you came here, to their old haunt, to snag yourself a Poole. Don’t you think you’re a little late? Maybe seventy years too late?”

He circled around the room, examining it by candlelight.

“Ahh, the memories,” said Harrington. “I can truly say some of the happiest moments of my life were spent in this room. But you knew, didn’t you, Caroline, that before this became the scene of our childhood romance, long before, this was Mrs. Poole’s bedchamber? After her husband hanged himself and your great-grandfather deeded her this house, which she accepted only because she had no choice, no other place to go, she spent months in bed in this room, never rising, only weeping.”

“She had her reasons, I figure,” I said.

“Her husband’s suicide was a blow, yes,” said Harrington, as surely as if he were discussing a ball game he had played in a few years back. “She would have killed herself, too, except for her daughter. But even before his death, she had given herself over to mourning. Her husband would lose himself in drink and she would spend her days castigating him or cursing Claudius Reddman to the heavens, blaming their misfortunes on him.”

“How do you know all this, Franklin?” said Caroline.

“I’ve made a study of the Pooles. They’re fascinating, really. A family cursed by luck. Did you know that the grandfather, Elisha Poole’s father, lost everything he owned in the depression of 1878? Ten thousand businesses failed that year, including his. He owned three buildings on Market Street, owned them outright, but mortgaged the buildings to buy shares in a gold mine in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory from a drinking buddy. Fortunes in gold were being dug out of the ground daily then, but not from that mine. With the depression, his tenants couldn’t pay the rents and he couldn’t pay his mortgages. He lost the buildings and spent the rest of his life drinking in celebration of his misfortune. Just like his son, who complained so bitterly about your great-grandfather.”

“Maybe he had his reasons,” I said.

“What reasons, Victor?” said Caroline. “What are you trying to say?”

“Only what you suspected, Caroline,” I said. “Those records you found behind the panel in the library, the accountant looked them over today. They show pretty clearly that your grandfather stole the company right out from under Elisha Poole.”

She didn’t respond, she just blinked at me for a moment, as if she was having trouble processing the information.

“Should I show you the rest of the house?” said Harrington, without even a hint of surprise at what I had said. “Maybe we should start with Emma’s room.”

He strolled out into the hallway and back to the room with the listing bed and the tacks in the wall. Caroline and I tilted our heads uncertainly at each other and then followed. His candlelight bathed the small room in a flickering yellow.

“Emma came to this house of despair when she was five,” said Harrington, the tour guide. “Walked four and a half miles to the public school each day. Cared for her mother through her long bouts of melancholia and then through her final sickness. Though rather unattractive, she idolized the famous beauties of her time, cutting their pictures from the papers and tacking them onto these very walls, Theda Bara, Lillian Gish, Irene Castle. And despite it all she remained rather cheerful and good-natured, until the end of her time here. Then even she lost her battle and turned to bitterness to keep her going.”

“How do you know all this?” said Caroline.

“She moved her mother permanently down to the parlor after a crushing stroke to make it easier to carry the old woman to the porch on warm days and allow her some fresh air. She moved herself out of this room into her mother’s room, which was bigger and had better light. It was in that room, our room, Caroline, that she fell in love and then fell pregnant.”

“Who was her lover?” I asked.

“Does it matter? I think she still believed in love then but just a few weeks before her delivery date her mother died, the deed to the house expired, and she moved out, deserted and alone. She had the baby in an asylum for unwed mothers outside Albany.”

“How do you know all this?” said Caroline. “Tell me, how?”