Picture the Dead Read online

  Picture the Dead

  Adele Griffin

  Lisa Brown

  A ghost will find his way home.

  Jennie Lovell's life is the very picture of love and loss. First she is orphaned and forced to live at the mercy of her stingy, indifferent relatives. Then her fiancé falls on the battlefield, leaving her heartbroken and alone. Jennie struggles to pick up the pieces of her shattered life, but is haunted by a mysterious figure that refuses to let her bury the past.

  When Jennie forms an unlikely alliance with a spirit photographer, she begins to uncover secrets about the man she thought she loved. With her sanity on edge and her life in the balance, can Jennie expose the chilling truth before someone-or something-stops her?

  Against the brutal, vivid backdrop of the American Civil War, Adele Griffin and Lisa Brown have created a spellbinding mystery where the living cannot always be trusted and death is not always the end.

  Adele Griffin, Lisa Brown

  Picture the Dead

  1.

  A ghost will find his way home.

  It’s dark outside, an elsewhere hour between midnight and dawn. I lie awake, frozen, waiting for a sound not yet audible. My eyes are open before I hear the wheels of the carriage at the bottom of the drive.

  And now the dog is barking, and there’s faint light through my window. The hired man has emerged from his room above the stable, lantern swinging from his hand. I hear Uncle Henry’s lumbering tread, Aunt Clara’s petulant “Henry? Who is it, Henry, at this hour?”

  I know that the servants are awake, too, though I can’t hear them. They have been trained to move in silence.

  What if the carriage brings news of Quinn and William? Or even my cousins themselves? That would be too much luck, perhaps, but I’m not sure that I’m strong enough for less. Another loss would be unendurable. And we are never given more than we can bear, are we?

  When I sit up, I am pinpricked in fear.

  The corridor is freezing cold, and the banister is spiky, garlanded in fresh pine. With both sons at war and her only nephew buried this year, Aunt Clara nonetheless insisted on bedecking Pritchett House for the Christmas holiday. Uncle Henry always defers to his wife’s fancies. She’s a spoiled child, blown up into a monster.

  Downstairs the front doors are flung open. I join the household gathered on the porch all of us but the hired man, who stands below in the drive as the trap pulls up. The moment feels eternal. I twist at my ring, a diamond set between two red garnets, more costly than the sum of everything I own. When Will slid it onto my finger, he’d promised that I’d get accustomed to it. Not true, not yet.

  “Doctor Perkins,” says Mavis, raising the lantern as the doctor jumps down from the buckboard. The housemaid’s chattering lips are as blue as her bare feet, and her braid swings so close I could reach out and yank it like a bell cord if she didn’t scare so easy.

  The doctor signals for Uncle Henry to help him with another passenger.

  Quinn. The name shatters through me.

  Aunt Clara looks sharp in my direction. Had I spoken out loud? I must have. But I’m sure it’s Quinn. And as the figure emerges, I see that I’m right.

  Quinn. Not Will.

  He is grotesquely thin and hollowed out, his left eye wrapped in a belt of cloth that winds around his head. He is barely human.

  “I’ll need hot water and clean bandaging.” Doctor Perkins is speaking as Mavis’s lantern pitches, throwing wild shadows. “A step at a time, Henry.”

  On the sight of her favorite son, Aunt Clara whimpers. Her hands clasp together under a chin that wobbles like aspic. “Oh, my darling boy, safe at home at last.”

  Quinn ignores her, an old and useful habit. He brushes past Aunt, the plank of one long arm hooked over Uncle Henry’s neck. But then he squares me in his eye, and in one look I know the worst.

  Will is not coming back.

  Blood rushes to my head; I might faint. I lean back against a pillar and take slow sips of air.

  “A few more steps,” pants the doctor. “Where is the closest bed?”

  Quinn’s bedroom is all the way up on the third floor, an inconvenient sickroom. He’d moved there last year, before he’d found a richer rebellion in joining the army and leaving home altogether.

  “Give him Jennie’s room,” says Aunt Clara. “Go on. It’s only one flight, off the landing. And Jennie can sleep up in Quinn’s room. It will work perfectly.”

  These suggestions part so quick from her lips that I know they’ve been squirreled in her head for a while. Even through her dread and worry, my aunt has been plotting against me.

  A very bad sign.

  2.

  Mavis has darted ahead. Before the others have a chance to tromp their boots through my bedroom, she has rushed in and collected my treasures. Father’s pocket watch, my brother’s and my christening cups, the lace collar I have been straining my eyes and fingers over these empty evenings. But most important is my scrapbook. I shudder to think of Aunt Clara’s fat fingers picking through its pages. Perched on top of my possessions, in an offering of solidarity, is a photograph of Mavis, plain as a platter in her Sunday best. I will add it to my book when I have more than a moment to myself.

  The room is tiny and airless and fitted with a narrow bed, an iron nightstand, and one dreary dormer window. Quinn had called it his rookery, and he’d relished its perch high above the family. I don’t feel the same way.

  I exchange my candle for Toby’s little silver cup, and I wedge myself into the windowsill, bumping my head on the eave. My temples pound, my lips are dry, my mouth tastes of ash. I stare out at the tar black sky.

  “Toby,” I whisper. “Is he with you?”

  In answer, silence. But I know I’m not alone. A ghost will find his way home. I learned this nine months ago when my brother died in a field hospital in Stevensburg, Virginia. I was in the parlor that day, using the last light to cut linen strips for the Boston Ladies’ Aid. Toby’s presence was a wave crashing over me, knocking the breath from my body. Three days later we received the letter.

  Many people have asked me if it’s strange to be a twin. I’d say it is far more peculiar to be a single twin. I was Toby’s alter and his double, and we created shelters for each other in the physical world. In life he’d been shy, and his death before he’d seen a day of combat was a quiet end to an innocent young life.

  And yet in death Toby isn’t ready to go, or to let me go. We used to predict our futures on scraps of paper in the downstairs coat cupboard. When I stare into the eyes of his photograph, which is safely tucked inside my scrapbook, I can hear his whisper in my head, confiding his dreams to spy for the Union and regaling me with stories of Nathan Hale and how wars are won through ciphers and invisible ink. “A spy sees everyone, but is seen by no one,” he loved to say. “Remember that, Jennie.”

  Other times, like now, he keeps silent, but I sense him. He guards me in spirit just he as did in the physical world. He has brought me closer to the other side, and I know that I’m changed.

  “Please, a tiny sign,” I whisper, my hands clasping the cup like a chalice, “if Will is really dead and gone.”

  “Who’s there?” Mavis has rushed into the room with armloads of my clothing. Her gaze jumps around the darkest corners of the room.

  “Nobody. I was…praying,” I fib, hiding the cup from sight, and then we’re both self-conscious. Mavis makes a business of hanging my dresses in the single cupboard and folding some of my personal items into its top drawer. As I pace the room, worrying the frayed sleeve of my dressing gown between my fingers, I catch sight of myself in the window’s dark reflection. My hair springs wild from my head, and there is a stunned look in my eyes, as if I am not quite
available to receive the news that I’m dreading to hear.

  “Quinn is settled?” I ask.

  She smothers a yawn and nods. “Doctor Perkins sent him to bed with a grain of morphine. Everyone says it’s rest he needs most, but oh, Miss Jennie, he’s got so thin, hasn’t he? Just the bones of his old self.”

  “I think Will is gone forever.”

  “Now, why would you say such a thing?” Mavis genuflects, then points the same finger on me, accusing. “Like you know something.”

  I hadn’t meant to say such a thing. I hadn’t meant to speak at all.

  “But you’re awful cold, Miss.” She catches my hand and squeezes, as though it’s she who frightened me, and not the other way around. “I’ll build up a fire.” She drops to kneel before the grate, steepling nubs of kindling. “And I’ll fetch you the rest of your clothing come morning,” she murmurs, “though you ought to be downstairs in the yellow room.” She strikes the match and sits back on her heels as the flame catches.

  “Aunt Clara’d have given me the yellow room if I’d asked for it.” The hour is late, and I’m drained, but Mavis is a delicate soul, led often to fears and tears. “It’ll be pleasant roosting up here near you. Nobody to pester us.”

  She attempts a smile. “Not Missus Sullivan, anyways. She sleeps like the dead, specially if she’d nipped into the cooking sherry. You’ll hear the mice, too. They get ornery when they’re hungry.” She waves off the phosphorus and steps back to watch the fire crackle. “I’m awful sorry, Miss. It pains me. This room’s not fit for the lady of the house.”

  “I’m not the lady of this house.”

  “Soon you will be, and everyone knows it. He’ll come back to you. By the New Year, I’ll predict.” She’s predicting a miracle.

  I look down, and my fingers find my ring, which twinkles in the firelight like an extravagant and sentimental hope.

  My tears will come later, I’m sure. Right now, I don’t want to believe it. I want to wake up from it.

  3.

  I wake with a pit in my stomach. I wish I could yank up my quilts and hide from the day, but the morning doesn’t know to mourn. The winter sun smiles over my view of the kitchen garden. Hannibal struts the fence, sounding his imperious crow. Aunt Clara’s clipped holly bushes are interspersed with hellebores, all blooming in obedient array.

  I’ll bring Quinn some flowers. An innocent excuse to pay him a not-so-innocent visit, but I need to hear him say it out loud. Of the two brothers, Quinn was more often the subject of Toby’s and my whispered confidences. We were cowed by his coolly impeccable demeanor and hurt by his ice-pick wit. Will was easier either warmly, sweetly happy or in a hot temper. Nothing in between, nothing to hide.

  “Even if Quinn thinks we’re low and unschooled,” Toby once declared, “I wish he’d do a better job of pretending he didn’t.” As we got older, we avoided our cousin rather than shrivel under his scorn.

  Quinn’s bedroom door is shut. I hesitate as my eyes land on a photograph hanging in the corridor. It had been commissioned of the brothers last spring, and in their summer suits they make quite a pair. Aunt enjoyed celebrating her handsome sons, both of whom she swore had the Emory chin, the Emory nose if pressed, she would avow that Quinn and Will possessed the Emory everything, with Uncle Henry offering scant more than his surname.

  I tap. And then again. Even when I creak open the door, Quinn doesn’t turn. He lies in bed like a prince on his tomb. His bandages are an unwieldy crown. But he’s awake. I jump to hear him speak my name.

  “Yes,” I tell him. “I’m here.”

  “You hate me, don’t you?” he says without looking at me.

  I am startled that my cousin would care what I think. “Don’t be ridiculous.” I place the vase so he can see it. The morning light is stark. I can barely recognize my returned cousin. Mavis was right he is a living skeleton.

  “Mrs. Sullivan says it might snow later today. But it appears that Mavis has already stocked enough firewood to keep you warm.” I add another birch log to the fire, but the chill has seeped inside my bones.

  “You wished I were Will. Last night I could see it in your face. You wished he’d come home instead of me.” He scowls. “Mother’s joy doesn’t make up for your devastation.”

  “No, you can’t ”

  “And why wouldn’t you mourn? My brother was your beloved, and now I’m your enemy even if you’ll never admit it. I convinced him to sign up with the Twenty-eighth, and I failed my most important duty, to bring him back alive.”

  “He’s gone, then.” I force him to confirm it. “He’s been killed.”

  “Yes.”

  I’d been braced for this truth, but I’m not sure I ever would have been prepared for it. The air leaves my lungs. It takes all my resilience to walk across the room and slip my hand into Quinn’s. He is suffering, too, after all.

  His palms are calloused, chapped. Gentleman’s hands no more. “Quinn, tell me. How did it happen? I’m strong enough to stand it.”

  “If I’m strong enough to tell it.” He swallows. “Undo my bandage first. And bring me a mirror. I want to see my eye.”

  “But Doctor Perkins ”

  His head jerks up from the pillow. “If it were your eye, you’d snap your fingers for a mirror and command me not to bully you.”

  Quinn hasn’t lost his uncanny ability to pin me to my own logic, but I’m too weak to spar with him. I retrieve the hand mirror from the bureau. Then I sit close and begin the odious task of unwinding his bandages. My attention is grave and utter, and for a few minutes there’s no other sound than our breathing.

  I thought I’d been ready, but a scream fills the cavity of my body as I peel back the last blood-crusted layer and let the cloth fall from my fingers.

  In the flinted symmetry of his face, Quinn’s wound is monstrous. Bruise-blackened, his eyelid raw as bitten plum, the whites of his eye filled with blood. He takes the mirror and stares at himself, then puts it down and looks at me, his head tilted like a hawk. Quinn was so beautiful. How he must suffer this mutilation. I pinch my thigh through my skirts as I return his gaze.

  “It must have been terrifying to be shot,” I say. The tremble in my voice betrays me. I sense his dare for me to keep looking.

  “It was, but this wound’s not from gunfire. It was Will who took the bullet.” Quinn’s words are hammered flat, though there’s density of emotion behind them. “That’s all you want to hear about anyway. On May sixth. It pierced his lung. We’d been fighting in Virginia, southeast of where we lost Toby. A special pocket of hell called the Wilderness.” His hand slips under his pillow and pulls out an envelope, thin as a moth wing.

  I open it. The paper of the telegram is creased and blotchy, but the writing is legible enough to see what matters. The message is signed by a Captain James Fleming.

  I refold it and return it to Quinn, vowing to come back for it later. I’m not stealing; I need it for my scrapbook. It’s evidence, a dossier fit for the spy that Toby had so desperately wanted to become. In the months since his death, I’ve been honing my skills. Toby was an astute observer. He never got lost; he could see like a hawk. Now it is up to me to adapt these habits. If I’d been his brother instead of his sister, I’d have stepped firm into Toby’s boots and charged out the door in a heartbeat to join the infantry, becoming the Union scout he wanted to be.

  But this telegram, which I’ll tuck alongside Will’s dog-eared letters home, are mostly evidence of a life cut too short. I hold my spine straight. The least I can do is not break down in Quinn’s presence when he’s had to carry the burden of this news.

  Still, my mind is spinning back through time. My last letter from Will had been postmarked the third of May. He has been dead all these months. How could I not have sensed it? How could I be so vain as to presume that I would have? Inexplicably, I’m furious with my twin. Why does Toby shadow me if he can’t serve as a messenger between worlds?

  “Was he in terrible pain?”

&nb
sp; “Not so much as shock.”

  “And you were with him in the end? Or did he die alone?”

  “I was with him. Of that I can attest.”

  “Did he…did he have any last words?” For me, I add, silently. I feel tears and blink them back.

  “He went pretty quick, Jennie.”

  “What of his things? Things he carried ” I’m thinking of the necklace that I’d given to Will before he’d left, a silver chain and heart-shaped locket, inside which his miniature faced mine. Will had promised that he’d wear it next to his skin every day and that, dead or alive, the locket and chain would one day return to me. But I don’t quite dare speak of it particularly, lest Quinn think me even more selfish than he already does, utterly absorbed in my own loss.

  “I’ve got nothing,” he says. “Other soldiers stole us blind before we’d got to the Wilderness…our watches, my belt buckle, my spurs. It happens. We all joined up so dumb and green, nobody thought… nobody expected ” His voice breaks off.

  On impulse, I reach out and smooth his hair, gingery brown and long enough to curl around his ears. It’s uncommonly soft, like kitten fur. I don’t think I’ve ever touched him before. His skin burns under my fingers, as though with fever. Quinn flinches but doesn’t move out of reach.

  “There’s a new kind of quiet in this house,” he says softly. “It bothered me all last night. It kept me up, and when I did sleep, I dreamed myself back into other times, like last Christmas. Remember last Christmas, Jennie? The four of us together skating on Jamaica Pond, and all our cracking-fun snowball fights, and how we carved our initials in the bark of that butternut tree?”

  I smile. “Of course.” The memories warm me like a sip of brandy in an ice storm. “And you’re right. It’s been too quiet here. And so lonely,” I confess. “I’ve missed you all of you a thousand different times a day. All of these months with only Aunt and Uncle have been enough to drive me mad.”