Picture the Dead Read online

  The sound of a polite cough makes me jump.

  “Madame Broussard.” I step away from Quinn. “I didn’t know you were expected here.”

  “Your aunt summoned me.” The dressmaker looks embarrassed. She smooths her impeccably smooth shirtwaist. “I’ve just done another round of fittings for Mrs. Pritchett. She sent me to find you. She told me you’ll need a new dress for young Mr. Pritchett’s dinner party.”

  “Dinner party?” I’m confused.

  “My twentieth birthday,” Quinn explains. “Mother wants a lavish spectacle. There’s no getting her off it.”

  “But we hardly ”

  “It’s an occasion. We can announce our engagement then, so you’ll need to look as sweet as a tea rose.”

  “A new party dress is such a luxury in these times.”

  Quinn’s fingers fan off my words. “What’s sauce for the goose why, I’m forever dashing into town to the tailor for this and that.” He taps his heels. “If I’m going to play the dandy on my birthday, there’s got to be enough in the coffers for a frock for you.”

  “I haven’t clipped out a pattern in ages,” I protest. “I have no idea what’s in fashion.”

  “I’ll bring patterns next time,” Madame assures. “But with your flair, Mademoiselle, you ought to sew the lacework yourself.”

  But after she leaves, I speak my mind. “Quinn, for heaven’s sake. The whole house has overheard your epic battles with Aunt about the budget,” I remind him. “I could wear a flour sack to your party and have fun.”

  “Our party. And perish all thoughts of flour sacks. You forget, Father has agreed that I should start my clerkship at the bank next month.”

  “You feel well enough to work?”

  “I’ve got the strength of a thousand men since we’ve been betrothed.” Quinn winds me to him, kissing me again. I feel the warm print of his lips burnishing mine. I lean into the crook of his elbow, but when I look up again, I see it.

  Traced as if by a finger into the fogged window glass, the image of the crooked little heart nearly stops my own. I break from Quinn’s embrace, my insides lurching, my knuckles stifling my scream.

  “Is this your wretched idea of a joke?”

  “What…?” He crosses to the window to inspect. “Why, it’s just like the heart on the butternut tree.”

  “Why did you do that? Why?” My voice saws upward in panic.

  “Me? This is ridiculous.” Quinn erases the heart in one wipe of his shirtsleeve. “Jennie, I don’t want to play this game. We both know you drew on the glass.”

  “I did? How outrageous!”

  “Is it? Because it’s just the sort of thing you would do,” Quinn continues. “Spiritualist nonsense. Your way of introducing this exact conversation.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to accuse! I hope you don’t mean it. Especially when we never speak of the others.”

  “I do mean it. And please, speak of your brother and mine all you wish, but your actions your midnight wanderings, your tumble into Will’s bed are quite on point. I worry, Jennie, of course I do. I live in terror that your grief might suffocate our future. Ever since our engagement, you’ve hardly slept ”

  “That’s not my fault, I ”

  “ and you’re as thin as a rake, and the tired rings under your eyes ”

  “ So now you think I’m a ghoul!”

  “You know I think you’re lovely, Fleur, but you’re not in your best health.”

  “Quinn, I didn’t draw on the glass.”

  He takes another step away from me. “Who, then? My brother’s damaged and wandering spirit? As a reminder of his everlasting love for you?” I feel his exasperation pulse through every moment. I have no answer, save the tears that well in my eyes.

  “If this is your game, then so be it,” he says levelly. “But remember, love isn’t a nightmare, or an empty bed, or a print on fogged glass. Love is flesh and blood. Don’t you see me? Because I’m right here, and I’m very much yours.”

  Then he leaves, shutting the door firmly behind him. I’m pained to have led the conversation into such a fraught and stupid place. Now I’m alone with my view and a knowledge that no matter how lovely this room is, it won’t give me the peace I crave.

  I press my forehead to the window.

  “If I’m a ghoul, Will, it’s your doing,” I say under my breath. “Let me have my future. If you ever loved me, you’d free me.”

  Of course, no answer.

  Later, on my way to find Quinn and smooth his ruffled feathers, I pass the front coat closet. Curiosity shifts in me; I can’t resist.

  A spy must trust his instinct.

  I press my ear to the door. Nothing. But then I grip the knob and turn it. My wary eyes scan the shadowed winter cloaks and wraps. Everything is just as it should be.

  I slip inside, closing the door behind me, and sit as I used to, with held breath and squeezed limbs. I shut my eyes the way Toby did. “I find my best thoughts in this closet,” Toby had said. As if his thoughts were loose, ripe apples he’d collected and hidden here.

  Sparks and stars float across my closed eyes. Sightless, I can almost feel my twin again. The darkness is alive and intelligent, and I fancy that I catch a bit of Toby’s own boyish scent, grass and cotton. I’m not sure how long I am burrowed there. My hand crawls to find a jam pot from our stockpile. My mouth is suddenly flooded with the taste of strawberries from sweeter and happier days. I drift…

  I’m startled from my reverie by voices in the corridor outside.

  “Tut, tut I’ve been looking for you, Mr. Pritchett,” Aunt Clara exclaims. “You need to write that check to Gladwell’s so that I may place my order. We are much in debt there.”

  “Don’t see why we need new wallpaper when the old hasn’t fallen down on us yet.” But Uncle Henry’s voice sounds enfeebled as always when bending to Aunt. “And this talk of debt is a tax on my health.”

  “You’ve never concerned yourself about our debt before, husband. There’s no need to start now.” Aunt’s voice is deceptively sweet. “Anyway, it’s a passing vexation until Quinn pays off everything as he’d promised and sets us right as rain.”

  Uncle Henry answers in a mumble, and he and Aunt part on a sour note as he storms off while Aunt patters away in the opposite direction.

  Alone again, I wait a few more minutes so that nobody catches me darting out of the closet.

  A spy hears everything and forgets nothing.

  I had no idea Aunt relied so heavily on Quinn’s future earnings. And yet she continues to spend with foolish abandon why do we need new wallpaper? I’ll have to report on these silly extravagances that continue to flow from Aunt Clara’s whims and Uncle Henry’s henpecked pen.

  A debt to Gladwell’s is news to me, too. Costs must be piling up. This private information is useful. Was it only chance that has drawn me to this closet? On impulse, I spin on my heel and return to the door. I place my hand on the knob and pull. But now the door won’t budge.

  25.

  “Don’t you see? Will can’t let me go.” I slide both prints, side by side, in front of Geist. “Sometimes I think he wants to drive me completely mad.”

  The flicker in the photographer’s eye mortifies me. He must find me ridiculous, but I refuse to buckle. It took some conniving for me to slip into the city today on the pretext of a visit to Madame Broussard. Now that I’m here, I’ve made a pact with myself not to leave Geist’s house without his promise of help.

  “But don’t you see, Miss Lovell? Any human hand could have ”

  “I didn’t ink either photo. I swear it.”

  Geist heaves up from his chair and folds his spectacles, slipping them into his breast pocket. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Mr. Geist, you’re my only chance to free myself of Will. You yourself told me that photography can be a portal.”

  “My child, we took your photograph. By your account, your sleuthing was successful. For you say” and now I detect the brus
hstrokes of impatience in Geist’s voice “that the heart inked onto your print led you to your locket, and then to one brother admitting that the other had been hanged in dishonor. You say Will’s spirit wanted your forgiveness, and that you granted it.” He steeples his fingers. “Your fiancé former fiancé is seven months dead. You say you’ve accepted that, too. What more is there to communicate?”

  Under Geist’s eye, I stand poker-straight while keeping my eyes and voice true. “I’d accept everything if I felt at peace with it. But I don’t. Mr. Geist, every night, save one, I’ve awakened to feel a noose around my neck. Just as it might have tightened around his. I feel his rage.” Now I speak out loud my gnawing fears. “I think Will wants me to come to him. I think he’s trying to send me to the edge. And possibly beyond.”

  Geist cocks his head. “Why would he do that?”

  “Perhaps because if he can’t have me, then he doesn’t want anyone else to have me?” I’m embarrassed to speak of such intimate matters, and my composure is melting quicker than ice on a skillet. “I don’t even know what I expect you to do for me. It’s not as if you can offer Will’s soul for me to study like Turkish tea leaves.” My voice dips. “But something is very wrong, and I am sure that I’ll have no peace until I make it right.”

  Certainly my sniffling hasn’t impressed either of us, but Geist lets me carry on for a bit before he steers me gently by my elbow from his sitting room to the foyer.

  “Miss Lovell, look to your own heart,” he says as he wraps me in my cloak. “You might find that some of your agitation is self-inflicted.”

  “Self-inflicted?” My throat scrapes the word in my throat. The exhaustion of all my sleepless nights hits me like a wave. “But I’m wrecked.”

  “Yet I see you’re again betrothed, yes?”

  “To Quinn, yes.” Under his hawkish eye, I fumble. “We’ve always been close.”

  “You’re blushing.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not sitting in judgment of you, my dear. Merely observing. But let me offer this it’s natural to feel some guilt and uncertainty. You loved one brother, and now you love the other. Your heart might need time to catch up.” Geist takes my left hand in his, tapping the fourth finger where my engagement ring sparkles again. I flush. I’m not sure how to defend myself, or if I even need to, when he changes subjects. “Young Pritchett came to visit me last week.”

  “Quinn did? Why?”

  “He wanted to purchase the original photograph I took of your family. He said that he wanted to destroy it. Spiritualist bunk, et cetera. He made no bones about his mistrust of my profession.”

  “Quinn thinks I suffer from delusions. And, yes, we have different opinions about your craft. Surely Quinn isn’t your first skeptic.”

  “Quite so. Nor will he be my last.”

  “I apologize if he was curt.”

  In Geist’s face I sense an apology reluctantly accepted. “Miss Lovell, I don’t mean to hurry you off, but I have a busy schedule today.” He raises his voice. “Viviette!”

  As Mavis whisks around from the pantry now that I’m a lady again, I’m not allowed to travel unaccompanied a visibly pregnant Viviette hastens down the stairs.

  Geist takes his leave as Viviette helps us with our bonnets and gloves. Opening the front door, she levels me in her anthracite gaze.

  “That first time,” she hisses, her breath so close that my nostrils detect an odor of pickled herring, “when you all was here, I was visited, too, I was. An evil presence come into that room with you and your kin. Evil as evil is.”

  “Stop it, Viviette. You’re just trying to scare me,” I tell her. “Though I don’t know why…”

  She webs her bony fingers over her belly, guarding it. “I told my fright to Mister Geist, and next thing I did was leave this place at once. I feared the curse might be catched onto my unborn.”

  “You talk of catching a curse as if it’s a pox,” I rebuke.

  “I know what I know.” Viviette yanks up her chin as she bumps the side of her thumb repeatedly against her breastbone. “I got the sight. Nobody would deny it. When there’s a demon close, it infects me. When that same demon returns, it strikes me exactly the same.”

  Surely I am not a demon in her eyes. What have I ever done to her? Why would she accuse me? My fingers fuss with my bonnet ribbon. “Viviette, I’ll thank you to keep your low opinion of me and my family to yourself.”

  “An evil business you’re tangled in,” she continues doggedly. “It’s a shame you’re too close to see it proper.”

  “Good day,” I manage, though I can’t mask that she’s shocked me.

  Out on the street, my heart beats hard as a hammer even as I shrug it off. “Silly chit.” I sniff at Mavis. “I’d wager the most demonic thing Viviette has encountered lately is her own sourpickle breath.”

  “Miss High ’n’ Mighty’s been posing as an angel too long,” Mavis agrees. “And a fine one she’d make these days, in her condition. Did you finish your business with Mister Geist?”

  “No, but he’s finished with me,” I admit. “He thinks I’m full of nonsense.”

  Mavis allows a pause. “If it’s any comfort, it’s not just you, Miss Jennie, who feels a…restlessness in Pritchett House. We talk about it sometimes, downstairs.”

  Her declaration surprises me. I thought that my haunting was for me alone.

  “Tell me what you mean, Mavis.”

  She bites her lip. “Oh, it’s wee things, here and there. Like from the fairy stories my mum used to tell us. I can’t help but notice the drafts that get into a room. A fire blown out. A window pushed open on a cold day. A shadow flung ’cross a carpet, but not a body attached to it. And there’s been times, Miss, when I’ll look up from my dusting or making up a bed, and I know clear as church bells that I’m being watched by someone, or something.” Her eyes meet mine. “There’s talk that Mister Will got corrupted in the war. That he turned bad. Have y’ever thought, Miss, that it might be best not to try and make peace with his spirit?”

  I am at a loss. “But what else is there? If not peace and forgiveness?”

  “I agree to a point, Miss. But if there’s a demon, why, you’ve got to drive him out.” Her fist smacks her palm. “Before he is the unholy death of you. For there are ways.” I sense these thoughts have been thickening in Mavis’s head awhile, as she recites them. “A Bible in the windowsill should help. Or hang a crucifix. Or get a cat. A good Maine coon cat’ll shoo the devil from a house better than most people. P’raps you could ask Father Sheehan to come sprinkle every room with holy water.”

  Her solutions are childish, but her emotions are fervent. I wonder how far and wide these tales of Pritchett House have spread.

  The wind nearly blows us backward once we turn the corner onto Federal Street, where I’m greeted in the bank’s atrium by the spectacle of both Wortley sisters, overdressed in flourishes and furbelows. They are both on me at once.

  “Jennie, what luck!” trills Flora.

  “We were just having our spring hats trimmed at Mrs. Hawksby’s, and then we stepped in here to wait for our carriage!”

  “Do tell us when we can call on you, Jennie, for we hear such delightful news ”

  “Mama wrote all about your turn of fortune when we were in Concord visiting Aunt Sal last week. Didn’t you land feet-up in the butter! So Quinn isn’t gone mad, as most everyone thought. He’ll be working right here in this bank, and you’ll be the new Mrs. Pritchett. When Flora read the note, she nearly dropped out of her chair with envy! She’s been in love with Quincy Pritchett since she was in bloomers.”

  “Hush, Rosemary, I am not but show us your ring!”

  “Yes, let’s see!” Rosemary captures my hand, then flinches as her voice drops. “Why, my dear, that’s the very same, the diamond and garnets ”

  Flora gapes. “Nooo…not Will’s ring!”

  “The one your aunt yanked off ”

  “Aunt Clara specially wanted me to have it
back,” I fib, though I could curse the flush blooming in my face. “It’s a family piece, after all.”

  “Certainly it would be a waste of an adequate stone.” Flora smirks, and I know she is burning to spread the gossip of my twiceused ring.

  “Are you planning a big June wedding?” Rosemary asks. “Think of us, dear heart, when you’re choosing bridesmaids. Whatever you do, don’t make me wear chartreuse, for it drains all the color from my face. Peach or mint would do nicely, though.”

  “Oooh, that reminds me will you serve ice cream?” Flora clasps her hands.

  Rosemary giggles. “Flora, you’ll eat yourself to death before you find a husband!”

  “Sister, you are too droll!” Flora grates a laugh, as she jabs Rosemary hard in the ribs. “There’s Mr. Jake now, waving for us. Here, take my card. I just had them done in the very latest design. And do you have one for me? No? Never mind, then. Good-bye, Jennie, darling.” They exit the bank in a babble.

  “Jennie, darling! Did you hear that?” I turn to Mavis. “Everyone knows that family’s the worst kind of snobs. It was only two months ago they all but refused my friendship.”

  “Oh, but Miss, this wedding’ll make you the belle of Brookline.” Mavis chuckles. “Both those sisters had set their caps tight for Mister Quinn ’fore he left for the war. My sister, Betsey, howled to watch ’em fuss and preen.”

  I smile. “I’d forgotten.”

  Mavis twinkles. “He was always tweaking one sister off t’other.

  And never serious with neither. Oh, no man in his right mind would marry either of those two spoiled nobodies!”

  But I’m not thinking of the plight of the charmless Wortley sisters. The echoes of too many voices hold my ear.

  Didn’t you land feet up in the butter…

  Isn’t gone mad, as most everyone thought…

  A demon close. A bad business.

  Quinn will only laugh it off and tell me that it’s the rare soul who’s truly happy for another’s good fortune. Especially not a fraudulent medium, or a family of social climbers, or a pregnant servant girl.

  Still, I cringe from public speculation, so easily given and so bruising. I make up my mind to order some engraved calling cards just as soon as Quinn and I are wed.