GENNIE MALONE HAD BEEN MORE THAN HAPPY TO abandon dinner in the hostel to join the search for the missing Mairin. She didn’t think she could have endured many more minutes with her fellow guests, even for pecan pie. She’d never before met so many unpleasant people gathered in one place. After three weeks with them, Grady and his world might seem far more tolerable. Or perhaps she’d just up and leave it all—take a train to somewhere way far away, maybe a big city like Louisville, find a job, and live on her own for a while. Away even from Rose.
Gennie stopped suddenly and looked around. The sun had nearly set, and she hadn’t been thinking at all about poor Mairin. From long-ago habit, she was heading for the Herb House in the northeast corner of North Homage. She turned around and scanned the rest of the village. Windows glowed with bright lights as Believers searched for the missing girl. Gennie looked toward the Herb House. Perhaps it was because of the memories that still haunted her—memories of a violent death she could never seem to forget—but the Herb House looked dark and foreboding, even to Gennie, who loved it.
Gennie was never one to let a little foreboding hold her back. She was still dressed for dinner, so to save her new tan kid high heels, she stayed on the path instead of taking the shortcut through the grass. She eased open the Herb House door, hoping not to send any errant children inside deeper into hiding. She needn’t have worried; the hinges were well-oiled. She closed the door behind her.
Leaving the lights turned off, she stood very still, listening. She shut her eyes and listened harder. She heard something; she was sure of it—a murmuring sound, just above her, as near as she could tell. She opened her eyes. Massive shapes seemed to jump out at her, but she knew they were just machines the brothers used to press herbs into tight packs. The presses wouldn’t be used until later in the season, when large amounts of medicinal and culinary herbs would be dry and crumbly, ready for processing. Then the air would be heavy with sweet and sharp scents, but now it smelled like dusty, dry grass. She saw no movement in the shadows.
With a guilty lilt of pleasure, Gennie picked her way through the dark room toward the staircase. The drying room was upstairs. It was early in the season, but there would already be some bunches of herbs hanging upside down to dry. Pungent young oregano, surely, and perhaps some sage, newly picked and not yet as musty as when it had fully dried. It all came back to her and reminded her of Rose. If she were running away, this was where she’d come.
Gennie’s feet still remembered each stair, and which planks squeaked. By the time she was halfway up, she knew her instinct had led her to the right place. She could hear the urgent voice of a child behind the closed drying room door. Unless she missed her guess, the voice belonged to Nora. Gennie ran up the last few steps and flung open the drying room door.
Two small, startled faces—one pale and blond, the other honey-brown and framed by fluffy hair—snapped toward her. They sat cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the room, leaning toward each other. Gennie put her hands on her small hips and raised stern eyebrows at them. In a flash, Mairin was on her feet, darting toward the drying room door. But Gennie was young and quick. As Mairin rushed past, Gennie scooped her up and held her by the waist. Mairin wriggled and kicked, but she was tiny, her growth stunted by malnutrition, and Gennie was determined.
“Oh no you don’t,” Gennie said, holding the girl tightly against her. “You’ve caused us all a heap of worry, and it’s time you faced the music.”
Mairin made a sound between a grunt and a scream, then she kicked Gennie in the shin.
“Ow! You little . . .” Gennie grabbed the girl’s knees with one arm to avoid another attack, but Mairin squirmed all the harder. Though she was still small for her age, good Shaker food had added pounds and strength to her frame. Gennie was afraid she was about to lose her grip on the child when Nora came over and clutched Mairin’s ankle with both hands.
“Mairin, please stop that,” Nora said, in a surprisingly adult voice. Gennie suspected Nora had heard those words herself, spoken to her by a desperate sister. “Gennie is a nice person, she only wants to help you. Everybody wants to help you, really and truly. Cross my heart and hope to die and everything.”
Mairin stopped wriggling. However, Gennie did not loosen her stranglehold. This was one unpredictable child. Mairin twisted her head around and stared at Nora for several moments, then let her body go limp.
For the first time, she spoke. “Let me down.”
“Can I trust you not to run away?”
“Yea.”
Gennie was startled by Mairin’s use of the Shaker form of “yes.” It seemed to give her promise added weight. Gennie lowered Mairin to the floor, then let her go. Mairin didn’t move. She stood with her body rigid and her face puckered in a defiant frown. It struck Gennie that Mairin expected a beating. Gennie dropped to her knees with no thought for the safety of her light tan dinner dress. The copper flecks in Mairin’s eyes glittered with fear.
“No one is going to hurt you, Mairin. I promise. It’s just that all of us, and Rose especially, have been terribly, terribly worried about you. When you disappear, we get scared that something awful might have happened to you. Can you understand that?”
Mairin’s small face relaxed. She nodded. “I don’t mean to make everyone worry about me,” she said, in her low, melodious voice. “Sometimes I just need to be outside.”
Suddenly Mairin seemed far older than the wiggling child Gennie had so recently restrained. Gennie swung a small, short-backed chair from its wall pegs and moved it next to a larger ladder-back that was standing by a well-worn desk. She gestured for Mairin to sit in the smaller chair.
“Nora, you run along to the dwelling house and let the village know that Mairin is safe. I’ll bring her back in a few minutes.”
Nora hesitated and fixed Mairin with a parental look, protective and stern.
“Run along now,” Gennie said. “Rose is beside herself with worry.”
“Okay.” Nora spun around and ran out of the room. Gennie closed the door behind her and turned to face Mairin.
“We need to have a little talk.” As Gennie walked toward her, Mairin flinched. Gennie noticed but said nothing. Words would not convince Mairin she was safe in North Homage—time might do so, and gentle care, but never words.
“Mairin, would you tell me something?” The child’s small chin jutted out defiantly, but Gennie continued. “Why do you sneak off? It’s more than just wanting to be outside, isn’t it?”
Mairin shrugged her shoulders.
“Mairin, I want you to listen very carefully.” Gennie’s voice had dipped to a deeper, less gentle level. Mairin’s eyes flicked toward her, then focused on the floor. “No one here will harm you,” Gennie said, “but that doesn’t mean we aren’t angry. Angry and disappointed. The Shakers have treated you well. Rose and Agatha love you and want only the best for you. Every time you disappear, you hurt them.”
Mairin was still.
“So why do you run away, Mairin?”
“I don’t know.”
Gennie watched the girl’s face for several silent moments. Her simple response had revealed nothing. Gennie had the nagging sense she was keeping something back. Yet maybe she really didn’t know why she ran off. “All right then,” Gennie said, “where do you go?”
“Nowhere special. Just all around. It’s more fun outside.”
“What makes it more fun?”
Mairin grinned, a rare occurrence that transformed her face. “It’s the people,” she said. “They do strange things. I sit in the trees and look down on them.” She giggled softly.
Gennie had a bad feeling. A very bad feeling. “Um, Mairin, what people are you talking about? Shakers?”
Mairin wrinkled her nose. “Nay, not the ones who live here,” she said. “All they do is work. But there’s been lots of other folks around. I don’t know them. Sometimes they act funny.” She giggled again.
Gennie was wishing herself just about anywhere else. She feared that young courting couples might be using secluded parts of the village, thinking they were alone. She was glad Grady hadn’t visited her since she’d moved into the hostel. In the past two and a half years, Gennie had grown from an innocent child to a mature and knowledgeable woman, but she was unprepared to explain courting to an eleven-year-old. She cleared her throat nervously. “Can you describe to me what you saw?” she asked.
“I saw lots of different things. I see folks dance around in a really funny way,” Mairin said. She slid off her chair and began twirling around the drying room. Her malformed bones, the result of untreated rickets, caused her to stumble and bounce off the edge of the worktable, but she just kept going.
Gennie sank back in her chair with relief. Mairin had seen Shaker dancing, that’s all it was. Dancing was so much easier to explain than a cuddling couple.
“Come sit down again, Mairin, you’re making me dizzy. I know you’ve seen some dancing worship before. Did Rose or Agatha ever explain it to you?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, you see, a long time ago, Shakers used to dance in the Meetinghouse when they had a worship service. Sometimes the sisters and brothers would twirl and twirl until they went into a trance—that’s like a magic place where they talked to Shakers who were already in Heaven. Or they heard angels singing beautiful songs and were shown lovely drawings, which were given to them as gifts.”
Mairin stopped whirling about and tilted her head like a curious puppy. She really is an endearing child, Gennie thought.
“I know all about that,” Mairin said. “This was different.” She began spinning again, this time throwing her head back so that she faced the ceiling.
Make that endearing and irritating. Gennie was about to scold Mairin when the child lost her balance and fell backward, crashing into a table holding several large screen trays used to dry small, delicate herbs, such as chamomile flowers. Mairin tumbled to the floor, the screens cascading on top of her.
With a cry, Gennie rushed to her. She tossed the screens aside and took Mairin by the shoulders. “Are you all right? Does anything hurt?”
Mairin sat rigid under Gennie’s grasp. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but instead her lower lip quivered.
“Oh dear, you’re hurt, aren’t you? Don’t move. I’ll get Sister Josie right away. She’ll know what to do.” Now in her early eighties, North Homage’s Infirmary nurse had handled many a crisis.
“Nay! Don’t tell anyone, please.” Ignoring the warning to stay still, Mairin clutched at Gennie’s arm. “I’m okay, so nobody needs to know, do they?”
Gennie laughed. “You didn’t knock down the whole Herb House, Mairin, just a few trays. They were empty, too. See?” She gathered up the screens and revealed the floor underneath, which needed a sweeping but wasn’t littered with ruined herb flowers or crumbled leaves. Mairin stared forlornly at the floor, then lifted her face to Gennie.
“What are you afraid of?” Gennie asked.
“Sister Rose is going to leave me again.”
“What?”
“She left because I’m bad. I’m bad a lot.”
Gennie clicked her tongue. “If you’re bad,” she said, “then I’m badder. I used to do more than knock down empty screens, believe me. I always loved the smell of herbs. In the late summer and early fall, when this room was full of herbs hanging upside down in bunches, I used to spin around and fling out my arms and hit them on purpose. That would release their fragrances. Of course, sometimes I’d knock them clean off their hooks.”
“Then what happened? Did you get punished?”
Gennie hesitated. She’d dug herself into a deepening hole, wanting to reassure Mairin. She hadn’t been punished because she’d always managed to rehang the herb bunches before anyone found out. She’d told herself that the floor was kept clean, it didn’t matter that the herbs had fallen on it. But she stopped short of encouraging the same sneaky behavior by Mairin, who was already sneaky enough. So far Mairin hadn’t paid the full price for her transgressions because Rose was being careful with her, trying to keep her from running away from the village.
“Well,” Gennie said, “whenever I or one of the other children was punished, no one ever spanked us or anything like that. The sisters would just make us stay home when the other children went on an outing, like swimming or sliding in the snow.”
“I’d just sneak out again,” Mairin said. She was matter-of-fact, merely stating the obvious.
“Mairin, I think they’re on to you—the sisters, I mean. They’d probably have one of the older girls watch you. There’d be no way out. Believe me, you’d have to stay put and be bored.”
Mairin stuck out her lower lip in a pout. Gennie reached out her hand to help her off the floor. “Come on, up you go. Time to go see Sister Rose.”
Reluctantly, Mairin took Gennie’s hand and let herself be pulled to her feet. They headed out the drying room door and down the stairs. Gennie paused in the middle. “Mairin,” she said, “you said you saw a woman dancing. Where was this?”
“Last time it was in that place where those things are that the sisters sit at—you know, like they’re playing music but they’re really making blankets or something?”
“Looms? Do you mean the Sisters’ Shop?”
“I guess so.”
“The sisters didn’t see the woman, too?”
“They weren’t there.” Mairin hung her head. “It was night,” she said. “I sneaked out after Nora fell asleep, and I saw a light on at the top of the building. So I watched. That’s when I saw her dancing around.”
“Who was she? A Shaker sister? Was it this ghost everyone has been talking about?”
Mairin shrugged. “I’m ready to go now,” she said.
“Oh, Mairin . . . You’ve got to promise me never again to sneak out at night. Will you do that?”
“Yea.”
Gennie didn’t believe her for a moment, but it was the best she could do for now. She would have a talk with Rose as soon as possible. Right now, she just wanted to go back to her room and rethink the whole idea of marriage and children. In the past half hour, Gennie had become convinced that, should she ever have children, God would ensure that they were every bit as difficult as she had been as a child.
Gennie sat alone in the parlor of the Shaker Hostel, curled in a wing chair, a light blanket covering her knees. She sipped at a cup of spearmint tea she’d fixed herself in the kitchen. It was well past midnight. Everyone else had gone to bed, but she knew that sleep would elude her. She had a lot to think about. For once, it wasn’t Grady who occupied her mind—well, not all of it, anyway. Little Mairin and her nighttime adventures kept interrupting Gennie’s attempts to sort out her own future. That dear and exasperating child had crept into Gennie’s heart, just as she had already done with Rose and Agatha. Yet Mairin trusted none of them, not completely.
Gennie held the steaming tea to her chest and inhaled the sweet fragrance. The days were warming up, as they did quickly in April, but it could still be chilly at night. She knew her room would be colder still. At least here she had two dying fires—one in the fireplace and another in the black cast-iron stove against the wall. The old stove was the only distinctly Shaker object in the room. Otherwise, Brother Andrew had used worldly furniture and décor, as in the dining room. Gennie had come to feel at home in such surroundings, yet a part of her always yearned for the simple Shaker life she’d known as a child. I’ve probably grown soft, too, she thought. It wouldn’t hurt me to do a little physical labor. Then she remembered standing in a kitchen all day, cooking for forty people, and going soft didn’t sound so bad.
A creak above her head startled her. She listened for a few moments, but all was quiet. The house itself was settling down to sleep. Gennie irritably kicked off the blanket. This wouldn’t do. She’d been ruminating for nearly a week, and she wasn’t getting anywhere except frustrated and—yes, bored. She needed to do something. Mairin’s haunting hazel eyes popped into her mind again, and Gennie knew exactly what to do. Right away.
Her heart fluttering in a familiar and pleasant way, Gennie folded the blanket over the chair back, returned the empty cup to the kitchen, and climbed the stairs to her room. Without bothering to flip on her light, she reached around to a wall peg just inside her door and grabbed her light spring coat. She’d changed out of her dinner clothes into a comfortable cotton dress and low-heeled shoes, so she was all set for adventure. She threw on her coat and hurried down the hall, giving no thought, in her excitement, to the noise she made. She slowed down only when she passed a door under which she could see a faint glow of light. Someone else couldn’t sleep. As she remembered, it was Mina Dunmore’s room. She didn’t hear any movement as she tiptoed past. Maybe Mina had fallen asleep reading. To be safe, though, Gennie made a mental note to avoid the view from Mina’s window.
She closed the front door behind her, grimacing as the latch caught with a click. North Homage still didn’t lock its buildings, even the hostel, so she didn’t have to fuss with a key. She turned and looked around her. She could see the north side of the village, all of which was dark except for one light in the Infirmary. She’d heard that Sister Viola, now in her nineties, was down with a spring chill, so Josie was probably sitting up with her. It was unlikely that a dancing ghost had materialized anywhere near Josie—if it dared disturb a patient, she’d give it a tongue lashing it would remember for eternity.
Mairin had seen the ghostly dancer in the Sisters’ Shop, which was at the south end of the village, southeast of the Shaker Hostel. Was the ghost drawn to one place, or was it roaming the village, building by building? What did ghosts normally do? While she was growing up, Gennie had heard lots of stories about Shakers receiving communications from the dead, but she’d never heard of an actual shade haunting a Shaker village.
Gennie walked around to the east side of the hostel so she could see the Sisters’ Shop. The building was dark, as it should be so late at night. Gennie would have to pass three buildings to reach the shop. The South Family Dwelling House was no problem; it had been abandoned for some time. The Schoolhouse would also be empty. But then she’d have to slip by the Children’s Dwelling House unseen. Sister Charlotte and the children still lived and slept there. Rose had wanted everyone to move to the big dwelling house, but Wilhelm drew the line at children. He didn’t like them much to begin with, and their numbers had grown in the past year because so many had been left with the Shakers by desperate parents crushed by this relentless Depression.
All children slept in the north end of the building, to be closer to the village. But that didn’t mean they’d stay in their rooms. Gennie had only to remember herself as a child to realize that. It would be just like Mairin to have slipped out of her bed and into one of the empty east-facing rooms. That’s probably how she first saw the ghost.
In the distance, the Sisters’ Shop showed no sign of life, either corporeal or ethereal. The spring air still carried a damp chill, and Gennie’s enthusiasm was waning. Before just giving up, however, she walked toward the back of the hostel to get a closer look at the shop. As she rounded the corner, she saw what she’d been waiting for—a brightly lit window that should have been dark. Not in the Sisters’ Shop, though. Instead it was to her right, in a second-floor window of the Carpenters’ Shop.
At times in the past, a brother might work into the night and then sleep in the Carpenters’ Shop, but Gennie knew no one did that now. Anyway, if someone were working late, the light would be shining on the first floor. Gennie approached the building slowly, keeping her eyes on the window even if it meant wandering off the path and into the dew-soaked grass. She didn’t care about her shoes or stockings.
Gennie had ventured within about a hundred feet of the Carpenters’ Shop when she saw movement through the window. It looked as if an arm had reached across and yanked shut the thin white curtains. Gennie stood still and waited, half expecting the light to go out. Nothing happened for several moments. Gennie chided herself for her overheated imagination and was more than ready to leave when a silhouette appeared in the window. The translucent curtain turned the image into a dark, faceless apparition with an unusually large head.
The figure bowed directly toward Gennie—or so it felt. Could it possibly see her? The creature turned sideways and bowed again, twice this time, as if someone else were in the room. Now Gennie could see that the large head was really the hood of a Shaker cloak pulled forward, hiding the face. Did ghosts have faces? Gennie was caught between the world and her Shaker upbringing. In fact, it was her worldly experience that made her believe this creature might be a real ghost. Grady would laugh at her, but his sister, Emily, loved séances and regularly used a Ouija board to guide her life. This was just the sort of ghost Emily believed in—dark and mysterious and probably very evil. It was nothing like the Shakers who had passed on, the ones Agatha used to tell her about.
The apparition faced the window again and bowed, then repeated its sideways double bow. Gennie caught her breath. It’s dancing. That stylized bowing was so like part of a choreographed Shaker dance of worship. The figure stretched its arms straight up, which expanded its width as the cloak unfolded like the wings of a bird. Circling slowly, it turned its face toward the ceiling. Miraculously, the hood did not fall backward.
Gennie ignored her damp feet and ruined shoes as she watched the ghost twirl faster and faster till the cloak billowed out like a tent. The specter whirled out of sight, then reappeared and twirled across the window. Gennie stood breathlessly still, waiting for it to return. Seconds passed. She began to count them. A minute went by, then another. Gennie’s heart was battering at her chest in anticipation of the next surprise. Three minutes passed.
“Well, I guess the show’s over.” The voice came from behind her. Gennie yelped and spun around. At first she saw nothing; her eyes had been glued too long on the bright window. As she adjusted to the darkness, a figure emerged, then another. Three people had been standing behind her, watching the window. She glanced around and located two more observers peeking around the corner of the Schoolhouse. As they approached, she realized they were all strangers.
“Look, she’s leaving,” said a woman in a hoarse whisper. She pointed toward the window. Gennie turned just in time to see the light fade out. The group waited several more minutes, but no other window lit up, at least in the part of the building visible to them.
A man took off in a sprint, circled the Carpenters’ Shop, and returned, out of breath. “All dark,” he reported.
“Haven’t seen you before,” a woman said to Gennie.
“This is my first time.”
“We been here every night this week,” the woman said. “At least most of us have. It’s better’n the circus. Why, I like to fainted dead away first time I seen that ghost prancing around.”
“How did you hear about this?” Gennie asked.
“Oh lordy, everyone knows about her by now. It’s been in the papers and so forth. My cousin down in Bowling Green heard about it even. I’m surprised there ain’t more folks here, but there’s probably lots watching the wrong buildings. Anyway, nothin’ much happened till a few days ago. We guessed she’d be at this building because she’s already done all the other buildings in this area, ’cepting that boardinghouse or whatever it is.” The woman seemed to have appointed herself the group’s storyteller, because the others had pulled back and were whispering among themselves. One of the women broke away and began spinning gracelessly. She collapsed, laughing, into the arms of a man.
“I’m Betty, by the way.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Betty,” Gennie said, without giving her own name. “Do you really think she’s a ghost?”
“I reckon so. There’s different stories going around, don’t know which is right. There’s them that says she’s a Shaker girl done in by her lover, and others think she done herself in, out of love for some man that jilted her. Me, I figure she got herself murdered and she’s come back looking to punish the man that did it.”
“But wouldn’t he be dead by now, too?”
“Well, more’n likely,” Betty said, “but if she’s been gone for a hundred years, maybe she got confused.”
Gennie gave up on any attempt to wring logic out of Betty.
“Have you seen her face—that ghost’s, I mean?” Gennie asked.
“Nope,” Betty said, with regret. “She’s always got that hood pulled forward or something. Maybe ghosts ain’t got faces.”
Gennie didn’t venture an opinion on the subject. As her excitement dwindled, her discomfort grew. She’d begun to notice that her shoes were soaked through. She wanted to go to her room, dry off, and snuggle under her covers. She forced herself to ask another question. “How many times have you seen her?”
“Oh, me and Arlin—that’s my husband—we been out here five nights in a row, ever since we seen that story in the Lexington paper, while we was visiting my sister. The first night we just wandered around, didn’t see nothin’, but we figured we’d come back and try again. That’s when we met those folks.” She pointed toward the others, who chattered as if they were at a church social.
“When we finally seen her, it was in that building over there.” Betty’s arm swung toward the abandoned South Family Dwelling House. “Next night she was over there, and then last night over there.” She’d indicated the Schoolhouse and the Sisters’ Shop. So the specter had jumped around a bit but stayed in the same area, avoiding the buildings occupied at night. Would it stick to the abandoned or empty buildings or become bolder and begin to haunt the Shakers’ living quarters? If the ghost ventured into the Children’s Dwelling House, it would surely have an audience of one very determined little girl. Gennie smiled into the darkness at the thought of Mairin following the phantom from room to room. If someone was perpetrating a hoax, Mairin would soon figure it out.
Betty stared at the South Family Dwelling House, her face scrunched up as if it hurt to concentrate. “Now I think of it,” she said, “I did notice something the other night. Arlin seen it, too. That ghost looked like she was fat. We didn’t notice it at first, not while she was dancing—maybe ’cause her dress was puffed out by all that spinning around. But when we was back in our wagon heading home, we caught sight of her running between a couple of buildings, and it sure seemed like her cloak was still pushed out, you know, like it would be over a fat person. Arlin, he didn’t think a ghost could have fat, not solid fat anyways. She was supposed to be a pretty young thing, too. So I reckon she was, you know, in the family way. Maybe that’s why she killed herself—or got killed. Makes sense, don’t it?”
“What buildings was she running toward, do you remember?”
“Oh honey, these buildings are so plain they all look alike to me.” A tall man who must be Arlin called to Betty. “Time for bed,” Betty said. “You take care now, hear? Get yourself dried off. Ain’t worth a chill.”
Gennie no longer cared about her cold, wet feet. A pregnant ghost—this was something she should take to Rose. And Agatha, too. If anyone would remember a story about a Shaker girl who got into trouble and died as a result, it was Sister Agatha. Gennie’s morose mood had melted away. She could put aside this endless fussing about Grady and Marriage. Adventure was in the air.