Carter, do you know for sure what happened to David Coleville that night?” Matthew asked.
Carter held up one hand, and in the firelight it cast a monstrous shadow on the wall behind him. “Back up, Vicar. You’re getting ahead of yourself. There’s part of the story you don’t yet know.” He paused to take a sip of scotch and leaned back in his chair. “I haven’t talked about this in so many years, and yet I can remember every detail as though it were yesterday.”
“Traumatic situations are like that,” Matthew said, squeezing my hand. “Sometimes they don’t recede.” After a moment, he added, “Go on, Carter.”
“We all thought Mercy had disappeared a full year before that ill-fated party happened.”
“Disappeared? But—”
Just then, I heard a clattering in the entryway.
“Mom?” Amity appeared, dressed in a rain slicker.
“Honey!” I rushed to her side and wrapped her in my arms. “What are you doing here?”
She scowled at me. “What do you mean? We got a call at Heather’s house that it was safe for me to come home. The police told Heather’s mom you were expecting me.”
The police hadn’t even arrived yet, so obviously they hadn’t called to tell Amity it was safe to come home. Then who …? As that thought occurred to me, a sense of terror, the likes of which I had never known, took hold of me. The last thing I wanted was to have my daughter here. But she was standing right in front of me, smiling, and I didn’t want to frighten her.
“Good, honey,” I said to her, helping her out of her slicker and leading her into the living room, my hand firmly around her arm. The more people around my daughter at that moment, the better. “Carter is just telling us a story.”
I settled Amity onto the sofa between Matthew and me as Carter went on. “Come to think of it, the journalist was here that summer also. The four of them, Johnny, Fate, David, and Adele, were thick as thieves, always playing croquet or sailing or just having drinks on the patio. I’d drive the four of them into town for movies or a night out.” He smiled, thinking back. “It was then Mercy disappeared, just before the summer solstice party. Charity discovered she was gone, and as you can imagine, she raised quite the ruckus with her husband, but she had to do it quietly because, remember, nobody outside the family, not even Adele, knew Mercy even existed.”
“My grandfather took her to the hospital in Switzerland, then, without anyone knowing.”
Carter shook his head. “Back then, we, the staff, were not told anything, other than that she was gone and wasn’t coming back. And frankly, we didn’t care if she was dead, locked up, or if she simply went back to whatever evil had made her. All we knew was she was gone. And we were free of her.”
I cut him off. “But … just a moment ago, you said you didn’t realize ‘something much, much worse’ was brewing. That doesn’t sound worse to me. That sounds like the solution.”
“He hasn’t gotten to the best part yet.”
The voice was coming from behind us. Matthew and I snapped our heads around toward the archway and saw Mercy standing there, smiling, holding a ream of paper that I could only assume was the manuscript. “It’s all in here. Haven’t you read it, Grace?”
Matthew was on his feet in an instant, a look of terrible calm on his face. “Miss Alban! So nice to see you again.”
She took a few steps into the room. “I asked Grace a question. Haven’t you read it, my dear? You’re the one who found it after all this time. Both of you.” She smiled at Matthew.
Her stark lucidity, her complete control of herself, sent a shot of icy dread through my veins. She certainly was not the fanciful old woman I’d met at the funeral who thought she was at a party in 1956, nor the confused, rumpled lady dancing in circles around the girls. I wondered if the lack of her medication had caused that strange, deluded behavior, or if it was all an act, designed to shock and deceive.
“I knew he loved me,” Mercy went on, coming closer still. The garish makeup she wore to the funeral was gone. Her hair was neatly pulled back, and she was wearing a simple blouse and slacks. She looked more like a fit, active seventy-year-old who had spent a lifetime exercising and eating right rather than someone who had languished in a drug-induced haze at a mental hospital for fifty years.
She set the manuscript on the table before us, and as she did so, I saw that she cradled a large kitchen knife, red with blood, in one hand.
“I knew he loved me,” she said, smiling a radiant smile. “He titled this book for me. Why, it’s all about me!”
“You were the girl in white,” Matthew said, taking my hand and leading me and Amity across the room, putting a table and a sofa of distance between us and Mercy. He nodded his head slightly to Carter, who made a show of refilling his drink but joined us.
“Of course I was, you silly man. Who else? The story frightened you; I know it did. You looked positively ashen when she was reading it to you.”
“You were watching us,” I said. “In the walls.”
“As Carter just said, the passageways were my world,” she said, shifting her focus to rest upon him. “My, haven’t you gotten old. You were always so handsome.”
And then she turned her attention to me. As she held my gaze, her face suddenly seemed very close to mine, and I became transfixed by her eyes—so dead, so lifeless, as though I were looking at a mannequin or into the eyes of a cobra hypnotizing its prey.
“Where is the nurse?” I said finally, my voice wavering.
“She didn’t see me until it was too late.” Mercy giggled. “It’s so easy to catch people unaware. Lucky thing for the rain today, isn’t it? You wouldn’t want to have to clean up that much blood. Such a bother.”
While Mercy was talking, I saw Matthew slip his phone off the table and hold it behind his back. I could only assume he was dialing 911, and I spoke up, so the police could hear what I was saying.
“So you’re telling us that the nurse is dead?”
Mercy smiled. “Aren’t we all, my dear?”
My stomach tightened as her grin widened, and as it did so, her face seemed to morph and change—her eyes glinted a bit too brightly, her mouth was contorted like an evil clown’s. In that moment, I became convinced that everything Carter had said, the whole fantastical story, was true. This thing standing before me wasn’t alive, not really.
“You killed the nurse, Mercy?” I repeated, for the police’s benefit, hoping they were listening on the other end of the line. “Is that what you’re saying to me?”
“I’m afraid it was necessary,” she said, moving over to the sofa and sinking down onto the cushions, crossing her legs. “I’m not going back there. Now that I’m off those ridiculous medications, I can see clearly. It’s no fun there. No passageways, no people to spy on. Nothing to do. No, I’m staying right here. This is my home, after all.”
“And Jane?” I said, a bit louder than I had intended. “Jane Jameson? Did you try to kill her, too?”
Mercy shook her head at me and laughed. “Who else, silly girl? I hardly think Carter here would have done it. He’s loved her his whole life. Isn’t that right, Carter?”
I turned to him in time to see his face go ashen white, and then redden. “That’s okay, Carter.” I smiled at him. “We all love her.” A tear escaped one of his eyes and he brushed it away with his hand.
“She intended to put me back on those horrible, mind-numbing medications,” Mercy said. “That just wouldn’t do. Not at all.”
A thought ran through my mind and took the breath out of me. “You just confessed to one murder and an attempted murder,” I said. “Why are you telling us all of this?”
“Why, to scare the life out of you, my dear.” She smiled at me, standing up and grasping the knife. “I find it’s always better to have my victims filled with terror and dread. It’s easier for me that way, invoking that kind of evil. Don’t you see, you silly girl, that I become much more powerful with those kinds of emotions swirling around me? I hardly have to do a thing! Just like poor Adele. She took one look at me and dropped dead.”
She laughed then, a terrible throaty laugh, and I could feel Amity shaking next to me.
“You were here the day my mother died?”
“Of course I was,” she sneered. “This is my home. Where else would I be?”
“I thought you were with Harris until the day of the funeral.”
“As it turns out, that little fool wasn’t the best babysitter.”
“Where did she die?” I asked her, my voice splintering. “They searched and searched but didn’t find her, until suddenly she was on the bench in the garden.”
“I was playing a little game with Jane.” Mercy raised her eyebrows. “Adele dropped dead when she saw me, but I took her into the tunnels that lead into the false basement until they had thoroughly searched the grounds. Then I laid her out in the garden. Jane’s face went absolutely white when she saw her. Alabaster!”
“Were you the one in the false basement? The one who broke into the house and went through my things? Why would you do that?”
“You are terribly slow, Grace,” Mercy said. “You’re not getting the theme. Let me spell it out for you, dear. Were you afraid?”
I could feel my legs trembling. If she had done it all simply to evoke fear in us, it was working.
She stood up, casting a long shadow on the opposite wall. It was then that I noticed her shadow wasn’t alone. I squinted to get a better look, and there, dancing on the wall alongside it, were four other shadows, moving closer to hers. I smelled lake water and my mother’s perfume, and I heard my brothers’ laughter so loud and raucous that I was sure everyone else could hear it, too. Their presence wrapped around me like a shield, and as it did, a sense of calmness passed over me. My family was here. And something else, too. It felt like the very house was standing with me. I wasn’t afraid anymore.
I took Matthew’s hand and I realized he was holding Mercy’s gaze and praying, soft and low, the words of a familiar prayer I had grown up with. His face was as serene as a lamb’s.
“You have lost, Mercy,” I said to her as coolly and calmly as I could manage. “We are not afraid of you.”
She moved toward us then, her eyes blazing, speaking words I didn’t understand, ancient-sounding, primal words. She seemed to rise up, gaining strength and power from whatever dark spell she was chanting.
“You all are going to be dead within very short order,” she shouted, raising her hand. “You will disappear just like they all disappear!”