Chapter 3
Thea

The tired, little northern town ran juxtaposed to its name. Pleasant Valley. It was neither pleasant, nor was it in a valley. It wasn’t unlike a funeral pall that had lowered itself over the town like a thick fog across an open countryside after a warm rain and a chilly night.

Thea was shaken from her visit to the Coyles. A simple knock on the door inquiring if anyone needed a family portrait, a memento mori, or even a single portrait for a lover. Traveling photography sales. Just as Mr. Mendelsohn had trained her to do. But the emotion of the afternoon was so raw, so very exposing, that it left Thea feeling unsettled.

Perhaps the Coyles were unsettling, but Pleasant Valley had its own oddities too. The one main street that split Pleasant Valley into two sides was just as peculiar.

“It’s the Protestant side,” the boardinghouse mistress, Mrs. Agatha Brummel, said and gestured toward the west. “And that is the Catholic side.” Her index finger tilted east.

Thea couldn’t help but raise her brows. The woman’s pointed chin jutted out from the froufrou of ruffles at the neck of her otherwise sturdy black dress.

“We’re all on good terms, you see,” Mrs. Brummel continued as she hitched up her skirts and beckoned Thea to follow her up a very narrow staircase made more claustrophobic by the walls on either side. “But, everyone knows a Protestant and a Catholic dining together over Sunday dinner are sure to argue. Doctrine and all, you see?”

Thea didn’t. But she allowed Mrs. Brummel to go on chattering in her reedy voice about the Virgin Mary, the Sacraments, and something to do with whether one baptized a soul as an infant or submerged the person in the nearby river as an adult.

The door to the room Thea was renting opened as Mrs. Brummel twisted the glass knob. It was tiny, with a lone window across the room overlooking the Catholic side of the street. Thea blinked to clear the idea from her mind. She wasn’t bothered by any predilection of association, so much as wished they’d all agree so she could make sense of how to determine her own eternal destination.

A bed extended out into the middle of the room. A small bureau, a writing desk, and a straight-backed chair were the only other pieces of furniture. A watercolor painting of a cow beneath a maple tree hung over the bed—the only warm spot in a room otherwise clinical and undefined.

Mrs. Brummel crossed the room, the heels of her sensible high-button shoes echoing on the rugless wood floor. She pushed aside plain curtains, her back to Thea. “Don’t let the Catholics intimidate you now.”

Thea bit her bottom lip. It would be funny if it wasn’t so very pathetic. “I’ve been exposed to them before,” she goaded Mrs. Brummel with her serious tone, as if it had been a traumatic experience when in fact it had all been quite pleasant.

Mrs. Brummel turned, her thin, mousy eyebrows raised over eyes holding little color other than gray. “Well, you know what I mean then.” She gave a curt nod.

Thea blinked away any humor that might have entered her expression and gave Mrs. Brummel back a very comforting, very conjured smile of shared opinion.

Mrs. Brummel returned to the doorway while Thea edged to the side, clutching her camera box in front of her. The woman eyed it, then lifted her gaze to Thea. “I assume you have a trunk?”

“I do.” Thea nodded. “My belongings are at the blacksmith’s in my wagon.”

“Ah yes.” Another curt nod of comprehension. “And rented a stable, I assume, for your horse. Smart young lady, you are. All these newfangled motorcars. Whoever thought it? A lot of good they are around these parts. Roads with ruts the size of valleys. Very well then. I’ll send someone to retrieve your belongings for you.”

“Thank you.” Thea offered a smile. The blacksmith was . . . she thought for a moment . . . oh yes, he would be on the Catholic side. Her curiosity got the better of her. “Pardon me, Mrs. Brummel, but may I ask what caused the town to divide into religious sects?”

Mrs. Brummel tilted her head to assess whether Thea was serious or not. Her lips pursed. “Pleasant Valley is the child community of the original logging camp that settled here in the late thirties. Before the war and most certainly before any of us knew who Lincoln was.” She waved a hand as if to silence her own wayward chattiness. “When Mathilda Kramer married Fergus Coyle, well, it was all rather a mess. Mathilda was the daughter of the man who owned the logging camp. Coyle was a laborer and very Irish Catholic. Kramer, being quite wealthy, preferred his daughter wed someone more suitable, but the business wasn’t stable enough at the time to risk an insult to his employees if a fuss were to be raised over societal standing and bank accounts. Kramer claimed it was all because Mathilda, who was very German Protestant, married an Irish Catholic. In any event, it still had poor effects on his employees and the town.”

Thea rested her camera box on the floor. “So, it has nothing to do with religion, but the fact that a wealthy man’s daughter wed an Irish pauper.”

The logic gave Mrs. Brummel pause, but then she nodded. “I suppose it does have little to do with the Catholics per se.” She waved her hand in the air again, dismissing the thought. “Either way, the town has always been on tentative terms and—” Mrs. Brummel cast a glance toward the window, then back at Thea, her eyes serious and penetrating with their stark sincerity—“and that is why the entirety of Pleasant Valley avoids the Coyles to this day.”

Thea reached up to pull the hatpin from her hat. “Fifty-some years later, Pleasant Valley is still punishing the Coyles on Kramer Logging’s behalf?” Her mention of the logging company brought a spark of admiration to Mrs. Brummel’s eyes.

“Well, not only that, I suppose. But also what happened after the marriage and throughout the years that makes us keep the Coyles at arm’s length.”

Thea rested her hat on the writing desk. “And that is?”

Mrs. Brummel’s lips stretched in a wan smile, and her eyes grew a bit colder, as if something awful had snuffed the warmth from the room. She lowered her voice to a hiss-like whisper.

“It’s the deaths, Miss Reed. All the strange dying the Coyles have had over the years. A stroke of bad luck, the superstitious say. Now, poor Mary. Poor, sweet Mary. We all know the truth.”

Thea swallowed, recalling vividly the Coyle home and the very recent passing of Mary Coyle. Funny how chance would have led her to their door, of all doors, to solicit photography services.

“A spirit haunts these woods, Miss Reed.” Mrs. Brummel raised an eyebrow that winged over her left eye like a crow’s beak. “Every time a Coyle passes, the spirit wails throughout Pleasant Valley the evening prior to their death. Half the time, no one even understands why they die, they just . . . pass away. Like poor Mary, God rest her soul.”

Mrs. Brummel walked through the bedroom doorway into the hall. She paused and offered Thea a grim smile. “They call the wailing woman Misty Wayfair.”

“W-Who is Misty Wayfair?” Thea couldn’t control the fearful stutter in her voice.

Mrs. Brummel’s mouth turned up on one corner in a sideways smile reminiscent of someone who knew a secret. “She’s the woman Fergus Coyle was meant to marry, but didn’t. They found her body in a well the morning after his first night with his new wife, Kramer’s daughter. Misty Wayfair had been strangled, they say, but that may just be the old story.” Mrs. Brummel’s smile dissipated. “Still, I would avoid the woods in the nighttime hours. Misty Wayfair likes to wander there.”

A grim nod. A lowered chin. A stern eye.

“And she is not a friendly spirit,” Mrs. Brummel concluded.

She wasn’t entirely sure how, but Thea found herself awake the following morning, dressed in her darkest gown of deep gray, and positioned on the buckboard of Mrs. Brummel’s carriage. The wheels carted them outside of Pleasant Valley, its springs bouncing them on the seat until Thea wanted to rub her backside.

Today was Mary Coyle’s funeral, Mrs. Brummel had announced that morning as she served Thea a bowl of oatmeal with a puddle of maple syrup in the middle. Very few from town would attend, she’d stated, being that Mary was a Coyle. Still, Mrs. Brummel had wiped her hands on her apron. It was Christian duty, after all.

Thea hadn’t denied Mrs. Brummel her company, although now she questioned the wisdom of it. Part of her had been convinced when they started out that a return visit would erase the unwelcome shiver that ran through her at the memory of yesterday. Of the dead Mary, the grieving Rose, and the indecipherable Simeon.

Now, as they neared the farmhouse, its narrow frame void of any angles or gables, Thea knew how very wrong she’d been to come. Her heartbeat quickened, her palms grew clammy, and for some reason every memory, both bad and worse, filtered unbidden through her mind.

Mrs. Brummel hustled toward the front door, which was perched open for visitors. There was no backward glance over her shoulder toward Thea, and it appeared she was content to let Thea fend for herself. “Miss?”

The deep voice just behind Thea’s left shoulder caused her to intake a quick breath as she spun. A tall man stood behind her, trussed up in a black suit, with a tie, a watch fob, and a bowler hat. His mustache drooped on either side of his mouth, his brown eyes sharp, with a bit of a John Wilkes Booth look about him. Thea figured that was not a complimentary comparison.

“Are you going in?” He extended his arm to encourage her to proceed.

“Yes.” A quick nod and Thea moved with hurried steps toward the house.

The man followed and was mere inches behind her as she slowed and crossed the threshold.

“Dr. Earl Ackerman,” he muttered in her ear.

Thea shifted aside and away from him. She met his gaze. It wasn’t inappropriate or overly bold, yet she was still uneasy. She refrained from granting him her name and nodded instead. Acknowledgment coupled with subtle indifference.

Mr. Mendelsohn would have been proud of her.

Thea entered the parlor, so familiar from yesterday. Mrs. Brummel stood to the side with two other women, their faces pinched, hands held by their lips as they murmured quietly to one another. She shifted her gaze to the casket. To Mary. Even paler than the day prior, the body now fully prepared for burial. Her hands crossed over her bosom. Her hair arranged in a curled pile on top of her head.

“You came.” A soft voice interrupted Thea’s perusal of Mary Coyle. “Bless you,” it continued.

Thea met Rose Coyle’s eyes. A sheen of moisture covered them, pooling in the corners. Rose dabbed at the tears with an embroidered handkerchief.

“Is it wrong that I-I will be rather thankful when this is behind us?” Rose’s admission might have shocked anyone else, but it echoed the very thoughts Thea had entertained many times over while learning the postmortem photography trade from Mr. Mendelsohn.

Thea gave Rose a reassuring smile. “I don’t believe it is wrong. I believe it is natural.”

Rose bit her bottom lip. Her eyes shifted about the room, timid of those who’d come to pay their respects. She leaned into Thea. “They all believe something is amiss. It’s why they’re here. Curiosity. As if we were a mystery to solve.”

“Are you?” Thea asked, before she stopped to think. She covered her mouth with her fingers. “I’m so sorry,” she breathed.

“I don’t know.” Rose’s voice was watery, with a wary edge to it as she glanced toward Dr. Ackerman, who stood over Mary, hat in hands. “We are Coyles, and Coyles have always been . . . cursed, I suppose.”

“Not cursed.” Dr. Ackerman had somehow overheard. He neared them, his eyes fixed on Rose’s face with familiarity. “You are a story that people cannot leave unread, when it is simply none of their business to begin with.”

For a moment, Thea’s opinion of the man swayed toward appreciation. He sounded appropriately offended by the guests milling about, sampling Rose’s plated baked goods, and whispering.

“There is no story but sadness and grief.” Rose’s lip trembled. She looked between Thea and Dr. Ackerman. “It is a dark and desperate world that Mary lived in.”