Chapter 14
Thea
Her room was cold. The chilling type of cold that seeped into her bones and her muscles. Damp aching that lingered long after she had snuffed out the lamp and settled beneath the sheet and light blanket provided by Mrs. Brummel in her boardinghouse bed. Thea tossed and turned, the bedding coming untucked and tangled around her body. She needed peace, even a precarious peace. For all her fascination and curiosity with the lives and stories of others, hers was one she often wished could be tossed on a pile of banned literature and begun again. The asylum loomed large in the back of her mind. The question of her mother and if she were in any way related to that dark place. And Mrs. Amos’s counsel had left her questioning. If she found herself, would she still be lost somehow? A conundrum that seemed spiritual and elusive at the same time. Was one’s purpose defined by knowing who they were, where they were from, or by something—Someone—greater?
Coming back to her room at night brought little peace and comfort. There was a darkness here, in Pleasant Valley. A spirit that lingered in the air, embracing its inhabitants, sinking into one’s soul like an uninvited guest entered a home and refused to leave. Something was out of place, and the people of Pleasant Valley seemed to know it. Keeping to themselves, smiling little, separated by a street, a history, and worst of all, a legend.
Misty Wayfair.
The name seemed to whisper into Thea’s dreams. She was awake, and yet Thea wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t dreaming at the same time. In the night’s stillness, she twisted herself free from the blankets, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and resting her bare feet on the wood floor. She lifted her face to the lone window. The moon shone through, patterns of shadows from the curtains dancing on the floor and across Thea’s skin. She watched them, mesmerized for a moment, reaching out to touch the shadow on the back of her hand. As if a ghost had entered her room, kissing her skin with a chilled touch, a shadowy spell, calling to her.
Misty Wayfair.
Thea rose, her white nightgown falling around her ankles. She moved to the window, reaching out to push the curtain aside. The street was silent, the buildings dark forms in the moonlight. Beyond the street and the deserted workplaces, the river flowed in the distance. Its waters glistened and called to Thea with a restless abandonment. Beyond lay the forest—the asylum’s forest.
She heard it again. So small, so soft that Thea blinked, trying to awaken herself fully. Trying to convince herself she wasn’t dreaming.
Misty Wayfair.
Her gaze drifted back to the river, to the stable, the blacksmith’s shop, down the empty street toward the portrait studio, and the whitewashed post office.
“Misty Wayfair.” The words were Thea’s own whisper this time.
For she saw her now.
Alone in the street, the lithe figure of a woman floated. Her feet touched the ground, but it seemed that, in the moonlight, she was transparent, glowing in white. Her gown fluttered around her legs as she gave a slow turn in the empty street, her arms stretched out as though attempting to fly away on the clouds of death. Hair the color of burnt embers floated around her shoulders, the strands thick and filmy.
Thea’s breath held in her chest, stopped by a heavy weight, unable to lift, to breathe around the pressure. The windowpane felt cool against her forehead as she strained to peer up the street where the woman twirled again, as if waltzing to an unknown sonata. Around and around she twirled, her head tipping back, her face lifting to the night sky like a bird set free.
Thea pressed the palm of her left hand against the glass. The vision was mesmerizing. Not only in her midnight beauty, but with the grace in which she traveled down the road. The rocks, the sticks, the animal droppings, and the rubble did not seem to affect her feet. Nighttime was her friend, embracing her with a welcome she received from no one else.
“Misty . . .” Thea whispered. Her breath fogged the windowpane.
Below the boardinghouse, Misty froze. Startled. Her dancing ceased and was traded instead for the stiffening of her shoulders. Her hands lowered to her sides. She stared up the street from where she’d come, afraid, as if someone were hunting her.
Thea watched, her throbbing heart louder than the tiny breaths that escaped her nose.
Misty clutched the front of her nightgown, pulling it into her chest and up her legs in a frantic, frightened gesture. Her legs were thin and pale, almost inhumanly so.
In that moment, Thea sensed it too. An imminent danger. The form of fear a prey might feel as an owl swooped from the branches, its claws fully extended to skewer through skin, lift the body, and carry it away. The deep horror a person could sense in their soul, when a foreboding came over them, oppressive and dark. The knowing it was coming. It being defined as the circumstance that would grasp hold of a being’s peace and squeeze it until it shattered into shards of irreparable glass.
“Run.” The word filtered through Thea’s lips, through the glass, and somehow . . . Misty Wayfair heard it.
She lifted her face, shadowed as the moon cowered behind a cloud as one would cover one’s face from the sight of something horrible. Misty’s eyes were deep and dark, though it was impossible to make out specific features in the night. Her cheeks were gaunt, as hollows in the face of one who rarely eats. But etched into every nuance of her form, every shadow on her face, was fear. A stiffening, immobilizing fear.
Thea’s gaze locked onto the phantom-like sight. Her throat tightened. It was time. Time to catapult this vision from her frigid state.
“Run,” Thea urged. Her voice was just above a whisper, but she palmed the glass, rattling the panes in its frame. “Run.”
A questioning look from the shadowy being.
She lingered there, a moment of time positioned between peace and fear, a connection of souls, and then . . .
Misty Wayfair ran.
“We’ll need a fern.”
Thea startled and juggled a vase she’d lifted from a shelf. It tossed in the air and fell to its demise on the wood floor, shattering in shards of blue ceramic. Pip hissed, arched his back, and glared at her with judgmental eyes.
“For all that’s holy!” Mr. Amos blustered past her, snatching up a broom that leaned against the wall. “I asked for a fern. What’re you so jumpy for?”
“I’m sorry.” Thea stepped aside as he swept the shards into the corner. She couldn’t shake the darkness from the night before. The sight she’d seen, or thought she’d seen. So surreal she questioned if she had perhaps been dreaming.
Mr. Amos looked up at her, clouded blue eyes under bushy eyebrows of gray. A moment’s study and then he shook his head. “Never mind. I didn’t like that vase anyway.” He leaned the broom against the wall again, then skewered her with a look. “Your mind’s not with it today.”
Thea swallowed a nervous lump in her throat. If she told the old man about Misty Wayfair, he’d only mock her. A man of faith, he wouldn’t believe she’d seen the ghost—the legendary ghost—who haunted the Coyles in retribution for thwarted love.
A shaft of sunlight spread through the window and across the floor. Thea stepped into it. Anything light, anything pure was calming to her frayed nerves.
“Well?” Mr. Amos barked.
Thea blinked. “Pardon?”
“Never mind.” Mr. Amos turned his eyes to the ceiling. “I already live with a woman with her head in the clouds, what’s the difference if I work with one too?”
His words were cutting, but then Thea noticed the twitch of his mustache and quick wink as he brushed past her.
Thea offered him a weak smile. No. She couldn’t explain last night. Misty Wayfair, her shadowed features that Thea couldn’t even remember the details of, and the odd dance down the main street of town. She’d had a dream once as a child that Mrs. Mendelsohn had been angry with her. When Thea had asked Mrs. Mendelsohn, the older woman had told her she’d not been angry and they’d never argued. A dream. But so real of a dream.
Perhaps that explained Misty Wayfair. Perhaps the unsettling visit to the asylum, following Simeon Coyle through the woods, the vision across the river of a bare-legged woman—perhaps all of it compounded with each other until they became half-real, half-imagined circumstances.
Mr. Amos was right. Her mind wasn’t with it today.
Thea straightened her shoulders and drew in a steadying breath. Mr. Amos groused in the corner, fumbling with equipment. The man’s shoulders appeared more hunched today, perhaps borrowing from some unknown stress. Simeon perhaps. She’d seen him exit the portrait studio again, early this morning. This time, Mr. Amos had walked with him, toward the asylum, and had not returned for over two hours. That she’d gained entrance to the studio was made possible because of a note Mr. Amos had left her, and the fact he apparently trusted her and the town enough to leave the door unlocked.
Thea determined to busy herself with work she’d been doing before the vase had shattered and she’d turned into an immobilized statue herself. She scooted a waist-high podium, Greek in style, wood made to look like marble, a few feet to the right. Bending, she hoisted a potted fern onto its platform.
Mr. Amos coughed, the hacking rattle of an old man, as he dragged a chair next to the plant. He stood back, hands at his waist. “That’ll do.”
“The photograph is of a family?” Thea inquired. He’d told her earlier, but she’d forgotten in her preoccupation with forgetting everything else.
His lips pursed. “No.”
It was more than apparent that the photographer was not welcoming the forthcoming visitor. Thea gave him a studious look. Mr. Amos ignored her.
“Who is it, then?” she finally asked when it became obvious Mr. Amos was not going to offer it.
“Kramer Logging’s Mr. Edward Fortune,” Mr. Amos supplied.
The memory of Mrs. Amos’s brief history about the nephew who’d inherited Kramer Logging instead of the Coyles came to mind. Thea raised a thin eyebrow. “The Mr. Fortune?”
“That’s what I said, didn’t I?” Mr. Amos readjusted the plant on its stand.
“Why does he need his portrait taken?” Thea tipped her head in question, struggling to come to terms with the idea that in a few moments she would be meeting the man who had come into the Coyles’ rightful inheritance.
“How should I know?” Mr. Amos strode past her and headed toward the back room. Thea followed, curiosity getting the better of her good sense and by no means stilling her tongue.
“And he was Mr. Kramer’s nephew?” She tried to let Mrs. Brummel’s gossipy sketch of the Coyle family history fall into place in her mind.
Mr. Amos made a pretense of raising a sandwich to gobble before Mr. Fortune came for his sitting. He nodded, his mustache twitching as he took a bite, chewed, and swallowed. “Nephew by marriage. When things turned sour with Kramer’s daughter, Mathilda, and after the whole Misty Wayfair debacle, Edward stepped up to help. But don’t be fooled. He’s no saint. Everything about that family is a shame. That logging company shoulda been Simeon’s.”
The final words were a muttered growl.
Thea hesitated, but then dared to ask, “Would Simeon have wanted it?”
Mr. Amos’s head shot up. “Who knows? But he wasn’t given the chance, now, was he? Suffered for the sins of his grandparents—sins or choices, doesn’t matter.”
“Does Mr. Fortune seem at all apologetic to the Coyles?” Thea crossed her arms over her chest and watched as Mr. Amos fiddled with his napkin.
He groused under his breath, but finally answered. “Doubtful. He took over the company before Simeon was born. Never seemed to try to set things to right. Maybe he doesn’t even know exactly what happened. It was all a mess.”
An idea came to Thea’s mind. It was so simple, almost strange to consider. “So, Simeon would have been a logging baron if his grandmother Mathilda Kramer hadn’t—”
“Hadn’t married Fergus Coyle?” Mr. Amos stopped and gave Thea a direct stare. “Yes.” His eyes dimmed, and he looked toward the back window in the direction of the asylum. “Time changes what one values. And with Simeon’s sister, Mary, just passed on . . . it’s not as though a pair of orphaned siblings even care about a logging company anymore.”
Mr. Amos sniffed, then turned back and gave Thea an honest nod. “Simeon and Rose have only each other. The last of the Coyles. The last of the Kramers, for that matter. Half the town wants to blame Misty Wayfair for that. No one points a finger at Edward Fortune. He got the lucky end of the whole sordid tale.”
Mr. Amos cleared his throat, breaking himself from his musings. He waved her off, although Thea said nothing.
“Simeon and Rose, they haven’t much future really. Death has a way of dealing its hand when you least expect it. I rather believe it’s all poppycock, but folks say Misty will come to claim them too. It’s just the way of it with the Coyles. Misty Wayfair won’t be at rest until every last one of them has passed on and joined her.”