Chapter 30
Thea

Thea.” Simeon’s voice broke through her frantic thumbing through a pile of loose papers scrawled with inked handwriting. Names, medical information, random paragraphs of random observations.

Thea ignored him. He had known. All along he’d known her mother was dead and buried at the asylum. She’d admitted to him she was afraid of finding her mother here. She’d taken on the duty of rifling through the haphazard records to find out if it was even possible. And, Simeon had already known.

“Thea, stop.” Simeon’s words echoed in the small office. His hand closed over her wrist.

Thea froze. She eyed it. She shook him off. Turning, she skewered him with her hurt, ignoring the way his face twisted and jerked. He was upset too. He should be. He was a liar. He was a deceiver.

“Why didn’t you tell me? You let me come here, and all the time—all the time you knew Misty and my mother were buried here. Why at the asylum? Is my mother really a Wayfair? How is this possible?”

The questions came along with tears. There was no closure in finding her mother’s grave. It had only opened and exhumed a chasm of unanswered questions.

“I didn’t tell you because . . .” Simeon hesitated. He appeared to will his features to be calm. A deep breath through his nose, and then he released it. “Because I don’t know the answers, Thea. I didn’t know how to explain it to you.”

“This is why Mr. Amos didn’t want me here, isn’t it?” He’d known too.

Simeon’s jaw set. His eyes were clear. Strong. They drilled into hers as he flipped the edges of some of the hospital records. “No one knows why your mother was here. No one knows why Misty is buried here. The asylum wasn’t built when she was buried. Those of us closest to it don’t know what to do with it all, so we try our best to ignore it. Right or wrong. That’s what we do.”

Thea studied his expression. Her emotions began to calm. “The asylum was built around her grave?”

Simeon nodded. “And until you came, with your mother’s initials and the surname of Reed, no one knew you existed.”

Thea licked her lips and bit the corner. “Misty Wayfair . . . is she my grandmother?” Visions of the woman in the street below her room replayed through Thea’s memory. Had the connection she’d felt to the eerie sight been that of a granddaughter to her grandmother? The thought was unnerving, and it gave Thea pause.

Simeon shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Do I have a father?”

Simeon’s look was pained and apologetic.

“You don’t know,” Thea concluded. She returned to the desk, lifting a stack of documents. She slammed them on the desktop in front of Simeon. “Start looking.”

Their eyes locked. She recognized something familiar in his. Something she detested but understood all too well. There was fear there. The monsters he’d mentioned, being loosed. The stories they might uncover. None of it would be welcomed. None of it would be pleasant.

Thea tamped down her hurt at Simeon’s actions. In a roundabout way, he’d been trying to protect her, just as Mr. Amos had. Maybe protect himself and Rose too. But it was time. Misty Wayfair had cursed these woods for far too long. Cursed the Coyles for too long. She had whispered death over them, avenging her own, and now she had touched Thea’s life.

Perhaps Thea had been spared by growing up in the orphanage and in the care of the Mendelsohns. Maybe it was that distance that gave her the courage Simeon didn’t have. Could she blame him? His father had abused and almost ruined him. His mother and sister had both passed without compelling causes. The town looked at him as an outcast.

But it was time.

Thea lifted her hand and touched Simeon’s bare forearm lightly, his shirtsleeve rolled back. He glanced down at her fingertips as if she’d pressed into his skin with a branding iron.

“Simeon, it’s time.”

He moved his arm until his hand wrapped around hers. Their fingers closed in a desperate grasp. Not friends. Not lovers. Not family. Not enemies. But two lost people, weary and desolate, and each without purpose in a life that never embraced them.

A small knock on Thea’s door brought her attention from the window and view over Pleasant Valley and the river. The fact it was night and the moon was full meant the world seemed half awake still, even at midnight. But she’d not expected the knock. The boardinghouse didn’t allow visitors into the living quarters, let alone in the middle of the night.

She leaned her shoulder against the door. “Who is it?”

“Mr. Fritz.”

Thea pulled back and frowned. It was highly inappropriate for him to be here just outside her door. Opening the door would make it even more so. Yet the gnawing curiosity of why he’d come, along with the shared intrigue surrounding the asylum, made her reach for the knob.

She opened it a few inches, mustering a stern frown.

The older man’s hand was already up, palm facing toward her to detour any conversation about etiquette and propriety. His balding head reflected a shaft of moonlight as it brushed across Thea’s room and into the hall.

“I apologize. But I must speak with you.”

“Now?” Thea glanced down the hallway. If Mrs. Brummel were to see them . . .

“Come downstairs to the parlor.” Mr. Fritz’s directive would only partially make the situation less controversial, but he turned on his heel and slunk away.

She shut her door and made swift work of changing out of her nightclothes. Skirt, shirtwaist, and a knitted sweater for extra covering. Pulling her long hair back, she twisted it fast and pinned it. No need to add a wanton appearance to this travesty of a midnight meeting.

Within moments, Thea tiptoed down the hall, snuck step by step down the narrow staircase, skirted the dining room and found her way into the front parlor. Mr. Fritz stood by the window, and he turned when she entered.

There was nothing but urgency in his expression. He motioned her toward him, and as she came, he looked past her to be sure she’d not been followed or seen.

“Mr. Fritz, what is so critical that you must beckon me in the middle of the night?” Thea drew her sweater tightly around her.

The man crossed his arms over his chest. He was fully dressed and had the vague scent of fresh air about him that made her wonder if he’d just come in after being outside. His eyes were wide behind spectacles, and he lowered his voice.

“I’ve seen her now!”

“Who?” Thea asked, though she already knew. Suddenly her sweater didn’t feel like enough covering.

“Misty Wayfair!” Mr. Fritz wheezed between clenched teeth. He took two steps toward the window and peered up and down the street before saying over his shoulder, “She’s out there tonight. Wandering. I saw her.”

Thea glanced into the dark corners of the parlor. Not that she expected to see Misty Wayfair materialize in one of them, yet that feeling she often got when Mr. Mendelsohn spoke of spirits as if they truly existed wrapped its chilling embrace around her.

“Where?” Thea’s voice had a slight shake to it. The morning’s interlude on the way to the asylum, the tormenting song, was all so real yet. But now? The image of Misty Wayfair and the possible link to her mother caused Thea to shiver.

Mr. Fritz turned from the window, his expression still intense. “She was by the river. Mrs. Brummel said she was wicked, and I daresay she’s right. The creature chased after me. Arms outstretched as if she were going to take flight! She stumbled and weaved. If she were alive, I would daresay she’d been imbibing, but as a spirit, it was haunting.”

Thea sank onto a nearby settee, her legs weakening. She stared up at Mr. Fritz. “Did she sing?”

“Sing?” Mr. Fritz shook his head. “No. She appeared—desperate almost. She knows.” He scratched with nervous energy at his shoulder. “Dear heaven, she knows!”

“Knows what?” Thea whispered.

Mr. Fritz looked out the window again. He appeared anxious that Misty Wayfair had followed him. That she would breeze through the wall and wrap her bony fingers around his throat, strangling life from him as had once happened to her.

“She knows I found out.” He noticed the curtains drawn back on either side of the window. Reaching out, Mr. Fritz began to loosen the tie on one side, letting the filmy lace drop in front of the glass like a shield. “I believe I’ve inadvertently found more clues as to how—and why—she died.”

Thea stilled.

He let the other curtain fall before hurrying to her side, dropping onto a chair only inches from Thea’s settee. Leaning forward, Mr. Fritz captured her gaze with his frantic, wide eyes.

“I had no idea what I was investigating! When I came here to research the hospital. When I asked you to—oh, Miss Reed!” He drew back. “You must not go back to that place. I have put you in grave danger. Promise me you won’t go back!”

Thea narrowed her eyes. “Mr. Fritz, tell me what you have uncovered. I must know.”

He drummed his fingers on his knee as if reconsidering why he’d asked her to the parlor in the first place. She could see the questions splaying across his face. Was he putting her in more danger? Would it sic Misty Wayfair onto Thea as it appeared she had come after him?

“Tell me, please,” Thea coaxed.

“I was researching when the hospital was first constructed. I wanted to uncover its purpose—its origins, as a part of my story. Why build an asylum in the woods? This isn’t a populated area, Miss Reed. The demand for a place such as Valley Heights seemed unwarranted at best.”

Thea stayed silent, afraid that if she responded, Mr. Fritz would cease talking.

He licked his lips and glanced toward the doorway. “It’s believed that Mr. Kramer of the logging company built it. Really no more than twenty years ago. That’s not that long ago, Miss Reed. Not long at all. So why is there already a second doctor on staff, the first having left no more than a few years ago? Word of patients having passed? Mental patients often live out long lives in hospitals run properly—even improperly, for that matter. How is it there are death records on file of several patients? That piqued my interest, as you must imagine. But then . . .”

Mr. Fritz’s pause made Thea desperate. She clasped her fingers together to keep from throttling the man with his dramatic glances at the lace-shrouded window. The shadows it cast made the parlor eerie. Ghostly.

“Then?” Thea pressed.

“Then—” Mr. Fritz drew in a shuddered breath—“there was another name on the register for the asylum construction. Fortune. Mr. Edward Fortune.”

It had far less of an impact on Thea than it had on Mr. Fritz. She frowned. It stood to reason Mr. Fortune’s name would appear on the paper work. He had, after all, been Mathilda Coyle’s cousin, Mr. Kramer’s nephew. He had become the heir appointed after Mathilda’s very public family ousting.

Mr. Fritz continued. “Edward Fortune was already in his sixties when the hospital was built. Think of the arithmetic, Miss Reed! Mr. Kramer would have been in his nineties. Nineties! How invested would a man nearing a century have truly been in constructing an asylum? Very little, I’d imagine! Therefore, it leads me to believe the driving force behind the establishment was not, as it was made to appear, Mr. Kramer at all. But rather, Mr. Fortune.”

Thea blinked, still trying to comprehend the implications that seemed very apparent to Mr. Fritz.

He studied her face. “You’re not following.”

Thea shook her head. “No. Well, I am. But I don’t see—”

“Why it is important?” Mr. Fritz gave her a nervous smile. “It was built over the well, Miss Reed.”

She frowned again.

“The well,” he insisted again. “The well they found Misty Wayfair’s body in. Strangled. Pale and gruesome in her death. A moldy stone well covered in moss and disregarded, as the old homestead it was on had been long abandoned. There was no newspaper here when she died, but with a little digging, it wasn’t hard to uncover who found Misty Wayfair after she’d passed.”

“Who?” Thea breathed.

Mr. Fritz swallowed hard. Thea saw his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. “Mathilda Coyle.”

It started to make sense. A little. Thea calculated the additional information. Edward Fortune, building an asylum over the place of Misty Wayfair’s death. Mathilda Coyle, the one who discovered the body of Misty Wayfair.

“I can only continue to wonder why Misty Wayfair haunts the Coyles but not the Fortunes as well,” Mr. Fritz mused, tossing another furtive glance at the window.

“Are you saying you believe Mr. Fortune or Mathilda Coyle were responsible for—” Thea stopped. She couldn’t say it. Didn’t want to say it.

“Did they kill her themselves?” Mr. Fritz choked out, as if the words were dragged from his throat. “I have to believe there’s more to it we don’t yet understand, Miss Reed. It’s not by chance there is still a rift between the families today. And a rift over an unapproved marriage for religious purposes? Perhaps in a place such as Milwaukee, but here? In the Northwoods of Wisconsin? People cannot afford to be that biased for that long. No, something darker divided them. Something far darker.”

“What?” Thea breathed, though she needn’t have asked the question.

“Murder,” Mr. Fritz rasped. “Murder—and sickness. Sickness of the mind, Miss Reed. Someone was very, very ill.”

Thea stared at him. The impact of his suspicions taking root in her mind.

Mr. Fritz surged to his feet, startling her. He strode over to the window and pushed back the curtain. “Misty Wayfair has come back now. Her tale is coming to light, and she will have it told.” He turned back to Thea. “She will avenge her death. I’m quite afraid that I—we—have not seen the last of her.”