Chapter Thirty-Two #2
“I knew what they liked. Mary and Nellie. Well, mostly Mary. Nellie thought stories like that were silly. My mother always said Nellie was the practical one, while Mary had her head in the clouds, and that was why they were such good friends. I thought, if I wrote a poem Mary liked, she’d see that it’s good to have two friends, because if you do not share an interest with one, you might share it with the other. ”
“Mary liked the poem.”
“She adored it. Even more than I ever thought she would. She couldn’t stop talking about it, and since I wrote it, I understood it and could talk to her about it more than Nellie could.”
“Which was nice.”
“It was,” Kate says. “Nellie already had her job at the factory, so while she sometimes came to a class, it was mostly only me and Mary. Mr. MacNiven didn’t really care for the poem, but he let us share it and everyone was interested, so he started to teach it, and that made us important.
Mary wanted to discover who the girl had been.
Detective work, like you and Dr. Gray do. That’s when Nellie got interested.”
“In finding the girl?”
Kate nods. “Who didn’t exist, so I…” She shifts, gripping the railing. “You know when someone wants to go in one direction and you pull them back?”
“Steer them.”
“Yes, that’s the word. I steered Mary away from finding the girl, and Nellie was not around much, so it was easy to do.
Instead, I convinced Mary that we should try to see the ghost. That seemed safer.
If we couldn’t find information on the girl—Clara Moore—Nellie would be suspicious.
But if we could not find her ghost, there was an explanation. ”
“That the ghost simply wasn’t appearing to you.”
“Yes. Only Mary, she became…” Kate’s face scrunches. “I do not know this word either. When someone is very interested in something. Too interested. They think about it all the time.”
“Obsessed.”
“Yes. Mary became obsessed with the poem. She wanted to re-create it. That seemed wrong, and Mr. MacNiven wouldn’t like it. He explained that the girl taking her own life was a sin and she would not get into heaven. So it didn’t feel right to play pretend.”
Icy fingers slip into my gut, and I glance at Gray, but his expression is unreadable.
“Mary wanted to pretend to … be the ghost? Or to drown?”
“Pretend to drown. She took a white nightgown from a drying line, and she would lie in the bog and ask me if she looked pretty. I really did not like the game. I made her float on her back, even though that’s not how I wrote the poem.”
“So she floated on her back, in a pretty gown.”
“But that wasn’t enough. She wanted to do it at night.
I said no, and we argued something terrible, Miss Mitchell.
” Kate scratches at her hand, nails digging in.
“We were finally friends—true friends—and she was angry with me. So I … I said yes. We would do it one time. Only she wanted more. There is a frog-catcher. He always comes just after dusk. She wanted to pretend to be dead, floating on the water, and scare him.”
“Scare the frog-catcher?”
“Not because she didn’t like him. He was nice enough. But he would see her, floating there, and he’d tell everyone, and we could say he must have seen Clara Moore’s ghost.”
Those icy fingers dig in deeper. I have an idea what happened, and it’s definitely not as simple as Mary drowning herself like in the poem.
“Did you agree?” I ask, and my voice is gentle, but her tears well again.
“I had to,” she says. “I know I will hang for this, but I never thought … thought…” She gulps air.
“Mary said she would do it with or without me, and I thought if I helped, it would be safe. We met on the bank, and she showed me the laudanum she had taken from her mother. She wanted to use it so she would appear still, relaxed and floating. I said no. Absolutely not. We fought again, but I insisted, and she gave in.”
Kate struggles to catch her breath. “She must have drank it when I wasn’t looking. I found … I found the vial. Empty. After … after…”
“It’s all right. Just explain. She was going to float in that dress…”
“Facedown. I said no, that was dangerous. I argued that she could not hold her breath that long. She said she could, and besides, I would be there to tell her when the frog-catcher was coming, and if I had not said it yet, she could lift her head and breathe.”
“Then what?”
“I gave in. Again. I helped her lie down. She showed me how she would lift her head to breathe. I went into the bushes. Right there.” She points.
“When I saw the frog-catcher, I was supposed to hoot like an owl, and she’d know to keep her face down.
I decided I would hoot when he was nearly at the water.
He’s old, and he cannot see well, but I did not want her holding her breath too long. ”
“What happened?”
“He did not come, miss. The sun set completely, and I decided that was enough. So I hurried down to the water to tell Mary. And she … she…” Kate gasps, both hands gripping the rail as she leans over it, struggling to breathe.
I look at Gray again and see a flicker of pain as he realizes what happened.
“She was dead,” I say gently.
“I did not believe it at first. I went in and lifted her up, and she was just lying there. I checked her breathing, as you are supposed to. There was no breath and no heartbeat, and when I slapped her, she did not wake.”
“What did you do next?”
“I was going to drag her to shore and run for help. But then I heard someone coming. Not the frog-catcher but someone walking along the road. Heading for this bridge, and I knew they were going to cross and see us. So I…”
Her cheeks scorch bright red as her gaze drops.
“I ran, miss. I hid in the bushes, and if they hadn’t seen Mary, I swear I would have come back.
I know I should not have run. I was thinking I would get help, and here was help, and I fled and hid!
” She grips the railing so tight blood wells up where she scratched at her hand. “I do not know what I was thinking.”
While this may not make sense to her, it does to me. There’s a difference between running for help and being “caught” holding on to your dead friend.
“So you hid…” I prompt.
“It was two farmhands. Going home after a night in the city, and when they crossed the bridge, they saw Mary in her pale gown. I waited to be sure and then I…” She trails off, her face twisted in misery. Then she blurts, “I ran home. I pretended I had been asleep the whole time.”
I give it a minute. Then I say, gently, “They found a note, Kate. It wasn’t from Mary, was it?”
She shakes her head, her gaze still down. “I wrote it later that morning. Everyone was saying Mary had been drowned by one of those farmhands. Maybe even the frog-catcher. So I wrote the letter.”
“In her handwriting.”
“I am very good at that, miss. Writing in other people’s hands. That is why the poem didn’t look like I wrote it. I wrote in Mary’s hand for years. She struggled at school, so I did her work. Nellie always said that was wrong, but I was trying to be nice.”
Trying to win the regard of a girl she desperately wanted to befriend. Years spent doing Mary’s homework in hopes of earning her friendship, which she does … but only after Nellie goes off to work.
I don’t like how Mary treated Kate, but I suspect it wasn’t intentional.
Not the typical scenario where the mean popular girl gets the smart lonely girl to do her homework.
From the picture I’ve constructed of Nellie, she wouldn’t be best friends with someone like that.
It seems to have been simple youthful carelessness.
Kate was willing to do the homework, so Mary let her.
“I should not have written the note,” Kate whispers. “I should have told someone what Mary planned to do, and if I couldn’t do that, I should have taken the laudanum away from her, and if that did not work, I should not have written the note, even if it meant someone else would be blamed.”
“Nellie knew you did Mary’s schoolwork,” I say.
Kate stiffens, and that answers my deeper suspicion, but I still have to push forward. “Did Nellie know you wrote the note? Or did she only suspect it?”
“Suspected it, miss. At the funeral, she took me aside and she tried to say she knew I wrote it, but when I denied it and broke down crying, she stopped.”
“She backed off on the note, but not the rest.”
Her head jerks up, and behind her, Gray nods, following my thoughts.
“If Nellie confronted you about the note, that means she suspected something was wrong with the story of Mary’s death.”
“She said it did not make sense. She asked if I thought Mary would drown herself, and I said no, that it must have been an accident.”
“Did she press?”
Kate frowns. “Press?”
“Ask for more about Mary’s death. You were living here, in the village, and she was not. She asked for everything you could tell her.”
Kate stares at me. “How did you know that, miss?”
It was another educated guess, but I say, “Because you said she wanted to find the girl from the poem. Play detective. That was her only interest in the poem. Then Mary died. If Nellie didn’t like the explanation, she was going to investigate.”
“She did ask, miss. Interviewed witnesses, like they say in the stories with you and Dr. Gray. She interviewed everyone, from me to Mr. MacNiven to the farmhands who found Mary. She wanted all the answers.”
And she wasn’t happy with the ones she was getting.
“Did she leave it at that?” I ask, though I know the answer. “Or did she keep digging?”
A pause, as Kate thinks about this. Then she shakes her head. “I wouldn’t know, miss. Shortly after Mary died, I quit school and went into the city to work. My family didn’t like that. But I could not bear to be here anymore. So I left.”