Chapter 10 #3
The artist had captured Halder as well, in a dozen poses, mostly at his desk.
The lines in his face were as deep as ever, and none of his expressions looked terribly pleased.
The artist didn’t seem pleased either, because they had crossed out several of the drawings and hadn’t painted in any of them.
Nor had they written anything next to the drawings, which struck me as odd, because the rest of the sketchbook was full of dashed-off comments, the sort that the artist never expects anyone else to read. Some of them were dated, most were not.
Wet today, stuck inside.
March 14th— Trillium up!
Went to town today. Horses outside general store.
Church very, very long today, saw these flowers outside, couldn’t wait to draw them.
Ugh, can’t draw at all today. (That last accompanied a handful of crossed-out sketches, and made me sigh with recognition. We all have those days.)
I turned pages slowly. Trees were interspersed with drawings of faces, sketches of hands, horses, wagons, even a remarkably detailed painting of an apple.
Exactly the sort of thing that’s in my sketchbooks, honestly.
It felt familiar and slightly intimidating all at once.
My predecessor was just so damn good. I took some small comfort that her drawing of trillium was not as good as one of mine would be, but her humans were a good deal better.
The last half of the book seemed to be full of sketches that could only be Smiley as a kitten. I turned back to the beginning, to the very first page.
Property of Louisa Halder
Halder House, Chatham
If found, I beg you, of Christian charity, to return this volume.
1893
I stared at the name blankly. Louisa Halder? As in Dr. Halder?
Was I here to replace a daughter? A sister? A maiden aunt?
In my mind, I heard Mrs. Kent, the first night. “He won’t marry you.”
My god. Did he hire me to replace his wife?
“Miss Wilson?” Jackson’s voice was muffled through the door. “Rose sent me up to deal with a possum?”
“Yes! Sorry!” I scrambled to my feet and opened the door for him. He glanced around the room with mild interest, including the stack of sketchbooks beside the trunk, but didn’t comment. I was glad to see that he was wearing heavy leather gloves.
“It’s on the balcony.” I showed him the broken pane and then the pitiful body beside it.
“Lord have mercy.” He squatted down and studied the smear of blood and hair on the window. “Never heard of a possum doing this. If it was stuck inside, maybe, trying to get out, but from this side…”
“Seemed more like it was trying to get in,” I said, and then immediately wished I hadn’t said that out loud at all.
“Yeah,” he said, shoving his hat back from his forehead. “Yeah, it … yeah.” He shook his head. “Right. Well, I’ll take it away and then fix that window up for you. Rose said the body ought to be burned?”
“In case it has some disease,” I said firmly. “And be careful handling it yourself, please.”
“Right. I’ll go get some burlap.” He shook his head. “Poor devil. Wonder if it was trying to bash the wolf worm out.”
I froze halfway over the threshold to the studio. “What did you say?”
“It had wolf worm.” Jackson glanced up at me. “Three of ’em, looks like.”
I did not want to spend any more time looking at that poor, bloodied rag of a body, but if there was an explanation for the creature’s behavior, I had to have it. I stepped back out onto the balcony. “Wolf worm?” Why did that sound familiar?
“Here.” He pointed to the deflated tumor on the side of the creature’s face.
The wound gaped like a small red mouth. “It was all curled up inside here, then it must have hatched out. And there’s another one back here, right on the back of its head.
” The possum flopped loosely as he turned it over with his boot.
“You see ’em on the squirrels around here sometimes.
Doesn’t usually kill ’em, but they’re not usually right on the head like this.
” He scratched his head. “Might’ve been pressing on its brain or something. ”
“Ah,” I said. I could hear Dr. Halder lecturing in my mind.… a Cuterebra. Botfly. Also called ‘wolf worms.’ Parasitic on mammals.
“Don’t worry,” said Jackson, seeing my expression. “They don’t bother humans much.”
“No, of course not,” I mumbled, scratching at my wrist involuntarily.
He went off to get burlap. I went back to the sketchbooks, trying, with difficulty, to push the idea of the botfly out of my mind.
A thing hanging on the side of your head, pressing against your face and you can’t get it out and it keeps growing and your skin stretches and it starts to cover one of your eyes and maybe you feel it moving, the swollen body wriggling against your skull and it’s just a thin plate of bone between your brain and the larva that’s drinking your fluids …
I might start bashing myself against a window too.
With difficulty, I forced my mind away from that image. I picked up another sketchbook and welcomed the question of Louisa Halder’s identity in its place.
This sketchbook was dated from 1897, and it was only partly completed.
The first few pages were studies of acorns and oak galls and an elegant drawing of a sweet gum ball that almost made me like the damn things.
Then more faces. Most of them were of a man this time, one I didn’t know.
He had a long, angular face and short dark hair.
I don’t know if he was handsome. Something about the line work made me think Louisa had thought he was.
Her son? I wondered. In the drawings, he looked to be about the age I was now. How old had she been? If she was Halder’s age, she could probably have had an adult son. Would that make him Halder’s son as well?
Well, if she was actually his wife, that would be logical … but was she? It felt correct, but just because it made sense didn’t mean it was true, as any good scientist knew. How could I find out for certain?
Could I ask someone? Not Halder, who was so cagey about his illustrator. 1897 was a little over a year ago. Sally’s probably too young to have been working as a maid then, but Mrs. Kent would surely remember …
And there I stopped, because Mrs. Kent had definitely known Louisa Halder—the sketchbooks were full of portraits—but when I had asked her about who had used the studio, she’d said she didn’t know. Had she lied to me?
No, she didn’t. She said that she couldn’t rightly say. Which I thought meant that she didn’t know, but that isn’t quite the same thing. She walked right up to the edge of a lie, but she didn’t quite go over.
I sat back on my heels, baffled and annoyed. First Phelps and the shed, Halder and the chickens, now Mrs. Kent? Why were people keeping secrets about things that seemed so utterly innocuous?
Had Louisa died?
Halder had one of her sketchbooks in his office, the one full of insects, but he’d left these here. Had he not known they existed, or had he simply not cared?
Given that there aren’t any bugs in these, he probably just didn’t think they mattered.
No, that was unkind. Perhaps he’d been grieving and simply shut the room up and tried to ignore it.
Grief takes people strangely, God knows.
I remembered how calm and efficient I had been when Father died, deciding what to keep and what to sell, as if my life and my future hadn’t been buried in the ground alongside him.
Though it was strange, now that I noticed, that there were no insects in the books. Not even a bee or a butterfly crossed the pages. Flowers, yes, and studies of animal skulls and Smiley at various ages, but not a single insect.
Perhaps she drew them so often that she was tired of them. I could certainly understand that.
The door opened again as Jackson returned with a burlap sack and a shovel. I jumped up, sketchbook falling from my lap. “Jackson!”
He swung toward me, startled. “What? Is it the possum?”
“No, no.” I shook my head. “No, I—I have a question.”
“Sure, shoot.” He opened the door and lifted the possum on the end of the shovel, then maneuvered it into the sack. “What’s on your mind?”
“Who was Louisa Halder?”
“Ah.” I couldn’t see his face, but there was a world of meaning packed into that syllable, if only I could decipher it. He stood, holding the sack with its unfortunate contents. “She was the doctor’s wife.”
Ha! I was right. “But … ah … when I asked Mrs. Kent about who had lived here before…” I trailed off, realizing that could be taken as a criticism of his wife.
Jackson glanced toward the floor, as if seeing through the layers of boards to where Mrs. Kent was at work in the kitchen.
“She ain’t too keen to talk about it.” He paused, clearly weighing up how much to say.
“They were pretty good friends, Louisa and Rose. And I sure wouldn’t go saying anything to the doctor.
It was quite a…” He stopped, as if he’d thought better of what he was going to say.
“Quite a…?”
Jackson shook his head. “Quite a mess. It’s all done and dusted now though.” His lips thinned. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t ask Rose about it. She still feels like she shoulda done more, and it puts her out of temper.”
“All right,” I said. “Err … did she die?”
“She left,” said Jackson, “and who can blame her?” He glanced toward the glass door and the dead possum, and for a moment I thought that would be his last word on the subject, but the soul of a storyteller is hard to keep down.
“Been a bit over a year now, though she was unhappy for a long time afore that…”
The story was short and all too familiar. Louisa had come from money, but had fallen in love with a man of science and put both money and artistic talents to work in his service.
Eventually, though, Halder’s bitterness was too much even for Louisa, and she fell in love with another man.
“Saul, his name was. Saul Gregor. Bit of a drifter, but he’d come into town a year or so earlier, and took one look at Louisa and she took one look at him and they were in love like a storybook.
I’m not saying she did anything wrong,” Jackson said.
“Don’t think that for a moment. She was a real good woman and a friend of Rose’s, and Halder’s …
well, you know Halder. All she really wanted was somebody who’d love her back, and here Saul thought she’d hung the moon and the stars. ”
“So she ran away with him?”
“Tried to.” Jackson shook his head again.
I could sense genuine regret behind the words.
“She snuck out one night, without much more than the clothes on her back, and met up with Saul. They’d planned to run, of course.
Only somebody tipped Halder off and Halder was waiting for ’em both with a rifle.
I don’t say he meant to use it, but Saul got between the two of ’em and Halder fired on him.
Saul took a bullet and yelled at Louisa to run, he’d catch up, so she did.
Only he didn’t ever catch up.” He sighed.
“Rose saw the whole damn thing. That’s why she doesn’t want to talk about it. ”
I swallowed. This was more of a tragedy than I’d expected. Halder’s rages had alarmed me, but it had never occurred to me that he might be a killer. “And he didn’t get into any trouble with the law? No one arrested him?”
Jackson snorted. “Feeling ’mongst a lot of people in these parts was that Halder’d been within his rights to shoot a man running off with his wife.
So the law was real careful not to ask any questions that would lead to answers they didn’t want to hear.
Saul never even got a headstone in the churchyard. ”
“What happened to Louisa?”
“She was brokenhearted and wanted to go back to find Saul, but I’m given to understand that some cooler heads among the womenfolk convinced her that would be a very bad idea.
” Jackson wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I suspected that he knew more than he was saying.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a possum to burn. ”
I let him pass. I had wrung as much information from him as I was going to get. Much more and I’d be going up against Rose Kent, which was the last thing I wanted to do.
Was it true? I didn’t think Jackson would lie to me, but he’d certainly felt no qualms in spinning me a tale about blood thieves. I wouldn’t put it past him to have embroidered a few details here and there, but which ones?
I ran a finger slowly over a page of the sketchbook, one with the unnamed man’s face on it. Saul, the doomed lover. Though if he was dead and Louisa was still alive, I wondered, why did the studio feel so much like she was haunting it?