Chapter Thirty-One Ashley
THIRTY-ONE ASHLEY
So Frankie was what? A cousin or something of our great-grandmother?” Mal asked.
“There’s an entry in here that says Frankie’s mother and Margaret were cousins. So, that makes Frankie and Margaret first cousins, once removed. And we’re Frankie’s first cousins, four times removed.”
Malcolm nodded, grinned at her.
“What?” she asked.
“You sound like Mom.”
Malcolm went back to haphazardly pulling things out of the trunk, giving them a quick glance, then dropping them back in.
There was no order to what was in there: piles of notebooks, pictures, random pieces of paper.
There was an old ledger book full of carefully recorded payments from the patients Thomas Endicott saw.
Ash and Mal laughed when they saw that sometimes he was paid in eggs, salt pork, a bushel of apples.
Ashley recognized the bookkeeper’s handwriting as Frankie’s.
“And Frankie lived with Thomas and Margaret?” Malcolm asked.
“They took her in when she was thirteen or fourteen. Seems she was orphaned when she was really little, and she was kind of shuffled from house to house until the Endicotts got to town.”
Malcolm continued to riffle through the papers.
“Whoa! This must be them,” he said, holding up an old black-and-white photo.
In it, a stern-looking man with pale hair and eyes stood with his arm around a petite woman who looked like she was trying hard not to smile.
They were in front of the house on Main Street, with the painted sign next to the door that read DR. THOMAS ENDICOTT, PHYSICIAN AND SURGEON.
“Wow,” Ashley said. “I’ve never seen a picture of them before.”
She looked more closely at the serious-looking couple, thought, This is where Gram came from. This is where I came from.
“You kinda look like her,” Malcolm said, squinting from the photo in his hand to Ashley’s face. “Around the eyes especially.” Ashley saw the resemblance too; saw herself, her mother, and Gram in this woman’s face.
“I think you do too,” she said to Mal, who had the same dark eyes, the same slope of the nose.
She was sorry she’d never seen a picture of her great-grandparents before; sorry, and a little angry that such a big part of her own history had been kept from her.
She understood her mother in this moment; her passion for genealogy, her insistence that to truly understand who we are in the present, we had to look to the people who came before us in the past. This photo, and all the others, had been hidden in a trunk in Gram’s house for years—for Ashley’s whole life, probably.
“And this must be Frankie,” Malcolm said, holding up another photo.
In it, Dr. Endicott had his arm over the shoulders of a young person wearing men’s pants and a coat.
Her hair was cut short and she had a wry smile.
There were a couple more photos of her: one with Margaret, each of them holding a pie and smiling.
In another, she had her arm around a stocky girl with pale hair in a dress trimmed with lace.
They both looked like they’d been laughing, caught right in the middle of a joke that only they understood.
“Do you think she actually died in the flu outbreak, like Josephine said?” Mal asked.
“I don’t know. And honestly, looking through this diary, I’m thinking maybe what wiped out the town in the spring of 1919 wasn’t influenza. Not the one that hit the rest of the country anyway.”
“Huh?”
“Frankie was keeping the diary at the time of the 1918 flu outbreak,” Ashley explained.
“She used it as both a personal diary and a medical logbook, telling what patients she and her uncle saw each day, what new things her uncle taught her, and notes on medical texts she was reading. Between her uncle’s hands-on teaching and her studying his medical books, she sounds like a highly competent assistant. ”
Ashley flipped to a page about halfway through the book.
“These entries here, they’re from the fall of 1918.
She writes about people in town being ill with the ‘Spanish flu,’ and that matches up with the influenza epidemic that was raging all over the country at the time.
About half the town got sick with all the symptoms you’d expect—high fever, fatigue, cough, respiratory distress.
Fourteen people died. It was terrible. But if you keep going, you see that by January, the flu was over.
The only calls the doctor and Frankie had were pretty routine: someone had a baby, a household got a bad case of ‘winter diarrhea,’ whatever that is, a man at the factory lost three fingers in a saw accident.
Well, actually four. They had to amputate his pinkie because it was almost severed—just hanging by a flap of skin. ”
“Well, that’s gross,” Mal said, rubbing the fingers of his own right hand.
“I know, sorry,” Ash said, smiling a little. Mal liked to get her with jump scares, but she knew real-world gore and body trauma freaked her brother out.
“But it came back, right?” Malcolm said. “The flu came back.”
That’s what Gram had said. The story they’d both been told their whole lives.
“No… I don’t think so,” Ash said, shaking her head slowly. She wished like hell she could go back in time, ask her mother what she knew about all this.
What might her mother have told her if Ash had said yes to that meeting for coffee?
Listen, her mother whispered to her now.
“People started getting sick, yes, but it doesn’t sound anything like influenza, or any other transmissible respiratory disease I know of.”
“For real?” Malcolm asked. He stepped away from the trunk and settled onto the bed next to her.
“Yeah. First off, it began with the horses.”
Her face was flushed, her heart beating a little harder.
She knew she’d discovered something important, something big.
She wished she had her laptop and an internet connection—there were so many zoonotic diseases, some very rare, and so much was still poorly understood in Frankie and Dr. Endicott’s day.
She wasn’t even sure how long they’d been using modern stethoscopes in 1919, for God’s sake.
With access to PubMed and a few other medical databases, she might be able to narrow it down.
She’d try to go to the library later, see if they had a computer she could sign onto for an hour or two to see what she could find.
Ash continued, “Every horse in town was sick within twenty-four hours. The symptoms were primarily respiratory, but they became aggressive—like going crazy and ripping each other apart type of aggressive. They shot the horses, but the next day, Thomas Endicott saw his very first patient with the same symptoms.”
“So, what? It, like, jumped from horse to human? Rabies maybe?” Malcolm asked.
“That’s what Dr. Endicott thought at first, but it wasn’t. There are all kinds of diseases that start with animals—swine flu, bird flu, Ebola, hantavirus, the list goes on and on. If I remember right, something like sixty percent of infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic.”
“Come again?” Mal frowned at her, rubbed at his beard.
“Zoonotic. They can be traced back to animal origins.”
Mal grimaced. “How does a person get a sickness from a horse? Did they, like, get sneezed on or something? Or was it from a bite?”
Ashley shivered at the idea of a sick horse sinking its enormous teeth into human flesh. She thought of the horse her mother had been riding in her hallucinations: the blood-specked foam around its mouth, the yellow glowing eyes. It was just like Frankie’s description of the sick animals.
“I don’t know,” Ashley said. “But I’m pretty sure who patient zero was.”
“Who?” Malcolm asked.
“The knackerman.”
“I’m sorry? The knackerman as in the weirdo who is currently going around terrorizing this town, painting creepy pictures on doors?”
“I mean, obviously not the same guy, but there’s got to be a connection.
Frankie writes a lot about the knackerman in her diary.
He lived outside of town, at the top of a place called Saw Meadow Hill.
He was who you called when a large animal died.
He hauled them away, tanned their hides, made glue, that kind of thing.
I guess it was an important job back then, maybe as important as town doctor, in a way.
So when the horses got sick in 1919 and died or were shot, he was called like normal, to cart away their bodies.
When he showed up in town, he was sick. Same symptoms as the horses had: fever, labored breathing, jaundice, and erratic, violent behavior.
He trashed the exam room when Dr. Endicott and Frankie were trying to check him out.
And then…” She hesitated, not sure how much detail to share with Malcolm.
“What?” Mal asked.
“He got very sick very quickly. Lost consciousness. In the night, Frankie woke to check on him, and neither she nor Thomas could find a heartbeat.”
“So he died?”
“That’s what they believed. But in the morning, he was gone. So they must have been mistaken—I don’t know how sensitive their stethoscopes were, it’s not like they could put him on a monitor, look for brain activity.”
“Okay, but it’s also not like it was caveman times, or they were amateurs.…”
Ash nodded. “Yeah, of course. But apparently he got up and walked out of the house while they were all sleeping, and proceeded to rove around the town, attacking people. Maybe making them sick too.”
“So we’re talking about a for-real fucking zombie plague here?”
“Mal, I don’t think—” She held up a hand in a come on now gesture.
“So what happened to him? Did the sickness finally kill him? Or was it like in the movies and he had to have his head cut off to stop him?”
She shook her head, sorry she’d shared the no-discernible-heartbeat part of the story.
“That’s what sucks—there’s no way to know,” Ash admitted.
“Gram tore the final pages out of the book.” She ran her fingers over the ragged bits of page that were left at the end, a few partial words here and there, but nothing she could make sense of.
“Okay,” Malcolm said. “The knackerman’s unmarked grave is with the other victims from that same time period, in the cemetery.”
“In the final entries before the missing pages, she writes about how the townsfolk were trying to hunt him down. They blamed him for everyone getting sick, thought he was cursed or a demon or something.”
“So you think they might have killed him?” Malcolm asked.
“Maybe? Wouldn’t be the first or last time a superstition and fear of the unknown got someone killed.”
Mal rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “He can’t still be alive, right?”
Ash shook her head. “Come on, Mal. He was an adult before Gram was even born. He’d be way over a hundred years old.”
“But if he was a zombie…”
“Malcolm,” she said flatly, giving him a warning look.
“Okay, if you say so. Well, maybe it was, like, his ghost or something? That you saw?”
Ashley forced out a squeaky laugh that sounded all wrong. “It was no ghost, Malcolm. Ghosts don’t use real paint.” She held up her hand, displaying the traces of sticky red paint still on her fingertips.
He nodded. “I’ll see what more I can find out about the knackerman from Josephine today.” He looked at his watch. “Oh shit, I’ve gotta go.”
“I’m going to try to find Mini and talk to her, see what she can tell me about the creepy red horse paintings. Maybe go to the library and do a little research. I’ll stop by Josephine’s later and see if you need rescuing.”
“Yeah, I don’t want to be stuck there in old lady doll-land all day,” Mal said as he zipped up his jacket.
“Promise me you won’t bring up your… business idea?” Ash said.
“I won’t say a word about it,” he assured her. Then, with a wink, he added, “Though I may surreptitiously check out the kitchen and dining room to see if they’d work for a B&B.”
“Mal—”
He raised his hands in surrender. “I’ll be good, I swear.
I won’t say anything. But it is a great idea, isn’t it?
Can’t you just see it? Endicott House Bed-and-Breakfast. Comfortable lodgings and farm-to-table dining located in the heart of…
” He considered which adjective to use. “Picturesque Boone’s Ferry, Vermont.
Leave the real world behind. Join us and feel like you’ve stepped back in time. ”