Chapter 35
POISONED
“The what club?”
“Cursed musicians. Winehouse, Cobain, Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison. All of them died at the age of twenty-seven under mysterious circumstances.”
Ah. I nod wisely.
Ever since last night, when I told Twig about Elijah’s reference to a curse in his suicide note, my tall friend has been struck with inspiration for an episode.
He already has a title picked out—A Chronicle of Curses—and spent a good chunk of Hollow Screen Horror Night recounting the string of eerie coincidences and tragic events that occurred on set during Poltergeist, a movie believed to have been just as cursed as these poor musicians.
My mouth splits with a yawn.
Lack of sleep is catching up with me. Thankfully, we have a shortened school week ahead of us.
In-service tomorrow, which means I get to sleep in on a Monday, along with our very own town holiday on Friday.
Normally, I would be giddy. The Phoenix Parade.
The Harvest Festival. The Hunter’s Moon Masquerade Ball.
A trifecta of pure whimsy. Instead, I can’t kick this bout of anxiety.
Perhaps watching Poltergeist until two in the morning wasn’t the smartest idea.
Mrs. Calloway knocks on Twig’s half-opened door and sticks her head inside with a bright smile.
She holds up a big bowl of Muddy Buddies, which is one of my favorites.
She’s been extra motherly ever since she pulled up my mother’s transcripts, but couldn’t show them to me.
She sets the bowl on Twig’s desk and tells us to enjoy.
I drop the stack of letters into the box and flop back onto Twig’s bed. I grab the eyeball off his nightstand—which isn’t really an eyeball, but a stress ball that only looks like an eyeball—and toss it toward the ceiling.
Catch and toss.
Catch and toss.
Four dreams.
Molly Ludwig, hanging from a rope. Rose Vandenberg, dying in The Blitz. Jude’s mother, bleeding out on a delivery table. And a woman named Florence, perishing in the fire.
All women.
All dead.
All involved with Vandenberg men.
Then there’s my mom, and the dream I had about her.
Twig scoops up a cup of the powdered, chocolatey Chex mix. “We could cover King Tut’s tomb. The Hope Diamond.”
“Macbeth,” I offer, recalling the book Jude was reading the first time we met. I give the eyeball another toss. Was it me, or was he noticeably different after yesterday’s discovery? He hasn’t texted or called today—not once. And we’re approaching dinnertime.
“James Dean’s car,” Twig says.
“James Dean had a cursed car?”
“It’s how he died. Car accident in a Porsche he nicknamed Little Bastard. Afterward, a whole bunch of weird stuff happened with the salvaged parts, including deaths and severe injuries.”
“We could cover the Kennedy’s,” I say.
They’re supposedly cursed. I did a report on them in the seventh grade.
The more I think about it, it really is surprising we haven’t done an episode on curses already.
I catch the eyeball and set it back on Twig’s nightstand.
I grab myself a cup of Muddy Buddies and continue reading the letters, determined to get through this box so I can knock on Jude’s door tomorrow morning and ask for another.
I try to focus as I read a letter addressed to My Dear Cousin, written by a woman named Drusilla Voorhees of Woodbridge, New Jersey.
One run-on sentence in, it becomes clear that My Dear Cousin is Ezra’s wife.
The tone is warm and chatty. The content, dry as toast. Drusilla’s youngest daughter is recovering from a fever, and she is proud to report that she has successfully transplanted her tulip bulbs.
I shuffle to the next, a letter addressed to Ezra Vandenberg from a business associate in Baltimore regarding shipment delays.
Thrilling stuff, truly.
I shuffle again and find another letter addressed to My Dear Cousin, only this one is written in a masculine scrawl, and is much shorter than Drusilla’s. Two sentences in, all traces of boredom have vanished.
My Dear Cousin,
I am deeply saddened to hear of my uncle’s continued hostility. I believe my father would gladly bury the hatchet, but Ezra's hatred will not be thwarted, and now I find myself its recipient.
The tragic death of your dear Lydia is sorrow enough, but to accuse me of harming her? How could I, in Winchester? I hate to even suggest it, but might his obsession with this curse have led him to poison Lydia?
Do give my warmest regards to your mother, Elizabeth.
Yours sincerely,
Raphael
By the time I reach the end, I’m gripping the letter in both hands.
His obsession with this curse.
The phrase blurs in and out of focus.
According to the last line, this letter was written to a young Amos, and the sender was his cousin, Raphael II.
A girl was poisoned. Amos’s dear Lydia. Ezra must have accused his nephew.
Young Amos must have told his cousin about his father’s accusation, and in response, the younger Raphael cast his suspicions upon his uncle. Because of his obsession. With a curse.
I’m on my feet, tapping Twig on the shoulder. I thrust the letter at him.
My mind is no longer sleepy. This discovery is as rejuvenating as two cans of Red Bull. Another mention of a curse, and a bread crumb we can follow.
A girl named Lydia was poisoned.
The next morning, Twig and I show the letter to Maggie.
“They must have been romantically involved, right? Amos and this Lydia?” I don’t wait for an answer.
I’m already moving toward the ledger that gave us Molly Ludwig—registries of guests at the Yuletide Ball.
If Amos Vandenberg was romantically involved with Lydia, then it stands to reason he would have escorted her to the ball.
Maggie doesn’t object, but she doesn’t join us either.
She stands there rubbing her chin, reading and rereading the words while Twig and I set the ledger on the table and flip to the registry from 1794, which would have taken place before Lydia’s death.
A thrill of excitement sparks in my finger when it runs into his name—Amos Vandenberg.
Only he didn’t escort a girl named Lydia.
In 1794, young Amos escorted Eleanor Doorn.
I flip back a page, to the registry taken in 1793. There’s no mention of Amos at all.
“They couldn’t have gone in 1795,” I say disappointedly. “She was already dead by then.”
Maggie has climbed onto a step stool. She stands on tiptoe, reaching for a shelf lined with volumes of The Foggy Hollow Gazette bound by year.
Despite the devastating fire in 1822, her issues span as far back as 1788.
If not for the Bogaard’s obsession with preservation, the first four decades of the paper’s existence would have been lost. Thankfully, the family kept personal copies of each issue.
Maggie’s fingers stop over a cracked leather spine three inches thick.
“Here we are—Gazette, 1795.” She removes it from the shelf and steps off the stool.
“If a young woman named Lydia was poisoned to death and the Vandenbergs were involved, I can guarantee you it would have been headline news in the Tittle Tattle.”
“The what?” Twig says.
“Tittle Tattle from the Hollow. A gossip column that ran weekly from 1790 to 1811. It was revived briefly in the 1840s, but lacked the same pizzazz. The original was always teeming with scandalous tidbits, let me tell you.” She sets it on the table with a look of warning.
“Gentle hands now. These pages aren’t spring chickens. ”
Carefully, I open to the front page of the first edition.
The pages are brittle. The script is faded.
The margins, small and tight. There are no headlines.
No images or illustrations. Just long paragraphs.
My eyes are crossing already when Maggie reaches past me and turns to the centerfold.
“Page two is where you’ll find local announcements.
” Her bony finger moves left to right. “But if you want the real tea, you’ll head over here. ”
To page three, a roundup of softer news.
Community events, poems, philosophical musings, and, sure enough, Tittle Tattle from the Hollow with its own tagline—a weekly whisper of this and that, plucked from parlors, pews, and porch steps alike.
I skim the first one. A shocking tale of an impertinent young man’s public proposal at Assembly Hall, which not only disgraced his intended’s family, but descended into fisticuffs to the great distress of ladies present.
I give a low whistle. “The nerve of the guy,” I say with more than a little sarcasm.
“Public proposals were quite scandalous back in the day, Selah,” Maggie says. “Especially if this fellow didn’t ask for permission first. By the sound of the rapscallion, I doubt he did.”
The front door jingles downstairs.
Walt calls out a greeting.
Maggie leaves us be as Twig and I take a seat at the table.
We’re unsure when Lydia died. We only know it couldn’t have been any later than July of 1795.
The letter to Amos was dated in early August of that same year and post back then didn’t travel quickly, especially if Raphael II was, as he claimed to be, writing from Winchester, England.
But was he, really?
I recall a different letter, one Jude showed me weeks ago inside The Cobbler, written from a grieving young man to his mother.
After the violent death of his twin sister, Gabriel Vandenberg set sail for Winchester, England.
Presumably, to reclaim the stolen portrait.
But according to the letter, Raphael II was nowhere to be found in Winchester, nor any account of the Vandenberg name.
Having no idea what to make of this contradictory information, I shove it aside and focus on the topic at hand.
A poisoned girl named Lydia.