Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [95]
Vaughan says, “I’ve been trying to figure it out. Things have moved rather fast. And just now, I’m sorry to say …” His voice trails off.
“What happened?” Frances asks. She pulls her hand out of his grasp. “Where’s Mother?”
He looks at her with an expression of great gravity. After a pause, he speaks softly and urgently about her mother, saying she felt ill, then began clutching at her heart, then collapsed. “She seemed to recover a little, and staggered. She got as far as the Young Master, and then she, well, died. She’s dead.”
Terror ripples along Frances’s spine. She tries to scream, but only a sigh comes out. Vaughan pulls her to him and settles onto the slipper chair with Frances on his lap. He says, “A young woman and her mother travel north. The mother is to marry a scientist. On the eve of her wedding, she suddenly dies. The man marries the lovely, innocent daughter instead. It was just as well, since he’d begun to find the mother tiresome, with a ghoulish streak.”
“She was angry with me,” Frances murmurs, stunned. “This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t made her mad.”
“You wanted to do the decent thing,” he says. “Bury those bodies. A man wants a woman who’ll make him do the proper thing.”
“Is this a horrible joke?” Frances asks.
“This house knows no jokes,” says Vaughan.
She leaps from his lap and runs for the door. He says, “Think it over, Frances.”
She hurtles down the stairs, into the basement, and spies the still form of her mother.
“Mother,” she cries, and touches her mother’s cheek, which is already cool. She pulls at her shoulders, but the body sags in her arms.
She takes the steps again, two at a time. If she can reach the door, she can get outside, to some safe place. She can almost feel the dew on the grass, the distance she’ll have to cover.
II.
“So that concludes the Ghost Walk,” Annie says, as her tour group applauds. “The Beverly mansion used to be right here. It was torn down a long time ago, but that’s a true story.” She adds the capper: “And Frances was my great-great-grandmother.”
The group gasps, and Annie savors the effect of her tale. Where the Beverly mansion used to stand, there’s only a depression in the ground. Across the street, there’s a massive Victorian-style apartment house, where Annie herself lives, with towering sycamores out front. Annie has heard the tree frogs, just like she said. Besides, this is the perfect place to wind up the Ghost Walk, because the Irish-themed bar where Annie works is a five-minute walk away. She went on too long about Frances and Vaughan, though. She doesn’t have time to return her oil lantern to the Chestnut Hill Welcome Center.
“I think he murdered Frances’s mother. He was a serial killer,” a woman in a trench coat says. “Is that what we’re supposed to believe?”
Annie’s legs hurt. It was a mistake to wear platform sandals to traipse around these sidewalks in the dark. She says, “Frances died before I was born, but the story was handed down. She did escape, and she married somebody else.”
“Did she tell the police?” asks the trench-coated woman. “If she didn’t, then she let him get away with killing her own mother.”
Annie feels her authority fading. It would be so much better if the house were still here. “I don’t know all the details. The Beverly mansion stood empty for years, and people claimed to hear screams coming from the basement.”
“It’s a legend,” a bearded man tells the woman. “Ghost stories are supposed to leave you hanging. They’re not about closure.”
“Well, I’m disappointed,” the trench coat says flatly. “If it’s true, she ought to know the rest of it.”
Annie is chilled to hear herself spoken of in third person. And she wants to say, It’s not just a legend.
A child pipes up: “I saw leeches at the other place.”
The child’s mother, a young woman in a pink tracksuit, says, “We went to the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion. He’s talked about leeches all day.”
“Have you ever eaten eyeballs?” the child asks Annie.
“No,” Annie says. “How do they taste?”