Wolf Worm — Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

Scritch … scritch … scritch … Something was scratching to get in the bedroom door. “Dammit, Smiley,” I muttered. I opened one eye, saw only the vague outline of my own hand on the pillow, and closed it again.

Scritch … The sound was insistent, and must have been going on long enough to wake me up. I poked my head up from the nest of blankets, yawning.

Moonlight was coming in through the narrow glass door of the bedroom. I squinted. Was that where the scraping sound was coming from? The door to the studio was open, and it sounded too loud to be coming from the hall.

Sure enough, there was a dark shape just at the door, right at shin level.

As I watched, it stretched up on its hind legs and pawed at the glass.

“Smiley, you twit, did you get stuck on the balcony?”

Smiley reached up even farther and tapped the doorknob, which only proved that a cat could be highly intelligent and rather dim at the same time.

“It’d serve you right if I let you sleep outside,” I called. “Maybe then you wouldn’t lurk on the balcony and get cat hair in my paint.”

Smiley obviously heard me, because this statement precipitated a whole volley of scratches. He actually hooked one paw around the doorknob and hung from it for a moment, as if trying to work out how to open the door himself.

I sighed. The last thing I needed was for the cat to figure out doorknobs.

One of my father’s friends had a cat who could work doorknobs. There hadn’t been a safe place anywhere in the house. He was particularly fond of barging into the water closet to stare at you while you attempted to attend to personal business.

“Fine,” I muttered with ill grace, sitting up. “I’m coming.”

I had one foot on the floor when I heard a quiet mrrrp? from the foot of the bed.

I looked down. Smiley looked back at me, probably wondering why I was disturbing his nest in the middle of the night.

The scratching from the door was suddenly very loud. … scritch … scritch … SCRITCH … I stared at the dark shape against the glass. It didn’t look all that much like a cat, now that I was really looking. The ears were wrong and the legs were short and the tail was much too thin.

“Oh Jesus,” I said out loud, “it’s a possum.”

My first instinct was actually to laugh. Possums are inherently absurd creatures. They try so hard to look scary with the hissing and all, but they’re so bad at everything. I’d seen possums try to run away and run headfirst into trees. If you spend any time around them, you eventually realize this.

“The Virginia opossum,” my father once dryly said, “is the closest we have to a refutation of ‘survival of the fittest.’”

“What are you doing?” I said to the creature, standing up and moving toward the door. “This isn’t a good place for possums.”

It stood on its hind legs and scratched at the door again, for all the world like Smiley trying to get in.

“Don’t tell me that someone has a pet possum and lost it.” I peered through the glass at it and it raised its head to look at me.

There was something on the side of its head. At first I thought it must be a trick of the moonlight or a distortion of the glass. But when I shifted to one side, nothing changed. A growth as large as my thumb hung from the right side of its face. Some kind of tumor?

“You poor thing,” I murmured. Sympathy warred with curiosity, but neither were going to cause me to open the door. Letting wild animals into the house was a good way to acquire bites, fleas, or both.

It gazed at me with dark, strained eyes. The one on its right was half closed where the growth pressed against it. As I watched, it stretched up to claw at the door again, and I saw another tumor on its side, even larger than the first. Is this some kind of disease in the local population? The marsupial equivalent of bubonic plague?

“Shoo,” I said, making flapping motions with my hands. “Get out of here. I’m very sorry for you, but I don’t think I can help.”

It ignored me and jumped for the doorknob again. This time it caught it in both paws and swung a hind leg up to brace against the doorframe.

The knob began to turn.

“No,” I said, grabbing the knob and holding it in place. “Stop it! I don’t know why you want to get in, but it’s not going to happen!”

I felt the knob try to twist in my hand. It was a strangely revolting feeling, as if the cold metal were some live animal sliding against my fingers. Except that I loved most live animals, and I didn’t like this at all.

There was a latch somewhere. I hadn’t bothered to throw it for days, since it didn’t seem likely that anyone was going to walk through the woods to Halder’s house, climb up the outside, and break in through my balcony. I hadn’t figured on diseased possums.

The knob moved again as I felt up the frame for the latch. “Stop that!” I hissed at the creature. It ignored me.

I wasn’t scared. That was the oddest thing to me, in retrospect. I was exasperated and baffled, yes, but it was a possum. Not even a particularly healthy possum. My heart was pounding, yes, but more from astonishment than fear.

At last my fingers found the sliding metal bolt. I threw it across the door and released the knob. It immediately turned all the way to the left and the door rattled against the bolt. The possum dropped back to the ground and stood for a moment. I could see its teeth in the moonlight as it opened its mouth. Was it panting?

In the hall, the clock tolled out midnight.

The creature stood up again and pushed against the door. I stared down at it. It couldn’t possibly understand doors. Possums, in my experience, barely understood rocks. What was going on?

It can’t be rabies. Possums hardly ever get it, and a rabid possum certainly wouldn’t be thinking clearly enough to work a doorknob.

The door rattled against the bolt again as it pushed. Despite what I thought I knew, the creature was certainly acting as if it understood doors. It had turned the knob until it unlatched and now it was trying to open the door.

It occurred to me that if I hadn’t woken up when I did, it would be in the room with me at this very moment.

I still wasn’t exactly afraid, but prickles of unease went through me at the thought. I told myself that I was just concerned that Smiley would get in a scrape with it and get some disease, not that I was thinking of it snuffling along the baseboards or climbing the bedsheets. Waking up to see the creature’s lopsided stare, the strange growth squeezed against its eye … It hit the door with force this time, shoulder first. The door slammed into the bolt again, hard enough to rattle the glass in the casement. I jumped back, startled. Smiley made a low, grating sound, not quite a yowl, the sound of a cat that is contemplating violence.

“Go on,” I said, a bit desperately. “Shoo! Possums do not belong here!”

It would be absurd to think that it listened, but the creature stopped. It gazed up at me for a long, long moment. There was a dark blotch at one end of the tumor that looked horribly like another eye staring back at me.

Then it turned and waddled away.

I sagged against the wall beside the window. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” I whispered. “What was that all about?”

Should I go tell someone? But who would I tell? Mrs. Kent had gone home with Mr. Kent, and the only other people in the house were Halder and Sally. I couldn’t imagine that Sally would handle an apparently crazed possum very well, and Halder would just yell at me for waking him up for a mammal. Assuming he believed me in the first place. Probably he’d just tell me that possums don’t act like that and decide I was a hysterical female.

The frustrating thing was that he’d be right—not about the hysterical bit, but that possums don’t act like that. I rubbed my temples. A new disease?

Not rabies, but maybe something else. I knew that there were diseases in sheep that made them act strangely, although I’d never heard anything about trying to open doorknobs. Then again, I didn’t know much about sheep. God knows that there are enough diseases that make humans act strange, maybe there’s some brain fever in possums now.

The doors in the studio banged as something hit them.

Oh my god. I lunged for the next room, heart hammering, already dreading what I’d see.

Moonlight streamed through the studio’s big glass doors, leaving enormous rectangles across the floor. The possum’s shadow made a dark

blot that stretched and twisted as it moved. It was already pawing at the doorknob.

I was halfway across the room when I heard the click as the knob unlatched.

My shoulder hit the door before it was more than an inch or two open, knocking the possum back onto the balcony. I held it closed, fumbling for the bolt. Double doors, damnation, where was it, it had to be here somewhere … The glass rocked as the possum struck it. The force was astonishing. I am not a small woman, but it actually shifted the door a fraction despite my weight.

The door bolt was clear at the top of the frame. Of course it was. The possum slammed into the glass again as I shot the bolt. My hands were shaking so badly that it took me two tries.

It seemed that I was afraid now after all.

I stumbled back, ready to throw myself at the door again if needed. The creature continued its assault undaunted, smashing itself against the glass over and over, thud thud thud!

“Surely it can’t break the glass?” I said out loud. I think I was hoping to reassure myself, but my own voice rose at the end in a question, and I was not at all convincing.

I looked around the studio for something to block the lower panes, just in case it could. Easel, no—bookcase, too heavy, unless I pulled all the books out—trunk, yes!

The trunk weighed more than I’d expected. It occurred to me that I had no idea what was in it. Opening it would have felt like snooping, so I hadn’t. But the thud of the animal’s body against the glass gave me the strength of panic, and I grabbed the handles and hauled it step by step across the floor. The rug rucked up under it and the far end was probably leaving huge gouges in the wood, but I didn’t care.

I dropped to my knees and shoved it into position. It blocked the lower panes on the doors and I could no longer see the possum outside. The sound of the creature hitting the glass was suddenly muffled.

I collapsed across the trunk, gasping, my forehead pressed against the lid. The carved wood made indentations in my skin, and my vision filled with gritty sparks. The thudding seemed to come from very far away.

Dear god, am I about to faint?

Don’t be ridiculous. I never faint. It’s simply not something I do. I clenched my teeth and breathed through my nose, and after a minute or two, the sparkles went away.

It took me a few more minutes to realize that the thudding had stopped. I

lifted my head, listening.

Silence.

I could move the chest and look … I could also run upstairs and throw myself off the roof, I told myself tartly. Which would be just about as sensible.

Did I really think that a possum was intelligent enough to give up attacking the glass and lie in wait for me instead?

Intellectually, it seemed unlikely. But everything this particular possum had done was wildly unlikely, and I wasn’t going to test it now.

The wood of the chest was cool against my cheek. I knelt on the floor and waited grimly for the dawn.

“I know I sound like a perfect ninny,” I told Mrs. Kent the next morning, as we climbed the steps to the studio. “But it beat itself against the glass so hard that I thought it was going to break the door. And this morning…”

Mrs. Kent’s eyebrows had gone up when I started talking about the possum, and hadn’t yet come back down. “No,” she said, “no, I figure that would be upsetting, right enough.” I had a depressing feeling that she was humoring me, but insisting that no, there had been a possum and it had been scary was going to make me sound like one of my old students panicking over a mouse. I clamped my lips together and led the way up the stairs.

I promise I’m not the sort of person who imagines things, Mrs. Kent. I’m a scientist. A rational observer. I have trained for years to try and see what’s really there, not what I think should be there. … And there was a possum, and it was scary, dammit.

When we reached the studio, she took one look at the chest in front of the door, then glanced back at me. I shrugged helplessly. I could feel the

tips of my ears burning.

“Well, let’s get this moved, then,” she said, reaching down to take an end.

I grabbed the other, and was surprised by how heavy it was. Mrs. Kent gave me an appraising look. “You moved this all by yourself?”

“Yes,” I mumbled. That was somehow even more embarrassing, since it meant that I had been gripped by the strength of panic.

Maybe she can’t tell. My sleeves are loose, she doesn’t know how much muscle there is under them.

The two of us wrestled the trunk out of the way. I could see twin gouges on the floor under Mrs. Kent’s feet as she walked her end backward, but she

didn’t say anything.

And then— “Lord have mercy!”

I followed her gaze to the bottom of the door.

An irregular blotch of dried blood and pale hair clung to the glass, and a thin crack had run through the middle. From the correct angle, the crack looked almost like an eyebrow over a bloody eye.

Mrs. Kent went down to one knee to look at it. I knelt down beside her, not sure if I wanted to crow with triumph or wince because apparently it had been just as bad as I thought it was.

“Looks like it very nearly got in,” she said. She sat back, shaking her head. “That’s a new one. Never hear of a possum acting that way.”

“Me neither.”

She got up and unbolted the door, pushing the unbroken side open. I felt a panicky rush of adrenaline, as if the possum might really be lying in wait on the balcony, eight hours later.

Is that so strange? It could understand doorknobs. I had left that bit out of my account. Even though I was pretty sure that it was true, I was not willing to offer that testimony to the jury of Mrs. Kent’s eyebrows. It had been much easier simply to say that it had been jumping at the door so hard that it jarred the doorknob.

“Well,” said Mrs. Kent from the balcony, “it didn’t get too far afterward, that’s for sure.”

I scrambled to my feet and found her staring down at the corpse of a possum. Its mouth lay open, the jaw misaligned, and its fur was matted with blood.

“Is it really dead?” I asked weakly, not wanting to get any closer. “I mean, it’s a possum…”

“Since there’s flies on its eyeballs right now, I’m thinking so, yeah.”

God, she really must think I’m a ninny. Probably because I’m acting like one. I wiped my hands on my apron and stepped around her, then crouched down.

It was definitely dead. The tumor on the side of its face was strangely deflated, the skin hanging loose and bloody, like an empty sack. Fluid leaked from the closest eye, as if it too had deflated.

I fished a pencil out of my apron and used it to move the head to one side. The flies buzzed away in a panic, though I knew they’d be back within seconds.

There was another, similar hole on the back of its head, close to its spine.

I wondered if there had been another tumor there, or what I had taken for a tumor, and I simply hadn’t seen it in the dark. “If it did have a disease,” I said, using the pencil to roll the poor creature over, “we should dispose of the body so that it cannot be spread.” The creature’s left side was clearly what it had been using to attack the window. Blood was crusted across its shoulder and I suspect that arm would have dangled if the body had not stiffened. The other lump, the one on its belly, had deflated much like the first one.

Mrs. Kent and I stared down at it, housekeeper and naturalist united in dismay. “I’ll have Jackson burn it,” she said finally. “And fix up the windowpane, though that’ll take a few days.”

“It’s fine,” I said absently. I set the pencil down beside the body. I couldn’t imagine drawing with it again. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. I don’t think I’ll be using the balcony for a while anyway.”

Mrs. Kent left me alone with a promise to send Mr. Kent up directly. I knew that I should get back to work, but I was restless and unable to settle.

Carefully adding leg hairs to paintings of nearly identical flies seemed rather less important than it had yesterday. So Halder got his flies a day or two later than I’d hoped. Would he notice? Would he even care? He wasn’t

going to praise me for having been early, that’s for sure. I was already failing to meet the deadline he’d set my predecessor, and never mind that he hadn’t bothered to hire a replacement for an entire year.

I paced through the studio, trying not to look at the cracked windowpane and failing miserably. When I found my gaze straying there for the third time, I turned away and told myself firmly to look at something else.

Anything else.

My eye fell upon the chest, still standing in the middle of the floor. Why had it been so heavy, anyway? It hadn’t really occurred to me to open it, since I still felt on some level that I was a guest in a stranger’s room. But if it was full of my predecessor’s things, those were more or less mine now anyway. Maybe it was more paints, or brushes, or boxes of paper. (Come to think of it, it was just about heavy enough to be full of paper.) I knelt down and flipped up the latch.

As it turned out, I wasn’t far wrong. The trunk was full of paper, though it was all contained between stiff covers. I picked one up and turned it over in my hands. The edges of the pages were wavey and stained from

watercolor washes. Are those…?

Sketchbooks.

The spine made a cracking noise, stiff from disuse, when I opened to somewhere in the middle. A page of faces looked back at me, quick gesture sketches with nothing like the precision of the insect illustrations. Yet I could see the same hand at work—something in the use of color, maybe, or an echo of a beetle’s carapace in the line of a cheekbone.

I was startled to recognize Phelps among the faces there. But of course, Mrs. Kent knew him, so there was no reason that the artist wouldn’t. Asa Phelps was written next to his image, in the familiar handwriting, reminding me irresistibly of the scientific names written under insects in the other sketchbook. A. phelps, type specimen collected in North Carolina … I snorted.

Then I turned the page and laughed out loud. There was Mrs. Kent from multiple angles, looking younger but with the same skeptical expression that I was learning so well. One had been worked into a watercolor study.

The artist had mixed indigo into the shadows of her face and the hollows of her neck, a hint of warm yellow ochre into the highlights, so that she glowed on the page.

At the top of the page, the artist had written It’s Rose’s birthday! Can’t believe it’s been another year already.

I sat down cross-legged in front of the chest, possum forgotten, and paged through the sketchbook. Mrs. Kent again, with her husband this time, both of them shown laughing together, faces detailed, framed by quick lines that suggested arms around each other’s shoulders. I’d never seen Mrs.

Kent laugh like that in person.

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?

OceanofPDF.com