An Untimely Frost, page 21
She smiled a bright smile, as if they were discussing the advent of spring instead of murder. “I can’t let you ruin everything, Miss Long. Not after such a long time. You do understand, don’t you?”
Oh, she understood perfectly. Prudence had no intention of letting Lilly go to the sheriff. No intention of letting her leave here alive. Trembling with another quiver of fear, she cursed herself for not putting her skirt back on. Why was it that her derringer was never in the article of clothing she needed it to be in? All she could do was keep Prudence talking on the off chance that she could be persuaded to put down her weapon.
“So you came back to get rid of the bodies,” she said, amazed by the steadiness of her voice. She gestured toward the remains on the cot. “Why don’t you tell me what happened, Mrs. Purcell? Exactly what did Harold do to Rachel Townsend?”
Prudence blinked. The surprise on her face was genuine. “Rachel? How would I know?”
It was Lilly’s turn to be surprised. “This isn’t Rachel Townsend and her baby?”
“Good heavens, no! That’s Sarah. Sarah and my grandson.”
Prudence’s gaze grew vacant, as if she were staring at some inner place or thing too horrible to contemplate. When she spoke again, her voice was dull, toneless. “She was only twelve the first time, you see. Twelve and so pretty. So very pretty. He liked them pretty. And young. They were all pretty and young. I was pretty when we first married. Like Sarah. Very pretty.”
Gooseflesh rose on Lilly’s arms. She was looking into the eyes of insanity, hearing the voice of lunacy. How could she convince Prudence to put away the gun when it was clear that she was mad?
“Who liked them pretty and young, Prudence?” she prodded. Keep her talking, Lilly. Keep her talking.
The older woman’s sharp, angry gaze swung to Lilly’s. “Why, Harold, of course.”
Perversion and madness. The Purcell legacy. “Prudence, are you telling me that your husband, a man of God, took sexual liberties with young women in town, and with his own daughter?”
“Oh, yes,” Prudence said, almost flippantly. “But it wasn’t just here. It happened other places, too. Everywhere the Lord’s work took us.”
“I hardly think seducing young women is what the Lord had in mind,” Lilly snapped, her anger momentarily overcoming her fear of the madwoman with the gun.
“It was on his mind all the time,” Prudence said, her wild-eyed gaze moving to the skeleton of her daughter. “Not the Lord’s. Harold’s. It was so easy for him. He was so handsome, you see, and had such a silver tongue. All the women thought he was so Godly, so . . . good. But they were wrong. They soon found that out.”
“And you knew what he was doing all along?” Lilly asked, as horrified by that fact as with the truth about Harold.
Prudence looked at Lilly. “I knew, but I loved him. I couldn’t help myself. I loved him and I hated him. I hated them, too. All of them.”
Her gaze slid to her dead daughter. “Even Sarah. They shouldn’t have been so pretty.” She looked back at Lilly, a bright smile in her eyes, on her lips. “He liked them pretty, you know. Young and pretty,” she repeated.
Her expression soured once more, and her tone of voice turned harsh, accusing. “They shouldn’t have laughed at his jokes, Miss Long. They shouldn’t have stolen his affection away from me.”
The woman was thoroughly insane. “How could you hate your own daughter?” Lilly asked, her mind refusing to believe what she was hearing. “She was the blameless one. All those girls, all those years, they were all pure. Harold was the one in the wrong. It was his fault, not the failing of the innocent girls he led astray.”
“Don’t be so naïve, Miss Long,” Prudence snapped. “Women have been leading men down the path to perdition ever since Eve duped Adam. The sin is passed on from generation to generation.”
Fearing she had inherited her mother’s nature, Lilly had discussed this topic with Rose at length. Everyone was a free moral agent, Rose had explained. Choices between right and wrong were made every day by every person. No one paid for another’s sins. Lilly was comforted to know she would not bear the responsibility for anything her mother had done, since she figured she would have enough to account for with her own transgressions.
“ ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son,’” Lilly quoted. “Ezekiel 18:20. Regardless of Eve’s sin, Sarah was innocent, Prudence, as were all the others. You should not have condoned what Harold did.”
“I did not condone his actions, Miss Long!” Prudence denied in a razor-sharp tone. “I detested them.”
“By not turning him over to the law you were aiding him in his wickedness!” Lilly cried, her anger once again overruling caution.
Prudence gestured toward the valise. “That’s what my sister said in her letters. She’d been saying for years that I should tell the authorities, but I was trying to keep my marriage together.”
“Marriage is a holy union. The marriage bed should be undefiled. What you had with Harold Purcell was an alliance with the devil.”
“Who are you to judge me?” Prudence cried, the dullness in her eyes replaced with a sudden burst of anger.
“It’s God’s word that judges, Prudence, not I.”
“Oh, yes, God’s word,” she said with an airy wave of her free hand. Her tone reeked of bitterness. “I certainly heard enough of that. Every time he took his pleasure elsewhere, he quoted scripture to me about a wife’s duty to be submissive to her husband. And he told Sarah that children were to obey their parents. . . .”
“He was twisting the scripture to make it fit his own evil desires,” Lilly said. “That’s a sin, too.”
“Placing blame doesn’t really matter now, does it, Miss Long?”
“I suppose not,” Lilly agreed, the truth of the statement draining her of her anger. “Tell me about Sarah. How did she come to this?”
Prudence drew a deep breath. “When we realized Sarah was expecting, Harold told everyone in town she had tuberculosis and had to be quarantined here at the house. That way no one would see her condition or question why she never came to town. Did I tell you he had a silver tongue?” she queried, her empty gaze drifting to Lilly’s once more.
Mad.
Lilly nodded.
“There had been others in town . . .”
“Rachel Townsend, Eloise Mercer, and Virginia Reihmann,” Lilly supplied.
Prudence looked at Lilly in astonishment, as if wondering how she knew. She shrugged. “Virginia Reihmann? Well, that’s a new one on me, but that Eloise always was a flirt. It was easy to see why Harold was so taken with her. Fortunately for him, she married that boy and he saw to it that the baby never saw the light of day. Of course her reputation was in tatters, and her relationship with her father was ruined, but then, these things happen, don’t they?” Prudence asked.
Unfortunately.
“Harold managed to be more . . . discreet for a year or so, and then there was Rachel. She never told anyone about Harold either, until she left town, and by then, he was already gone, leaving me here with Sarah. She was getting quite far along by then.”
“Who? Sarah or Rachel?” Lilly asked.
A thoughtful expression entered Prudence’s eyes, tempering the madness for a moment. “Why, both of them, I suppose, since it seemed they were due to deliver near the same time. At any rate, Harold had decided it was time for us to leave town, and when Mr. Townsend came to confront Harold, he was already gone.”
Her features took on an expression of exasperation. “I had to lie for Harry—not that it was the first time. I told him we should have left months before we did, but he said Rachel was keeping quiet, and no one knew about Sarah, so he thought he could handle things for a while.” She frowned in thought. “I wonder if Harold made the decision to leave when he found out about Virginia?”
After a moment, she offered Lilly a bright smile. “Oh, well, it hardly matters now, does it? Anyway, I was making preparations to leave when Sarah went into labor. Perhaps it was the stress that brought it on,” she said with a shrug of nonchalance. “At any rate, he left me here to clean up his mess—as usual. I truly didn’t know he’d taken the money, Miss Long,” she added as an afterthought.
“So Harold left by train,” Lilly prompted. “And you were here with Sarah, delivering the baby.”
“Yes, she had a really hard time of it. I grew so tired of hearing her scream I stuffed rags in her mouth. It took nearly sixteen hours for the baby to be born. He was fine,” Prudence said with a proud smile. “So perfect. But he was big for a first baby and Sarah hemorrhaged terribly. Nothing I did stopped the bleeding.”
Prudence gave a breathless little giggle that sent chills down Lilly’s spine. “I was in quite a pickle, as you can imagine. I was supposed to bring Sarah by wagon to meet Harold so that no one would know we’d left town for a few days, but she was in no condition to travel. I knew she would never make the trip by wagon, and I couldn’t take her by train, so I wrapped up the baby and put him in the valise where I kept the letters from my sister. I helped Sarah up the stairs to this room. My room.”
“Your room?”
“Yes, mine. Harold had it built especially for me, a place where he put me while he was having relations with all those girls. No one knew it was here, of course, so I thought it would be years before anyone found it . . . or Sarah, and by then we would be nothing but a bad memory to the people in town.”
Lilly swallowed back the bile rising in her throat. “So without a qualm, you just brought your daughter and grandson up here to die?”
Prudence cocked her head in a considering manner. “Actually, by the time I got myself cleaned up and drove away, I began to see that it made a certain kind of sense. We all pay for our sins, and Sarah paid for hers. Perhaps you think I acted wrongly, and perhaps to most people I did, but believe me, I’ve paid for my sin these past twenty years, just as Harold did. The way things have worked out is a sort of poetic justice, if you will.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, I believe that it was our penance that Harold and I have had to live together all these years with me knowing what he’d done to those young girls and our daughter, and him knowing I’d left Sarah and his incestuous baby, the son he’d always wanted, to die. It seemed . . . fitting, somehow.”
“What do you mean you both had to live with that knowledge all these years? You told me Harold died.”
“Of course I didn’t!” Prudence scoffed. “That would have been a lie. I said that the life he loved ended. You see, Harold had a series of strokes not long after we left here, Miss Long. He’s been confined to a wheelchair ever since. He doesn’t walk or talk. I take care of him, and I don’t have to share him any longer.”
There was no brother, Lilly realized. The man in the wheelchair was Harold. “You told the neighbor he was your brother. That was a lie.”
Prudence backed through the doorway, a gentle, indulgent smile on her face. “A small fib, Miss Long, since technically we are all brothers and sisters in the Lord. Besides, we do what we have to do, you know.”
The ends justify the means.
There was no doubt now that Prudence intended Lilly to die. While Lilly was weighing the wisdom of rushing the older woman, Prudence whirled and fled the room, slamming the door closed and shutting Lilly in with the ghosts of the Purcells’ past. Her cry of surprise drowned out the scrape as Prudence turned the latch.
Knowing that she had just been sentenced to the same end as Sarah Purcell, Lilly stumbled to the door, kicking it with her booted foot as she pounded on it with her sore hands and screamed for Prudence to let her out.
“Don’t make things worse for yourself, Prudence!” Lilly cried. “Don’t repeat the wrong you did twenty years ago!”
Even over her cries for mercy, there was no mistaking the sounds of an unrepentant Prudence scooting the trunk back in front of the door, then replacing the crates and mirror on top. With a sinking heart, Lilly listened as the madwoman’s footfalls faded down the stairs.
Being shot would have been a kindness.
“Prudence!” she cried once more though her throat had already gone raw from screaming. “Let me out of here!”
There was no response. Lilly didn’t know how long she continued to scream and rail. She cursed Prudence and Harold and herself for being so stubbornly pigheaded. Her toes felt bruised in her heavy boots, her voice was reduced to a raw whisper, and her hands were swollen and bleeding once more. She dragged the quilt from the cot and sank down on the dusty floor. Wrapping her arms around the quilt, she rested her cheek against it while tears of exhaustion seeped from her eyes.
She must have slipped into a short sleep, because she dreamed. Dreamed of a baby sleeping in a valise while Timothy, wearing nothing but ankle boots and a signet ring, strangled a naked Kate while Lilly hid under the bed. Rose came in, hoping to help Kate, but Timothy shoved her against the fireplace and when her head hit the hearth, her skull split open and money streamed out. Then Rose was gone and Kate was the skeleton on the bed, lying in a tangle of bloody sheets. Next to her sat the valise with the skeleton baby, but now Lilly was the baby.
She woke to the sound of herself crying and tears running down her cheeks, her heart breaking for the mother and sibling she’d lost.
CHAPTER 39
When Lilly first opened her eyes, she was greeted by a profound silence and a room filled with deepening shadows. For a moment, she had no idea where she was. Her sore and aching body felt as if she’d been dragged for miles behind a horse and buggy. Her hands were so swollen she could barely make a fist. Then she remembered. Though her body was beaten down, her mind was clear. The empty grave. Prudence’s confession. Being locked in with Sarah and her baby.
The dead made good sleeping companions. Perhaps their blameless spirits had watched over her while she slept the deep sleep of total mental and physical exhaustion.
She thought of her theory that when men were pushed into a corner, they felt no qualms about sacrificing whoever stood in their way. Since hearing Prudence’s horrific confession, Lilly had revised that opinion to include the female of the species. Evidently, some women were just as capable as their male counterparts at cunning, subterfuge, and murder. For that’s exactly what Prudence had done when she left her daughter and grandson here to die. And murder was precisely what she’d intended when she locked Lilly in the attic room.
A bitter lesson learned, one that would stand her in good stead in the future. If she had a future. She glanced around the small room. There must be some way to get out. She would not die in this sepulcher without trying to escape! Instead of resorting to her earlier panic, she sat perfectly still and pondered her situation. Screaming and pounding would do her no good. Prudence was long gone, and there was no one to hear her but Sarah and her baby. Lilly had to use her mind instead of her battered body. When the sun set, she would be unable to see, and any attempt to escape would have to be postponed until morning, unless someone from town missed her and came to help. Even then, would they find her up here?
She couldn’t leave salvation to chance. There must be some way to open the door from this side. She knew her arms weren’t strong enough, but her legs and thighs had done a good job of moving the heavy trunk. Could she possibly use the strength of her back and legs to push out the single nail holding the latch and move aside the things blocking the doorway? How strong could one nail be?
She soon learned that with the trunk and mirror in front of it, the door refused to budge an inch. Fighting back the threat of tears, she drew in a deep breath. Oh, if Robert Pinkerton could see her now! How he would gloat. She could imagine his smug smile, could hear him say, “I told you this is no job for a woman.”
Blast Robert Pinkerton! She might die here, but not for lack of trying. Use your head, Lilly. You’re a smart woman. Physical strength isn’t everything. There had to be some way to get out of this cursed place!
The only other means of escape was the window, and it was three stories aboveground. Pushing the negative thought away, she crossed the small room to see what lay below. She tried to remember what the rear of the house looked like and recalled that the back porch ran the length of the house, so the porch roof would only go to the floor level of the second story. The problem became how to get from level three to a first-floor roof.
Rubbing the grime from the panes with her bandaged hand, Lilly leaned close and cupped the sides of her face to peer out. All remnants of the rain were gone but the glistening wetness. The last light of day would soon be pushed away by the encroaching darkness, but right now there was still plenty of light, and she could see the backyard and the gaping hole she’d dug. Despite her determination to escape her prison, the sight sent a shiver of apprehension through her. Suddenly, a mockingbird’s medley came through the window. The sassy song gave her a feeling of hope, and with it renewed determination.
Yes! The porch roof was there, as she’d known it would be, but even if she managed to . . . Something gave her pause. The roof below her was too small and too near to be the back porch covering. Instead, this roof was peaked and came all the way to the top of the second story, which put it within jumping distance from the window she was looking out of—if she could fit through the window.
Unable to see what lay to either side of her, she closed her eyes and tried again to picture how the back of the house looked from the cemetery. She recalled the layout of the upper rooms she’d searched earlier in the week and remembered a bedroom with two nice-size dormer windows that overlooked the rear yard. One had been used for sewing; the other boasted a window seat and a ready supply of books. This was the roof she was seeing! Below them ran the roofline of the back porch. Perhaps there was a chance.
The first thing she had to do was open the window. She soon learned that was an impossibility, which meant she had to break out the glass and wood that made up the individual panes. Sitting on the floor, she pulled off one of her muddy boots. Grabbing it across the top, she turned her face away and swung the heel at a pane. Her reward was the tinkling of glass and a slight sting as a few shards nicked her wrist and forearm.
