Chapter 44

C HAPTER 44

Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.

—Emily Dickinson

"Didn't get it from me," Sophronia reiterated. "You'll have found none of in my room or in my tonics." She held out her hand for the key to her stillroom.

"True," the doctor agreed without returning the key. "I have not found evidence in your stillroom, though I tested every bottle I could find."

"Hope you cleaned up after yourself," was Sophronia's only complaint. "The girl works hard enough to keep the place as neat as a pin and shining like a copper penny. Don't want you giving her any extra work."

It was as close to a compliment as Marigold was like to get. "Thank you."

"I'll want to retest for digoxin in the bottle we collected from Ellery Hatchet's pocket," Oliphant confirmed.

"More tests?" Officer Parker was getting frustrated again. "Are you looking for more evidence of poison? Or of stabbing?"

"Perhaps we should look for evidence in the place where Ellery Hatchet was last seen alive?" Marigold redirected their attention to Cleon. "Ellery was bleeding and you helped him down to the water's edge, Cleon?"

"Ayuh. Sat him down against the rocks." The old fellow pointed out the window toward the shoal of glacial moraine that formed the southernmost point of the island. "So's the water could flow over him and wash him clean."

"Was he still bleeding?"

"Red as a tide," was Cleon's answer. "That's why I brung him. But I left him be there, cuz that was his private place for praying, see, where I wasn't allowed. Got to thinking I might shouldn'ta put him down into the water like he asked, cuz he didn't go down to Moses on the River Jordan like he said. Next morn he was back up in the garden, and I knew it were the curse that put him there."

"The curse? Oh, Cleon." Marigold was nearly overwhelmed with pity for the old man, but she wasn't about to tell them that Samuel and Seviah had actually put him there. "There is no curse."

"There surely is. I were here the day he cursed the place," Cleon swore. "Rained that hex down on sister and Cousin Ellery's head. Made her hair turn to white, it did that day. Cursed us all."

"Who did?" Parker asked.

"He doesn't know what he's talking about," Alva insisted. "Never has. He's gawney—always has been. She did this," Alva accused in that pleading quaver, pointing first to Sophronia before she switched to Marigold, as if she couldn't make up her mind. "She's the one that made him go away, for her revenge. She put the idea into his head. She's the one that did all of this."

The policeman was rightly confused. "Now, was it you," he asked Marigold, "who cursed him?"

"Not I," Marigold swore. "I assure you, I've cursed no one." Deserving boarding school girls and recalcitrant clerks excepted.

"I heard her with my own ears," Alva countered. "She said, ‘You leave him to me.' Right there in that yard, bold as day, she swore that to Wilbert." She turned on her grandson. "Tell me she didn't, boy. Tell them what she said to you."

"No, no," Wilbert stammered. "I mean, she did say that, like, but that's not … I didn't think she meant anything."

Marigold spoke for herself. "I didn't mean anything more than that I would help Wilbert with his plan—"

"Aha!" Alva crowed. "There you have it. It was her. She was planning her revenge all along!" She had their attention now. "From the moment she came here, all insinuating and curious, nosing and pushing her way into our business. All for what she could get from us. Well, I won't let her take this place."

Marigold's normally banked temper finally began to flare. "I do not want this place—who in their right mind would? Sorry, Wilbert." She apologized to her cousin but would not be put off having her say. "But I did not come out here to pry. I came at my cousin Sophronia's invitation—but for her letter, I would never have known the Hatchets even existed."

"Admit you wanted him gone," Alva insisted.

" He wanted gone!" Marigold abandoned grammar for the sake of expediency. "Ellery Hatchet hated Hatchet Farm. He talked openly and incessantly about how cursed the place was and how nothing would grow—until I made a garden and showed how wrong he was. But he resented the garden as much as he resented his sons." But perhaps it would be better if she did not supply those sons with motives in front of the police. "What he wanted was to preach. All I did was encourage him to do just that—to join the Reverend Cooper's tent revival that I had seen advertised in waybills about town."

"I saw the waybills too." Cab quietly added his support. "I reckon we all did."

"Well, that's beside the point." Officer Parker wasn't letting go of the low-hanging fruit. "And maybe he didn't want to go, so you—"

"But he did want to go!" Marigold swore. "He said so in front of the whole family the night of the Endicotts' party. He told them all, including his mother, that he was leaving to go on the revival circuit and that there was nothing she could say to stay him. And he left that very next morning."

"That's exactly what happened," Wilbert averred. "I rowed him over myself. Happiest I'd ever seen him. Talking the whole time about the plans the Lord had for him."

"Said the Lord would provide," Cleon confirmed. "The Lord would give it to him if he were good and holy."

Marigold had learned to take Cleon literally. "Give what exactly, Cleon?"

"What he were looking for! Years he spent looking. Years he spent praying, asking the Lord." Cleon gazed out the breezeway toward the point. "Though he never did find it."

Had Ellery been talking to God that day she had seen him kicking up the bank? He had been swearing in a manner more fit for Lucifer than the Lord, but …

Another thought occurred. "Cleon, is that why Cousin Ellery was always digging holes wherever he went on the island? What was he trying to find?"

"The chest."

"What chest?" Wilbert asked.

Marigold let Cleon answer, though she was sure she already knew. "Old Elijah's chest," Cleon said, "that he brought out here and hid, even from sister."

"Sister?" And for the first time, Marigold understood that singular word— sister . And it all began to make sense—the old man sleeping on the kitchen table all night and most times of the day, waiting to do his sister's bidding, after the rest of the house had gone to sleep or was up in the barn playing juke music or locked into their rooms by Sophronia to keep them safe not only from Ellery Hatchet's volcanic tempers but also from the one person who was entirely unaccounted for at Hatchet Farm—Alva Hatchet. Alva, who never came out of her room but somehow knew word for word what conversations Cleon had been listening to on his sister's behalf.

"What was in the chest, Cleon?"

"Don't rightly know, since he never could find it. But it were supposed to be treasure."

"A child's tale, foolishness." Alva contradicted her brother. "He's gawney. Always has been. Doesn't know what he's talking about."

But Marigold felt the old man knew perfectly well. "Like an iron-banded tea chest, Cleon? One the clipper ships would have brought back around the horn from China?" China, where Elijah Hatchet had sailed as first mate to Jacob Endicott in the tea trade.

"Ayuh," Cleon agreed. "The very like. Elijah told sister he'd hidden it on the island."

Marigold looked over Cleon's head at Cab.

Who looked back at her with the same sharp understanding—that the chest Bessie had discovered in the root cellar, the chest that was full of silver specie of the sort used by American clipper ship captains to buy their cargoes, and this treasure were one and the same. "Wilbert, remind me that I have an important—but welcome—chore for you later."

"Don't be making Wilbert into your cat's paw to do as you like—like you did to my Ellery." Alva reinserted herself in the conversation. "She's a she-devil, come here to have her revenge."

Marigold held her temper in favor of logic. "That's the second or third time"—frankly, with so much to keep track of, she had lost count—"you've said that, Great-Aunt Alva. But I should like to ask, quite particularly, revenge for what ? What on earth would I want revenge for?"

The silence that met her question was deafening.

"You know," Alva finally insisted.

"I do not know," Marigold responded. "Though I came here at my cousin Sophronia's invitation to find out." She pulled the smooth folds of Sophronia's letter from her pocket and held it out to her. "Without her letter, I would not have known the Hatchets existed. Don't you think it's time you told me why I was invited to stay?"

Alva retreated into pettishness. "I never wanted you to come. I forbade it."

"Naturally." Marigold gained some respect for Sophronia. "Look at you," she teased gently. "Going against her wishes. Not a bit mothlike."

The faintest beginnings of a wry smile warmed Sophronia's face. "Ayuh. For all the good it's done me."

"What are you talking about, Ma?" Wilbert broke in. "Cousin Marigold's done us a world of good. Just look around this kitchen, this farm. Even with the old barn gone, this place has never looked so good."

"It used to look fine, until she came," Alva accused with a glare at Sophronia.

"So it might have," Sophronia agreed in her laconic way. "But nothing any of us did—not Bessie, and certainly not me—were ever enough to please you. So I stopped trying. Until she came." She looked at Marigold. "You changed everything, just as I feared and hoped you would."

"Yeah, yeah." Office Parker was like a dog with a dry bone. "But what I want to know is what in tarnation this has to do with Ellery Hatchet's murder."

"Nothing and everything," Sophronia said in her cryptic way.

"This would sure go a whole lot easier if one of you would go ahead and confess," the policeman groused.

"We cannot confess to that which we did not do," Marigold returned tartly. "And Cousin Sophronia attested that it could not be either Wilbert or Daisy or I, since she had locked us into our rooms on the night in question. Just as she was locked in her stillroom."

"That's right," Sophronia affirmed.

"All I have is your say-so," Officer Parker returned, "with no way to tell whether or not it's a dad-blamed lie. But I ain't leaving here until I find out."

"Oh, you'll find it out," Sophronia murmured, returning her gaze to Marigold. "It's time you found out. You'll need this." She fished another long key on a string out of her bodice and handed it to Marigold.

"What are you doing?" Alva cawed in protest. "I forbid—"

"Which door?" Marigold asked, cutting her off.

"Mine."

Marigold rushed to the central stairwell, above which Sophronia's and Wilbert's rooms lay. Wilbert's she had seen before—so spare as to be Spartan—to deliver clean laundry, but Sophronia's had always been locked. Though her dread increased with every step, Marigold stepped through the doorway into Sophronia's chamber. And was immediately taken aback by the cozy simplicity and order.

The bed was covered by a worn but well-made quilt—similar to the one on her own bed. Checked curtains, though sun-bleached, hung neatly over the clean single dormer window. A chest of drawers and dressing table held not a speck of dust.

The contrast with the rest of the disordered house was so great as to be bizarre.

But what was most bizarre was the dressing table, decorated with an array of small, framed tintype and sepia-tinged photographs—most of which were of Seviah, all "togged up," as he had said, in his dinner suit from the evening of the party. "But how did he have his photograph taken—"

The answer came to her on a gasp when she picked up the frame. It could not be Seviah—the style of evening clothes was thirty years old if it was a day. The handsome young man who gazed so calmly from the portrait could be none other than the charming rogue who had been Harry Minot Manners. "It's my father."

"I thought I recognized him." Cab had followed her up and put a warming hand to her elbow in unspoken support. "I suppose I can guess who that is too." He pointed to another frame, which Marigold had, upon first glance, assumed to be Daisy but upon closer inspection proved to be her own darling mother, Esm é Sedgwick Manners. This, then, was the photograph both Cleon and Bessie had remarked upon.

The resemblance was indeed uncanny.

More photos, of small children, clad in the long, androgynous dresses of an earlier time, whom Marigold could not immediately identify—the pronounced likeness between Daisy and Esm é and between Seviah and Harry had her utterly confused—were tucked into the sides of the frame of the folded mirror.

"Look." Cab pointed into the shallow open drawer on the left side of the dressing table, which contained more photos—warped and curling with age—alongside newspaper clippings of Marigold's preparatory school graduation and a photogravure of her winning the collegiate championship in golf.

"Why are there so many pictures of Seviah and so few of Wilbert?" She pulled open the other drawers, only to find more of the younger son, including a photograph of him as a solemn-faced, dark-eyed child staring forthrightly into the camera.

And felt a strange stillness overcome her.

"That's—" Her voice sounded quiet, subdued, even to her own ears. "That's Seviah, isn't it? But it looks just like me." Her parents had kept a similar photograph of her on top of the piano in the Beacon Hill house.

"Yes," Cab murmured. "The resemblance is pronounced."

The wonder and strangeness of it all crashed into stupefaction. But she could see the truth in the faces staring out at her from the photographs. It was obvious. And inevitable. "Are Daisy and Seviah Esm é and Harry's children? Are they my brother and sister?"

"Perhaps," Cab cautioned quietly.

"I don't understand." Officer Parker—whom Marigold had entirely forgotten in her wonder—stood in the doorway. "This Harry and Esm é are, or were, your parents? And how are they connected?"

Her mouth spoke the words even as she struggled to make sense of them. "My mother is Sophronia Hatchet's first cousin. But that does not explain how their children got here, to this godforsaken place." Her mind was whirling ahead. "Unless this is the ‘great and godless wrong' that Ellery Hatchet did to my mother? Oh, dear heavens!"

The truth hit her like a golf club to the back of her head. "That horrible, hateful old man! He stole my beautiful mother's beautiful children."