A Season of Whispers Read online

  Judith’s expression grew thoughtful. “So you’re saying people prefer the fiction. You like reading fictions.”

  It was impossible without a looking glass to see if she blushed, yet Minerva certainly felt her cheeks grow hot. As Mrs. Alby often sent Judith to the Consulate to collect their mail, the girl knew about Minerva’s habit of ordering novelettes through the post. Minerva tried hard to keep this secret from the rest of Bonaventure: fiction, being a falsehood of sorts, was therefore antipodal to truth. Her tastes, of course, did not run to the pornographic, which was the common perception of such slim volumes; but the infamy of the lowest often clings to the reputation of the highest, even when respected names like Poe decorated their covers.

  “I’m saying there’s no non-fiction to prefer. I doubt anyone ever disappeared here in the first place. The case of Mr. Hollin aside, there’s no holes into which anyone could fall.”

  “What about the cave?”

  “What cave?”

  “The one near the stream. I often see your father there, talking to himself.”

  Minerva stopped to look at her. “Show me.”

  It was less a cave than a crevice between two adjoining slices of rock, set into the slope above the water’s edge where the stream ran dark and slow. According to Judith, on more than one occasion she had spied the elder Grosvenor there.

  “He’ll sit and speak into it as if it was a megaphone,” said the girl, “and then listen to the echoes as they come back. But the echoes are wrong.”

  “What do you mean, wrong?”

  “Sometimes they say words your father didn’t originally say.”

  Minerva crossed her arms, suddenly cold. “Such as?”

  Judith shrugged. “I’ve never been able to hear clearly. I never wanted to get that close. They were just whispers, really, but I could tell sometimes the words came back different. Like one time your father talked about salmon swimming upstream and the echo said something about returning to the sea. It’s a good trick.”

  Minerva regarded the crevice with misgiving. “Only a child smaller than you could fall in there,” said Minerva finally. “My father is fond of geology. I’m sure it’s some acoustic anomaly he’s discovered, that’s all.”

  “Maybe they’re not echoes,” said Judith with slyness. “Maybe he’s talking to Mr. Hollin. Hey!” Her face brightened. “We should tell people that whenever we’re in town. We’ll start a new story about the farm—a new fiction—all by ourselves.”

  But the older woman didn’t hear. Minerva stood rigid and motionless as if listening to some distant sound, yet when Judith likewise paused to listen, all she heard was graveyard silence.

  “Judith,” said Minerva very quietly, “we must go back.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Minerva shook her head, scanning the trees around them. “I just have a feeling.” She held out her hand for Judith’s. “Hurry.”

  They began their return, walking at first, then speeding into a trot, as Minerva held onto the girl with one hand while the other hiked her own skirts above the knees to free her legs. Judith had to jog beside her, lashed to a runaway horse she couldn’t control. Every third step became a leap to keep up with the taller woman’s stride.

  Then with a rumble the ground under the trail collapsed and Minerva pushed Judith away as she spilled downwards into a suddenly yawning pit, clawing wildly for purchase, pebbles and stones raining upon her. A thick root soared past. Minerva grabbed it, her whole body jerking to a halt.

  For a moment she dangled as sand drizzled past. Above her, Judith peered over the rim, her face white and wide-eyed. “Minerva,” she said, “Climb. Climb.”

  Gasping, Minerva planted her heels into the pit’s side and hand over hand, pulled herself up the root. Judith’s mouth opened and closed but little sound came out.

  She reached the top of the root. A gap of several feet still existed. “Judith—please.”

  But Judith just stared beyond her. From the bottom, if there was a bottom, emerged an awful, improbable sound.

  “Suspicion is a terrible emotion.”

  “Judith. Your hand.”

  The girl shook her head, not so much denying Minerva as denying what she beheld beneath her.

  “Please.”

  Judith thrust out her arm.

  Taking one hand off the root, Minerva began to fall again. She lunged for Judith.

  Judith caught her. Her strength wasn’t enough to pull her up but Minerva used her arm as she had the root, stamping her boots into the loose earth and pulling her way up and over the edge.

  Together they scrambled away from the pit into the leaf litter, hoarse and tearful. They looked back toward the pit. It lay silent. When she dared to peek over its edge, all Minerva saw was an empty depression with nothing but sand and rocks at the bottom.

  •••

  Our thoughts in the nighttime are not like those during the day. Having fallen asleep in a world that flows by logic, by cause and effect, by customs and manners and etiquette—a world defined by predictability—we awake after our first sleep in a confusion of looming shadow and creaking floorboard. With few others awake, there is no reliance on sociability for our cues; we cannot look to them to inform us. The light of reason is subsumed by whim and mercury, leaving us with our senses as lonely guides through strange forests. We stare: what is that shape at the end of the bed? Then we remember it’s only our clothing thrown over the back of an old chair. Our force of will becomes the singular hand that molds the clay back into its daylight form, and yet as soon as we turn our attention away the shape springs immediately back into lumpen mystery.

  Minerva lay in her bed, the hour of the night unknown to her. The day had passed in a confused jumble. Upon their return to the Consulate, the story of the sinkhole had been met with a flurry of alarm—the roaring collapse had been heard in the fields but dismissed as the Moodus Noises. Brandy was produced and given to Minerva in brief sips; meanwhile Mrs. Alby had bundled Judith off to their cabin, saying the girl was babbling and feverish. Minerva thought Judith quite cogent. The issue lay in the inability of the others to comprehend what she said.

  The brandy made Minerva sleepy and after being helped to bed by her mother, she had tumbled into dreamless depths the minute she touched the pillow; and yet from there, some indeterminable time later, she had risen to wide wakefulness, buoyed to the surface by a single image in her head. It did not, as might be expected, concern the day’s events.

  It was the remembrance of Mr. Sutton’s letter.

  There were many strange things about it, not least of which was Sutton’s anonymous and detached exit. So strong was his abolitionism that he had spoken at times, with at least some small degree of seriousness, of journeying south to free the slaves at gunpoint; and it was difficult to reconcile this firebrand nature with the image of a man skulking off in the early morning hours after pinning a letter to the Consulate’s front door. And as both Minerva and Mr. Presley could testify, Sutton failed to depart with most of his belongings. That afternoon in the cabin Presley had muttered something about his friend’s property being too crude for a broker’s office in New York—it was no loss to leave it behind. Neither spoke aloud their suspicion that Sutton might at least have taken those items known to have some intimate stake with him, if only the letters from his sister.

  If Mr. Sutton had fallen into a sinkhole, why would he have left a note?

  It was always a joke at the farm, the supposed vanishings, made comical by time and the lack of connective tissue between the Bonaventurists and the original family. Before today no one, certainly not Minerva, ever stopped to assume the stories were true. Of course, for decades the farm sat empty, and the legend of it carried some weight with the locals. But not with the modern tenants.

  And yet, lying in the dark, it suddenly did not seem so inconceivable to Minerva. Perhaps the Garricks did drop through soil one by one until none were left, save for t
he last poor fellow who fled west.

  Sutton vanished as his hog John Tyler had vanished. As did John Bradway. And Clemmie Russell.

  Minerva’s thoughts between sleeps eddied and spiraled. In the center of her mind’s ocean, a single berg of ice loomed larger than the rest, the others winding about it in slow orbits. They came together, jostled, rebounded, and flung themselves away in new patterns, and yet always gravitated toward the larger mass.

  It was common in the evenings, after dinner but before everyone retreated to their slumbers, to hold some entertainment in the Consulate parlor or out of doors on the lawn. There would be readings of essays, either homegrown or from The Dial, or speeches or plays; the previous year Minerva had portrayed Hermia in Bonaventure’s episodic production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, spread across four sequential nights.

  Upon a recent night there had been a poetry reading, with the Shelleys and Byrons among the community rising to stand before the audience and, with sometimes quivering hands and trembling voices, share their own efforts. Mr. Presley versed his way through doggerel celebrating the life-giving benefits of the sun, while Mrs. Alby offered a few lines calling for the equality of women before the law. Yet no one had been more delighted than Minerva when little Judith Alby stepped before the room and announced, “On Obligation.”

  “We drive and beat across the frontier, taming the untamed land,” she read, “yet traveling not so far as to leave behind obligation to our fellow man.”

  In a steady tone, her sheets of paper clutched before her, Judith praised the improvement of the American countryside and the innovation of its people, of its farmers and settlers, all the while reminding her listeners that such progress was worthless without responsibility to others. For these reasons and more, she intoned, the names Meriwether Lewis and William Clark should be held in higher esteem than Washington or Jefferson; and Minerva thought Judith made several clever couplings with seemingly unrhymable phrases like Corps of Discovery and Sacagawea. And while one metaphor regarding the digging of shallow holes seemed overused and, odder still, was accompanied by sharp glances at Minerva’s father, who simply nodded and smiled in encouragement, throughout her poem Judith praised the loyalty among those early explorers of the wilderness, equating the tenacity of their mission to their fidelity toward each other.

  “Friendship, like duty, is hard won but easy to lose—and equally it was shared by the men and woman in their hide-bound canoes.”

  The seats in the parlor were loosely arranged in two groups. That evening Minerva had chosen not to sit beside Lyman, or perhaps Lyman had chosen not to sit beside her; tongues bounced enough regarding them and their walks together, and Minerva did not always care to indulge the gossip of the butter churn or the hay bale. Yet rarely was he far from her mind. Greedy for a quick smile or a wink of affection, she turned to sneak a glimpse at him seated across the aisle.

  How to describe what she saw, or her astonishment at the sight? Supportiveness, amusement, boredom; any would have been expected emotions. Instead she saw a man perched rather than sitting; a man whose hands gripped, not held, the spindles of the chair in front of him; a man whose spine leaned forward like a willow bent toward the water. Rivulets coursed down his cheeks and his nose sniffled. His eyes—his eyes adored. Minerva, far from taking a cursory peek at him instead stared openly, safe in her place far outside his attention. She doubted whether Lyman was aware of her or the others at all, or even the room or the house or the planet. For him in that moment, all that existed was Judith and her message of devotion.

  How little we know each other, Minerva thought. One meets a person and paints a portrait of him using colors to our preference, and then upon confrontation with evidence outside their shared experience, the paint smears and bleeds. We assume people only exist within our eyesight; that they were born seconds before we met and die moments after we leave them. What an illusion it is to imagine that by spending a few idle moments in common company we comprehend another person. Not more than an arm span from Minerva was a stranger, a being moved by an emotion unknown to her. Something between love and uneasiness gripped her deep within. What tenderness lay beneath the bark of a man, Minerva wondered, that a child’s poem could bring him to tears? Or should she rather ask what sin had he committed, what trespass against a brother had he effected, that could kindle inside his soul a remorse so intense that it flowed like warm mineral waters down his face?

  Suspicion is a terrible emotion.

  It was useless to lie abed, Minerva knew: sleep would never come, at least this night, until she received explanations. She rose and dressed quickly, throwing an extra shawl around her shoulders against the chill. When she was ready, she reached for the unlit lantern on her nightstand. Her hand hesitated. Instead she plucked up Bitty’s amulet lying beside it, feeling its embossed arcs and circles in the thick leather under her thumb. In the dark it somehow seemed brighter than any lamp. Rather than tie it around her neck, she stuffed into the pocket of her jacket.

  Any other time it would’ve been easy enough to creep downstairs and slip out the door without interference, but on this particular midnight, the front parlor was occupied by Mr. Isaac Rose. After conducting whatever unspoken business he’d had with Minerva’s father, Rose joined Bonaventure for their communal supper and then—after gamely helping the other men in the washing up—was given pillow and blanket and a place on the divan. Rose said he intended to depart Bonaventure the next morning, and none raised an eyebrow that an associate of the farm’s founder might be granted a free night’s room and board. Yet even so, something about tiptoeing past the parlor made Minerva uneasy; and for some ambiguous reason, she felt that Rose’s ears would prickle at the sound of her sneaking toward the kitchen door. Either instance, she was sure, would lead to inquiries and interrogation.

  So instead, with great caution and stealth, she skulked to the open window at the end of the second-floor hall, climbed through and down the trellis, and stole across the yard.

  The moon was half coming or going, Minerva didn’t know which, but the result was that under a clear sky she had little need of a lantern anyway. The road past the fields and cabins glowed beneath her lace-up boots, even after it trickled into two ruts between weeds. Soon the woods closed over her head, shielding her from the moonlight, and she slowed her pace, wondering if she might lose the path and stray off into the thickets. Strangely, the thought of another pit failed to frighten her. Then the black hulk of the stone house rose on her right, elevated slightly from the road, the windows blank and dark. Carefully she swung herself up the incline, using the skinny maples and birches like walking canes to prevent her from tripping.

  For a long moment she stood on the step. In her bed Minerva hadn’t conceived how this moment should go. It was entirely possible Lyman was sound asleep and she might knock all night before he answered. And yet she asked herself if knocking was even proper. Tradition and niceties seemed superfluous in a world of moonlight and undefined space, like a landscape where the artist had run out of pigment before reaching the edges. Dupin wouldn’t knock, that she was sure of.

  The door was unlatched, the bolt unshod. It slid open on silent oiled hinges.

  The main room was barely furnished, though the floor was swept and the windows shut. Cautiously she stumbled through the room to the mantel. A pair of stubby candles waited there, hard wax pooled in the dishes of their holders, but when she knelt to poke the ashes in the grate, she couldn’t even find an ember to light them.

  Perched on a corner of the stone was a piece of paper, dropped there as if the owner, having made reference to it, became distracted and laid it aside, forgotten. Immediately a vision of Sutton furiously jumping up from his afternoon coffee, letter in hand, lunged at her from the recesses. She seized the sheet and in less than four steps crossed to the window.

  Yet peering close to it in the moonlight, Minerva apprehended it was not a letter at all.

  Brothers and Sister
s

  evil

  the Basement

  to be

  No one should go

  picnic

  lunch

  yes/no

  good Friend

  hog, pig, swine

  And thusly the list continued. The words and phrases were written in a neat and measured hand, arranged in columns of ten. Minerva quickly calculated over three-hundred seventy itemized.

  “You haven’t—why not—too long—”

  As if lifting off the page in her hand, words floated up through the floorboards to Minerva’s ears. They arrived as incomplete fragments, chopped and sawed, without meaning. Though distant and far away, yet Minerva recognized the voice unmistakably as Lyman’s. Yet whom he spoke to, if anyone, Minerva could not distinguish.

  She dropped the list back onto the mantel, the paper again forgotten, and breathed deeply. Carefully she stepped across the floorboards, allowing only the leather of her sole and never the heel to touch wood. The basement door stood wide open, a black portal gaping in deep shadow; and Minerva regretted being unable to light the candles from the mantel. Yet she told herself whatever advantage of sight it provided would negate stealth; and so, very carefully, with hands on the rail, she dipped her toe over the edge of the landing, seeking the step below; and when that was found, lowered herself by slow inches onto it before reaching out for the next.

  “I cannot—you demand—”

  By careful descent Minerva found herself in the basement, wrapped in thick blackness. She turned and saw, from beneath the stairs, a soft glow coloring the mouth of a low tunnel. The earthen floor made movement easier, muffling her steps, even if she fumbled in darkness as complete as a tomb’s. Her hands trailed like those of a blind man’s along the wood of the staircase, refusing to leave it behind, a single line of string leading her from the labyrinth. When she realized she could go no farther without releasing it, she held her breath and lunged at the tunnel entrance, only releasing the air from her lungs once the damp, cobwebby stone pressed against her palms.