A Widow's Curse Read online

  This book is for Lee, who took me to Barnsley Gardens, both real and imaginary; and for Kristin and Diana, whose perfectly combined collection of dogs and paintings is a continuing inspiration. All three were essential to the process of this book because it takes three women to ward off any hint of a true widow’s curse.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  One

  What was left of the Barnsley estate rose into view at the hilltop. A full moon made the mansion skeletal, something from a grotesque animal more than remains of an antebellum home: a vision to match the story of its curse. A razor of wind cut across my fingers and kicked up leaves; I thought they might have been footsteps following behind me.

  Moonbeams revealed a dwarfed boxwood maze that seemed to guard the entrance walkway. Winding through a rose-framed garden knot, the path to the front door was deliberately designed to slow the pace of anyone coming to the house. A visitor was forced to take more time, appreciating the grandeur of the house. A resident would have a moment to assess the visitor from behind an upstairs curtain, or inside a hidden shadow.

  That small garden attacked the senses, even in the September night. The air was filled with black crickets’ bowing, the funereal scent of white gardenias, the red noise of cicadas, and the blood of roses. A moldering angel at the center, head bowed, seemed to be weeping rust tears. Tall cleome and shorter cockscomb shivered in each gust of cold wind.

  I stood staring up at the house, one more visitor the ghosts could evaluate, wondering how I’d gotten to that very black moment. The process of collecting folk stories, my own psychoarchaeological exploration of the collective ancient mind, could never have prepared me for such a circumstance. I found I was having a very basic ontological dilemma: Was I actually the man standing in this dark garden?

  I began to imagine myself, instead, standing in the upstairs window of the derelict mansion, looking down on myself standing in the cleome. How did the man down there, I thought, get from his perfectly comfortable life to that desperate garden, wanted by the police, pursued by a murderer?

  The idea that a single phone call from a stranger had transported me there seemed insane.

  The schizophrenia of that moment made me shiver.

  And with each shiver, I found myself recalling, one by one, the doomed events of the Barnsley family curse.

  The Barnsleys lived happily for centuries in Derbyshire, England. The first American Lord Barnsley was Godfrey, a cotton magnate who amassed a great fortune in Savannah. By the late 1830s, his wife, Julia, could no longer tolerate the heat and flies on the coast. Godfrey determined to come up from the sea to the cool, clear hills of Cass County. That decision sealed their thorny fate.

  Lord and Lady Barnsley had the misfortune to arrive at the site of their home just after the Trail of Tears.

  Cherokee people, who had lived happily for centuries in those hills, had been forcibly removed from their land. Men, women, and children were herded a thousand miles under the orders of astonishingly indifferent military men. Over four thousand died, compelling the remaining Cherokee families to name their sorrow Nunna daul Tsuny—literally, “the Trail Where They Cried.” Each tear that hit the ground, one story said, became a binding curse, contaminating all the land around it.

  Apparently, the feeling was palpable to anyone who set foot on the acorn-shaped hill near the holy springs where Barnsley would build his stuccoed Italianate mansion. So much so that he was warned many times not to build on the site. But Godfrey was a man who had been warned not to come to America, not to plant cotton, and not to marry young Julia Scarborough—all of which he had done to great success. So build he did.

  He called his home The Woodland: twenty-four rooms constructed at ridiculous expense. Even in the nineteenth century, the mansion enjoyed hot and cold running water and flush toilets. A copper tank near the main chimney furnished hot water to bathrooms, and another tank in the bell tower provided cold water to house and gardens. The wine cellar was, reputedly, the most extensive in America. Doors and paneling were fashioned by London cabinetmakers. Marble mantels were brought from Italy.

  And when it was done, the fortune of the entire Barnsley clan had been tempered in hell.

  Godfrey’s infant son died in an upstairs bedroom; his beloved Julia succumbed to tuberculosis; their second daughter, Adelaide, passed away in the front room of the house. The eldest son, Howard, was killed by no less than Chinese pirates while on a mission for his father to find “amusing shrubberies” that would complete the family garden.

  The Civil War destroyed much of the house and grounds: Furnishings were burned and Italian statuary was smashed by Sherman’s troops, who were hoping to find hidden gold. All the china was broken; all the wine was drunk.

  When the war’s end brought no relief, Godfrey moved, by himself, to New Orleans in the hope of re-creating his fortune. He left son-in-law Captain Baltzelle and daughter, also a Julia, to manage the estate, but Baltzelle was killed in 1868 by a falling tree—a bit of inescapable irony, in that his plan to recoup the family fortune lay in timber sales.

  Godfrey died alone and penniless in New Orleans in 1873; his body was returned to Woodlands and buried there.

  In 1906, a tornado robbed the house of its roof.

  By the end of 1942, the house and gardens were entirely hidden under a green blanket of kudzu, forgotten by everyone save the many spirits who inhabited it.

  That, alas, was only the beginning of the curse—or at least the start of my part in it.

  Early in the twentieth century, Godfrey’s granddaughter had two sons. One grew up to become the nationally known heavyweight boxer who called himself K. O. Dugan. Unfortunately, he killed his brother, Harry, and was sent to prison for the rest of his life. The family had nothing. When his mother, last of the Barnsleys, died in 1942, the estate and its few remaining furnishings were to be sold at auction.

  My great-grandfather, Conner Devilin, was then reported to have been “strangely compelled” to travel from our home on Blue Mountain to the more western Cass County in order to bid on several items of the Barnsley estate that he said were of “immense personal value” to him. This made little sense to the rest of the family, as they had never heard of the Barnsley estate, or family.

  Conner had been born in Wales and apprenticed in Ireland before coming to America under dire circumstances of his own. He had narrowly escaped conviction and imprisonment for murder. He was a strong-willed man, and once he set his mind to a thing, the best course of action was, everyone knew, to stand well clear of him while he went about his task.

  So he traveled to the Barnsley auction, successfully bid on three items, returned home, locked the items in a trunk, and never spoke of them again. When he died at eighty-six, his possessions were sold, and some of the money was used to pay for my university education. Because of him, I was able to escape my home place at seventeen, gain my doctorate, and grow to an adult in an urban environment far from my own parents’ bizarre lives.

  Was it only a few days ago that I came to realize that the inheritance was the beginning of my part in the Barnsley cur
se? It seemed like a year.

  And the curse was apparently in fine working order: I was shaken from my reverie by the certain sound of footsteps rustling the leaves not far behind me.

  Someone was following me in the darkness.

  Two

  The events that brought me to the Barnsley mansion had begun only a few days earlier, the first Wednesday in September. It had been unseasonably hot; humid air that usually stayed in the lowlands had decided to vacation in the mountains. Perhaps it hoped to catch an early turning of the leaves. But true autumn was well over a month away; tourists were still in shorts and T-shirts.

  I was moving stones in my yard, under the illusion that my arrangement would be more pleasing than God’s. It was two o’clock in the afternoon; I was drenched in sweat; I had huge purple bruises on my left arm. When the phone rang, I considered it a reprieve. The boulder I’d been muscling toward two others went rolling, slowly away, back to where I’d gotten it, and I limped toward the house.

  My living room was dark. The sun outside was stretched in white sheets, blinding, from certain parts of the sky through breaks in the canopy of pines. For a moment as I went through the front door, I was blind. In retrospect, it was a clear omen, but that kind of cold warning goes unheeded in unseasonable heat.

  I managed my way to the kitchen phone. The man on the other end began speaking before I could say hello.

  “Is that Dr. Devilin?”

  “It is.”

  “My name is Carl Shultz.” He waited. “Do you know me?”

  I took in a slow breath. Often a former student or someone else I had known in Atlanta would call me, and I hardly ever wanted to have the rest of the conversation. A student might be looking for a job recommendation; someone from the university might be calling from the fund-raising campaign: “As a former faculty member, your donation would…,” which is about as far as they’d get before I’d say something like “Your university closed down my department and sent me home, so I’m not entirely disposed to any sort of donation, thanks.”

  And to make matters worse, the man on the phone had a Yankee accent.

  “I don’t think so,” I said hesitantly.

  “Oh well.” He offered a philosophical sigh. “It was really too much to hope for.”

  “What was?”

  “My father,” he said, as if that answered my question, “same name, bought this thing from someone up there in the mountains, and it’s old and sort of folky in the Joseph Campbell sense. Don’t you just love Joseph Campbell? I saw him on that television show. Anyway, I called around, and apparently you’re the man who knows. So I thought maybe you’d tell me the name of the person he bought it from, or, if not, at least, I mean, you’d know what the hell it is. And second, of course how much is it worth. You understand. Mostly for insurance purposes.”

  I took a second to piece together his jagged diction.

  “You have a piece of folk art from Blue Mountain?”

  “I think it’s older than that. I mean, and it’s not art as I would call it. It’s a coin, really. Or a medallion. They said at the university that you were the guy—”

  “What’s it made of, do you know?”

  “Silver. Old silver. It’s not dated, but the guy at this jewelry store said it was pure and, as I was saying: old.”

  “And someone in Blue Mountain sold it to your father?”

  Despite my best efforts, curiosity’s ugly pate reared up.

  “About fifteen or twenty years ago. I believe it was a woman. Who sold it.”

  I stared out the kitchen window. I could actually see waves of heat rising from the granite stone I’d let roll away in the yard.

  The primary reason I was engaged in such a useless occupation was hard to admit: I was bored. If Lucinda had been in town, of course, I’d have been at her house. She might have had me moving stones in her garden, but it would have seemed a more valuable enterprise. Solitary endeavor will always seem less productive than work contrived by two. Under most circumstances in my life, in fact, I would never have admitted idle curiosity, but it was the first part of September: I was hot, a bit lonely, and intellectually dehydrated. What harm could possibly come from asking a few innocent questions?

  “Can you describe the images on the coin?” I sighed.

  “It’s some guy,” he ventured. “I guess he’s an angel or a saint—he has one of those halos around his head that looks like he has a big dinner plate glued to the back of his skull. You know the kind?”

  “Sort of. Is he standing, sitting?”

  “He seems to be leaning over a…kind of a bubbling spring, or a well, maybe.”

  “And the other side.”

  “A very ornate letter B. Nothing else.”

  Who in my little town would have owned such a thing? It certainly wasn’t a product of the Georgian Appalachians. In the first place, most of the people who had come to settle in the hills around my home had been dogged Protestants. And they would have had precious little silver of any kind.

  I had a brief thrilling thought that Mr. Shultz might have something in his possession that one of our families had brought to America from the old country.

  Settlement patterns in Colonial Georgia were fairly easy to trace: most well-born Englishmen settled on the coast or in the lowlands; Scots and the Irish—a few Welshmen, came to the hills.

  There was a time when I might have been able to trace any family in Blue Mountain back to their medieval clans in, say, Scotland, generation by generation. And the families here would still have songs and stories and ideas that were almost as old as those roots. In the twenty-first century, alas, most evidence of that sort was gone, gone for good. Plywood spec houses stood empty and waiting where two-hundred-year-old log homes once sat. Pop music blared from car radios in place of ancient fiddle tunes on the air.

  If Mr. Shultz had somehow acquired anything with a genuine history, it would certainly be worth my time to investigate. Maybe I could even get a nice article out of it.

  “Well, this might be interesting, Mr. Shultz,” I said slowly, “but of course I’d have to see it.”

  “Oh my God, I’m really relieved to hear you say that,” he shot back quickly, then lowered his voice as if he were sharing a secret. “Some of the people at the university said you’d be too grouchy to help me. Did I tell you I called the university to ask them about this?”

  “They used the word grouchy?”

  “I’d rather not say the exact word that was used,” he hastened on; “the point is that I was led to believe you wouldn’t care to help me.”

  I looked out the window again. I thought about going back into that heat. I thought about the reasons I was rolling boulders around like Sisyphus. My fiancée, Lucinda—and I was still getting used to that terminology—was in California. She wouldn’t be back until the end of the month. My best friend, Skidmore Needle, the town sheriff, was in Birmingham, engrossed in a computer seminar that would revolutionize the crime-fighting world, or so his postcard had told me. I had absolutely nothing to do, no one to talk with, and there I was, about to turn down the only conceivable bit of interesting activity for the foreseeable future.

  Sometimes any activity at all is better than inertia.

  I was suddenly painfully aware of how I can crust over if I’m not doing anything. I get an angst roughly the size of Canada tangled in my aura. I wake up at three in the morning with nameless dread and stay awake until first light, then complain to myself about how tired I am by two in the afternoon. I worry about everything, and have vague neck pains that are probably a harbinger of cancer. I eat terrible food, and my stomach declares war on what little well-being I have left. Nothing is right. I can’t do anything well. I pore over past foibles endlessly, emphasizing foul deeds; no accomplishment seems significant, no merit justified. Then nothing is any fun: Food is tasteless, music lifeless; every joy is gone.

  “Mr. Shultz?” I croaked into the phone. “Why don’t you bring your coin up here. I can s
ee it firsthand and you and I can make some inquiries together, see if we can’t find you some answers.”

  “You can’t come to Atlanta?”

  “Your father got the coin from up here. Here’s where the answers are. And, P.S., you called me—so you have to come up here, right?”

  “Right,” he mused. “But I don’t know.”

  It sounded for a moment as if he were consulting someone else in the room, mumbling with his hand over the receiver.

  “Do you want to send it to me through the mail?” I prodded.

  “God no.”

  “Well, I have to see it somehow, if you want me to try and tell you what it is.”

  He gave out a terrifically heavy sigh. “I could take a long weekend.”

  “There you are. And to make things easier, I’ll get in touch with a friend of mine in Atlanta and he’ll drive you up. You’ll both stay at my place, we’ll have an adventure, and you’ll be back in Atlanta before you can say ‘I can’t believe I wasted all that time in the mountains.’”

  “Lovely,” he sneered. “You realize that if I hadn’t called you, I’d think this was a con.”

  “The person you’ll be traveling with is a bona fide college professor with an English accent and everything,” I assured him. “Check him out, ask around all you like.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Dr. Andrews, at my university.”

  “He doesn’t have to teach?”

  “He’s on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule. He’ll take tomorrow off and make a long weekend out of it.”

  “I don’t know.” Shultz had taken his mouth away from the phone again, consulting the other person there with him.

  “Well”—I yawned—“decide soon. This is a whim on my part, and if you call back tomorrow, I’ll probably have changed my mind again. I may even deny that I invited you at all.”