A Widow's Curse Read online

  I really couldn’t say why I had insisted on Shultz’s visit, but part of the thinking, obviously, was that it gave me an excuse to call Andrews.

  Dr. Winton Andrews, Shakespeare scholar at my ex-university, was the last remaining good friend I had from my academic life. In fact, we had only recently returned from being in London together. He had directed a strange new version of The Winter’s Tale, and for some reason he’d hired me to help him with the music for the production. He’d wanted authentic reproductions of folk music from Shakespeare’s time instead of courtly, composed music—though that would have been easier to come by. I’d spent weeks in research, tracing song types, mostly ballads, back as far as I could, then inferring the rest; deciding on the perfect period instruments for the job; jotting down the most feasible melodies. I’d done most of the work at home, only spent a week in London, but I was able to see the opening-night production. It was quite impressive, and, apparently, a hit. But Andrews, of course, had been preoccupied with his work and we really hadn’t seen each other in almost a year, not to relax and catch up—or drink heavily. So having him squire Shultz up to my place in Blue Mountain seemed a perfect plan all around.

  After Shultz agreed to the trip, I arranged for him to meet Andrews at the university. I called and explained the situation to Andrews in detail, and asked him to take the scenic route up to my little town—which was also the slower way by about two hours. I thought it would put Shultz in the right mood, get him used to the pace of the mountains.

  I did my part, first doing a bit of cursory research so I would have something to say to Shultz when he arrived and then, the rest of the day, dusting and airing out the bedrooms upstairs in my home, a more haunted enterprise.

  Growing up, the three of us in my family had lived out our lives in separate bedrooms. Mine was a corner room, always so crammed with books that my father, angrily, changed all four walls into floor-to-ceiling bookshelves one day when I was at school.

  “Fill all that up!” he’d growled.

  I had, in about a week. There was only room for a double bed, an antique secretary that had belonged to my great-grandfather Conner, and a huge overstuffed armchair in the corner between two windows. Best of all, I had my own small bathroom in the other corner, more a concession to my father’s desire for privacy than a convenience for me, but a delight nevertheless.

  The oak tree outside had made a perfect ladder when I was younger, and I’d left the house by window and tree more often than I had through the front door.

  My father’s room, where Andrews often stayed, was a bit more spacious: a double bed there, too, but less clutter. It was across the hall from mine, and made the opposite upstairs corner of the house. The windows faced east, and morning light poured in after the autumn leaves fell every year. Pictures of family members crowded the walls, but the only other stick of furniture in the room was a trunk the size of a casket: all the tricks from my father’s magic show stuffed into a box. He had earned his living with the things in that trunk, enough to keep a wife and strange child above the poverty level, clothed and fed most of the time.

  When I was young and he was gone, I would often open that trunk and try to figure out what trick he could get out of, say, a red bandanna, a hoop made of copper, and a tiny dagger. Those particular items were in a wooden box marked ESCAPADE. I never learned what trick they were used for. Some things were less fascinating to a boy of eleven: an old pair of shoes, a packet of musty letters from strangers, a locked pair of handcuffs without a key.

  Nearly everything in the trunk was absolutely baffling—just like my father. He might let a person see what was inside the box, but when he did, it proved to be as much of a mystery as the closed box had been. He even explained his tricks sometimes, but in such a way as to make them more astounding, more impossible to comprehend.

  I investigated those mysteries in my father for two decades before I gave up, surrendering to the possibility that there was no explanation—or maybe that there was nothing there at all.

  My mother’s room, on the same side of the hall as my father’s, where Shultz would stay, was the most haunted of the three. A single wrought-iron bed stood in the exact center of the room. The walls were covered with strange tapestries she’d said were from her family in “the old country,” though in my presence, she had never been specific about which country that had been. The tapestries were faded. Some were woodland scenes; some might have been Bible stories. By the time I was interested enough to look at them closely, they had mostly faded beyond deciphering.

  My mother had often kept fresh flowers on the sill of her only window—a box seat. By that window there was a worn leather chair, a floor lamp, and a footstool. As far as I could tell, they had never been touched, the chair unoccupied, the lamp never turned on.

  The wooden floor was nearly covered by a thick Oriental rug, mostly golds and greens. The room was always dark and quiet, and had never been in the kind of disarray found in my bedroom. This was not because my mother had been more fastidious than I. Her bedroom had always been clean because she’d rarely stayed there. She’d usually stayed in someone else’s bedroom, in someone else’s home—first one, then another. Unlike most ghostly rooms, that room was haunted more by her absence than by the presence of any spirit.

  So cleaning up the spare bedrooms was a jolly affair, as usual.

  Summer air made the whole house musty, and there didn’t seem to be relief in sight. Though I had conceded to most modern conveniences over the years, my cabin did not have air conditioning. With fans and open windows, the house might be cooled to a bearable level in the evening. To ensure greater comfort for my guests, I drove all the way to Pine City for new window fans to put in each bedroom. The dust churned up by these fans actually made the air in the house look foggy, even when I opened the windows upstairs and down.

  There was little need to clean or even straighten up the first floor of my little cabin in the sky. I always kept it neat as a pin, in the great southern tradition: As long as the living room is clean for unexpected company, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the house looks like. Alas, for me, the living room and the dining room, as well as the parlor and the kitchen, were all basically one big room. Bronzed oak beams framed the room. A larger-than-normal galley kitchen lay to the right as you came in the front door. A cast-iron stove had been set into the stone hearth to the left by a large picture window when I was a boy. Quilts on the walls suggested a stained-glass brightness; the staircase in the far corner led up to the bedrooms.

  I gave the downstairs a quick inspection, then spent the rest of the day in research, hoping to be prepared for what Shultz was bringing me.

  Around sunset, shortly after I’d remembered to shower and get into a nice black T-shirt and jeans, I heard a car pull up in the front yard. Two men emerged, both talking nearly at the same time, and loudly.

  “Pure shite!” Andrews bellowed. “In a bucket!”

  “You can say that all you want,” the other man, presumably Shultz, answered pleasantly, “but I read the book and you have to at least acknowledge that some people in the world agree with me. I mean, I didn’t make up this crap, right?”

  I threw open my screen door and attacked the front steps.

  “This moron,” Andrews moaned to me before I could say anything, “thinks that Bacon wrote Shakespeare because somewhere one of the sonnets secretly spells out the word pyg—with a y!”

  Andrews was dressed in his customarily inappropriate mountain-visiting costume: cutoff shorts, loud Hawaiian shirt, and tennis shoes.

  “Pig with a y?” I was completely in the dark.

  “Because where do you get bacon?” Andrews shouted.

  Light dawned.

  “From a pig.” I turned to Shultz. “And you think…”

  “I don’t think anything,” replied Shultz, correcting me. “I was just telling Dr. Know-It-All that the theory was, in fact, advanced by the Bacon family, and massively researched.”


  “Dr. Know-It-All,” I said calmly, “least loved of the James Bond movies.”

  “You were right,” Shultz said to Andrews, warming. “He does look a little like an albino.”

  Shultz had decided on the more ordinary flannel shirt, chinos, and hiking boots, expecting it to be colder than it was. His red hair was desperately receded and he was a bit on the heavy side, in his midfifties.

  “Except for the eyes,” Andrews pointed out. “He doesn’t have albino eyes.”

  “You have to be Dr. Devilin,” Shultz said, extending his hand to me.

  “I suppose I have to be. I offered my hand, as well.

  “And I must be…going to the bathroom,” Andrews said, breezing by me, blond hair flying backward. “Did you know that the so-called scenic route to your little blue heaven is neither scenic nor much of a route, and takes almost twice as long as the way I usually go? I have to pee like a pistol.”

  And he disappeared into my house, leaving Shultz and me to complete our hand-shaking moment in silence.

  “So,” I offered at last, “need help with your bags?”

  “Nope. Only got the one.” He reached into the car. “I discovered once, on a trip to Europe, actually, that you generally wear the same pair of pants for, like, a week before changing. Two or three shirts that work with one jacket, two pair of shoes, enough clean underwear and socks, and everything I need for a month’s vacation fits into this one light item.”

  He held up a battered leather travel bag only about twice the size of an old-fashioned satchel briefcase. The presentation came with a smile.

  “Come on in, then,” I said, and turned toward the house.

  “Nice place,” he told me, his voice softer. “Nice view.”

  “I grew up here” was all I could say.

  Shultz followed behind me up the porch steps. The living room was already dark, so I went around turning on all the lights while Shultz stood in the doorway, uncertain what to do. We could both hear Andrews knocking around upstairs.

  “Let me show you your room,” I said suddenly, finally realizing that Shultz was waiting for me. “It’s up here.” I indicated the steps with a nod of my head.

  “After you,” he said cheerily. “I don’t know where I’m going.”

  “Right.” I almost jumped to the steps. “This way, then.”

  We were up the steps before Andrews was out of the bathroom. I stood to one side of the doorway to my mother’s room. Shultz walked through it into the room.

  Which was his mythological mistake, in fact: When you have a choice, you should never cross a threshold into the other world.

  “Wow.” He set his suitcase down. “Spooky room.”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked quietly.

  He turned my way.

  “I’m just the tiniest little bit psychic.” He grinned. “Or so I’ve been told.”

  “And?”

  “This room belonged to a woman.” He looked around. “A sad person. A nun maybe.”

  I almost choked.

  “It was my mother’s room,” I hastened to tell him.

  I omitted the rest of the story, that my mother had slept with half the available men in the county when I was a child—and possibly more than half of the unavailable ones.

  “So I was right.” Shultz nodded triumphantly. “A woman.”

  I looked around at the flowery bedspread, the ornate bed, the slope of the chair by the window. A seven-year-old might have guessed that the room had belonged to a woman.

  “You and Andrews share a bath, I’m afraid,” I went on. “Across the hall, just there.” I pointed.

  “Great.” Shultz lowered his voice. “Now, Andrews mentioned something about a certain apple brandy. Went on and on about it. That’s just the sort of thing that can take the sting out of a long trail ride.”

  “Don’t start without me!” Andrews called, coming out of the bathroom.

  “We could have a tiny libation now, if you like,” I admitted, “but it’s better after dinner.”

  “You’re not going to believe this brandy,” Andrews gushed from the hall. “Food of the gods.”

  “So dinner, you say,” Shultz said uneasily. “It’s not some—sorry, but it’s not, like, hog belly and rutabagas or something, is it?”

  “We could have that if you prefer,” I told him, turning to go downstairs, “but what I have prepared is a nice peach-glazed duck breast over grilled chipotle polenta. We’ll start with morels in lemon cream sauce, of course, and then move on to roasted acorn squash soup, finishing with a very thin apple tart.”

  “Which goes perfectly with the aforementioned brandy,” Andrews chimed in.

  “Am I dead?” Shultz said immediately.

  “What?” Andrews shot back.

  “Do you have any idea how much I love morels in cream sauce? And duck? It’s my favorite food. I never in my wildest—am I dead?”

  “Blue Mountain isn’t heaven,” I assured him over my shoulder, going down the stairs.

  Behind me I could hear Andrews tell Shultz, “Reserve judgment on that until after your third brandy.”

  By the time I poured the third brandy, we had discovered that among the three of us, we knew everything there was to know. We were very happy with ourselves concerning our scope of knowledge. The homemade apple brandy, a secret family recipe, was just that good.

  We were sitting on the front porch. The air had cooled nicely. The moon was up, dusting powdery white through all the impossible breaks and cracks in the black branches above us. The moonlight was soft but visible, even through the buttery interference of the five oil lamps I’d lighted and set on the porch.

  Shultz was slumped down in his rocking chair.

  “Boys,” he said grandly, lifting his glass in our general direction, “the only thing better than making great new friends is spending time with the old ones. Here’s to my experience of the first tonight, and my hope for the second in the not-to-distant future.”

  “Absolutely,” Andrews agreed.

  Andrews was sitting on the steps, shoes off, enjoying being cold.

  I set my brandy down on the floor of the porch.

  “But now it’s time,” I said, sobering just a little, “for a first look at the reason for our little gathering.”

  “Huh?” Shultz said, genuinely confused.

  “Let’s have a look at the coin,” I urged him.

  “Oh yeah. God.”

  He fished in his pants pocket, produced a manila envelope the size of a business card.

  “You don’t know the name of the person from whom your father bought the coin?” Andrews sipped.

  “Nope.”

  “Do you know how much he paid?” Andrews went on.

  “I believe he paid five thousand dollars,” Shultz bragged, “which, twenty years ago, was a hefty sum for a dinky coin.”

  “Especially to someone here in Blue Mountain,” I said.

  “You’re sure it wasn’t closer to five hundred?” Andrews squinted. “You know how time can exaggerate things like this.”

  “I know,” Shultz agreed heartily. “But the insurance company who, well, insures it? They have in their files or something that it was purchased for five thousand dollars. I mean, I guess the old man might have been trying to pull a fast one—it wouldn’t be entirely out of character for the guy—but wouldn’t somebody at the insurance company have actually looked at the thing? I mean, would they just take his word?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “But it does seem like quite a bit of money.”

  “Well”—he lowered his voice again—“a story goes with it.”

  Often that sentence makes the difference between an inconsequential find and a significant artifact.

  “Tell us the story,” I said steadily.

  A sudden gust of wind shifted grass outside, shook leaves, and the sheen of white on the granite rocks seemed to shiver a moment, hover just above the surface. It was a phenomenon I had heard called “the gh
ost dance.” I didn’t know the origin of the phrase, but it meant an early autumn.

  “Apparently, this woman,” Shultz began, unaware of the climate demon in my yard, “the one who sold the gizmo to my father? She was desperate.”

  “In what way?”

  “Her husband had just died, and she was in dire economic circumstances. Dad always said she had the look of a, you know, witchy woman, like the song?”

  “I don’t know what song you mean—” I sighed “—but did your father discuss this business often?”

  “Why do you ask that?” He was only curious.

  “The phrase ‘Dad always said’ would seem to indicate a certain frequency.”

  “Say, that’s pretty good. You should be a detective.”

  “So the story…,” I encouraged.

  “Right. Dad said the woman was distraught. Then she got out the coin thingy, and she said it was very old, and it would bring him good luck. She said it was a talisman. I mean, who uses that word?”

  “Did it work?”

  “What?”

  “Did the coin bring your father good luck?” I was mostly asking just to vex the man. “Or not?”

  “He thought it did,” Shultz said, not the least bit disturbed. “And he wasn’t a particularly superstitious man.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Go on,” I prompted after what seemed like five minutes.

  “What ‘go on’? That’s it. I thought you were thinking.”

  “That’s the story?” I didn’t bother to keep the irritation out of my voice.

  “Yes.”

  “No,” Andrews corrected him. “A story is: ‘And he always kept the coin in his pocket, and that was about the time he began to amass his great fortune.’ Or: ‘He was looking at the coin in a restaurant one day, not long after he bought it, and it attracted the eye of a strange woman. And today that woman is my mother.’ That sort of thing.”

  “Yeah,” Shultz admitted, “that kind of thing would be a great story. But Dad was already rich when he bought the coin. And my mother was no miracle, I can tell you that. I assume you’re familiar with the term gold digger.”