he had blamed the mill, insisting that the mill itself had somehow claimed their son’s life.
Then, in the last few years of his life, when his mind had begun to fail as rapidly as his body, he had become fixated on a box of old records from the last days of the mill’s operations.
He had kept them in a metal box in the closet, and as he drew closer and closer to death, he had spent more and more time poring over them, and mumbling about the evil in the mill.
She took the metal box off the closet shelf now, and went to sit in her favorite chair by the window. Opening the box, she carefully removed the old journals with which it was filled. The pages were yellowed with age and threatened to crumble in her fingers. Slowly, she began reading.
Strange records of odd things happening at the mill.
Horrible things that seemed, on a bright sunny morning like today, far too terrible to believe.
And Abigail didn’t believe, despite her husband’s fanatic ravings. She turned the pages one by one, shaking her head sadly as she thought of the manner in which Conrad had wasted his life because of a few lines in an ancient journal.
Even on the day he died, he had demanded that she bring him the box, then, propped up in his bed, he had pored over the journals for the last time, his hands trembling as he fingered the pages, muttering to himself as he deciphered the words once more. Abigail had watched him, knowing that his mind was no longer in the present, that he had taken himself to another era. Finally, late in the afternoon, his breathing had suddenly changed, and the hollow rattles of death had gripped him as his worn-out heart began its last spasmodic flutterings.
Abigail had pried his fingers loose from the journals, but even as she put them back in the box and carried the box itself back to the closet, Conrad had reached out for them, as if by grasping the past one last time he could stave off death and prolong the final moment.
When she had returned to his bed, he had struggled to speak, his words barely audible as they bubbled through the fluids gathering in his lungs.
“She’s there,” he’d gasped at last. “She’s still there, and she hates us all.… Keep her there, Abigail. Keep her there for me.…”
And then, clutching at her hand, he’d died.
Abigail had pondered his last words since then, but only now, as she sat fingering the crumbling documents, did she decide that whatever he had been trying to say, the words had been nothing more than the fragmented ramblings of a dying man.
Now Abigail put the journals back in the box, closed and locked it, and returned it to its place on her husband’s closet shelf. Then she went to the window, and gazed out across Westover, as she had so many times before. At the other side of the town, silent and forbidding, lay the ancient hulk of the long-abandoned mill.
When she and Phillip had finished with it, though, it would once again be the proudest building in Westover.
Nothing and no one would stop them.
Neither Conrad’s insane superstitions, nor Carolyn’s inane prattling, would ever convince her that the mill was anything but an ordinary building.
And it was there—had always been there—to make money for the Sturgesses.
Certainly there was nothing either shameful or evil in that.
Hannah eyed Tracy suspiciously.
“Isn’t it a little late to be switching a party?”
Tracy sighed dramatically, and did her best to look as upset by the whole thing as Hannah seemed to be.
“Well, of course it is,” she said. “But I can’t have my party without Alison Babcock, and she won’t be able to come on Sunday! So we’ll just have to have it on Saturday, instead.”
“What about the other kids? What if they can’t come on Saturday?”
“They can,” Tracy lied smoothly. “I’ve already talked to them, and they can all come on Saturday. I don’t see why you want to make such a big deal about it.”
Hannah’s brows arched skeptically. “And just when did you talk to Miss Alison? The phone hasn’t rung here all morning.”
Tracy’s eyes narrowed, and glinted dangerously. Who did Hannah think she was, anyway? Didn’t she know she was just a servant? “I called her. We were talking about something else, and she remembered. So I’ve been calling all the other kids ever since. Okay?”