Jacaranda (The Clockwork Century 6)

“I got it. Can I see her now?”

The nun nodded, despite the uncertain glances cast her way. “You can see her, Tim. I’ve laid her out, and she’s lovely. Come and pay your last respects, and leave your gift beside her.”

He opened his jacket to reveal a ragdoll that had been much beloved in some years past. “It was hers,” he told them. “She let me keep it, for night time. I don’t need it anymore.”

Inside Sarah’s room, the young woman was no longer dangling—but lying on the bed, dressed in something clean with a very high neck. Her hands were folded across her belly. Tim stared at her, but did not appear particularly grieved. Though that wasn’t fair, or so the padre told himself.

Whatever went on in the boy’s mind, it stayed there. That was all.

Tim placed the doll beside his cousin’s shoulder, leaving it staring at the ceiling from which she’d had hung. It was not a pretty doll, and its face was stitched from black thread—giving it an expression that should not have been very comforting at night; but it was Sarah’s again, and that’s what mattered to the young man now. He looked satisfied, at least.

The Ranger asked him, “Who told you Sarah died?”

“Jack told me.”

The nun frowned. “Jack?”

“Jack always knows. He always tells me.”

Juan Rios felt a sinking in his stomach, because Sarah had been wrong. The hotel did speak to her cousin, innocent or not. “You mean Jacaranda.”

Tim nodded. “It talks.”

“To you?”

He shrugged, and gave his cousin another long look before turning and walking away. “It just talks. It said that Sarah broke her promise. It said she left me alone.”

Ranger Korman asked all the hotel guests the same question, inspired by Violetta’s hastily whispered testimony: “When you think of the Jacaranda, and why you’ve come here, and why you stay here…what memory springs to mind? Was there something you did? Some vow you broke?”

The padre was unsettled by the answers, each of them recorded in the Ranger’s small notebook. Horatio Korman’s pencil scratched across the paper, testimony after testimony.

A pattern emerged.

But there was always a pattern, wasn’t there? When you stepped back far enough, when you were no longer standing at the center? Except this was still the center. This was still the Jacaranda Hotel, and there was still a storm drawing ever-nearer to the island—and soon they’d be at the center of that, too. With every interview, every statement, it felt more and more like standing inside a monster’s gaping mouth…ever on the verge of closing.

***

Friendly, heavyset William Brewer’s face went pale and his eyes grew dark when he spoke of his mentor, Professor Hanson. Together they had discovered some wondrous new species of flower, with seeds that showed immense promise against certain respiratory diseases—as had long been rumored among the Comanche. (Who had surely known of it for a thousand years, and found the “discovery” something of an annoyance, or so the padre was rather certain).

There were papers to be written, studies to be undertaken, seminars to be held…and credit to be assigned. The two men quarreled, but resolved their differences with a formal vow to share and share alike all profits and proceeds that might come of their work.

But. Even so.

At the center of the botanist’s confession was a field survey in the Texas panhandle, and a nighttime encounter with a roaming victim of the sap-plague—one of the last to wander undead, to be sure (after all these years). William Brewer could have warned his elderly companion. He might have helped him escape or come to his defense, but when the shambling revenant stumbled upon the professor’s tent, the botanist did none of those things. And now the credit and the profit from the flowering thistle (Cirsium brewsterae) belonged to William, and now he had come to the Jacaranda.

And every night when the wind scraped its nails against his window, and the floorboards creaked as if he were not lying in bed alone, he thought of Professor Hanson roaming the north Texas wastelands, mindless and hungry, with nothing at all behind his dry and withered eyes to suggest a brilliant scientist, a curious mind, or the co-founder of an astonishing new medicine that might cure consumption.

A chat with the newlywed Andersons revealed a story with a terrible center too—one hinted at by Constance Fields…an accusation breathed with some of her very last words.

Yes, there’d been a nephew—a boy orphaned when his mother died in childbirth, for his father had died in a ridiculous hunting accident, some years before. “Keep him for me,” his mother pleaded, as she bled to death in the fine feather bed. “Promise me you’ll raise him, and love him, and guard his fortune like it was your own.”

Mr. Anderson had done his level best but there was so much money and no, the money and the boy were not his own; and the boy was sickly, and unhappy—difficult enough to like, much less love in a fatherly fashion. But the child enjoyed swimming in the tide, when it came high and close to the Strand. He liked the feeling of the sand and the salt, and on the rare occasions that he smiled, he did so on the beach.

It was Mrs. Anderson, who’d been left in charge…back before she was Mrs. Anderson, when she was only an ambitious governess. She wanted a marriage but not without the money, and there was a child in the way of both these things. A weak one, frail and in need of constant supervision. It was a simple matter to look away. A simple thing, to lose track of him. Easy as pie, finding him floating against the pier, having exhausted himself in the waves. Easy as inheriting a fortune.

Easy as a wedding. Easy as a funeral.

Lean, clever Frederick Vaughn denied any and all knowledge of any curse, any deaths, any unnatural draw, or anything he might have done to find