Silence for the Dead(60)

“Knew what?” I said.

“That something had happened to her. If Anna could have written me, if she was physically capable of it, she would have. The fact had to be that she couldn’t write me.”

Jack pushed himself back up into a sitting position, drawing up his knees again. “All right. I’ll admit that’s strange. What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.” Now Maisey’s voice conveyed real anguish. “Her last letters hadn’t concerned me overmuch at first, but when I reread them, they’re so horribly downcast and gloomy, as if something was wrong. Papa wrote me that the Gersbachs had left, but I heard that no one had seen the trucks move out.” She stopped, went on. “He said they were opening a hospital here. I was working in London by then—the war was over. I took a few days’ leave and came back to see for myself. There it was, clear as day: a hospital moved into Portis House. I couldn’t believe it. Everyone thought it curious, but the Gersbachs had been standoffish, even snobs. They kept to themselves; they never made friends. Half the town thought they must be German. No one much cared what had happened to them. Except me. Anna was my friend, my true friend. Something had happened to her. Something horrible.”

Maisey was close to tears. I remembered the face in the locket. That must have been Anna, a keepsake given to her friend. I wondered what it felt like to have a friend like that, a girl who was like a sister. It must be wonderful. And what would I do if I had such a friend and she disappeared? The answer was obvious. “So you applied for a job at Portis House,” I said, “to find her.”

Maisey nodded. “Matron took me on. I resigned my position in London, and Papa sent for my things. I told Papa the war was over, the men were coming home, and someone had to help the shell-shocked ones.”

“He didn’t want you looking into Anna’s disappearance,” Jack said.

“No. We fought over it. He said it was over, the Gersbachs had left somehow, Anna had forgotten about me, and that was all. She was just a girl, and girls forget. He thinks girls forget their best friends.” I’d never had a friend like Anna, but even I knew that was wrong. “So I pretended I’d let it go for a while, and then I told him I wanted to work at Portis House. He never suspected. He was just happy I wanted to work somewhere close to home.”

I leaned forward on the bench. “Maisey, have you heard anything about ghosts at Portis House? Anything at all?”

Her eyes widened. “Never,” she said. “Not until I started working there. I had spent many nights at Portis House, you understand. It wasn’t haunted. We never even joked about it. But after I came back . . .” She looked down at her lap, where she twisted her gloved hands together. “The staff talks, you know,” she said. “And the house had changed. They’d closed off the west wing. Mr. Gersbach’s library was an isolation cell. The gardens were overgrown. The entire house is—it’s rotting in some weird way. It was never like that before. It was a new house. There was never as much as a scratch in the paint when I stayed there. Now the plaster is falling from the ceiling in the west wing. And the feeling is different. As if there’s something wrong. I asked about the Gersbachs—I tried to be subtle—but no one knew anything. And then Matron put me on night shift . . .”

“What did you see?” I asked.

“There were sounds in the lav,” Maisey answered. “There was something awful about it; I didn’t even want to go in. I started thinking about Anna, wondering how she would feel if she saw her home like this, if she were here to see it being used as a madhouse, falling apart, a place of so much misery and suffering. And I started imagining that Anna really still was there, in the house somewhere, watching me.”

She stopped and dashed at the tears that had started in her eyes, then continued. “It started to feel real, as if she was trying to tell me something. I thought if she was haunting the place, it meant something terrible had happened to her, something unthinkable, and now she couldn’t rest. Then Mr. Childress had that awful nightmare, he started screaming, and—” She pressed her hand to her mouth again. “I know he didn’t mean it, but it was so terrifying. And on top of everything else I was thinking, I didn’t know what to do. So I lost my nerve. I packed a bag and got on my bicycle and went home.”

I leaned back on my bench, my shoulders sagging. She hadn’t actually seen the ghosts, then. “That was two weeks ago,” I said.

“Yes.” She sighed. “I’ve recovered now, and I’ve had time to think about it. I realize my imagination got away from me, and I’m no further along than when I started. But when you wrote me, I thought . . .”

“You thought Kitty could continue the investigation,” Jack said.

Maisey blinked. She seemed surprised he’d spoken, but then I realized she’d noticed the use of my first name. “I don’t know. I just know that nothing has been answered, and now I’ve gone, and perhaps—perhaps if you heard anything, if you found any answers, you could tell me. Perhaps they got sick? All of them?” She looked at me with pathetic hope in her eyes. “It could have happened. But then, who buried them? If Anna is dead, I want to pay my respects to her grave.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard that Mr. Gersbach dismissed all the servants.”