The Last to See Me Read online

  Also by the Author

  The Deadwood Beetle

  The Floodmakers

  The Medusa Tree

  Copyright © 2017 by M Dressler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2067-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2068-8

  Printed in the United States of America.

  For the spirits at my side,

  Alison and Chelsey

  Never make peace with the thing that’s trying to kill you.

  1

  He’s come to clean me out.

  It’s as simple as that.

  He’s come to scrape me clean, like a strand of meat clinging to a mussel’s shell.

  He wants to put me down in Evergreen, in the tangled graveyard set aside for lost souls. This hunter, he hopes to put me down there with the poorest of the poor, the forgotten, the graves no one tends to, their crooked stones leaning aft, as if taken aback by how far injustice can go, even after death. In that cemetery, hard by St. Clements Church, the animals pile insult on injury. They burrow down toward the collapsing coffins, our boxes softened underground, and bring up bits of bone and tats of lace. And the dead can do nothing about it, their hands and feet tied.

  But what ghost has ever asked to be gnawed and stripped? Who wants to lie down in a cold bed she didn’t choose or make? Who wants their bones rolled into a hole, like dice weighted to land on only one number, and always the worst?

  Now, let’s say you want to change the odds. Let’s say you refuse to be put down in a pauper’s grave. What do you do?

  You fight.

  It helps to be trouble. Troublesome. Irish stubborn. A mighty will—that’s the ticket. It takes will not to be what everyone expects you to be. It takes heart not to go where they tell you to go. Especially here, along the rugged north coast, in this place where the tides would as soon see you dragged under as drawing breath.

  In the seaweed that washes up on my village’s cove, you’ll find all sorts of things the tide has dragged along with it: bobbing globes of buoys, ruined fishing line, plastic grocery bags choked with sand. Things that can’t fight back. Look up from the beach, craning your neck toward the top of our crumbling cliffs, and you’ll see the village of Benito itself, ignoring the flotsam below, dressed in its Sunday best, even on the blackest days. For we do have black days here, even in this most beautiful part of California.

  In winter, our sky grows so heavy it’s like a box lined with padded silk closing down on you. The fog stifles. The foghorns moan. The waves turn to claws on the black rocks, and the air smells of cold, wet lead.

  In summertime, it’s better. That’s when the tourists come up in their bright, sparkling cars and their smart summer clothes, and they marvel at the view from our peninsula, and lick at expensive toffees and taffies, and don’t even guess that what they might be tasting, on their tongues, in the air, isn’t only summer’s seasoning but the ashes of all the brave women and men who once lived here, as I did, before each life turned to salt.

  It’s funny, isn’t it, how the people who eat up the most in this world often don’t taste what it is they’ve dined on? How those who have the means to eat whatever they like are always hungry for more, always more, while the truly famished among us sweep the floors and scrub the dishes and leave the village at night to sleep in places where the rooms are smaller, away from the water and the views, in the woods, in simple beds behind doors as thin as paper, the best wood having been cut for somebody else—for Augustus Lambry, and his like.

  When the loggers first came here, a hundred and fifty years ago and more, they were poor—but their will was mighty. They might have worked for men like Lambry who slept in clean, white sheets, but the trees those lumbermen felled were their own business, their own life and death at the edge of the void, and they cut only the biggest, loftiest trunks and shoved and dynamited them downriver, toward the mills and the sea. In those days, Benito’s cove was a half-moon’s sweep of deep water, deeper than it is now, with cypress trees perched thick as crows on the cliffs, except for where a track was cleared to make way for the Lambry logging chutes. Even after the boardinghouses and saloons started going up—once there were so many loggers, a town had to be built to manage them—those trees, and the mounds of salt grass covering the headlands, stayed free and wild. Then, in time, the Main Street Hotel sprang to life, where maids who washed and ironed and cooked could hope to stay clear of grabby sailors; and the peak-roofed storefronts all along Albion Street; and St. Clements Church, its white steeple driving away the last of the Indians; and finally the temple the Chinamen built, with its roofs curled like red shoes left out in the sun. And closer in, on the first hill after the fine houses of the merchants, Evergreen Cemetery was laid out. Evergreen, where even now my poor family rests, broken footstones all in a row.

  Above the marble monuments of the wealthy, the gulls rooked and called, and the white-waisted clouds floated, while down in the cove the doghole schooners bobbed at anchor, creaking, and over at the Point, the lighthouse swung its jeweled lamp in a wide circle, warning of hidden dangers.

  Just because you can’t see a thing doesn’t mean she isn’t there.

  The hunter has parked his bright car at the foot of Evergreen Hill and is coming, now, from the direction of the cemetery toward me. I know what he is. I’ve seen and heard a hunter’s boots before. They make a sound like a sawblade scraping on sand. This one, he’s tall and bulky and box-jawed. He squints at the house, his cheeks taking up the slack skin under his beard. I’m standing in the rose garden in my white dress with my red ribbon twining though my hair, and a little shiver runs through me, a piece of my own will. I hold steady, the way you do when you know a wave is coming, and you lock your knees to meet it. The sandy street leads him to the wrought iron gate at the edge of the garden. He opens it, then turns around to make sure he’s latched the groaning lock securely behind him, but maybe also to be certain he’s alone. So this is a hunter, I think, who watches his back. He looks up and sees the black-railed tower of the house, the steeple meant to rival the church’s with its white shingles layered like gulls’ feathers, though here the paint is starting to flake off and show the older white underneath, the ghost of its old self. He narrows his eyes again, and I see that his skin is rough—a working man’s face—and that his clothes are black and simple—a working man’s clothes—and that although he is, to be sure, one of the living, he’s one of the dying, too, because there is gray at his temples and gray blurring his whiskers, his own flake showing.

  He turns his peppered cheek to his left, then to his right, and sees, not me, but the
great bundle of life beside him: one of our famed Lambry rose bushes. He reaches his hand out, entranced, cupping one perfect, yellow bud. A breeze coming from far out at sea stirs its petals and my dress. And it’s this flutter of wind, he might decide, and be wrong, that pushes the black thorn deep into his skin, under his sleeve, at the wrist.

  The name the living give to such blows is “accident.”

  I watch him lick the blood from the root of his palm. I see the flash of silver inside his sleeve. It’s that metal band these hunters all wear. The thing that marks them.

  Then, with a motion as calm as when he opened the gate, he takes the yellow Lambry bud and lifts it gently back into its place in the overgrown, latticed arbor, as though putting a child back in its high chair, and he turns away to move farther along the garden. As though I hadn’t just warned him not to.

  I’ll need to adjust my thinking, then. His is the strut of a man who takes the first cut lightly. Or maybe he’s like me. Emma Rose Finnis. Irish born. Irish stubborn. Raised to be staunch in the face of wounds. The bells of St. Clements are ringing, and the sun can’t make up its mind about where it wants to burn, dancing in and out of the mists over the cove. But I’ve made up my mind already. I’ll keep this man close.

  2

  It’s ten in the morning by the church bells, and in the cove the seals are moaning and sliding off their barnacled black rocks in search of some breakfast. My hearing is so much finer than when I walked alive and with a heartbeat. It’s something I’ve had a century to ponder: how much does the beating heart of one creature drown out the heart of another?

  My senses are my pride and joy now. I can feel, twisting toward the smell of the headlands, each wildflower rubbing up against the other. That ticking sound—it’s a poppy opening up to the June sun. That whisper—it’s the mustard seed losing its buttery fluff and color. I sense, too, the dirty bits of a tern’s nest loose in the wind and the stench of a single starfish dying on the rocks, having aimed too high.

  I can smell the mossy rankness that clings to our village’s old-fashioned water towers, loitering like headless windmills behind the houses. On some, the rotten wooden tanks have fallen away or been pulled clean down, and shingled rooms built in between the struts, bed-and-breakfast nooks for the tourists. These visitors are the ones I can hear stretching and yawning in the distant yards, as they open their heather-wreathed doors, hungry.

  I cross the lawn ahead of the hunter, moving along the flagstone path and onto the curved porch, drawing aside as he comes close. He’s done nothing dangerous yet, as he nears the steps, only wiping his hand along the smooth white railing as he climbs, lifting his fingertips and rubbing the grit between them. He squints again and turns and looks back across the lawn as though gauging the distance between gate and arbor and house. He listens and glances down at his coat pocket before taking out his black device. Someone is calling for Mr. Philip Pratt. I know his name, because I’ve heard the real estate agent (the little one who always comes to the house now) say it. He taps the device and puts it away and looks off in the direction of Evergreen, the cemetery. He might look and look and look, I think, and yet he’ll still know nothing of all the poor souls who sleep there. The loggers and the millers, the sailors and the boardinghouse keepers, the maids, and the dead washerwomen like my mother. I can feel myself beginning to grow angry, upset, which isn’t wise with a hunter near—giving way to anger gives up the ghost, as they say. I know I must calm myself and leave the porch and rise up toward the strengthening sun, whose light keeps me safe. I sit on the steeple and wait. Like all of his kind, this Mr. Pratt won’t be able to see me unless I’m foolish enough to let anger paint my face, my jaw, my father’s cleft chin, and my wide Finnis forehead, stark white.

  Any ghost who hopes to hold her own against a hunter has to know how to still the rage inside her and blend with the weather of every moment. And so I do. I still myself. The sun is cheerful, bright enough to screen me. How odd it is that most of the living think we spirits live in shadows. Why, when we are always trying to hold back the darkness?

  Pratt will be waiting now for the young real estate agent, Miss Ellen DeWight. I’ve been watching her all these weeks. She’s a small, sweet thing, trying hard to make her way in a world that will tell you when you’re small, you’re nothing at all. I remember how she went around the property talking to herself that first day she came to the Lambry House. Bucking herself up, reminding herself not to be nervous that she’d landed such a prize but to stay sharp and not be flustered by the new people about to come calling. She’d stood on the fine, wide porch that noonday with me beside her and waited, sweating, her little suit buckling at the ankles and shoulders, her face like a folded dinner napkin, white and fresh but with lines on either side of her mouth, as though her lips had been pressed for a long time into a single, careful shape.

  Her telephone device had rung, and she’d pulled it from her leather satchel and answered the woman on the other end.

  “… No. No. I won’t overdo it, don’t worry. I have a good feeling about this. I really do. They said they’ve been waiting for a property exactly like this one. I will. You can count on me. I’ll be sure to call you right after. Okay. The office is fine. Everything’s fine. Have fun in LA.”

  She put the thing away and looked at her watch, puckering her small mouth, but also keeping it steady. It’s her littleness, maybe, that makes me feel so free and easy around her. I haven’t minded her the way I’ve minded so many others who’ve come through the house over the years.

  We waited together, at the front, until the great black Rover came up the street, sleek as a hearse with its dark windows. It parked by the house, its wheels slowing to a stop, big silver platters rolling on their sides. Ellen DeWight lifted her head and set her small chin, all business.

  The door opened. Out of the black metal slipped a shining blond head, a pair of golden sunglasses, and a soft blouse tucked into a belt stitched with many tiny beads. Another door opened, and a balding man came out. Their skins were a golden orange, as though the sun followed them everywhere they went. Mr. and Mrs. Dane.

  Ellen hurried down from the porch, over the stone path, and through the arbor, between the bobbing roses.

  “Mr. Dane. Charles?”

  The man stared blankly at her, pulling off his sunglasses. “You’re the broker?”

  “The agent. Ellen DeWight. I represent the heirs of Alice Lambry, the late owner. My broker is on business down in LA, so I’ll be taking care of you today. It’s wonderful to meet you. Welcome to the Lambry House!”

  “Oh—Charlie, look!” the woman next to him fawned. “It’s just like I pictured it! So stately but lush.”

  “Welcome to you, too, Mrs. Dane.” Ellen held out her hand, but the woman didn’t take it, and Ellen pulled it back. “Those are yellow heirloom roses. And a full acre of gardens. Very rare on a narrow peninsula like this.”

  “I so get that. So different from Napa. Fabulous.”

  “Let’s wait for the mouth-feel before we get ahead of ourselves,” Mr. Dane said, putting his sunglasses back on. “That’s been the deal breaker for us on these old houses so far.”

  “Of course, of course, absolutely. Right this way.”

  “Charlie, I do love all the gables, though.” Mrs. Dane leaned into his silken shirt. “And that steeple. Is that a little iron walk around it? And the weather vane, is it original—Ellen?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love it.”

  That quickly, Ellen brought them up to the porch. My porch.

  “So! We have a pair of fine double front doors, as you can see, finished in etched glass, dating to 1899, when the house was built. They’re in mint condition and also all original. Step right into the foyer.”

  She let them into my house. The Lambry House. Still fitted with the finest of carved English furniture, still gleaming with scrolled wooden paneling, glowing warm and rich as it did when I saw it being carried in by bent-backed Lambry workers
a hundred years ago, when I was just a lumberjack’s little girl. The floors still thick with carpets dressed with fringe softer than a girl like me could ever expect to wear on her shawl. The rooms deep and full, the hall mirrors and pier glasses so tall, like Augustus Lambry himself. In the corners, around the high ceilings, white plaster and painted wood prettily molded into the shapes of angels and roses and trumpets. And enough paintings in gold frames to have filled another mansion.

  I flitted into the light of the chandelier in the foyer, hanging from the plaster rose above Ellen and the Danes. I must be very cold now, and give nothing away of myself, or my feelings.

  “And here,” Ellen said, “above this incredibly preserved wainscoting, we have some history, as you can see. Photos of the original owners.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to see those.” Mrs. Dane wrinkled her nose at all the dead Lambry faces. “To be honest, it makes a house feel, you know, already used. These carpets are special, though.”

  “Turkish. Antique.”

  “We may bargain for them,” Mr. Dane said.

  “Why don’t we go into the parlor on the west side of the house? Watch your step over this rug, now. Tassels.”

  “Charlie, these wood floors are a bit too dark for a beach house. They’re not airy enough.”

  “I agree,” he said. “The whole house is a little choked.”

  They looked all around. I followed above and after them. They didn’t seem to notice Alice Lambry’s wild watercolors hanging like open windows on the walls, painted boxes of gray and green and blue-tinted land and sea and storm and sky. The finicky Danes: they brushed their hands over the antique furniture and looked into the tall mirrors and tried to keep their faces closed, as if they weren’t pleased enough to smile or disappointed enough to frown.

  “Let’s take a look at the east side of the house now,” Ellen said, smiling.