The Curse of Bloodstone. V. J. Banis

to puff leisurely on his pipe. “You just wait, Rachel. Old Simon will tighten the reins on you before long.”

      “How can he? The property isn’t solely his. It belongs to the town...to all of us,” Caroline Brewster said.

      Noah glanced at her. “Now, Caroline, you know Simon better’n that. Once he and those highfalutin friends of his gets control of something, they’ll figure out some way of running the whole shebang. Oh, they’ll do it all right and legal and proper like, but in the end they’ll wind up owning everything and you’ll all be right back where you started.”

      Zeb jumped to his feet. His wife put a hand on his arm but he shook it off. “I don’t agree with you, Noah,” he said angrily. “Simon Caldwell and his crowd don’t have no claim on my farm now.”

      “Don’t he?” Noah asked sagely, narrowing his eyes to give his question the proper degree of seriousness he meant to convey. “Do you have sole claim to your farm, Zeb?”

      Zeb floundered. “Well, no,” he stammered. “It ain’t mine and Caroline’s outright. But it ain’t Simon Caldwell’s neither.”

      Noah sucked smoke into his mouth. The howling storm was the only sound in the room. Finally Noah glanced up at Zeb. “Jeremiah Mallory deeded your farm and all the rest of his property over to Skull Point,” he said. “Skull Point is run by Simon Caldwell. You and me and everybody else is run by Simon Caldwell.”

      “But what about the council? We have a town council,” Caroline argued. Caroline Brewster was a big woman and her voice matched her size.

      “And who, may I ask, is on that town council, Caroline? I’ll tell you,” Noah answered. “Simon Caldwell, Sam Hastings, Will Wilkins, and four or five other close, intimate chums of old Simon’s...all of whom, I might add, are deeply in Simon’s personal debt.”

      Rachel Black leaned across the table. “Well, we’re not in Simon’s personal debt.”

      Noah merely smiled. “You’re not on the council, neither,” he said. He put his pipe back between his teeth and bit into the stem. The whipping, screeching wind and rain lashed against the house. A sudden, appalling crash made everyone stand up. The noise cut through the room like the blade of an ax.

      “Glory be,” Caroline groaned, making the sign of the cross. Her husband went toward the window. He couldn’t possibly have seen out through the heavy wooden shutters. He just stood there staring at the boarded window.

      “A tree,” he said softly, nervously. “I guess it was just another tree.”

      From beyond the closed door a child started to cry. The women glanced toward the sleeping room beyond. Ruth started toward it.

      “No, Ruth,” Rachel Black said. “I’ll go see.”

      Ruth went to stand in front of the fire. She rubbed her hands nervously, bringing circulation back into her chilled fingers. “There won’t be no land to worry about if this storm don’t let up,” she said. Her lips were thin and white, her face pale and drawn. Her nervousness and fright were responsible for her turning sharply on her husband. “It’s bad enough for us to be upset about this storm without you upsetting us with other problems.”

      Caroline Brewster was suddenly as jumpy as the others. “Why do you say ‘problem,’ Ruth?” she wanted to know. “The deeding of the land to the town was no problem until you and Noah here made it into one.”

      Noah leaned back and tried to look as calm as possible. “It’s Simon Caldwell who will create the problem.” He bit hard on the stem of the pipe and wished he’d given a little more forethought to his remark. Everybody was becoming more and more unnerved.

      * * * *

      The men and women in Simon Caldwell’s kitchen were as composed as a group of spectators at a music recital. Simon Caldwell’s long, bony face, however, was screwed into a frown. He was thinking about the land, but it wasn’t the deed to the lands that troubled him. Vanessa Mallory’s presence in Skull Point was his problem. What did she want?

      Sam Hastings echoed his question. “I wonder why Vanessa came back here to the Point?”

      Simon shrugged. “Where else would she go, Sam? This is her home.”

      “But she left it to run off after that sea captain, or whatever he was.”

      His wife gave an admonishing huff. “Wild! That’s the only word to describe Vanessa Mallory. Just like her granddaddy. Wild!”

      Simon rubbed his bristled chin. “Maybe so, Jenny. But something happened inside Bloodstone these five years ago, something that we don’t know about. Jeremiah and Hester would never say what it was, but I know something happened there. Vanessa didn’t run off into that storm for no reason.”

      “There was that sea captain,” Martha Wilkins reminded him.

      “No, there was something else. I just know there was,” he said.

      Simon’s craggy old face caught the reflection of the fire. To the others he looked exactly like what the children of the town called him: Mr. Skull Point—not because of his position in the town, but because at times like this Simon Caldwell looked more like a bleached skull than anything else. The cheeks were sunken, the eyes deep set and ringed with dark, grayish circles.

      Simon was an oddity to look at and to add to his oddity he had no wife—never had one—which made him seem more queer, especially to the children of the town. The older folk—those close to Simon—knew there had been a woman in his life at one time. Simon had loved her more than life itself, but Hester Cartwright had married Jeremiah Mallory and Simon Caldwell had adopted bachelorhood and sworn never to love again.

      Simon sighed. “I don’t know, Jenny. I just don’t know,” he said. “But it’s something.”

      “You don’t think Vanessa is going to try to get back the deed to the properties, do you, Simon?” Will Wilkins asked.

      “How can she?” Simon said. “I’ll wave the deeds in front of her pretty nose. What can she do?”

      Simon moved a little away from the heat of the fire and studied his friends for a moment. “We don’t have a deed to Bloodstone,” he said. “The mansion wasn’t included in the list of properties.”

      “I wonder why?” Jenny Hastings asked. “They thought Vanessa dead. Who else would Jeremiah and Hester deed it to but us?”

      “Us? You mean ‘the town’ don’t you, Jenny?” Martha Wilkins corrected.

      “Same thing,” Will said, giving his wife a hard look.

      Martha lowered her eyes and fumbled with some imaginary object in her lap.

      “Perhaps old Jeremiah deeded it over to some relative we don’t know about...maybe one of Hester’s people,” Sam said.

      “There aren’t any relatives,” Simon told him. “Jeremiah; his wife, Hester; his daughter, Vanessa, that’s the lot of them.”

      “That old house should be torn down before it falls down,” Will Wilkins said as he adjusted his more-than-ample frame deeper into the soft chair in which he was sitting.

      “Lord, I wouldn’t go near that old place for love or money,” his wife said.

      Jenny Hastings laughed. “Now, don’t tell me you believe those tired old stories about its being haunted, Martha. Why, this is 1851.” Jenny Hastings was a modern, worldly woman, or so she considered herself.

      “The place is haunted,” Martha insisted.

      “Nonsense. There aren’t such things as ghosts any more. They went out in our granddaddy’s time.”

      Simon rubbed the bristles on his chin. “Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, Jenny. Ghosts are ghosts. They’ve always been and they’ll always be.”

      Simon