The Ghost Bride's Last Contract

The bride asked Mae to kill the lights before she lifted her veil. "The left side is quite bad," she said. Mae had brought a lamp precisely because electricity troubled the dead. She turned off the chapel switch, waited for the fluorescent tubes to stop humming, and set her little oil flame between them. Beneath the veil, a woman's mouth opened in a face packed with river mud. Mae kept her own mouth still. Her mother had taught her that much, at least. "Lenora Vane?" The bride nodded. A button fell from her sleeve. Before it reached the floor, it was back on the sleeve again. Twenty-eight years in the same wet dress. Mae understood why Lenora had put her face away. "You said on the telephone that you could break a marriage." "A binding made under false terms. I can't make someone stop loving you." "That won't be necessary." Behind Mae, a man laughed once. He had a carpenter's pencil behind his ear and plaster in the dark hair at his temple. He was kneeling beside a pew, tying a strip of red cloth around its broken leg. "That's not a joke," Lenora told him. "I know. Sorry. Nervous habit." The chapel had passed to Elias Crowe from an aunt he barely remembered. He had hired Mae because Lenora stood in front of the demolition crew every morning, asking which of them was her husband. Two men had quit. Another had walked through her and spent an hour weeping for a woman he had never met. Elias had paid half Mae's fee in advance. She had used it to prevent the removal of her mother's things from storage. The receipt was folded inside her glove, where she could feel it whenever she bent a finger. "I'd like him outside," Mae said. "I'd like to stay," Elias answered. "She asked me." Lenora held out her wedding ribbon. The inscription moved beneath its surface like a vein: freely given, freely witnessed. Mae took a needle from her case and lifted one stitch. Under the visible words lay a second set, written in brown. The bride shall remain until the river returns what it received. "Were you married beside the river?" "I was married here." "Did you sign a second promise?" Lenora looked toward Elias. "I signed quite a lot of things." He set down his pencil. "Lenora. She needs an answer." "I wanted somebody to take care of me. There. Is that sufficient?" The anger made her briefly beautiful. Mae preferred it to the dutiful stillness she so often found in dead wives. Anger could answer questions. Stillness let other people answer them. She explained what she could do. Cutting a false witness term would free Lenora from this aisle. A larger bond might remain. Disturbing an old contract could hurt anyone named in it, so Mae needed the whole marriage settlement before she touched the ribbon. "It was burned," Lenora said. "Then we wait until we find a copy." Mae shut the case. Her fee agreement did not promise success. She reminded herself of that while imagining the storage man's van outside her door. Lenora put a hand over the clasp. Cold soaked through the leather. "Your mother cut without a copy." The chapel became very quiet. "My mother lost her license." "After she tried to help us." Elias had risen. He watched Mae now, giving her the chance to be the person who said no. She almost resented him for it. "You knew who I was," she said to Lenora. "I have called nine breakers. Seven heard Vane and hung up. One came, looked at the ribbon, and left. You came inside." "You haven't answered me." "Yes. I asked for Elspeth Arden's daughter." Mae's mother had died eleven years earlier with a pair of ruined shears under her pillow. Mae had spent those eleven years being asked whether she was as unreliable. Here was someone who had asked for her because of it. She opened the case again, but took out a magnifying glass instead of the shears. Under the false witness term was a witness's thumbprint. The broken crescent of its scar matched the imprint reproduced on Lenora's death notice, which Iris Bell had sent that afternoon. Lenora herself had been made witness to a riverside marriage held two days after her body was found. Mae could challenge that narrow lie without pretending to know the rest. She told them so. She also told them about the risk she could not measure. Elias went to the door. Mae felt disappointment, absurd and immediate. Then he turned the sign from OPEN to UNSAFE and returned. "No one else comes in," he said. "What do you need from me?" "Don't touch the ribbon. If anything changes, say so." "I want it cut," Lenora said. "I want to stand on the other side of that door." Mae had heard grander wishes. It was the small ones that undid her. At ten nineteen that night, she cut the false witness stitch. Lenora took one astonished step away from the aisle. Her dress no longer trailed water. She reached for the chapel door with both hands, laughing, while Elias clapped as if he had watched someone take a first step after an illness. Then his laugh stopped. He stared at his right palm. Something black pushed up beneath the skin. Mae dropped her shears and caught his wrist before he could close his hand. A wedding band worked itself free without leaving a cut and slid over his third finger. Water spilled from his mouth. It struck the chapel floor in a thick gray stream, full of silt. Elias bent over, coughing, one hand braced on the pew he had repaired. Mae reached for her phone. Lenora slammed the chapel door before she could get outside. "You knew," Mae said. Lenora pressed her back against the wood. "I didn't know it would be him." Mae called an ambulance. She gave the address and described a breathing emergency. The dispatcher kept her talking until Elias could sit upright. He was breathing again, though every breath dragged. She would not let a haunting become an excuse to deny him ordinary help. The ribbon lay beside her knee. New writing rose where she had cut it. FIRST TRANSFER. DROWNING. TWELVE HOURS. Below it appeared a name. ELIAS CROWE, SUCCESSOR GROOM. He read it over her hand. "Successor to what?" Lenora would not look at him. Mae knew this form from one of her mother's prohibited casebooks. A murdered bride's last unfinished act could be stored in a marriage settlement. Break the wrong stitch and the act found another body. Twelve hours was the outer limit, not a promise that it would spare him until then. Destroying the material object that held that death could stop it. That was all the casebook had offered. No successful case had followed the description. She told Elias. She could hear how little it was. "Can you put it back?" "No." He shut his eyes. For a moment his hand gripped hers with such force that her knuckles hurt. Then he loosened it. "Don't say you're sorry yet. Find out what to break." Outside, a siren turned onto the chapel street. Lenora lifted her veil again. This time she did not hide the ruined side of her face. "A bridal chest," she said. "They put me inside it." Elias looked at the ring, then at the woman he had applauded. "You told me you fell in the river." "I liked you," she said. "I wanted you to keep coming back."