The Ghost Bride's Last Contract

The Chest That Kept Her

Elias would not let Lenora ride in the ambulance.

She stood beside its open doors with her hands folded, almost a guest waiting to be invited into a car. When he shook his head, she moved away. The lamp on Mae's knee trembled. Lenora could wander now, but only as far as the light that had witnessed the cut.

"Take her in a taxi," Elias said.

Mae climbed out. The paramedic closed the doors between them, and she was left holding a case of tools with which she had nearly killed a man.

At the hospital, ordinary tests found no water in Elias's lungs between attacks. During an attack, he coughed enough to soak a towel. A doctor who had worked in Bellweather for thirty years did not argue with the discrepancy. She treated what she could, warned him against exertion, and kept him under observation while Mae called Iris.

Iris arrived wearing a cardigan inside out. She had brought sandwiches because she knew Mae would forget to eat and a borrowed trolley because she had guessed at the size of the thing they needed.

"A bridal chest," she said. "Not a coffin?"

Lenora shook her head.

"Cedar? Painted?"

"Blue. With a landscape inside the lid. I painted it myself."

Elias lay back on the hospital pillow. He had asked Mae to keep the curtain open. Every time it moved inward, he watched it as if the room were shrinking.

"Was it buried with her?" Mae asked.

Iris passed over her phone. "Her effects went to the old municipal annex after the family challenged her will. Most are still there. The basement flooded twice. Nobody wanted to pay for the removal."

She showed them a photograph taken during the last inspection. The chest was barely visible behind a cabinet. Elias enlarged the picture with a thumb, then gave the phone back. His hand had begun to smell of cedar. He scrubbed it against the sheet until Mae put a towel beside him.

"It's getting closer," he said.

She could not honestly tell him otherwise.

"I did," Lenora said.

They looked at her.

"In my will. I paid to keep the collection intact."

Elias turned his face toward the wall.

Mae sat beside him after Iris took the lamp into the corridor. There was no useful explanation to offer. Lenora had concealed the chest; Mae had accepted a narrow answer because it allowed her to proceed. She laid the fee receipt on his blanket.

"I needed the money. I should have waited."

He looked at the paper. "For what?"

"My mother's things."

"Are they useful?"

"Some. Mostly I can't bear the idea of a stranger throwing them away."

He let out a breath that ended in a wet cough. She held the bowl while he recovered.

"That's an expensive sort of honesty," he said. "Keep it for later. Right now I need you to do the work."

"Iris can stay with you."

"I'm going where the chest is."

The doctor objected. So did Mae. Elias listened to the risks, asked whether staying could stop the attacks, and made his own decision when the answer was no. He left with instructions to return at once if his breathing worsened. Iris drove. Mae kept the hospital number visible on her phone, ridiculous comfort though it was.

At one in the morning, the old annex smelled of wet cardboard and cold stone. Iris had authority over its abandoned holdings, but her key would not turn in the basement door. Elias crouched beside it, examining the hinge.

"Swollen," he said. "Not locked."

He showed Mae where to lift while he pulled. The door opened with a noise like a tooth coming loose. For one second they grinned at each other. Then he spat a mouthful of black water onto the step, and the grin was gone.

The basement held the possessions of people no one had wanted to remember. A child's rocking horse stood beside a stack of municipal shields. Lenora stopped at the horse.

"My brother had one like that."

"Keep walking," Elias said.

Mae had never heard him be cruel. She did not rebuke him.

They found the chest behind a cabinet of property claims. Its blue paint had peeled into islands. On the lid, two swallows flew toward a sun rubbed nearly white. A heavy iron hasp crossed their wings.

Lenora put her hands over her eyes.

The ring on Elias's hand tightened. He braced himself against the wall while Mae examined the chest. Through the hasp ran three silver wires, each knotted in the same pattern as the stitch she had cut. This was the anchor. She could feel the contract pulling toward it, like a toothache answered by pressure on the jaw.

"What happens when we break it?" Iris asked.

"The stored act loses its hold. He stops drowning."

Lenora lowered her hands. "And the things inside?"

Mae looked up sharply.

"What things?"

"Letters. Mine. His. Everything from before."

Iris tugged gently at the hasp. The chest shuddered. Water spread beneath it despite the dry boards overhead.

Lenora had painted a different picture inside the lid. They saw a sliver through the opening: a man's hand reaching toward hers, a white tablecloth, yellow fruit in a bowl. Not a wedding portrait. A breakfast. Something ordinary she had wanted to keep.

"We can take the letters out," Mae said.

"No," Lenora whispered. "I asked them to keep us together. The contract obeyed."

Under the lid, the letters were stitched to the wood. Ink crawled across them in the same living brown as the marriage ribbon. The affection and the murder had been preserved in one object. Taking the letters out would take pieces of the anchor with them. It had to be destroyed whole.

Elias slid down the wall. His shoulders moved as if someone were forcing his head beneath water and allowing him up only long enough to suffer it again.

"Who was he?" he asked Lenora.

"My husband."

"The one who put you in this?"

She nodded.

"Why keep his letters?"

Lenora's face crumpled. "Because he didn't always."

Mae wanted to touch her. There would be nothing under her hand, but she wanted to do it anyway.

Instead she lifted the small crowbar from Elias's tool roll.

Lenora caught the end. Dead fingers could grip things bound with their own promises. The metal jerked out of Mae's hand and clattered against the chest.

"Please," Lenora said. "Give me a little while."

"He hasn't got a little while to give you."

"He has until morning. You said so."

Elias looked up from the floor. Mae saw the exact moment he understood that the hours before death could contain almost any amount of pain.

Iris knelt beside him with the hospital bowl. He waved it away and dragged himself toward the chest.

"Don't make her choose me," he said to Mae.

He reached for the crowbar. His hand shook too badly to close around it.

Lenora watched that hand. At last she let the metal fall.

"I don't choose you," she said. "I want that understood. I'm only too tired to stop you."

Mae picked up the crowbar. The first blow split one painted swallow down the middle.

Lenora screamed as if the wood had been part of her body.