Mystery on Graveyard Head. Edith Dorian

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СКАЧАТЬ by the time the pair of them had caught up with the rest, the atmosphere around the Farr house had grown so practical that any self-respecting ghost would have taken flight, squalling, with the outraged sea gulls, from the roof. Four men were prowling from one side to another, tapping framework for the hollow tune of rotten wood, and on the front porch Mrs. Purchas was prodding and poking at the floor boards.

      “They’ll still hold us over there by the door,” she announced. “You can get busy with that crowbar, Steve.”

      The sound of ripping wood brought the men hurrying up the steps, ready to lend a hand, but Steve was not having much trouble. Rusty nails and screws simply broke off under pressure. It was the door itself that presented the real problem. In the end, they had to force it because the lock was so badly corroded. Then Dr. Sutton pushed it wide, and they crowded after him, peering eagerly over one another’s shoulders. Even with only the door open, light streamed ahead of them down the wide hall, and they could see how meticulously Patience Farr had prepared her home for safekeeping before she sailed on her last ill-fated voyage. Yellowed dust sheets covered settles and tables, and on the wall each picture wore a newspaper blanket.

      “How Dr. Sutton’s grandmother must have loved her house to take care of it this way,” Linda exclaimed impulsively.

      “Loved it and had to leave it again and again to sail with Jude,” Mrs. Purchas said, nodding. “Just as Jude’s mother before her had loved it and left it to sail the seven seas. Farrs were born at sea and died at sea, Linda, but the Head was always home.”

      Naturally, upstairs was too dark to explore, but they looked as best they could through every room on the first floor, barking their shins on furniture and stirring up clouds of dust, before they wandered down the hall again to the front door. The shrouded pictures on the wall had roused Linda’s curiosity more than anything else.

      “What do you suppose they are?” she asked Steve as the rest trooped out ahead of them.

      “Family portraits and pictures of the Farr ships, I guess,” he said. “Most of the old houses around here are full of them.”

      Sunlight was streaking across one picture right in front of them, and Linda reached up to tuck its wrapper more securely behind the frame. “Watch it,” Steve warned her, but the paper had already crumbled under her touch, and she looked at him in dismay.

      “Never mind,” he said. “Go ahead and pull the rest off. We can wrap it up again. Waity’s got tonight’s paper stuck in his pocket. I’ll go swipe a piece of that.”

      Left alone a minute, Linda removed the last dusty shreds and studied the picture in delight. It was a portrait of an oddly beautiful girl with a cluster of flaming red curls in the nape of her neck and strange greenish lights in her eyes. She’s only a little older than I am, Linda thought, but she’s not nearly as tame. Maybe she was born in a storm at sea. She leaned forward quickly to read the name “Loraney Farr” on a brass plate. Then she rewrapped the picture in the newspaper that Steve brought her and they strolled on outside.

      “You’ll want electric lights and plumbing, I suppose,” Dr. Cobb was saying when they found the others. “What about water? Will you drill a well?”

      “If I have to, of course,” Dr. Sutton said, “but there used to be a wonderful spring on the place according to my mother. Maybe one of the Purchases can tell us what’s happened to it.”

      “You mean the Witch Spring, Dr. Sutton,” Steve told him. “It’s still the best spring anywhere around. I’ve been here berrying when it hadn’t rained all summer and half the wells were dry, but the Witch was flowing the same as ever. She’s over here.” He led the way toward a green thicket a dozen yards further. “The springhouse tumbled down years ago though. You’ll have to build that over again.”

      Trailing along after them, Linda listened interestedly. What she wanted to have accounted for was that name. “Would somebody please stop just long enough to tell me why it’s called the ‘Witch Spring’?” she asked.

      “Because the Farrs were smart enough to have a witch in their family,” Mrs. Purchas said, smiling. “She tapped the ground one day and created it. At least, that’s the way the story goes. Before that, the Farrs had a dug well and it was always running dry like everybody else’s.”

      They stood awhile watching the water flow steadily over the worn silvery stones, and Linda’s eyes grew dreamy. “Perhaps she’s still lurking around her spring, Dr. Sutton,” she said. “Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll see her riding her broomstick across the face of the moon with her nose in a big shadowy hook and her white hair flying.”

      “Then she won’t be our witch, and I’ll have to chase her for trespassing,” the doctor protested. “There was nothing toothless and scraggly about the Farr witch, I’ll have you know! Ours was nineteen and redheaded.”

      “A disturbin’ woman,” Waity added promptly. “That’s what my great-great-grandfather called her in his diary. Loraney, her name was. She was living on Bailey Island yonder, time she married Shubael Farr.”

      He pointed at the rocky shore across Merriconeag Sound, but Linda was paying no attention.

      “Why, I’ve just seen her back there at the house,” she cried. “No wonder she didn’t look as tame as I do.”

      At Dr. Sutton’s startled expression, Steve couldn’t keep his face straight, and Linda chuckled.

      “Her picture’s hanging in the hall,” she explained. “She’s absolutely gorgeous. I can understand Shubael all right, but what made a witch decide to capture him, Dr. Sutton? Was he supposed to be fabulous?”

      “Girl in every port, according to the family stories,” the doctor assured her, “but frankly I suspect Shubael was a man of business. I have his old account books, and for a whole year he’d entered regular payments to Loraney opposite the notation ‘spells for favorable winds.’ Perhaps he decided it would be more economical to marry his witch. Then fixing up fair winds for his voyages would fall under the head of ‘wifely duties.’ ”

      But Linda refused to listen. “I don’t believe it,” she announced indignantly. “Loraney bewitched Shubael for some good reason of her own. She brewed brews and mixed potions.”

      “Strawberry hair likely was enough brew,” Waity said drily. “It beats all how unsettled most men can get when a redheaded woman crosses their bow.”

      Dr. Sutton laughed. “As long as she fixed up this spring for me, I don’t mind how unsettled Shubael managed to get. Anyhow, poor Loraney’s spells must have failed her. The first voyage she and Shubael sailed together, neither they nor their ship came back.”

      The general conversation turned to practical details of piping water into the Farr house, and Steve pulled Linda aside. “Loraney’s headstone’s down near the shore with the others,” he said, and she fell hastily into step at his side.

      “What’s her headstone doing there, though, if she was lost at sea?” she demanded.

      “Families put them up anyway,” Steve explained. “After a ship was so long overdue they had to give up hope, they ordered a headstone with ‘Lost at Sea’ on it. There are plenty of that kind with nobody under them on Graveyard Head. The Farrs were all sailors—fishermen and whalers and clipper-ship men.”

      He pushed tangle after tangle of myrtle СКАЧАТЬ