Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Greenbriar Ghost

“Did you speak to anyone who witnessed her death?”

“No sir.”

“So you have no personal knowledge of the manner of your daughter’s death?”

She paused.

“Come now, Mrs. Heaster, it’s a simple question. Do you have any personal knowledge of how your daughter died?”

“Yes,” she said at length. “I do.”

Grimby’s eyes were alight and he fought to keep a smile off of his face. “And how do you come by this knowledge?”

“I was told.”

“Told? By whom, madam?” His voice dripped with condescension.

“By my daughter, sir.”

Grimby smiled openly now. “Your…dead daughter?”

“Yes sir.”

“Are we to understand that your dead daughter somehow imparted this information to you?”

“Yes, my daughter told me how she died.”

The jury gasped. Preston could have objected here, but he had lost his nerve, clearly believing the case to be already lost.

“Pray, how did she tell you?”

Mrs. Heaster raised her eyes to meet Grimby’s. “Her ghost came to me in a dream, sir.”

“Her ghost?” Grimby cried. “In a dream?”

There was a ripple of laughter from the gallery and even a few smiles from the jury. Preston’s fists were clutched so tight that his knuckles were bloodless; while to my other side Holmes sat composed, his eyes fixed on the side of Mrs. Heaster’s face.

Grimby opened his mouth to say something to the judge, but Mrs. Heaster cut him off. “You may laugh, sir. You may all laugh, for perhaps to you it is funny. A young woman dies a horrible death, the life choked out of her, the very bones of her neck crushed in the fingers of a strong man. That may be funny to some.” The laughter in the room died away. “My daughter was a good girl who had endured a hard life. Yes, she made mistakes. Mr. Grimby has been kind enough to detail each and every one of them. Yes, she had a child out of wedlock, and as we all know such things are unthinkable, such things never happen.”

Her bitterness was like a pall of smoke.

“Mr. Grimby did his job very well and dismantled the good name of my daughter while at the same time destroying each separate bit of evidence. Perhaps most of you have already made up your minds and are planning to set Trout Shue free.” She paused and flicked a glance at Holmes, and did I catch just the slightest incline of his head? “The law prevents me from telling what I know of Mr. Shue’s life and dealings before he came to Greenbriar. So I will not talk of him. Mr. Grimby has asked me to tell you how I came by my personal knowledge of the death of my daughter, and so I will tell you. I will tell you of how my dear Zona came to me over the course of four dark nights. As a spirit of the dead she came into my room and stood at my bedside, the way a frightened child will do, coming to the one person who loves her unconditionally and forever. For four nights she came to me and she brought with her the chill of the grave. The very air around me seemed to freeze and the ghost of each of my frightened breaths haunted the air for, yes, I was afraid. Terribly afraid. I am not a fanciful woman. I am not one to knock wood or throw salt in the devil’s eye over my left shoulder. I am a mountain woman of Greenbriar County. A farm woman with a practical mind. And yet there I lay in my bed with the air turned to winter around me and the shade of my murdered daughter standing beside me.”

The room was silent as the grave as she spoke.

“Each night she would awaken me and then she would tell me, over and over again, how she died. And how she lived. How she endured life in those last months as the wife of Edward Trout Shue. She told me of the endless fights over the smallest matters. Of his insane jealousy if she so much as curtsied in reply to a gentleman tipping his hat. Of the beatings that he laid upon her, and how he cleverly chose where and how to hit so that he left no marks that would show above collar or below sleeve. My daughter lived in hell. Constant fear, constant dread of offending this offensive man. And then she told me what happened on that terrible day. Trout Shue had come home from the blacksmiths, expecting his dinner, and when he found that she had not yet prepared it — even though he was two hours earlier than his usual time — he flew into a rage and grabbed her by the throat. His eyes flared like a monster’s and she said his hands were as hard and unyielding as the iron with which he plied his trade. He did not just throttle my daughter — he shattered her neck. When I dared speak, when I dared to ask her to show me what his hands had done, Zona turned her head to one side. At first I thought she was turning away in shame and horror for what had happened…but as she turned her head went far to the left — and too far. Much too far and with a grinding of broken bones Zona turned her head all the way around. If anything could be more horrible, more unnatural, more dreadful to a human heart, let alone the broken heart of a grieving mother, then I do not want to know what it could be.”

She paused. Her eyes glistened with tears but her voice never disintegrated into hysterics or even raised above a normal speaking tone. The effect was to make her words a hundredfold more potent. Any ranting would have painted her as overly distraught if not mad; but now everyone in the courtroom hung on her words. Even Grimby seemed caught up in it. I hazarded a glance at Shue, who looked — for the very first time — uncertain.

“I screamed,” said Mrs. Heaster. “Of course I did. Who would not? Nothing in my life had prepared me for so ghastly a sight as this. After that first night I convinced myself that it had all been an hysterical dream, that such things as phantoms did not exist and that my Zona was not haunting me; but on that second night she returned. Once more she begged me to hear the truth about what happened, and once more she told me of the awful attack. I only thank God that I was not again subjected to the demonstration of the extent of damage to her poor, dear neck.” She paused and gave the jury a small, sad smile. “I pleaded with Mr. Preston to let me tell my tale during this trial and he refused. I fear he was afraid that my words would make you laugh at me. I believe Mr. Grimby placed me on the stand for those very reasons. And yet I hear no laughter, I see no smiles. Perhaps it is that you, like I, do not find the terrible and painful death of an innocent girl to be a source of merriment. In any case, I have had my say, and for that I thank Mr. Grimby and this court. At least now, no matter what you each decide, my daughter has been heard. For me that will have to be enough.”

She looked at Grimby, who in turn looked at the jury. He saw what I saw: twelve faces whose eyes were moist but whose mouths had become tight and bitter lines and whose outthrust jaws bespoke their fury.

Then the silence was shattered as Shue himself leapt to his feet and cried, “Tell whatever fairytales you want, woman, but you will never be able to prove that I did it!”

The guards shoved him down in his seat and Holmes leaned his head toward Preston and me. “Do you not find it an interesting choice of phrase that he said that we will never ‘prove’ that he did it? Does that sound like the plea of an innocent man or the challenge of a guilty one?” And though he said this quietly he pitched it just loud enough to be heard by everyone in that small and crowded room.

Chapter 9

That was very nearly the end of the Greenbriar affair and Holmes and I left West Virginia and America very shortly thereafter. Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue was found guilty by the jury, which returned its verdict with astonishing swiftness. The judge, with fury and revulsion in his eyes, sentenced Shue to life imprisonment in the State Penitentiary in Moundsville, where Shue died some three years later of a disease that was never adequately diagnosed. Mr. Preston sent Holmes a newspaper account from Lewisburg after Shue’s death in which the reporter recounted a rumor that Shue complained that a ghost visited him nightly and as a result he was unable to sleep. His health deteriorated and when he died he was buried in an unmarked grave. No one that I knew of attended the burial or mourned his passing.

But before Holmes and I had even set out from Lewisburg, as we shared a late dinner in our rooms at the hotel, I said, “There is one thing that confounds me, Holmes.”