Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: see Chapter 1

LIVING LA VIDA LOCA

Chapter 5

"What're you thinking, Sam?" his father asked into the dewy morning air.

By the time they'd finished, it had been almost four-thirty in the morning, but no way were they going to go grave-disturbing until full light. Now they all trooped out to the family cemetery behind the house so they could get this over and done with before Bernice Hoskins, the first of the hired help to arrive, pulled up at seven o'clock.

As Dean had claimed, the Wainwrights ran to mausoleums and marble crypts for their interment, though again a lack of the ostentatious curlicues and such that adorned many wealthy persons' places of eternal repose was pleasantly apparent. It was simply a question of walking into the crypt, prising off the lid and voila.

Sylvie and Emily were grossed out in an excited way, the twins were loving it and little Tommy simply leaned contentedly against his mother, watching proceedings with big baby eyes.

"Something I hope I'm wrong about," Sam answered obliquely.

John Winchester didn't press him as they went down into the vault; nobody did. Asking Peter if there were any family papers or diaries he could look at, Sam had spent the previous hour-and-a-half in the library poring over every word pertaining to Charlotte Wainwright from cradle to grave and had come out with a grim visage that precluded interrogation.

Julie and Peter sternly insisted the four children stood back whilst John and Dean, wearing improvised face-masks, prepared to crowbar the lid off Charlotte Wainwright's coffin. It was positioned directly below that of her mother Annetta Wainwright, Nathaniel III's first wife, and had clearly never been disturbed since it had been placed there.

Everyone flinched at the crack of the lid as it gave. John and Dean eased it aside carefully and everyone moved closer to see. Apart from jewellery, only the skeleton and some remnants of a silk gown remained; but the crushing damage to the left side of the skull was obvious.

Julie Hanson drew in a sharp breath. "Oh…"

In the centre of the coffin at about waist level, rested a tiny but perfectly formed skull and the curved vertebrae of a spine. Stepping forward, his lips pressed tightly together, Sam used a pair of sterilised kitchen tongs to pop a couple of the foetal vertebrae into a plastic bag. After he had done, John and Dean replaced the coffin lid and sealed it with glue, scattering dust over it to give the illusion of it being undisturbed.

"Is there any way of getting a DNA sample of Nathaniel Wainwright IV without opening his coffin?" Sam asked Peter grimly.

"Yes there is but why…" Peter's voice trailed off; he and Julie shot quick glances at the children as they figured out what he wasn't saying. "Back at the house."

They left the crypt, John, Dean and Sam making sure it looked as if it had not been disturbed. Taking them back to the library, Peter opened a cabinet drawer and showed them the little glass compartments where generations of Wainwright parents had placed a curl of their child's hair. Using a pair of tweezers and another plastic bag, Sam got a couple of strands from the sample labelled as Nathaniel IV.

"Is there any way we could have a comparative DNA test done on these fast?" he asked Peter.

"Let me take them into town." Peter suggested, "I can arrange to have the results tomorrow night, no questions asked."

"Thanks." Sam nodded gratefully as Peter took the samples and left.

Fortunately the subtext had gone over the children's heads and the adults made sure that they were kept distracted and focussed on other things for the remainder of the day. For the Winchesters, it was almost like a vacation as they spent the day doing nothing more innocuous than playing softball with the kids. When night came, Sam stated that he believed there would be no disturbances, and he was right.

The following day went on as normal, and again the adults made sure that the kids had a day of very tiring fun and were asleep in bed when Peter Hanson opened the folder delivered that afternoon by express courier from his no-questions contact. He looked at the results and handed it to Sam, who read it with no indication of any great surprise and passed it on to Dean.

Julie's face twisted in distaste as she read what they had. The DNA test results were conclusive – 'vertebrae' was the child of 'hair strand'.

"Charlotte Wainwright and her brother had an incestuous relationship…how did you know?" Peter asked Sam.

"It wasn't a revelation; it just sort of floated around the edges of my mind." Sam shrugged as if it had been a lucky guess; after all he could hardly explain that personal experience of an unnaturally intense, co-dependent sibling bond had been the cause of his epiphany.

His and Dean's profoundly and (doubtless unhealthy) inter-dependent relationship had grown and intertwined like a hothouse vine from their childhood spent perpetually on the road with nobody but each other and John Winchester. It had occurred to him to wonder what twists that bond might potentially develop in such a case but where the two siblings in question were of different sex, and once he'd had that thought the rest wasn't a quantum leap.

Sam expounded, "Nathaniel IV and Charlotte were only 16 months apart in age and their mother Annetta died in childbirth to a stillborn son in 1851, just 13 months after Charlotte was born. Nathaniel III's business commitments – and his burying himself in work to ease his grief - meant he had to spend most of his time in New York, Boston and Washington D.C., so the two children…"

"Grew up isolated and alone here in Wakefield, just the two of them rattling around this big old mansion with only each other for company, and the odd servant they passed in the halls." John Winchester surmised.

"They hit puberty, the hormones kicked in and the rest is history," Dean commented. "In a house this large as long as they were sensible nobody would have suspected a thing, especially once the servants had left for the day or were tucked up in their quarters under the eaves."

"But then Charlotte got pregnant," Julie put in, shaking her head, "I mean…how long? She was 23 when she died…how long had they been…?" she swallowed, "Please don't tell me that somewhere in this back garden there is a bunch of murdered-baby graves."

"No." Sam quickly shook his head. "A series of infanticides was what I was looking for when I was reading the diaries, to see if that could account for the disturbances."

"Murdered children are at the top of the restless dead scale," Dean explained softly, sadly, "Their innocence was pure – and their rage therefore righteous."

Sam continued on quickly at the Hansons' obvious distress. "I'd say their affair started from when they hit adolescence and, like Dean said, an acutely-intense, stiflingly close relationship and no other candidates to focus all the hormones on did the rest. But when she was ten, Charlotte fell seriously ill with Scarletina and German Measles. She could have died, and the doctors believed she was infertile."

"So they avoided the bullet for years but then…" Peter frowned, "but why has all this been happening to us? What's the point?"

Sam sighed wearily, "There'll never be any proof, but I don't believe for a second that Charlotte Wainwright had a freak accident. I believe Nathaniel IV murdered her."

"Because of the baby?" Julie surmised shrewdly.

Sam nodded, "When dad checked into the Wainwrights he turned up nothing but nice people, but even the best families have a few rotten apples. Nathaniel and Charlotte Wainwright pursued their incestuous liaison for a decade or even more without detection or difficulty, but then Charlotte, who had been told she was barren, experiences what to her is a miracle – she's pregnant. She doesn't give a damn that it's her brother's child; she is finally going to be a mother."

"But Nathaniel was freaked big time?" Dean put in dryly.

"Oh yeah. If Charlotte had the kid, she'd have him over a barrel forever, even assuming she kept quiet about the father's ID to everyone else," Sam said, "and if it was discovered who had sired her child, his sweet lifestyle would have exploded in his face. Father or not, Nathaniel Wainwright III would have brought him to book for his crime – and his sin. On top of that, Nathaniel III had recently acquired a viable heir other than Nathaniel IV – Arthur Wainwright I, his infant son by his second wife."

"So Charlotte flatly refused to abort, and Nathaniel IV was faced with losing all that lovely inheritance from daddy." Dean took up the conjecture. "So Nathaniel IV sneaks in a rock from the rockery and bashes Charlotte's head in during an opportune moment when there are no servants around, probably when she was asleep or engrossed reading a book or something. He then replaces the rock where he found it and takes her body out from the house into the garden, so it looks like she slipped and fell, helped by the incidental rain shower that morning, which made the paving stones greasy."

"How do you know he didn't lure Charlotte out into the garden and kill her there?" Julie enquired.

Dean smiled, "Silk slippers. As soon as Sam said he thought her brother murdered her I realised how unlikely it was that Charlotte would go for a walk in the garden so soon after rain in something as flimsy as silk slippers – especially since she was pregnant. I don't know anything about female infertility but I can't see her doing anything that would jeopardise her baby, such as walking on wet, uneven surfaces wearing inappropriate footwear."

"And he got clean away with it," Peter snorted, "because they just buried her without an autopsy."

"There was no reason to." John Winchester pointed out. "In those days celibacy until after matrimony was assumed automatically in the case of women. Charlotte Wainwright was not courting any man as far as anyone knew, and was widely believed to be sterile. Plus there was a clearly obvious cause of death and a victim who was the only daughter of a very rich local man. The idea of an autopsy never occurred and Charlotte was simply laid to rest in the crypt with nobody any the wiser they were burying two people."

Peter scowled now, "But the foetal skeleton was fully formed, so she had to be so far along…I mean, wouldn't she have 'shown' a little?"

John Winchester shook his head. "Not necessarily, it all depends on the position of the foetus in the womb. When my wife, Mary, was expecting Dean here, she looked as if she were wearing a balloon under her dress from about three months because Mr Impatient was lying forward in her pelvis, but Sam was positioned back towards her spine, so she still had a pancake-flat stomach at six months – Mary loved being able to get into her size ten jeans and be able to tell everyone she was seven months pregnant."

"I didn't experience any morning sickness or bloating with Emily until I was nearly five months pregnant," Julie reminded her husband quickly as John Winchester's pain became an almost tangible thing in the room, "if the baby was lying back in Charlotte's womb as you say and she wasn't worshipping the porcelain every morning or suffering irrational cravings for bananas and mustard at two in the a.m., she may have been able to hide it quite easily."

"The one bright bit is that Nathaniel didn't get to enjoy much of the cash and highlife he killed her for." Sam informed them with satisfaction. "Six weeks after he murdered Charlotte, Nathaniel Wainwright IV died in a cholera outbreak in Boston aged 25 and his half-brother Arthur Wainwright I eventually got everything, lock stock and barrel as Nathaniel Wainwright III's only surviving child."

"So that's it?" Peter demanded. "Charlotte wanted us to know that her brother whacked her and for this she played Pinyada with our household fixtures and fittings for two months? Why us? Why not throw things at the Wainwrights!"

There came a loud bang from a nearby room. They jumped up and hurried out into the hallway, but the continued silence from upstairs showed that fortunately the noise had not disturbed the children. They went into the room, which was just another sitting room, except that it had a large plasma-screen TV and VCR combination, which was currently on.

Moving forward, John Winchester turned off the TV/VCR and unplugged it from the wall. The screen momentarily went blank but a second later the snow came back, even though there was no power going to it. Dean and Sam exchanged knowing glances.

The TV screen flicked onto a picture, for a moment just vague shapes before coalescing into clear images. Sam's eyes widened in shocked revulsion; little Tommy was seated on top of a kitchen worktop, naked from the waist down. With one hand, Clarice Wigmore fondled his tiny genitals; she had her blouse open and was using her other hand to move Tommy's hand back and forth over her nipple. She swayed slightly, a dreamy smile on her face, until Tommy squirmed, batting at her fingers between his legs with his free hand, a miniature scowl on his face. With a hiss she pinched him and made his eyes tear up as she was jerked out of her reverie and ignored him as she angrily began to re-button her blouse, even when Tommy wriggled dangerously close to the edge of the worktop.

The screen went blank and there was a sharp click – a tape shot out of the impossibly functioning VCR and Julie Hanson caught it like she'd been a pro-ball player all her life as the machinery finally and abruptly went as dead as it should have done when John pulled the plug.

"Charlotte Wainwright's son – or daughter – was unable to speak out in his or her own behalf, and was murdered along with Charlotte; unknown, unmourned, unmissed." Sam said quietly. "Charlotte encountered another child who couldn't speak for himself and became his voice."

"You can say you accidentally left camcorder running; take that tape to the sheriff and you'll put Clarice Wigmore away for a long time. And for what it's worth…Tommy is a year old. As he grows up, he'll have no memory of this happening. You'll be haunted for ever, but Tommy will suffer no ill effects." John Winchester didn't look at Sam as he spoke quietly but with absolute certainty; it wasn't necessary – Sam had no memory of the woman whose ghost never entirely faded from standing just behind John and Dean Winchester's shoulders.

Continued in Chapter 6…

© 2006, CD Stewart