Episode 52: The Undertow

Tuesday, September 6, 1966

My name is Victoria Winters. I originally came to Collinwood hoping to solve the mystery of my past. But the mystery of the present has overshadowed that for the moment.

Carolyn knocks on Vicki’s door and comes in. She wonders why Vicki doesn’t have the door locked.

“Sometimes I forget.” She also notes that ghosts can come through anything. It’s hard for her to realize that she’s only been there for a short while, so much has happened. Was it always like this?

“No. It was always strange, the way my mother never goes anywhere.” People would come around sometimes trying to get a look at the witch and the witch’s daughter, but things didn’t really start to happen until—until Burke Devlin came back.

“You were going to say until I arrived.”

“Well, you arrived and he came back the same day.” Carolyn asks if Vicki had ever met Burke before.

No. She met him at the station, and he told her to go back home.

“I bet you wish you had.”

Vicki says not. She is going to stay until she finds what she came for.

Carolyn is concerned. She thinks it was a body they saw. The tide might have carried it back out. Carolyn’s mother would never let her swim there because of the undertow.

“There’s only one person I know of that’s missing from Collinsport.”

“He doesn’t have to be from here.” Carolyn says he could have fallen in somewhere down the coast. She would have known if it was Bill. “Bill Malloy is the closest thing to a father I ever had. It wasn’t Bill. It couldn’t have been.”

Vicki agrees that Carolyn’s right.

Carolyn notes they’ll have another ghost now. Vicki says there’s no such thing. 

Carolyn thinks she hears something.

Maggie finds her father on the couch and tells him he should go to bed. It’s one o’clock in the morning. He’s worried about Bill Malloy.

“He’s a big fellow. He can take care of himself.”

“Normally, I’d say yes. But these aren’t normal times. There are forces loose in Collinsport that frighten me to think of.”

“What forces?”

“Evil forces. I can smell it in the very atmosphere.”

Maggie says the atmosphere is the purest in the country. That’s why all the summer people come up, to get away from the air pollution.

“This pollution lies in the souls of men, not in the air.”

“I’ve never seen you so gloomy.”

“I’ve never had as much to be gloomy about before.”

“Is it money?”

No, it’s Bill Malloy. He made an appointment with Sam, begged him to come, and then never showed up. Sam wants to know what Maggie did with the letter he gave her. She says it’s in the safe at the hotel.

“I’ve let it known that such a letter exists.” If anything happens to him—

What could happen?

He doesn’t know. Just like he doesn’t know what happened to Bill Malloy.

Vicki suggests the noise is a shutter. Carolyn says it isn’t. She knows the sound of every shutter in the house.

She hears it again.

Vicki checks to see if David is up to something. He appears to be asleep.

Carolyn wants to ask Roger and Liz if they knocked something over downstairs. 

Vicki says they’ll just think she and Carolyn are hearing things now, in addition to seeing things.

Carolyn wishes she hadn’t lost that wristwatch. Since it was a birthday present, Vicki mentions that she never had a birthday.

“You had to be born.”

The foundling home gave her a birthday, but nobody knows if it’s right. (Then she has had a birthday, right?)

“When you haven’t had something,” Vicki says, “it becomes important.” (No presents in the foundling home, apparently.)

Maggie tells Sam that Bill probably had to leave town for a few days. He’ll be back.

“Burke Devlin is a harsh man.” Not the kind to forgive and forget.

Maggie asks about the other day, when Sam said he could see death staring him in the face. Was it Bill’s death? Or Sam’s?

He tells her he doesn’t remember saying it or what he meant by it. He asks her to go to bed, and she silently complies. Then he goes to the phone and dials.

Vicki hears the phone ringing downstairs and grabs her robe.

As she leaves, the window begins to bang. 

Carolyn fastens it and runs after Vicki.

When Vicki answers instead of Roger, Sam hangs up.

Vicki and Carolyn follow the sounds they hear into the drawing room. 

Another unfastened window. 

The family history book is on the floor. 

Vicki picks it up and drops it. It makes a loud thump. 

Maybe a cat got in the window and knocked it off. Carolyn notes that it’s too far from the table to have been gotten there by a cat.

After they leave, an invisible presence opens the book and moves the bookmark. 

The page is one devoted to Josette Collins (1810-1834).

Maggie comes back and says she heard Sam on the phone asking for someone named Collins—the only Collins she knows is Roger.

Sam says Roger just doesn’t want him to do Burke’s portrait because he’d prefer Burke not stay in Collinsport too long.

Maggie says she and Sam used to trust each other and confide.

That was before.

Maggie wants to know why Burke came after he wasn’t coming to pose. To ask questions? Did he get any answers?

Vicki and Carolyn go back to Vicki’s room. Carolyn wonders if it was Bill who called. 

But he would have asked for her mother, and he wouldn’t have hung up.

Vicki says it’s something a drunk would do, call and forget why he’s calling. It didn’t sound like Bill.

Carolyn says she thinks Bill has always had a crush on her mother. That’s why it’s so strange he hasn’t called.

Vicki mentions that Burke came about Bill too.

As long as he didn’t come just to see Vicki.

“He had a lot of other things on his mind. You know, I think he’s very anxious about Mr. Malloy.”

“Old chin whiskers,” Carolyn says. “I wonder where he is right now.”

“Where is Bill Malloy?” Maggie asks.

Sam says he wishes he knew. He wishes Bill were in the room right now. He has so many things he wants to ask.

Not as many as Bill wants to ask him. He gave her the third degree yesterday.

Sam says he can’t tell her what’s going on.

But he wrote it in the letter? She’ll just read that.

Sam says she can’t and wants her to get the letter back in the morning. 

He grabs her arm and hurts her, making her promise she won’t read the letter.

She says she won’t, and she’s never lied to him or broken a promise to him in her life.

He sinks down on the couch, deflated.

        Cast, In Order of Appearance

Victoria Winters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alexandra Moltke

Carolyn Stoddard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Nancy Barrett

Maggie Evans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kathryn Leigh Scott

Sam Evans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  David Ford

Fashion by Ohrbach’s

Directed by John Sedwick

Written by Francis Swann