Episode 53: Between a God and a Devil

Wednesday, September 7, 1966

My name is Victoria Winters. My home is now Collinwood, a strange, brooding house where I tutor a small boy—and try to teach him that ghosts are not perfectly natural visitors.

David asks Vicki if anything special happened last night since he heard someone screaming. 

She says she doesn’t remember. 

David thinks she ought to, because she was the one screaming. He saw her and Carolyn running up the hill. Did they see a ghost?

She says there’s no such thing. 

David says there are. He’s seen them.

Finally, she advises him to look in his crystal ball for the answers. He says he did and she would scream even louder if she knew what he saw. Someone is going to try to kill her. And when she’s dead, David won’t even come to her funeral.

Vicki wants to know why David doesn’t like her. He tells her it’s because she came there to take his mother’s place. She says she came there because she had a job offer.

She asks if he has a picture of his mother. He had one, but someone stole it. Probably his father.

Vicki thinks he should consider himself lucky to have a father.

David says Roger would beat him if not for Aunt Elizabeth.

Liz comes in. David asks her about what happened last night. She says it’s nothing to be concerned about. She goes out to visit Matthew.

David says if anyone ever hurt Elizabeth, he would kill them.

Vicki wonders if that’s all he can think about, hurting people and killing them.

“Why not? They’re all trying to hurt me.”

Joe arrives. He says he’ll wait for Liz to come back.

They discuss David’s crystal ball. Burke Devlin gave it to him. He wouldn’t give David anything fake.

Joe thinks David sees what Burke wants him to see. There’s something wrong with Burke.

Vicki comes up behind him and asks what’s wrong with Burke. 

Joe says David thinks Burke is a god and Joe thinks he’s a devil.

“Maybe he’s something in between,” Vicki says. “A man.” 

Vicki and Joe go into the drawing room and she tells him about the adventures of the night before. Carolyn is still asleep. David eavesdrops.

Liz comes back, and she tells Vicki to join David upstairs for his lessons.

Bill isn’t back. He’s there every morning for the boats to go out. Every morning but this one.

Joe goes back to work.

Liz calls the sheriff’s office and tells someone named George that she’s worried about Bill Malloy.

Vicki is teaching David geography, but he’s more interested in the dead body they saw. She realizes that he was eavesdropping on her and Joe.

“How did you know the man was dead?”

“He wasn’t. I mean, there wasn’t anything there.”

“If he wasn’t there, how could you see him?”

Vicki says they were mistaken. It was seaweed. Their conversation is about rivers interspersed with talk of the night before.

Joe returns with Carolyn’s watch, which he found near the house.

Liz calls Roger again, but he hasn’t come in to work yet. Liz says if anyone asks about Bill to say that he’s out of town on business.

David thinks there was a dead man, and that it was probably Mr. Malloy.

Matthew found the note Liz left for him. He tells her he wasn’t home because he was out with Roger showing him the spot with the seaweed.

Matthew thinks Carolyn should stay away from the spot where Josette jumped. She might have been drawn there by unnatural forces.

David says his father killed Bill. Vicki says it’s all in his imagination.

Ever since she came here, he’s been trying to get his father in trouble, and her too.

Why not? They are always making trouble for him.

Vicki says he should understand how serious what he’s saying is. His father could go to prison for life.

David says that would suit him just fine.

Liz questions Matthew about the night before. She notes that in eighteen years, he’s never deliberately lied to her. (Backstory change alert: Matthew says he worked for her father on the boats before working for her—rather than the previous story he told Vicki about cleaning the cannery.)

Liz wants to know whether there was a body on the beach when he first went down. He admits there was. He pushed it back into the water to avoid trouble.

Liz calls the sheriff and says she knows where Bill is.

        Cast, In Order of Appearance

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

David Collins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Henesy

Elizabeth Collins Stoddard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Joan Bennett

Joe Haskell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joel Crothers

Matthew Morgan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Thayer David

Fashion by Ohrbach’s

Directed by John Sedwick

Written by Francis Swann