“For twelve people,” her father added, his hands in the pockets of his khaki pants.
Regan tried to end the visit on a positive note by saying, “Or me.” She’d just spent an hour giving them a tour and having her mother criticize all her furniture placement while her father calculated maintenance costs on a house that size.
She was exhausted and just wanted to close the courtyard gate on them and sink onto her couch, which was placed exactly where she wanted it, thank you very much.
Her mother, wearing a red pants suit even though she’d had no plans that day other than this visit, fluffed her short, chic gray hair. “I know it’s none of my business.”
That was such a promising start to a sentence.
“But honestly, Regan, can you just give me one good reason why you’re throwing away your marriage to Beau? It’s not too late. He’d take you back, I’m sure he would. Just tell him you panicked, you got confused, he’ll understand.”
There it was. Yet again. Her mother’s conviction that she had suffered some sort of temporary insanity. Regan crossed her arms over her chest then realized her action, and purposely dropped them. She didn’t need to defend or protect herself. “I didn’t panic. I didn’t get confused. Our marriage wasn’t working for me.”
“So you just gave up? Like that?” Her mother snapped her fingers. “The shine wore off the new toy so you threw it away?”
When had she ever behaved that way? Her entire life she had caused no ripples, had always done what was expected of her, and respected all of her mother’s rules and desires. Regan could be totally honest in saying she had been a passive child and teenager, not a brat. That was no doubt partly the result of her sister’s death at the age of six. Regan had never wanted to add to their grief, had never wanted strife or tension. Felix had been right about that in his reading of her.
“No,” she told her mother carefully, determined not to lose her temper. “It was a mistake. I never should have married Beau in the first place.”
Her mom opened her mouth, but her father interceded. “Mary,” he said, a soft warning in his voice. “It’s time for us to go.”
“Thanks, Daddy,” she said. “Thank you for dinner.”
He gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Talk to you soon, princess.”
“Bye. Bye, Mom. I love you both.”
“I love you, too, Regan,” her mother said, her disappointment so apparent it undid Regan’s carefully constructed façade.
Knowing she was going to cry, she waved and retreated into the house, shutting the door behind her and locking it. Rude, no doubt. And something she would hear about later, but God, she couldn’t stand that look on her mother’s face. The implication that Regan had left Beau purely on some juvenile impulse, a bratty plea for attention.
Did her mother even have one clue about who she was?
Regan wandered through the enormous gourmet kitchen and wondered, did she really know herself?
Who exactly was Regan Henry? And who had Regan Henry Alcroft been? That was easier. She had been fictitious, a woman who didn’t actually exist. A woman who had never really been, and would be no more.
Her family’s reaction to her divorce was what she had been expecting, no matter how much it distressed her. But Felix’s reaction in his shop hadn’t been what she’d been hoping for.
Regan climbed the stairs to the second floor, her hand gripping the rich mahogany balustrade. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but it wasn’t such coldness.
Then again, why would he care about her marriage breaking up?
It was more than a little embarrassing to think how frequently he had popped up in her thoughts over the last few months, and clearly she was just a random customer to him. One of hundreds he saw in a year. Nothing special to make her stand out in his mind.
Though he had remembered her.
And he had said she was lovely.
It was artificial flattery, nothing more, and she needed to remember that.
Stepping into her living room, she went over to the box she had purposefully avoided unpacking before her mother had seen the house. It would have led to another argument, and Regan could only handle one at a time. Ripping off the tape, she opened the box and pulled out the picture frames, then removed them from their Bubble Wrap one by one.
On the creamy buffet she used for storing candles and magazines in her living room, Regan arranged the photos of her childhood. Her and Moira at the beach. The two of them lying in a hammock together. Wearing twin grins in another picture, mouths rimmed with chocolate ice cream. The formal picture of the Easter that Regan had been four and Moira six, before the diagnosis. They were both dressed in yellow chiffon, white gloves, rosebud purses clutched delicately in their laps.
Her mother didn’t approve of Regan displaying pictures of her sister. It was too painful, her mother claimed. But for Regan, it was a way to hold on to the good, to the wonderful memories of sisterhood, of happy times, and the fast friendship that only siblings can share. In these pictures they were two little girls living life to the fullest, and that was the way she remembered Moira. Even when she’d been dying of leukemia, all her hair gone, Regan had memories of Moira singing along to the TV in the hospital, grinning in delight at the treat of a Popsicle, and offering for Regan to snuggle under her covers with her, then tickling her.
It was a mystery how her father felt about his oldest daughter’s death, because he was silent on the subject, but her mother’s opinion was clear—the hole in her heart had never healed and she didn’t appreciate being reminded of that.
The mother-of-pearl frames surrounding the treasured photos were expensive antiques from her grandmother on her mother’s side, passed to Regan at her death. Another point of contention between Regan and her mother. Bad enough she had pictures of Moira lying about, but to stick them in her grandmother’s frames ... to her mother, that was heaping grief on grief. For Regan, it was comfort, a way to keep them both close, to show respect.
She pulled a small crystal lamp out of the box, placed it on the end of the buffet, and plugged it in. Surveying the tablescape, she arranged a few frames, then was satisfied. Considering what a long day she’d had, that was good enough for tonight. She’d tackle the real unpacking tomorrow.
For now, she was going to sit on her balcony and go back to the beginning of CAC’s journal. She didn’t want to read it out of context, but wanted to read the author’s whole story, from start to finish. She was meeting Felix the next day, and she wanted to at least have some questions ready for him about voodoo so he didn’t think she was using the journal as some sort of excuse to see him.
Which maybe she was. In part, at least. She really did want to understand the journal, but there was no denying she also wanted to see him.
For some reason, her dream from that morning popped into her head, and she felt the flicker of arousal spark between her thighs. Her body was clearly sending her a hint that it didn’t appreciate being neglected.
Unzipping her boots in her bedroom and tugging them off, she flung them on the floor at the end of her bed. The room was a disaster of boxes stacked on boxes, but she had a bed, and she’d put sheets on it, so the rest could wait. Except for one thing. Rustling around in the box she’d marked with a heart drawn in marker, she pulled out the stuffed monkey, its ear tattered, tail perilously close to falling off.
It was her sister’s and it belonged in the bottom of her nightstand, close to where Regan slept. She would have preferred it on the bed, but didn’t want to hassle with hiding it every time her mother came over, because invariably one day she would forget, and that would be disastrous considering that her mother didn’t even know she had Patrick the monkey. When she lived with Beau, she had kept it tucked away as well because she hadn’t wanted to explain anything to him, to share the pain of her loss.
Maybe that should have been a red flag to her, that she couldn’t be vulnerable with him.
She supposed it had been.
Tucking the monkey into the nightstand, on his yellow blanket, she took the journal and headed out onto her balcony. Regan flipped past the first two entries she had read with Chris and read two more that outlined normal day-to-day tasks. It wasn’t until she got to the entry on July 2 that Regan got her first glimpse of understanding as to what had happened to this poor girl.
Mother died this evening. I can barely write for my shock. We dined as usual, all seven of us, and all was well. Within two hours she was poorly, and now it is midnight and she is gone from the fever.
I cannot express my grief. My mother, gone. It is beyond comprehension.
Regan sighed, her heart going out to the girl who had written those words of pain. She understood all too well the grief, confusion that death brought.
July 3, I am. Jeanne-Marie has the fever now and is quite ill. Her moans are pitiful and I fear greatly for my sister. Father recalled the physician who left after my mother’s passing, but we have heard the fever has taken the city in earnest and it may be some time before he can return. I can only pace and pray.
1:47 am. Lord help us, both Isabel and Frances have the fever as well. The physician has not returned.
2:01 am. Jeanne-Marie has passed after a brief, but horrendous struggle. Her cries of agony are burned onto my consciousness. I am utterly devastated. My beautiful mother and sister gone from me forever.
4 am. Clara is afflicted as well.
7:17 am. Just finished preparing the mourning room for Mother and Jeanne-Marie. I am moving in a fog of shock and exhaustion.
8:03 am. Frances has joined my mother and Jeanne-Marie.
10:12 am. Father has the fever.
10:23 am. Clara dead.
Noon. Isabel dead.
5:19 pm. Father dead.
5:20 pm. All dead, save me. I pray my time will be soon.
July 5, 1878. I did not die.
“Good God,” Regan whispered as she read the last entry. Those words, scrawled onto an otherwise empty page, told the entire story.
Here was a twenty-year-old girl who had lost her entire family, four sisters and her parents, in less than twenty-four hours. It was unimaginable. No one could recover from that kind of staggering loss.
Regan shivered, leaning back in her chair to stare blindly at the house across the street from her.
Her heart broke for the girl who had endured such a horrible tragedy. The girl might be long dead, but Regan wished she could offer her some measure of comfort. But there could be no words to make someone feel better under those kinds of circumstances. It was beyond horrible.
And it had happened in her house.
She sat up straight in her chair. It had happened in her house. All those people had died here, somewhere within these walls. The mother and father probably right there in her bedroom. They had suffered and died from yellow fever.
Regan wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Of course anytime you buy an older home, you have to recognize that at some point someone probably died there, but to know for sure that they had, and in such a tragic montage of death, well, it was a totally uncomfortable feeling.
Though maybe it hadn’t happened here. Maybe the girl had moved here afterward. Maybe it had been a fresh start. Maybe she had married someone other than the undesirable Mr. Tradd.
Regan would have to do a little investigating, but she could find out who had owned the house in that time period and see if she could research the family.
But the question was, did she want to know?
Logic told her they most likely had all died here.
The taxi driver’s story popped into her head. He had mentioned a young woman who had killed herself by jumping off the balcony. Maybe that was true, though it wasn’t over a boy. Maybe it was a young woman who had struggled to continue after she lost her entire family and eventually gave up the fight.
Regan would have to read the rest of the journal to see if there were any clues as to what had happened to the author.
She got up to go inside and snag a Diet Coke so she could keep reading. Passing through her bedroom, she glanced over at her bed. And stopped cold.
Patrick the monkey was on her bed, right in the middle, propped up on her pillows.
She let out a shriek and almost dropped the journal. “Oh, my God.”
Stuffed monkey’s didn’t move by themselves.
Someone must be in her house.
Panicking, she felt her pocket for her cell phone, darting her gaze around the room, but not seeing anyone or anything else of suspicion. Setting the journal down on the chest of drawers, she rushed back out onto the balcony and shoved a chair in front of the French doors. Digging her phone out with trembling fingers, she dialed Chris at the same time she walked the length of the balcony, checking for any intruders through all of her windows.
She saw nothing but empty rooms, the phone up to her ear and ringing. When she passed her living room, she realized that if someone was in the house, they could reach the balcony through that set of doors, but then again, why would anyone chase her onto the balcony?
Chris answered his phone. “Hey, can I call you back?”
“No! Don’t hang up. I think there’s someone in my house!”
“Are you serious? Well, fucking call 911 then!”
Good point. “Okay, I’ll call you right back. Answer the phone.”
“Of course.”
Regan called 911 and explained she thought she had an intruder then called Chris back. “They said they’d send someone over to check it out.”
“Where are you?”
“On my balcony with a chair shoved against the door.” Regan paced back and forth, checking the windows inside. All the rooms were still empty. “I figure if someone comes out here, I can scream for help at least”