She knew she should have turned, then, and gone back out; she had a firm rule about not taking chances moving around empty campus buildings at night. But the thought that Brendan was in his office was strong. She reached into her purse for her cell phone to check … but then dropped the phone back into her bag. She opened the stairwell door quietly and eased it shut behind her, then walked as noiselessly as she could up the stairs. Each step increased her unease.
At the top of the stairwell she heard voices coming from down the hall, murmuring, even though the lights in the corridor were down to half-power. Someone was in Brendan’s office with him.
Katrina?
she wondered instantly. Her face flushed hot, and she was just as instantly ashamed of the thought.
Nevertheless she was compelled. She walked down the corridor, slowing her footsteps, and placing her feet carefully so that she was making no noise.
She stopped just outside the doorway—and was startled to hear not Katrina’s, but Tyler’s voice.
She hovered, straining to hear.
The voices suddenly stopped, and Brendan’s voice called out sharply. “Is someone there?”
Laurel stepped into the doorway.
Brendan looked startled, then said, too heartily, she thought …
“Dr. MacDonald, I’m so glad you came back. First of all, we’re in luck. Apparently Mr. Mountford here is much more accomplished in audio and computer technology than I am, so we won’t have to bring in an outside tech expert.”
Laurel remembered Tyler mentioning that he’d run light and sound for the theater department.
If that wasn’t just another lie,
she added to herself grimly. She looked at Tyler and he had the grace to look flustered.
“It’s not rocket science,” he muttered.
She turned away from him, back to Brendan. “And second?” She asked coolly.
“Second?” Brendan repeated, confused.
“You said, ‘First of all.’ I wondered what ‘second of all’ was.”
“Oh, I see!” Brendan’s laugh sounded forced. “Well, second, I should have offered to walk you to your car to begin with.”
“It’s all right,” she said coolly.
“I insist,” he said, and stood gallantly. “We’ll meet to requisition the equipment tomorrow, Mr. Mountford.” Tyler shifted in his seat and mumbled assent.
Moonlight spilled across the deserted lawn of the quad as Brendan and Laurel walked on the paths under the shadows of oaks. Laurel was silent and stiff beside him, too aware of the heat of his body.
There was a touch of chill in the air, a hint of coming winter. She shivered, and the next thing she knew Brendan was taking off his jacket.
“I don’t—,” she started, but he already had it off and was draping it over her shoulders. His hands lingered for just a moment on her shoulders, then dropped to his sides again.
They continued to walk in silence. The scent of his aftershave and his skin rose from the leather of his jacket, enveloping her.
Don’t
… , she warned herself, and walked more stiffly.
They were almost to her car when Brendan suddenly spoke beside her. “I can’t tell you what all this means to me, Mickey.” His voice was husky and low. “I feel like my life finally makes sense. All of it. I’m so glad—”
He paused, and she looked at him, in spite of herself. He shook his head slightly, but smiled at her.
They stopped beside her car and she fumbled for her keys.
She zapped open the lock and Brendan started to open the door for her. She tried to step by him but he looked down at her. She froze, her heart in her throat, her pulse pounding in her head …
Then he touched her hair, the lightest touch. “Sweet dreams,” he murmured.
He closed the car door on her and she sat trembling in the front seat.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Move-in day was blanketed with clouds. They had decided to drive down to Five Oaks separately; the house was isolated enough that multiple cars seemed prudent.
Laurel got on the road early. She stopped in to leave the cat with Aunt Margaret and Uncle Morgan, explaining that she was doing a three-week research project without actually saying where she was going. Uncle Morgan looked at her with sad reproach, which both tore at her heart and made her wonder just how much he knew, both about the past and about what she was about to do, but he refused to answer when she spoke to him.
Laurel closed her eyes briefly, thinking about it.
The cat, however, had gone to him immediately and jumped up in his lap as if she belonged there, and Uncle Morgan cradled the animal to his chest and disappeared with her into his library as if she were the only thing he’d been waiting for.
On her own behind the wheel, Laurel paid much more attention to the route. She passed through sleepy towns with no more than a thousand inhabitants, and some obviously with far fewer. “Town” was sometimes no more than a Food Lion, a Family Dollar Store, an Auto Zone, and two or three gas stations along the highway.
With each mile, Laurel had the sense that she was driving off the grid entirely.
She turned off the highway onto the six-mile road that took her out to the Folger House, passing horse pastures and patchwork fields bordered by split-rail fences, then leaving those behind, too, as she drove into the Pine Barrens.
At the foot of the estate the gate already stood open and she drove between the gateposts with their stone dogs, feeling a shiver of anticipation as the wheels crunched over the slate chips of the circular drive.
The house was bigger than she remembered, and more strange, crouched between pines, and white as a shell.
The enormous circular drive was empty—somehow she had beaten everyone here. She shut off the engine and sat for a moment, staring up at the house.
Fine. I’ll wait. No way am I going in there alone.
The car door made a hollow
thunk
as she shut it—too loud in the stillness. The wind slipped through the tops of the pines, making the long and glistening needles shiver.
As she stood on the slate-chip path looking up at the house, she saw clearly for the first time that it was really three houses, joined by two two-story brick connecting walkways. The front of the structure was the original white house with its white-painted brick and patios and multiple archways and almost Spanish flavor. Then that smaller brick connector, two stories, attaching the Spanish house to the older main house, redbrick with white colonial pillars holding up its double porches. Then another small two-story walkway joining the brick main house to the separate white two-story shingled house that was comprised of the servants’ quarters. The long snakelike corridor she remembered from their first visit must stretch across all three separate parts of the house.
The wall of pines that surrounded the house were taller trees than she could ever remember seeing before, except for maybe the sequoias of Northern California. The height of that green wall gave an otherworldliness to the place that was awesome and unnerving.
Gravel crunched behind her and she whirled, startled.
“It’s okay, it’s okay.”
Brendan, of course, holding up his hands apologetically, flashing her that dangerously appealing grin. He was dressed in jeans and a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater, and looked like he’d just stepped out of a J.Crew catalog. Laurel pulled herself together. “I didn’t hear you. Where’s your car?”
“I parked around back to bring in the equipment and food.”
“How long have you been here?” she asked, surprised.
“An hour or two,” he said vaguely. “I thought it would be good to have everything moved in before our subjects get here so their first impressions of the house are as undiluted as possible.”
It made sense, she had to admit, but there was something about his arriving early that disturbed her, in a minor but nagging way.
“Let me help you with your stuff.” He grabbed the box of clean linens and bedding from her trunk, and she lifted out her suitcase. “We’ll go up the back way and save the main part of the house for a first walk-through,” he said, fairly brimming with enthusiasm.
They crunched their way over a path spread with more slate chips, the same gray as the roof, and onto a concrete path that led them past the round span of grass with the marble nymph at the head of the circle, past the elegant enclosed porch with the Colonial columns in front of the old main house. Around and above them the wind made a silky sound through the pines. At the back stoop Brendan juggled the box of linens to open the back door for Laurel, and she stepped inside.
The spell of the house, as before, was instantaneous, settling on her like a provocative dream. The silence was a palpable weight. They moved through the back hall into the house manager’s office and wound up around the creaky back stairs of the servants’ quarters to the long narrowness of the upstairs, the endless rooms.
“How many bedrooms are there? Did you count?” Laurel asked, breathless.
“It depends on how you want to define ‘bedroom,’ ” Brendan said over his shoulder. “Six along this upstairs corridor, plus a kitchen, three bathrooms, a study, and four or five of those weird nonrooms.”
As he spoke they passed through one of the nonrooms, where the corridor widened into a room the size of half a bedroom, with a divan and an end table under a window on the left, and a wall of linen closets on the right. Then the three extremely steep and beautifully carved steps leading up to the relatively large study on the right, with its slanted ceilings and nine-paned windows.
They moved into the study. Laurel noticed again the deep, rich dark grain of the wood floors. There were standing bookcases with sets of dusty leather-bound volumes and newspaper pages framed on the walls of the room; Laurel made a mental note to take time to read them.
Could be something interesting there.
The room was so much larger than the ones before it; she stepped to one of the windows to look out and realized that they had already left the tall, narrow white house in back; the study room was the start of a much larger corridor—built on top of the brick part of the house.
“I see—” she started.
“Yep. Now we’re on top of the original house. That bizarre dining hall is right below us, I’m pretty sure.” Laurel noted that he called the dining hall “bizarre.”
So it wasn’t just me,
she thought.
There’s something wrong in that room.
And then she wondered what she was thinking.
Out the study door the hall jogged to the right again and resumed, quickly opening into another wide space. To the right was a staircase leading downstairs (Laurel guessed to the kitchen, but was not entirely sure). There was a large bathroom to the right and a small bedroom to the left—then another four steep stairs to an archway, after which the hall continued into the three bedrooms in a row on the left: the large room with the twin sleigh beds and the fireplace, then the tiny, narrow room with an adjoining door (
the nanny’s room,
she thought again), and then the nicely appointed one with the hearth and with big windows overlooking the garden. All of these opened onto the long, narrow balcony overlooking the gardens.
“Can you imagine living like this?” Laurel said suddenly. She didn’t have to explain what she meant; Brendan gave her a look of complete understanding.
“No, I can’t. Not in a million years,” he said flatly. “Not for lack of trying, though.”
“Where is everyone going to sleep?” Laurel wondered aloud, and just as suddenly felt flustered.
“We’ll let them choose,” Brendan said. “Might as well let them go with whatever vibe they feel. In for a penny, in for a pound.”
It occurred to Laurel that she would be sleeping alone in a room in this ominous, resonant old house.
Brings real meaning to publish or perish,
she thought, with slightly hysterical humor.
She reached out and tried the knob of the single door to the right again. Still locked.
“Locked,” Brendan said, simultaneously with her thought. “We’ll have to do something about that”—he winked at her—“but we’ll wait for the team.” He waved a hand back the way they had come. “I just left my suitcase in the closet in the study—den—whatever that room is. Figured we’d wait to choose our bedrooms and unpack later, after we get the children settled.”
She nodded assent and they headed back to get another load from the car.
At the car again, she scooped up her laptop case from the trunk and Brendan lifted out a box of books and files. As Laurel shut the trunk lid, they heard a roar of engine, and Tyler zoomed up the graveled drive in a Maserati.
Well, if I didn’t know he came from money before, I guess I do now
…
Music blasted from the windows, dark and British-sounding. Laurel recognized The Cure.
Very retro of you, Tyler.
To her surprise, both Tyler and Katrina got out of the car, Katrina looking as removed and regally indifferent as if she’d just been dropped off by a chauffeur.
Interesting,
Laurel thought.
Before she was acting as if she wouldn’t give Tyler the time of day, and now they’re riding together? But then, nothing would shock me from that one.
She was gratified to see the two students stop in their tracks, and stare up at the house in a sort of stupefied admiration.
“Holy shit,” Tyler whistled. “Y’all weren’t kidding around about haunted, were you? You sure there’ll be any room for us, with all the ghosts?”
Brendan took charge, which Laurel was grateful for, as it allowed her to stand back and watch. “We’ll take you up the back way to dump your stuff and—freshen up. Then we’d like you to take an official tour, so we get your first impressions recorded.”
“You’re the boss,” Tyler said lazily. But he looked at Laurel as he said it, and she felt again that annoying flutter in her stomach.
They trooped up the outer back stairs and Brendan let them in to the tiny servants’ kitchen. Laurel and Brendan hung back and let the two students go first. Laurel noticed Katrina looking around her with a faint moue of distaste. The house was fairly clean, considering how long it had been empty, but Laurel imagined Katrina was used to far more elegant circumstances. The girl’s shiny pants and embroidered blouse were casual, but Laurel recognized couture when she saw it.