First Frost

by Sarah Addison Allen

  “But what about lunch?” Violet said.

  “Claire hasn’t even gone for it yet. You’ll have time.”

  Bay squirmed in the chair. “Mom, costumes are optional. This is not a big deal.”

  “This is your first dance. It is a big deal. I will not let you go without a costume. Does anyone have any clothes from the eighties?” she asked her stylists. “I do excellent mall hair.”

  Claire finally decided to throw Bay a rope. “Grandmother Mary had a few old dresses I kept. Long, filmy things, like party dresses from the 1920s. I think they might have belonged to her mother.”

  Sydney smiled, as if remembering something she’d almost forgotten. “I used to think you were the only person in the family to ever throw parties in the garden, like your first frost parties, but now I remember that Grandmother Mary once told me about picnics she had in the garden. She would invite people in and dress like a garden nymph.”

  “That’s what I’ll be, then,” Bay said quickly, definitively, wanting to put an end to this. “I’ll wear a Grandmother Mary dress and be a garden nymph.”

  Claire and Sydney exchanged glances. This was a big step for Sydney, accepting this about her daughter. Bay was a Waverley who wanted to dress up like a Waverley, and not in jest, like the time when they were kids and Sydney dressed up as Claire one Halloween, wearing a long, black wig that covered her face and an apron that said KISS THE COOK, which she’d thought was funny, because no one had wanted to kiss weird Claire. Of all the things Bay could be, a Waverley is what she’d chosen. That’s who she was. It wasn’t really a costume at all. Sydney gave in, ultimately lured in by the possibilities of styling Bay’s hair. Bay had only let Sydney trim it for years.

  “Fine,” Sydney said, pumping up the chair. “Claire, will you pick up some flowers at Fred’s so I can put them in her hair?”

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Wait, get me some pie, too, will you?” Violet called as Claire passed the reception desk and walked out.

  * * *

  When Claire stepped outside, the autumn light was slanted and orange, like the noontime sun had fallen to the ground somewhere far away in the flat distance. The light at this time of year had a different feel to it, like a beacon slowly fading.

  She was about to turn right, toward the café and Fred’s market, but to her left she caught the glint of something silver, and she turned to see two ladies standing outside of Maxine’s clothing store, speaking to an elderly man in a gray suit.

  It was him. The old man she’d seen outside her house, twice. She hurried up the sidewalk toward them, bypassing a group of college students who had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to take a group selfie, as if the act of walking on the sidewalk itself needed to be documented. Claire hedged around them, losing sight of the old man for a moment.

  When she looked again, he was gone.

  Puzzled, Claire approached the ladies. She knew them well. Claire used to cater all of Patrice’s anniversary and birthday parties. Patrice was with her sister, Tara, who often visited from Raleigh. Claire had gone to school with Patrice. Sydney put a lot of emphasis on her own high school years, how pivotal they were to her. And Sydney wanted so much for these years to be good for Bay. But Claire could honestly say she didn’t remember much of her own high school experience. She went, kept to herself and waited to go home in the afternoons so she could join her grandmother in the kitchen. It was, like most things in Claire’s experience, something she glossed over in favor of better memories. Sydney called it her revisionist history.

  “Claire, we were just talking about you,” Patrice said. She was in her early forties and fighting it. Her hair was long, super-blond and shiny. Facial fillers kept her mouth from moving too wide, so she spoke with a slight fish-face expression. Her blue eyes were deeply rimmed in black eyeliner, a look she wasn’t young enough to pull off, and her pupils were always a little dilated from taking one too many anti-anxieties, though she thought no one noticed.

  “That man, who was he?” Claire asked, trying not to sound like it was urgent, because it wasn’t really urgent. At least, she didn’t think so.

  “What man?” Patrice said.

  “There was an elderly man standing here a moment ago,” Claire said. “He had silver hair. He was wearing a silver suit.”

  “There was no one here,” Tara said. Tara was older than Patrice and not fighting it as well, in large part because Tara didn’t have the kind of money Patrice married into. Her hair was darker, and she wore tunics covering a perfectly acceptable middle-aged belly, hiding it from her go-to-the-gym-every-day sister.

  “He was right here,” Claire said, getting frustrated. “Right where I’m standing.”

  “I’m sorry, Claire,” Patrice said. “We haven’t seen anyone like that.”

  “You were talking to him,” Claire said, frowning.

  “We were talking, but just to each other,” Tara said. “What was it we were saying?”

  “I don’t remember,” Patrice said.

  Tara laughed. “That’s funny, I don’t remember, either.”

  “We came out of the store, and you walked up to us. I thought we’d been talking about you, but I suppose we hadn’t.” Patrice shrugged.

  Claire said good-bye and walked away, leaving Patrice and Tara staring off into space, as if someone had put them in a trance.

  Someone who smelled like smoke.

  6

  Back at the Pendland Street Inn, Anne Ainsley stood outside room number six with a set of fresh sheets in her arms.

  “Mr. Zahler?” she called as she knocked.

  He didn’t answer. She knew he wouldn’t. She’d seen him leave for downtown after breakfast.

  She unlocked his bedroom door and entered.

  In every one of Anne’s three marriages, she’d found herself surprised by her husbands’ lies. Genuinely, knocked-off-her-feet surprised. After her third husband cheated on her and emptied her bank account of the last of the money she’d inherited from her parents, she swore she would never allow herself to be surprised like that ever again. Men lied. She accepted that now. They couldn’t help it. It was their default position. They denied it, but that just proved her point.

  Russell Zahler was lying about something. And she truly didn’t care. It actually gave her some satisfaction that Andrew was being conned. But she was curious and bored. Andrew didn’t let her have a television in her room. There wasn’t a television in the whole damn inn. It isn’t authentic to the house, Andrew would say. Sometimes she wanted to say, What about electricity, Andrew? That’s not authentic to the house, either. God, he was so much like their father sometimes. So, Anne had to find her own entertainment.

  Her entertainment mostly consisted of the Internet on the front-desk computer, and spying on guests and rifling through their things when she cleaned their rooms. She never stole anything. Andrew would toss her out in a millisecond if she did that. She just liked to see what people brought from their homes, what their perfumes smelled like and what sizes they wore. She liked the stories she would make up about them.

  Anne had always been a bit of a sneak. She knew that about herself. Anne and Andrew’s father had been an optometrist and their mother had run his office, but their mother had also secretly sold naughty lingerie in her spare time, mostly to the Clark women in town, who were known for their sexual prowess and always married well because of it. Their father had never known about their mother’s side business. And Andrew had been aghast when he’d found their mother’s catalogs and wares after she died.

  But Anne had known all about it. She’d found the stuff when she was ten, after discovering the locked trunk in the back of her mother’s closet. She’d searched all over the house until she’d found the key to it hidden in the toilet tank.

  Their parents had died on their first road trip after they retired. They’d saved a fortune and had intended to live very well into their old age. The several hundred thousand they’d l
eft had made Anne soft in the head. That’s the only explanation she had for letting Andrew have the house. She’d been married to her first husband back then, and Andrew had still been living at home. He’d always been a prissy man. Women made him uncomfortable and he never dated, so Anne had thought she was being magnanimous by letting him have a place to live out his lonely years.

  Two husbands later—two husbands and their two failed businesses, both of which Anne had funded—and Anne was broke. For the past five years, she’d been living here in her childhood home, which Andrew had turned into an inn. She’d always secretly felt it was a little creepy, like creating a shrine so people could visit their dead parents. Andrew gave her room and board (their two tiny bedrooms were now in the basement) and minimum wage, which she spent on beer, cigarettes and magazines. This was her life now. She accepted that. She was fifty-nine, so close to sixty she could taste it, and she had no expectations for her own happiness anymore.

  She closed the door to Russell Zahler’s room behind her. This was officially called the Andrew Ainsely Room. It was even written on a small plaque on the door. This was Andrew’s old bedroom from when they were children. It was decorated in dark purples and aubergines, which Andrew called royal colors.

  He’d named Anne’s old bedroom the Hopes and Dreams Room.

  She wasn’t sure, but she thought that was a dig.

  She set the sheets on the queen-sized bed and looked around. Russell Zahler had left the heat turned up and the clear glass lamp by the bed on. But he hadn’t hung anything in the closet, and there were no toiletries in the small attached bathroom. There was only his large leather suitcase on the luggage rack at the bottom of the bed. She walked over to it and clicked it open. There wasn’t much inside. Another gray suit and a white shirt, folded; a threadbare pair of pajamas; that outlandish lord-of-the-manor robe he’d worn that night he’d walked into the kitchen and scared Anne to death because she’d thought it was Andrew, catching her smoking again; socks and underwear; and a black toiletry bag containing a comb, toothpaste, a toothbrush, deodorant, a bar of soap, a razor and a bottle of aspirin.

  That was it.

  That wasn’t much of a story. She was a little disappointed.

  She frowned as her fingers touched the bottom of the suitcase. It didn’t feel like she had reached all the way down. She tapped at it with her fingernails. It sounded hollow. She found the corners and pulled the divider up, revealing a secret space.

  Ha! she almost said out loud, satisfied as she always was when she discovered something someone didn’t want found.

  Inside was an old deck of tarot cards, a small white crystal on a cheap chain necklace and a thick pile of tattered office folders held together by a large rubber band.

  Anne took the file folders out and slid off the rubber band. The tabs on the folders had names of people on them, each folder containing newspaper clippings and photographs and copies of public documents like land deeds and marriage certificates. She didn’t recognize any of the names until she came to the tab on the folder that read: Lorelei Waverley.

  That was Claire and Sydney Waverley’s mother. Anne had been a few years younger than Lorelei. Lorelei had been odd, like all the rest of that family. But wild and sad, also. Lorelei had left town years ago and died somewhere in Tennessee, from what Anne had heard. Was that why Russell Zahler was so interested in the Waverleys? Because of Lorelei? Had he once known her? Anne looked inside the folder. There were several copies of a single old photograph. It was taken in the 1970s, judging by the pointed collars and the mustard and brown colors of the clothing. In the photo, there was Lorelei Waverley when she looked to be in her twenties, sitting next to a middle-aged Russell and another dark-haired couple with a baby. They were in one of those curved corner booths found in older bars and Pizza Huts. She glanced at the rest of the contents of the folder, which, interestingly enough, seemed to be all about Claire Waverley, not Lorelei; articles about Claire’s business, and tax documents, which she wanted to take a closer look at, but she nearly jumped out of her skin at a knock on the door.

  “Anne?” her brother called. “Are you in there?”

  “Yes,” she said calmly. She was about to put the file folders back when she suddenly noticed a few antique flyers, yellowed with age, that had been under the folders in the suitcase. She picked one up. It was an old advert for a traveling carnival, featuring a magician and psychic called the Great Banditi.

  On the bottom right-hand side of the flyer was a circular photo of a man wearing a large turban with a jewel in the center. He had his hands out in front of him like he was going to shoot lightning out of his fingertips.

  It was Russell Zahler.

  Now here was a story.

  “Anne!” her brother called again.

  “Coming,” she said as she folded one of the flyers and put it into her pocket, then put the rest of the things back into the suitcase, exactly in the places they’d been. She snapped the case closed, then went to the door.

  “What are you doing?” Andrew asked.

  “I’m changing the sheets,” she said with a shrug, “like I do every day.”

  He pointed to the sign hung on the doorknob. “There’s a DO NOT DISTURB sign here. We take these things very seriously.”

  She hated when he referred to himself as we.

  “Oh. I must have missed it.” She went back into the room and grabbed the folded sheets she’d left on the bed. “Sorry,” she said as she walked out.

  “Don’t let it happen again.” Andrew glanced around the room, then firmly closed the door behind him.

  * * *

  Several hours later, Claire, Sydney and Bay were searching through the Waverley house for one of Grandmother Mary’s dresses for Bay to wear to the Halloween dance, which felt to Bay like trying to find a specific drop of water in a well. The Waverley house was large and stuffed to the rafters. The only place that had any order was the commercial kitchen, which made sense, because that’s where Claire spent all her time. As for the rest of the house, Claire had apparently kept everything that had once belonged to her grandmother. And when Tyler had moved in, he’d brought all his things, including his painting stuff, which took up most of the guest room.

  Bay was secretly hoping they wouldn’t find a dress in time, then she could take these ridiculous daisies and green leaves out of her wildly curled hair and go as herself. All she wanted to do was make sure Josh saw her, saw her ignoring him, not making a scene, then she’d leave. He said she wouldn’t come. She’d show him. He had no idea who she was or what she would or wouldn’t do. He’d never even talked to her.

  They’d just come from the attic when they met Tyler and Mariah in the hallway, home for the day.

  “What are you doing?” Mariah asked brightly, instantly intrigued. She was still in her gymnastics uniform. Her hair was in a messy bun that her father had obviously tried to execute. “Is this a game? Why do you have flowers in your hair, Bay? You look so pretty, like my new best friend.”

  Bay put her arm around her cousin, who smelled like peanuts. “Thanks, squirt.”

  “Hi, baby,” Claire said, almost guiltily, like she was caught doing something that wasn’t work. “How was gymnastics?”

  “It was fine. What are you doing?” Mariah asked again.

  “We’re looking for old dresses for Bay to wear to a Halloween dance, dresses that once belonged to my grandmother,” Claire explained.

  Mariah screwed up her face for a moment, thinking, then said, “Have you tried the guest room closet?”

  “Not yet. That’s a good idea.”

  Mariah turned and ran into the guest room, where the springs of the bed were soon heard squeaking as she jumped on it.

  Claire turned to Tyler. “When you get time, would you caulk around the vents in the attic? I felt some cold air coming in when we were up there.”

  “You’d feel cold air if you were standing on the sun,” Tyler teased.

  Claire smiled. “Did you a
nd Mariah have fun today?”

  “Gymnastics, and then office hours. It’s been the longest day anyone has ever had, ever. Seriously, I win.” Tyler scrubbed the stubble on his cheeks tiredly.

  “Sorry. Don’t forget to eat. I bought some rotisserie chicken at Fred’s today.” Claire leaned in and said in a low voice, “Was Em at gymnastics practice?”

  Tyler shook his head, as seemingly perplexed by this new best friend as Claire was. “Apparently Em doesn’t do gymnastics. Or ballet.”

  “Wait,” Claire said, drawing back. “You mean you haven’t met her yet?”

  “You two can play old married couple some other time,” Sydney said. “The dance is in two hours!”

  Bay snorted. “Like you and Dad don’t act that way all the time.”

  “I feel like I’m in competition with good old Henry. Come here,” Tyler said, grabbing Claire and bending her back over his arm and kissing her.

  “Please,” Bay said. “Not in front of the kids.” She turned and walked to the guest room, rolling her eyes for effect. Tonight, of all nights, she really didn’t want to see how well love worked when two people felt the same way about each other.

  Claire and Sydney soon followed her. The guest room closet was so small only one person could get inside it, so Claire went in and started bringing out boxes. Sydney and Bay opened them while Mariah jumped on the bed, happy to be with them. They found old linens, a box of antique cracked leather purses, candles that had gone soft and melted into each other, and a cat bed. But no dresses.

  “There’s one last box in here,” Claire said from the back of the closet. “They have to be in this one. Otherwise, I don’t know where they might be.”

  “That’s okay,” Bay said, reaching up to scratch her head, which felt tight and itchy. “I really don’t want to wear a costume.”

  “Don’t you dare touch that hair,” her mother warned, and Bay dropped her hand.

  “It’s stuck in a corner. Wait, I’ve almost got it!” Claire pulled the box free, hitting her head on the low shelf in the closet as she stood, upsetting the contents on the shelf. A shoe box fell, scattering old photos all over the bedroom floor.