by Wendy Webb
I was stretched out on the chaise on my balcony, my eyes just fluttering closed, when Harriet poked her head around the French door.
“I’ve brought your supper, ma’am,” she said. “With everything that you’ve handled today, I thought you’d prefer it in your room.”
Until she mentioned supper, I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. “Thank you,” I said, my words coming out in one long sigh. “I don’t want to seem antisocial, but I think my lack of sleep last night is catching up with me. It will be nice to just climb into my pajamas and curl up in front of the television. I want to see how the news treats this story.”
“You’re not antisocial one bit,” she said. “The director of Cliffside has a lot to carry on her shoulders. Your first two days have been a walk through fire—we’ve all seen it—and you should know that the staff is very, very glad you’re here with us. You’ve handled it all beautifully. But I’m sure you could use some solitude now. It’s what Cliffside is famous for, after all.”
She was right. I stretched and wondered how much effort it was going to take to get out of that chaise.
“I’ve set your dinner on the desk,” she said. “And now, I’ll take my leave. I have a dinner date with Mr. Baines in the kitchen, and then we’ll be off. If you need anything, just ring.”
“Goodnight, Harriet,” I said. “I’m sure I won’t need anything. I’ll see you in the morning.”
When she had gone, I pushed myself up from the chaise, slipped into my pj’s, and settled into bed with my dinner of roast beef and vegetables—hey, people had breakfast in bed, I reasoned, why not dinner?—and clicked on the television news.
“Patron of the arts Penelope Dare, the director of Cliffside Manor, died in her sleep last night at the age of seventy—” the newsman said.
Seventy? Was she really only that old? It had to be a mistake. Robert Redford was older than that, for goodness’ sake. Miss Penny looked ancient, and had seemed just as old twenty years earlier. I would have put her a decade older than that, maybe more. If she was seventy when she died, that meant she was just fifty when I first met her, when her sister and father died. I had young, vibrant friends from the newspaper who were older than that now, and yet, Miss Penny had seemed like such an elderly woman back then.
I took another bite of my roast beef and wondered what had aged her so terribly. Sure, grief ages a person, but when I met her, she hadn’t been grieving, not for long, anyway.
I turned my attention back to the news report, with old photos of Miss Penny, her father, and her sister flashing on the screen as the reporter narrated.
“Chester Dare, a patron saint for the tuberculosis patients of the day, turned patron of the arts—”
I clicked from channel to channel, until I was stopped by my own face on the screen. How jarring it was to be the person on the news instead of being the person reporting it. I squinted at my image. Miss Penny wasn’t the only one who looked a little rough. I made a mental note to put on some makeup and run a brush through my hair the next time cameras were rolling.
I finished my dinner, stacked my plates on the tray Harriet had left on my desk, and headed into the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash the day off my face. I eyed the tub and thought how wonderful a good, long soak would feel, but I was afraid my exhaustion might cause me to fall asleep in a warm bath. That’s all Harriet would need—to find a second director dead in as many days. Instead, I slipped under my covers and settled in to watch an NBC special about Cliffside and the Dare family.
Before I knew it, my eyelids were feeling heavy. I really wanted to see this special, but I couldn’t fight it anymore. I’d just close my eyes for the commercial break, I told myself. And then I began to dream.
I was walking around Cliffside’s main floor, but it didn’t look like it did today. It was more stark, more clinical, the furnishings dated, as though they were from another time.
I saw two men playing cards at a table by the fireplace in the drawing room, where several tables were set up, presumably for this purpose. A checkerboard game in progress sat on one. A chess set on the other. I went on to the winter garden to find people slumped in chairs. One woman was struggling to breathe; another man just looked at me, his eyes sunken, his skin gray. He put out a hand to me, but I backed away and then turned and ran, hurrying through the rooms until I got to the veranda.
I slipped out of the French doors and saw the veranda was full of people lying on chaises, covered with white blankets. It looked like a battlefield hospital, so many people lying side by side.
The sound of painful, deep coughing rang in my ears, and I watched as one man held a handkerchief to his mouth and then pulled it away, soaked red with blood. A nurse pushed past me toward another man lying on one of the chaises. The nurse took his pulse and shook her head as she covered his face with the sheet that was wrapped around him.
And then she looked at me. “Get back to your room with the others,” she said. “You’re on bed rest. You shouldn’t be wandering around down here.”
My eyes opened with a start, my heart racing.
The television was still on. I glanced at the clock. It was 3:45. I thought back to the last thing I remembered—the television special about Cliffside—and realized I had been asleep for nearly eight hours.
I tossed and turned for a bit, trying to will myself back to sleep, but it wasn’t going to catch hold.
I slipped out of bed and poured a glass of water, finishing it in two big gulps. I couldn’t get that dream out of my mind. Obviously, I had been dreaming about Cliffside’s sanatorium days, influenced by the television special. I remembered seeing the photographs hanging on the walls downstairs—that’s where the dream must’ve come from. Still. I couldn’t shake the images of those patients, lying side by side on the chaises, just waiting. What had Miss Penny called sanatoriums? Waiting rooms for death, that was it. That’s just what the veranda looked like—people lined up, waiting for their turn to slip to the other side.
Now I was wide awake, rested after a long night’s sleep. Except it was still the middle of the night. What to do now? Part of me wanted to settle back into bed and watch some mindless TV until the sun came up, but I clicked off the television instead. What I really wanted was coffee. I could make some, bring it up to my balcony, and watch the dawn break through the darkness. Lovely. Just what I needed to shake off that dream. I hadn’t seen the sun come up in some time.
But, if I wanted to be sipping coffee when it happened, that would mean a trek through the big, dark, empty house. I got goose bumps at the thought of it.
Quit being such a scared rabbit, Eleanor. I was fed up, already, with this skittishness, this fear that had plagued me and cost me my job. I was a strong woman, I had handled the events of the past two days beautifully, Harriet had said so. More than that, I had interviewed murderers, sociopaths, and pedophiles in the course of my work. Faced down all manner of monsters to get the story. I had solved crimes the police couldn’t solve. People were in jail because of me. The woman who did that could damn well walk through the house to the kitchen to make some coffee.
I pulled on my robe and slid my feet into my slippers. There was nothing terrifying about coffee. I opened the door and peered around it into the darkness. All of those empty rooms to pass before getting to the stairs. Fortunately, all of the doors were closed, even the door to my office. Beside it, I knew there was a light switch that would illuminate the hallway and the stairs. I took a deep breath, hurried over to it, and switched it on. Let there be light. I wouldn’t have done that if the fellows were here and asleep in their beds, but I was alone on this floor. If I wanted it to be bright as day at 3:45, it could be bright as day.
I could feel my heart pounding in my chest as I descended the stairs, beating harder with every step I took. My breath was coming fast and shallow now, and I could feel little beads of perspiration beginning to form on my forehead and on the back of my neck. You’re having a panic attack just because you w
ant some coffee, Eleanor? Really? I had let this feeling control me for too long, I told myself. I had lost too much because of it. I wanted some coffee, and I was going to get some coffee, by God.
“There is nobody lurking in this house,” I said aloud as I hurried through the darkened foyer, wondering where the light switches were. I couldn’t find any, so I switched on table lamps as I went. With each illumination, I took a deep breath.
“There is nobody hiding here,” I said again, scurrying past the wall of windows leading out to the veranda. And then, louder, “If anyone is hiding, come out now and get it over with.”
Nothing. Only the silence and stillness of an empty house. Just a house. But then another thought slithered into my mind. It was a house that had seen more than its share of death and suffering. Even as recently as yesterday. And what of those children . . . ?
But that was silly, I told myself. Miss Penny had lived here nearly her whole life. None of the fellows ever ran scared from Cliffside, that I knew of. If death and suffering had left an imprint here, it wasn’t bothering them. I cut those thoughts off when I finally reached the kitchen door. I pushed it open, felt around for a light switch, and mercifully found one. The room lit up, bright as the afternoon sun.
The countertops were empty and sparkling clean, just like they must’ve been during the sanatorium’s heyday, I thought to myself. In fact, the whole kitchen had a sterile look about it. Stainless steel sinks. Institution-grade refrigerator. Gleaming white tile. The walls were also white, and the floors were made up of that particular kind of speckled tile—light gray, a dash of red, a dash of blue, a dash of black—popular in the 1950s.
I muddled around, opening the cabinets and drawers, which I found to be metal, and finally unearthed the coffee (pre-ground, in a silver tin with a copper cover, labeled Coffee) and an old-fashioned coffee pot. An electric percolator of the 1950s variety. I had been looking for something a little more in keeping with the modern age—even a Mr. Coffee—but I really wasn’t surprised to find this relic, given the manual typewriter on Miss Penny’s desk and the drawer full of paper files. This was probably the same coffee pot her father had used.
Fortunately, I knew how to use one. I’d had a roommate, way back when, who loved vintage things like old percolators. So I filled up the internal basket with coffee, poured some water into the pot, plugged it in, and waited. While it was brewing, I found milk in the fridge—in a glass bottle, no less—and a porcelain mug in the cupboard. I wondered if anything had changed in this kitchen since the 1950s.
No matter, I thought. I knew people in this part of the country were very into not just vintage things, but sustainable everything. It was a movement of sorts, a complete deviation from the convenience products we had come to rely on in the modern age. Getting one’s vegetables from sustainable, backyard gardens or local growers instead of at the grocery store. Eating only what is in season. Meat from local ranches. And milk, as I smiled at the glass bottle I had placed on the countertop, from local dairies. I had been too busy in my former job to really bother about all of that. A box of mac and cheese from the convenience store or a frozen pizza had been dinner too many nights of my life. Maybe all of that could change now. I felt healthier just thinking about it.
Funny, those simple, normal actions like making coffee in this old-fashioned pot and fishing milk out of the fridge did wonders for my mood. My heartbeat had settled back down, the tinny taste of bile that I always felt in my mouth during these panic episodes receded. As the intoxicating aroma of coffee filled the air in the kitchen, I took a deep breath. My first since I had left my suite. I was okay. This was okay. And the coffee was just about ready. A triumph over terror. Take that, scared rabbit.
I poured my first cup, splashed some milk into it, and walked back through the darkened rooms, bolder now. I thought of going back up to my suite, but trekking all that way with a hot cup of coffee wasn’t too appealing at the moment. I decided to head out to the veranda instead. I told myself I was being bold and unafraid, but really, I wanted to make sure that awful row of patients wasn’t somehow still there, coughing into their handkerchiefs, waiting to die.
I flipped on the outside light and peered out into the night. No patients. No coughing. I pulled open one of the French doors and settled onto a chaise. I noticed there were many of them in a row, many more than I had noticed yesterday. Mr. Baines’s handiwork, no doubt, readying the place for the arrival of the fellows. Each of the chaises had a white afghan folded neatly at its foot. A nice, crisp touch, I thought, pulling the one on my chair up around me to ward off the cold night air.
I took my first sip of coffee and exhaled, gazing up into the starry sky. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that, just sat and looked up into the heavens on a starry night. Being away from the lights of the city really made a difference. The sky was filled with stars, so many that I could almost feel vertigo settling in. I understood why the ancient people the world over would look upward and create stories from the designs in the night sky. There was Orion. There was the Big Dipper. So many stories told, so many battles fought, so many loves lost and won, so many tales told by parents to children around small fires before bedtime.
I was rapt by the sight of it all, wondering what was up there, what was happening on each one of those stars. I wondered if there was somebody looking back at me.
A voice broke my reverie. “Look long enough and you’ll see the northern lights.”
I snapped my head around to see a man standing at the edge of the veranda. He was smiling and running a hand through his mop of sandy brown hair.
I wanted to run away but felt tied to the spot, as if making myself small and silent would send him away. I curled my legs up to my chest, spilling my coffee as my cup fell onto the cement and shattered.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said, walking toward me. “I’ve startled you. I certainly didn’t mean to do that.”
“Who are you?” I croaked, my tongue thick, my throat oddly dry. I could feel the blood racing through my veins at top speed. “What are you doing here?”
He stopped, his smile drooping slightly. “I could ask you the same question.”
“I’m Eleanor Harper,” I stuttered.
“And I’m Nathan Davidson,” he said, inching closer and extending his hand. “Nate.”
I didn’t make any move to take his hand. “I thought I met the entire staff when I arrived.”
He rubbed his hand on his pants rather than let it hang in the air. “Oh, there are a lot of us around here,” he said, perching on a chaise next to mine. “You never know when somebody will turn up.”
His manner was so easy, so casual. Sociopath? I had met my share.
He smiled again, a brilliant, movie-star smile that lit up his face. His eyes smiled, too, crinkling up at the edges and glistening. I had learned to look for that with sociopaths. Their eyes never smiled.
His gaze dropped to the coffee I had spilled on the ground.
“I’ll get you another cup,” he said, standing up and stretching. “It’s only right for startling you like that. I think I’d like a cup myself. Cream?”
I was about to object when he strode off, through the French doors and into the house.
What had just happened here? I had certainly not met this man when I arrived at Cliffside, nor had I seen him the next day. I wondered if I should ring for Harriet, but I realized that I’d have to go back into the house to do it. And he was in there. The last thing I was going to do was put myself into a dark, empty house with a stranger.
I scanned the lawn. Where was Harriet’s house? I had seen a map of the grounds in the information packet Miss Penny had given me on my first day at Cliffside, but I didn’t study it as well as I should have. Past the light of the veranda, the lawn was pitch dark. If I ran, I could very well be running in the wrong direction, toward the cliff for all I knew. It was miles back to the main road. And I was in my pajamas and slippers. I could feel my heart beating so har
d in my throat I thought it might choke me.
I was just trying to decide what to do—take off into the night? Hurry up to my room and lock the door? Get to an intercom to summon Harriet and Mr. Baines?—when the man came back, holding two mugs of coffee.
He handed one to me and I took it, gingerly.
“I thought I was the only one around here with insomnia,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee before settling into a chaise, leaning back, and stretching out his legs, crossing them. He put an arm behind his head and smiled at me.
I curled into the corner of my chaise, as far away from him as I could get. My mind was racing with possible exit strategies—throw my coffee on him? Hit him with my cup?—but in the end, I did neither of those.
“I understand,” he continued. “It’s unsettling, your first days in a new place.” So, he knew who I was, then. “I suppose neither of us should be out here at this hour,” he said, grinning. “But I won’t tell if you won’t.”
I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, but I half smiled, going along with it.
“But truly, you don’t have to be afraid of me,” he went on. “You’re looking at me like I’m going to murder you.”
“Are you?”
At this, he laughed. “That’s not on my agenda for the day, no,” he said. “You know, had we met at four o’clock in the afternoon, I think you’d feel differently about me.” He took another sip of his coffee. “I wouldn’t be some strange guy showing up in the middle of the night.”
“No,” I said. “You’d be some strange guy showing up in the middle of the day.”
He chuckled again. “I suppose you have a point,” he said. “If you’d feel more comfortable, I’ll go. You really do seem on edge.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to lose sight of him. At least while I could see him, I knew he wasn’t lurking in some corner, ready to strike.
“What do you do here at Cliffside?” I asked him, finally. “You live on the property, I’m assuming?”
