by Wendy Webb
I sighed. As I read through them again, I remembered my first conversation with Penelope Dare. It was the day after the accident, and I had driven back to Cliffside at her request. I was stunned to get the call because she had flatly refused to see anyone, even the police, on the day of the accident. I never quite understood why they acquiesced to that, actually, especially with all of the knowledge I had gained in the years since about how the police worked in situations like this. Back then, I chalked it up to the sometimes cozy relationships very rich families have with the police in small towns, and I still think that’s right, considering how quickly they ruled it an accident, how the bodies were buried without autopsies per the family’s request, and how fast the police moved on.
I remembered pulling up to Cliffside in the old, green Jeep Cherokee I was driving at the time and chuckling slightly at the sight of it parked next to the Dare family’s two Bentleys.
A woman, who I now knew was Harriet, was standing outside to greet me.
“Miss Penny is on the veranda,” she said, leading me through the door. “She will see you there.”
As Harriet led me through the Cliffside entryway, I remembered gasping at the opulence around me. This, I remembered thinking, is a retreat for artists and writers? Nice work, if you can get it.
Harriet pushed open the French doors leading to the veranda, and I caught my first sight of Penelope Dare. She was standing, looking out onto the great inland sea, her posture ramrod straight. I don’t know why I always remembered that—posture is a funny thing to note—but it said something to me about her character. Controlled, strict, rigid. When she turned to me, I saw that her eyes were red, a lone tear gliding down her cheek before she whisked it away.
“You are the journalist who was here yesterday,” she said, crossing her arms.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m Eleanor Harper. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
She smiled slightly as her eyes filled with tears. “Are you?” she said to me. “Are you really?”
I shook my head, wondering why she had called me there. “Of course I am,” I said to her.
“Well, I’m glad to hear that, Eleanor Harper,” she said, motioning to a pair of chairs on one side of the veranda. “Please sit down.”
I did as she asked, and she joined me. But before I had a chance to ask her any of my questions, she began to speak.
“The police think this was a simple accident,” she said, eyeing me. “What do you think?”
My stomach knotted, wishing I’d had years of experience instead of only days. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say or do in a situation like this, so I just followed my instincts.
“I think it’s a little early to be making definitive conclusions about the deaths of two people,” I said.
She nodded. “Exactly what I believe.”
I took a deep breath and opened my notebook.
“What do you think happened to your father and sister?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “But I do know that my father had driven that road hundreds—thousands!—of times. He could drive it blind, he was fond of saying. Something had to have happened to make him drive off that cliff.”
“Like what?”
She shook her head. “It could be something as innocent as a heart attack behind the wheel,” she said. “Or . . .”
“Or, what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But they’re gone, and I need to hold somebody, or something, responsible.”
Was her grief leading to a need to blame? An accident was simply out of the question in her mind. But I had the same inklings in the pit of my stomach. I felt that there was more to this than an old man driving off the road.
“Where were they going at that hour of the morning?” I asked her. “Did they have a plane to catch?”
“No,” she said, dabbing at her eyes again. “Chamomile would never have gone anywhere without telling me. We were as close as can be.” I can still see the sad smile on her face, the tears filling her eyes.
“But, she did,” I persisted. “She was in the car with your father. They were going someplace.”
“I don’t accept that.”
“But—” I didn’t know quite how to phrase my next statement. Their bodies were found with the car. Chester was still behind the wheel. Chamomile had been thrown. They had been in the car, going someplace.
“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice rising. “The police don’t understand, either, but to your credit, at least you’ve come here to hear my side of the story. Milly and I went to sleep the night before as we always did. We talked about the day ahead. We had planned to take a long walk the next day. We had plans—do you see that, Miss Harper?”
“And you believe those plans preclude her getting in the car with your father early yesterday morning?”
She nodded, hard. “Yes, I do. She never did anything without telling me. We shared a room, Miss Harper, for our entire lives. She would never have risen early, not awakened me, and left. Never.”
“And yet she was in that car.”
“And therein lies our mystery,” she said, sitting back.
I dove into the case after that, talking to everyone on the staff (with Miss Penny’s blessing, they were a bit more forthcoming), but I never did find out the answers to any of those questions, not definitive answers, anyway. What were they doing? Where were they going? And, to me, most telling was the fact that Milly had left Cliffside without telling her sister. It told me there was more to this story than a simple accident.
But, in the end, I’d had other stories to cover that took my attention away. I moved on and left Cliffside behind. And now, here I was again, in the middle of a two-decade-old mystery that had gotten murkier with the addition of Miss Penny’s suicide.
I fished the letter she had written me out of the drawer in my desk where I had left it. I opened it up and read it over again, hoping to find something in it that I had missed. But it was just the same enticement to solve a puzzle she had left behind and the same veiled threat. I sighed, wondering what to do next, when something in the letter grabbed my attention.
Milly and I spent our youth running up and down these hallways, splashing in the pool, playing on the cliff, writing in our diaries before turning off the light at night.
Diaries. I quickly scanned my case notes and did a word search—no mention of a diary or diaries there. She hadn’t told me back then that she and her sister regularly kept journals. My gaze drifted to the ceiling. Miss Penny and her sister had shared a room on the third floor of this house for nearly their whole lives. Could those diaries still be there?
CHAPTER 10
It was nearly eight o’clock, but there was still plenty of sun in the sky. I figured that at this time of year, I had at least an hour before it started to fade. I was glad of that as I climbed the backstairs to the third floor.
I hadn’t been up there since we’d found Miss Penny, and that day, I had rushed toward the sound of Harriet’s screaming so quickly that I hadn’t taken any time to look around. I wasn’t sure what I’d find now, and as I reached the top of the stairs, my stomach tightened. I flipped the light switch and gasped.
Miss Penny had told me that the third floor had been an open ward for the children who were TB patients back in the day, and part of it was still that way. A wooden floor stretched to a wall of windows on one side, facing the driveway. A couple of the windows were open a bit, their sheer curtains fluttering. Light shone in, illuminating the dust particles floating here and there on the soft breeze. Boxes were stacked in one corner. I saw my suitcases near them, along with several large trunks. On the other side of the room, I saw a wall that had clearly been added to the big, open space to create a bedroom. Miss Penny’s room. I remembered it from that horrible day when we had discovered her in it.
I was there to look through her room for her diary, but I got sidetracked by the trunks on the opposite w
all. I wondered—could it be as simple as opening one and finding a stash of journals? So, I walked toward them, my footsteps echoing throughout the room so loudly that it startled me, as though the sound itself was an abomination in the silence in the room.
I pulled open the lid of one of the trunks and was hit in the face with a burst of cold air. Where had that come from? Not from the trunk, certainly. I glanced up at the windows, but the curtains were still fluttering softly. Had I really felt that cold air? I shook my head and thought about how I had doubted my own senses many times since coming to Cliffside.
The trunk, I found, did not contain any diaries. It was full of toys. Old toys. Dump trucks, their paint fading, old play telephones with knotted cords, balls losing their air. Sad relics of the past. I wondered if they were the toys of Miss Penny and Chamomile but then thought better of it. No, surely these were the toys of the children who had been sequestered in this place when it was a hospital. I could almost hear the same laughter I’d heard outside my window that night. Children, most of them dying, were the ones who’d played with these toys. I shivered again at the thought of it.
Just across from the trunks, I saw two doors with faded lettering on them—Boys and Girls. Bathrooms, obviously. I wasn’t up there to investigate every nook and cranny, but for some reason, I really wanted to have a look so I walked over, trying to make softer footfalls this time, and pushed open the door labeled Girls.
I was taken aback by how large the room was—more like a school locker room than a bath in a household. The room was entirely white with octagonal tiles on the floor and larger subway tile on the walls leading up to small, rectangular windows that ran the full length of the room. It had to have been freshly cleaned; it was spotless and gleaming. Several stalls lined one wall, with sinks opposite them, fresh, white towels hanging nearby. Around a corner, I found four glassed-in shower stalls and, past them, behind a half wall, an enormous claw-foot tub. A collection of bath salts and lotions and a couple of candles were placed on a shelf near the tub. Ah, I thought. That’s why the bathroom was so fresh and clean. This was the bathroom Miss Penny used, obviously.
Just then, I heard the sound of water running. I poked my head around the wall and saw it was coming from one of the sinks. A slight stream of water was trickling from one of the taps. Had it been on when I’d come into the room? I didn’t think so. Had it somehow turned on by itself? A faulty gasket, maybe? I stared at the running water for a moment, not knowing quite what to make of it, then walked over and turned it off. As I did so, I glanced in the mirror above the sink. There, quick as a flash, I saw a face. And then it was gone.
I whirled around. “Harriet?” I croaked out, but I knew it wasn’t Harriet. It was the face of a child, I was sure of it. Laughter floated through the air, low and scratchy, as though traveling from another time. I tried to listen, but then it dissipated. And I wasn’t quite sure whether it had really been there or not.
All at once, I wanted very much to get out of that bathroom. I pushed my way through the door and hurried back into the main room, my pulse racing. Had I just seen—and heard—a ghost? I didn’t know. I thought I was above all of that nonsense, but the coldness that now enveloped me was telling me that something had just occurred. I just didn’t know quite what.
I stood there for a moment, looking around the empty room. Everything was just as I had left it. The curtains were still fluttering, the trunk’s lid still standing open. But something had changed. I imagined this room as a hospital ward, beds lined up, one next to the other—I could almost see the image of the room in the past, hovering, just beyond what was really there. The sick children, taken away from their parents, probably afraid, wondering if they’d ever go home. I shivered when I realized that many of them hadn’t. TB was a killer. This was indeed the waiting room for death Miss Penny had described.
Was that what I was seeing and feeling—the residue of the children’s suffering and pain, somehow still here, hanging in the air, lurking in dark corners?
I eyed the stairway, my stomach in a tight knot, fear wrapping itself around me and squeezing, hard. I wanted to retreat back down those stairs to the familiar second floor, abandoning what I had come up here to do. But then, I thought: no. Walk through the fear, Eleanor.
Daylight was fading, and I really did want to have a look inside Miss Penny’s room while there was still light in the sky. If I went downstairs now, I might never gather the courage to come back up.
So I cleared my throat and crossed the room to Miss Penny’s door, turned the knob, and went inside.
In all of the commotion on the day we found her, I hadn’t really registered what the room looked like. I don’t remember seeing anything except her body and the letter. But now, I was able to take it all in.
The room was actually a suite of rooms with an archway separating them. In the main room, the bedroom, two twin beds sat on each side of a wooden bedside table with what looked to be a small Tiffany lamp on it. Both beds had cream-colored chenille bedspreads and several floral pillows in reds and yellows and blues, all arranged on the beds in exactly the same way. Windows spanned the length of the room with a cushioned window seat running under them, and books were stacked neatly beneath it.
Two identical dressers stood next to each other on one wall; a vanity with an enormous mirror and a long bench seat was positioned in the corner. Two sets of silver hairbrushes, combs, and mirrors waited on the vanity, as if their users might pick them up at any moment. An old-fashioned, round, glass container that I knew held powder foundation and a puff sat on a mirrored tray along with several lipsticks.
Through the archway, I found a study. Two desks sat side by side, with identical green lamps placed in the same left-hand corner on each one. A bookshelf dominated one wall; two wing chairs stood nearby with a shared ottoman between them.
Miss Penny had kept Chamomile’s furniture in the room they had shared, all of these years. It wasn’t unusual—I had heard of parents keeping their child’s room just as he or she had left it, long after that child was buried in the ground, or wives who never could bring themselves to take their husbands’ clothes out of the closet. The grandmother of a friend of mine kept her husband’s pipe by his favorite chair for thirty years until she herself died. My heart ached for Miss Penny as I looked around her room, knowing she had been living with that kind of grief.
I sighed and scanned the room behind me, wondering where the diary might be. It wasn’t on the bedside table. Where to look next?
On one wall in the study, I spied a small doorway, child-sized. The door was ajar, and I could see light coming through the opening. I walked over to it and bent down, creeping my way through. I was not prepared for what I found.
It was a playroom. The cracked and chipping faces of at least a dozen dolls—now antique, but surely purchased new when the girls were children—stared at me from a series of shelves on one wall where they sat, their dresses faded with decades of exposure to the afternoon sun, which was now illuminating them in the deep oranges and reds of sunset. A tea set was placed on a small table in the corner, two stuffed bears sitting on chairs around it, waiting to be served. A trunk was tucked in a corner under an eave, surely filled with more toys. But it was the enormous wooden dollhouse that drew me in. I stared at it for a few moments before I realized—it was an exact replica of Cliffside.
I sat down in front of it and peered inside. There was the drawing room on the main floor, complete with its marble entryway. Dolls were positioned in a group in the drawing room and more were seated at the table in the dining room. In the kitchen, a doll was standing at the stove. I gingerly reached into the room and picked it up. It wore the same kind of black dress and shoes as Harriet. I shuddered and put it back in its place.
On the second floor of the dollhouse, there were dolls in the bedrooms—one was painting, another was seated at a tiny typewriter, a third stretched out on a bed. The fellows of Cliffside, here on an artistic retreat. There was even
the director’s office with a doll seated at a desk. And there was my suite of rooms with a male doll nestled into a big armchair in front of the fireplace. Chester Dare?
On the third floor, a replica of the suite of rooms in which I was sitting, complete with two dolls in front of a tiny replica of the dollhouse itself. Penelope and Chamomile.
I shook my head, in awe of the painstaking detail work someone had undertaken to make a miniature version of Cliffside, so that two children could control the comings and goings of everyone within it. In a sense, it made young Penelope and Chamomile into gods, peering into the lives of everyone within those walls, manipulating their actions, calling all the shots.
All at once, a violent shudder passed through me, and I wanted very much to be out of there. The diary be damned. I scrambled to my feet, stooped, made my way through the little door, and was heading out of the bedroom when I noticed the painting.
It was hanging on the wall between the twin beds—I don’t know why I didn’t notice it when I came in, but there it was. A watercolor of three girls, each wearing colorful dresses, standing in a field of flowers. The Cliffside gardens? Two of the girls looked like Penelope and Chamomile. They stood together, arms entwined, wry expressions on their faces. Small smiles, laughing eyes. Behind them stood another girl. She was holding a flower, a gladiola, and wearing a lovely little yellow dress, but her expression was anything but lovely. She was staring directly at me, it seemed, her eyes intense and focused. She was not smiling. In fact, she seemed to look menacing and, dare I say it, even dangerous. I feared for the young Penelope and Chamomile with such an evil-looking playmate.
I wondered who the girl was and whatever would possess Chester Dare to commission that painting and hang it in his daughters’ room.
And that was it. I couldn’t spend one more moment in there. I pushed my way out the door, closing it behind me, crossed the empty room, and hurried down the stairs, feeling more relieved with each step.
