by Cat Winters
The engine sparked to life beneath the hood of the car, and the floor vibrated against the rubber soles of my galoshes. Mr. O’Daire ran back toward his side of the automobile, his wet hair hanging in his eyes. With a sigh, he dropped down in the seat beside me and slammed the door shut.
“Off we go!” He threw the clutch lever forward, and off we indeed went, puttering into gray and waterlogged Gordon Bay.
I peered out the rain-streaked windows at souvenir shops and restaurants, most of which sat dark and empty. “I don’t know if anyone told you, but I’m to stay in the boardinghouse.”
“The boardinghouse is a dump. You’re not staying there.”
“But—”
“Gordon Bay blooms in the summer and dies a lonely, miserable death every fall, so I have plenty of rooms available in my hotel. I’ll let you stay for free.”
“Oh, I couldn’t . . .”
“Miss Lind . . .” He looked my way, water streaming down his cheeks from his hair. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for someone with a background like yours to show up out here.”
“Are you certain? I am here to examine all of the children, not just Janie.”
He ignored my words and drove us past the last buildings of that hiccup of a town. Open grasslands lay before us, between the sea and foothills coated in Douglas firs and mist.
I folded my hands beneath the blanket and endured the tips of my fingers tingling back to life. “Mr. O’Daire, did you hear what I said?”
“If you’re being forced to travel out to this godforsaken region of the world in the middle of storm season just to help our kids, then the least I can do is give you a comfortable room with a fireplace.”
He steered the car around a bend, and a three-story structure—a Swiss chalet-style beauty—rose into view on the edge of a cliff above the churning sea. Fog devoured the top halves of a dozen or so chimneys; gables and exposed beams lent the place a dashing European air. The moody sky hovered impossibly close to the ground, and the building seemed to have slipped straight out of the clouds.
“Is that your hotel?” I asked.
“Do you like it?”
“And how! Did you build it?”
“My father did, as soon as the railroad linked us to Portland thirteen years ago. Before that he constructed houses.”
I leaned back against the seat and marveled at the architectural masterpiece. My skin longed for the heat of the fireplaces attached to all of those half-hidden chimneys. “Honestly, I’m used to simple boardinghouses, even ones considered ‘dumps.’”
“It’s no trouble at all. I swear.” He drove us around another bend, and the hotel disappeared from sight behind a thicket of pines. “Not that a person who doesn’t believe in ghosts would care,” he added, “but the place isn’t known to be haunted, nor does it have any tragic tales of murder attached to it.”
“Why did you expect me to ask about that?”
“I didn’t, but one of our competitors brags that his inn is inhabited by the ghost of a sea captain’s widow, so everyone expects the same of us.”
I sighed and shook my head. “I blame the séance frenzy I was just talking about. That and our culture’s bizarre fascination with sideshows and amusement parks. Over the summer, my oldest sister dragged me to the Winchester house down in San Jose, California. Have you heard of it?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester Rifle fortune, lost her life no more than three years ago, and people have already turned her mansion into a tourist attraction, complete with a guide who tells stories about spirits driving the woman mad. My sister adored the theatrics. I, however, spent the entire time rolling my eyes.”
I bit my lip, for I realized Mr. O’Daire displayed no discernible reactions to my views on Mrs. Winchester’s house, despite his talk about ghosts. He stared ahead at the road, his expression now contemplative, his lips pressed shut. I also realized what a boring bluenose I sounded.
However . . . the fellow did need to know that I in no way intended to diagnose any of the Gordon Bay schoolchildren as suffering from paranormal phenomena, despite whatever he believed about his daughter.
The hotel reemerged, and Mr. O’Daire steered the car onto a driveway that wound around to the front entrance in the shape of an elongated S. Through the dance of the squeaking windshield wipers, I spotted the words GORDON BAY HOTEL spanning a wrought-iron archway. The car dipped through a pothole and knocked my elbow against the door. I braced my hands against the seat.
“The weather is hard on the property,” said Mr. O’Daire with a tone of apology. “Half my job is maintenance.”
I returned my hands to my lap. “Well, the hotel is awfully beautiful, I will say that. And it looks far dryer than that overhang under which you found me huddled.”
“Good Lord, I hope your stay here doesn’t compare to that.”
We both chuckled, and he brought the car to a rattling stop beside a cement sidewalk, just a few short yards from the hotel’s front door.
“I’ll help you out”—he set the brake—“and get you settled inside before fetching your bags.”
“Thank you.”
More dashing about in the wind and the rain ensued, although this time the gusts refrained from knocking me to the ground, and the distance was so short, it took just a few swift sprints before I found myself standing inside a bright yellow lobby radiant with heat from a fire that crackled in the hearth. Stained-glass chandeliers flooded the room in electric light, and a rust-colored sofa and armchairs, devoid of any guests, occupied the center of a space large enough to hold a party of at least forty people.
A broad-hipped woman with a silver serving tray in hand traipsed down a staircase located behind the front desk. Her hair—waved in front, pinned in back with the help of a tortoise-shell comb—matched Mr. O’Daire’s coloring, only with streaks of white threaded through the gold.
“Good afternoon,” she said, her voice rich and earthy, as though deepened from smoke or drink. She sized me up with eyes like Mr. O’Daire’s—large, luminescent eyes that also couldn’t decide if they preferred to be blue or green. “I was a little worried when you didn’t come straight back, Michael.”
“The storm was hell. I took my time driving back.” He groomed his hair with his hands again. “Miss Lind, this is my mother, Mrs. O’Daire. She helps run the place from time to time.”
“So nice to meet you.” I walked over to my hostess with the thick heels of my brown oxfords echoing across the walls. “I’m Alice Lind, a school psychologist who’s come to evaluate the children of Gordon Bay.”
“Yes, so I’ve heard.” She accepted my hand with a firm shake, and I smelled a tea rose perfume that reminded me of my own mother’s. “I’ve already got a fire started in your room, and I just delivered a pot of tea.”
“Oh?” I looked back to Mr. O’Daire. “Then you both decided I was coming here before I even knew I was to be staying.”
“Someone wanted to stick her in the boardinghouse,” said Mr. O’Daire with a snort.
“Oh no, that won’t do at all.” His mother placed a hand upon my shoulder. “Would you like me to draw you a bath?”
“No . . . no, thank you. I was hoping to quickly change and go straight to the schoolhouse to introduce myself to Miss Simpkin.”
“I’m driving over to fetch Janie and some of her friends in fifteen minutes,” said Mr. O’Daire with a gesture of his thumb toward the door. “Let me go grab your bags. You can change and warm up for a moment, and then we’ll head over. You can meet Janie.”
Before I had time to agree—or to contemplate if the best time to meet his daughter was right then and there—he threw open the door and jogged back out into the rain.
“Come along, then.” Mrs. O’Daire steered me around by my shoulders and lured my wet coat off my arms. “Let’s get you dried and warmed before you catch your death of cold. I’ve put you on the second floor, where you’ll have
a fine view of our lovely, restless Pacific.”
I opened my mouth, half-tempted to bring up Janie with the woman—she was the girl’s grandmother, after all. I thought better of it, however, and sealed my lips shut.
Before I knew it, the O’Daires had tucked my belongings and me inside a charming room with a white double bed, white-paneled walls, and white ruffled curtains. A fireplace warmed the space, particularly the left side, and a blue and gold rug gave the room its one jolt of color. I blinked at the stark brightness of the quarters after drowning in the murk of the storm.
Once left to my own devices, I kicked off my shoes and poured myself a cup of much-needed tea. A stray drop scalded my wrist, warning that the beverage required cooling. While I waited, I grabbed a towel from a stack of linens on the bed and dried my hair in front of the dressing table’s oblong mirror.
“Good heavens!” I said in response to my drowned-rat appearance, brought on by five and a half hours spent on a train, in addition to the damage from the storm. A bob, I discovered, was not attractive at all when it dripped rainwater onto one’s sweater and hung to one’s chin like limp brown shoestrings. My eye makeup stained my face, as I’d worried. My bangs stuck to my forehead. My neck, roughly the same width as my head, appeared even more mannish than usual with my hair too short to hide it and water glistening across it.
But this is all for the children, I reminded myself, rubbing my hair dry with the towel. The Department of Education specifically requested that you be the one to administer the Gordon Bay examinations—you, Alice Lind. Not a man. Not someone with more experience. Just remember how much you wanted a person like yourself to appear out of the blue and help you when you were young. Just remember . . .
My eyes shut. In my head, I heard a sound that often followed me around whenever my confidence faltered—a cruel skipping rope rhyme, chanted in the voices of neighborhood children.
Alice Lind,
Alice Lind,
Took a stick and beat her friend.
Should she die?
Should she live?
How many beatings did she give?
Something rustled near the hotel room’s door. I spun around, and my eyes darted about, on the hunt for tiny movements—not from spiders or mice, but from eyelids, blinking as someone, perhaps, spied on me through a hole in the wood.
Of all the fears I carried with me—a terror of gunshots, a wariness of the dark—the paranoia that people were watching me in rooms where I undressed and slept perplexed me the most. My heartrate tripled, and my hands went clammy and cold, even though I had never once, in my conscious memory, experienced an actual Peeping Tom.
“Is . . . is someone there?” I asked.
No one responded.
I half-wondered if Mr. O’Daire stood outside the door, a new hat in hand, waiting to take me to see his Janie. I imagined him bending down on one knee and peering through the keyhole with one of his captivating eyes, his breath fluttering against the wood.
“Is someone—?” I shut my mouth, chiding myself for giving into that old stab of anxiety. It had manifested two years earlier, when I first embarked upon the job of traveling around to rural schoolhouses, and it had made for countless sleepless nights on the road.
“Always face your fears, Alice,” I whispered to myself, as I often did when paranoia attacked. I gritted my teeth and pulled my tan sweater up past my shoulders and over my head, exposing my arms, my satin slip, and a birthmark the shape of a nickel at the top of my left breast, three inches below my collarbone. “No one wants a crackpot evaluating their children—and no one cares to gawk at your naked body.”
CHAPTER 2
The rustling I heard, it so happened, derived from someone leaving a cotton laundry bag on the dark wood floor outside my door. Not a Peeping Tom.
“Did you find the bag I left?” asked Mrs. O’Daire from around a bend to my left, at the far end of a pristine white hallway dotted with golden knobs on four-paneled doors. She climbed into view from the top of the staircase, drying her hands on an apron she now wore over her simple brown dress.
“Um . . . yes.” I lifted the bag.
“It’s for your wet clothing.”
“Ah.” I nodded. “Thank you.”
“Slide them inside”—she headed toward me, pantomiming the movement of sticking clothing into a sack—“and I’ll wash them up for you.”
I smiled. “You and your son are far too kind, Mrs. O’Daire.”
“We just feel so awful about our weather. Michael said he found you clinging to the wall of the depot, soaked to the bone, shaking.”
“Yes.” I laughed. “I was just thinking how much I must have resembled a drowning rat. I’m sure my hair still looks a fright.”
“You look fine.” She patted my upper right arm—she was one of those people who liked to touch, it seemed. “I admire you young women who possess the courage to march into the dangers of the world on your own. I hope you had time to warm up with your tea.”
“Yes. I’m now toasty on both the inside and the outside.”
“Good.” She imparted one final pat, this time to my left shoulder. “Now go fill up that bag so I can attend to your clothing. Then you can run straight back into the rain and meet Miss Simpkin and the children. My son is waiting for you downstairs.”
“Mainly I’m meeting Miss Simpkin today,” I said, just to clarify. “I’ll start working with the children tomorrow.”
She squished her lips together and nodded, and again neither of us mentioned little Janie.
THE DRIVE TO the schoolhouse proved to be far less traumatic than our previous trek through the streets of Gordon Bay. A light rain spat against the windshield, and the bruise-black clouds rolled westward, over the crests of the Coast Range, away from town. The sky overhead gleamed from the sun hiding behind the lingering gray, and the winds pushed against the car with more of a nudge than a shove.
Mr. O’Daire drove us along a street that ran perpendicularly to the main section of town. We passed two more souvenir shops and one eatery, every one of them closed.
“As I told you before,” he said, following my gaze to the wilted-looking buildings, “Gordon Bay dies every autumn. It’s a dramatic, crumbling death that strikes right after the beginning of September.”
“So I see,” I said. “It must be a struggle for everyone to make ends meet during the rest of the year.”
“It is, unfortunately.”
Up ahead, in front of a barber shop, a scarecrow of a fellow in a plaid cap teetered on the edge of the sidewalk. An auburn beard that resembled tree moss rambled down to the open collar of his olive coat, indicating that he most certainly had not just visited the barber shop behind him.
“Is that man all right?” I asked.
“That’s Sam, one of our local veterans.” Mr. O’Daire slowed the car to a stop and rolled down his window. “You all right, Sam? You’re standing a little close to the edge of the road there, buddy.”
Sam gave a salute and swayed to his left. “I’m fine, Mikey. Just trying to keep my feet dry.”
“Get yourself out of the rain. Have a cup of coffee, why don’t you? Do you need a dime?”
“Just trying to keep my feet dry,” said the fellow again, and his right foot plunked into a stream of water flowing through the gutter. His shoes weren’t tied, so he soaked his laces.
“Sam?”
“I’m all right, Mikey.”
Mr. O’Daire shook his head and rolled up the window. “I’ll check on him later—make sure he’s not still standing there.”
“Is the poor man drunk?”
“Probably, although he acts that way when he’s sober, too.” He sighed and drove us onward.
Not more than a quarter mile farther, in an empty field of mud-matted grass, stood our destination: a whitewashed schoolhouse that looked like dozens of other schoolhouses I had already visited in my brief career as a traveling test administrator. A bell tower with a pointed peak stretched high above
a set of doors, reached by wooden steps in desperate need of sanding and painting. I could practically smell all of the odors waiting for me within: dusty blackboard chalk; damp shoes; a sooty fire in a potbelly stove; the sour stink of children who hadn’t bathed in the past week.
“Did you say the schoolteacher, Miss Simpkin, is your former sister-in-law?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“Might I inquire what your current relationship with her and your ex-wife is like? Are you all on speaking terms?”
Mr. O’Daire offered a strained smile that failed to involve those charming dimples of his. “As much as people can be in this sort of situation.”
“Miss Simpkin doesn’t mind you coming to the school?”
“Don’t worry”—he shifted the car into a lower gear—“you won’t witness any squabbling. We’re civil to each other, even if we all have different opinions on what’s best for Janie.”
He pulled his vehicle alongside a long black motorbus inhabited by a heavyset driver who puffed on a cigar.
“Oh, how nice,” I said in the direction of the bus. “I presume this is transportation for the children who live too far to walk?”
“It is.” Mr. O’Daire stopped the car and climbed over the back of the seat once again, knocking objects about down on the floor behind me.
I met the eyes of the driver beside us. He smiled and nodded and didn’t seem to question the upside-down person next to me. Primarily, he looked to be avoiding an early death of hypothermia. A pythonesque scarf encircled his neck, and a wooly gray hat consumed his hair, eyebrows, and ears.
“You might want to duck,” said Mr. O’Daire.
I did as he asked, and something fluttered over my head. When I sat back up, I found him clasping a green umbrella.
“Hold tight.” He opened his door and then the umbrella, everything whooshing and blowing and reminding me again of my dramatic arrival on the depot platform. “I’ll come around and get you,” he said, and he did just that.
