“What do you want?” she asked bluntly, trying to push through this strange fog that seemed to have dulled her sensibility.
“Oh.” Nick’s smile faltered. “Right.” He cleared his throat and lost his charge. “Could I come in for a bit?”
They both saw at once that this would not be nearly enough to earn him entry. He tried again. “I’m here about your—an—inheritance.”
So he was from the bank after all. Cassie felt her jaw clench. She wished she had some clothes on for this fight, but if the time to have it was now, so be it. “That money is mine fair and square. She left it to me. I know the house needs a lot of help, but she owned it outright, which means I own it outright now, and I may not look like I know much about money and houses and that kind of thing, but I do know you can’t just take it from me until I’ve had sufficient time to—”
He waved his hand to stop her right there. “I don’t know anything about that. I’m here about money you’ve just, well, as of yesterday, you’ve inherited from someone—a relative?”—he seemed to be having a wrestling match with his own words, as if every one he uttered was up for debate—“someone”—he settled for that safe word, nodding diligently over it—“someone I’m not sure you’ve met…” He peered over her shoulder, into the darkness of the foyer, then tilted his head as he met her eyes again. He looked surprised when their gazes matched, as if she’d scalded him. “I’d really love to come in.” He cleared his throat. “To fill you in.” He gained confidence, rivering his fingers over the brass filigree that lay around the doorbell, then looking back at her with unbridled enthusiasm. “I had no idea you live in such a treasure. This should be on the register.” She frowned. He reined himself in. “Can I…can I come in? It’s important.”
No, she thought, no, you can’t, I’ll be the one who decides what’s important. But maybe the house wanted him, because, before Cassie said yes, she knew she was going to say it. When a gentleman came calling, you learned his business over a pitcher of lemonade served in the front parlor; that had been her grandmother’s way.
“I don’t have anything on,” Cassie said. A quick blush touched Nick’s cheeks, just as Cassie caught the scent of him again. A third note, something like juniper, hit high in her nasal passages, where it would linger. She clutched the bedspread. She felt her face grow hot, unexpectedly hot. She’d meant to say, or should have meant to say, something appropriate, like “Fine; just give me a minute.” She turned abruptly in to the house. Blind in the dark foyer, she waded through the snowdrift of mail, cringing at the crinkle of paper under the soles of her feet. The pile of correspondence had reached an untenable state; she could see this clearly now that Nick Emmons had followed her inside.
She reached for the banister just as her eyes adjusted. An inheritance, from a relative? But it didn’t have to do with Two Oaks? What could that mean? A mistake, most likely; she didn’t have any relatives to speak of. Or maybe it was some kind of scam. Maybe Nick Emmons was a stalker, someone who smelled just like Aaron Wilson-Myers precisely because he knew Cassie would go weak in the knees for a man who smelled like Aaron Wilson-Myers, and he was soundlessly slipping up the stairs behind her. At the landing now, she glanced back in alarm, but no, there Nick was, just where she’d left him, turning in wonder at the vast foyer above him, at the curved pocket doors of the round office, at the brass lion’s head on the front doorplate, as though he’d never been anywhere so beautiful, and Cassie felt unexpectedly flattered and undeniably proud.
Cassie dressed from the dirty pile that had been growing like mold around the outskirts of her bedroom. Once decent, she pushed the weeks’ worth of unwashed detritus into the wardrobe, and the rest of it to the far side of her bed, just in case Nick happened to peek in. She laughed at her strange logic. Why would he ever just peek in? Then she made the bed. Why was she making the bed? Why did she feel the need to sniff her armpit and dab on Secret? She was not going to sleep with Nick Emmons, a man she did not know, a man with a message about some mysterious inheritance. She went to the mirror and pulled her hair into a greasy ponytail.
Instead of heading back down the master staircase, Cassie padded across the open upstairs hall, lit by the three fleur-de-lised stained-glass windows in yellow, grass, and rose. She passed three of the home’s ample bedrooms, then turned in to the tight, dark passageway that led, to the left, toward the servant hall and stairs, and, straight ahead, into the fourth, underfurnished bedroom.
Into the ruddy servant hall she went. The red pine that lined the walls reminded her, uncomfortably, of a coffin, especially as she glanced into the maid’s room and wondered what it must have been like to sleep every night in that tight box above the kitchen.
There’d been a black maid at Two Oaks once, if Cassie was remembering right. Cassie had seen a picture in one of her grandmother’s albums. The woman was very old, older looking than Cassie’s grandmother had been when she died, hunched and gnarled and skinny but dressed in an apron. To think of making an old lady cook and clean for you. “It was different then,” her grandmother had explained primly when Cassie asked. “She’d been at Two Oaks for years. Where would you have her go?” And Cassie had bitten her lip about rich, male racists; one never questioned her grandmother’s precious uncle Lem, even though he was sixty years gone.
At the lip of the stairs, Cassie leaned forward and listened for Nick. Nothing. She checked the window; the side street was empty, as it always was this time of day, just porches and lawns, everyone either at their jobs down at the plant or crocheting blankets in front of their morning shows. She wondered if anyone had taken notice of her gentleman caller. She supposed they couldn’t think any worse of her, the wayward granddaughter of St. Jude’s most upstanding citizen. Everyone knew that she hadn’t made it back in time to do much except sit by the old woman’s bedside. In the grocery store, or as they eyed her from their front porch swings, she resisted the urge to cry out that it wasn’t her fault; her grandmother had kept news of the brain cancer from her. But of course Cassie knew it ran deeper than that, that plenty of things were her fault, and even if she hadn’t delivered her grandmother to a painful, lonely death, she’d done plenty to contribute to the disappointing, lonely life that had immediately preceded it.
Cassie stepped down gingerly—the stairs were straight and simple, creaky but secret. She skipped the fourth, noisy step, wondering, as she did so, why she was hiding in her own home.
On the last step, Cassie leaned against the pine wall to listen. She could hear a murmur from the front of the house. That smartphone again. Her stomach snarled. She ducked into the tight hallway and then into the kitchen, thinking to grab herself a bite. But then she heard her grandmother’s inconvenient voice at the back of her mind: “Make every guest welcome.” Damn those hostess genes.
A jar of green olives stuffed with pimientos—into a white-ridged ramekin. A half-eaten bag of sour cream and onion potato chips that weren’t as damp as they might have been—into a cut-glass bowl. She sawed the mold off a hunk of cheddar that had been in the icebox for so long that she couldn’t remember buying it. Everything went onto the pressed melamine tray her grandmother had used for TV dinners. Cassie added a carafe of flat 7UP. At least it was cold.
The doorway connecting the kitchen to the rest of the house had always been divided in half all the way down to the doorsill; pine on the service side, oak for company. The tray rattled as Cassie stepped over that line into the foyer, the hollow rib cage at the center of the house, which connected the front door, straight ahead, to both the front and back parlors at Cassie’s one and four o’clocks respectively, to the kitchen straight behind her, then the dining room at seven, and, beside that, the master staircase soaring up past the stained-glass windows toward the two floors above. At Cassie’s nine o’clock, the foyer tapered out toward a side door that led underneath that overhangy thing where people had once waited for their horse-drawn carriages—her grandmother had called it something fancy she couldn’t for th
e life of her remember—and, finally, tucked beside the front door at her eleven o’clock, stood the architectural wonder of the house, a cylindrical office for which the infamous Uncle Lem had imported a curved mantelpiece and windows. By the time Cassie was in residence, the office’s curved doors were wedged halfway open, off their tracks; at least that wasn’t her fault.
No sign of Nick as she waded through the pile of mail, hoping not to spill the 7UP. Almost to the front door, starting to believe Nick might, in fact, be there to kill her, Cassie heard him sharply note, “Nick, calling for Max.” Then a pause. His voice was coming from the front parlor. “Yes, yes, I know, but he’ll have to come through me first.” Another pause. “Because that’s how she wants it.” Cassie turned in to the double-wide doorway just to the right of the front door and found Nick tucked, quite comfortably, into the corner of her grandmother’s yellow velvet davenport, the davenport that had moved to Columbus when the old woman came to care for Cassie, and then, once Cassie was off to college in New York, went back to its spot by the wide corner windows of her grandmother’s favorite room in the world, fluttering with lace curtains.
“There you are,” Cassie said as he begged off—“Have to call you back, Sarah”—drew his phone back from his ear, pressed end, and stood—a bygone, gentlemanly gesture.
“Sit,” Cassie commanded as she set the tray down on the busted footstool between them. She’d propped up the broken leg with two two-by-fours nailed together, which worked just fine as long as you didn’t move it.
His eyes danced over the ornate plasterwork that connected ceiling to walls. “Lemon Gray Neely,” he said, shaking his head with warmth, as if he loved the guy. “What a visionary. Can you imagine what it must have taken to get this neoclassical treasure designed and built in a little town like St. Jude in the nineteenth century?”
“Uh, how do you know about Lemon Gray Neely?”
He tapped his phone proudly. “Googled it. Not a whole lot of information, but at least a couple of hits.” Then he rubbed his hand along the dark wood of the doorway, taking in the oak mantelpiece inlaid with red tile and the grandfather clock at the edge of the room, which had clanged and ticked so loudly when Cassie moved in back in December that she’d let the pendulum wind down again.
Cassie allowed herself, for a moment, to see past the crumbling plaster, the spiderwebs spanning the corners, the dust bunnies gathered along the edges of the room. She saw what the place really looked like: shabby, yes, uncared for, sure, but undeniably majestic. She checked Nick again; he seemed genuinely awed.
But she wanted to know about this inheritance. She popped a chip into her mouth. It melted too quickly. She dragged the horribly uncomfortable floral armchair from in front of the fireplace, hoping the action would break Nick out of his reverie. He offered to help, but she waved him off, even though the thing weighed at least fifty pounds, all horsehair and mahogany. It dated from who knew when, and expelled dust when she plopped down in it.
She noticed him eyeing the olives. “Want some?”
“I had a shake on the plane.”
“The plane.” She lifted one eyebrow mysteriously. “The plane from where?”
He cleared his throat. There it was again—the apprehension she’d first noticed on the porch. “Los Angeles.”
“City of Angels!” It came out like an old lady would say it, which she usually didn’t care about; she’d accepted her fate. Still, she tried to modulate her voice. “A shake, huh? Like, chocolate, or…?”
“Spinach. Kale. Ginger.”
She lifted the olives and shook them in front of him. “Imagine the chemicals.”
He took one. Popped it in his mouth.
“So,” she said, after watching him eat a chip (small victories), “you mentioned an inheritance.”
A tiny frown formed between Nick Emmons’s groomed brows. He folded his hands before him, like a child playing businessman. “Do you know who Jack Montgomery is?”
A black-and-white head shot of a movie star from a different era floated to the surface of Cassie’s mind. In the picture, the man was leaning toward the camera ever so slightly, hands folded under his chin. He was handsome in an old-fashioned way, with a heavy, dark brow and brooding lips. Where had she seen that picture? It had been taken earlier than the other really famous photo that popped up in her mind’s eye: a full-color shot of him chewing at the end of a stalk of wheat, gazing out across an empty, golden field. That particular image was, Cassie knew, a still from that manly movie involving horseback riding, guns, a pretty girl, and plenty of ennui. A pre-Jim boy had taken her to a screening at Film Forum. Absalom’s Ride? But Jack Montgomery was primarily famous for being famous by the time Cassie was born; he was old, older than her grandmother.
“Jack Montgomery passed away three days ago,” Nick said. “Turns out he left everything to you.” He said that last sentence casually, but he watched her as he said it. “So I suppose you could say I’m here because of your grandmother. I’m here because of June.”
What followed Nick’s mention of the name June was unprecedented. Yes, the dreams Cassie had been having were all-consuming; yes, they stayed with her during the day; yes, she ruminated on them, sometimes all day long; but they were dreams—just dreams. None of what happened in them actually showed up in her real, waking life. But then Nick said her grandmother’s name, and, suddenly, she felt everyone arrive. “Everyone” was the constellation of people in Two Oaks’s dreams, a crush of laborers and guests, of those who’d once built the house and maintained it, who’d filled Two Oaks in that party dream Cassie sometimes had, in which a great white tent was pitched over the side lawn and everyone was dressed to the nines.
Two Oaks was stuttering to attention. The mention of those two names together was too much to sleep through. In its excitement, the house ushered forth its crowd of memories, flooding the foyer and the parlors, where Nick and Cassie were discussing Jack and June.
Cassie couldn’t see the dream people, not exactly, but she could feel them, gathered around her, gathered around Nick, pressing in from the foyer and peering down from the stairs. Hundreds of people, if she wanted to count, people she’d never even noticed in her dreams but she now understood had been waiting there, on the outer fringes. She could hear them too—voices chattering in gossipy whispers, the thumps of their heartbeats, their swallows, their concern—and smell them—Ivory, menthol Kools, Old Spice, Pepsodent, and, dangling above it all, the heavy waft of a floral perfume. Cassie was surrounded, and, well, it was terrifying.
Cassie had assumed that her active dream life at Two Oaks was a safe—if odd—phenomenon, but this assumption was predicated on her being asleep when the dreams began. Now it was morning. She was certainly awake. She knew this because she pinched herself and she wasn’t waking up. It was daylight, there was a man here named Nick, he was saying words to her, but all she could attend to was the house filling with, what, souls? Souls she was starting to think might, alarmingly, be dead. Was that what she was seeing in the night? Ghosts? Were all the dream people really former people, coming to haunt her? Why had they roared to attention at the sound of her grandmother’s name?
“June,” she said sharply, testing them. Nick thought he was talking to her, and stopped and frowned midsentence. She realized she was sitting at a strange angle, that she had frozen in her chair, her arms tight at her sides, her head lolled back, but she didn’t think she could move. And now Nick was onto it too, rising, coming over to her, looking concerned.
They hadn’t responded the way Cassie had thought they might. They were just chattering on around her, as though the name meant nothing to them. So why were they here then? Maybe it wasn’t June’s name after all. Or—Cassie thought back to the moment they’d shown up—maybe it was June’s name paired with the name of the movie star.
“June and Jack!” Cassie shouted, and, sure enough, every one of them quieted. The dream people remained around her, but they were noticing her now, leaning in, more
interested than they’d been, and the names said together had made that happen. As a little girl, Cassie had loved to feel her pet hamster stilling in her hands, even as its heart throbbed like timpani. That’s what it was like now, the house alive but quiet, and the hair on Cassie’s arms stood on end.
“June and Jack!” she called out again, and, in the same instant, all the dream people were gone. Cassie and Nick were alone in her house.
At the moment Cassie called out Jack’s and June’s names, Two Oaks had gone from hardly knowing Cassie was inside it to considering her essential to its survival. Only someone who knew of June and Jack (only someone who knew of the schism and loss and fear and newness born of those two lives entangled), could begin to understand how to mend what had been broken. But Two Oaks could feel it had alarmed the girl, and it wouldn’t make that mistake twice. It would calmly observe her from now on, hoping she followed through, feeding her the dreams that would tip her in its favor, but, otherwise, it would keep its dream people at bay, at least during the daylight hours.
Meanwhile, as far as Cassie could tell, everything had gone back to normal. She found herself pressed into her chair, as though centrifugal force had pushed her backward. Gravity was her friend again.
“Are you all right?” Nick was perched over her, a glass of 7UP held above her head, asking her again and again how she was. She couldn’t tell whether he was planning to pour the drink on her or offer a sip.
She nodded to quiet Nick’s insistent concern, took the 7UP, and gulped it down. He watched her carefully as she came up for air.
“That was…”
He nodded. “It looked like you were going to pass out.”
She gestured to the empty space, which had, so recently, been jam-packed. “I’ve never felt it like that before.”
June Page 3
