“That doesn’t sound like witchcraft to me.”
Variola shook her head. “My mother taught me the religion of vodou. Some call that witchcraft. But in fact it is a faith, a system of beliefs. It is a blend of African tribal religions and Roman Catholicism. The power of vodou is real, but it is not what the movies would have it to be, all black magic and zombies. It is, rather, the herbs and roots and flowers of the islands.” She laughed, that sound of chimes again. “What seems like witchcraft to some is increasingly recognized by health care givers all over the country as sound, proven medicine. Have you never taken echinacea when you’ve had a cold, Mrs. Huntington? St. John’s Wort when you’re feeling down? Goldenseal for indigestion? They’re all in my bag of tricks, but they are also sold in the heath food store downtown.”
“I pass no judgment on your beliefs. I just want to understand what goes on in this house.”
Variola gave her another sympathetic smile. “What is it that troubles you, ma’am? You can speak freely with Variola. I do not betray confidences.”
For some reason, Liz suddenly felt as if she could trust this woman. “All right. It started on my very first day here. Jamison told me that Dominique’s ghost still walks this house. Thad is convinced of the same.”
“I have heard those tales, too.”
“You gave Thad a pendant for protection against her.”
“His pendant protects him from whatever dangers he believes he faces because he gives it the power to do so. Not me.”
“But why does he believe that Dominique haunts this place? Why did Jamison believe it as well?”
Variola sighed. “She was a very . . . formidable figure. Perhaps they have a hard time believing she is really gone.”
“Formidable? In what way?”
“Well, she was very beautiful.”
Liz nodded. “I can see that from the portrait.”
“She was also charismatic and vain and demanding and not always very pleasant, though she could be exceeding charming when she chose to be.”
Liz swallowed hard. “My husband loved her . . . seemed to love her very much.”
“Is that what he has said?”
Liz realized David had never actually said such a thing, at least not in so many words. “It’s been obvious to me. He took a cruise around the world to get over the grief of her death. Whenever her name comes up, he is stricken . . . I can see the pain on his face.”
“Well, he was her husband,” Variola replied. “I’m sure her death was hard on him.”
Liz hesitated. “Do you . . . do you believe her spirit is still here?”
Variola smiled kindly. “You are asking me if I believe in ghosts?”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“I do believe that the dead can come back. I have seen many things that cannot be explained by science alone.”
“So you believe Dominique’s ghost—”
Variola shook her head. “Her ghost does not walk here. Variola could see if it did.”
“Are you certain of that?”
Variola evaded giving her a direct answer. “I take it, then, that you do believe in ghosts, Mrs. Huntington?”
Liz smiled weakly. “I didn’t before I came here . . .”
“But now you do? Because of the babbling of frightened men?”
Liz leaned in closer to Variola. “I’ve smelled gardenias.”
“Ah. Her fragrance.”
Liz nodded.
“You are aware that Rita wears the fragrance, too?” Variola asked.
“No, I hadn’t noticed . . .”
Variola grinned. “She frequently does. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Hoffman still sprayed the fragrance to remind her . . .”
“Mrs. Hoffman! That would make sense . . .”
Variola folded her arms across her chest and gave Liz a knowing look. “Tell me why that would make sense, Mrs. Huntington.”
Liz held the chef’s gaze. “Because . . . they appear to have been very close.”
“Very,” Variola confirmed. “As thick as thieves sometimes.” She took a step closer to Liz and lowered her voice, as if she were about to reveal a secret. “They brought me to this house. Dominique and Mrs. Hoffman. They were interested in learning the fine arts of the islands. They were like little girls eager to find hidden treasure.” Variola’s face darkened. “But they weren’t interested in art or culture or faith or religion. They were interested only in how my heritage could benefit them. They were greedy. Selfish.”
Liz was surprised to hear the chef speaking so plainly. “Do I take it that you don’t like Mrs. Hoffman?”
“I work fine with her,” Variola assured her. “You needn’t worry about that.”
“I’m not sure she likes me,” Liz offered.
Variola arched an eyebrow. “Mrs. Hoffman has only ever liked herself and Dominique.”
Liz decided to trust the chef some more. “Many times since I’ve come here, she’s made me feel as if... as if I don’t measure up.”
Suddenly Variola leapt at her and grabbed her hands, gripping them tightly in her own. “Don’t you listen to Mrs. Hoffman when she starts talking like that! You hear me? You are a good woman. Variola can see that now. Can see that clearly.” Her dark eyes reflected Liz’s own. “Your husband married you because he loved you. You must know that. Variola can see that, too, as clear as I can see the nose on your face.”
Liz felt as if she might cry. “Oh, thank you, Variola, you have no idea how much it means to me to hear that.”
Variola let her hands go and smiled craftily at her. “I think we will be good friends, Mrs. Huntington. I think we can help each other.”
“I hope so,” Liz replied.
“You come to Variola,” the dark-eyed woman told her, “if you ever feel lost in this house. Variola will make it right for you.” She lowered her voice again. “And pay no attention to the honeyed words of Mrs. Hoffman. Beware her. She is not your friend. The time will come when we will stand up to her. Variola will make sure you are safe in this house.”
“Safe from what?”
“From everything you fear,” Variola told her.
Liz appreciated the support, though she realized it probably hadn’t been wise to get herself involved in what was apparently a domestic rivalry between these two women. Still, what Variola had just told her made her extremely happy.
Your husband married you because he loved you. Variola can see that, too.
In that moment, Liz’s cell phone jangled. She grabbed at it, suddenly convinced it was David, telling her that he was coming home. But it was a number she didn’t recognize . . .
“I think you should answer that,” Variola told her.
Liz did so. It was Roger, asking if he could take her to dinner tonight.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Liz said.
Overhearing the conversation, Variola smiled at her. “Invite Mr. Roger here to the house for dinner,” she said. “Tell him I’ll make him his favorite curry goat.”
Liz relayed the offer, and Roger accepted.
After Liz had hung up the phone, Variola said, “You might let Mrs. Hoffman know we will have a guest tonight.”
Liz said she would do so.
Yet neither she nor Variola were aware of the eavesdropper who was standing just outside the kitchen door in the shadows, listening to every word of their conversation.
25
In the servants’ washroom, the door locked securely behind her, Rita wrapped the necktie tightly around the little wooden doll.
A part of her thought what she was doing was utterly and ridiculously mad. She had never believed in such things before. She had told Jamison he was crazy to talk about ghosts and devils. But then Jamison had been killed for such talk . . .
Rita thought back to the day she first came into this house. She’d answered an ad she’d found online, looking for a chambermaid. Mrs. Hoffman had interviewed her, looking her up and down with those creepy eyes—the only part of her
face that ever moved. Rita had felt as if the older woman was peeling off her clothes with her eyes—her clothes, her skin, seeing right into her soul. Rita had shivered. At the end of the brief interview, she was given the job.
Rita had been thrilled, because she’d really needed the job. She was saving to move out of her parents’ house and go back to school. She’d started beauty school a year earlier, but had had to drop out when her father lost his job and could no longer help her pay tuition. How Rita ached to live on her own, to have her own life.
But the life she observed at Huntington House had made her want a very special sort of existence—one that no job as a cosmetician would ever give her.
Very quickly Rita had spotted the way Mr. Huntington looked at her. When he was around his wife, he seemed very much in love—completely devoted to Dominique, in fact—but when she wasn’t around, David’s eyes wandered. Rita saw how he looked at her, and she learned how to hold his gaze for that tenth of a second longer than was acceptable. Finally, one day, in the solarium, as David sat reading and Rita watered plants, she’d deliberately brushed past him, stumbled just a bit, and nearly fell into his lap. He’d responded by kissing her. Dominique was away for the day, on another plastic surgery adventure, and they’d had the rest of the afternoon to themselves. Rita had never known such lovemaking. She had decided then and there she would not only be David’s mistress, but she would someday be his wife as well.
Oh, yes—she wanted everything that Dominique had. She wanted everything that vain, imperious woman lorded over her. Rita wanted her clothes and her cars and her spending allowances. But she wanted her husband, most of all. And Rita would love David in a way that Dominique had apparently been unable to do.
Rita could see that something had been missing from the Huntingtons’ marriage. When they were together, David had refused to ever let Rita speak his wife’s name—almost as if he could not speak it himself. At first, Rita had thought he was simply guilt-ridden about the affair; as time went on, however, she discerned something else was going on. David never spoke Dominique’s name around her because he hated her—he was desperately unhappy being married to her. Yet for some reason he could never bring himself to admit that to Rita, always changing the subject when she tried to bring it up.
So when word came that Dominique had been washed overboard on their yacht, and no amount of plastic in her body had kept her from drowning, Rita hadn’t felt in the least bit regretful. The woman had never been kind to her. She’d snapped her fingers and expected Rita to come running. She’d kept David on a short leash—while at the same time, flirting outrageously with every male member of the staff. How the bellboys and chauffeurs had been dazzled by her. Rita wouldn’t have been surprised if Dominique had been carrying on affairs with all of them. She was simply a horrible woman, and Rita was glad she was dead.
Finally David was free! But he had left the house in such a miserable state—after tearing up the gardenia plants in the garden because he wanted no memory of Dominique in the house. But if hated her so much, why had he been made so distraught by her death? He hadn’t loved her. All that attention he gave her in public was just a show. It couldn’t have been real—not with the way that David brought such passion to his relationship with Rita. Rita believed deep down in her bones that David was glad that Dominique was dead. But for whatever reason, he’d left Huntington House for all those months after her death—and when he came back, he brought that little drip of a new wife with him.
It made no sense to Rita.
That was, it made no sense until after Jamison was killed. It was the only answer. All the talk she’d heard ever since coming to this house—all the talk of witchcraft and black magic—must be true. It was the only thing that could explain David’s attachment to Dominique. He was under some kind of spell. When Dominique wasn’t around, David could break somewhat free of it, and find some moments of true happiness with Rita. And when Dominique died, he had been shattered—almost like an alcoholic who suddenly gives up alcohol cold turkey.
But who had put David under the spell? It might have been Variola, on Dominique’s order. Variola had never possessed any particular love for Dominique, so no doubt she was being paid to cast her spells. And Rita suspected Variola wanted to continue that profitable enterprise by keeping her hold over David. That’s what had caused him to act so uncharacteristically and so impulsively and marry some cheap little dancer he’d met on a cruise ship. Rita didn’t think little Liz knew that her husband was under a spell, or that he’d married her only because Variola had directed him to do so. She suspected that Variola would make her schemes and her demands known to the new mistress of the house in time. Then she would go back to controlling the house once again and enjoying whatever forms of payment she received.
And if it wasn’t Variola who cast the spell, then it must have been Mrs. Hoffman, but had she truly learned enough of Variola’s black magic to keep David under such control?
Rita looked down at the vodou doll in her hands. She didn’t trust Variola, but she believed the chef when she said that she wanted Rita as her ally. She suspected the two women, Variola and Mrs. Hoffman, were in a struggle for control of Huntington House. Whoever controlled David, of course, won. And what better way to control David than to reignite his affair with Rita? Quite possibly, Variola was using Rita as a weapon in her fight against Mrs. Hoffman. But her reasons didn’t matter. Rita had the doll. She was going to use it.
And soon she would have David back in her arms.
“You’re missing me, aren’t you, David?” Rita said, looking down at the little doll.
Its painted red eyes stared up at her.
Rita tightened the silk necktie even more. If the doll were human, it would be struggling to breathe.
“You need to come home, David,” Rita said. “You are filled with thoughts of me, aren’t you? Remembering the way I kissed you. The way we made love to each other. You are filled with thoughts of my face. You are overcome by my scent. You want me. You need me. You must have me.”
She loosened the tie, then tightened it again.
“You are coming home, David. You are getting on an airplane and coming home to me. It is me you yearn for. Me. Say my name. Rita. David and Rita.”
She lifted the doll from its little coffin and cradled it at her breast.
“You are coming home because the spell is broken, and you no longer love that silly little twit you married. You are coming home to tell Liz that your marriage was all a mistake and you want a divorce.”
She kissed the doll’s little painted mouth.
“You want a divorce and you want to marry me.”
She replaced the doll in its box.
“Once the spell is broken,” Rita whispered, “you will see that you truly love me. This is not an enchantment to make you love me, David. You already love me deep in your heart. It is merely a spell to free you so you can embrace your own true feelings.”
She tightened the necktie once more, choking the little doll.
“Come home, David,” Rita purred. “Come home.”
26
The day was bright and sunny, without even the slightest shred of humidity. Liz strolled across the green manicured lawn of the Flagler Museum, exulting in being out of the house for the first extended period since she’d arrived. How beautiful Palm Beach was! How marvelously lush and green and balmy. And how marvelous was her tour guide: her husband’s handsome, charming brother, Roger. Liz felt as if she were a bird, freed at last from its cage—and she was enormously grateful to her liberator.
“This beautiful mansion,” Roger was telling her, “was given by Henry Flagler, one of the founders of Standard Oil, to his wife as a wedding present.”
Liz gazed upon the tall white columns that fronted the mansion. “Was she happy here? His wife?”
Roger shrugged. “That much I don’t know. But who wouldn’t be happy in a place like this?”
Liz looked again at the mansion glitteri
ng in the sunlight, the tall palm trees swaying gently around it, the bright red bougainvillea popping out everywhere.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “One can be unhappy even in the most beautiful of places.”
Roger smiled kindly at her. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of another young wife given a mansion to live in when she married a rich man. A wife named Liz.”
She smirked. “How’d you guess?”
“Liz, you will be happy in Huntington House. I promise you. Once David comes home, everything will be different.”
How kind his eyes were. Roger looked so much like David, but the kindness . . . that was different. Had Liz ever seen kindness in David’s eyes? She thought she had, when they’d first met on the ship. But maybe all she’d seen then was grief—his terrible sadness over losing Dominique—and she’d mistaken that vulnerability for compassion. Because the David she’d been speaking with on the phone—indeed, the David her husband had become the moment they arrived at Huntington House—had shown not a smattering of kindness or compassion. All he’d demonstrated to Liz was impatience and annoyance.
Roger had come for dinner the previous night. How they’d laughed. For the first time since she’d come to that house, Liz had laughed out loud and easily. Roger told her tales of his boyhood—when he was constantly showing up to elegant, snooty parties thrown by his parents dressed in T-shirts and flip-flops. David, of course, had obediently worn the requisite suit and tie, but Roger—the bohemian, the artist—was always dropping canapés on the dresses of society ladies and winking at their daughters.
Then he started in on the stories of setting up his art gallery, and how he outraged Palm Beach society with his irreverent exhibitions of art from the inner cities. Once he hosted a performance artist who got naked onstage and covered herself in chocolate and invited patrons to lick it off her. The police had closed down the show after complaints that it was obscene. Roger had fought the closing in the courts and won. “I’m always upsetting apple carts,” he told Liz, and she had spied the way Mrs. Hoffman had pursed her lips when she overheard the remark. Mrs. Hoffman, Liz realized, didn’t like Roger. That made Liz like him all the more.
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