With all those thoughts haunting me, I needed a hint of normalcy. I needed distraction. A few cat memes would not be remiss.
There was one room in the house that might help me. I’d seen it on my way to my bedroom. The library. It had been huge and dark and gloomy, but huge meant shelves upon shelves of something that might make up for the fact that I couldn’t connect to the web to download a book to occupy me until the rain had passed.
I put the receiver back on the phone with a solid thump.
The need to run burned in my knees, but I wasn’t familiar enough with my surroundings. Right now, the only place I knew of to stretch my legs was the garden pathways. The thought of going back into the garden at night was not a cheerful one. My mind jeered at me with images of me running all right. But in those imaginings I was running from something or someone, my feet pounding and my heart pumping and always the idea that I would never be able to run fast enough.
* * *
I met Mary’s aunt in the library. I wouldn’t have known she was blind by the way she cleaned. I attributed her slow, methodical movements to age and habit. Her hair was gray and piled high on her head, held with unseen pins in an elaborate style from a time before wash and wear. She had a careful familiarity with the books she dusted. Her fingers weren’t nimble and quick, but they were sure, never hesitating from one volume to another.
“It’s quite a collection,” I offered, sure she’d seen me walk into the room in the wavy glass of the antique mirror behind the mantle. I tried not to look at it much myself because of the odd way reflections seemed to play in old glass.
Only then did she startle and jump, turning toward me with dim, unseeing eyes.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to surprise you,” I said.
Thankfully, she didn’t frown or faint. She merely nodded and turned back to her work.
“If I was easily frightened, I wouldn’t have worked here for thirty years,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“I thought one week was the limit?” I replied, jokingly but not. Not really joking at all.
“Well, I come and go, don’t I?” she said, continuing to dust each book in turn. “I’ve tried to keep the place habitable even when no one lived here.”
“Thirty years. That’s a lot of dusting,” I said.
I looked around the room at the floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with aging tomes. For some reason, her dusting seemed less OCD and more tragic, as if she’d set herself a Herculean task that no one would ever even appreciate should she accomplish it.
“The first O’Keefe didn’t read. But he definitely collected. Oh, yes, he definitely collected,” she said, still dusting, one book after another. Pulled it out, slid the grimy cloth over each cover, front then back, then the top of the pages, then the binding, then the bottom. And then she slid it back into place. Again and again. “I’m Mrs. Scott,” she offered.
“I don’t know how you do it,” I said. I had only been in the room long enough to see her dust several books and I already wanted to run screaming for fresh air and sunshine.
My heart thumped in my chest. And not just because of her endless patience for her never-ending task. I was imagining what it would be like to walk the halls of this giant, dark house blind to who or what might be around me.
I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry. I allowed a look at myself in the mirror and saw my face floating pale among the shadows. My green eyes were wide. They were also darker than they should have been. More shadows or faults in the old glass? I couldn’t be sure.
Behind me, the hall was even darker and beyond that the whole empty house. Or was it? Was it really empty after all? Since I’d stepped into the garden, the spot in the middle of my back between my shoulder blades had been tingling. Thornleigh definitely encouraged it. So many rooms. So many shadowy corners. And mingling in the size and the darkness, there was a heavy feeling of disuse, of dust and decay. Poor Mrs. Scott had her work cut out for her.
“I’ve been blind since I was a little girl. They said it was scarlet fever. These days even my hearing is fading.”
She turned to me suddenly. So suddenly, it was my turn to start. Her eyes were a pale, unfocused blue. Her face was wrinkled to the point that it was impossible to decide what she might have looked like years ago before her skin began to sag. She was pretty now. The kind of pretty a nice, neat elderly woman acquires when all her edges have softened and all her softness has sharpened.
“I’m no audience, that’s for sure,” she said. It sounded like a warning. “I can’t see at all and I can’t hear well and even when I could hear I refused to listen. You shouldn’t stay. Thornleigh is hard on people who can see.”
I thought of O’Keefe and how very deeply he seemed to see me when we’d met earlier. With his artist’s eyes, Thornleigh would be the hardest on him of all.
“I’ll be fine,” I assured her. The words came easily to my lips. They’d been my go-to platitude for a long, long time. I’ll be fine…even when the pain won’t fade and the nightmares keep me up at night.
Mrs. Scott closed her eyes and lifted her chin. She tilted her face to the side as if she was listening with her failing ears to something I couldn’t hear.
“Maybe,” she finally said just as the moment grew awkward.
Her eyes popped open and I almost gasped because the hallway behind me was reflected in her widened black pupils, and it looked as if it stretched on forever in the curvature of her eyeball.
“Maybe not,” she continued.
I didn’t know what to say to that. No one had ever challenged my assurances before. It was easier to accept I was okay rather than try to prove to me otherwise.
My neck prickled and I had to glance back to prove to myself and to my instincts that some black hole to eternity hadn’t opened behind me while Mrs. Scott had distracted me with her dusting and her creepy proclamations.
Nothing.
Only dust motes and shadows and old faded carpet that was more alarming to my senses than it had any right to be. An alarm that said a good home makeover would go a long way toward setting things right. There was something about the abandoned and forgotten quality in the air here that went beyond poor maintenance and shoddy upkeep. The house was almost willfully aged. As if it refused Mrs. Scott’s efforts to clean it. Yes. I know. Dark fancy. But how else to explain the dust when she worked so hard to get rid of it?
“No, really,” I said firmly, to settle my nerves and break the prophetic mood of her words.
“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced, and then she turned to slide another book from the shelf.
Go. Get sculpted. All my friends had thought it was the best idea. And my therapist had called it “brilliant,” though there were times she worried that I forced myself into situations where bravery was necessary in order to prove the attack hadn’t turned me into a coward. If they all could see me now, reduced to being nervous of statues and shadows, their certainty might turn into dusty maybes, as well.
* * *
I chose a book at random, barely glancing at its cover, before murmuring a goodbye to Mrs. Scott. She didn’t pause again in her work, only dusting, dusting, dusting. There was a perpetual quality to her movements, as if she’d been at the task forever and would be at it forever still after I left.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I was able to walk away, but niggling unease prickled my subconscious because I knew she continued to dust even after.
I tucked the book I’d picked under my arm and made my way across the aged carpet. It noiselessly ate my footsteps all the way to the stairs.
I’d rushed down them earlier, twisting and turning with little thought as to what or who might be around the frequent bends. It wasn’t spiraled exactly, but it did curve, with landings at each floor.
My room was at the top, just beneath the attic.
Now that I’d come upon Mrs. Scott unexpectedly, I slowed my climb up the wooden treads, conscious that the thin runner beneath my feet wouldn’t mask my
advance. “She’s coming,” each step seemed to announce.
Creak-creak-creeeaaak.
For some reason, silence would have been better. I wanted to pass back to my room unnoticed. Why? I couldn’t be sure.
Intermittent wall sconces flickered. From the storm or faulty wiring, I couldn’t be sure. They didn’t illuminate the long, winding staircase as much as its dark corners demanded. Each landing I attained opened up onto a long, barely lit hallway lined with empty rooms.
I sneezed twice because the atmosphere was heavy with dust and age. Both times the explosive noise made me cringe and hold my breath.
Then, I knew I wasn’t alone.
Five treads before the final landing, there was a difference in the air. Respiration or the very atoms around me stirred by a second pulse? It was a deep and instinctive surety. I wished as I took each step that I didn’t recognize it as a prey-to-predator reaction. But I did recognize it. I knew it well. The attack hadn’t made me a coward. I’d traveled the world looking for challenges to prove it. But this time I might have gone too far because not being a coward and not being afraid were two different things. Thornleigh did unsettle me, but unreasonable fear wouldn’t chase me away. I wouldn’t let it. The flutter of it in my chest was only a constant reminder that I wasn’t as strong as I was determined to be.
Maybe I should have stopped, one foot above the other, with a superstitious shiver and a wishful sigh that the threat would stretch on forever rather than the sudden split second need to face it. Or maybe I should have gone back down in a stumbling fall all the way to poor Mrs. Scott and her dusty library.
I shook off both urges even as I caught the scent of rain in the air.
It was O’Keefe. He had paused on the landing, waiting for me. I was intimidated and glad all at the same time. While the landing barely left room for us both when I reached it and stood beside him, the staircase would have been worse. In its close confines, we would have been touching. Here, we were nearly touching.
Even that made my pulse quicken.
“I came to check that you’d found your room,” O’Keefe said.
I didn’t doubt him. I was nervous and oddly affected by him. My instincts were drawn to him and put off by him at the same time. But he seemed detached from me. Observant but totally untouched by what he saw.
“I went down for a book,” I explained, pulling the pilfered volume from where I’d tucked it. Only then did I see it was old and leather-bound. Probably some first edition and I’d grabbed it like a paperback from a grocery store shelf.
O’Keefe reached for the book and my breath caught as his fingers brushed mine. His were calloused, but also long and well formed. Mine were shaking. Though brief, his touch was intimate. Warm and immediate and nothing to do with books and dark stairways.
“I don’t spend much time in the library. It’s Mrs. Scott’s domain,” he confessed.
“She was dusting,” I said. I watched his hand on the book. I had fisted the fingers he’d touched to stop the tingling.
“Yes. She does that,” he replied. “And, yet, it’s always dusty.”
He opened the cover of the book and flipped a few pages. A nervous laugh in response to what might have been a joke caught in my throat.
I had noticed, but I didn’t want to offend him or insult his housekeeper. And I certainly didn’t want to share my hypothesis about the old house preferring it that way.
“Victorian poetry? I guess we’re poorly stocked. No recent thrillers or erotic romances.” O’Keefe commented on the book I’d unknowingly chosen. He handed it back to me. It had fallen open to a page marked by a faded ribbon.
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow;
The storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me:
I will not, cannot go.
—Emily Brontë, “The Night Is Darkening Round Me”
He teased, but the mood of the poem seemed to more closely match the expression on his face. I couldn’t help looking at him. Even in the flickering light that painted shadows across his bold features, I saw more than I’d seen before.
He wasn’t detached. He was contained. Carefully, carefully contained. The poem and our proximity tested that control. I could see the war he waged to hold himself apart. Why? Why not laugh and talk and enjoy not being alone in this gloomy place?
I could only guess based on my own experiences. Any emotional connection might tap into darker emotions I couldn’t and wouldn’t face. I loved my friends and family. Possibly even more than before the attack. But I didn’t show it. Ever. One fissure and the dam would fail. For some reason, O’Keefe had the same sort of dam to hold himself back. What had caused him to be this way? What darkness did he hide within himself?
“I didn’t even know what I had picked up,” I said, lightly touching the once-red ribbon with my index finger. When it moved, it left a yellow line of age down the page.
“Be careful. Thornleigh has a way of making you do the unexpected,” O’Keefe murmured. He reached out and closed the book as if he found the poem threatening.
I probably should have scoffed. I wanted to reach out and brush the dark waves of hair from his forehead. Instead of either, I spoke.
“I’m always careful,” I confessed. Here, in the dark with O’Keefe it didn’t feel like a boast. More of a reassurance or a promise. I always looked for experiences to challenge myself, but those challenges were always carefully executed and controlled.
“Are you?” he replied.
He stood so close we were almost touching. I had to tilt my neck to look at his face. He held it turned down to me…almost…leaning.
“I’m not sure that’s true,” he continued.
I stood in near-dark in an almost empty house on a stormy night with a man I’d never met before. One who smelled of rain…and roses.
No. Maybe I wasn’t always careful. And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, after all.
My heart was just beginning to pound in response to a certain gleam in his eye when he drew back and turned away.
“Good night, Ms. Knox. Don’t dream.”
I stayed on the landing and listened to his retreating steps until they faded away.
Chapter Three
It happens sometimes. More often than I confess to anyone. The nightmare comes—when I’m too tired or not tired enough, when I’m someplace new and different or I’ve been too long in Abingdon, when I’m exhilarated from reaching a goal or I’m disappointed because a goal has slipped through my grasp.
I remember the beautiful day. I used to love spring with its promise of flowers in the air and my workshop thrown wide-open to the Virginia breeze. The nightmare always begins the same. I don’t think it would be nearly so bad if I didn’t remember the “before” moments so clearly.
That day, I had finished a particularly challenging piece with intricate solder work and numerous settings for precious stones that had to be fitted to perfection or risk losing heirloom rubies that had been in my client’s family for generations. I had spent months designing then crafting a necklace that was to be an engagement present from a man to his fiancée. He was old Southern railroad money. She was from Quebec. It was to be my largest commission to date and it would support me for months, but, most important, I thought the piece had captured the couple’s relationship in a meaningful way. It was a sweet, romantic gesture to welcome her to his family and I was pleased and proud to be a part of it.
La Roux had a reputation to uphold and this piece, more than any I’d created before, lived up to that. I wasn’t just the dabbling niece. I was contributing something meaningful. I remembered my eagerness to show
my aunt the pendant. I didn’t even change. I wore my worn and faded denim bibs complete with scorch marks and solder drippings. I loved those bibs. Their looming destruction in my nightmare eats at me every time I relive it. Almost as if they mattered more than my flesh because they couldn’t heal. One day I’ll ask my aunt if she’s the one who threw them away.
I drove carefully through town because of the speed trap all the locals mocked and all the tourists cursed. No matter how many times I drive that street, I can’t make my dream-self put on the brakes and turn around. I try. Each time I try.
La Roux is lovely in and of itself. Even if my aunt hadn’t filled the walls and the carefully arranged pedestals and shelves with brilliant works of art, both local and from all over the world, the building itself is stunning. Built of dark red salvaged brick in the old-fashioned shotgun style so popular on main streets throughout the South, it had drawn me to its cool, whisper-quiet interior for years. It hurts that I love it even in the nightmare almost as if it’s a different place before the attack than after. Because I don’t go there anymore. He took La Roux from me, too.
My parents had me late in life. I was an only child and was closer to my father’s youngest sister than anyone, even my own parents. When they retired to the Florida Keys, it was natural for me to gravitate even closer to my aunt and La Roux. She encouraged my interest in silversmithing. I helped her with her business as it became established and regionally respected. The gallery was ours. The artistic community of southwest Virginia was our extended family.
That day I was happy, confident, loved and safe. Oh, how I thought I was safe. There was a warmth to that perception that I’m sure I’ll never recapture.
My aunt had been out. I remember being disappointed. In my nightmare, the disappointment is sharp and accusatory as if her presence might have saved me. In waking moments, I’m so happy she wasn’t there. What if he had taken her, too? Of course, he did. One of the worst parts of the nightmare is that I know I’ve lost her in some way and I don’t know how to find her again.
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