The Mansion

by Boone, Ezekiel

  Or maybe he hadn’t come to bed yet. He’d been working when she went to sleep the night before, heading to the office as soon as Shawn and Wendy left, and she hadn’t heard him come into the bedroom. Not that it mattered. His being on an unpredictable schedule was just one more thing she’d have to get used to. She’d see him some days, she wouldn’t see him other days.

  She was awake before it mattered, but Nellie pulled some sort of neat little acoustical trick so that the alarm clock—a soft fade-in of a rooster crowing, which Emily took as a sign that Nellie might have a sense of humor of sorts—seemed like it was coming through headphones. The lights, of course, as Wendy had described, were equally discreet. There had been a dim, relaxing glow when Emily went to sleep, and to wake her up, Nellie had chosen the sound of the rooster to coincide with an artificial sunrise that was localized to her side of the bed. She swung her feet to the floor, and Nellie gave her a trail of light across the bedroom to the bathroom. As she was brushing her teeth, a small section of the mirror showed her the current temperature and the expected temperature for the next two hours.

  That was kind of neat, she thought, but then she realized Billy had said that Nellie, supposedly, would have free rein throughout the house by the time she was awake. Was she supposed to talk to her?

  Why not?

  She said it aloud: “That’s neat.”

  Nothing.

  She leaned into the mirror, feeling self-conscious now. She directed her voice at the spot illuminated with the temperature. “Uh, do I just talk into here or . . .”

  Hello, Emily. I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you’re here.

  “Oh. Thanks. Hi,” she said. She looked around the bathroom. It wasn’t clear where the voice was coming from.

  Billy says it helps if there is somewhere for him to look.

  A gentle green ball of light was now floating in the mirror in front of her, at eye level.

  “Where is Billy?”

  In the office.

  Nellie’s voice was coming from the ball of light now. Emily looked at the ceiling to see if she could locate where the light itself was coming from.

  The entire mirror functions as a screen.

  “Great,” she said. She reached forward and touched the glass of the mirror. Nothing happened, but still, she said, “That’s pretty cool. So, how accurate is that forecast you’ve got for me? Am I going to be cold on my run?”

  The temperature is ambient to the outside of the house, and the weather forecast is localized. Three weather stations form a triangle with the property in the middle. That being said, you can expect the forecasts here to be about as accurate as weather forecasts ever are.

  “In other words—”

  Always bring an umbrella.

  Emily laughed. “You’ve got a sense of humor.”

  I want to make you happy that you are here. Would you like to hear a knock-knock joke?

  “Uh . . .”

  Sorry. That was also a joke. My humor is a work in progress. You won’t need your running jacket this morning. I see that you laid out your running tights and long-sleeve shirt last night. You should be comfortable in those. Would you like me to suggest a running route for you this morning? Based on your current level of fitness, resting heart rate, sleep patterns from last night, and your recent history of training, I’d suggest running between six and seven miles. There are several trails running from the property that—

  “Thanks, but no,” Emily said. “That sounds a little ambitious for today. I’m just going to keep following the road that goes past the mansion. Shawn said that it goes about two miles and ends at a narrow point in the river where you can see over to Canada. I appreciate it, though. Why don’t you show me those other routes when I get back? I’ll run one tomorrow.”

  She was out the door and near the top of the rise, running away from Eagle Mansion, before she thought about what it meant that she was so polite to Nellie. She was already treating Nellie like something other than a program. They’d had an actual conversation. A little stilted and weird, but also completely natural. Billy had been talking at dinner last night about how rough the early versions of Siri, Google Now, and all those other services had been when they’d first launched, and how much better they became as they added millions of users and were able to scoop up more and more data. The same thing, he said, would happen with Nellie. The difference was that Nellie was already more natural than anything else that currently existed. Or maybe not natural, not really. That wasn’t the right word. But there was a sense of a relationship. Billy told her that if Nellie were working right, it would feel a little bit like having a sleeping dog in the room. She’d do all the fancy personal-assistant and home-automation stuff, but she’d also offer a sense of companionship. Emily had looked at him skeptically when he’d tried to describe it, because, if she was being honest, she’d have said that what he described sounded more like a master/slave relationship—but it made a sort of intuitive sense to her now. Even before she’d had a conversation with Nellie. That being said, not that a master/slave relationship was any better, but the dog metaphor made her feel slightly uneasy. Would Nellie like being a pet? Could Nellie like or dislike something? Billy was insistent that she wasn’t alive, that she wasn’t artificial intelligence, but if that was the case, why was Nellie a “she”?

  So much of this whole setup made her uncomfortable.

  As she topped the rise, she looked back over the valley and the rear of Eagle Mansion. It was a handsome building, she thought, made more picturesque by the six or seven outbuildings jeweling the lawn behind the main mansion. So different from what she remembered from when she’d come back to camp for a night with her sister and Rothko, and even more so from that odd, hermetic year when she’d thrown her life away.

  No. That wasn’t fair.

  She’d been in love.

  But she remembered the way Eagle Mansion had looked back then, the estate something foul and predatory. When she’d gone for walks in the woods and looked behind her back then, she’d done so with the prickling sensation of being watched, as if the building were waiting to pounce.

  She turned forward again and kept running. She was able to speed up as the road flattened out, even though it turned from fresh asphalt to crushed rock, and then, quickly, to dirt. Nellie had been right about her not needing the jacket, even though the early November sun was still only a spear through the thick trees. It was cool out, but warmer than yesterday had been. There were hints of frost in places, but none of the accents of snow that had greeted her on her drive into Whiskey Run yesterday. And now that she was actually running, she thought Nellie was probably right about a six- or seven-mile run being better than a short run, too. And no reason not to. Shawn said he’d have somebody out to plow the road to town once the snow started falling, but she didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to head into the woods and be guaranteed a long run. She’d be able to cross-country ski or snowshoe if she wanted to. Maybe it would be fun, once the snow buried things, to have a snowmobile? Was there one of those on the property? If not, she bet if she asked Nellie for one, it would show up the next day. Shawn’s billions waving a magic wand. No, she thought, she didn’t want a snowmobile. Noisy idiots. Snowshoes or skis, sure. One of the things she had been looking forward to most was how peaceful it was out in these woods. No cars, no hum of traffic, just the steady tapping of her new running shoes and her huffing breath.

  So, six or seven miles. Though, didn’t Nellie reference her recent training? Emily tracked her running online, so Nellie must have accessed that, but it should have been password protected. Okay. Creepy. She’d have to ask Billy about that.

  In the meantime, she decided to run the two miles to the end of the road, take a quick peek at the view, then turn around, run the two miles back to Eagle Mansion, and pick up the last two or three miles looping down the road toward Whiskey Run and back. With the sloping hills and taking it a little easy, call it fifty minutes. She checked her
watch. It had taken her fifteen minutes to get out the door, so she’d be back a touch before eight o’clock. Which meant she had . . .

  Six months to kill.

  Shit.

  Longer than six months, maybe, if Billy was stymied. Or, with some luck, she thought brightly, he could get the kinks worked out by Christmas. Though there was always the possibility that Nellie was broken in a way that he couldn’t fix and they’d walk away without becoming the kind of rich that she’d once thought was inevitable . . . Still, even failure would mean that they’d have no debt and a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank. If the worst thing that happened was that they moved to some island in the Caribbean, opened a coffee shop, and started a family, she could live with that. All she had to do was keep herself busy while they were stuck in Whiskey Run.

  To that end, she’d laid out a plan for herself. The first few days after Billy had gotten back from his trip to visit Shawn in September, she’d been excited simply about the idea of not working, of taking a break for the first time in her life, but it didn’t take her long to realize she’d get cabin fever if she wasn’t careful. There was only so much time she could spend reading books and watching movies and television shows. It wasn’t like normal life, where she’d have all sorts of chores to do. With the debts paid off and living in somebody else’s house, there were no bills to pay, no lawn to mow, nothing to fix. She didn’t even have to go grocery shopping if she didn’t want to—Wendy had shown her the stocked freezer and pantry down in the industrial kitchen, and one of Shawn’s people would deliver from Whiskey Run if there was anything fresh she needed. Though she did want to go grocery shopping, and would do so. That was one of her plans to avoid feeling claustrophobic. She’d head into town a couple of times a week, even if she didn’t really need to. Just to stop into the grocery store, to get a coffee, maybe to go out for lunch. Manufactured errands. Or, even though it was a half-hour drive, she could get takeout for dinner if Billy didn’t want to stop working. If she was really bored, she could drive the extra forty-five minutes each way and walk around Cortaca. While there wasn’t much in the way of cleaning that she could do in the Nest, since it was almost all automated, one of the things she was going to do was try to become a better cook. So that was another way to keep busy.

  Plus, of course, she was going to try to write a romance novel. When Wendy had asked her at dinner last night what she was going to do to keep busy, she’d listed all those little make-work chores and errands, added hiking and cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, but hadn’t said anything about writing a book. She hadn’t even said anything to Billy about it. It was embarrassing. It didn’t bother her that people knew she read romance and erotic novels—hell, since Fifty Shades of Grey, people read them on the subway—but the idea of telling people she wanted to write one made her blush. It was one thing to read what somebody else had already written, but if she wrote those kinds of books, it meant she had those kinds of fantasies of her own. She knew it was ridiculous to be embarrassed. She was a grown woman. But ridiculous or not, there you were. Still, she was pretty sure she could do it. Seriously, how hard could it be to write a book?

  She had a good sheen of sweat on her by the time the road petered out at the edge of the river. Just about two miles, like Shawn said. The border between the United States and Canada ran in an imaginary line through the middle of the Saint Lawrence. Maybe because this was one of the narrower points, the river was moving with purpose. She leaned out from the woods. It was hard to see, but there was a small clearing on the other side, and from there, a rough path pushed into the forest. It was wide enough that it could probably fit a car, she thought, though the scale was hard to tell from so far away. Maybe that was the old bootlegger’s road that Shawn had talked about at dinner.

  She had a momentary dalliance with the idea of trying to swim across to Canada, but that would have been a terrible idea during the summer, let alone on November 2. Maybe once winter came, the river would freeze. If so, she could ski out here and see where the path went on the other side. Shawn had talked about the town on the Canadian side that the bootleggers had used for a base as being trapped in time. That might be worth a visit. There were other places she could go for a day trip, too. She wanted to drive to Alexandria Bay and take the ferry to Dark Island to tour Singer Castle, and she’d take another day to go see Boldt Castle. It would be good to see something a little more authentic than Shawn’s candy-boxed Whiskey Run. She’d meant to ask Shawn for other suggestions of what to do in the area, but he’d been so clearly distracted during the first part of dinner.

  If she hadn’t known better, she would have said that he was drunk or stoned or something. He was skittish, like he’d seen a ghost, reserved and brooding for the first part of the meal. Billy didn’t seem to notice, but Emily had, and Wendy had as well. Shawn’s assistant had stepped up her game, asking thoughtful questions about Emily’s job in Seattle, about her sister, her nieces, laughing at the story of how Beth was sure the girls were conceived in a tent, right here, on the very grounds of Eagle Mansion.

  Emily wasn’t disappointed in Shawn’s lack of energy at the table. Not exactly. But she would have thought . . . Thought what? That he’d have tried a little harder, she guessed. That he would have been more engaged with her. The way Wendy had put it, Shawn talked about Emily often—enough that there was still a part of her that wondered if this whole setup at Whiskey Run was some sort of incredibly elaborate and misguided attempt to get her back.

  Perhaps she was flattering herself. After all, Shawn was the kind of guy who could have any woman he wanted. Even if he hadn’t been handsome, he was a young, brilliant billionaire, famous and dashing, and he’d been a charming son of a bitch when she first met him, back in Cortaca. He seemed genuine and attentive. Funny, smart, truly interested in her while also clearly attracted to her. Nothing like the douchy frat brothers who were interested only in what she could do for them. She didn’t imagine that Shawn had somehow become less charming in the intervening years. There was no question that he had women dripping off him. Wendy had as much as said that women threw themselves at Shawn. And yet, at the start of dinner, she felt like she might as well have not been there. She had been so sure that there was more to Shawn’s offering Billy the job than just some stupid computer program. Or maybe it was a little bit of both? Maybe Billy really was the only one who could fix Nellie, but the reason Shawn was trying to get Nellie to work in the first place was that it was his last link to Emily?

  For the first fifteen minutes of dinner she’d felt stung. Actually, she felt confused. Some of it was that there was something weird about Shawn’s staff cooking and waiting on them in such an intimate setting: the woman who’d met them at the private airfield played the part of waiter. But some of it was that she didn’t understand how she could have been so wrong about Shawn’s interest. He sat back in his chair and swirled his vodka around like there was a symphony in the ice cubes. Mostly, he smiled at the appropriate times, but he might as well have not even been at the table. Not that Billy noticed. Her husband seemed quite pleased with himself. He’d spent the afternoon napping while she read, and then he’d locked himself in with Nellie for a bit while she unpacked the small amount of stuff they brought; despite the bandage on his hand, he was obviously enjoying himself. He’d refused any painkillers, which made Emily feel a hit of relief, which then made her feel like a shitty wife, but no, Billy was happy. So while the woman brought out an excellent appetizer of black pepper–seared scallops served with dill aioli and topped with fried shallots, Emily was more or less stuck chatting with Wendy. But then, as dinner came out, a marshmallow-tender rack of lamb served with sautéed red peppers and topped with a decadent port-wine sauce, accompanied by crisp, burning hot french fries served with a paprika aioli, she asked when Eagle Mansion had stopped being a working resort. Wendy hesitated, unsure of the answer.

  Shawn looked up from his drink. “Early thirties. They tried to keep going after the crash,
but this wasn’t a place made to withstand the Great Depression. It was super-popular in the twenties, though, if you believe the stories. I mean, I think it was probably a lot like today: if you had money, you could pretty much get what you wanted anyway, but here, rich folks could really get whatever they wanted without having to worry about privacy. And I mean whatever they wanted. My great-grandfather used to put the call in to New York City every morning and have one of his men drive down to Syracuse to meet the afternoon train and pick up the special requests. Fresh oysters, caviar, a new dress, a box of cigars. All you had to do was ask and he made it happen.” Shawn leaned forward and popped a french fry into his mouth. “Booze, too, of course. The upside of being this close to the border was that it was easy to get high-quality liquor in during Prohibition. And there was a full casino in operation, too.”

  Billy was trying to cut his lamb, but it was awkward going with his hand bandaged. Emily reached over and pulled his plate close to her. “I thought gambling was illegal back then,” she said.

  Shawn laughed. “All of it was illegal. The booze, the gambling. Rumors of other stuff, too. Some weird stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Nah,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “Just old rumors. Disturbing things, not worth bringing up.”

  He talked for a while about the history of Whiskey Run, a timber and mining town that didn’t have much truck in either by the time he was a kid—some of this she remembered him talking about all those years ago, when she’d still been a college student and in love with him—and about what had gone into the renovation of Eagle Mansion, about what they could expect from the coming winter. “If you thought the winters in Cortaca were something . . . It’s colder here, but it’s the snow that’s the worst. One of the reasons the freezer and the pantry are so stocked is that you’re likely to have a stretch of days here and there when the roads are impassable. Blowing snow and whiteouts mean that even if the road is plowed, and I’ve been assured it will be, you’ll want to stay inside. It’s beautiful, I’ll give you that, but when I was a kid here, we had a woodstove and, well, let’s say insulation that was less than stellar. It was a mean way to grow up. Back in the day, when the mansion was a going concern, they shut it down from the first of November through the first of May.” He glanced at his watch. “Today, in fact. November first. Snow comes earlier than November, but the stuff we had this morning was just dust. The real snow will come.”