A Stranger in Alcott Manor

by Alyssa Richards

  The hunger from her unanswered questions silenced with the feel of his arms around her. Her mind filled with the nearly-forgotten memories of what it felt like to be loved by him.

  When he finally set her down, he stepped away from her, their hands joined together.

  “You’re okay.” She laughed, still unbelieving. “Where have you been?”

  “Here.” He gestured to the walls. “I haven’t left the manor since the night of our rehearsal dinner.”

  7

  They sat next to one another at the shadowed end of the dining table. He held her hands, kissing them now and then. The polished gentlemanly image she had first seen faded and was replaced by utter fright. Worry lines marked his forehead and fear illuminated his eyes. “How long has it been?”

  Panic fluttered in her chest, a sensation that said her surroundings didn’t make sense. She focused on the fact that Beau was alive. His bones hadn’t been picked clean and scattered on some mossy forest floor, the result of a terrible accident or horrific murder.

  Peyton licked her dry lips. “You’ve been gone for nine years. What do you mean…you’ve been here?”

  “Nine years,” he whispered. His eyes widened and he stared at the floor for a moment as if the breath had been knocked from his lungs. He cleared his throat. “Here. Stuck here, in its past. Actually, it’s not the past. I mean, it is, but—time doesn’t move here. Not linearly. We go from event to event. There are hard boundaries you can’t escape.”

  Beau told her how he had searched for a way home, for a way back to her and hadn’t been able to find one. “Please tell me you can get us home.”

  Peyton closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, she said, “Are you sure you’re okay, because none of this is making sense. I mean the clothing, and you. I mean, are you—? You’re really here. I think. And—” She looked at the gas-fueled chandelier and shook her head. Maybe this was a dream.

  “You don’t remember how you got here, do you?” he said.

  “I fell asleep on the settee, sort of. I had a stomach ache. When it passed, I opened my eyes, and you and those other people were here.”

  “No, Peyton. We’re not with you. You’re here, now. With us. Oh my—” Beau stood, crossed the length of the dining room, rubbed his hands over his face. Then he returned to his seat and held her hands again. “You’re not home anymore. You’re not anywhere.”

  “Beau—I’m not— Where have you—”

  He pulled her tight against him, and a flood of memories swept through her: the way she held his waist when they rode home from school on the back of his motorcycle, their long Saturdays on the ocean in his father’s boat, his proposal to her on the beach at sunset. He was real, so real.

  “I would never have left you. You have to know that,” he said. “The house took me, I haven’t been able to get to you.”

  Tears slid down her cheeks. She remembered the lesson she learned about the time the dry cleaner packed her wedding dress into a box suitable for long-term storage: That loving someone too much could wreck your life. She couldn’t help the way her heart and soul connected with Beau.

  As it did once again. A familiar note, a familiar groove, a familiar love.

  She looked at the table that should have been littered with her files and papers and her laptop but wasn’t. Instead there were plates filled with remnants of food and she could still hear guests down the hall, people she didn’t know.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on here,” she whispered.

  “All I know to say is that we’re in these memories and they...they seem to belong to the house.”

  She looked at the plates littered with half-eaten chicken and clumps of mashed potatoes and her stomach turned. She needed fresh air.

  Ladies’ laughter echoed from the front of the house and Peyton turned toward them. “Who are those people?”

  He shrugged. “Your ancestors.”

  “My—what?”

  He walked the length of the room again. Then he walked toward her, at a slow pace, licked his lips distractedly as if the news he was about to share was not good. “I’ve searched. There’s no way out. Unless you remember how you got here.”

  He handed her the rose from the centerpiece and she sniffed its fragrance. Dreams didn’t have scents, did they? Peyton tried to swallow, her throat tight with terror. “I feel sick,” she said.

  She walked toward the front door, in the direction of voices that chatted and laughed. For all she knew she wasn’t even really awake at this moment.

  “Peyton—no!” Beau called after her. She stopped short of the foyer. Six women gathered just outside of the parlor, a photographer in front of them. The women faced an antique camera that was perched on a tripod. One that looked much like the camera Mrs. Miller had used to take Peyton’s picture earlier in the evening.

  The photographer placed the cap on the lens and when he noticed Peyton, stood upright and glared at her. “You!” he yelled.

  She turned around and ran into Beau.

  “Act as if you’re my guest,” he whispered.

  A hissing noise sounded from overhead and she looked at the gold chandelier that hung from above, where gas flames flickered instead of the steady glow of light bulbs.

  A group of older men stood in the formal living room across the way and stared at Peyton as though she were an uninvited guest. Horror shot through her at the realization that she wasn’t simply in her ancestral home late at night. This wasn’t a dream, this was something else entirely.

  She ran her damp palms along the front of her dress. The house must have sucked her right into its history.

  “You have gotten into my picture! Now I have to do it all over again!” The photographer yelled with a French accent. He shoved a glass plate at them and tapped on its surface.

  “It’s okay,” Beau said to the photographer. He raised his hands and tried to calm the man who clearly considered this to be a ruined work of art. “It was my fault. I was giving my friend a tour and I didn’t realize you were taking a picture.”

  “Beau?” A woman appeared at the edge of the formal parlor, her wide smile blinding and magnetic. All eyes turned to her. Her dark hair was twisted high on her head with several long curls trailing just past her neck.

  Peyton had seen this woman’s image numerous times over the years—painted, photographed and even carved into marble and wood. She had seen more of the woman’s face recently, now that she was back at the manor. This was Bertha Mae Alcott. Living. Breathing. Upright and beaming.

  Panic exploded in Peyton’s chest and she gasped.

  The photographer fussed and argued, his accent making it hard to understand what he said.

  Bertha Mae stroked the outside of the photographer’s arm and he visibly calmed. The lilting sound of her voice made her words sound like a lullaby. She spoke to him in French, so the only word Peyton could make out now and then was the name Beau.

  When she spotted Peyton, Bertha Mae stopped mid-sentence, the high wattage slipped from her smile. She turned at Beau.

  “Well, Beau,” Bertha Mae said breathlessly, her accent full of Southern grace. “Who did you bring into my home tonight?” Bertha Mae pushed her way past the photographer and threaded her arm around Beau’s and patted his chest with her other hand.

  Beau turned to Peyton and he opened his mouth. No words came out.

  “Beau?” she asked.

  Peyton’s head swam and a pain hit her stomach.

  “Who are you, dear?” Bertha Mae leaned toward her.

  Peyton thought she was going to be sick. She spun around and tugged on one of the iron double doors that led from the foyer to the front porch. When it opened just enough she slipped through.

  She ran around the porch toward the beachside of the house. Waves crashed in the distance and she drew deep salty-air breaths into her lungs. This had to be some sort of bizarre nightmare. She couldn’t have just seen Bertha Mae Alcott.

  Her sister La
yla had said that the manor gave her strange dreams. That’s probably all this was. A strange dream. A stress dream. A Xanax-induced dream. Beau, Bertha Mae, the dress, the history… She had been thinking about them too much lately, she had seen too many photos of them and they were heavy on her mind.

  She would simply go back into the house and everything would be as it had been before she fell asleep—fully restored, decorated, quiet, empty of guests. Maybe Beau would still be there. Her stomach cramped hard again and it doubled her over in pain.

  She dropped to her knees, her arms wrapped around her midsection. She squeezed her eyes shut. The dizziness hit again, only worse this time. With her eyes closed, the world spun around her, beneath her.

  She pressed a palm against the hard wood of the porch floor, trying to feel steady again. When the pain and the dizziness subsided, she rested on her heels. She opened her eyes expecting to see the ocean. Instead, she found herself on the floor of the Alcott Manor dining room.

  She pulled herself upright. The dining table was empty except for her laptop and file folders and the empty coffee cup. She glanced around the room. There were no plates or remnants of a partially eaten meal, there was no Bertha Mae. And there was no Beau.

  8

  Beau Spencer stood at the side of Alcott Manor’s wraparound porch. “Peyton!” he screamed.

  The ocean crashed onto the sand in the darkness.

  “Peyton!”

  He walked around the back of the house, searched the area. He crossed the grassy lawn, knowing better than to go too far. Especially at night.

  “Peyton?” he called.

  He’d been trapped in the memories of the manor for years, he had searched every inch of the place and he hadn’t found a way out. Had she found a way? Did he miss his chance?

  The ocean breeze hit him hard, knocked him backward several steps. This was the night that a storm would hit, he remembered. He called for her again but there was no answer. He searched behind every tree and bush. She wouldn’t have run away, not from him.

  When there was no sign of her, he slow-walked his way to the side of the porch where the wind wasn’t as strong. He replayed the evening in his mind. The rain pelted against the roof. Peyton’s image was so vivid—the midnight black of her hair, the sparkle in the light of her eyes. She was even more beautiful than he had remembered.

  He looked around, tried to think—did anyone come onto the porch on this evening? He usually spent this night in the dark corner of the dining room to avoid the party guests and the storm. He didn’t have to sleep on the floor or outside on this particular night which was always a welcome change.

  He looked at the back lawn one more time, hoping to see her running toward him in that pale blue dress. Sheets of rain beat against the porch. He turned to go inside but couldn’t.

  He leaned on the wall, slid down it until he sat on the floor. He drew his legs up, ran a hand over his wet face. Thunder crashed and lightning lit up the sky. In the time he had been stuck in this house, he had often prayed to die. Now with the chance to see Peyton again, he wanted to live. He wanted to be with her for the rest of his life. He’d known, from the first time he’d seen her, in just the same way they showed in movies, that she was the one for him.

  He glanced at the second pillar from the far corner. After they had been dating for a while, they walked along the beach and ended up here at Alcott Manor. The house was run down then, or partially so. They were always in the midst of a restoration.

  He had carved their initials in that pillar. It made her laugh and she called him crazy. “Someone will see,” she said. He told her he knew he wanted her in his life forever and he didn’t care who knew.

  The wind blew the rain against his face. With a storm like this she would have come back by now if she could have.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, wished for something to numb the pain. On a normal night—not that anything was normal in the manor—he would drink the same whiskey that the Alcott men and their friends drank. He would wake up the next morning with a sick hangover and a naked woman sprawled at his side. Maybe a redhead, sometimes a blond. Never a brunette. Never anyone who looked remotely like Peyton. He couldn’t be close to anyone who reminded him of what he had lost.

  And no matter how much he drank, he couldn’t forget the life he’d almost had, and he couldn’t forget Peyton.

  Hadn’t he seen her tonight? Now he didn’t know. He wasn’t drunk. But she wasn’t here. He looked at his hands that had just held hers, touched her face and felt the softness of her skin. He curled his empty hands into fists.

  He looked around the empty porch, then lowered his head. Almost prayed again to die. The scent caught his attention, and he lifted his lapel to his nose.

  Her lilac perfume, heady and spicy, was still there.

  9

  Peyton sipped her hot coffee and stared over the waves where the sun would soon reveal its fiery face. The breeze off of the water was cool and she pulled the light blue blanket around her shoulders. She dug her bare toes into the sand and squeezed.

  The night before had been filled with too much work and too many mysteries, so she’d never made it home to her mother’s house. She’d pulled her suitcase from the rental car, found her toothbrush and a change of clothes. Her Boston marathon t-shirt and black yoga pants were a welcome change from the formality of the pale blue party dress she had worn throughout the night. The simple ability to sit on the beach and draw her knees close made her feel more like herself again. Being outside of the manor, if only by a few hundred feet, helped, too. The coffee didn’t hurt.

  Seagulls called and her text alarm buzzed from where her phone lay in the cool sand. She looked at the screen:

  Morning, honey.

  It was Ira. Another message alert buzzed.

  Be there shortly. You okay?

  She could feel the comfort he had intended with his words, as if he had spoken them to her face to face, running his thumb along the side of her neck. His gentle touch could send goosebumps down one side of her body and up the other. She often mused that was because he was a doctor, he knew where all of the nerve endings were and he played them like a song. “Nope. I just know you,” he would say.

  He cared about her happiness in every way—was the wine to her liking, was the temperature just where she wanted it?

  She had started dating Ira about two months after she moved to Boston and began her new job at the agency. She met him on a blind date that Amanda had set up. “He’s a doctor!” Amanda had said like he was the largest prize on the carnival game shelf and Peyton should go for him and quickly.

  She actually enjoyed herself on that first date. They had a lot in common, talked with one another nonstop and when he held her hand in the cab on the way home, she thought the gesture was sweet. She liked him.

  He left for France the morning after their date and by the time he returned at the end of the week, she had received two flower deliveries from him. “He’s courting you!” Amanda had all but shrieked. “These cards, they’re love letters!” she had said. “He said he can’t stop thinking about you or your kisses!”

  Truth was she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about his kisses that week either. He called her the day he got back and that night she slept in his arms. His kisses continued to be as gentle as they had been on the night of their first date. That was important to her because she could tell a lot about a man by how he kissed.

  She had refused second dates with men whose kisses were tight little pecks. That meant they were stingy, selfish and uptight. Same for men whose tongues were too wild with exploration. She couldn’t suffer that lack of self-awareness.

  But Ira’s kisses were spectacular and she could have kissed him nonstop for days on end. The fact that his kisses were the same now as they were on that first date told her that he held nothing back from her. What you saw was what you got with Ira. No pretense. No secrets. That made her feel a little guilty because she had held a few things back from hi
m. She wondered if that showed in the way she kissed him.

  They had developed a weekend hobby of finding the best wines in the city and an early morning habit of jogging through the Boston Commons. They discovered they both liked old movies and hated hot yoga and somewhere along the way she realized she wasn’t thinking about Beau every moment of every day. Her heart had made room for Ira.

  She was surprised at how quickly she had fallen in love with Ira Byrne. He was funny and smart. Brilliant, really. He was one of the most sought-after pediatric surgeons in all of the Northeast. He was charming and sophisticated and it didn’t hurt that he was from old money. He had surprised her on more than one occasion with an impromptu trip overseas. The first trip had been to Spain, then London. And finally, Paris, with a sojourn to the south of France. While dining on the Mediterranean in Cassis, he proposed to her with champagne and a five-carat solitaire. She enthusiastically accepted.

  When she thought of Beau just after Ira proposed, she’d thought that was silly. She told herself that Beau popped into her mind because Ira had been the second man to propose to her. Beau had been the first. She was just someone who thought about those types of things. Even when she didn’t mean to. She attributed it to her extraordinary memory. It was always coughing up details from the past that had a connection to the present. No matter how remote.

  It was Ira who had given her a passion for work. One she hadn’t realized how much she wanted. She had always planned on traveling the world with Beau because that was what he wanted. He had taught her the art of photography and together they were going to travel for the magazine, shooting and writing about faraway places.

  But it was Ira who showed her how much good she could do with her knack for reinventing public image. “Think of all the people and the businesses who need a second chance,” he had said. “You have a real gift for this. And nearly everyone deserves a second chance.” That simple sentence set her on fire. Her work wasn’t about money or prestige, it was about helping people by using her natural talents.