A Stranger in Alcott Manor

by Alyssa Richards

  She turned her head to the side. The angst and worry, built up over all those years, wondering what happened to him, it threatened to spill over. “She—Mrs. Miller has an oddly effective way of getting people to do things. She leads them down the primrose path and traps them before they realize what’s happened.”

  They walked along the beach and away from the manor. The sun had nearly disappeared behind the manor. Its weight sinking to the other side of the water oaks and magnolias that were far shorter, thinner and younger than when she had seen them when she was at home.

  “Do you mind if we look around the front of the house? I don’t want to miss anything. Especially if Ruby or Horace might be there. Plus I just have to look around while I figure out a plan.”

  He stared at her with narrow-eyed intensity, standing so close that she could almost feel the warmth of his skin. There was a heat between them that pulsed, its strength taking on a life of its own. She looked away. Told Beau about the loan, his father’s bank merger and how he was trying to take the house from them.

  Beau shook his head. “I never thought he would do something like that. I wish I were there to try and stop him for you.”

  “Jayne Ella is probably cursing my name right about now since I missed the meeting with the bankers. Of course, when I do make it home, if I make it home, there will be all sorts of accusations about my selfishness, how I abandoned my family when they needed me most.” She walked quickly and knew she sounded chatty.

  To the side of the house she saw the lush green gardens and tall hedges that had been sheared into a labyrinth, something else she had only seen in photos. Squeals of children’s laughter could be heard from inside the maze. She slipped her shoes on, the remaining sand on her feet rubbing against the inside of her shoes like sandpaper. They passed a young magnolia tree and Peyton remembered Ruby Lee tackling her in that spot, how she held a knife to her toe and sliced the skin. She wondered if Ruby were more subdued now, too. Or had she become worse?

  The perfumed magnolia scent was so thick and strong, it was three-dimensional. Clinging to everything in sight, defining a visitor’s experience at Alcott Manor. That was what Bertha Mae had written in her diary, that she had planted the magnolias to define a visitor’s experience, even before they reached the house.

  They rounded the corner of the manor and she half expected to see the familiar—the white pebble and shell drive that crunched under her step, Jayne Ella’s light blue Cadillac, and maybe a few other visiting cars.

  Instead, the curved driveway was light brown dirt. Horses and carriages were parked where cars should have been. Several of the horses stared and snorted.

  She gathered her skirts and walked all the way to the end of the long drive, passing one gentleman in a tuxedo who tipped his tall black hat.

  “May I help you, miss?” he asked.

  “No, thank you,” she said and hurried her steps.

  Just past the front entrance was a narrow dirt road and beyond it were acres of cotton plants. She didn’t know where she was going, she just kept walking. Beau was several feet behind her but he might as well have been right by her side for as close as she felt to him. She turned left, grit and dust kicking up from the road and irritating her eyes. Her face slammed hard into something solid, and pain shot through her nose and cheekbone.

  Peyton stepped back, feeling foolish that she hadn’t seen whatever it was that she’d run into. There was nothing ahead of her except for miles of an empty dirt road with crops on either side. She stretched her hand out and her fingers met a smooth, thick surface, like the glass of a window pane. She searched for a way around it, looking like an idiot, she suspected. When she found the invisible barrier immovable and without edges, she turned around and found Beau standing with his hands in his pockets. As if he had been waiting for her to discover something he already knew.

  “What is this?” She touched the invisible wall that kept her contained.

  “This would be the last photo that Bertha Mae had someone take today.” He pointed to the visual horizons that surrounded them on four sides. “Therefore, there’s nothing beyond what you can see.”

  16

  When they reached the ocean side of the manor again, Beau placed a finger over his lips and nodded toward the opposite end of the beach. “Follow me. I want to show you something.”

  They snuck past the wedding reception by sticking close to the dunes.

  “They can’t see us?” Peyton whispered.

  “Right now, Senator Alcott is making a toast to his niece, the bride. No one is paying attention to anyone but him. Heard that speech several times, he’s a captivating speaker.” He pointed to the white tent where the man in a black tuxedo stood on a platform with a raised glass of champagne.

  He held her hand and guided her over several black lines, making sure she didn’t fall in. He couldn’t bear to lose her again. He honestly didn’t think he would survive that.

  They headed toward the forest that, in this picture at least, was much closer than it was in their current day. He hadn’t realized just how many trees had been removed over the years until he ended up here. There was a luminescent glow to the area, like spirits blinking and swirling around the trees.

  “What’s going on there?” She smiled like a fairy-tale princess.

  He escorted her the rest of the way, knowing that ocean, forest, and sand was her favorite combination. In fact, it was in a place not unlike this where he had taken her on their first date. He had seen her expression when she found the hard edge of their world. He knew that exact feeling of devastation, felt it many times in this land of trapped Alcott reality—there was no way out.

  She needed a break, a distraction, so that she wouldn’t lose hope.

  “Lightning bugs!” she said. “There must be thousands!”

  “Nothing to scare them off, I guess. Not many visitors to this area at this time of day. No vehicles of any kind. I guess Bertha Mae caught it with her camera.”

  It was a magical scene, thousands of lightning bugs coursing through the forest, flashing their courtship messages. She walked through the fluorescent crowd, several landed on her hands.

  “It’s amazing that she captured this! Well, I guess her diary did say that she took pictures of everything.”

  Beau wrapped his arm around her and pointed to the back porch in the distance. A photographer stood behind the camera on its tripod. Bertha Mae stood behind him, her arm extended, pointing in the distance as if to direct his efforts.

  Thunder rolled through the air. Dark clouds appeared to move in their direction. None of it happening in real time, and yet its danger couldn’t be ignored. On the great lawn there was a commotion and guests began to file inside the manor.

  “Why, would be my question,” Peyton said. “What is it about her or this camera that causes that to happen?” She raised her hand and another lightning bug landed on the tip of her finger.

  Beau put his hands in his pockets, studied her. “She reminds me of this professor I had in college, he was a former green beret. He took pictures of everything. I mean, everything. The outside of the communications building, the inside of the classrooms, the hallways. I saw him take pictures of students and teachers when they didn’t even know he was watching them. He was obsessive about photographically documenting every event. It was like he was creating his own world, one that didn’t require an actual connection.”

  “An ideal,” she suggested. “Maybe he was trying to compensate for something he saw in the war. Maybe he had too many bad things happen in his life and he was desperate to create some sort of ideal world. Maybe one where certain horrors didn’t exist.”

  “That’s what I thought. Like maybe he needed to paint a better picture for himself. She started early this morning, making tintypes of the house and its interior. She shot the grounds in every which direction. She had someone else shoot the wedding and the reception, but she kept a close watch on them. She checked the tintypes they made as soon a
s they were ready. If she didn’t like them, she made them do the tintypes over. I think she has an iron fist tucked inside of those white gloves of hers. If she had been born in our time, she would have been some sort of social media fiend.

  “It’s like a disorder, that she has to document her life like that. She’s constantly painting a particular version of her life story.” He picked up a shell and tossed it into an oncoming wave. “She’s covering for something. Hiding something,” Beau said.

  Peyton nodded like his words resonated in her, as if they had struck a tuning fork. “The manor has always kept more than its share of secrets, and the Alcotts have constantly tried to cover them.”

  “She’s photoshopped the Alcott Manor image to hide her secret.” He took her hand, rubbed his thumb over the fingers of her left hand. He remembered kneeling in front of her in an oceanfront setting much like this one and slipping the yellow diamond on her ring finger. He expected to see that same ring on her hand fifty years into the future.

  She pulled her hand away, pressed it to her midsection. “History paints Bertha Mae as an ideal mother, but that’s not what I saw today. She has no love for that child. I wonder if we reveal how the little girl actually died, if all of this just falls away.” She gestured to the forest around them. “Even if we don’t find Horace and Ruby Lee, if the truth comes out, maybe that would be enough to get us home? Maybe it would be enough to get all of us home.”

  “It’s worth a shot,” he said.

  “Then I’ll find the camera that Mrs. Miller used to send us here and destroy it. That poor girl.” Her chin trembled and she wiped the tears when they slid down her face. “I’m sorry—I—I wasn’t expecting to feel this way.”

  He held her close. “What’s going on, Pey?”

  Her face crumpled and the quiet sobs seemed to come from somewhere deep within.

  When she finally lifted her head from his shoulder, she looked at the ocean, drew in a breath.

  “When I was young I used to idolize Jayne Ella. She was my heroine—she was so strong and fierce. She had her own business, she was so in charge. She was everything I wanted to be, and believe it or not, we were so close. I was like her doll. She would choose my outfits and do my hair every day. She tried to be that way with Layla, but those two never synced the way she and I did.

  “Anyway, when I was about ten, that all changed. The closeness went away when I told her I was stuck in the manor the night when Ruby disappeared. She told me I was making it all up, especially the part about the blood. I’ve never been able to forgive her for that. She should have been there for me, she should have had my back. She should have known I wasn’t lying.”

  “You’re right. She should have.” Beau thought about the night of their rehearsal dinner, the last night he had seen her. “I’m sorry that we argued when you told me what happened that night—”

  She shook her head, ran her hand along his jaw. “No, you were right. About part of it, anyway. The blood obviously wasn’t Ruby’s. I didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance. Not directly, anyway. And apparently she’s not even dead!” Irrational laughter burst out of her mouth. He put his arm around her, to ground her, to let her know he cared.

  “Mrs. Miller intervened about then. She introduced me to Bertha Mae by showing me all the tintypes in the museum. I read Bertha Mae’s diary, fell in love with who I thought she was—this morally upstanding woman who honored her family, overcame the odds. Hell, I’ve even designed a series of exhibits at the manor to honor her—her tintypes, her diary, her clothes!” She tried to laugh again but the noise was quickly stifled into quiet crying.

  “Jayne Ella was not an easy mother.”

  “I always wanted Jayne Ella to be more like Bertha Mae. Unfortunately, I think she is.” She sniffed and studied the glow of the fireflies that surrounded them like fairy dust.

  He pulled her closer still. “Both of them seem to have their own agenda.”

  “I actually thought that if I worked on the manor for her, that this might bring us closer. Even though it was hard to spend any time there, I thought it was important to mend my relationship with my mother. But, forget it.”

  Peyton mentioned the darkness she had seen in Bertha Mae’s eyes. “Like some kind of evil,” she said. She launched into all the different ways Bertha Mae could have hastened her daughter’s death, like ignoring the fact that the medicine wasn’t working, or encouraging Rachel to swim when she was too sick.

  Beau had seen that in Bertha Mae, too. “At the funeral, she behaves more like a host, like she’s the center of attention,” he said. “Almost like she’s energized by the event, somehow.”

  “She doesn’t deserve children. We need to follow Rachel, ask her questions.”

  He pushed his hands through his hair. “We don’t really have time for that.”

  Peyton’s eyes owled, and he wanted to pull her closer. Knew how the fear was getting ahold of her. He’d always had that ability to calm and center her. To bring her home, so to speak. She was stronger now, more independent. But he still had a fierce need to protect her and he definitely wanted to help her find a way home.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  He turned toward the manor, double checking his memory of the events he’d lived through too many times. “The next scene we shift into is Rachel’s funeral.”

  “She’s dead by tomorrow?”

  He nodded.

  “Beyond tomorrow, how long before we see Rachel again?”

  He rested his hands on his hips and tried to remember. “If we stay in order, there are about three or four hundred tintypes, I think, before we go all the way through to the beginning—when the tintypes started. I would guess another hundred or so before Rachel appears after that. Not every memory lasts a full twenty-four hours, so, about a year.”

  “So, we have no shot of figuring out what Bertha Mae did to her, at least not for a long time?” She pressed her hand to her head, paced back and forth. “Our only shot is to find Ruby and Horace.”

  He tried not to look discouraged. The lead they had on Rachel’s death was the first he’d had. “I think so.”

  “What about going into one of those black gaps together? We might end up coming out in a better place in the order?”

  “I thought about that. But we could also get separated.”

  Disappointment and resignation shadowed her face and caused his chest to ache. She was trapped. Anchored, leashed to this world that offered very little explanation for its existence. He wanted to tell her that they would find a way out, but he didn’t know if they would.

  “At least we have each other.” He offered her his hand and she accepted it. “We won’t give up, we’ll keep trying.”

  “We’ll keep trying,” she said softly.

  He kissed her left hand. “You left your engagement ring at home, I guess.”

  “Yes, it’s at home.” She turned toward the wind. He watched her stop herself from chewing on the inside of her cheek. Sensing bad news, the worst news, he felt sick and dizzy.

  “Beau—” A shadow crossed her face. He let go of her hand.

  “I waited…for almost six years. I kept thinking that maybe—” Her voice caught in her throat.

  Never did he think he would be hearing this from her.

  “I kept thinking that you were going to come home somehow.”

  “I had no way to get to you,” he said.

  Thunder rolled through the sky, a long and angry warning.

  “Your family. They made a grave for you in the cemetery on the east side of town. After you had been gone so long that you were considered legally dead. I guess they decided it was time to— Oh, gosh. I’m so sorry. I realize this must sound heartless.”

  He didn’t respond. Just stood there, thinking that he would have preferred living what was left of his miserable life without hearing this news. “You’re married?”

  She shook her head, licked her lips.

  He exhaled hard.
Not married. The wind blew her hair. He wanted to grab her shoulders, tell her that she was his. Instead he kept still and quiet, curled his hands into fists.

  “Everyone kept telling me I had to move on, that I was wasting my life. So, I finally accepted dates, let myself get set up on blind dates. I was trying to be healthy. After a couple of dinners, I would inevitably find a reason not to see these guys any further. Friends and family criticized me for being stuck in the past, unable to move forward. Everyone said I needed a therapist. I finally did see a therapist for grief counseling, because I couldn’t get over you.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks.

  “When I finally told the counselor that you had disappeared several years previously, she said I had to find a way to move on. Either that or get on medication.”

  Pain shot through his jaw as his teeth ground together, because he knew that she hadn’t chosen the medication.

  “What’s his name?” he asked.

  She waited a moment before answering. “Ira.”

  He turned and looked at the darkening sky, feeling as if his soul were being ripped from his body. When he looked at her again, he asked, “Do you love him?”

  “We’re engaged.”

  He nodded, short and quick as if he’d been shot.

  “He’s a good person. I think you would even like him.”

  He stepped closer to her. “Under the current circumstances, I rather doubt that.” Then he realized that she hadn’t answered his question. “Do you love him?” he asked again. His voice strained, it took effort to keep it calm.

  She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and winced.

  He thought she might regain her composure. But when she didn’t, he tried to find peace in that. If she was conflicted, that wasn’t the worst thing she could feel. And he thought that meant she would tell him the truth. They had never kept anything from one another, at least not until they had been parted.

  “Yes, I do,” she said.