A Stranger in Alcott Manor

by Alyssa Richards

  “It’s not as simple as that,” she said.

  His hand dropped slowly, his lips closed. He stared at her for a long moment. “Once you know what you want, everything else becomes pretty damn simple.”

  Peyton watched Beau put the final touches on his outfit—buttoning his white shirt, buckling his belt, brushing dust and hay from his jacket. As if he were going to work.

  His absence in her life meant she had spent the last nine years with an ache that kept its full-fisted grip on her heart. When she’d met Ira, that pain lessened, but Ira said she kept a piece of her heart closed off to him. A private chamber, so to speak. Now she wondered if that hiding place hid a wound, or did it keep safe a love that would never die?

  “Rachel’s funeral is a busy day at the manor. There are lots of tintypes, so, be wary of all the black lines. The barn disappears because she doesn’t have tintypes made on this side of the house.” He glanced at his pocket watch, wound the knob on the top.

  Beau’s tone was all business and it made her feel alone. The connection they shared was broken. She tapped her left leg three times, then tapped her right leg three times—her yoga instructor’s method for balance. She repeated the pattern on each side, hoping a centeredness would come over her.

  She thought of Rachel. The secret of how she might have really died, whatever it was, was big enough and hidden enough that it might keep her and Beau trapped in these tintypes forever. Once again, she was taking her secret to her grave with her. If they couldn’t find her body, they would have to wait a year before they would find Rachel alive again, before they could follow any clues that might reveal how she died. By then Austin would have claimed the manor and torn it down. Peyton, Beau, Horace and Ruby would all cease to exist. The manor, its memories and everyone trapped inside of that torrent of recall would be gone forever.

  Buried secrets. Peyton’s life was full of them—her mother’s affair with Austin, the gold that was probably beneath the floorboards, the childhood memories at the manor she couldn’t completely recall. She hated information that hid from her, lurked in dark corners and threatened to grab her by the ankles.

  “We only have a few minutes left before things begin to change. Do you need help with buttons or anything?” He gestured to her dress. His expression wasn’t the peaceful sort of happy she had seen the night before, but it was resolute.

  She pushed the last hairpin into her hair that she had twisted into a loose bun. “How do I look?” She winced, expected a sarcastic remark. Not just because of the tenor of their conversation, but because she knew she must look a fright. There was no place to shower or bathe, no hairbrushes and no mirrors.

  He stood in front of her in his black 1850s suit, his eyes full of her. The combination of his towering height, sun-bleached hair and blue eyes was just as arresting as the first day they’d met.

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  19

  Jayne Ella stood to the side of Alcott Manor’s grand staircase, staring at the hiding place she had helped Austin create over twenty years ago. She bit off tiny pieces of skin from the side of her thumbnail. The area was already raw, and if she didn’t stop soon, it would bleed. She kept chewing. Nipping at the skin with her teeth, the sharp pain was a strangely satisfying release.

  Austin and his henchmen were gone. Before Austin left the front porch, he had whispered to her one last time, reminded her that she had a choice. She could give him access to the gold they had hidden together in the manor, or he would take the manor and help himself.

  In front of his associates, she offered a polite laugh to the whispers they couldn’t hear. But when they stepped away, she whispered in return, “Need I remind you that what you want is buried in a hard to access corner, beneath hardwoods and cement? That there is no way to dig—” She turned around to see if anyone could possibly hear what she was saying. “There’s no easy way to dig that up. This place is crawling with volunteers night and day, and cutting through wood and cement makes a hell of a lot of noise.” It actually wasn’t an impossible situation, but she wanted him to think that it was.

  “I’ll come at night when everyone is gone.” His finger found her hand and stroked it gently. “Take care of security and I’ll do it for you.”

  She moved her hand out of his reach, propped it on her hip. She didn’t like the effect his touch had on her and she didn’t trust herself around him. “You won’t get through that much flooring and cement in one night, the reconstruction done on this place is extraordinary. I’d also have to clear the repair with the security company and the county cop that patrols this place at night. Blasting through cement is not a quiet project. Not to mention that I don’t know how we would explain the giant, very deep hole in the floor as a needed repair.”

  “Nonsense. It’s more important that we get all of it up and out. No one is going to think anything about a hole in the floor. Repairs in this place aren’t an unusual thing. Let me take care of it for you.”

  Jayne Ella knew what she had to do. She would dig up their gold and move it somewhere safe, someplace he didn’t know about. If he wanted his share of the gold back, he’d leave the manor alone.

  Austin wasn’t stupid. She could imagine him making his own move. Buying all the right equipment today, somehow getting into the house and sawing through wood and cement this weekend. If she confronted him, she could also imagine him pulling a gun on her, shooting her before she could scream, then burying her underneath Alcott Manor until the end of time.

  No, she would get to it first. She would also film the entire process with her camera, so that when his watch was uncovered, that proof of his original participation, proof that he was there when the gold was buried in the first place, would be evident. She wasn’t entirely sure that his watch was buried with the gold. She didn’t remember him losing it that night. But she would be prepared to capture proof just in case.

  Taking a page from Mrs. Miller’s book, she would make copies upon copies of the video, and she would tell him that she had left instructions in her will that the video was to be taken to the police in the event of her untimely death.

  That would be enough to keep him away from the manor. She couldn’t anticipate how her move would affect his temper. He’d said it many times, he didn’t like being held under someone else’s thumb. He might just grab her by the throat and strangle her on the spot. Or he might coil like a snake in the grass and wait until he figured out another way to strike.

  20

  When the tintype shifted, Beau held Peyton’s hand tight. The ground slipped beneath them, the hay-covered dirt floor morphing into grass. The horse barn that had given them shelter for the night disappeared completely, leaving only open sky in its place.

  The towering hedges of the labyrinth she had seen yesterday stretched out before them still, and to the side of the house. It was fitting, she thought, that Bertha Mae would have constructed a complicated maze next to the manor—it was most likely her memories that had, in effect, become the complicated maze where Peyton and Beau were trapped.

  A hairpin slipped out and a chunk of Peyton’s bun fell.

  “Hasseltine will help us,” Beau had announced when he saw her fussing over her hair. “She’ll probably help us find new clothes, too.”

  Mourners began to arrive by simple, black horse-drawn carriages. The muted clomp, clomp, clomp of horses’ hooves sounded from the dirt drive. Bertha Mae stood next to a photographer on the front porch, the camera perched between them on a tripod.

  Peyton assumed she and Beau would appear in a tintype at home and she wondered if Mrs. Miller would be watching them. Maybe she tapped on the glass. Peyton wondered if she would feel the tapping like thunder or an earthquake.

  Peyton had known from studying family history that Rachel drowned. What she hadn’t known was how much Rachel hated the ocean. She doubted that Bertha Mae would let her little girl swim, not with her health history. And she didn’t think there had been much swimming in the 1850s anyway.<
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  When she and Beau arrived in the kitchen, Beau made up some story about traveling, losing luggage and requested Hasseltine’s help with clothes. She agreed and disappeared upstairs.

  Peyton and Beau slipped around the corner and found Bertha Mae in a wide-skirted, black taffeta dress talking with several women. Her hair had been perfectly styled and her gardenia-scented perfume filled the room. She looked too well put together to be a grieving mother.

  “We tied a rope to her waist.” Bertha Mae chewed at her bottom lip. “The end of it was tied to the cabana. I never left her, of course. But a wave took her under and when I tugged on the rope, she was gone.” Bertha Mae’s face crumpled. She wiped the falling tears with her white handkerchief.

  The women cried together, shook their heads and took turns hugging Bertha Mae. They told her what a beautiful little girl Rachel had been, how lucky Bertha Mae was to have had her in her life if only for a little while. The more they lauded her with their sympathy, the more she seemed to plump and glow. As if she fed on their attention.

  “I’ll never get over losing her.” She bit her lip so hard a drop of blood appeared at the lower corner.

  Eventually the women shifted their stances as if they became increasingly uncomfortable with the situation, as if they were afraid that Bertha Mae’s loss might be contagious.

  There wasn’t a casket in the living room. Just two silver vases of lilies on either side of a long table in the middle of the room. In the center of the table were several tintypes of Rachel in healthier days, appearing beautiful, almost unreal, like a prized doll.

  Bertha Mae moved from group to group, circulating, almost like a bride at a reception. Peyton thought of her own mother and how she seemed to draw energy from others’ attention. Peyton was the opposite, needing solitude after too much interaction.

  When Bertha Mae fanned her face and turned toward the hallway, excusing herself from the group, Peyton took Beau by the arm.

  “Let’s go,” she whispered. She didn’t want to be caught watching.

  They scurried to the kitchen where Hasseltine had returned with their clothes. She pointed to the black hoop-skirted dress. “This is Mrs. Alcott’s dress. She has several black ones, she won’t miss this one.”

  Peyton and Beau slipped into one of the upstairs guest rooms to change clothes. When they were dressed, Beau shoved their old clothes into the back of an armoire. “The scenes will change soon enough, they’ll never find these.”

  The idea of spending the rest of her life sleeping on barn floors and living off of leftovers made her want to scream. She was starving, in need of a bath and desperately wanted to find a way home. She smiled, in part to try to make Beau feel better. It wasn’t his fault that they were stuck here.

  Something in her expression must have revealed her true feelings because Beau sat next to her on the bed.

  “I know,” he said, rubbing his hand along her thigh. “This is no way to live.”

  “Are you mind reading or are my thoughts that transparent?”

  “You have this sort of half smile you do when you’d rather be anyplace but where you are. Then you look down and to the right. Like you’re too polite to be honest. That, and I know you.” He raised his eyebrow at her before he stood in front of the dresser mirror and adjusted his cravat.

  She wanted to say that he didn’t know her as much anymore, but it seemed that he did. At least in some ways. So she said, “Huh. I guess it’s an Alcott trait. Maybe none of us can lie too effectively.”

  The manor was quiet except for the low din of conversation from downstairs. She thought of her mother’s many expressions, her little tics that shined a light on the emotions she tried to hide. “Jayne Ella has this tell whenever she’s lying or trying to hide something. Her mouth twists to the side and she chews on the inside of her cheek.” She told him what she had seen downstairs. “I think we’re on the right track with Rachel’s death. I think she’s lying when she says it was an accident.”

  Beau searched the walls as if he waited for them to react.

  She paced over the hardwood floors, the too-tight antique shoes pinching her toes. “There have to be clues. And where is Rachel? I doubt she drowned. I doubt she ever even went swimming.”

  “Funeral home?” he asked.

  “I think funerals were all held in private homes back then.” She tried to remember something, anything from all the tintypes she had seen over the years that might help. “Bertha Mae reminds me a lot of Jayne Ella. Proud of her children in some ways, jealous in others. I think Bertha Mae hates being a mother, but she likes the attention she gets from having a sick child.”

  “And now she gets attention from being the mother who lost a child,” he said.

  Peyton pressed her palm to her forehead. “That must be why she doesn’t have the body on display. There must be proof of how she died, a wound of some kind, maybe marks on her neck.”

  “We have to find her body,” Beau said.

  “She has to be in the house somewhere.” She and Beau searched every room on the second level. From the moment she opened each door, she half expected to find Rachel lying on the bed with her hands folded over her chest.

  When they exited the last room and hadn’t yet found her, Peyton stood still in the long, narrow hallway. “There’s no way to search the main level, not with everyone there.”

  They stood at the top of the grand staircase and looked down at the empty receiving area. Peyton’s nightmares came back to her, the hand reaching up from the stairs, grabbing her and dragging her below ground. Then the sense that someone was screaming. She told Beau about the dream.

  “The lowest level, is there an outside door yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet. Only access is a door through the hallway.”

  Beau took a gas lamp from one of the bedrooms. Then they tiptoed down the back steps, past the kitchen, moving quickly toward the basement door. Several visitors who had come to pay their respects were gathered in the foyer, the crowd of people spilling out of the large living room.

  Several of them turned when Beau and Peyton were about halfway to the door. Beau took Peyton’s arm, threaded it around his and slowed his pace. He nodded in a gentlemanly manner and hid the lantern behind his back. Peyton smiled her most gracious smile. The group eyed them suspiciously in return.

  They opened the basement door as if that were the most normal thing to do—go to the basement during a funeral.

  “Hurry,” Peyton said when they reached the stairs. “Someone is going to come down here now that they’ve seen us.”

  The downstairs was dark and dank and the light from the lantern only allowed them to see a few feet ahead. The furniture was simpler than it was upstairs. The rooms were smaller. Peyton had seen the area once before in her normal world, when her sister stayed there, and it had been filled with light. But now she felt oddly unwelcome. The strange scent of meat wafted through the rooms.

  The rooms were significantly cooler than the upstairs and a chill covered her neck and chest. She held tight to Beau’s hand.

  Beau held the lantern up to send more light into the space. It cast a dim glow onto empty couches and chairs; a blue and beige rug covered the floor. She checked behind and beneath the furniture. “Nothing in here,” Peyton said.

  “The grand staircase would be about there.” Beau pointed in the lightless direction of the ceiling at the opposite end of the hallway.

  She grasped tightly to his arm. One step, then another. If they found Rachel, they might be set free. If they ran into Bertha Mae, they probably wouldn’t survive.

  “She might have used an ax,” Peyton whispered. “Might have cut her head clean off while she was sleeping. Or maybe a gun.”

  Beau’s arm muscles tightened in her grip.

  In the back room, a food storage area was packed with bags of grain. Glass jars of jams lined the shelves, slabs of raw meat wrapped in burlap hung from a rack. Blankets covered a table behind the meat. A tripod stood in
the corner.

  “Shine the light in there,” she said.

  When she took another step, Beau placed his hand on her arm. “I’ll check,” he said. He led the way as he always had, walked to the blankets and lifted the corner.

  Brown hair tied back with a blue ribbon was the first thing Peyton saw. She gasped, lifted a hand to her mouth.

  Beau pulled the blanket the rest of the way. Rachel Alcott laid still, her mouth slightly open and eyes closed as if she slept. But she wasn’t sleeping, there was an emptiness to her body that told her Rachel was long gone. She glanced at the tripod. “She must have made the tintype earlier in the day.”

  “That stench.” Beau pressed the back of his hand to his mouth.

  Peyton bent to the floor and held one of Rachel’s small, cold hands. White horizontal lines crossed her fingernails. “She was poisoned. Arsenic.”

  Beau lowered himself to squat beside her. “How do you know?”

  She leaned closer to the little girl’s mouth, the scent became stronger. “Garlic,” she said.

  Beau leaned close and sniffed, scrunched his nose.

  “The scent was really strong on her breath the first night I saw her. I thought it must have been something she ate. Then she got sick in the kitchen and that smell was really strong, and now, look at this.” Peyton showed him Rachel’s fingernails.

  “In one of my college photography classes we talked about how the photo chemicals used to have arsenic in them. Most chemical formulations had arsenic in them, like paints and so forth. You could even buy arsenic at the chemist. The pharmacy. I think they used it as rat poison. We got into this big discussion about arsenic poisonings in history, how some of it was accidental, some were intentional. The Borgias were partial to arsenic.” Peyton tucked the little girl’s hand under the blanket. Left her hand on top for a moment.