A Darker Shade Read online

  A Darker Shade

  Laura K. Curtis

  Copyright © 2019 Laura K. Curtis

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, once living and now reappearing as ghosts, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  For “the ladies,” Sharon, Almena, Monica & Rena, and for all those caregivers whose hours of labor, both physical and emotional, all too often goes unrecognized.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Want to Hear From Me?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Laura K. Curtis

  Chapter 1

  If my mother had been alive, she would never have allowed me to take the job. But then, if my mother had been alive, I wouldn’t have been on my fourth night of rice and beans, struggling to pay the rent for the portion of the two-bedroom apartment Ali and I shared with our aunt, uncle, and two cousins. Instead, I would have gotten my Master’s. I’d be working in a career I loved. Or at least, that was the dream, and while Mama lived all dreams were possible, no matter how grim our circumstances. Em Allworth believed her children could conquer the world and for far too brief a time, we believed it, too.

  I’d buried that confidence along with Mama, however, and when I recognized the care service number on my cell phone, I almost wept with relief. I held up a hand, waving for quiet in the chaos of the apartment while I answered. I could have taken my cell into the hallway, but our whole building lived as we did, with only the thinnest of walls and doors between us, and I would have no more peace in the cold and uncomfortable stairwell than on our cozy couch.

  “He’s looking for an au pair and tutor for his twelve-year-old daughter and fourteen-year-old niece,” Sandy explained. “It’s a big house, and his sister-in-law lives there, too. He has a housekeeper five days a week so you don’t have to clean, but you’ll be responsible for some of the cooking. The thing is, it’s in the middle of nowhere, Maine. He tried a service out of Boston first, and they sent two candidates who couldn’t cut it more than a few months. And that was in the summer. Come winter, you won’t be able to leave the property at all. Apparently they’re surrounded by woods and don’t bother to plow the road out.”

  Never live in. It was one of Em Allworth’s cardinal rules. If you lived in, you lost your autonomy, lost any chance of having your own life, keeping your own traditions. But as far as I was concerned, living in meant no more rent. Even being shut away from the world entirely and disobeying my mother’s prime dictate wasn’t enough to balance out the financial incentives. Besides, most of our traditions had died years before, when my father’s murder forced us to move to Connecticut.

  “Not a problem.” I had given my little sister our Honda, which was almost as old as she was, to use at college. Bright, beautiful, brilliant Ali would not lose her dream. She would conquer the world, if I had to die to make it happen. She had a full-ride scholarship to a university in Missouri that covered food, housing, books… everything but transportation, and St. Louis wasn’t Hartford—she needed a vehicle. Even if there’d been a hundred places to go in Maine, I wouldn’t have had a way to get to them.

  “What does it pay?” Even if it weren’t much, without me around, Aunt Nadya and Uncle Bo could rent out the room Ali and I usually shared, so I wouldn’t owe rent.

  A long silence came over the phone, echoing into the apartment as my relatives waited to hear the answer. The Allworths survived as a unit. If I got paid, everyone benefited. I had been out of work for two weeks, and we were all eating rice and beans, goulash, and peanut butter and jelly.

  “It’s an unusual setup,” Sandy said finally.

  “Unusual how?” A hard lump formed between my shoulders.

  “As I explained, you’ll be the third woman who’s gone up there. The first two he paid a regular salary without restrictions, but he’s reluctant to do it again. So he’s offering a sliding scale. The first three months you’ll get a thousand a month. The second three months, two thousand a month, the third, three, the fourth, four. If you make it there a year, your pay will stay at four thousand a month with six month contract renewals. He’ll also pay for the minimum standard state health insurance. If you leave before the end of six months, however, you’ll be responsible for paying what he owes me out of your pocket.”

  Four thousand a month plus insurance and room and board. I had never even imagined earning that kind of money. Not without an advanced degree. Still, it sounded too good to be true and I drilled for the inevitable downside.

  “That’s more than Sharon or Almena make on their live-ins.”

  “Desperation premium,” Sandy replied tartly. “Plus, Sharon and Almena have easy situations. There’s a small hitch on this one.”

  Because of course there was. For those who lived as Ali and I did, there was always one more hitch. A job too far away, an employer who changed their minds, our mother’s cancer… nothing came easy to the Allworth sisters.

  “The daughter is uncommunicative.”

  “Uncommunicative as in sullen, or uncommunicative as in mute?”

  “It’s not that she can’t speak, it’s that she doesn’t. Her mother died two years ago and apparently Liza became quieter and quieter until she stopped talking altogether. Mr. Prescott doesn’t expect you to work miracles. The other girl, Hailey, requires a regular tutor, but you just need to do what you can with Liza. And if you can get her talking, there’s a bonus in it for you. Ten thousand dollars.”

  My heart tripped. Literally skipped a beat. I whispered a prayer I’d learned at my father’s knee as my fingers tightened on the phone. Ten thousand dollars. Ali could apply directly to medical school. She wouldn’t have to take some job cleaning houses with our aunt or doing elder care or child care for Sandy, putting her educational goals on hold. If I could see her off with some combination of cash and scholarship money, I might be able to return to my own long-deferred ambitions without betraying the promise I’d made my mother.

  I shook off the dream. I had only a rudimentary education in child psych, the few courses I’d taken in college before my mother’s diagnosis derailed my plans for a career as a school counselor. My chances of coaxing a truly damaged girl out of her silence were slim. “Is that why she’s being home-schooled?”

  I could hear Sandy breathing on the other end of the line, but she did not answer.

  “Sandy?”

  “You understand that even if you refuse this job, you are prevented from discussing the circumstances by the non-disclosure agreement you signed when you came to work for me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. You’ll likely have to sign another—Mr. Prescott made the others he hired si
gn them. He doesn’t want his daughter labeled crazy—but the gist of it is that he pulled Liza out of school because she told anyone who would listen that she could talk to her mother’s ghost. Of course, that was before she stopped speaking altogether.”

  Sandy was too professional to mock a client, too ladylike to snort, but even over the phone line I could hear her eyes rolling. I made a noncommittal sound, shaking off the little shiver that ran over my skin. I might have been first generation American on my mother’s side, but my father’s grandfather had arrived well before World War II, and I put my faith in psychology. Still, my heritage would not let me dismiss the spiritual altogether. Spirits, if not actual ghosts, lived among the Romani, as well as in the Catholic church my mother had insisted we attend before my father’s death and her falling out with God. For what were saints but benevolent spirits?

  “She’s been under a psychiatrist’s care,” Sandy continued, “but with winter coming that may have to be put on hold. Since the girl won’t talk, it’s all art therapy and play therapy and nonsense like that, anyway.” Typical Sandy—no more patience with psychiatry than with the paranormal.

  “As long as her father understands that I’m not capable of taking the psychiatrist’s place, it should be fine.”

  “You’re certain? As I said, it’s remote. Very little cell phone access, so you’ll have to give your sister the house number, and even that goes down in big storms. My reputation is on the line here. I can’t afford to send someone out there who won’t stick.”

  “I’m certain. Send me the paperwork.”

  The morning I left, Aunt Nadya drove me to the bus station, passing along a steady stream of advice the whole time.

  “Keep your head down and your chin up,” she finished as I hugged her goodbye in front of the long, low building. This was one of her favorite sayings and I’d never worked up the courage to ask her how such a thing might be possible. Maybe in another twenty years, when she’d lost a little of her stiff-spined, intimidating posture to age, I’d find my nerve. For the moment, I appreciated all her advice, no matter how contradictory.

  As the bus pulled away from the station, I glanced back only once. Twenty years there, and nothing called to me from Hartford. I still remembered every detail, all the smells and sounds and sights of the tiny apartment I’d shared with my parents in Queens before my father’s murder sent us north to his family, and bringing it to mind sent a pang of longing through me even now. It was as if, still tied to New York, my heart had never made the move.

  At least homesickness would not be an issue as it had been for Prescott’s earlier hires. I glanced around the interior of the bus. Only a dozen people shared the space, so I had a row to myself. The next row up and across the aisle, two women in their forties had taken out flasks and were sipping from them and giggling as they looked at the screen of a tablet. In the front, a man in a suit had unpacked an entire office-worth of supplies onto the seat beside him and tapped away at a laptop. A couple in their twenties squished as close together as possible, her long hair tangling in his beard as they snuggled. Others minded their own business, reading, sleeping, staring mindlessly out windows. Time to get to know my new charges.

  I pulled out the slim file Sandy had given me when I went into the office to sign my contract and the non-disclosure agreement. The front page listed the household members. Nothing unexpected there; Nathaniel Prescott, age thirty-five, and his daughter, twelve-year-old Liza. He would sign my paycheck, but I was also responsible to his sister-in-law, Jennifer Brahms Prescott because her daughter, Hailey, was my second student. The housekeeper, Mrs. Irene Vogel, came in five days a week. Her husband, Henry, was a local cab driver and did light repair work around the house. He would meet me at the station in Portland and drive me to the house.

  The second page of the packet was the “plan of care.” Sandy had come to childcare from elder care, where such plans were common. A plan of care went over all a caregiver’s responsibilities, the weaknesses and difficulties of the client, the problems she might encounter. Unlike the typical elder care plan, which consisted of a series of bullet points like “assist with bathing,” Sandy had chosen a a narrative format for this page.

  The Prescotts are a family in crisis and will need to be handled as such. Liza’s mother, Marianne Prescott, died two years ago. Instead of recovering from that death, the child has become increasingly disturbed and closed off, to the point that she no longer speaks. Evaluating her learning will be difficult, but her father says she is an eager student.

  Daniel Prescott, Nathaniel’s brother and Hailey’s father, died in a car accident six months ago. His wife was injured in the wreck and now uses a cane but is self-sufficient and does not need the attention of a medical aide. Hailey had been slated to go to a very competitive boarding school, but Jennifer Prescott felt that after the accident the child was too anxious and too emotionally fragile to be sent away immediately. Mother and daughter moved into the Prescott house in Maine to recover. Hailey will need intense education if she is to keep up with the coursework at the boarding school.

  While your essential responsibility is to educate the girls and keep them occupied and entertained, the Prescotts may call on you to do anything they need to keep the house—known as Rook’s Rest—running smoothly. Prescott runs his boatbuilding business out of the home, and his sister-in-law frequently assists him. Mrs. Vogel does the majority of the cooking and cleaning, but the girls cannot simply run wild or they will ruin his business.

  In short, both girls need to be educated, trained, molded as they mature. According to Jennifer Prescott, neither girl likes to get up particularly early. You will want to discuss the schedule in detail with her because if her daughter is returning to a regular school next year she may wish to get her on a particular plan. Liza is overly imaginative and believes in ghosts. She must be cured of this if she is to grow into a successful adult member of society. If you can eliminate this particular fantasy, there is a good chance she will speak again.

  A sticky note attached to the page at this point reminded me of the bonus for convincing Liza to talk. As if I could forget.

  The idea of a house with a name captivated me, pulling my mind from its usual endless circle of worries. Pemberley. Manderley. Brideshead Castle. I knew such places from my reading, but I’d never imagined living in one. Combined with the generous salary, the house’s name brought pictures of rolling, perfectly manicured lawns and fountains sparkling under endless sunlight.

  The bus rolled on, wheels swishing against the pavement, and I pulled out the notebook I used as an auxiliary brain. As usual, the file touched only on the facts of the job. I always had dozens of questions left unaddressed. Before I could begin this particular job, I would need a curriculum for each girl, for example. But a more pressing issue, at least to me, was the nature of Liza’s paranormal experiences. On the phone, Sandy had said that Liza had spoken to her mother’s ghost, but surely that was not enough to label her “damaged.” I’d certainly called out to my father after his murder, and had half-imagined him answering. Nor would my mother have been particularly surprised had I come to her certain I’d seen him, heard him, even years after his passing. But the spirit world lived with us, with my mother’s side of the family if not the Allworths. From Mr. Prescott’s reaction—moving his daughter all the way to Maine to eliminate his wife’s continued presence in her life—I doubted the spirits of the departed formed a valid part of his culture.

  For all the differences at first glance when I stepped off the bus in Portland with my fellow travelers, I might have gone round trip. The smell of diesel hung thick in the air and the rumble of engines drowned out the city’s native soul. But then, I imagined bus stations were much the same everywhere, with none terribly cheerful. The driver hauled my duffel from the bay beneath the bus and handed it to me and when I turned, a small, wizened, winter apple of a man had appeared at my elbow.

  “Miss Allworth? I’m Henry Vogel. I’m to bring you
to Rook’s Rest.”

  I shouldered the duffel and followed him out to a boxy Volvo station wagon idling at the curb. He popped the back and I stuffed the duffel in.

  “I c’n give you a quick tour if you like. Show you downtown. There’s not much to it. Portland’s a small town.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  Henry was right. Portland was small. And short. It occurred to me that with every move, I’d literally come “down” in life—from New York’s skyscrapers to Hartford’s multi-level skyline, to Portland’s squatter buildings with only the occasional tall spire. But if the buildings were smaller, the sky was bigger. Blue-white with puffy clouds decorating the high dome, an upside-down bowl spilling clean, salty air over us as we drove.

  “It’s beautiful.” I sucked in a deep breath of the sea-fresh air from the open window.

  “Ayup.”

  We turned off the small streets and onto a highway of sorts that wound through the woods. The deciduous trees were already turning here, though they were still green in Connecticut. Fiery gold and bloody red they fluttered as we passed, overhanging the road and blocking out the sun.

  “Your wife works at Rook’s Rest, right?” I leaned forward to speak to Henry Vogel.

  “Ayup.”

  “Is it a very grand place?”

  He grunted. Not much of a talker.

  “How did it get its name? Do you know?” That had been bothering me. I knew several meanings for the word rook.