A Darker Shade Read online

  His jaw clenched so hard I thought he’d crack a tooth, but then he nodded. “Fair enough.”

  Nathaniel left with the command to get some sleep, but I could not bring myself to shut off the light. Indeed, once I finished the last, cold dregs of my chocolate, I pushed out of bed and thrust open the heavy drapes, letting the harsh moonlight illuminate the corners the glow from the bedside lamp could not touch. Nothing stirred; I was alone.

  Of course you are.

  But I could not shake the memory of that frigid grasp on my legs and the outstretched cables of greasy smoke reaching for me. I snatched my bag from its spot near the wardrobe and launched myself into bed once more, avoiding the shadowy space beneath. Propping the pillows behind my back, I noted everything Nathaniel had told me about Liza’s previous tutors.

  I had sworn to Nathaniel that he had nothing to fear from me. Despite the growing evidence to the contrary, I believed in my own sanity, which meant more than childish fears and emotional trauma haunted Liza. But the phenomena that terrified me and annoyed Hailey seemed to comfort Liza. The way she tilted her head and sometimes looked beyond us seemed as if she were listening to a presence the rest of us could not see. And she never reacted with fear. On the contrary, she seemed to trust the invisible speaker. I carefully listed every instance I remembered of her attending to that voice and the events surrounding it.

  I’d witnessed the behavior the moment I arrived. Liza’s invisible companion had whispered in her ear as she watched me from her shadowy perch at the top of the stairs. And it had warned her of Jenn and Hailey’s return. She’d ignored me in favor of that voice at the pond, too. Again I remembered the feeling of a push at my back. If that had been a malevolent spirit, might it also have engineered Nathaniel’s fall from the ladder? I had never heard of a ghost sawing wood, but perhaps it had convinced someone in the house to do so. Like Aimee and her butcher knife. Had it come to her in the night, wearing Nathaniel’s form as it had worn my mother’s? Was that why she thought he had made her promises?

  I shivered and pulled the covers more tightly around me. The stories about both women terrified me. But if indeed some spirit haunted the house, what was its end game? What might an otherworldly presence hope to accomplish? Did they even function through logic and ambition? The ones our neighbor Sultana conjured came across as pure emotion: love, loss, regret, anger. The messages she passed to her clients did occasionally carry commands—“don’t let your father drink away your fortune,” “be careful, your new girlfriend is a gold-digger,” “your husband still loves you and he wants you to remarry so you can be happy”—but the tone of the messages indicated that personal ambition lived and died in the physical body. The body discarded, ambition focused outward, on the happiness of others.

  Not that I believed Sultana. After all, she was nothing more than a carnival queen. My mother’s warnings about the other side, on the other hand, echoed through my unquiet mind with the distinct edge of truth. Nothing frightened Em Allworth. Even cancer had merely saddened her. The spirit realm, however, was unpredictable and therefore daunting. No bargaining or reasoning would shut that door once opened and so it must remain barricaded with all possible force.

  But here, the door was open. Whatever lived at Rook’s Rest—if such a creature could be said to have life—had already passed through. Having seen it as both a cancerous mother and a roiling whirlwind of ash, I could not believe its intentions kind or its ambitions outwardly focused. What it wanted, it wanted for itself, though I had no idea what that might be. Nor what it might do to achieve its goals. Was Liza in danger? So far the thing had made no move to hurt her. But it had moved against her father, and losing him would devastate her. It was no longer safe to ignore the malignant spirit. We had to confront it. Or I did. Preferably without convincing Nathaniel Prescott that I had lost my mind.

  Chapter 12

  I finally managed to fall asleep as the sun’s first rays crept through my window, eliminating the last shadowy hiding places in my bedroom. In dreams, I found myself near the little graveyard, standing over the two exiled markers. I ran my fingers across the carving concealed beneath a century or more of dirt and deadfall. I dug and scratched until my nails cracked and my fingers bled, but the stone refused to reveal its secrets.

  My own sob of frustration woke me. Reflexively, I checked my hands. Though my fingers tingled and itched, my nails remained whole, mocking the sensation. Psychosomatic reaction. Could happen to anyone after a scary dream.

  A faint noise drew my attention to the door. The knob turned slowly, stealthily, and my heart jumped. I was reaching for the heavy American History textbook, the only handy weapon, when Hailey poked her head inside. I swallowed hard and tried to smile.

  “You’re up! Uncle Thane said I couldn’t bother you if you were still sleeping.” She shifted to the side and Rocky muscled his way by to sniff and snuffle his way around.

  I reached for my phone. Only eight o’clock.

  “You’re up early.”

  “I’ve been up for ages. Uncle Matt wanted me to watch the sunrise with him. She scrunched her features into a disdainful scowl. “I don’t know why people make such a big deal over sunrises. Sunsets are just as pretty and they’re at a way more reasonable hour.”

  “I suspect in this case it has less to do with the sun than with the company. Your uncle loves you. He probably wanted to spend time with you alone.”

  She squinted. “He did ask me a bunch of questions.”

  “See? He’s interested in you, not the scenery.”

  “Maybe. Though we mostly talked about mom. And Uncle Thane. And you.”

  Me? What had Matt told his niece about me? My own thoughts and emotions with regards to Matthew Brahms were a conflicted mess, however, and I could not go down that road with Hailey.

  “Those are all big pieces of your life. You’ve gone through a lot of changes and he probably wants to be sure you’re okay.”

  “I suppose. No one really worries about my mental health, though. Because of Liza, you know. If my mother killed herself, it would be different. Liza needs the help, not me.”

  “Still, you must miss…coming here must have been hard for you.” I had no idea what Hailey’s relationship with Daniel Prescott had been. He’d been her father for most of her life.

  She shrugged. “Danny was a nice guy, but he wasn’t my real father. And it’s not like he meant to leave us, not like Aunt Marianne. She totally ditched Liza.”

  “That’s…not how suicide works. When people get to the point where they are so sad they can’t see any way to make things better except by dying, the people they leave behind have faded from their minds. The only thing in a suicidal person’s life is intolerable pain; they can’t feel the love others have for them any longer.”

  She cocked her head, a remarkably chilling imitation of Liza’s posture when listening to the indistinguishable voice, and studied me. “Is that what happened to your mother?”

  The question was like a sword, quick and sharp and twisting. All the blood drained out of my head and my skin went hot, then cold, then hot again.

  “No! No, my mother died of cancer.”

  “Oh. Okay. Sorry. But you sounded like you knew about suicide and pain and stuff.”

  Oh, yes. I understood pain. My mother had been raving with it at the end. No matter what she took, the pain simply laughed and came back stronger. It ate her alive from the inside. Even when the hospice workers gave her enough to knock her out, the lines around her mouth never eased. I was with her the night she died, and it was the relaxing of those muscles, the final respite from the unceasing agony that let me know she had gone.

  The relief I felt in that moment was a shame I would carry the rest of my life. I chased it away, focusing on the present.

  “You never told Liza her mother left her, did you?”

  She rolled her eyes. “As if. My mother would shoot me. But it’s not like she doesn’t say it herself.”

  “She
says it? As in, with words?”

  “Get real. No, just, like…you know.”

  “I don’t, actually. You’ll have to be a bit more specific than that.”

  “Well, the whole ‘the ghost of my mother is hanging out in the studio talking to me but no one else can see her’ thing. Because that’s like saying her mother left everyone else but not her.”

  I heard Jennifer in that explanation and gritted my teeth.

  “I see.”

  “You don’t have to believe me. It’s just that whole poor, pitiful me thing gets on my nerves. It’s not like Aunt Marianne had a whole lot of time for Liza when she was alive. Why would she suddenly be hanging out with her now? Unless the afterlife is really boring.”

  So Liza’s relationship with her mother hadn’t been all roses and sunshine? What kind of guilt might that produce? I’d read somewhere that poltergeists were physical manifestations of emotional turmoil, not spirits at all. I’d be a lot happier with an incarnation of misery than with an actual ghost. Still, I could get more—and better—information from the girl herself if I could crack her shell than what I might filtered through Jennifer and Hailey. This conversation encouraged the unhealthy competition between the girls, so I changed the subject. “Have you had breakfast yet?”

  “Yeah. But Uncle Matt said I should tell him when you were awake and he’d bring you yours. He really wants to help because it’s going to snow later on so he has to go home soon.” The previous day’s jealousy had evidently dissipated a bit, and I was not anxious to revive it.

  “Well, okay. I don’t need much.”

  Matt arrived in his typical good humor, apologizing almost the moment he set down the tray for the fact that he wouldn’t be able to stay.

  “A nor’easter off the coast changed direction. It wasn’t supposed to land here at all. If I were wrong half as often as the weathermen, I’d lose my job. The house itself is perfectly safe, but a good blow shuts everything off. No phone, no internet—much as I would love to be shut in here with you, I can’t lose touch with the office right now. I’ll have to take off right after lunch.”

  “I understand.” I glanced at the pale gray light seeping around the edges of the curtains. “Are you sure you should wait until afternoon to go?”

  “Trying to get rid of me?”

  The teasing and the blush I felt rising in response only exacerbated my confusion and discomfort. Matt was handsome, caring, easy to talk to. So why could I not encourage the flirtation? Why did I dream of a far darker, more somber face when I slept at all?

  “I don’t want you to get caught in a nor’easter is all.”

  Still, I had a purpose beyond food or flirtation for allowing him to bring me breakfast and over a plate of soft-boiled eggs and toast, I asked whether the third floor of the house had been open when he had visited as a child.

  “Open? Like, in use?”

  “Yes. We’ve changed one of the rooms into the schoolroom—I don’t know whether Hailey mentioned it—and I wondered what they’d been in their heyday. Obviously, someone loved billiards, but that table could be ten years old or fifty or a hundred. And the other rooms don’t give many clues.”

  “That pool table.” He shook his head. “It sorely tempted us. But we were never allowed to use it. In fact, the whole room was off limits because Thane’s father used it as his office. In the summers, when we spent the most time here, he locked himself into that room and wrote, and woe betide the child who interrupted him!”

  “He wrote? He didn’t build boats?”

  “Oh, no. The boat business came from Thane’s mother’s side of the family. As did this house, come to think of it. His father is a professor of American history at a university in Connecticut, but you know what they say about ‘publish or perish’ for professors, so he was forever scribbling away in the billiards room. In fact, one summer he put a giant piece of plywood over the table to create a second desk. Thane and I snuck in there one day and were horrified to see stacks of paper from one end of the thing to the other. Old paper. Dusty, greasy, yellowing, with indecipherable handwriting. That’s not the appropriate use of a pool table. Still gives me nightmares.” He winked.

  “I bet. What about the other rooms?”

  “They didn’t particularly interest us. I can’t say anyone told us to stay out, but we really didn’t have a reason to go in, either. We spent most of our time outside.”

  Had they subconsciously avoided the family room? If I owned a house this size, I’d put another bedroom up there, make a space for guests. Instead, the Prescotts had built an apartment over their garage. And then Thane had considered adding yet another new dwelling by the pool. Why not simply open up the upstairs?

  “Sorry I couldn’t help more,” Matt said.

  “Hmm?”

  “With the original purpose of those rooms.”

  “Oh, that’s fine. Idle curiosity. You know, being stuck in here all day.”

  “You could ask Thane. That summer of the ancient papers, Jim was writing a book on Maine history and he had found a lot of stuff about the Wilton family, Linda’s ancestors, who originally built Rook’s Rest. I never read it—not my thing—but if there’s a copy in the house anywhere, it might say.”

  By lunchtime I’d screwed up the courage to insist the girls take afternoon classes on the third floor. The schedule called for history of fashion and then handwork, either of which I could easily have taught from the comfort of my bed, but I needed to prove—to myself as much as to Nathaniel—that I’d recovered from my night terrors.

  The wind howled around the house as we waved good-bye to both Matt and Mrs. Vogel, who was leaving early because of the storm. The gusts set the lights to flickering, but the girls paid no mind, pounding up the stairs with Rocky hot on their heels. I followed at a more sedate pace. Before joining them in the schoolroom, I took a deep breath and laid my hand on the knob to the family room door. The brass warmed against my palm, inanimate. I twisted it sharply and shoved the door open. The rocking horse sat peacefully in its corner, dust motes disturbed by my entrance floating gently over its head.

  “Whatcha looking at?” Hailey came up behind me.

  “Nothing. Making sure the window is closed for when the snow arrives.” I turned away from the view, but did not shut the door behind me. Wood and brass had proved no protection the night before; at least this way I could see any threat take form.

  Our morning conversation, however, had alerted me to another, completely mundane threat to Liza’s well-being. I paid close attention to her interactions with Hailey.

  “Since you’re reading about the settling of America,” I said, “let’s have a look at what the earliest settlers wore.”

  Predictably, Hailey grimaced. “Eww. Pilgrim clothes. Boring.”

  “Not at all. Certainly, some chose to keep to a plain, religious garb, but many early travelers brought with them extensive wardrobes. The ability to pay for imported fashions marked you as a member of a certain class in society then, even as it does today.

  “And just as in the modern era, people who didn’t fit the mold were scorned. You can imagine how the ladies who powdered their hair and perfumed their bodies looked upon the Native American population. Fashion called for the palest skin, the most ruffled dresses. Even the men wore colorful, tailored outfits.”

  “With ruffles?” asked Hailey.

  “Let’s look.” I opened the book, and we paged through several outfits that might have been brought to America from Europe.

  “Remember, this was before the industrial revolution. Every stitch on these dresses, on these pants, was sewn by hand. They were hugely expensive, so a person might own only three or four outfits. And washing weakened the fabric, could tear seams. So they didn’t launder their clothes very often, either. History was a pretty smelly place.”

  “Gross.”

  I laughed as Hailey’s horror at my statement chased away my own fears. For the moment, these were merely two normal girls in a norm
al house. Even their competition had vanished in the face of such a repulsive idea. Once the American History section was complete, we took a break and switched over to the handwork portion of the lessons.

  “The first thing each of you needs to decide,” I said, “is whether you’d prefer learning to knit or to crochet. Liza wants to crochet—we discussed it at the yarn store—but you can do either. Knitting is more versatile, I think, but there’s a Japanese style of crochet that allows you to make stuffed animals called amigurumi that are just adorable.”

  “Which one is easier?”

  “I’m not sure either is actually easier, but in my experience, crochet is more forgiving. It’s easier to fix a mistake, and a mistake is less likely to unravel your project. That said, most of the yarn work you see around is knit because it makes a flatter, more flexible fabric.”

  “Can I see both?”

  “Sure.”

  We looked through the beginner’s pattern books I’d picked up at the yarn shop, and Hailey agreed that she wanted to learn crochet like Liza. Because I had worked with Liza at the hospital, she was ahead of the game, allowing me to focus on Hailey and we spent the rest of the afternoon learning the basics of yarn tension and single and double crochet stitches as the first flakes spattered and crackled against the windows, flung at the house by the angry hand of the wind.

  Chapter 13

  At dinner, Jenn quizzed Hailey about what she’d learned. I held my breath—she was testing me as much as her daughter—but Hailey answered enthusiastically about the historical clothes and the relations between fashion and industry. Her mother smiled at me and I relaxed.