A Darker Shade Read online

  The room above mine and Liza’s was the feminine equivalent to the library and its sheer size explained the phenomenon of attached rooms I’d noticed on my arrival. My room and Liza’s would likely have been a single room like this one, divided at some point in the house’s history. The furnishings here were lighter, both in weight and color, with pale, buttery yellow and rich gold dominating. Age-stained creamy wallpaper above the wainscoting was printed with faded tea roses and twining vines.

  In the final room, a mahogany embroidery frame with a padded stool took up one corner,. A number of chairs and a loveseat, less dainty than the ones in the rose room, surrounded a cotton rug. A small blue wooden chest and an ancient rocking horse sat beneath the window that faced the front yard. If the main floor was what guests saw, the formal entertainment space, and this floor was for family, this must have been the nursery. From my history of education classes, as well as the books I’d read in English, I knew that parents of a certain class—and there was no doubt that the owners of this home had belonged to that class—did not spend much time with their children. It cheered me to see the toy chest and rocking horse sharing space with the embroidery frame.

  The taxidermy, on the other hand…A fox mid-jump greeted us at the top of the stairs, and he was far from alone. Where the walls of the first two stories held art of all kinds, up here dead things floated overhead and peered from pedestals in corners. Fish gleamed dully, raccoons held up meticulously articulated fingers, glass eyes in mounted deer heads followed our every move. And in the library, a giant moose head menaced from his superior position above the fireplace.

  “Isn’t it awesome?” Hailey spun around, her flying arms taking in the gruesome display.

  No, I could think of many, many words to describe the taxidermy, from appalling to wretched, but in no way awe-inspiring. “I plead the fifth.”

  She laughed. “Okay, why don’t you and Liza hide first and I’ll find you?” Taking our assent for granted, she plopped down on the floor and hid her face in the corner next to a stuffed wildcat to start counting.

  Liza shrugged and made for the library, so I took the room with the rose wallpaper. The spindly-legged desk offered no cover, but I could squeeze in between the miniature overstuffed sofa and the wall.

  The maid service had done a decent job, but a musty odor arose nonetheless from the flocked fabric of the sofa and I had to suppress a sneeze.

  “Ready or not, here I come!” Hailey sang out. Her footsteps thundered down the hall and directly into the room where I hid. I hadn’t been particularly stealthy. The space was too cramped for me to move without giving myself away, so I could not see where she was searching.

  Another sneeze snuck up on me and as it seized me, Hailey pounced. I squeezed out the other side of the sofa and ran halfheartedly for the door, but she grabbed me.

  “Gotcha! Now we can look for Liza. Next time, you’re it.”

  We found Liza hidden behind the thick velvet drapes in the library. It wasn’t the most imaginative spot, but she’d scrunched herself into such a small corner, behind the chair for the desk, that if we hadn’t pulled the curtains all the way back we might have missed her. Of course, the problem with wedging herself in so tightly was that there was no escape when Hailey reached out to tag her.

  I took my turn hiding my eyes and counting to twenty. I tried to listen to which direction they went, but the creaks came from everywhere. They must have split up. I checked the room where I had hidden first—it would be the easiest to eliminate. A stand with a few delicate vases on it stood in the corner—I knew what it was called, but the word wouldn’t come to me—and it butted up against a chair with a quilt draped over it. I didn’t think Liza was small enough to fit beneath the chair, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  I had no luck finding either girl in the rose room, so I switched over to what I had come to think of as the “family” room. I tipped the rocking horse and watched it sway smoothly back and forth. Up close, I could see it had been hand carved and hand painted and again I was warmed by its presence. My eye fell on the chest. The hasp was shut, but not locked, and I popped the lid open. Liza lay curled up inside and I reared back. I’d half expected her, but her pale face staring up at me out of that wooden box— A picture of that unadorned iron cross standing over just such a wooden box flashed into my imagination but my mind shied from the comparison. I tagged her and then helped her climb out.

  She led me back to the library. Together we opened the bottom cabinets beneath the glass-fronted bookshelves. I almost laughed when I saw an ancient cut crystal decanter of brown liquor and a set of glasses in one cabinet. How many years had it stood there waiting for the return of a lifestyle long out of date? On the desk, a stuffed rat had been turned into a pen holder. Unlike the decanter, that had never been in fashion. I twitched away from it and Liza grinned. She was accustomed to the grim displays and I was willing to endure them to see her smile. She pointed downwards and gestured that we should take the desk from opposite sides in case Hailey was in the kneehole.

  She was, but not alone. I peeked under the desk and found myself confronted by a blotch-bodied serpent winding around a heavy branch.

  I screamed.

  Hailey laughed and took off and Liza and I chased her down the hall.

  We played a few more rounds before the rumbling of Hailey’s stomach gave away her hiding spot and we broke for lunch. The weather called for grilled cheese, and the girls and I were in the kitchen slathering butter on bread and layering it with cheese when Jennifer joined us, followed closely by Prescott.

  “Grilled cheese?” I plopped two sandwiches into the pan and began putting a third together. “Liza, wash those carrots before you put them on the table. I don’t care what the bag says, they need it.”

  “No, thank you,” Jennifer said. “I just came to be certain you had everything you needed to start classes tomorrow. I’m going into town this afternoon if you don’t.”

  “I had a thought about that when we were on the third floor.” I addressed both of them. The lessons might be Jennifer’s purview, but the house was Prescott’s. “Can we move the desks up to the room with the rose wallpaper? It’s not that the playroom isn’t adequate, because it absolutely is, but studies show that people learn better in dedicated educational environments. We are all creatures of habit, and getting in the habit of working a particular space is helpful. Plus, if we wanted to have a more comfortable spot for crocheting, there’s the old nursery across the hall. It has sofas. That way we could keep all the schoolwork contained to the third floor.”

  “That’s not a bad idea. The playroom is full of distractions. Thane?”

  “First and most importantly,” he said, “those sandwiches smell amazing. Do you mind making me one?”

  “Not at all.” I was being paid to serve them on the weekends, but I appreciated his kindness in asking rather than ordering. I laid a plate in front of each of the girls and then started a new pan with food for Prescott and me.

  “I’ll move the desks after lunch,” he said. “I have to do a few other things around here anyway. There are three dead bulbs in the front hall chandelier, which means it’s time to change them all. I’ve been putting it off because it means dragging the big ladder in from the shed, but Mrs. V has been making noises about having Henry do it.” He shuddered. “Henry Vogel on a ladder—my insurance would cancel me if they knew I allowed such recklessness.”

  Having driven with the wizened little man, I had to agree.

  “Mom, can I come to town with you? I want to go to the stationery store and look at school supplies.”

  “Of course, sweetie. Liza, would you like to come?”

  Liza shook her head.

  “You’re okay on fountain pen ink?” Prescott asked.

  A flush stained Liza’s cheeks as she nodded. Embarrassment over using such an old fashioned instrument in the age of computers, or something else?

  The playroom desks did not suit the rest of th
e house’s decor and if I’d needed further proof that Nathaniel Prescott hoped to send his daughter back to a regular school, the cheap laminate desks would do it. They set the definition for temporary.

  Prescott and I each took one side of the desks and carried them upstairs, while Liza grabbed the whiteboard. I would not put holes in the wall to hang the whiteboard as it had been put up in the playroom, but the étagère—that was the word for that shelving unit!—had a central spot that would do nicely to prop it up once I removed the fancy vases to a safer place.

  “You choose the one you want,” I said to Liza once her father had gone downstairs. “We’ll bring in the study materials and put your things where you want them and Hailey’s can go on the other desk.”

  I had decided to use the small writing table with its spindly legs as the teacher’s desk. It looked frail, but so did most of the room’s pieces, and they’d lasted at least a hundred years, so with a little luck I wouldn’t damage it. I moved the vases out of range of clumsy schoolchildren—or their teacher—and brought all the books Jennifer had gathered for Hailey and Liza’s schooling up from the playroom. It took a few trips, but with Liza’s help it went fairly quickly.

  Once I started separating out the subjects in the packet, however, I realized I would need more space than the tiny writing table afforded. I’d seen a metal filing cabinet in the corner of the playroom, so I went down to see whether I could carry it myself.

  The file cabinet was rusty and heavy. It was also, I discovered as I looked to see whether I could remove either of the drawers for carrying purposes, filled with papers. Overfilled, even. They were all old, and a film of greasy dust rose from the cabinet as I poked through them. Maybe Prescott would let me throw them out. They’d probably lost all importance long before he was born.

  I’d seen him setting up the enormous ladder in the front hall. The chandelier, one of those frivolities my aunt always referred to in disgust as a “dust catcher,” had at least a dozen bulbs, but cast relatively little light. It hung from a heavy steel chain in the ceiling and nothing on God’s earth could have persuaded me to climb up to clean or change it. My aunt had some kind of contraption she used for lights in the big houses she cleaned with their vaulted ceilings and she still complained about them nonstop. I had no intention of bothering Prescott while he was atop the ladder; the file cabinet could wait.

  I went back up to the new schoolroom to finish setting up as best I could and was surprised to find Liza gone. I hadn’t heard her while I was in the playroom—had she managed to get down to the second floor to her own room without me noticing? It was possible, she moved like mist.

  “Liza?” Of course there was no answer. I ran down the stairs and poked my head into her room. No luck, and the bathroom door stood wide open. A completely irrational fear slid through me, weakening my knees. She could not be in real danger here. And surely whatever psychological block she had against speaking would not prevent her from crying out if she were in pain.

  “Liza?”

  The door to the family room was closed. Maybe she was playing in there and hadn’t heard me? I put my hand on the cut glass knob and a cold shock ripped up my arm and paralyzed my lungs. My feet were bolted in the place by spikes of ice and the muscles in my wrist and arm fused into a single, solid block. Forcing myself to breathe, I gritted my teeth, focused all my strength on breaking that block, and wrenched the door open.

  The cold was a living thing, biting and clawing at my skin and scratching at my eyes until they bled tears. Through the haze, I saw Liza sitting on the window seat, her knees drawn up to her chest with one hand on the glass.

  “Liza!” The word came out a strangled moan, the sound that wakes you when you scream in a dream. Liza did not turn from the window. I pushed my way into the room, as much swimming as walking, for the freezing air had a thick, viscous quality. Each inch took tremendous effort and Liza seemed farther away with every step I took toward her.

  And then a tremendous crash shook the house, Liza’s head whipped around, the cold abated, and reality snapped back into place.

  Chapter 8

  It took less than a second for me to realize that the crash had to have been made by Prescott falling from the ladder. Unwilling to leave Liza alone in that strange room, I grabbed her hand and dashed into the hall and down the stairs.

  I reached the ground floor slightly ahead of Liza, and considerably more out of breath. Nathaniel lay half under the enormous ladder, which had fallen sideways so that its top rested in the corner next to the front door while the bottom remained in the center of the hall beneath the chandelier.

  My heart sank at his pale face and closed eyes, but then he blinked and cursed. When his gaze caught on his daughter, he snapped his mouth closed.

  She tried to push past me but I held her back. “Hold on, sweetheart, we don’t want to make it worse. Move slowly and don’t disturb anything.”

  “Don’t worry,” Nathaniel assured her, “nothing’s broken. Well, nothing but the ladder, which I probably should have checked out before climbing on it.” He hitched himself into a sitting position, back against the wall.

  “We should call an ambulance anyway.” I peered into his eyes. Hi pupils appeared the same size, so if we were lucky, the fall had just knocked the air out of him for a moment. “You took a hard fall. I’d be more comfortable if they examined you.”

  “Don’t be silly.” He tried to stand, sucked in a breath, and sank back down onto the floor. “Okay, let me revise that. Nothing’s broken, but I may have cracked a rib.”

  “I’ll call 911.”

  “No. Seriously. It’s not bad, and we can get there faster driving. It takes emergency services ages to get all the way out here.”

  Liza knelt next to her father and held his hand. He raised her fingers to his face and kissed her knuckles.

  “I’m fine, baby. Nothing’s going to happen to me. Promise.”

  My mother had told me the same thing, almost word for word, numerous times after my father’s death. And she’d kept her promise for years. I hoped Nathaniel managed the same. But as I glanced at the wreckage of the ladder, my eye caught on the top step. At the sight of the perfectly aligned breaks with barely a splinter from the pressure of his foot, doubt slipped through me.

  “If we’re going to the hospital,” I told Liza, “you should go on upstairs and get a book or whatever you want to keep you busy. You could bring the yarn and hook we bought in town, and I can start teaching you crochet, if you like. You know how emergency rooms are. They take forever to tell you nothing’s wrong.”

  She frowned and studied me for a long minute, as if trying to discern a falsehood in the simple statement, before darting up the steps.

  “Look at this,” I said the minute she was out of earshot. I pointed to the clean breaks on the top step. The second step had behaved as one might expect, shattering into a thousand splinters from the impact of his weight landing on it when the first one gave way. That top step, however, had separated cleanly from the sides of the ladder. Only about a quarter of an inch at the surface looked broken. The rest had almost certainly been sawn.

  “What the—“ he broke off when Liza clattered back down the steps, bag in hand. His eyes flicked to mine.

  The conversation was not over.

  He shoved the ladder away and eased himself to his feet, but when he tried to take a step, he had to bite back another curse. “Sprained ankle,” he said. “Molly, can you bring the truck around? I probably shouldn’t drive.”

  “Of course. You’re okay, though?”

  “Absolutely. I know what a break feels like. Did it once mucking about on a boat. This is just a sprain, and a mild one at that.”

  I left him with Liza and jogged out to the garage where I found a beat up crew cab pickup with the keys in the ignition. I pulled it around to the front of the house and followed Nathaniel’s directions to the hospital.

  Once the nurse heard what had happened, she called for someon
e to whisk Nathaniel away almost immediately, leaving me in the waiting room with the silent Liza. Under the fluorescent lights, her face was even paler than usual and my heart squeezed. She was so alone. Even when mama was dying, Ali and I had each other. And though at times my father’s extended family—Nadya and Bo, Milosh and Walther—felt oppressive, they provided a safety net I didn’t see in Jennifer Prescott.

  “He’ll be fine.” Unable to resist, I touched her hair in sympathy. “A little banged up, but broken bones mend.” Her forehead was cool and clammy. Might she be in shock? I was ashamed not to have considered it. “Are you feeling okay? You’re not sick or feeling faint or weak or dizzy? You don’t want a nurse to examine you?”

  She shook her head and dug the yarn and hook she’d brought out of her satchel and handed them to me. As I showed her the steps of chainless foundation single crochet, her brow wrinkled and she bit her lip. On the pretext of correcting her yarn tension, I laid my hands over hers. Her bony fingers stiffened and she narrowed those dark eyes at me, unfooled. But that was okay. I didn’t mind if she knew I cared about her.

  Liza was a quick study had put six rows onto the scarf she was making by the time a nurse came out to speak with us. Liza stilled at her appearance and drew even further into herself. The woman smiled as she approached, seeming completely oblivious to the child’s fear.

  “You must be Liza.” She took the chair next to Liza’s. “You look just like your daddy. He’s going to be absolutely fine. I don’t want you to worry. Just a few bumps and bruises. Nothing worse than you might do to yourself in gymnastics class or playing on a trampoline.”