Crooked House (6 page)

*

Sometime later, he started awake.

Angela was a few feet from
him, whimpering in her sleep.

Groggily, he sat up and wiped a hand across his face
. He licked his teeth and groaned. He should have brushed his teeth before going to sleep. His mouth felt gross. But when had he fallen asleep? He had no memory of drifting off, only of not being able to sleep. He sat up and looked around. The candles were out, that was good, and evidently the power came back on as well, for there was a dim glow coming from the entryway and kitchen, where they must have left the switches in the on position.

Beside him, Angela made another noise
. She wasn’t whimpering, he realized, but moaning in her sleep.

He crawled over to her
. Back when she was four or five, he’d go to her room to check on her before he went to bed and he’d sometimes find her bolt upright, terror-stricken, but still asleep. She’d mutter unintelligibly. She’d throw the covers off her legs. Once she’d even gotten out of bed and walked all around the room, clearly in distress, muttering something about snakes before he and Sarah had awakened her and finally been able to calm her down.

What she was doing now didn’t look like one of those episodes
. It wasn’t quite that bad. But she was clearly upset about something in her sleep, and so he did what he had done for her when she was younger and whispered as soothingly as he could in her ear, stroking the hair out of her face.

“Easy,” he said
. “Shhh, you’re okay. Go to sleep, baby.”

When at last she seemed to be through it, he sat back down on his sleeping bag, running his fingers through his hair and wishing he could go back to sleep
. That wasn’t going to happen, though. He could feel that now. And he had an early meeting too.

Then, from somewhere behind him, he heard a noise, like a woman whispering
, the words indistinct, but clearly a voice.

He looked at
Sarah, who was sleeping soundly on her own pillow.

He waited, and when nothing happened, he put his head down.

But then he heard it again, and sat up, his skin prickling, his ears straining against the silence of the house. When it came again he jumped to his feet. Was somebody in the house? It had been empty for nearly three years, like Thom had said, the only visitors Lightner’s housekeeping staff. Maybe one of them had decided to crash here for the night, or was living here without anybody knowing, or...Oh hell, he thought. Just go figure this out.

In the hallway outside the library he heard the sound again
. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from, just that it was coming from somewhere inside the house, and not too far off. Robert checked the conservatory, the kitchen, the breakfast room. Nothing. He went into the entryway, which was brightly lit now, and waited.

This time, when the sound came again, he was certain it was coming from upstairs.

He started up, trying to be quiet, listening carefully, but when he smelled smoke he broke into a run.

At the top of the stairs he sniffed
. He’d never had a keen sense of smell – and certainly not since smoking a pack a day back in college and early grad school, which had killed his sinuses – but he was certain the smell was coming from the east wing.

S
omebody smoking up here?

That was it, wasn’t it
? Not only had some maid decided to squat in his house, but she was smoking in it too. The bitch.

“Hey!” he yelled
. “If there’s somebody up here you need to show yourself right now.”

The itching had returned, and he could feel it needling at his back, his arms,
his belly. He waited, chasing the itch up and down his arms, and when the whispering came again, his anger and his resolve melted. The sound was the same, breathy and feminine, but his reaction to it was different up here. Robert suddenly felt cold. His hands were numb. The whispering seemed ominous and dreadful. It filled up the silence of the house and everything around him felt absolutely still. Even the rain hitting the windows to his left made no sound.

“Hello?” he said.

The smell seemed to be coming from a room just off the landing, where a door stood ajar. He thought back to several hours earlier, when he and Sarah had chased Angela down this hall. Robert thought he remembered that all the doors along the length of this passageway had been closed when he was here before, but he couldn’t be sure.

He put his hand on the knob
and swallowed. His throat felt tight and dry, and though it wasn’t cold up here, he was trembling. Somebody was in that room, he was certain of it. Holding his breath, he pushed the door open, groped the wall for the light switch, and turned it on.

The room was empty.

It looked like it had been empty for a long while, too. Not just years, but perhaps decades. And it wasn’t a bedroom either. There was no bed, no dresser, no sign of a closet. Only chairs in groups of twos and threes arranged around three different wooden card tables. The back wall was curved and he realized that this must have been the sitting room of the lady of the house. The curved windows along the far wall looked over a gazebo and a small rose garden. This room must have been on the edge of the fire damage, for the wall on the right side was different from its mate on his left. The difference was subtle, but easy enough to see.

The smell of smoke of was g
one, as too was the whispering.

When had that stopped
? He searched his memory, but couldn’t remember.

He looked around the ro
om again. Like the rest of Crook House’s interior, it was aristocratic and elegant, perhaps even more so than the rest of the house. It spoke in whispers of soft blue and cream, with hints of raspberry pink accenting the cushions of the delicate chairs and the powder blue lampshades. Definitely a woman’s retreat, he thought.

“Fucking bitch,” he muttered.

He froze.

Where in the hell had that come from?

He stood up straight and scratched at his neck. He sniffed the air. The smell of smoke was back. Robert frowned. He could almost – no, no he could, he
did
– hear wood crackling and hissing. A fire. That’s what she did, the fucking bitch. That fucking
bitch
. You build up a home for them, a family, you work yourself to the bone day and night, day and night, when you’re sick, when you’re tired, when your head’s so fucking full of worries that you think you’re going to blow a vein in your neck, you still work because you’re the man and it’s your job and you do it and you do it and you do it, again and again. And then the bitch, that fucking bitch, she goes and loses her fucking mind and strangles your babies and burns your house and you come home to nothing because it’s all been for nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing –

There was a snap.

Robert shook himself, and looked down at his hands. The back of the chair he’d been holding was in bits, a busted piece of it in each hand.

“Oh God.
” He dropped the busted chair. He was breathing hard, his skin flushed with heat. With his sense of alarm mounting he backed out of the room and stopped in the hallway, looking at the door.

The anger
he’d felt inside still clung to him. Like smoke.

He shook his head, trying to make it go away
. He squeezed his eyes shut. His squeezed his fists so tightly his hands shook. He even beat his fists against his thighs, like he could pound the bad feelings away. But he couldn’t shake them.

“Robert?”

He jumped. He turned toward the landing and saw Sarah standing there in her T-shirt and panties and bare feet.

“What are doing up here?” she said, her voice heavy with sleep
. “I thought I heard you yelling. Were you yelling?”

All he could manage was to shake his head.

She sniffled and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “Well, come on. Let’s go back to bed.” She motioned for him to follow. Robert paused only long enough to glance again at the sitting room, and then quickly went after her.

December 19

The next morning, the three of them sat down in the breakfast nook over a meal of the fruit and oatmeal bars left over from their road trip. Robert was drained. He hadn’t slept well. Or at all, really, and his exhaustion left him irritable and anxious. But Sarah and Angela were chattering away about the busy day ahead of them, and that part was good. It calmed him, listening to Angela giggle.

He liked this room
. There were no window treatments, and the sunshine came pouring in. There were a few formal accents, like an ornately wrought chandelier and a huge Oriental rug dominated by shades of blue that were matched in the sectioned, boarded ceiling, but in the main it seemed designed for peaceful family meals. This room, Robert guessed, rather than the stuffy dining room in the east wing, must have been where James Crook and his doomed family shared their meals.

Oh Christ, he told himself
. Stop it.

Here, in the light of day, sitting in a comfortable wing chair and eating
an oatmeal chocolate-chip bar, he found it hard to linger on the events of the night before. The anxiety he’d experienced in the upstairs sitting room seemed remote now, almost dreamlike. Last night, suffused with dread, he’d nearly convinced himself that the sensations he’d experienced were of a supernatural persuasion, ghostly, beyond the grave, all that nonsense. Certainly, he’d gone back to bed thinking that. But now, surrounded by his family and smiling when they laughed, that earlier conviction seemed foolish. What had Scrooge said of Marley’s ghost, that surely there was more of gravy to him than the grave? He was an undigested chunk of potato. Something like that. Robert had simply been tired. Plus, there was so much on his mind, so many problems on his plate. Between all that, and the stress of moving and driving all day, was it any wonder he’d let himself get so worked up?

Of course, he told himself
. It was that and nothing more.

Feeling a little better, he helped
Sarah make a list of the things she would have to take care of. She was going to have a busy day, and as he had to be in meetings most of the morning, he wouldn’t be much help. The movers were due at eight, and dealing with them was going to be her job. Plus, they needed groceries, and arrangements would have to be made for Angela to start school the following semester. With Christmas only a week away, they were fast running out of time to get it all done.

“You’ll be home around what?”
Sarah asked.

“I don’t know
. A little after lunch, I guess. Maybe around two.”

“Okay.
” She glanced at the clock on her phone and said, “You better get going. It’s almost eight now.”

He looked at her phone and saw he had eleven minutes to be in Thom Horner’s office
. He kissed her, kissed Angela on top of her head, and hustled out to his car. Luckily, the campus was nearly deserted and he didn’t have any trouble finding a parking spot close to Lightner’s academic offices. From there he moved from one meeting after another. He was introduced to a dizzying array of people and he managed to forget the names of all of them as soon as they were out of sight.

Thom told him not to worry about it
. “It’s a small school,” he said. “Within a few weeks, you’ll know just about everybody from the gardeners to the president.”

“I hope so.”

“I know you will.”

When they finished their meetings Thom took him to lunch
, hamburgers and fries at a little place just off Brackenridge Park, a bucket of beer between them.

“So how’s it going with the house
? What does Sarah think of it?”

“I don’t know if she’s really had a chance to see much of it yet
. We got in late last night, and the power was out most of the night. And today she’s gonna be dealing with the movers. They should probably be there now.”

“Well, she’s a good one, Robert
. I hope she likes the house. I have to admit, I really wanted to impress you guys with it. And the timing, while unfortunate, couldn’t have been better.”

Robert frowned at that
. “What do you mean?”

“About what?”

“What do you mean, the timing was unfortunate?”

“Well, um…” He shrugged
. “The houses have to be, you know, vacated before we can rent them out to somebody new.”

“Vacated?”

“Yeah, you know, the previous occupant…well, he died.”

“In the house?”

Thom shrugged again. “Yeah.”

“Who was he?”

“His name was Brian Hannett. He was one of our English faculty. Poor guy, he was only sixty-three. But, you know, he smoked, and he was kind of overweight. His heart attack didn’t surprise me much. He’d only been in the house for about a month when it happened.”