Kelly McClymer-Must Love Black (10 page)

A plunge into the brisk chill of the unknown can make even the most stalwart of nannies shiver and shake.

—Miss Adelaide Putnam to Daisy, the chambermaid,
Manor of Dark Dreams,
p. 22

A few days later I was flipping through the Chrysalis Cliff brochure for the ten-thousandth time, trying not to go stir-crazy as the girls finished the Camp CSI work online. We hadn’t left the building, or even strayed from our domain for a family dinner, since our excursion to the arcade. Since the girls’ dad had shown so little interest in hearing about their mandatory fun, it seemed almost pointless to force them into more of it. But if I didn’t find a way to get them away from their computers, I was in serious danger of spontaneous combustion.

There was a picture of the pool in the brochure, which made me desperate to go swimming. I loved pools, and I was determined to escape our domain, even if I had to twist the
girls’ arms and bend the rules to do it. The one loophole I could see was that the rules actually offered us a window of poolside opportunity, despite the fact that there was no time actually scheduled for us to use it.

Not that we’d been following the schedule to the letter so far. And swimming fit into the category of “fun” things to do. The girls had enjoyed our time at the arcade, so . . . “Who wants to go for a swim?”

They both looked around curiously as if someone else might say yes. Neither of them leaped up to go swim. I would have loved having a pool when I was their age.

I immediately realized that I should not have asked a question when I had no intention of entertaining “no” as an answer. But that was just a rookie error and could quickly be righted. Fortunately, I was the nanny. I opted not to debate but to dictate—one of the privileges of being the nanny that I was beginning to love. “Oh, well, let me rephrase that. We’re going swimming.”

I think mutiny might have been on their minds, but I wasn’t about to succumb. I made them put on their bathing suits and get towels, and I braided their hair. But I also let them take books out with them because (a) I’m not a tyrant, and (b) I didn’t want them to have revenge on their minds if I got flustered around Geoff, if he happened to be around while we were swimming.

The pool was a spalike grotto. A waterfall at one end created a sound barrier, and unlike the huge oblong pool I’d learned to swim in, this one was all curves, with a private nook behind the waterfall. I guessed it was the whole solitude thing again.

I tried to engage my reluctant charges, who were looking at the pool as if it were full of poison. “So much for laps. How do you swim in this thing?”

“We don’t swim.” Rienne was disdainful.

“You live with this beautiful pool and you don’t swim?” I’d have been in the water until it froze over if I’d had a pool like this at their age.

Rienne went for the scathing observation. “It isn’t very useful, swimming around in circles.”

Triste nodded. “What’s the point? You still have to shower, so you’ve gotten wet for nothing. We know
how
to swim, Pippa. But we choose not to.”

Okay. I wasn’t going to argue. It was looking less and less like I was going to be able to bill this activity as “fun” to anyone but me. And even for me it wasn’t as fun as it could be since Geoff was nowhere around.

These two seemed to think everything out to an ultralogical conclusion. I wondered if, in a few years, they’d be making their boyfriends crazy with their pragmatic decision-making process. Of course, puberty changes everything, as I knew firsthand. Wasn’t I keeping an eye out for Geoff even when I knew he was Laurie’s guy? Maybe the twins would be a little less logical and a lot more into the moment by the time they were interested in boys. Or maybe they’d save themselves the heartache and stay clear of the confusing boy-girl stuff.

The blue tiles of the pool shimmered with the movement of the water in the breeze, and I was drawn to the edge. I dove in without asking if the pool was heated. In Maine, doing that can be dangerous. Fortunately this pool was nicely warm. Even
in the evening dusk I felt comfortable and soothed as I swam to the deep end and did a few underwater somersaults.

“I’m being pointless!” I called to Triste and Rienne. “Quick! Call the pointless police to arrest me.”

They both looked up from their books for a moment, shook their identical heads, and went back to reading without comment.

“Don’t you want to be pointless? Just once? It’s fun.” I paddled around lazily, thinking about what it must be like to be a paying guest.

All of a sudden Laurie appeared. “Philippa?”

I waved at her. “Hey, Laurie.”

“What are you doing?”

“Swimming.” I was tempted to say something snarky, but I didn’t. Unless you count answering literally.

Her expression went sour. “Didn’t you read the rules?”

“Yes.” Call me petty, but I always enjoy setting rule-bound people straight when I’m in the right.

“The pool is for the patrons,” she lectured.

I smiled and swirled my arms around, well aware that the girls were watching me, waiting to see if I would give in or fight. Duh. Once they knew me better they wouldn’t wonder. “Actually, the pool is reserved for guests for most of the day, but the girls and I can use it from five a.m. to seven a.m.”—as if—“and from seven p.m. to eight p.m., when the guests are celebrating their meal.” Petty me, to quote the “rules” so precisely.

Of course, I’d underestimated Laurie. She smiled, and I knew I had missed something. “The girls are not swimming;
they are reading. Something they have no need to do by the pool.”

“True. But they’re in their bathing suits, so they may choose to swim.” I could see Laurie was doing the same calculations I was doing. Evil nanny versus father’s right-hand woman? I wasn’t willing to bet I’d come out on top of that one. So I ducked under the water and took a second to think in the blank underwater moment.

I surfaced. “I’m going to teach the girls to swim. But it takes a little time, you know, to persuade them that it makes sense. They’re really sensible creatures, if you haven’t noticed.”

Laurie grimaced at me. I think she meant it to be a smile, but it sooo was not. “Nevertheless, the rules are clear. You are the nanny. You cannot swim while the girls are left unattended.”

“Have you ever heard the expression, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink’?” I made sure I sounded patient, though I had to try hard. The waterfall suddenly sounded much louder and less peaceful. The roaring of time, of injustice, of the forces of nature that didn’t care a hill of beans about one sixteen-year-old and her desire to swim uninterrupted in the waters of life.

Behind me I heard a splash. I was tempted to turn around, but I didn’t. I watched Laurie’s face instead. She frowned in the direction of the splash. “Really. Those girls are not horses. I don’t know what you think you’re doing. I’ll make sure Lady Buena Verde hears of this.” She huffed off. Interesting, how she’d called on the authority of Lady Buena Verde even though she was employed by Mr. Pertweath. I couldn’t help
wondering if her loyalties were just a touch divided.

I turned. Triste was climbing out of the water. She was dripping wet and clearly not pleased about it, but still, she had gotten my back. I was glad one of them had. “Thanks for risking the wrath of the pointless police.”

The dry twin, Rienne, shook her head and sighed at me. “Not at all pointless, Pippa. We don’t like her any more than you do.” Rienne put down her book and threw a towel at her soggy sister. “Only one of us needed to get in to make the point, though.”

I certainly couldn’t argue with that logic. How had they decided which of them would make the sacrifice? Coin toss? Short straw? Were they really reading each other’s minds, like it sometimes seemed?

Recognizing that they’d had my back, I got theirs. I’d escaped the domain for a swim, and now it was time to make the twins happy and return. “I guess we can go back in now, before your lungs get too full of this fresh air.”

“Horrors!” Triste smiled, though with only the barest up curve of her lips. Rienne met her smile with an identical one. I remembered how, after Mom died, everyone was always telling me to smile. People liked you better when you smiled; you made friends when you smiled. I’d ignored them since I didn’t want people to like me for being fake happy and I didn’t need shallow friends. I couldn’t help wondering what it would have been like to have a twin, though. Maybe I wouldn’t have minded Dad finding Krystal and starting to smile again.

Triste and Rienne scrabbled up in haste, grabbing books
and towels and jamming their feet into their sandals like they were being timed to see who could get ready faster. And then, all of a sudden, they froze. “Look!” Triste whispered.

On the flower bushes planted at the base of the waterfall were two butterflies. “I guess they wanted a change of scenery too,” I joked. But neither girl offered even the ghost of a smile this time. They were intently staring at the butterflies.

“That’s the butterfly I photographed for Camp CSI. The American Lady.” Rienne pointed to the yellow and green one.

“It probably just looks like the same one,” I said. But then I saw the gray butterfly beside it and I wasn’t so sure. For some reason it felt creepy.

“I wish I had the camera,” Triste said. “That Mourning Cloak looks like a ghost.”

Rienne stepped closer to the butterflies, carefully. “Do you think it could be a ghost?”

My instinct was to say there were no such things as ghosts. That would be the normal response. If these were normal ten-year-olds. But this was Chrysalis Cliff. This was not the kind of household where normal worked. “Why would a butterfly ghost haunt here?” I said instead.

Triste looked at me in surprise. “Didn’t you read the brochure information about our ghost?”

“No.” Missed that. How did I miss that? Maybe I was too focused on the pictures of the gardens and pool and mud baths to read the fine print.

“This used to be a sea captain’s house. One day, when the captain didn’t come home from a trip, his wife threw herself off a cliff. He came back the next week, married a young pretty
girl from the town, and had five children. The first wife has haunted here ever since, ruing her mistake.”

Triste added, “We think she’s the one who led Mother off the cliff. She’s not a happy ghost. But nobody has ever described her as a butterfly ghost before.”

Rienne stepped closer to the butterflies. “Do you think the other one might be Mother?” The hopeful look in her eyes struck me like a punch. I hadn’t seen that one coming.

For a moment I couldn’t even breathe. Mothers reincarnated as butterflies? I said, carefully, “I doubt it. Didn’t you guys find out in your research that butterflies don’t live very long?”

“True.” They still didn’t move, and we ended up watching the butterflies for another five minutes, until they fluttered off.

“Let’s go. We don’t want Laurie to chew us out again.” We trekked back inside, glad not to run into Laurie hovering to make sure we vacated the pool before the spa patrons saw us.

Once we were back in the safety of our domain I made my case. Facts only: “Your father wants you to have fun. Your father is going to start worrying if you don’t have fun. I could get fired if I don’t get you to have fun.” There. Three indisputable facts. How could they argue with that? Ha!

“We do have fun,” Triste argued.

I felt for them. They were having fun in their own way. I totally got that because I’d been that way too, right up until Krystal starting sticking her nose into my business. Problem was, I had a job to do. A job I very much wanted to keep since
it came with a fabulous shower and a pool with a waterfall. “I’m not talking about your perceptions. I’m talking about your father’s perceptions.”

“But father understands how much we enjoy our studies and our research,” Triste explained.

Okay, so they were smart, but they hadn’t really learned to read people yet if they thought that. Their father loved them, but abstractly, as if they were objects he could admire but not actually connect with.

“Besides, we already had fun that day at the arcade,” Rienne chimed in.

“I think your father wants you to do things that could be classed as fun and would be more than a one-day trip somewhere.”

“You mean like get a pet?” Rienne said, wrinkling her nose. That hadn’t been what I had in mind, but maybe a small lizard or a goldfish wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Triste shook her head. “A pet serves no purpose,” she said dismissively.

No purpose? That I could argue. “It gets your father off your case. Makes him stop worrying about you.” I felt my own brilliance in that argument even before the twins reluctantly nodded.

“That is worth something,” Triste agreed. “Father already worries about his business too much since Mother died.”

Rienne pursed her lips in profound thought and finally sighed. “True. If a pet will make Father less worried, then that is definitely a worthwhile purpose.”

“Excellent. Then we’ll get a pet.” I was careful not to
phrase it as a question. Just the facts, ma’am. We were getting a pet.

Triste asked the expected question much sooner than I’d hoped. “But what kind of pet should we get?”

She wasn’t asking me, she was asking Rienne. They stared at each other, and I realized this discussion was going to take a long time.

“Good question. Unfortunately, it’s bedtime. Let’s think about it overnight and decide what to get in the morning.” Maybe by then I could think of a really great argument for fish. Or pet rocks.

In the morning I had an e-mail from Laurie that made the matter of a pet become priority number one. Mr. Pertweath was asking for an update on our mission for fun. Laurie’s e-mail was short, and I wondered if she was still mad that Triste had decided to crush her nannies-shouldn’t-swim-alone argument by leaping into the pool with me.

Please inform Mr. Pertweath of all fun activities that are occurring this week. Feel free to send an e-mail or update me personally at the end of each day.

Umm. Right. Why would he need a memo when I could just tell him over dinner? Or, better yet, the girls could tell him. I’d thought my dad was a workaholic, but Mr. P made him look like a loafer. Then again, my dad didn’t have Lady Buena Verde breathing down his neck and telling him how to run his ship. The pet thing needed to go on the front burner.