Mrs. Crumb got up and took the children’s bowls. “We should get along, you and me. You’re going to need me.”
Andie looked at the old woman’s cold little eyes. Jesus, I hope not. “I’d like to see my bedroom, please.”
“I’ll show you everything,” Mrs. Crumb said, her defiance back. “I’ll just show you.”
“Just my bedroom,” Andie said, but Mrs. Crumb had already headed for a door in the far wall, so she smiled one last time at the kids, picked up her suitcase, and followed the housekeeper.
It was going to be a long month.
Andie followed Mrs. Crumb into a short dismal hallway with faded wallpaper and a worn wood floor. The housekeeper turned to go up a narrow flight of equally worn wooden stairs that were probably the servant stairs, and then she stopped on the first step, her watery, protruding eyes even with Andie’s now.
“I hope you didn’t get the wrong idea,” she began. “I’m sure Mr. Archer just forgot to tell me—” She looked past Andie and scowled. “Now what are you doing out here?” she snapped, and Andie turned and saw Alice standing behind her, looking even smaller and thinner than she had in the kitchen, her neck festooned with all that jewelry, the headphones from her Walkman still over her ears.
“Hello, Alice,” Andie said.
The deep shadows under Alice’s eyes and cheekbones made her little face almost skull-like. She stared at Andie for a minute and then pushed past her and Mrs. Crumb and began to climb the stairs, something stuffed under her arm.
Andie reached out and touched her sleeve and Alice jerked away and kept going.
“Is that a doll?” Andie asked, and Alice stopped a couple of steps above her and took her headphones off.
She held up a stuffed doll with a bluish-white head, its three-tiered sepia-toned skirt flaring out from a faded gold ribbon belt around its lumpy waist. The thing looked like it had been left to mold before Alice had found it, the face and dress mottled with age. “It’s Jessica,” Alice said and went on up the stairs.
It’s dead, Andie thought.
“She won’t give that up,” Mrs. Crumb said, in her idea of a whisper. “I’ve tried giving her other dolls but she just wants that one. It’s not right. We should do something about that, you and me.”
Andie watched Alice’s straight little back climb the stairs without wavering even though she must have heard the housekeeper’s voice. “If that’s the doll Alice wants, that’s the doll she gets.”
Mrs. Crumb sucked in her breath and shook her head and then continued up the stairs.
They reached another short hall on the second floor, and Mrs. Crumb walked around the stairwell and started up another flight. “Nursery’s on the third floor. Keeps the noise down.”
“Noise?” Andie said, following an entirely silent Alice, but Mrs. Crumb didn’t speak again until they were on the third-floor landing in another cramped little hall.
“This is the bathroom,” she said proudly, opening a door opposite the stairs that led to a large vintage washroom with a freestanding brass-and-frosted-glass shower in the middle of the hardwood floor. “You’re sharing this with me. My room’s on the other side”—she nodded toward the front of the house—“but I know you won’t mind since we’re going to be such good friends.” Then she moved toward the back of the house to a door that was ajar because Alice had walked through it moments before.
“This is your bedroom,” Mrs. Crumb said, pushing the door open wider.
Andie followed her into a large, high-ceilinged paneled room, dominated by a four-poster bed and a stone mantel surrounding a gas fireplace. The long stone-lined windows looked out over the old woods behind the house, and Andie could hear the last calls of the crows in the flushed sky.
“And that’s the nursery through there.” Mrs. Crumb jerked her thumb at a door to the right that was also ajar, probably from Alice walking through it, too. “I’m going to go make you a nice hot toddy now. Just the thing to help you drop off to sleep.” She smiled again, and again it didn’t reach her eyes, and then she went back out through the hall door.
“Hot toddy,” Andie said, not even sure what that was, and walked over to the open door and looked through it.
The nursery was huge, maybe thirty feet across, with a bank of barred windows across the back including a little bay-windowed alcove with a window seat full of books spilling onto the floor. There were two narrow twin beds, their mattresses naked, an ancient rocker with chipped white paint, a rump-sprung old sofa, a battered table with paper and pencils on it and several mismatched chairs scattered around it, and an old TV in the middle of the room with an ancient boom box on top of it. At the far end was a cold gas fireplace with a small, modern fire extinguisher on the mantel. It was about as cozy as an abandoned mental hospital.
Andie crossed the room and opened a door on the other side and found herself in another short hall. In front of her the door was open to a small bathroom, to the right was a stone archway to another hall, and to the left was a closed door.
Jesus, she thought. This place is Little Gormenghast. I’m going to get lost here and never be found.
She opened the door to the left and found Alice sitting on a twin bed, leaning toward an old white rocker at the foot of the bed. The walls were pink, her bedside table had a pink lamp, and her bedspread was pink and covered with daisies.
“This is my room!” Alice said, straightening as she clutched her blue Jessica doll to all the jewelry on her thin little chest. “You have to knock before you come in!”
Andie surveyed the little room, puzzled. “Do you like pink?”
“No!”
“I didn’t think so. Sorry about not knocking.”
Andie closed the door and then crossed the small hall into the larger one and found another staircase on her left, this one stone and much grander, and to her right a massive stone archway. On the wall in front of her was another door, so she opened it.
Carter jerked back against his headboard, his eyes wide, almost dropping the comic book he’d been reading. Then he saw her and scowled. “You ever hear of knocking?”
“Sorry,” Andie said. “I can’t tell which doors are rooms and which ones are halls.”
“This one’s a room,” Carter said, and went back to his comic.
Andie looked around the room and saw ancient heavy furniture and a bed covered with old blankets in various shades of drab. The only interesting things in the whole room were the stacks of comic books, papers, and pencils on the bedside tables that said Carter did something besides glare and eat, and the carpet at the end of the bed that was riddled with scorch marks. Pyro, she thought, and was grateful the house was mostly stone. She looked up to see Carter watching her, his face stolid, so she nodded and began to close the door only to stop when she took a second look at his bedside table.
There was a lighter on it, a cheap plastic job. She opened the door wider and saw two more on the other table.
He was still staring at her, and she thought about saying, “What in the name of God do you need three lighters for?” But it was her first night and Carter already didn’t like her and she was too damn tired.
“Don’t set anything on fire,” she told him, and closed the door.
Then she walked through the stone arch on her right and almost ran into an ancient wood railing that ran around three sides of an open space. The railing rocked a little as she put her hands on it, so she looked over the edge carefully.
The opening dropped two stories down to a stone floor, empty in the growing darkness.
Okay, then, Andie thought, and made a circuit of the gallery, discovering doors that led into the nursery and into the servants’ stairwell. Then she went back to the little hall and to Alice’s room, where she knocked.
“Go away,” Alice said.
Andie went in and saw that Alice had changed into a too-large jersey T-shirt that hung down past her knees, clearly a hand-me-down from some adult. She looked both pathetic—poor little A
lice had to get ready for bed on her own—and eerie—poor little Alice’s shirt said BAD WITCH on it in glowing green letters. She looked oddly defenseless without her armor of necklaces—they were hanging over her lampshade now—but with her white-blond hair standing out every which way, she also looked demented. We’ll comb that tomorrow, Andie thought.
“Sorry,” she told Alice. “I just wanted to say that if you need me, I’m on the other side of the nursery.”
“I won’t need you.” Alice got into bed and pulled her covers over her head.
“Right.” Andie noticed that Jessica had fallen to the floor. “You dropped something.” She bent and picked up the old doll and poked Alice under the covers.
“Hey!” Alice said, and then Andie pulled back the covers and handed her the doll.
“Good night,” Andie said, and Alice pulled her covers up over her head again.
“Yes, we’re going to be great pals,” Andie said, and headed back across the nursery to her own room, thinking that it was no surprise the nannies had cracked. They’d probably expected to be put living in the tomb at any moment, probably by Carter and Alice.
She heard something from the hallway by Alice’s room and went back to check. Alice’s door had come partly open, and inside Alice was talking.
“She’s not staying,” Alice was saying. “She’s just going to be here a month. She’s not even a nanny. It’s okay. We’re staying right here.”
Andie pushed open the door a little more, expecting to see Carter, and Alice looked around, alone in her room.
“I told you,” she began.
“Who were you talking to?”
“Nobody,” Alice said, turning her head toward the wall.
Imaginary friend, Andie thought, and said, “Okay.”
Then she turned to go and saw the white rocker at the end of the bed.
It was rocking.
She looked back at Alice, who met her eyes defiantly.
“What?” Alice said.
She did that, Andie thought, and said, “Nothing. Good night,” and closed the door, now in complete sympathy with the nannies who’d bolted.
Anybody with sense would.
• • •
Andie put the weirdness that was Alice and Carter out of her mind and spent the next hour unpacking and settling into her new room. It was surprisingly charming: white paneled walls and high, sculpted ceilings and long stone-lined windows covered with full, patterned draperies that clashed with the incongruously cheap silver-patterned black comforter that somebody with a lot of romance in her soul and no money in her checking account had bought to cover the large walnut four-poster bed. The rest of the furniture in the room was a mixture of styles probably inherited from different parts of the house as hand-me-downs, and the crowning touch was a cheap metal plaque over the bed that said ALWAYS KISS ME GOOD NIGHT. There was something a little obsessive about that which, given Andie’s surroundings, leaked over into creepiness. She put her pajamas on, brushed her teeth in the bathroom, put Kristin’s folder about the kids on the bed, and then, looking at the “Archer Legal Group” label on the folder, went to find her jewelry box. Buried at the bottom in a small manila envelope was her wedding ring, pretty and cheap, now painted and varnished to keep it from tarnishing again, the last thing she had left from her marriage. She should have thrown it out since it was worthless, but . . .
She slid the ring on her left hand and smiled in spite of herself, remembering North going crazy trying to replace it with a real gold ring that wouldn’t turn her finger green. Then she put the jewelry box away and was pulling back the covers when she heard a knock at the hall door and opened it to see Mrs. Crumb with a small tray. “A little cuppa before bed,” the housekeeper trilled, her red cupid’s-bow mouth smiling tightly, as she put the tray on the table next to the bed. “I got no problem bringing you up a cuppa every night since it’s only going to be a month?” She let her voice rise at the end, part question, part hope.
“Uh, thank you.” Andie eyed the tray doubtfully, but the yellow-striped teapot smelled richly of peppermint and there were violets painted on the big striped cup.
Mrs. Crumb nodded. “I put in a little liquor, too. You sleep good now.” She glanced down at the foot of the bed. “Sweet dreams.”
She retreated back through Andie’s door, and Andie closed it behind her and sniffed the pot. Minty. Very minty. She sat down on the bed and poured tea into the cup and then took a sip and got a full blast of at least two shots of peppermint schnapps. Whoa, she thought. The tea was good and peppermint was always nice, but unless Mrs. Crumb was trying to put her into a schnapps-induced stupor, the housekeeper had an exaggerated idea of “a little liquor.”
Maybe she should make her own tea.
She began to read Kristin’s notes, sipping cautiously. The kids’ mother had died giving birth to Alice, she read, their father had died in a car accident two years ago, and their aunt had died in a fall four months ago in June. And now, Andie thought, they’re alone with Crumb. And me. That thought was so harrowing that she forgave them the weirdness of their first meeting. Things would get better.
Poor kids.
She sipped more tea and read more notes. The three nannies had all said the same thing: the kids were smart, the kids were undisciplined, the kids were strange, there was something wrong, and they were leaving. Only the last one had tried to take the kids with her, and Alice had gone into such a screaming fit that she’d lost consciousness and the nanny had had to detour to a hospital. After that, the nanny took the kids back to Archer House and left them there. “These children need professional psychological help,” she’d written, and Andie thought, So North sent me.
That was so unlike him, not to send a professional, not to get a team of experts down there, and she thought, He’s not taking it seriously. Either that or he wanted her buried in southern Ohio for some reason.
She tilted her head back to think about that and saw the curtain of the window nearest the bed move, a flutter, as if from a draft. She watched, and when it didn’t move again, she shook her head and went through the rest of the folder, sipping the liqueur-spiked tea until the combination of that and the dry curriculum reports from the nannies made her so sleepy, she gave up. She turned off the bedside lamp, and the moonlight seeped into the room—full moon, she thought—and it was lovely to be so deeply drowsy on such a soft bed in such soft blue light that she let herself doze, thinking, I should have called Flo to tell her I arrived, I should have called Will, I should have . . .
Something moved in her peripheral vision, maybe the curtain again, she was pretty sure nothing had moved. Exhaustion or maybe the liqueur in the tea. She looked sleepily around the room, but it was just gloomy and jumbled, a gothic kind of normal, although it seemed colder than it had been, so she let her head fall back and snuggled down into the covers and drifted off to sleep, and then into dreams where there was shadowy laughter and whispering, and someone dancing in the moonlight, and as she fell deeper into sleep, the whispering in her ear grew hot and low—Who do you love? Who do you want? Who kisses you good night?—and she saw Will, smiling at her, genial and easygoing with his blond frat-boy good looks, and then she fell deeper and darker, and North was there, his eyes hot, reaching for her the way he used to, demanding and possessive and out of control in love with her, and she sighed in relief from wanting him, and somebody whispered, Who is HE?, and she went to him the way she always had—impossible to ever say no to North—and lost herself in him and her dreams.
Andie woke at dawn with a headache, which she blamed on Mrs. Crumb’s hot tea along with the hot dreams about North, probably evoked because she’d taken his name again. Guilt will always get you, she thought and resolved to stop lying, even if it was the only way to defeat Crumb. She took an aspirin and went down and moved the rest of her things from her car to her room, and then drove fifteen miles into the little town at the end of the road and hit the IGA there for decent breakfast food. Then she headed b
ack to the house, determined to Make a Difference in the kid’s lives, but once there, she hit the wall. Alice was in the kitchen demanding breakfast, but she didn’t want eggs or toast or orange juice. Alice wanted cereal. She’d had cereal the day before and the day before that and the day before that and today wasn’t going to be any damn different. Andie looked into Alice’s gray-blue eyes and saw the same stubbornness that had defeated her in her short marriage.
“You’re an Archer, all right,” she said and gave Alice her cereal.
Then she made ham and eggs for Carter on the stubborn old stove, thinking of the kitchen North had remodeled for her when she’d moved into his old Victorian in Columbus, of the shining blue quartz counters and soft yellow cabinets and the open shelves filled with her Fiesta ware. It’d been her favorite place in the world, next to their bedroom in the attic. This kitchen was like a meat locker. Very sanitary but . . .
“That is not good,” Alice said, looking into the pan, but when Andie dished it up for Carter, he ate everything. He kept his eyes on his comic book the whole time and then shoved the plate away and left, still reading, but he ate it all. Progress.
“You’re welcome,” Andie called to his retreating back, and turned around to see Mrs. Crumb smiling at her, her powdery, jowly face triumphant over Alice’s empty cereal bowl as Alice deserted them, too.
Andie ignored her and tried to call Flo using the kitchen phone, staring at the battered white bulletin board that held only a list of faded phone numbers and an even more faded church collection envelope, which probably summed up Mrs. Crumb’s life. When she couldn’t get a dial tone, she said, “No phone?” and Mrs. Crumb said, “It goes out sometimes.” Terrific, Andie thought and went to scope out Archer House before she made a trip to the shopping center she’d passed on the two-lane highway the day before.
The layout of the house was, for all its size, fairly simple. The center of the house, as Mrs. Crumb told her, was the Great Hall, more than twenty feet square with a stone fireplace large enough to party in. The hall rose three stories to a raftered ceiling that dated back to the original house, sometime in the sixteen hundreds, each level ringed by a gallery with that ancient wood railing that Andie had almost fallen through the night before. Impossible to heat, Andie thought. And those railings are not safe. There were six rooms on each floor: one room on each side of the hall at the front of the house, and four rooms across the back. The first floor had empty rooms in front, and the kitchen, dining room, sitting room, and library across the back; the second floor had two bedrooms in front and four in back, all with four-posters and naked mattresses; and the third floor had Mrs. Crumb’s bedroom on the front left and Carter’s on the front right, and then Andie’s room, the doublewide nursery, and Alice’s room across the back. In between the front rooms and the back were staircases—the narrow servant’s flight behind a discreet door on the left and the massive formal stone staircase through an equally massive stone arch on the right. A long, white-paneled, red-carpeted entrance hall separated the rooms on the right from the Great Hall, but otherwise it was pretty much two rooms in front and four in back all the way up. Every room in the place was covered in dust, the paintings on the walls looking muddy and faded in the gloom and the bedrooms on the second floor doing a nice business in cobwebs and the occasional dead mouse. Jessica the ancient blue-faced doll would have fit right in there. Still, Andie was cheered by her ability to navigate the stone barn she was living in, so when she had the scope of the place, she went back to the library where Carter had folded his gangling body into a deep, red-cushioned window seat.