“Holy crap.” The words fell out before I could stop them, and shamed me. I didn’t want Connie to think I was some loser townie who’d never seen a mansion. But I hadn’t, not one like this, and I actively repressed speaking my next thought—and this is just their friggin’ summer house!
Connie said nothing, but I sensed she enjoyed my awe. She seemed to be driving extra slow, allowing me time to marinate in Skylark’s splendor versus my comparative irrelevance. I braced myself as the tires ground hard against the bleached crushed-shell drive, then strained against gravity as we shifted gears and rumbled up.
I never stopped looking at the house. It reminded me of a ship. A ship that had been tossed clean from the sea by some monster storm to survive intact on the cliff above.
From a third-floor window, I saw the shadow of someone observing us drive in, but once the car stopped, the curtain twitched and the figure moved off. It’s never a good feeling, that prickle of being watched. Who was it? I frowned up. Then yawned, fake and on purpose—as if to ensure that whoever was looking down on me didn’t think that I cared.
We got out, and I followed Connie up the planked steps that led to a wraparound porch, and through the front door, which looked too big to spring open at the turn of the knob, though this is exactly what happened as Connie made it clear that she was Top Dog by bullying in ahead of me. The foyer—a term with which I was now familiar from Mom’s reading off the Little Bly real-estate sites—was big enough that you could park a couple of cars inside it, and was decorated in a harmony of tropical Life Savers colors: banana, melon, fruit punch. Walnut floors buffed to glowing bordered the carpets, and the living and dining rooms were filled with delicate antiques. Painted vases crowded every surface and bloomed with arrangements of starflowers, baby’s breath and elephant’s ear. One thing was obvious: Connie was nuts for this house. Every room she showed me was immaculate. All it needed was a bride descending the stairs.
Instead, it only had us going up; Connie lisping house rules in the rushed voice of a person who loves to talk more than she gets to, and me stubbornly silent and frankly still grumpy about that linen-pants comment.
Colors deepened as we ascended. At the landing, the stained-glass window of Noah gathering animals into his ark filtered hues of orange, cherry and lemon into a pattern of light over the carpet runner. Down wide corridors hung with family portraits, I noticed the ancestral repeat of teardrop nose and gingery hair. Not beautiful, but dramatic features that carried all the way around to the full-length painting at the end of the hall. Where two redheaded boys and their raven-haired but drop-nosed sister, swathed in dark velvet and white lace, were grouped around a chunky Saint Bernard.
Here, we stopped.
Gawking at the children’s sweet faces, I was acutely self-conscious of my blundering intrusion into this cloistered world of genteel innocence. I didn’t belong here. I should go while I could.
I hardly noticed the door opposite, until Connie opened it.
“You’re in the blue room. Which you’ll thee ith more than enough.” Connie’s tone suggested that this wasn’t her choice, that I didn’t deserve the honor. In her hesitation before she stepped through, I wondered if she hoped I’d do the right thing here and request more suitably humble quarters—preferably nearer to an attic or washing machine.
But I knew from the moment I entered that I wouldn’t trade squat. The room was perfect, fit for the princess I would pretend to be. And wasn’t that what I needed, most of all? To jump-start myself into the more substantial, confident Jamie Atkinson than the girl who’d whimpered away from the stick in the eye that had apparently qualified as my junior year?
At the very least, as Mom might say, I could play it for laughs. Dig up a tasseled shawl or strip of mink and send pics of myself at the dressing table with a caption like “And how’s your summer going, dahling?”
“Duth everything thuit you?” Connie asked, all Sylvester the Cat sarcasm, as she opened another door to the en suite bathroom.
I turned from the window in a slow circle, my eyes tracing a line of the room’s encompassing beauty, its fireplace and four-poster, its paintings and bookshelves, skirted dressing table and crowned armoire, back to the window with its view of green lawn, blue sky, oyster sea.
“It’s the shite.” A Maggie-and-me word, a joke word, with a hint of Euro-cool.
But Connie frowned. “Remember your language. A child livth here.”
I moved to look out the bathroom window, which had a view of the pool, an imposing bluestone rectangle so meticulously landscaped that the idea of going for a swim in it seemed disruptive, like a prank. “Where is she, anyway?” I’d been listening for Isa since I’d walked in, but the house was silent. No thumping feet from the upper floor, not a giggle, not even a whisper.
Connie was looking through my bedroom window. I left the bathroom to follow her gaze outward to the lighthouse that stood on a high outcropping of rock, facing Skylark and separated by an inlet. I’d seen it as we’d driven up, but from this angle, the window framed it neat as a painting. “Likely gone out.”
I pointed. “As in all the way out there?”
“She yoothed to go out there quite a bit, latht year.” The housekeeper turned on me. “The Mithter didn’t tell you about what happened here latht year, did he?”
My mind sped through Miles’s email. The punch points. The time zone. The request not to bug him. “Is there something I should know?”
Connie didn’t answer. She smoothed a pinch in the curtain, stooped to pick a bit of fluff off the carpet, pulled out the handkerchief she kept in her watchband and honked into it. Then retucked the snotty cloth into place. “Go find her, when you’re thettled. It wath Jethie who encouraged her to do anything and everything. Though the differenth between a free thpirit and completely thpoiled I mutht be too old to tell.” And with an old lady’s sigh to prove it, she heaved my suitcase onto a small luggage rack at the foot of the bed and unzipped it, preparing to unpack my things.
I stepped in front of it. “I’ll take care of that.” Nasty snoop. I’d have to watch out. Find a good hiding place for my Ziploc, for starters. “Who’s Jessie, anyway?”
“The girl from latht thummer,” said Connie, reluctantly backing off my bag. “The girl who had your job?” Her voice quizzed me.
I shook my head. No, Miles McRae hadn’t mentioned Jessie.