Amber House (18 page)

“Where did you hide it?” a male voice growled. A fire somewhere behind me threw dancing light and shadows across a bare dirt drive in front of the oak on Amber House’s lawn. A man in breeches and rolled-up shirtsleeves paced in the dirt, rhythmically striking his boot with the riding crop he gripped. His face was dripping sweat, and fury boiled just beneath its composed surface. It was the Captain again, maybe a decade younger than at his son’s funeral. He stopped in front of a black woman, stripped naked to the waist, bound by her wrists to a low branch of the tree. “Where’s the child, you damned witch?”

She did not answer. The crop whistled as it arced down to land on her bare back, where red and bleeding welts crisscrossed the white stripes of old scars on both sides of her spine. Dark drops sprayed from the blow, and I could see that the crop’s leather was stained wet brown.

I would have thought the woman was dead — blood soaked the ground beneath her, and she was hanging limply from the ropes tied to her wrists. But each fall of the crop pulled a low mewling from her. Her groans mingled with sobs from a black-haired woman sprawled in the dirt — Deirdre, her face bruised, with blood seeping from a fresh split on her cheekbone. Beyond her, almost hidden in the shadows, the little girl with blond curls watched impassively.

I let the crop fall from my grasp and sank to the floor, back into the cold darkness of the attic. I knew now why all these things had been locked away. Perhaps they simply should have
been burned, but the past was hallowed in this place. In Amber House, even the ugliest memories were not destroyed.

“Put it all back,” I said again, and Jackson did as I asked without another question. He shut the chest and put the loop of the broken lock back through the hasp. Then he helped me to my feet. I felt old. I wished I had not seen.

I leaned on the arm he offered me, feeling the hard ridges of the scars beneath his sleeve. I wanted out of here; I did not ever want to come back.

Near the door, I noticed a large framed canvas tucked into the eave. I stopped. “Would you turn that around for me?”

He lifted it out. It was a portrait that had been slashed from corner to corner. Gingerly, I pushed the pieces back into place. A man stood before a velvet drape, his blue jacket splendid with gold buttons, a hat tucked under his arm. He had deep-set eyes over a long, slightly curving nose and a full, smiling mouth. I thought to myself, crazily, the words from the fairy tale:
What big teeth you have.

He was the Captain. The man I had just seen beating a woman nearly to death.

I jerked my hand back from the pieces. It occurred to me, then, that if I could measure this painting, I would find that its frame fit the pale spot in the entry hall exactly.

“Who is it?” Jackson asked.

“I think, coz,” I said, “that’s our great-great-whatever-grandfather.”

And I asked that he return him to his dark niche.

I followed Jackson closely to the landing on the second floor, where he stopped to shine the flashlight around the edges of a section of bare wood wall. With sureness, he reached up and
pushed a small, hidden catch. The wall sprang in a crack with a metallic groan, and Jackson inserted his fingers and pulled it all to one side. He’d found a hidden opening just across from the door to the nautical room. We spilled out, dropping down a few feet to the hall rug.

I looked back at the hole. A three-foot piece of wall — from the waist-high molding to the crown molding — now hung behind the neighboring wall. Jackson tugged the end of the sliding wall. It glided back into place with a quiet
snick
and the opening disappeared.

“How did you know?” I said.

“How did I know what?”

“How did you know how to open that?”

He shrugged. “It — just seemed logical.” He changed the subject. “Do you want me to keep you company until your family comes back?”

I shook my head. “Thanks. But I think I’d better take a shower, wash off some of the dust.”

He nodded, touched my face briefly. “You want to tell me what you saw?”

I nodded back, but said, “Just not tonight.”

“Okay.” He turned and headed for the west wing. I guessed he was going to slip out through the conservatory again.

I shut myself in the bathroom near my room and turned on all the lights. The girl in the mirror looked a mess. Tears had made tracks through the dust on my face. I hadn’t even realized I’d been weeping.

I felt a little better after a steaming-hot shower. I put on my PJs and headed back to my room carrying my filthy clothes. I was going to have to find a way to wash them myself — they were a mess, and there was a hole in one of the shirtsleeves from a splinter of wood that had gotten stuck in the rolled-up cuff. I
picked it out and wondered what I should do with it, wondered what it had broken off of.

“Sarah.”

Had Sammy come home while I was in the shower?

“Sarah.”

I headed toward Sammy’s bedroom. I felt like I was moving against a current, walking into air that rejected my presence. It was the same kind of feeling I’d had, come to think of it, a bunch of times, starting with that night in the conservatory.

I made myself open the door. The pale boy whom I’d just seen lying dead looked up from where he sat at the table.

“It’s all done,” he said. “See?”

A girl — Sarah-Louise — stepped forward from where I stood in the doorway and stopped behind him, her hands upon his shoulders. I could see he had gotten weaker. His skin clung to him tightly and seemed almost translucent. I wished I could tell them, warn them, death was almost there. But they knew. They didn’t need my warning.

Sarah-Louise smiled down at Matthew’s box. It was finished, polished.

“It is beautiful, dearest. How did you do this work?” she asked, running her fingers over the intricate pattern of inlaid hardwoods. She flipped open the top, and inside it was lined in velvet like a jewelry box, a mirror in the lid.

“This is the best part,” he said. “You push it here —” He slid one end of the box a quarter of an inch to the side. “Then you push this whole piece —” The back face moved one quarter inch into the void left by the first panel. “Then you can slide this one, and this one.” The bottom edge of the front came out entirely. “And see? — A hidden drawer. You can keep something in there and nobody will ever know.”

“You’re so clever, Matty.”

The other Sarah hugged her brother. Hugged him tight.

I tucked the piece of hardwood in my hands on the molding above my head, where it would be safe. Then I backed out of the room and closed the door.

Downstairs, the front door slammed. “Sarah!” Sammy’s voice this time, definitely. “Sarah! Look what I winned!”

I went on down. Sammy shouted his news, punctuating it with little jumps. “We played bingo, Sarah, and I got the bingo! I winned knives!” He held up a box of wood-handled steak knives.

Just what every five-year-old needs
, I thought, smiling a little.

Mom placed a steadying hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Go up and get ready for bed, sweetie.” I turned to go with him. “Not you, Sarah.” She cleared her throat.
Bad news.
“What exactly was the point of that performance today?”

“No point, Mom. I was racing.”

“But what were you
thinking
? Did you stop, even for a second, to think of what you had to lose?”

“So what if I beat Richard Hathaway?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Sarah. Let’s just think about that for a moment. Here you have a nice, good-looking boy who is taking you around, obviously making an effort to show you a good time. And you respond how? By going out of your way to humiliate him in front of all his friends? Is this why you’ve never had any boyfriends? Because you don’t have the faintest idea of how to treat them?”

I knew I was talking back more than I should, that I should have just let Mom vent so we could get to the end of it, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was too exhausted, too drained, to hold it
in. “I didn’t realize you were keeping a scorecard for my love life, Mom.” My smile was brittle.

“Not keeping score, honey. Just keeping track.”

“I’m not going to pretend to be incompetent just to make some boy feel good.”

“Richard aside, you’re not paying attention to what’s important here. I am trying to assure my children’s future by maximizing the sale of the assets that have been left to me. You sabotaged those efforts by offending Richard’s father. You remember him — the senator?”

“I was just sailing, Mom.” The words came out of my mouth like bullets.

She paused, regarding me for a moment, puzzled. Perhaps she saw my weariness. She finished her point, but her tone was mild. “You were hardly ‘just sailing’ and you know it. You were
competing
. That particular inclination of yours doesn’t kick in anywhere near often enough — in school, for example. But when it does, God help everyone in your path.” She sighed and shrugged. As if to say, spilt milk. “Good race.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled. “Sorry.”

“The trick in life, honey, is to think more and apologize less. I’m going to need your help again tomorrow morning. A writer from
Southern Home
cornered me today. She knows about Amber House, and she thought your party might make a good article for the magazine. She wants to come over to take some preliminary photos so she can pitch the idea to her editor.”

“That’s great, Mom.” Me in a ball gown at a coming-out party, captured for posterity and displayed in every magazine rack in the south. I wasn’t sure the money was worth it.

“It
is
great,” Mom said. “You’ll help me, won’t you?”

I swallowed my sigh. “Absolutely.”

“I’ll see you in the morning, then.” She turned toward her
bedroom, but stopped, turned back. “You feeling all right, honey? You have some pretty dark shadows under your eyes.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m okay. I just — want to go home, you know? I miss being home.”

“Me too,” she said. “But, it’s nice, I think, for you to have had this chance to get to know Amber House.”

As I turned back up the stairs, her words kept echoing in my head:
get to know Amber House.
It seemed that even in my mother’s mind, Amber House was more like a person than a thing.

I kept my promise to Rose the next morning — I found and scrambled a few eggs for Sammy and me. Put enough ketchup on them, they were almost edible. Sam didn’t complain.

“Sarah, how can you tell if it’s a dream?” He shoveled a bite into his mouth, as he pushed the little bits scattered on his plate into a pile with his fingers.

“How can I tell
what
is a dream, Sam?”

“You know” — the pile of little bits got pushed up onto his fork — “the stories that happen.
All
the stuff. How can you tell?”

“Well, like, give me an example, bud.”

“Well, for ’xample, I met this pretty lady who gave me a great toy.” He stuffed in the bite. Some of the little bits made it, some did not. “But now I can’t find the toy anywhere.”

“
Where
did you meet her?”

“In a dark room with no walls.”

“Oh,” I said, “then I’m pretty sure that one was a dream, Sam. Did you wake up after it?”

“Maybe I did,” he said dubiously. “I can’t remember.”

“See, Sam, that waking up thing is a pretty big clue. You gotta look for that part —”

A knock at the front door ended our philosophic musings. When I went to answer it, it turned out to be a florist delivering two large buckets of assorted flowers. The idea being, I supposed, to make the
Southern Home
writer think we had five hundred dollars worth of flowers around the house every day of the week.

Mom put me at the kitchen table with a pair of clippers and a dozen vases. My pronounced droop made her shake her head. “You’ve got to adjust to Maryland time, Sarah, and get some more sleep. You look like hell.” Ordinarily, I would have taken offense at the remark, but since I
felt
like hell, I thought it only fair.

She plunged on. “I need two big ones about this tall” — she held her hand up over a vase — “for the dining room and the living room. Start with the branches to give yourself a framework. Then” — she gestured to the smaller vases — “just assorted sizes for elsewhere. Give me one that’s all roses. Put a different mix in each of the little ones.”

She grabbed a couple of dust rags and a bottle of liquid wax, and I realized I had the better of the two jobs. So when she asked me dubiously, “You got it?” I said, “Yeah,” making myself sound certain.

“Sam?” she said. “You come help me dust.”

“All riiight,” he said excitedly. I smiled. I was never sure if his odd enthusiasms were just little-kidness or the autism. Not that it mattered. I liked them.

I’d hoped my assigned work would keep my mind occupied and off more unpleasant subjects, but it proved to be the perfect task for mental wandering. And all my wanderings took me back to a woman lashed to a tree and a baby being drowned in a bucket. Both acts committed by psychopaths in my family tree. It was kind of a hideous contrast to the cheerful faces of the asters, Peruvian lilies, amaryllis, and echinacea — each package had a little sticker to inform the ignorant. Which would be me.

I finished one. Not bad. Pretty good, in fact. I polished off the other one to the same effect.
All right
, I told myself wearily.
Way to go.

My mother came through the swinging door just then, glanced at the arrangements, and deftly shifted a few stems.
Instantly, the vases had a beauty that had not been there before. Long varied with short in an artful, careless rhythm.

That was Mom. Better than perfect.

She took up one large vase and headed toward the dining room. “Good job,” she said briskly. “Keep going.”

Sometimes it sucked to be me.

I slogged my way through a half-dozen more vases (long and short, balance the colors), when someone else came to the door. “I’ll get it,” I called, putting down the clippers.

Mom and I reached the door at the same time. It was a FedEx guy with a special package all for me from my school back home. One week’s worth of assignments.

“You’d better get started on that,” Mom said.

Did I mention that sometimes it sucked to be me?

I opened the envelope in my room, since I figured it would be infinitely easier to ignore if nobody else took an inventory of the contents. I dumped the two-inch stack of paper on my dresser and skimmed off the top half inch. Five work sheets with explanatory pages for geometry. I took two. Instructions from my history teacher for an essay “summarizing the causes of WWI.” Not today. A packet of ten work sheets for
Français. Merci
, Madame Anderson,
reine
of busywork. I set her whole packet on top of my two geometry sheets — my immediate to-do pile. I stuffed everything else back in the envelope. I’d worry about the rest later.

With the groan of the condemned, I found a pencil and started pushing it. Two hours later, I felt I had been sufficiently virtuous and put the remaining French work sheets aside.
Une autre fois
— another time. But at least, all the while I’d been working, I had not once revisited in my mind the agonies of the beaten slave woman.

I wished I knew who she was. I thought I might find some clue in Fiona’s journals. Since the man was the Captain, the whipping
had occurred in the late 1700s. I pulled out the four volumes I’d stuck under my bed and opened up the earliest volume. I ran my fingers over the tracings of script etched into the heavy paper. Some part of me heard the sound of a pen scratching, but I forced that thought aside. I only wanted to read about the past, not visit it.

Leafing through the first few pages, I saw that the entries were not in order. The dates jumped from month to month, year to year. All of them, however, fell within the decade written on the cover, 1770–80. I picked an entry at random and read.

Camilla? Who was that?
I wondered briefly what color her hair was.

Matthew and Sarah. My friends. Not merely brother and sister, but twins. I grieved for them a moment — for their loss, their separation — as if they were people I knew and not strangers long buried.

The journal entries made obvious what I had not understood before, and what Fiona’s editor had never known. None of my great-grandmother’s history was fiction. She had witnessed all the events in visions like mine. Which she’d recorded in these journals.

I flipped to another page:

Persephone? A child lost in the underworld? What sense did that make? Did this mean that Fiona could see someone
else
who was caught up in the same echo? Was that even
possible
? How would she know that? I thought to myself that I could wander a long time through Fiona’s disordered journals and never find the answer. But it explained her insistence on the statue guarding her pool. I wondered why Fiona couldn’t help this Persephone. And whether anybody else could.

Maybe the reason Fiona had spent time in a mental institution was because of the visions. I knew, from Gramma, that Fiona’s mother had been from the Deep South. Not part of the Amber House legacy. Maybe Fiona’s parents didn’t know about the gift. Maybe when Fiona had started seeing dead people, her parents figured she was — what was the term Mom had used? Schizophrenic.

I shuddered. I remembered reading about the things they did to people in asylums in the first half of the 1900s — electroshock
treatments, lobotomies. What would they have done to Fiona to make her thoughts “more normal”? For that matter, what would my mother do to me if she ever found out about the things I was seeing?

I took my great-grandmother’s book from the drawer and leafed through the beginning. I couldn’t find any reference to the slave woman, but about a third of the way in I found miniature portraits of Sarah and Matthew. The caption below the pictures identified the twins and reported that Matthew had died shortly after this likeness was made. Lower on the page, another picture showed Matthew’s headstone in the family cemetery, right beside that of his mother, who had died after him. Her inscription read,
DEIRDRE DOBSON FOSTER, BELOVED MOTHER. 1743 TO 1776. SHE SLIPPED DREAMING TO THE FURTHER SHORE.

I checked the brief index included at the back. The entry for “slavery” took me to pages about the woman identified in Fiona’s family tree as her grandmother, Maeve McCallister, who’d evidently been an abolitionist active in the Underground Railroad — the woman Gramma told me about. It was clear by the number of pages Fiona had dedicated to her that she’d been proud of this member of her family. I was proud of her too — at least one member of the family had tried to atone for the sins of our forefathers.

I picked the book up to move it to the bed, and loose papers fell from the back. They were written in a hand that wasn’t Fiona’s. The top sheet was dated June 20, 1969. That meant they must have been written by my grandmother.

I stared at the note in my hand and felt a familiar sense of outrage. Another shocker from my mother’s past. Mom must have gotten sick. Really sick. And she had never mentioned it.

It was beginning to seem like my mother had never told me anything about her childhood. Like she’d kept it all hidden. I wondered what had made her sick, what had happened after. I started to look through the pages for answers, but my mom yelled up the stairs.

“Sarah? Phone.”

I put the loose papers back in the book and the book back in my drawer. Then I went down to the phone in the front hall.

“So, Parsons, you ran a pretty decent race.”

I was impressed. I never thought I’d hear from Richard again, let alone get a pat on the back. “Just got lucky,” I said.

“B.S. They obviously know how to train you up there in the Arctic Circle.”

I chuckled. “Seattle’s not quite arctic, but you don’t want to fall off the boat. Water can be pretty cold. I would know.”

He laughed. “Come to school with me tomorrow. Hang out with us.”

Wow.
Let’s see. No work, don’t have to pay attention, not going to be called on when I don’t know the answer, just try to look good standing next to the best-looking boy I’d ever seen outside of a magazine?
And
escape this house
and
my mother? “Sure,” I said.

“I’ll pick you up at eight forty-five.”

“Cool. See you.”

“Later, Parsons.”

Mom had come at the beginning of the call to loiter unobtrusively. She was eyeing me now like she wanted to grill me. I just smiled. And said absolutely nothing.

“The photographer is here and needs my help,” she finally
said. “I didn’t have a chance to fix your brother some lunch. Make him something?”

I shrugged. I hadn’t had lunch either.

Sammy was sitting at the table when I got to the kitchen. “Me and Heavy Bear are hungry, Sarah. We want grilled cheese sammiches.”

“Looks like P. B. and J., bud. What kind of jam?”

“Nope. Not peanut butter. Grilled cheese.”

“And grape jam it is.” I pulled the jam from the fridge and went looking for the peanut butter that had to be somewhere. “Want some banana slices in that?”

“
Nope.
We want grilled cheese. We
hate
peanut butter.”

Okay. Sounds like I was being mean. But I knew the rules of this game. A kid with Sammy’s mental wiring will get it in his head that he wants to eat something, and nothing else in the world will do. And, you know, he’s little, and he’s weird, and you want to be nice and make life easier. But my dad told me a long time ago that I wasn’t doing Sammy any favors by letting him win — he had to learn to see the world differently, to accept other people had needs too. So I had to be more stubborn than Sammy, and, turns out, I was fine with that. In fact, I kind of had a natural aptitude for that. Especially when I didn’t feel like cooking.

“Listen up, squirt. First, I know for a fact you don’t hate peanut butter. You eat it all the time. Second, I am
not
cooking grilled cheese. I am
not
washing a pan. If I’m making the lunch, you can have peanut butter or you can have cereal. Now, what’ll it be?”

“Peanut butter,” he said with resignation.

I fixed two sandwiches, one for each of us. We were down to crusts when Jackson came to the back door. He stuck his head in, smiling. “I gotta get something for Gran for dinner. She’ll be home this afternoon. Sam? You wanna come?”

“Me
and
Sarah,” he said, taking my hand as if he did not mean to let it go.

“Okay,” Jackson said in a measured voice. “If Sarah wants to come.”

A trip to the grocery store?
I shrugged mentally.
Sure.
“Um, if we’re heading into town, I should change my clothes.” The jeans were okay, but the oversized tee I’d stolen from Dad — not really fit for public.