The Trespassers (2 page)

On a bright, clear day Halcyon Grove was an enchanted place, its mysterious green-tinged shadows spangled with filtered sunlight, but today the light was dim and gray, and wisps of ocean fog drifted among the trees in ghostly veils. They walked silently down the steep slope among live oak and madrone trees and then into the deeper forest of redwoods and ponderosa pines that grew along the bed of the creek. Great towering trees that were native to the Monterey coast but which, in this particular place, had actually been planted years ago by gardeners so that the Hutchinsons could have their own private forest.

As they made their way through the dense grove Neely stole a glance now and then in her brother’s direction to see if the old familiar magic was working. But today nothing seemed to help. Grub just went mooching along, his face puckered into a pug-nosed mask of tragedy.

For a moment Neely felt angry. Why should it always be her responsibility to cheer Grub up? After all, she was just his sister and only three years older than he was. But somehow it had always been more or less that way. She didn’t know why exactly, except that she and Grub were a special case, being what some people called afterthought children and therefore almost like a separate family. After their parents had had Aaron and Julie and Lucinda, almost ten years had gone by before Neely was born, and then three years after that came the final afterthought, Gregory Bradford—or as Aaron called him when they brought him home from the hospital, “the Grub.”

So maybe it was just that by the time Grubbie came along no one had the time or energy left to cope with things like his gloom-and-doom attacks. No one except Neely, and from time to time even she ran out of the kind of patience it took to deal with Grub’s weird personality.

It did help, of course, that he was so gorgeous. If you’re going to be a pain in the neck, it helps to be a beautiful one—though, of course, the opposite is true too. From very personal experience Neely knew that if you’re not beautiful you’d better not be a nuisance—not if you know what’s good for you.

If, for instance, you happened to inherit a square jaw and straight, no-particular-color hair instead of the fine features, masses of dark curls, and enormous long-lashed eyes of the Bradford side of the family, you really needed to work on your other talents. Talents such as poise and personality, which Neely apparently had plenty of, if poise and personality accounted for the fact that her classmates had elected her class president or secretary or treasurer more times than she could remember.

But having to make up for a lack in the appearance department was one problem Grub would never have to deal with. Even today, trudging along with his curly head bent down and a gloomy frown dipping the ends of his eyebrows and the corners of his lips, Grub somehow managed to look disgustingly charming. It really wasn’t fair. Neely sighed and looked the other way.

They were climbing again on the far side of the valley where the road wound its way up toward the entrance to the Hutchinson estate, when Neely suddenly realized that Grub wasn’t there beside her, nor anywhere on the road behind her—as if he had suddenly faded away into the drifting fog.

F
OR A MOMENT, LOOKING DOWN THE EMPTY FOG-DIMMED
lane, Neely felt a twinge of anxiety, but she had barely started back the way they had come when she noticed a movement in the underbrush. And there, on the ground behind a tall clump of ferns, was Grub. Crouching down on his hands and knees, he seemed to be completely engrossed in something on the ground in front of him.

Good, Neely thought. Grub had always been so fascinated by every kind of living thing that sometimes all it took to cure one of his depressions was an unusual bug, or butterfly, or even a particularly gruesome slug. All prepared to make an enthusiastic fuss over whatever it was he’d found—
Wow! Look at that! Isn’t that the most beautiful...or interesting...or slimiest...or whatever seemed appropriate
—she hurried over to squat down beside him—and immediately realized that what Grub had found this time wasn’t going to help at all. It was a tiny baby squirrel. A tiny dead baby squirrel. And death had been high on Grub’s anxiety list since he was about four years old, when he’d started asking everyone to explain death, and tell him why God allowed it to happen.

Reaching out with one finger, Grub touched the tiny furry head between its pitiful little sunken eyes and then looked up at Neely.

“Why?” he said in a quavering voice. “Why did it have to die, Neely?”

“Look, Grub.” Neely knew she was sounding exasperated but she couldn’t help it. The “why death” question was one Grub had pestered her with for so long she’d pretty much run out of answers. “I’ve told you before, and so have Mom and Dad, that there’s just no point in—”

But at that very moment she heard something that made her lose track of what she was saying...the nearby stutter and chug of an approaching car. Crouching down beside Grub she whispered, “Shhh. Get down. It’s Reuben.”

Peering through the ferns, they watched as a rusty old pickup truck struggled around the curve, weaving from side to side as it bounced in and out of the deep ruts. Inside the cab a slouching figure topped by a floppy old hat was just visible through the dusty window. It was Reuben all right, on his way to the highway on his regular Monday trip to Monterey.

Reuben Flores, who lived in a small cabin behind the main house at Halcyon, had been the watchman and caretaker of the Hutchinson property for as long as Neely could remember. His dog, a very large mastiff called Lion, was, according to rumor, attack trained and a vicious man-killer. Whenever Reuben left Halcyon, which he did every Monday and usually on Saturdays, too, he turned Lion loose to roam the estate grounds. Which meant that no one—no local kids and not even any nosy tourists—dared so much as set foot on the Hutchinson property. No one dared, that is, except Grub and Neely Bradford, who had been regular visitors to the grounds of Halcyon House for almost two years.

Grub had been only six years old at the time of their first visit to the estate grounds. On that particular day he and Neely had been playing a game in the grove. The game, if Neely remembered correctly, had been based on
The Jungle Book
, which was one of their favorites that year. Grub, as Mowgli, had run off pretending to be kidnapped by the Bandar Log. But when Neely, playing the part of Bagheera, the black panther, went to the rescue, Grub wasn’t in any of their regular hiding places.

She had looked everywhere and was getting a little frantic when she heard a giggle coming from the other side of the huge wrought iron fence that surrounded the estate grounds. And there she had finally found Grub, sitting on the ground in the middle of the Hutchinsons’ weed-grown driveway, being enthusiastically slobbered over by the terrible Lion. Lion, it seemed, like almost every other animal Grub had ever met, had fallen in love with him at first sight.

After that amazing discovery they had returned many times to visit Lion—and the grounds of the estate. All they had to do was watch and listen for Reuben’s pickup as it chugged past their house, and they would be off, up the hill, down into the grove, and from there into the estate grounds. Then, with Lion trotting happily along beside them, they would explore the weed-grown lawns and gardens, the crumbling tennis court, the grand old stable with its high-domed hayloft, and even walk along the leaf-strewn verandas of the huge house, trying to peek in through the shuttered windows.

Neely was particularly fascinated by the windows. Windows of deserted houses, she had always thought, were like sad, empty eyes, forever weeping invisible tears for the warmth and life they had once known. And the windows of Halcyon House were particularly spellbinding because of all the strange things she had heard about the people who had once lived within its walls.

But it was impossible to see very much through the cracks in the heavy old shutters. So the secrets of Halcyon House remained hidden away. Hidden, that is, until that day. The day of Grub’s cholesterol anxiety attack.

N
EELY WAITED UNTIL REUBEN HAD COMPLETELY DISAPPEARED
into the fog before she crawled out from behind the ferns. Standing in the middle of the road, she looked back to where her brother was again staring mournfully at the dead squirrel. “Come on, Grub,” she said suddenly. “Let’s go.” She didn’t have to say where.

Grub gave the dead squirrel one last lingering glance, got to his feet, and without a word led the way into the estate grounds. Not, of course, by way of the grand gateway where wrought iron vines twisted up sturdy pillars and formed themselves into an archway of ornate letters spelling the word
Halcyon
. Passing by the gate, which as always was locked and chained and doubly padlocked, they went on up the slope to where a dense thicket of Scotch broom grew up on both sides of the fence. There, in the midst of the thicket, a socket had rusted out, so one of the iron fence poles could be pushed to one side, leaving a sizable gap. A gap through which Grub had crawled on that first day when he discovered that Lion was really a pussycat—and through which he, and Neely as well, had crept many times since.

Inside the fence they zigzagged through the weeds, tiptoeing carefully and as lightly as possible to avoid establishing a telltale path to their secret entrance. But once on the driveway they needed only to follow the deep ruts worn by Reuben’s pickup. The road rose steeply here as it curved and twisted through a grove of ornamental trees and bushes, ending on the high plateau from which Halcyon House had looked down for more than eighty years...down over the narrow wooded valley that cut through the treeless plain and on out to the endless blue of sea and sky. They had just reached the plateau when Lion emerged from behind the house and bounded out to meet them.

Grub’s giggle sounded almost normal when Lion showered him with sloppy kisses, and later when they discovered the tadpoles in the stagnant water of the swimming pool, his behavior certainly seemed to be typical Grubbiness. Squatting at the water’s edge, he stared at the bug-eyed black blobs in the slimy green water with the kind of concentration that most kids save for their favorite TV programs. Watching Grub watch the tadpoles, Neely decided the sky-is-falling syndrome was over, at least for the time being, which was a decided relief.

After the tadpoles finally lost their charm, they moved on past Reuben’s tiny cottage and Lion’s enormous doghouse, and then through the rose garden, to pay a visit to the stable. The beautiful old stable, built in the same massive rustic style as the house itself, was one of Neely’s favorite places and a visit there was always included when she and Grub visited the grounds of Halcyon.

They entered the stable by the small door set into one of the large double panels that had once opened to accommodate wagons or trucks. Once inside it was necessary to wait for a few moments while their eyes accustomed themselves to the dim light before they could move forward over the dusty inlaid brick floor. Neely loved walking down the central corridor sniffing carefully for the faint faraway odor of hay and horse and imagining beautiful Thoroughbred and Arabian heads sticking out over the doors of the roomy box stalls on either side.

Leaving the stables, they moved on slowly across the weed-grown lawns, pushed their way through the trailing tentacles of vine in the sagging grape arbor, and then came back to rest on a stone bench at the edge of what had once been a rose garden.

The bench faced the south wing of the house, where an ancient wisteria vine coiled around the stone pillars that supported the roof of the veranda. From that angle, facing away from the weed-grown lawns and gardens, the house, seen by itself, still looked grand and imposing. The lower level with its walls and pillars of gray fieldstone looked as if it would last forever, and even the upper floors with their heavy wooden shingles seemed almost untouched by time. It was only the peeling paint on door and window frames and a few sagging shutters that spoiled the illusion. But if Neely squinted her eyes only a little, the house looked almost as magnificent as it must have during its days of glory.

She often thought about those olden days at Halcyon House.

“Dad says there were parties here all the time,” she told Grub, “with people going up our road in fancy cars with chauffeurs in uniforms.”

Grub’s eyes were unfocused. “And carriages with lots of white horses.”

Neely laughed. “No, silly. Dad’s not that old. And the house isn’t that old. Dad says it was built in 1910, and there were already cars by then. And by the time Dad can remember, there were lots of cars.”

Grub shrugged. “There were carriages once, with white horses. I read all about it in the encyclopedia.”

He hadn’t, of course. Anytime Grub wanted to win an argument he claimed to have read about it in the encyclopedia. But Neely didn’t ask him if he was telling the truth. She and Grub had always had a kind of silent agreement about certain kinds of questions. The agreement was that they didn’t ask questions about whether something was “really true” or not. “Really true” questions were absolutely out. And besides, she rather liked the thought of the horse-drawn carriages herself.

She was still imagining the horses when Grub asked, “Why did they all go away?”

“You know why,” Neely said. “Dad told us. And I’ve told you before. Lots of times.”

“I know, but I want to hear it again. I want to hear it now, while I’m looking at the house.”

That made sense. Neely was sure she could tell it better while the grand old house was right there in front of her.

“Well,” she began. “The first Harold Hutchinson was a very rich man. The richest man in the whole world.” She wasn’t sure about that last part, but it did make the story more exciting. She could tell that Grub liked it, too, so she added some more.

“He was so rich that he had dozens of houses all over the world. So many houses that some of them he only lived in for three or four days out of the whole year. He had grand palaces in Europe and everywhere and when he was going to visit them a whole army of servants would come first and clean everything up and put flowers in all the rooms. And then the Hutchinsons would come roaring up in huge silver Rolls-Royces, with all their friends and relations, and they’d stay for two or three days and then they’d go away for another year.”