The Fate of Mercy Alban (2 page)

But then she heard it again. Louder this time. A voice?

She tried to listen closely—her ears were full of the ringing that came with age—but she couldn’t quite make out what the voice was saying. She wasn’t even sure of the language. It sounded ancient and guttural, like it was coming from another place, a more savage and primitive time. And then the memory hit her—she had heard this voice once before, on a summer night many years ago. But it couldn’t be. Could it?

Adele shuddered and rose to her feet, wanting very much to be in the company of someone else. Jane, Mr. Jameson, anyone. She hurried down the hill toward the fountain where she had found him that night, all those years ago. But the voice was louder there. It came swiftly nearer until it was right behind her, whispering in her ear. She swung around and could not believe her eyes.
What sort of magic is this?
It was the last thought that ran through her mind before everything went black.

Jane looked at the clock. That journalist would be here in no time, now wouldn’t he? Where was Mrs. Alban? Jane rambled from the living room to the library, poked her head into the study—no sign of her employer anywhere. And she certainly wouldn’t be in the kitchen, Jane thought with a hint of a smile.

“Mrs. Alban?” she called up the grand staircase. No response. Jane put her hand on the cherry-wood banister and thought about the dusting she’d do tomorrow.

Reaching the second floor, she scurried down the hallway and knocked quickly on the door of the master suite. She pushed open the door and poked her head inside. “Ma’am?”

And then it settled around her like a cloak, the deafening silence. There was no energy, no noise, no signs of life. This enormous house was empty but for her.

Jane hurried down the stairs and out onto the front patio, spotting the gardener kneeling over a rosebush.

“Mr. Jameson!” Jane called out, rushing toward him down the smooth marble patio steps and into the immaculately manicured English garden that he had coaxed to life in this harsh, northern climate for a half century. She was out of breath when she reached him and took a moment to recover before speaking.

“And what can I do for you, Mrs. Jameson?” Her husband, Thomas Jameson, smiled at her.

“It’s herself,” she said breathlessly, looking into his eyes and putting a hand on his chest. “She went out for a walk on the hill this morning and hasn’t come back. That fool journalist is supposed to be here soon, and …” She stopped as she watched her husband’s expression fade from amusement into worry.

“How long ago, did you say?”

“About an hour. A bit more than that now.”

“Did she have any shopping to do?” Mr. Jameson asked, looking across the rose garden toward the carriage house where Carter, the family’s driver, lived. “I didn’t notice the car pull out, but Carter might have driven her somewhere.”

Jane shook her head. “I don’t think so. Why would she go anywhere when someone was coming here to meet with her?”

“All the same, I’ll check in with him. And I’ll get the lads to help us search the grounds.” He put down his shears and took his wife’s hands into his own. “Don’t you worry, dear. I’m sure she’s all right. We’ll find her. You go back up to the house now and wait.”

As Mr. Jameson strode off in search of Carter and the two young men he had hired earlier that spring to help with the gardens, Jane hurried back up the steps to the house.
Where was the old girl?
She rushed from one room to another, one floor to another. Forty rooms later, Jane was officially panicked.

She wound up in the green-and-black-tiled solarium, a room full of leafy plants, gurgling fountains, and plush sofas and chairs, where Mrs. Alban always took her tea in the afternoons.

Breathing heavily after all that rushing around, Jane sank down onto one of the wicker chairs and fished a tissue out of the pocket of her apron, dabbing at her brow. But she couldn’t sit still. The feeling, the same one that had taken hold of her moments before when she was upstairs, was stronger now. Nobody else was alive in this house.

“Mrs. Jameson!” Her husband’s muffled voice startled Jane, and she pushed herself up to her feet and rushed out the doors onto the patio where he and Carter were climbing the steps toward the house.

“Well?” Jane asked, knowing the answer by the look on her husband’s face.

“Nary a trace,” he said. “We’ve searched the entire grounds. More than once. Even the cemetery beyond, thinking she might have been visiting the relatives, so to speak.”

Carter shook his head. “I don’t like this.”

“I don’t like it, either,” Jane said, her voice a low whisper. “Something just doesn’t feel right.”

“Aye,” her husband said, pulling the blue felt fisherman’s cap from his head and twisting it in his hands. “Aye.”

“Tell the lads to search the grounds again,” she said. “I’ll get us some iced tea while we wait. But if they don’t find her soon, it might be time to call the police.”

A few moments later, Jane joined her husband and Carter on the patio with a pitcher of iced tea and three glasses on a tray.

As she was pouring, Jane’s gaze drifted toward the main garden in front of the house, the one with the fountain and the manicured hedges. Her shriek pierced the afternoon’s silence as the pitcher tumbled out of her hand and shattered on the cool cement floor, the dark tea pooling in the crevices like blood.

After a restless flight from Seattle to Minneapolis, my daughter and I rented a car and drove northward, watching the landscape change from city to suburb to farm fields to pine forests. Cresting the top of the hill near Spirit Mountain, I took a quick breath in as I saw the expansive view before me—the bay between the cities of Duluth and Superior, the iconic Aerial Lift Bridge, rising and falling to accommodate the massive ships that needed to get into the port, and the flood of city on either side of the bay that seemed to have crested in my absence. Beyond all that, the vastness and ferocity of Lake Superior shimmered. Taking it in for the first time in two decades, I felt my stomach twist itself into knots.

I had come home to bury my mother, an event that seemed as surreal to me as the circumstances of her passing. As I drove down the hill toward town, it felt like time itself was ticking backward, the years folding in on top of themselves as though I were leafing through a book, back to the page when my mother was a vibrant fifty-year-old who still rowed on this greatest of lakes every summer morning. It simply didn’t seem possible that death could find her or, if it did, that she couldn’t persuade it to come back another day.

I wondered if it all hadn’t been a mistake, if I would arrive at the house to find her on the patio sipping a glass of lemonade or a gin and tonic, as she liked to do in the summer months.

Looking back on it now, it wouldn’t surprise me if my mother’s spirit had indeed been hovering as I drove toward the house that day. Not to welcome me home but to warn me of what was awaiting me there—memories that would unearth themselves from the graves I had dug to contain them, and things much stranger than that, monstrous things that would creep and lurk and hide. I’ve always known that old houses are full of such things, Alban House most of all.

As I turned into our driveway, I gasped aloud when I saw a ticket booth at the end of what was now a parking lot. I knew the croquet lawn had been paved over, but it still gave me a jolt to see dark asphalt where the grass my father tended so carefully—obsessively, my mother always teased—used to be.

Visions of our annual summer parties crept into my mind—girls in cotton dresses, boys in seersucker suits, lemonade we’d secretly spike with vodka. A croquet tournament in the afternoon; a bonfire on the lakeshore at night. I could see the shadows of my brothers, the twins Jake and Jimmy, running their ridiculous victory lap around the croquet lawn, mallets held high over their heads. The sound of their laughter floated around me before diminishing little by little until it was gone, as if it were buoyed downstream on a river of memory that flowed through this place and through me.

My daughter’s voice pulled me back from those visions of the past. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing toward the booth and pulling the earbuds out of her ears for the first time in the nearly three hours it took to drive here from the Minneapolis airport.

“The house is, well … it’s sort of a museum now, remember?” I reminded her.

Amity’s face didn’t betray any hint of recognition. She furrowed her brows. “What do you mean, a museum?”

“We talked about this, honey.”

She opened her eyes wide and shrugged with the particular type of silent sarcasm that only teenage girls seemed to possess. I sighed and tried again. “The university asked us if it could conduct public tours of the first floor of the house and the garden because of their historic value. I told you all of this last year.”

“I don’t get it. It’s just an old house.”

“Oh, Amity, for goodness’ sake.” I pulled through the parking lot and into our driveway. “Why don’t you read a history book or, better yet, listen when your family talks to you? In any case, it couldn’t matter less right now.”

Instantly, I regretted my shortness with her and put my hand on her arm. “Sorry, honey,” I started, but she had already slumped back into her seat and put the earbuds back into her ears. Another fantastic mother-daughter moment.

As I climbed out of the car, I noticed a woman poke her head out the ticket booth’s door, eye us suspiciously, and then skitter across the parking lot toward us, her high heels clicking all the way. “Excuse me!” she chirped, wagging a finger at me. “Excuse me! You can’t park there!”

I ignored her and opened the rental car’s tailgate as Amity unfolded herself from the passenger seat.

“This driveway isn’t for visitors, and besides, the house is closed,” the woman huffed, finally reaching us. “I’m sorry, but there are no tours today or for the foreseeable future. And we don’t want people wandering around the gardens on their own. That’s not allowed.”

“I’m not here for a tour,” I said, managing a smile. “I’m Grace Alban.” I watched as the woman’s scowl melted into confusion and then recognition.

Then a breathless stream of backpedaling. “Oh! Miss Alban! I’m so sorry! I should have recognized you right away!”

“That’s okay,” I said with a nod. “I haven’t been here in quite a while. Thanks for being so vigilant, keeping people out. We appreciate it, especially now.”

“I’m Susan Johnson,” she said quickly, still staring wide-eyed at me. “I’m with the university. I’m just here gathering some things. We’re not sure how long the house will be closed or if we’ll be able to open it up again.” She squinted at me. “I suppose that’s up to you now.”

I supposed it was.

She clutched her clipboard tighter to her chest. “I’m so sorry about your mother. We all are. What a wonderful lady.”

Tears were stinging at my eyes, so I grabbed my bag from the back of the car and nodded to Amity to do the same. “Thank you,” I said to the woman as I popped the suitcase’s handle up into place, grateful for something to distract me from her concerned face. “We’ll be in touch with you about reopening, but don’t plan on it for a while.”

“Of course. And, Miss Alban, this goes without saying, but if there’s anything the university can do …”

“Thank you,” I said to her again, eyeing her name tag. “Susan.”

I turned and let myself look at my home, Alban House, for the first time in twenty years. The redbrick façade rising three stories tall, the parapets jutting out from the roof, the enormous stone patio running the entire length of the house facing the lake, the stairs down to the gardens that framed the property—none of it had changed at all.

Growing up in Alban House, I felt I was a princess living in an enchanted castle, and indeed, the house was designed to look like one, patterned after the Jacobean estates European kings built for themselves in centuries past. But I soon learned people who lived in castles—the ones I read about in my storybook fairy tales—didn’t necessarily live enchanted lives. Not sweetly enchanted, anyway. Strange and otherworldly things swirled around them, threatening, no,
wanting
their happiness. At least that’s how the stories I read went. I held my breath as I realized I was walking right back into mine.