by Audrey Keown
He folded his handkerchief and tucked it back in his pocket. “I’ll call a plumber in the morning to inspect the pipes. For now, I’ll turn off the water supply to the main-floor bathrooms, and you can place the ‘out of order’ sign at the door.”
After a quick trip to the boiler room, he met me back at the desk. “Did everything else go all right tonight?”
“Yep.” Except for the gravestone group. “Actually, there was a small issue.”
“Yes? How can I help?”
“You know the group that was booked to arrive, the grave-studying club?”
“Ah, right. Unusual hobby, don’t you think? If only it were Halloween.”
I smiled. “So, they seem to think they’re going to tour graves here.”
He brushed a stray thread from the surface of the desk.
“Here,” I said. “At the hotel.”
He looked at me expectantly. “Did they want to preview the tour information? I’ll bring it back with me in the morning.”
“You’re giving them a tour? You mean there are graves here on the property?”
He scrunched his eyebrows slightly and lifted one side of his mouth. “I thought you might have figured that out by now, Miss Nichols. Of course, Ms. King has gone to great lengths to keep them secret.”
I thought of Pan, of the satyrs, of Aeneas, whose story Mr. Fig had told me after I had found the secret passage last year. “The garden statues are memorials?”
“Many of them.”
A cold drip seemed to trickle down my spine, and I shivered. “I guess Clarista thinks a cemetery out back might put guests off.”
“Precisely.” He folded his hands. “Mr. Zhang keeps the plants trimmed neatly, but by design, they are allowed to grow tall enough to cover the inscriptions.”
Mr. Zhang, our secretive gardener, was technically bound to the same restrictive period standards as the rest of us, but out on the grounds, he had more freedom from Clarista’s and Mr. Fig’s examining eyes than us indoor staff.
“I guess I haven’t looked at the statues closely enough,” I said.
“Well. I’m awake. You’re awake.”
A laugh burst out of me. He was never this casual. “What? Now? And leave the desk unattended?”
What had come over him?
“Just this once.” He narrowed his eyes conspiratorially.
I sighed with satisfaction. The times he bent the rules for me were few and far between, but I’d never seen him do it for anyone else, definitely not for day-shift Doyle.
Mr. Fig knew he could trust me to keep this between us. If I explored my shadow self, which by Carl Jung’s definition was the unexplored side of the psyche, I was sure I’d find a buried urge to gloat about the special treatment. However, I’d never give in to that instinct and let the others think Mr. Fig was susceptible to a character flaw like favoritism. (My dad had expected me to be bored with Jung by now, but I was still heartily obsessed.)
My jacket was in the staff dressing room downstairs, but we kept a few coats in the hall closet for this sort of occasion, most of them forgotten relics of former guests.
I slipped my arms through a vintage fur cape. Something so lux would never have been worn by a servant in this house, and I enjoyed the incongruence.
Mr. Fig had a manner of turning and walking away that encouraged me to follow him, and he did so now, although he was slightly less debonair wearing his cardigan than his butler’s uniform.
As I passed my great-great-grandfather Murdoch’s painting, I threw him a quick salute before catching up to Mr. Fig at the end of the portrait gallery.
He opened the beveled glass door when he reached it and paused to let me go before him.
A gust of frigid air blew my skirt against my legs.
It was thirty degrees out there, which wouldn’t have felt so cold except that yesterday’s low had been sixty. Tennessee weather was fickle like that, but it conditioned us inhabitants into vigorous people.
We stepped out and rounded the corner of the terrace, my dress sweeping a wide trail in the snow. Most of the statues were in the back garden.
“Be sure to take the rail,” Mr. Fig said. “The stairs are coated with ice. I’ll salt them before I leave.”
“The temperature’s going back up tomorrow, right?”
“Yes, but there’ll be little sun to warm the northern exposure. I don’t want anyone falling.”
When we reached the foot of the long staircase, the frosted garden wrapped around us on three sides. The greenish-copper lampposts shined little moons on the silver ground.
At the sight, I almost forgot the cold. It’d been years since Chattanooga had seen a blanket of white like this one.
Mr. Fig offered me his arm, and we strolled down the path together. At one corner, he stopped and faced the nearest snow-topped statue—or memorial?
Long Grecian braids framed her attentive face. She had eagle wings, and a tail fanned behind her. In her arms she cradled something small and perhaps human.
“What is she?” I looked at Mr. Fig.
“A harpy.”
“I thought harpies were ugly monsters.”
“Indeed, sometimes thieves of children even, but the earliest mention of the creatures is more complimentary than that. They were often agents of justice.”
If it was a memorial, there would be an epitaph on the base, which was shielded by shiny green gardenia leaves. I put a foot into the snowy bed and pushed a branch back to read the inscription. Lucretia Lillian Morrow. 1896–1920. Kings might be espoused to more fame / But king nor peer to such a peerless dame.
“Shakespeare,” Mr. Fig said. “From his poem about the most famous Lucretia.”
“Oh. But Lucretia Morrow was who? I mean, in relation to me.”
“Your great-grandfather Blandus’s sister.”
That meant she was the daughter of Murdoch and Lillian, who had built the house. Her middle name was her mother’s first.
Mr. Fig shifted a leaf off the path with the toe of his shoe. “Your family often called her ‘Good Lucretia.’ She worked as a nurse overseas in the First World War, I believe, and died shortly after, quite young, as you can see.”
An image of war-era nurses in their distinctive white, folded caps popped into my head. My mental picture was black-and-white, removed by several degrees from Lucretia’s experience. An ache tightened my throat, and I walked away.
Mr. Fig followed me to the next-nearest statue, centered in a trefoil-shaped, fluff-topped hedge.
“A replica of the famous statue of Marcellus as Hermes Logios, a first-century Roman work,” Mr. Fig said.
Maybe it was the snow obscuring the figure’s features, but the man looked like George to me, with his long Roman nose and lean shape. Even the sculpture’s marble was like George’s pale skin.
But Marcellus wasn’t wearing a stitch, and as close as my best friend and I had been for the last sixteen years, I’d never seen him in the buff.
A memory surfaced of the time I had accidentally walked in on George changing into his soccer uniform at fourteen. He’d had his boxer shorts on, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. If anything, the encounter had taught us just how much awkwardness we were willing to get over in order to hold on to our friendship. Anyway, the fleshy sight of him then hadn’t ignited any feelings in me. He’d been all height and no muscle. Not like now.
My face felt hot and cold at the same time.
“The original Marcellus sculpture was owned by Pope Sixtus the Fifth and France’s Louis the Fourteenth before ending up in the Louvre,” Mr. Fig said.
“Wow,” was my highly educated response.
Around the plinth were rosebushes that had broken free of their winter dormancy just weeks before the frost. When I pushed aside their branches, the Latin inscription was barely visible.
“This one is dedicated to Blandus,” Mr. Fig said. “Marcellus, like your great-grandfather, was a powerful and effective leader.”
I saw now a
t the base of the statue a rectangular marble slab that clearly marked his grave.
“Miss Nichols.” Mr. Fig inhaled. “I want to prepare you, if I may. Your family has been, in your mind, whatever you wanted them to be … for a long time.”
Behind him, the hemlocks’ white sleeves reached for the darkness at the end of the bluff.
“They’ve been a frustrating mystery mostly,” I said.
“There’s a touch of the romantic in mysteries. While they last, they’re open-ended and, therefore, full of hope.”
I’d never heard him talk this way. Almost—what was it?—wistful.
“However, filling in the very real details about your family’s lives and character …” He looked pointedly at me. “Sometimes it can be difficult to take a revered loved one off the pedestal one has built for them.”
Our current positions next to a statue on a pedestal, whose purpose was to immortalize my ancestor, underlined his words with irony.
I didn’t want to argue with him. I was sure he was right. Digging into the past was always a risky endeavor.
But reality was so much better than fantasy in the end. The truth was something firm to build your life on. I wasn’t an orphan, and yet, for years now, I’d felt like a leaf lost in the wind. I needed to root myself to the people who had come before me.
“Are you talking about their mental health?” I said. “I know about my great-great-grandmother Lillian’s psychosis. And I know she must have passed it down.”
“Those aren’t character flaws, as much as the family tried to hide them,” he said.
The same strand of mental illness caused my panic attacks—at least I’d always thought so. My old psychiatrist and the therapist I’d started seeing last month had suggested that parts of my past were also to blame.
Mr. Fig knew all about my panic disorder, and he gave me leeway when I needed it, but he never made me feel pathetic.
“I don’t blame the Morrows for trying to hide their issues,” I said. “They lived in a time that was less understanding.” Even less, I should have said.
I glanced up at the house. Its golden limestone walls, lit softly by the terrace lamps, faded into shadow toward the roofline. On the third floor, a light flicked off in the Romulus or the Remus room. I wasn’t sure which.
“I should get back to the desk,” I said.
“I believe I am up to the task.” He smiled softly. “Take your time.”
I watched him walk back to the house, all my affection for him squeezing my throat.
Before last October, I hadn’t been able to see why he favored me. The small allowances he made for me were like floaters in my eye that disappeared when I tried to focus on them. When I found out that he had worked in this house decades ago and knew I was a descendant of the family to whom he was still so loyal, I understood the reason for his soft spot.
For him, I was already one of them.
I was still trying to figure out what it meant to fill those Morrow shoes, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t doing it yet.
The need to feel closer to my family ruled me, but I was careful not to use Mr. Fig for information or overwhelm him with my constant questions.
We had years, maybe decades, to be friends.
Of all the people who must have worked for my ancestors, only he had found a way to come back. And now he was the backbone of this place. It couldn’t run without him.
II
Burning Love
I waited until I got to work the next afternoon to talk to George about the graves.
He’d be more responsive in person than over text. Three-quarters of his communication was in the angle of his shoulders, the dance of his coal-black eyebrows, and a variety of nonverbal sounds that, over the course of our friendship, I’d learned to interpret. Fluency in this language really paid off when he was at his moodiest—when he felt guilty or misunderstood.
I came into the hotel through the basement-level service entrance and the whitewashed hall, changed into my constrictive black dress, and pinned my brown hair into the requisite poofy bun on top of my head.
As I scaled the narrow servants’ staircase, the front desk bell rang out.
It was 3:55, still five minutes till my shift technically started, so I let Doyle get it. (Any nearer to the end of his shift and he would refuse.) I needed the time to see George.
But before I could swing through the kitchen door, where I was sure to find him stirring sauces and pickling vegetables, the bell pealed again.
I popped into the hall and found no Doyle at the desk, only an especially grumpy, cardiganed guest tapping his fingers on the crook of his cane. He’d stayed with us before, and the glad tidings of his repeat visit hit me like a shovelful of coal.
When he saw me, the folds of his paraffin face tightened, and one hand lurched forward on the desk like an anxious crab.
“Mr. Wollstone,” I said with all the pleasantry I could muster and stepped behind the desk. “How nice to see you. How may I help you?”
“If I’d’ve known you were harboring a colony of rats in this old place, I’d never have returned.” With his white, flyaway hair, he was something like a snowy owl who’d been abruptly awakened during the day.
I sighed patiently. “I apologize, Mr. Wollstone, but whoever told you we kept rats here was mistaken.”
A mouse now and again, maybe.
“Nobody told me. I heard ’em myself scratching in the walls last night. They woke me right after I’d fallen asleep.” He grumbled and twitched his mouth.
Like a reflex, I glanced at the wall opposite me, almost thirty feet away on the other side of the entry hall.
Something was out of place—a strange, letter-sized paper tacked up in the empty space between the classical paintings. “I am sorry, sir. How dreadful. I will inform the butler, and we will refund a portion of your stay.”
“Well. That’s more like it.” He nodded, thunked his cane in place, and frowned with satisfaction.
I didn’t say what portion.
As he cantankered back to his room, I crossed the hall and examined the strange paper a little closer. It was a crayon drawing, a simple one with only three or four colors.
I tugged the paper, and it came off the wall with a few pieces of Scotch tape stuck to its back. Only a kid would do this kind of thing, and there was only one staying here at the moment. Was his name Parker? He was the son of one of those gravestone goobers.
But where had he even gotten tape? It wasn’t the kind of thing most people traveled with, and we didn’t keep it anywhere a guest could find it. Tape would be anachronistic, after all.
I was sure Mr. Fig would not approve of this kind of “art,” so I carried the drawing back to the desk and stuck it in the lost-and-found, where it would probably stay until it yellowed like the expired kale in Dad’s and my vegetable drawer (over which I still suffered buyer’s remorse).
I turned toward the kitchen again but heard voices and footsteps on the second-floor gallery. “No, he tried to kill him though.”
It was Clyde Borough, president of the gravestone club. What was he saying?
The other voice was a woman’s, his girlfriend Renee Gallagher’s, perhaps. I missed the first of her reply but made out, “—thought that he died.”
My ears pricked. Were they discussing an attempted murder?
“Poseidon rescued him,” Clyde said.
Poseidon? That was fishy.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been listening in, but there were so few ways to pass the long hours at the desk.
“Oh, so Aeneas challenged Achilles to a duel that he would have lost?” Renee said.
“Yes, well, Aeneas is a tremendous symbol of self-sacrifice.”
I quickly lost interest. They were talking about three-thousand-year-old fiction, not a real life at stake. Staying in the Achilles suite must have sparked their conversation.
Every room in the place was named after some Greek or Roman figure or region, and of course there
were the Greek replicas, old texts, Roman numerals and such scattered about, but I hadn’t known how personal my great-great-grandfather’s enthusiasm for the classics was until I had discovered his secret basement passage with Mr. Fig.
Holding hands, Clyde and Renee rounded the second-floor landing at the top of the staircase. Renee wore a matching sweater set with pearls, but she wasn’t at home in them. It seemed more like she was dressing for a role as a midcentury TV mom.
I wondered if someone else had bought the outfit for her.
Clyde’s banana-colored polo nearly matched his hair.
Renee stopped at the top of the stairs and leaned on the carved balustrade.
Clyde swiveled around to look at her. “What?”
The brunette closed her small eyes and pinched the skin between her eyebrows.
Forcing an exhale and dropping her hand, Clyde said, “Don’t tell me it’s one of your headaches.”
“It’s not like I can control them,” she groaned.
“Wait here.” He climbed up two steps. “I’ve got something in the room that will take care of it.”
“But what is it?” Renee lowered her hand, and her eyes whined at Clyde.
“Some kind of magic pills. Ms. Velvet gave them to me for the next time this happened,” he said, still climbing the stairs.
Velvet Reed was one of the two octogenarians in the gravestone cohort who had checked in a few hours before Clyde and Renee the day before.
“Wait,” Renee called.
Pausing, he slapped a palm on the banister and huffed. “What now?”
“Well, I don’t know that I want to take something if I don’t know what it is,” she pleaded.
An ugly, mean smile slid across his face. “I see what this is. You’re just trying to get out of the tour tonight.”
Renee glared at him and turned to go back up the stairs. “Fine. Give me the drugs. And don’t bother reading about dosage or side effects. I’m sure I’ll survive.”
As she marched past him, his eyes met mine, and he sent me a pleasant but strained Everything is good here glance.
Now that he’d gotten his way, I imagined it would be.
When the lovely couple was gone, I stepped through the curtain behind the desk, through the little office, and into George’s kitchen. The sharp sweetness of herbs hit me first, followed by a wave of salty air that reminded me of the Gulf Coast where Dad and I vacationed sometimes.