Monarch Manor

by Maureen Leurck

  I watched as the man in the dress shirt whipped his arm in a circle over his head—Let’s get to it. Four of the men climbed into enormous yellow machines and whirred them to life. I watched as they approached Monarch Manor in a combat line, pausing for a moment before driving forward, knocking easily into the rotting wood and crumbling plaster.

  My heart began to pound as I saw the back of the house collapse forward, the roof caving in and down toward the ground, surrendering to a fate that had been decided decades before, when everyone abandoned it. The bulldozer pressed forward toward the lake, the rubble pile growing bigger, until it reached the veranda, the place where I pictured the Hoppe sisters—and Emily and John—sitting and staring out at the lake. I had imagined that they sat on the porch, eyes trained over the sparkling water, and assumed the house would stand witness throughout the decades.

  The bulldozers pushed forward again, and the porch collapsed, also gone forever. All that was left was rubble, and the sadness of neglect that permeated the air.

  * * *

  “You look like you need a drink. Beer?” my mom said as she disappeared into her kitchen. She didn’t wait for me to answer and appeared with two bottles, thrusting one in my direction.

  I took a long pull of the beer, wincing at the bitter, hoppy IPA taste, before I set it down on the scratched oak end table that had existed in their house since before I could remember. “Since when did you start liking craft beer?”

  “Someone brought over a twelve-pack for our neighborhood Fourth of July party, and I’ve been slowly pawning it off on unsuspecting guests.” My mom settled down on the couch next to me, tucking her legs up underneath her, a proper light beer in her hand.

  Across from us, my dad snored lightly on the love seat, his glasses still perched on his nose and his iPad on his chest. We always joked that he fell asleep whenever he was at any angle greater than ninety degrees. He had welcomed me with a hug, asked me to sit down, and fallen asleep thirty seconds later.

  “I just keep thinking it’s all such a shame: Amelia, John, the house. The last piece of all of it was torn down, oh, three hours ago. I’m sure some new mansion will go up on the lot, for the low bargain price of ten million.” I had seen the houses around the lake, the ones that were meant to look like they had been there forever, bearing a perfectly worn Craftsman cottage style, but they were less than a decade old. They were priced with so many zeros on the end that it was hard for me to imagine who owned them. And almost all of them were summer houses, and none of them looked well loved. It baffled me to think someone had spent multiple millions on a summer house (after all, what did their regular house look like?) and then never used it. At the rate Luke and I were going, our summer house would be a tent in the state park—and even that might be stretching it.

  “So what’s next, kiddo?” my mother asked as she drained the rest of her beer, glanced down at the empty bottle, and shrugged.

  “I’m not sure. I guess I should start researching Amelia, but I’m not sure what to do first. I don’t know much about her, other than what the illustrious Internet has told me.” I held my hands in the air, full IPA in my right hand. “I did read a whole bunch about that time period, and about how they all had these huge estates, with servants, and nannies, and cooks, and how the women spent all summer up there with the children, while the men came up on the weekends. There was even a special train for them on Friday afternoons, nicknamed ‘The Millionaires’ Special,’ that went straight from downtown Chicago to Lake Geneva so the men could get to their lake homes right away after work.”

  “Rough life, right?” my mom said as she rolled her eyes.

  “Totally. And all these famous people visited at one point, like Monet and Einstein—”

  “Probably just there for the booze and parties,” my mom said with a laugh.

  I nodded. “Why wouldn’t they? I read the estates all had crazy names, like Harrose Hall—Harry Selfridge’s house—named after him and his wife, Rose.”

  “No egos at all,” she said. “And let me guess: It was Days of Our Lives, with everyone sleeping with each other.”

  I pointed my beer at her. “You got it. Like, if your wife died, you married her sister, or whichever rich, single daughter lived next door.”

  “These people sound peachy. Sure you want to even research any of this?” she said.

  I looked down at my beer bottle and ran a finger along the label. “The little boy, Mom. John and his mother.” Will and me, I added silently.

  “As you wish, kiddo.” My mother leaned over and snatched the iPad off my dad’s chest.

  “What did I miss?” he said, sitting upright and reaching for the tablet.

  My mom held it out, away from his grasp. “Nope. We need to do some important research. And you’re sleeping.”

  He shook his head. “No. I was just resting my eyes for a minute.” He looked at me. “Sorry, honey.”

  I smiled. “Don’t worry about it, Dad. Besides, I’m not sure what Mom is planning to research, anyway.”

  She started pecking away at the screen. “Well, since we don’t know much about Amelia, let’s start with someone we do know something about: Emily, my grandmother.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “What do we know about her?”

  “That she had two kids: my mom and my uncle Emil, who died sometime in the sixties, I think. And that she lived in Milwaukee, or at least somewhere outside Milwaukee, from the few times I visited her before she died.” She peered down at the screen. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

  “Oh! Look at that!” I pointed to a blue link, and my mother clicked on it, taking us to a page on wedding announcements from a 1937 article in the Milwaukee Sun. Halfway down the page was Emily’s name.

  Mr. and Mrs. David Koehler happily announce the engagement of their son, Scott, to Emily Rochester. The bride, raised in New York City, is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. George Rochester. A fall wedding in Chicago is planned, after which the couple will honeymoon in Italy and in France. Upon their return, they will reside in Milwaukee, with the groom working at a law firm.

  “New York City,” my mom said quietly. She turned to me, eyes wide. “Wasn’t there some report that Amelia was seen on a train bound for there the day after the accident?”

  I nodded slowly, reading the engagement announcement once again. “That might be a coincidence, right? New York City is a big place. That still doesn’t mean anything, even if the report was true.”

  My mother exhaled slowly and handed me the iPad, sitting back and drumming her fingers against her beer bottle. “Or it could mean everything. It would mean that her sister Eleanor might have been involved in helping her escape . . . or that she was possibly involved in John’s demise.”

  I chewed on the inside corner of my mouth, pulse quickening. “That can’t be true. So the whole family was involved in some kind of conspiracy to murder a little boy? That’s pretty dark.”

  “I didn’t say murder. It could have gone down a number of ways. But still, kiddo, I think this one is worth considering,” she said. “After all, her husband was dead, and she was alone. Who knows what frame of mind she was in at the time?”

  Later that night, as I lay in the guest bedroom, after Luke convinced me to spend the night at my parents’ house and drive home in the morning, I considered the possibility of what my mother said. As I stared up at a picture of my parents on their wedding day, I thought about Amelia jumping off the edge of the yacht, pulling John down with her. And I couldn’t help but think of Will.

  Life with him at times felt like the brightest of sunrises and the darkest of thunderstorms. The day and the night, and we were never sure what we were going to experience. And during those blackest of moments, when we had no road map to tell us which way to steer, all we had was hope and blind faith. I failed more than I wanted to acknowledge in those times, and that always brought me to my own midnight. My own dark thoughts, of how I was making things worse, not better, for him. Thought
s that I didn’t know what I was fighting for anymore, of what I hoped would happen. Of what was fair for me to hope for anymore.

  Despite what my mother believed and despite what my worst self whispered to me in difficult times, I still couldn’t allow myself to consider the possibility that Amelia did something to John. Even considering whatever she felt at the time, whatever terrible options were in front of her, she couldn’t have chosen such a horrible fate for him. No, something else happened, and maybe if I found out I could somehow figure out how to navigate my own difficult choices.

  CHAPTER 15

  AMELIA

  Amelia watched as Cecilia Grant, Jane’s soon-to-be sister-in-law, struggled to pull up her pale pink bridesmaid gown over her large chest and hid a smile.

  “Mother, this is not the size we ordered. That wretched seamstress must have measured me wrong. I knew we should never have allowed their family to choose who made the gowns!” Cecilia yanked on the silk sleeve so hard that it slipped out of her hand and she smacked herself in the face.

  Amelia let out a laugh, and Cecilia turned, her eyes burning with fury, but she said nothing, her face growing redder where she had slapped herself silly. Thankfully, Jane was dressing in the bride’s room, with only Mary and a maid attending her. She had wanted to make a grand entrance, even for her wedding attendants.

  There were five of them in the room upstairs: Eleanor, Amelia, Cecilia, and two of Jane’s friends from school, who lived in Chicago. Jane had requested (demanded was more of a proper word, yet the letter stated: I request ... ) that they wear pink silk tea-length dresses with impossibly full skirts and puffy sleeves. They were to be made in Paris by Mary’s seamstress, no variations. The bridesmaids’ hair was to also be worn swept up, with a spray of pink roses on the side, and the pink satin shoes would have rhinestone buckles on them.

  Amelia thought the wedding party looked like a troupe of rouge-covered marionettes.

  Somewhere on the other side of the house, in the children’s quarters, John was in his room, resting. She had promised him that he could have one of Alfred’s treats, a rose-gold-dusted petit four, if he went to his room and lay in his bed. It was bribery, but the only way she could be sure that he wouldn’t wander off with so many people milling about the estate, prepping the house.

  “Let me help you,” Amelia said when she saw Cecilia was still struggling with her gown. The woman glared at her but nodded slightly. Amelia grabbed each side of the gown. “On the count of three. One, two . . . three.” On the final count, she jerked upward, hard. At first the dress resisted, but then it slid up to Cecilia’s shoulders with a silken sigh of relief.

  Amelia waited for a thank-you, but Cecilia turned her back and walked over to a vanity table, barking orders at the maid to style her hair so she wouldn’t be late. Amelia walked over to the large window that overlooked the east side of the house, toward the apple orchard and dairy barn. It didn’t have a view of the lawn, so all she saw was the glittering lake water below the tree line. The apple trees’ white-and-pink blossoms released a light, fruity scent throughout the orchard, signaling that the trees would soon bear fruit in the fall. Amelia could see the farmhands in the dairy barn carrying pails of milk out, lugging them toward the house for Alfred to store in the icebox.

  She ran a finger along the glass, just below the leaded octagonal design at the top, and looked toward the familiar outline of Cottingsley Glen, Matthew’s childhood home. Only the top tower was visible from Monarch Manor, and she wondered how many times she had stared at it as a child, trying to will Matthew to escape his lessons and come swimming with her.

  Henry hadn’t believed her when she told him that she used to jump in the water with all of her clothes on as a child. The first time she brought him to Monarch Manor, he looked at her skeptically as they stood on the pier after disembarking the steam yacht. He glanced down at the dark waters below and shook his head.

  “Amelia, you’ve never been one to bend the rules. I just can’t picture you running from the nanny and leaping into the deep water, feetfirst.” He had outstretched an arm, wanting to pull her close, toward the house, and toward the safety of her familiar role.

  She had taken a quick step back, just out of his reach. She knew he was, in his own strange way, trying to compliment her, by implying that he couldn’t imagine she was anything but the proper lady he saw in front of him. Yet, in her mind’s eye, she could see that dirt-streaked little girl running down the pier barefoot, splinters be damned, Matthew chasing behind.

  And so she had turned, kicked off her black heels, and jumped into the water before he could say anything else. It was September, and the water had already begun to turn cold, the springs at the bottom of the lake overtaking the dwindling summer sun. The water felt like a glove on her skin, moving up her spine to the crown of her head. When she surfaced, she saw Henry’s slack face, mouth opened, and laughed louder and longer than she could remember.

  Of course, the official story became that she had fallen in (“clumsy, adorable Amelia!” as Henry would giddily relay at parties) and he had rescued her, holding his hand out to pull her from the terrifying waters. It was only Patrick, the one deckhand who was still tying up the yacht, who saw. Whenever they crossed paths in the future, only the tiniest of head nods proved neither of them forgot the real story. When he had left to go back to Ireland a year after John was born, Amelia had slipped him an extra purse of money, which he initially refused but accepted after she threatened to throw it in the bottom of the lake.

  When Henry would tell the story in front of Margaret, she would purse her lips in satisfaction, Amelia’s apparent clumsiness a kind of equalizer between them. Margaret had resented their relationship from the beginning, a wedge between her and her son.

  Everything else about Henry was easy, nearly too easy. He loved her. He wanted to marry her, have children together. He was safe. Stable. Perfect. Except for the one blemish that only Amelia had to navigate: Margaret. More than once, she had heard Margaret refer to her first as “his friend,” followed by, “his wife.” Like the first party they attended at the Cartwrights’ home after they were first married, introduced as “Mr. Henry Cartwright and guest.”

  Amelia was brought out of the memory by a knock at the door of the bedroom. The girls gasped, and covered themselves, even though they were already dressed. She sighed slightly and cracked open the heavy wood door with transoms above that let in the lake breeze.

  “Oh. Yes?” Captain Scott stood at the door, his white hat in his hands. He had a short gray beard and a long, lined face that was etched with lake wind and cold spray from the water.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Cartwright, but I’m afraid I have some bad news.” He pointed toward the other side of the room, at the window that faced the west side of the house.

  Amelia turned and her eyes widened at the sight of thick gray clouds beginning to gather over the tree line in the distance, toward Buttons Bay. The rest of the sky was a beautiful blue, with the occasional white puffy cloud daring to float lazily across. Yet to the west, the weather looked different.

  “My goodness. That doesn’t look promising.” Amelia kept her voice low and hoped it sounded calm, a rouged, powdered veneer over her insides, which began to churn at the thought of flashing lightning and booming thunder. Rain would certainly rough up the lake’s surface and make it impossible to navigate.

  “It might not be. I just want you to be prepared that if that storm hits we will need to postpone all boat trips out of safety,” he said.

  “No,” she said automatically, her stomach churning in alarm at the thought.

  The captain gave her a quizzical look. “Safety should be our first priority.”

  She swallowed hard, thinking of the hundreds of guests who were due to arrive via train and then be transported on the Monarch Princesses for the festivities. And the boat cruises that Jane had specifically asked for after dinner, so that the guests could see the estate illuminated from the w
ater.

  Not to mention the white tablecloths and beautiful roses that would be soaked with rain and covered in mud, and the handmade gowns and delicate shoes sinking into the wet grass.

  The wedding could very easily be a disaster, and then Jane would make sure they all felt her wrath, Mother Nature’s fault or not.

  All of the plans for the night would be ruined should a storm appear.

  “Thank you for the information,” Amelia managed to whisper before she walked over to the west-facing window and saw that the cloud in the distance was growing larger and seemingly darker. She pressed a palm against the glass and closed her eyes until she could stop the tears that threatened to form. She took a long, slow breath before she turned back toward the bridesmaids, smile on her face.

  There may have been a storm approaching, but she needed to will the sun to shine.

  CHAPTER 16

  ERIN

  “Who knows what frame of mind she was in at the time?”

  My mother’s harsh words about Amelia were still very much on my mind as I drove home from her house the next morning, and throughout the following day while the twins were at school. I tried to focus on the mounting chores and tasks I had at home: endless laundry, bills to be paid with a sad bank account, empty shelves badly in need of groceries, but in the middle of each task I would stop and stare off into space, trying to imagine how Amelia felt on that final day, in those final moments. Did she, too, have an unending sense that the chips were being loaded against her? That her equilibrium was on the most tenuous of scales? That it would be so easy for her comfortable existence to crumble away under her feet, turning to dust?

  If so, would it be that hard to imagine that she tried to find a way to escape and failed?

  Each time I would think the thought I wanted so desperately to not be true, I would stop and shake my head, a physical reminder that I was not to go to that place. I would even say it out loud: “No.”