“That’s settled then,” he said. “Let me know when the two of you get to Falconwood. I’ll need the date for my records. Now if you’ll excuse me, our time is up in this room, and I’ve got another bickering couple to deal with.”
Ben got up to hold the door for David then waited for me. A woman waiting in the hall butted in, looking Ben up and down.
“Thank you,” she said. “Are you Mr. Brown?”
“No, he’s not,” I answered for him. “And we weren’t finished with the room yet.”
The woman stood her ground. “Oh, I’m sorry. We booked it for nine-thirty, and it’s five minutes past. My mistake.”
I matched her challenging stare. “Don’t worry about it.”
As Ben held the door for me, the woman glanced down at his wedding ring. “Hang in there,” she whispered to him and winked.
Ben smiled. “Thank you.”
With a huff, I headed for the stairs, possibly at a faster pace than how I arrived. Ben’s footsteps followed me to the first floor and the main lobby of the courthouse.
“What was that all about?” he asked. “You were really rude to that woman. She’s probably here to do something similar to what we’re doing.”
“She interrupted us,” I said. “And if she’s getting a divorce, she sure is bouncing back quickly. Did you see the way she looked at you?”
A gentleman through and through, Ben held the door for me to get outside as well. “Would it matter to you? You’re the one who doesn’t want to be married anymore.”
“Ben, we’ve talked about this. Damn it!”
Freezing water gushed over the toes of my sneakers. I’d stepped right into a puddle of melted snow. My toes shriveled up instantly. Ben took my arm and helped me out of the pothole.
“Why aren’t you wearing your boots?” he asked as I shook off my foot.
“I couldn’t find them.”
“They’re in the coat closet.”
“Why would they be in the coat closet?”
“Because that’s where the boots go.”
“You know I never put my boots in the coat closet,” I told him. “I always leave them by the door.”
“And then I always trip over them when I get home, so I put them in the coat closet,” Ben replied. “We’ve had this discussion before.”
“We’ve had all these discussions before. Ugh, great. I’m freezing now.”
Ben zipped up his heavy workman’s jacket. “You want a ride home? I’m parked right up the block.”
“No.”
“Peyton, come on. It’s your car anyway.”
Every time Ben said my name, it was like taking the DeLorean back to high school, when Ben and I first started dating. He had the warmest inflection I’d ever heard, and he always said my name with as much love as he could muster. When he was mad, he refused to say my name at all.
“Are you sure it’s okay?” I asked him. “We’re supposed to be separated.”
He unraveled his scarf from around his neck and draped it across my shoulders to give me an extra layer of warmth. “We promised we’d stay friends, remember? Friends can give each other a ride home. Besides, we still live at the same address.”
The longer I stood on the curb, the more likely it seemed my foot might solidify and fall off. “Okay. As long as you’re good with it.”
“I’m good with it.” Ben nudged me with his shoulder. “I would’ve given you a ride this morning too, but someone tried to beat me up with a pillow.”
“You know I’m violent before coffee.”
“I sure do. Come on. Let’s go tame the beast.”
At home, Ben made coffee for both of us because I liked his coffee better than mine, but after he handed me a steaming mug, he went into his office and shut the door. If I wanted a chance at discussing the Abram Mansion further, I’d have to fish one out later. Instead, I called my mother.
“Hello, darling,” she cooed into the phone.
“It’s not even ten in the morning,” I said. “Are you already drunk?”
“No, why would you ever say such a thing?”
“Are you tipsy?”
“Much more likely,” my mother replied. “But I’m having brunch with the ladies, so in this case, my drinking is an example of totally acceptable social behavior rather than a cry for help from a functioning alcoholic. Besides, the restaurant was running a special on bottomless mimosas. Can I do something for you, my dear?”
I checked to make sure Ben was ensconced in his office before sneaking my coffee into the master bedroom. Ever since I spilled an entire mug across the white carpet a few years ago, Ben had banned coffee from our room. The stain was still there, like a giant reminder of how many times I’d disappointed my husband.
“Did you know Grandpa died?” I asked her as I settled onto the unmade bed.
“Emilio?” she gasped. “No!”
“Not Emilio,” I said. “Andrew. Your father.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mom answered. “I got a notice a few years ago. Why?”
“He left me a house,” I told her. “Actually, he left it to both me and Ben, and if we want to sell it, we have to live in it for six months first. Otherwise, we can’t get divorced. Any ideas on that insanity?”
Mom slurped on her drink. “Hmm. No idea, kiddo.”
“How did he even know about me and Ben? We never talked to him.”
“Your wedding announcement in the papers, I guess,” Mom said. “Maybe he thought he owed you something since he was never around before.”
“Then why didn’t he leave the house to you?”
“Because nothing could repair our relationship,” she said. “He made that clear when he left my mother and never came back. Where’s this house anyway?”
“Falconwood, Connecticut.”
She groaned, and the ice cubes clinked in her glass like she’d drained the rest of her drink. “Of course it is. That’s where he disappeared to on a supposed job assignment all those years ago.”
I covered my feet with the blankets and rested my coffee mug on my stomach as I reclined on the pillows. “Do you know anything about this place? Have you ever heard of Abram Mansion?”
“Not a clue about the mansion,” Mom said. “But Falconwood is supposed to be nice. Are you going to do it?”
“I don’t think I have a choice,” I told her. “Ben doesn’t want to hire a lawyer.”
“But he wants to live with you for another six months?”
“Why do you say that like it’s such a bad thing?”
My mother sighed into the phone. “Because you broke his heart, honey. There’s no other way to put it.”
“Mom, we got married when we were eighteen. We were—”
“Too young,” Mom finished for me. “Yes, I told you that on the day he proposed and the day you got married, but you didn’t listen to me, did you?”
“I’m not in the mood to have an I-told-you-so battle.”
On the other end of the line, a fresh stream of liquid rattles the ice in my mother’s glass. “Honey, I get it. There’s nothing wrong with realizing you made a mistake.”
“I’m not saying our marriage was a mistake,” I said. “I loved Ben. I still do in a lot of ways, but it’s not enough. I have to get out of this town.”
“Then do it,” she challenged. “Go to Falconwood. Sure, Ben will be there too, but it’ll help you dip your feet into a different area. Get to know some new people. Figure out what it might be like to live somewhere else, and when you get there, don’t rely on Ben to take care of you.”
“I am capable of caring for myself, thank you.”
“I know that, but I’m not so sure that you do.”
I hugged a pillow to my chest. “I’ll think about it. Thanks for the talk. Enjoy your mimosas.”
“I switched to bourbon.”
“Bye, Mom.”
I took a gulp of coffee. It seared off my taste buds and jolted me off the pillows. Coffee sloshed over the lip of the mug and t
idal-waved across the expensive duvet cover that Ben bought me for my birthday last year.
“Great,” I muttered.
I wiggled the duvet cover off the actual blanket, balled it up as tightly as possible, and snuck into the laundry room to wash it. As I crept past Ben’s office, I heard him speaking softly on the phone and paused outside to listen.
“I know, Mom. I know,” he was saying. “It’s a crazy idea, but I think it might do us some good. Six months is a long time. Maybe I can prove to her that a divorce isn’t the best way to handle things.”
As he paused to let his mother reply, a lump rose in the back of my throat. No wonder Ben didn’t want to fight David on the subject of the Abram Mansion. He thought it might be an opportunity to win me back.
“She’s always wanted to go somewhere new,” Ben went on. “Falconwood is somewhere new. If we stay there for a while, she might realize how good we have it here.”
I withdrew from eavesdropping, unable to listen to Ben’s hopeful tone any longer, and accidentally bumped into a nearby table, knocking over of Ben’s old high school football trophies. The head of the tiny gold man popped off as the trophy hit the floor.
Ben emerged from the office and looked down at the broken trophy. “What happened here?”
“I guess I overdid it on the caffeine. I’m sorry.”
Ben picked up the decapitated plastic head. “It’s fine. I can glue it back on.”
“Listen, Ben,” I said. “About the Abram Mansion—”
Ben’s office phone rang, and he held up a finger. “Hold that thought.”
As Ben answered the phone, I attempted to balance the trophy man’s head in place. A moment later, Ben stuck his head out of the office.
“Peyton, why is Annie Phillips asking me for scuba diving lessons?”
2
According to the Internet, Falconwood was a tiny town in the foothills of the mountains with a population smaller than the crowd at a homecoming football game. From the few pictures I could find, it looked nice enough. It was surrounded by miles of natural forests, and the town itself had the cutest center square I’d ever seen. Though my first wish after divorcing Ben was to explore the biggest cities I could find, it was comforting to know that moving to Falconwood wouldn’t be a huge change of pace. The hardest thing about moving from one small town to another was getting to know the locals.
A day after our meeting with David, Ben landed a big job with a high-paying client. He was a freelance technical writer who often worked from home, and though he had a steady income, opportunities as lucrative as this one were thin on the ground.
“Do you mind?” he asked me, covering the phone receiver with his hand so the client wouldn’t hear our conversation. “The extra cash would help us both in the long run.”
“Of course. Go ahead.”
He accepted the position and got started right away, which left me to figure out how to get ready for our temporary move on my own. I unearthed our dusty luggage from where it was buried in the basement, wiped the insides with a damp cloth, and tossed a few dryer sheets in each pocket to get rid of the musty smell. The last time Ben and I went on vacation together was our honeymoon. Since then, I’d been begging Ben to take me anywhere in South America or Europe, but his answer was always the same; he couldn’t take that much time off of work. When I offered to compromise with somewhere closer, like California, he shot me down too. His resistance to traveling was one of the reasons I knew we wouldn’t work out in the long run.
The largest piece of luggage in my set was missing, so I returned to the basement to look for it. After sneezing years’ worth of dust from my sinuses, I finally found the last suitcase hidden behind the massive toolbox Ben wanted for Christmas one year but never used once I’d bought it for him. When it became apparent that the toolbox would never become home to any screwdrivers or nail guns, I commandeered it for my own use. Back then, I took several rolls of photos every day, and the toolbox was the perfect place to store photography supplies and all of my prints. For nostalgia’s sake, I opened the top drawer and rifled through the pictures.
Most of the pictures were prints I desperately wanted to be shown in galleries. After high school, I did an entire project on small-town life, photographing every inch of my hometown from Stan the Hot Dog Man to the rickety footbridge over the creek that was one good chomp away from succumbing to termite damage. But when I sent out the pictures to various galleries, no one wanted the story. They all told me the same thing. Photography wasn’t about taking pictures of the things everyone already knew. It was about capturing raw emotion and making people feel something by looking at your photographs. My pictures weren’t special enough. After that, I didn’t pick up my camera for months.
Digging deeper into the toolbox, I found the collection of wedding and engagement pictures I did for my so-called photography business. If I had been more dedicated, the business might have grown to a decent size, but I found weddings so boring to photograph that I let the last few brides swindle me out of a fair price. They got their wedding photos for cheap, and I ran my business into the ground.
Beneath the wedding photos were the first ever pictures I took in high school with a DSLR that I’d borrowed from the yearbook department then accidentally stolen because I forgot to return it on the last day of school. In high school, everyone knew me as “the camera girl” because I was constantly shoving a lens in someone’s face. It resulted in a thorough history of my high school years, though since I was taking the pictures, I wasn’t in many of them. Ben, however, was the star of several of my photos. The first one I took of him was at tryouts for the football team. Ben, only a fourteen-year-old freshman at the time, was long and lanky, and he punted the ball with such strength and accuracy that the coach immediately put him on the varsity team. He was the star kicker for all four years of his high school career, and I photographed every second of it.
As I flipped through the pictures of Ben, nostalgia reared the ugly part of its personality and kicked me in the stomach. I had been infatuated with Ben since the day we met, and so had a hundred other girls in my grade. He was the cutest boy I’d ever seen. His curly golden hair was so long that it fell into his light-brown eyes, he had dimples on either side of his beautiful smile, and he had the tendency to wear hand-knitted sweaters that his mom made him no matter how much the other guys on the team made fun of him. Ben was always a class act like that. He didn’t care that football inducted you into a club of popularity and renown. He had a few close friends on the team, but he mostly hung out with the yearbook staff. Lucky for me.
When I found mine and Ben’s prom picture—he’d trimmed his hair and donned a perfect black tux for the occasion while I wore a backless red dress that my mother had deemed “too sexy for a high schooler”—I put all the photos away and closed the toolbox. It wouldn’t do me any good to relive the better years of our lives. In a way, I missed the people we were in high school, but at the same time, we were the exact same couple as we were back then, and that was a huge part of the problem.
I packed Ben’s things for him. I knew him well enough to pick out his favorite outfits, coats, and boots to bring with us. I included a few of his favorite books as well as a set of fresh notebooks. For all the technical writing Ben did at his computer, he matched with pages upon pages of handwritten poetry and prose, though he claimed he wasn’t half as good at it as he was at his job. Once upon a time, he’d written love poems and left them around the house for me to find. Sometimes they were silly—roses are red, violets are blue kind of stuff—but other times, he wrote beautiful sweeping passages that, with a little refining, could have been published in a collection. No matter how many times I told that to Ben, he refused to look into it, insisting he needed a hobby that had nothing to do with making money.
When I finished loading the car late one night, I popped my head into Ben’s office. He was finished with his work already, and he sat in the window with a notebook in his lap and a pen be
tween his teeth. He wasn’t writing though. He gazed outside instead, his eyes angled skyward to watch a fresh layer of snow float through the yellow light of the street lamps.
“Ben?”
He didn’t look over. His noise-canceling studio headphones smashed his curls flat. When I tapped him on the shoulder, he jumped and nearly asphyxiated on his pen. He pulled his headphones off.
“You scared me,” he said.
“Obviously,” I replied. “I wanted to tell you that the car’s all packed. Are you ready to leave tomorrow morning?”
“Already?”
“It’s been three days since we met with David,” I said. “I thought you’d want to check this place out as soon as possible. Isn’t that what we agreed on?”
He set his headphones on the ledge of the window and fluffed up his curls. “Yeah, I just didn’t realize you were so eager to get there.”
“The sooner we start our six months, the sooner they’ll be over.” I took his pen and notepad from him and set them on the desk. “I packed your writing things. All you need is your laptop. Look around to make sure I haven’t forgotten something you might need. We’re going to be there for a while.”
I turned to leave, but Ben slipped his fingers into my palm. “Peyton?”
Instinctively, I squeezed his soft, warm hand. “Yes?”
“It won’t be so bad,” he promised. “I’ll stay out of your way. If you want, we can sleep in completely different sections of the house. The place is supposedly huge. You could have your own wing.”
“Thank you,” I said, letting go of his hand. “But that won’t be necessary. It’s not like I don’t want to see you. I’m just—”
“Tired of being my wife?”
“No! Ben—”
As he shook his head, his curls bounced into his eyes, and he became unreadable once again. “I know already. You don’t have to explain.”
The Haunting of Abram Mansion Page 2