I unpacked and repacked three more boxes before I hit pay dirt in the form of a black cardboard scrapbook. It was old, but not old enough to look interesting. Used, but not loved. It looked like something Lark might have found at a thrift store or a flea market. Anyone who’d seen it on a shelf would have left it there. From the outside, it seemed like a scrapbook meant to be filled and forgotten.
I opened it, and inside was a different story. I flipped through the scrapbook, page by page. Brittle photos that looked a hundred years old and clippings that appeared to have been printed right off the internet were attached to black sheets that felt like preschool construction paper. Captions and notes written in white pencil accompanied many of the pictures. They weren’t scribbled down. Lark had taken the time to write clearly. She’d known that the scrapbook wasn’t just for her eyes. She had planned to share the stories she collected, but I don’t think she’d finished. The book ended with a third of its pages empty.
I went back to the beginning and started going through it more carefully. The first dozen pictures Lark had carefully adhered to the pages were all of Grace Louth. Arranged chronologically, they followed Grace’s development from a plump infant in frilly lace dresses to an impish child and later to a beautiful young woman with long blond hair worn in a single plait. In every picture, Grace stared fearlessly at the camera with such interest and intelligence that she seemed to be peering into a different world on the other side. This was not the girl I’d pictured as the heroine of the ghost stories I’d read online. I’d imagined a dainty doll with ringlets and ruffles. That girl had nothing in common with the real Grace Louth.
The final two images of Grace had been pasted side by side in the scrapbook. One was a photo, the other a newspaper illustration. The photo showed Grace at seventeen or eighteen. She was standing against a wall, her hair piled in a bun on top of her head and her arms crossed in front of her as she peered down at her photographer. She appeared thinner than she had in the earlier pictures, perhaps a bit paler. But the look in her eyes was the same as it had been—confident and determined. In a word, unafraid.
Beside the photo was a newspaper illustration that had accompanied a story about Grace Louth’s tragic death. The drawing was a perfect copy of the photograph in all ways but one. The newspaper artist had altered Grace’s eyes. Instead of peering out confidently at a photographer, they now gazed up toward the heavens. It changed everything. The girl they’d drawn looked like she was ready to throw herself into a river. The real girl in the photo looked far more likely to push someone in.
On the opposite page were Lark’s notes in white pencil.
Grace was born in New York City 1872. Died 1890 in Louth.
She fell in love with someone in Manhattan. (Can’t find a name.)
Must not have been rich enough. Daddy dearest was furious.
Legend says Grace and her lover were going to run away together.
The night they planned to elope, the dude was a no-show. (No proof this ever happened.)
Grace came here to Louth Manor to recover from a broken heart.
She refused to leave the house, so her father hired an artist to bring the outdoors to her.
The artist seems to have been a woman. (Can’t find any more.)
A little while later, Grace discovered that her beloved had married someone else.
That night she put on a wedding dress she’d made in secret. (How do you make a wedding dress in secret?)
She ran out of the house. (How?) Two servants chased after her.
Before they could catch her, she leaped into the river and was carried away.
No one noticed the girl in the mural until a few days later.
The artist had vanished by that time. (How’d she know what was going to happen???)
Frederick Louth blamed himself for his daughter’s death.
He died of a heart attack while trying to destroy the mural he’d commissioned.
Mrs. Louth never came back to the manor.
People say the house is cursed. It preys on the weak, and young women are its favorite victims. In Louth, they’re called the Dead Girls.
I call bullshit.
What really happened to Grace?
I read Lark’s notes over and over, lingering each time on the last three lines. I’d been right. Lark hadn’t believed the official story. She’d been searching for the truth about Grace Louth—just as I was trying to figure out what had happened to Lark. She knew there had to be more to the story, and that, not mental illness, had been the reason for Lark’s obsession. The discovery thrilled me. Still, I felt a twinge of jealousy. No one had ever bothered to look into my story.
I turned the page and discovered a picture of Grace’s parents on their wedding day. Clara Louth, dressed in a white gown, sat on a plush chair with her husband standing guard behind it. Frederick was a short, stocky man with a mustache that probably hid most of his face for a reason. His willowy wife appeared decades younger, and I had a hunch Clara was sitting down to disguise the fact that she was taller than her husband. People didn’t smile much in photos back then, but Clara looked ready to burst into tears. Even before I read Lark’s notes, I knew it hadn’t been a love match.
Frederick Louth and his happy bride, 1870.
Frederick grew up poor and made a killing in coal.
Literally a killing. Thousands of men died in his mines.
Clara was from a fancy New York family with a dwindling fortune.
Clara’s family traded her in for big bucks. Frederick got respectability.
He was 45. She was 19.
The manor was her wedding present.
The people who worked here hated Frederick. People still talk about him in Louth.
He was cruel to his workers, and he didn’t treat Clara much better.
They spent their first night together here at the manor.
Looks like she would have preferred to throw herself into the river.
The photos that followed showed Clara’s wedding present being built. I found them fascinating. I’d come to think of the manor as an ancient part of the landscape. I couldn’t have imagined the hill without it. Yet there it was, a bald patch of dirt, with every last trace of nature stripped away. Then, picture by picture, a skeletal frame emerged from the mud, and the mansion began to take form. Its white, perfectly stacked blocks looked awkward and out of place.
Lark had commented on only one of the photos, a picture of the completed manor as the gardens around it were being constructed. In the picture, gardeners were weaving strands of ivy through a massive metal trellis fixed to the front of the house.
Frederick must have decided his house looked a little too new.
He couldn’t wait for the manor to age gracefully, so he cheated.
Seems ivy is perfect for social climbing.
The next photo showed the results of the gardeners’ work. The transformation was remarkable. With its face covered in ivy, the brand-new house magically appeared at least a hundred years old. The photographer had captured a woman wandering through the manor’s newly planted garden, a hand resting upon her swollen belly. The brim of her hat threw a shadow across her face, but I was certain the woman was Clara Louth, which meant the baby she was carrying would have been Grace.
The last picture of the manor had been taken eighteen years later, shortly after that baby died. It was published alongside an article in a New York newspaper following Grace’s funeral. According to the story, you could see what many believed to be the ghost of Grace Louth lurking behind the rose room’s windows. I’d already come across the photo online. There did appear to be a blurry, veiled figure standing in what was now my bedroom. But it could just as easily have been a trick of the light.
Then I turned to the next page of the scrapbook and gasped. Pasted to the p
aper was an enhanced close-up of the phantom’s face. I don’t know what digital witchcraft Lark had used, but the features were now clear enough to identify. I saw Grace Louth’s piercing eyes staring out from behind the veil. The caption Lark had written below the picture was two words long. That’s her. The girl who’d appeared to me had kept her face hidden. But the dress she’d been wearing had looked much the same.
I skipped over an old photo of the town of Louth and read through the obituaries for all three members of Grace’s family. In 1916, Clara Louth was the last of the family to die. She’d moved to Europe following her husband’s death at the hands of the rose room’s mural. According to Lark’s notes, she’d ordered that the painting be preserved, but she refused to return to the house. After she kicked the bucket, the house passed to a series of nephews, none of whom ever set foot in the manor—or touched the mural—for fear of the famous curse. Over the next seventy years, a series of rich New Yorkers rented the house to throw fabulous parties. Then, in 1986 the house was abruptly closed up, abandoned, and left to rot. Then the last Louth nephew expired, and the manor became the property of New York State. Shortly after that, my uncle James showed up and bought it.
Only four photos in Lark’s scrapbook covered the years between 1916 and 1986. According to Lark, they were of young women in their late teens or early twenties who were rumored to have fallen victim to the manor’s curse. The first photo was a black-and-white of a sultry girl with dark hair and a cupid’s-bow mouth.
Violet Jennings stayed at the mansion in the summer of 1921. She’s said to have jumped off a bridge the following winter.
If she did, it didn’t kill her. According to her obituary, she lived to 96.
The second picture was a high school yearbook photo of a serious-looking young woman with chunky black glasses and a Peter Pan collar.
Shirley Hill stayed at the mansion in the summer of 1940. She’s supposed to have thrown herself into the Hudson, Grace Louth–style.
She drowned by accident in 1943—in California.
A sophisticated girl with bright red hair graced the third photo.
Ondine Connor stayed at the mansion in the summer of 1965. She lives in Dublin and thinks the rumors of her death are hilarious.
She says she was bored out of her mind while she stayed at Louth Manor.
The last photo was of a gorgeous girl with long black braids that cascaded over her shoulders.
April Hughes CONFIRMED dead. She stayed at the manor the winter of 1986, and her body was discovered in the woods the next spring.
WTF. I always thought this story was bullshit.
Pasted on the following pages were stories about April Hughes from all the New York papers. She was spending the week after Christmas at the manor with her parents when she vanished without a trace on New Year’s Eve. The police learned that, in the days before her disappearance, April had begged her parents to let her return to Manhattan. They had refused to allow her to go. For months, it was believed that April had run away—despite the fact that she hadn’t taken any of her possessions with her.
The following spring, April’s frozen body was discovered in the forest, still dressed in the nightgown she’d been wearing the night she’d disappeared. No one knew why she’d left the house—or how she’d managed to do so without being seen.
April’s parents reported that their daughter had begun showing signs of paranoia shortly after the family’s arrival in Louth. She’d claimed that someone was watching her inside the manor. Several nights in a row, she had pushed a dresser in front of her bedroom door. The morning she was discovered missing, it had required the strength of three men to push the door open. A psychiatrist interviewed by the New York Times suggested that April’s behavior may have been evidence of a serious mental condition. Even he couldn’t explain how she’d slipped past her own barricade. Confusing the matter even more was the note she’d left behind. There was a picture of it printed in the New York Post. Scribbled on ruled paper ripped out of a small three-hole binder, it said, SOMEONE’S AT THE DOOR.
Lark’s last entry was a police photograph of April Hughes’s body. The girl had crawled under a spruce tree and curled into a ball. The freezing temperatures had preserved her perfectly. She was the most beautiful corpse I’d ever seen.
Alongside the photo were three lines written in Lark’s handwriting. G knows this house. G won’t leave. G wants to hurt me. I couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to mean, though.
The rest of the scrapbook’s pages remained tantalizingly blank. I sat for a while, staring at the last picture ever taken of April. If you believed the stories, three girls had gone mad in the manor. Grace Louth had drowned herself. April Hughes had run out into the night. And Lark Bellinger had jumped from a balcony. No wonder people thought the manor was cursed. Only the house knew for sure what had happened to the girls.
I closed the scrapbook and set it aside. I’d just begun rooting around in another box when I heard something outside in the hall. My eyes shot to the door, where the rug I should have used to hide the light was still propped up against the wall. There was no time to position the rug as Sam had told me, so I dove for the light instead. I flipped the switch, and the bare bulb that lit the room flickered out.
The darkness was absolute. I couldn’t see my own hands in front of me. As the footsteps grew louder, I stood motionless, too terrified to move. I had no idea if the person had spotted the light beneath the door. I wondered if they could hear my lungs pulling in the dusty air, and prayed I wouldn’t feel the urge to sneeze.
Hide, a voice whispered urgently inside my head. What scared me the most was that the voice wasn’t my own. I turned and groped through the darkness until I found the narrow passage between the boxes. I followed it until I reached the space Sam had carved out when he’d removed the first boxes. Then I crawled in and curled up with my knees to my chest. I put my hands over my ears as I had when I was a kid, and counted until it was over.
In the dark, it made no difference if my eyes were open or shut. At some point, I must have fallen asleep, because I found myself back in Manhattan, standing at the front door of my uncle’s old house on the day five years earlier when my life had changed forever. The memory was so clear, it was as if I’d traveled back in time. A winter storm had surprised the city, and school had let out early. The snow was piling up quickly, and though my walk had been short, my feet were frozen.
James and his wife lived two blocks from my school in what they called a town house—and what most people in New York would have recognized as a mansion. I’d been a regular visitor since the day they’d moved in. I adored my handsome, charming uncle and my beautiful, brilliant aunt. But that wasn’t the only reason why I spent so much time at their house. Even back then, I seized any opportunity to avoid my mother. I’d known since I was little which adults were happy to have me around—and which wished I’d just go away. When I was with Sarah, my mother never called and asked me to come home.
While James focused on his business, Sarah and I grew even closer. By the time I was eleven, my uncle would leave town for weeks at a time. Sarah worked from home, and I sensed she was lonely, so I stopped by more often. She always seemed exhausted, as though James’s professional troubles were taking a toll on both of them. He’d lost weight, and dark circles filled the hollows beneath his eyes. When he lost his temper, I barely recognized him at all. Sarah swore the situation was only temporary. James had promised her he would start spending less time at work.
Sarah had given me keys to their house, and I was allowed to come and go whenever I liked. On the day in question, I was paying my first visit in over a week. Sarah had just returned from a desert spa, and James was away on business, as usual. I rang the doorbell and waited. Most of the time Sarah or her housekeeper answered the door. But no one seemed to be home yet. So, I pulled out my keys and let myself in.
The house felt unnaturally still. Sarah’s cat didn’t greet me in the entryway as she usually did. I don’t recall a strange smell in the air. I just remember thinking that the house felt airless and stuffy. But I kept moving, as if on autopilot, toward the kitchen at the back of the house. I was passing the living room when my eyes landed on a shoe next to one of the sofas. It was a woman’s high-heeled pump in a pale flesh tone. I stopped and stared at it. I didn’t know why, but it unnerved me. Nothing else in the room seemed out of place. Just that single shoe, lying there by itself, as if abandoned by an absentminded Cinderella. Strange, I thought. Then I took a step forward and saw the foot.
Sarah had slumped forward on the sofa, her face buried in its cushions. One foot wore only stockings. The other had kept its heel. An arm dangled over the edge of the sofa. The sleeve of its blouse was pushed to the elbow, and the skin of her forearm bore fading purple blotches.
A few feet from my aunt, a man lay on his side on the floor. I couldn’t see his face at first, but I knew the suit well. It was one of my father’s favorites. He’d been wearing it that morning when he’d kissed me on the top of my head and wished me a good day at school. I walked over to wake him. His glasses had fallen off, and I reached down to pick them up. That’s when I saw that his eyes weren’t completely closed. They were staring blindly at the rug, and gravity had pulled his tongue halfway out of his mouth.
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