But a problem he didn’t so much mind right now.
When she finally glanced away from him to the road ahead, he spoke again. “What about you? Before coming to America, how heavy was your security?”
“It was always there, I guess, just not so—close,” she replied after a minute. “Then again, maybe I was used to it. We had security to and from the social events, to and from really any event, at which point our house or the palace security took over.”
“And overseas?”
“Pretty much like this. I never paid much attention. There were always more people to protect than only me.”
“So you haven’t done much traveling.”
“Not outside of Europe, no.” There was a wistful quality to her voice and Win fought to keep himself from smiling.
“That explains the interest in hospitality. Lots of opportunity to travel if you’re exploring a career in one of the worlds fine luxury hotels.”
Her answer to that surprised him. “You’d think I put that much consideration into it, but you’d be wrong,” she said, laughing. “I mainly chose hotel management because it upset my father. I had originally thought marine biology would send him around the bend, but I’m a very timid swimmer, so I figured why put myself through four years of misery? Hotels seemed the better option.”
“The far better option,” Win agreed. “Have you found any hotels in particular that you’ve particularly enjoyed?”
“None that eclipse those owned by Masters Real Estate Holdings,” she said with a laugh. “That is the appropriate answer, right?”
They continued on with simple, inconsequential banter, and he could sense the gradual thawing of Marguerite’s reserve, the embarrassment fading and something else too, a tension he didn’t quite understand. Not sexual tension—that he would have easily understood, but something subtler. Something he truly wanted to explore except…
Except nothing. Ruthlessly, he summoned the gentle, open face of Annelise to his mind, her wide, trusting eyes gutting him like they always did…and how blank and lost she’d looked before she’d attempted to take her own life.
Win scowled, and Marguerite fell silent as well. They drove in near silence until they cleared the city limits, then she sat forward as the landscape began to change. “This is Summerland County?” she asked as they drove past one palatial property after another. “All of these were plantations?”
“Not all, but many—preserved for the tourist trade now, or simply because of it. It’s no good to have an active antebellum mansion and museum a quarter mile down the road while your old house looks like wreck.” Win said nothing as they passed the austere gates to the Grand—unmarked of course—but Marguerite exclaimed over the enormous barrier anyway. “How do they know if anyone is waiting at the gate? Are there cameras?”
“Usually, yes, in cases like these. Manned around the clock.”
She eyed him with a smile. “That’s your house, isn’t it?” she said, her voice triumphant as he grimaced. “I knew it! Will you take me there sometime?”
Almost as soon as she said the words she stiffened, no doubt hearing how intimate the question sounded. Then, as quickly, her manner eased again, the consummate hostess recovering her equilibrium. “Assuming they let you back in after you fall through the floors at Holt House, that is.”
Win allowed her the joke, offering her an easy grin. “You’ve heard that it’s all but condemned on the inside?”
“Yes, but I have a hard time believing it. Mr. Holt seemed a little eccentric, but hardly the type to let people trot through his family home without an escort if there were any possible danger.”
Win had thought the same thing. That, and when he’d contacted Holt about entering the building, the man had practically swooned with pride. He’d clearly wanted to join them but had said quite emphatically that he—his family—were well part of the problem, and that if any Holt was onsite Win and Marguerite might not find anything useful at all. The house held him in that much disdain.
Eccentric was perhaps putting it mildly.
It took Win and Marguerite another half hour to wind their way back to the Lowcountry idyll where Holt House stood, and by the time they did, the van with Win’s men was right behind them. They all pulled into a long lane, slipping beneath enormous oaks hung with Spanish moss. When they finally emerged a quarter mile later into what he assumed had once been a park but now was little more than a jungle, he finally saw the house up ahead.
It was every bit as much of a wreck as advertised.
Before he could comment though, Marguerite reached over and put her hand on his arm.
He froze, his breathing going suddenly shallow, but thank God, she didn’t seem to notice. “I should have told you earlier, but Cindy said Mr. Holt employs snipers to shoot down drones. He’s that dedicated to his privacy. We may, um, want to warn your men.”
Win managed to respond almost naturally, but he could barely tear his eyes away from where Marguerite’s fingers rested gently on his sleeve. What the hell was wrong with him?
“We covered that before we left Charleston,” he said. “Everything’s in order. We’re safe from shooters, intruders, local law enforcement—probably even Constance Gibbs.” He gestured ahead, desperately glad when Marguerite’s hand fell away from his arm. “But I don’t think we’re necessarily safe from that.
Chapter Six
Though her Google search on the Mr. Holt’s property had turned up empty, Marguerite had lived for the past few months at the former plantation house of Heron’s Point. Based on that, she’d pretty much decided what Holt House would look like.
She couldn’t have been more wrong.
The House was, well, a cottage by most plantation standards. Instead of a soaring a big, blocky building with a double staircase and aggressive roofline, it almost looked like a fairy tale—a sculpted mansard roof topped the main portion of the building, but each end of the house sported a turret topped with a cone, the castle-like effect missing only flags to make it perfect. All of the house’s windows—and there were dozens—were covered with dark panels that were streaked with dirt and pollen. The first floor of the house was completely surrounded by a wrap-around porch, deep and gracefully lined beneath the fallen branches littering it, and the second floor had an inset balcony.
“It’s…stunning,” she breathed.
“It’s a death trap.” Beside her, Win was studying the house with a far more critical eye. He pointed to the walls. “That creeping vine is insidious. Gets stuck onto to mortar and brick and starts ripping it away almost immediately. We’ll be lucky if half the structure doesn’t come down with it when we start work.”
She turned to him, surprised. “You’re going to refurbish the house?”
As she watched him, he blinked, suddenly seeming to come back to himself.
“No! No, of course not.” He offered her a rueful smile. “Force of habit.”
“I thought Masters Real Estate Holdings strictly managed commercial properties.”
“It does, but I didn’t start there. I apprenticed with local builders.” Ignoring Marguerite’s startled glance, he turned back to the Holt House. “I see a structure like this, historic, no doubt unimproved in any way, and I immediately start working the angles. But the angles here are all bad. That roof is weighed down with—something. See?”
He pointed to where a heavy shadow stood out among all the other heavy shadows. Honestly, the entire building seemed to be freighted with the press of trees around it, the Spanish moss trailing from the oaks to drape it in a fine grey shroud. “Tree branch?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Something. And you can bet it’s something expensive to remove. Those panels have been replaced within the last ten years, and they’re top of the line hurricane shutters, underneath all that grime. So the windows are probably still somewhat intact. But if this is what the outside looks like...”
She finished the thought for him. “Then the inside is a nightmare.”
>
“Exactly.”
With the two men following behind, Marguerite and Win moved up the lane on foot—as it neared the house, it seemed to grow more overgrown and rutted, not less. “There’d been some sort of park here, from the looks of it,” Win said, gesturing at the wide central space before the house.
Marguerite studied it. “No trees out there anymore. Just brush and…well, more brush.”
“Probably most of this had been cleared out to set off the house. Don’t see any gardens, though. Google Earth maps show the house backs up to the river, but it’s all so densely overgrown between the trees and that infernal moss that it’s impossible to see into it.”
“And don’t forget the snipers.”
His chuckle was unforced, but he still turned his attention to the trees. What he saw must have satisfied him though. “Even if they were still here, it’s too thickly overgrown. Better shot toward the sky, and that’s where they were aiming.”
Still, with a wave of his hand he set the two construction assistants into action, the men striding forward confidently, then parting to scout out the path ahead of them.
When they all reached the edge of the house, the ground beneath their feet changed slightly. It became—not spongy so much as soft. Rich. The grass thicker, the earth beneath it almost springy beneath Marguerite’s hiking shoes.
Win noticed it too. “Strange. Some kind of fertilizer they used to aerate the ground?”
“Would they have shipped dirt in?”
He snorted. “In those days, there’s no end to the weird things they did when building their mansions. But shipping dirt…probably not.” He scanned the verdant grounds, noticing the same thing she had. “Plenty of stuff growing here, but it’s true. I don’t see any flowers.”
One of the men called down from the front porch. “This is sturdy enough. Good planking. Door looks like it’s been reinforced recently. New sticker for a security service, and these.”
He pointed a flashlight up under the eaves, and as Marguerite and Win mounted the stairs, she saw what he meant. “Motion sensor lights?”
“Top of the line,” Win said. “Holt may have let this place fall to ruin, but he didn’t scrimp on security. That’s a good sign.” He took a small ring of keys out of his pocket and inserted various ones into the series of locks—there were three in all, Marguerite realized. The door still took a bit of a push to open, of course. Humidity hung so heavily about the place that her clothes were already sticking to her skin.
Win gestured the men in first, and they stepped in, their high-beam flashlights sweeping over the place. One of them let out a low whistle. “You can come in, sir. Place is sturdy inside, too.”
The first thing Marguerite noticed when she stepped inside the cool, dark space was…well, how cool it was. She blinked, trying to adjust to the darkness. “It’s air conditioned?”
“So it would seem, unit must be in the back, though. There’s no sound.” Win reached for the light switches, and the room was flooded in a dim, pale light. “High efficiency bulb lighting,” he murmured, staring at the fixtures.
“Win,” Marguerite breathed. Something in her voice must have recalled him, because he dropped his gaze to where she was staring.
“What…in the hell,” he muttered.
Marguerite could understand his confusion. They might as well have stepped inside the parlor to any house museum in downtown Charleston. The floors were coated with dust and a few lines of footprints, and everything was covered with heavy cloths, but it was all still, irrefutably in place—side tables and lamps, stuffed chairs and cabinets, even the long Persian carpet lining the foyer, leading into—
“There are so many books!” Without realizing it, Marguerite had taken the dozen steps required to cross the entry hall, where the two men were scouting a room that had to be a library. One of them had lifted the heavy cover to reveal glass-fronted bookshelves that reached almost to the ceiling, and the room was outfitted with what looked to be several reading chairs and an empty—and pristine—fireplace. “How is it all of it is just—here?”
“Holt said he hasn’t visited the place himself in over a decade,” Win mused. “This isn’t a decade’s worth of dust.
“One year, sir.” One of the men stood in the room beyond it, at an enormous central structure that had to be a dining room table. There was a short stack of documents that he read using his flashlight to augment the dim light. “Records going back thirty years. Cleaning service—not one I’ve ever heard of.” As he spoke a machine kicked on somewhere in the distance. The air conditioning unit, Marguerite suspected.
“But one that’s definitely been used regularly,” Win mused. He shook himself as if visibly trying to refocus. “Place doesn’t seem cursed, so far.”
Marguerite smiled, her heart speeding up a bit as she watched him peer up at the ceiling, once more seeming transfixed by the details. He was such an attractive man, it was a complete and utter pity that—
Focus, she told herself firmly. Win was engaged. He was off limits—and besides, that’s not why they were here. “Holt said he had no idea what had caused the curse, but he mentioned the aunt’s troubles, right?”
Win nodded, still distracted. “There’s nothing in any site I was able to find except for the basic story I emailed you, and believe me, I had more than one person looking.”
“So, they kept it a secret. But something happened, and then, without warning…”
“Everything died. And stayed dead.” They replayed the legend that Marguerite had eagerly reviewed late last night. No one on the outside knew anything was going on except for that a terrible blight had struck the gardens of Holt House, the family had merely stopped entertaining in the early 1940s. Then the war had come and there wasn’t much cause for entertaining for a few years, and by the time anyone noticed, Holt House had been quietly shut up and left by the current generation.
They’d never truly returned.
“It’s been standing here for more than seventy years, abandoned,” she mused now, still having a hard time believing it.
“Well, not really abandoned.” Win gestured around the space. “This is preserved—updated, even, to some extent.”
“But preserved for what?”
“Sir! Some damage here.”
Marguerite looked up, surprised that the voice was floating down from somewhere high above them.
“Wait here,” Win said. He turned and strode from the dining room, back through the library. Marguerite quelled her need to follow him by taking off in the opposite direction. If this was the dining room…
Her curiosity rewarded her. The door between into the next room swiveled forward easily onto an enormous country kitchen, with everything intact except for appliances. There were three enormous hearths built into one of the walls, with a half dozen wrought iron kettles and stands lined up in front of them, though no wood remained in the grate. She could only imagine the size of dinner parties the Holts used to have, with a kitchen like this. Her gaze moved to the large panel-covered windows, and the large rear door. It had to lead to a veranda of some sort, she reasoned.
Easy enough to check.
She opened the door with little difficulty, swinging it wide…
And screamed.
“How long has it been down, do you think?”
Win scowled at the light streaming in through the window. It had been broken by a falling tree branch, which still lay against the glass, pressing inward. The wooden panel that had originally covered the window had been split down the middle and half of it was gone.
“Can’t be more than a few months, you ask me. Probably during that last hurricane run,” one of the men, Stan Greer, offered up.
“No, Holt would have had someone come out and check it then,” the other countered—Stan’s cousin, Frank. “Nothing about this place would indicate he’d leave it untended after a storm like that. More likely, it was regular storm that came and went and nobody knew the difference. Lot of t
rees here, and this room seems pretty untraveled.”
That was true enough. The fine patina of footprints extended throughout the upper floors, but here on the third floor it stopped short of entering the rooms. These all looked to have been sleeping quarters for the children or—like this one—sitting rooms intended to use up extra corners of space not already allocated below. There was a wood planked floor, still in good shape beneath its layer of dust, an area rug that had probably lain there for half a century, a few chairs and a desk—nothing more.
“We’ll let Holt know about it, but we should look at it from the outside, make sure there’s no structural damage,” Win said. “Odd that the plank was torn away while the others remained.”
“Odd in a couple of ways actually.” One of the men was squinting at what remained of the board. “This board is newer than the others, what’s left of it. Got a stamp on it with the date. First time I’ve seen that.”
“A stamp…” Win frowned and moved over to where the man was pointing. Sure enough, the board was stamped 7.2010. “Well, I guess it’s lasted quite a few years, though. That’s something.”
The man behind him grunted. “Probably why ol’ Holt didn’t check this summer. If the thing had a way of breaking every July, he’d have been out here already.”
“Fair enough.” Win leaned forward further to get a fix on the damage outside the window, peering over the dropped tree branch. He could only just make out the ruin of what had once been a structure far below, in the rear of the building. From this height, it almost looked like it could be a gazebo. But the roof had caved in, a tree still dropped heavily on it, and from the looks of it, it’d been like that for a while.
He recognized the structure immediately.
“That building,” he said, pointing. “That’s what you see in the aerial shots of Holt House. The one clear shot into the place.”
Chosen: Gowns & Crowns, Book 7 Page 6