Gnarled Hollow

by Charlotte Greene

They both sat quietly for a while, and Emily felt a strong, sweeping pity for the youngest sister, along with something like disgust for Margot. It was cruel of her to leave like that. Julia had been alone for the last six years of her life. And, as far as Emily knew, Margot didn’t come back before Julia died. She’d still been in Europe in 1925.

  Mark got to his feet. “I’ll leave you to it, then. I’m going to do some more digging in the official records. I might find something like a coroner’s report or something, though I doubt it. How long do you want to stay today?”

  “Couple of hours? I can’t read this kind of thing for very long before my eyes start to bug out.”

  “We could take a break for lunch around noon, if you like, and then decide if we want to come back after. I’ve been to all the cafes downtown and know the best one.”

  She agreed. “I also wanted to see if we could get in touch with someone from the school. He would be pretty old now, if he’s still alive, but I wonder if this Harold Arnett, who wrote Margot’s obituary, is still around, or if someone who knew him is still here.”

  “Good idea. I’ll call around now and try to set something up after lunch.”

  It didn’t take long to find Julia Lewis’s death notice in the paper, but unlike what the obituary for Margot had said, the newspaper claimed she had died from an accident, not TB. Emily read ahead and back a few days in the paper but saw no other details.

  It took her longer to find the notice for Nathan, and when she read it the first time, she almost shouted with surprised joy. She had to run upstairs to find Jacob to ask him for help, and he and Mark followed her back downstairs, caught up in her excitement. She wanted to figure out a way to print or scan the page she was looking at, but Jacob explained that they would have to send the reel away for a printout. This machine was incapable of it.

  “Can I use your phone really quick, Mark? I want to call June and tell her the good news.”

  “Sure. Here you go. I have the house phone programmed in.”

  Mrs. Wright picked up, and it took a few minutes for her to find June and bring her to the phone. June sounded breathless when she picked up.

  “Emily? Is that you?”

  “Yes, June, and you’ll never believe what I found today. Nathan Lewis, Margot’s older brother, attended a prestigious art school in New York. I don’t have any details yet, but it was mentioned in his death notice.”

  “What? That’s great! But that means—”

  “It means that, at the very least, we know one of the artists from the house.”

  “When did he die?”

  “1919.”

  June was quiet, long enough that Emily was afraid they’d been disconnected. “June? Are you still there?”

  “Yes. Listen—I have to check a couple of things. Could you print out that notice for me?”

  “We have to send it to another library first, so it might take a few days.”

  “That’s fine.” June sounded distracted, and Emily let her make her excuses, hanging up slightly puzzled. Something about the year she’d mentioned had obviously bothered June, but she would talk to her about it later.

  She and Mark left for lunch after this, telling Jacob they would either be back later today or tomorrow morning. She felt positively triumphant at their morning finds and couldn’t wait to share their news with the rest of the household when they got back. She thought already that she would ask Mark to call it a day after lunch so they could go home early. She almost suggested it now but could tell that Mark wanted to delay going home for a while longer. She remembered then that she wanted to look up Harold Arnett and asked Mark what he’d found out when he called around earlier.

  “Mr. Arnett is apparently alive, but retired. He still lives in the area, even. I left my number with the office assistant there at the school, and she told me she’d relay my number to him. Hopefully he’ll call us back.”

  They found a parking spot directly in front of a café, and when they got inside Emily was surprised to find a business so chic and upscale in such a small town. The place seemed more like something someone would see in Northern California than in upstate, rural New York. The menu was likewise surprisingly varied, with a wide range of vegetarian and organic options. It was strangely crowded for a Monday afternoon, and it seemed from the conversations she overheard that it was mainly locals here today. Everyone seemed to know each other, and after strange stares at them when they came through the door, everyone more or less ignored them.

  Several people were sitting at the front counter, so she and Mark took a booth. As he read the menu, she took the opportunity to glance around at the people in here. Something about one of the men at the counter gave her pause, and she watched him from behind long enough to remember him. It was the same man she’d met on the way to Gnarled Hollow—the helpful cyclist on the road. He hadn’t seen her, or pretended he hadn’t, and she frowned in concentration. She needed to remember something about him, but the harder she tried to think of it, the more distant the sensation became. Maybe it was simply that he’d been so dismissive of her experience, so certain she was wrong about the time, but that didn’t seem quite right. There was something more—something important about him.

  She stared at him long enough to see him reach into a pocket and pull out a cell phone. He held up a little slip of paper and peered at it for a moment before dialing, and a second later, Mark’s phone was ringing.

  The man turned, comically surprised, and Emily saw his eyebrows shoot up at the sight of her. Mark’s back was to the man, so he’d missed this exchange, and he dug around in a pocket for his phone. The man hung up and got to his feet, walking the few feet over to their booth.

  “Mark Somner?” he asked.

  Mark looked up, startled. “Yes?”

  The man held out his hand. “I’m Harry Arnett. You wanted to talk to me?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Harry Arnett was staring at the Turner, his shaggy gray eyebrows lowered in concentration. Like the last time Emily had seen him, he was unseasonably dressed in heavy tweeds, but whether for fashion or for warmth, he was, to judge from both occasions, used to dressing like this: something like a nineteenth-century gamekeeper.

  Back at the café, she and Mark had introduced themselves, and strangely, without speaking about it, she and Harry had pretended it was the first time they’d met. Maybe he wanted to be polite and save her the embarrassment of recalling their awkward encounter, or maybe he had another reason—either way, the gesture made her like him immediately.

  When she and Mark had explained what they wanted to talk about, and why they were here in town, he had asked if he could see the estate and the house. She and Mark had agreed at once, and now he was here in the sitting room. They’d left him alone in order to tell the others about their visitor, but as Jim was hard at work upstairs in her bedroom, and Chris outside with Lara, only June was available to meet him.

  June carried in a tray of tea, and the rattling cups and saucers made Harry turn around, smiling at them.

  “Thank you, Miss Friend,” he said, sitting down on the sofa. “You didn’t need to go through all this bother.”

  “Not at all,” June said, sitting next to him. She poured him a cup of tea and handed him a small plate of cake. Emily and Mark sat down in the seats across from the sofa, and Emily watched Harry gaze around the room some more before he shook his head. “I can hardly believe I’m here after all this time. It’s not at all what I expected.”

  Mark leaned forward, his expression serious. “Mr. Arnett—”

  “Harry, please. Mr. Arnett is what my students called me.”

  Mark smiled. “Harry, then. We told you that we read the obituary you wrote for Margot Lewis. Could you tell us more about what you know about her, or about the house?”

  Harry’s heavy eyebrows went up. “Of course.”

  “You seem to be the only person in town willing to talk about anything related to the Lewis family. I’ve brought them up wi
th several people, and the niece of the owner, Lara, has done the same. The conversation changes, or they deny outright that they know anything. My colleagues and I are all doing research here, but of course, sometimes the best information comes from word of mouth. It’s never recorded.”

  Harry smiled. “I’m not surprised no one will talk to you.”

  “Oh?” June asked. “Why not?”

  “It’s kind of a local superstition. People around here claim this house is haunted—cursed, really.” Harry shook his head in disgust. “Bunch of hogwash, of course, but there you have it.”

  Emily, June, and Mark shared a look before Mark asked, “Is there any reason people think that?”

  Harry made a seesaw motion with one hand and shrugged. “Yes and no. A lot of it has to do with this estate’s isolation. People will probably always think a place like this is haunted, if only because it’s so far away from everything, and locked up like it is. That big fence around the place doesn’t help, of course. I know when I was a boy, me and some friends tried to get inside the grounds, but we couldn’t figure out how, so we gave up. There was also a rumor that someone tried and got impaled out there on the fence.” He grinned. “But that’s probably just a story.”

  “Why else do people think the place is haunted?” Emily asked.

  Harry hesitated long enough that she almost regretted the question, but he finally sighed and set down his empty cake plate, leaning forward and clasping his hands.

  “Okay. I’ll tell you what I know, what I’ve heard, I should say, but keep in mind all of it is hearsay—a friend of a friend, the brother of a friend, that kind of thing. I heard stories when I was a boy and also when I was a teacher. It’s something we all talk about around here—scary stories we repeat over and over again to frighten each other, like in any small town.”

  “We understand,” Mark said. “Go ahead.”

  Harry leaned back on the sofa. “Most of it traces back to the people who worked here over the years. A lot of them lived in town. More recently, some of the men were hired to do renovations here at the house. I guess this was after the last owner died, last December or January—I can’t remember which. One of these men is my nephew, so I heard it from the horse’s mouth, as it were. He told me strange things about the doors—closing on their own, appearing overnight, all sorts of things that were hard to believe.” Harry’s eyes moved across the room to the heavy umbrella stand holding the door to the sitting room open. No one said anything, and Harry looked momentarily confused.

  “Before that, various landscapers from town claimed they saw things in the windows—people, usually—when the house was empty. No one’s lived here since 1960, yet they claim they saw faces in the upper-story windows.”

  Emily felt a chill. So far, they’d seen all the things Harry had mentioned for themselves. On the one hand, she was relieved others had seen these things, too. On the other, Harry’s words seemed to make what was happening more real, more insidious, as his story suggested that whatever was going on had been happening for a long time.

  Harry rubbed his eyes. “The rest of what I’ve heard happened much longer ago, before I was born, even, and goes back to the root of the problem, if you will. The cause, if you want to call it that. This estate employed a lot of people at one time, and while some of them lived here in the house, others lived in town. And, of course, the Lewis children sometimes came to town themselves when they were younger. They were privately tutored here at the house, but they would show up for carnivals, shopping, that sort of thing. People met them, liked them even.”

  “What did people say about them?” June asked.

  “At first, they were pitied when their parents died. It would, in the end, have been much better for them had they been taken in by their parents’ families in New York City and elsewhere. No one knows why they stayed here, or were left here, whichever it was, though there are some guesses. Various relatives would come for a while and then go home again, leaving them here, alone.

  “After Nathan left for art school, only the girls were out here, and I think everyone in town was even more surprised that they were on their own. In those days, it would have been one thing if a man was around, even a very young man, to watch after the girls, but another entirely with them to be all alone with their servants. It was unheard of. Girls in those days, of that class, needed chaperones.

  “But then Nathan came back after a couple of years in the city, and like any man of his class and age, he caused a few problems in town—drunken carousing, a pregnant girl, that sort of thing. I don’t know how much of it is true, but the rumors are he was something of a hellion. Still, people were glad, at the very least, that he was home to watch after his sisters again.”

  “Was any of that true?” Emily asked. “I mean, was there a baby?”

  Harry smiled slightly. “Yes. In fact, she and my father dated for a while before she and her family moved away. He wanted to marry her.”

  “Do you know her name?” Mark asked.

  “Hilda,” Harry replied, laughing. “I’ll always remember that name, since my father used to tell me she was the one who got away—never when my mom was around, of course. I don’t know her last name, but she was born when Nathan came back—late teens, maybe 1918 or 1919.”

  Mark made a note of her name. “But despite this hell-raising, people were glad Nathan was back?”

  Harry hesitated, his face hardening as if he was reluctant to go on. Finally, he looked up and met their eyes. “Not exactly. Before he left for school in the city, one of the maids, a young thing, told someone in town that she’d seen something unnatural happening between Nathan and one of his sisters. No one wanted to believe her, of course, but then someone else—a gardener, I think—said he saw Nathan and one of the girls in the greenhouse together. Naked.” Harry sighed. “The whole town turned against them. They had to send away for their groceries, even. No one in town would serve them.

  “When Nathan died, a lot of people around here thought it was his just deserts, punishment for unnatural acts. Then, of course, Margot left for Europe, and only Julia was left out here in the house until she died.”

  Emily leaned forward. “You said in your obituary for Margot that Julia died of TB, but I read elsewhere that she died in an accident.”

  Harry frowned. “Yes, that. Well, you see, that goes into another thing people hint at but never say. There were a couple of attending officials at Julia’s death, and they got their wires crossed, I think. They should have agreed on a cause of death they decided to share, because they put out to the newspaper that it was an accident and wrote TB on her death certificate. I didn’t want to get into it in Margot’s obituary, so I put down one of them there, even if we all knew better.”

  “Why would the officials do that?” June asked.

  Harry sighed. “I’m sure a family like the Lewises has enough money to pay off people to cover up what really happened.”

  “Which was?” June asked.

  “Suicide,” Mark said quietly.

  Harry nodded. “A lot of people said at the time that Julia hanged herself, though it might have been something else. Even before she died, there were rumors that she’d lost her mind when Nathan died. Some people have told me she was always a little off. They said the family had her locked up in the attic sometimes, though I never met or heard of anyone that actually saw her up there.”

  Emily shivered, remembering the shackles and the splintered furniture they’d seen in one of the larger attic rooms. She’d felt incredibly uncomfortable in there—confined and suffocated.

  “So all of this is supposed to explain the doors, the faces in the windows, everything?” Mark asked.

  She was surprised to hear that he sounded skeptical, almost as if he hadn’t seen it for himself.

  Harry raised his hands. “I guess so. At the very least, it’s a good story. It’s got incest, suicide, a murder, and a haunted house. It’s no wonder people still talk about it.”

&nbs
p; “Wait—what murder?” June asked.

  “Oh. I forgot to say. Some people believe that one of the sisters—Julia, probably, since she was the one who was supposed to be crazy—drowned Nathan. He was said to be a very good swimmer, so people of course make that leap.” He shrugged. “But he might have been drunk. He was a heavy drinker, from what I’ve heard.”

  “Wasn’t Julia much younger than him? Would it have even been possible for her to drown him?” Emily asked.

  Harry smiled. “Scary stories don’t have to make sense, Miss Murray.”

  “Did anyone else see anything here? I mean besides the doors and the faces in the windows?” June inquired.

  Emily thought she sounded a little too eager and was afraid she might give something away.

  Luckily Harry didn’t seem to notice. He shook his head. “No one but the caretakers and the landscapers have been inside this estate since Margot Lewis lived here. And when she came back from Europe, most people in town felt sorry for her. She kept to herself, never came to town. She was alone for all those years. My father told me that something happened out here in 1940 or so, when the steam room was installed. Two men were killed in some kind of freak accident when they were working on it. The rumor mill kind of picked up again for a while after that, but I never heard many details about it. The Lewises are very good at hush-hush tactics.

  “When I was a boy, there really wasn’t anything new to hear. Most of the stories were old hat by then. You’d hear things now and again about the house, from gardeners and the like, but I don’t know that many people actually believed the stories then or now. It’s just something we talk about to pass the time.”

  “The previous caretakers never said anything?” Mark asked.

  Harry shook his head. “No. In fact, if anything, Tom and Lydia—the caretakers before the Wrights—tried to shut down the stories. They would deny everything when people brought the subject up.”

  “Are they still alive?” Mark asked.

  Harry shook his head. “No—they’ve been gone a while, now. Died of cancer, both of them.”