Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  “Work?”

  Cleo translated for her brother. “Investments, dear, the stocks and bonds.”

  “So you work on Wall Street,” said Charles in an attempt to be helpful. Oh, wait. There was that pesky word again. Work? Us?

  “No, we manage our own investments,” said Lionel. “But it is time-consuming.”

  Somewhere between the chocolate mousse and postprandial brandy, the conversation had turned to the subject of fortunetellers. Where this topic had come from, Charles could not say, but he suspected that Bitty had raised it in a small voice and wafted it across the table to her mother, a willing receptacle.

  “I’ve had a few tarot card readings,” said Cleo, “and it was worth years of therapy. But there’s nothing mystical about it. The fortuneteller reads the person, not the cards. Some readers are remarkably intuitive.”

  And Charles took this to mean that a fortuneteller had once flattered her. No, that was unkind and in conflict with his heightened sense of empathy. He suspected a wound at the core of this woman, some serious misadventure of the psyche. It was a certainty that she shared this affliction with her brother, hence the odd bond between them. Something had happened to them, some great trauma.

  Bitty gulped down her brandy and reached for the decanter, saying, “Aunt Nedda can read tarot cards.” Out of the entire company, Nedda Winter was the most surprised by this news. Bitty quietly slipped away from the table and left the dining room door ajar as she made her way across the front room, wobbly but stumbling only once.

  Upon finally noticing her daughter’s absence, Cleo shrugged her apologies to Charles. “I’m sure she’ll come back.”

  “It might be better if she didn’t,” said Lionel. “She’s had way too much to drink.” He turned to Charles, saying, “My niece isn’t accustomed to alcohol. The religious life, I suppose. Her current church—”

  “Religious?” Sheldon Smyth pronounced this word as if he had never heard it before. “Bitty? She’s never even been to Sunday school.”

  “It’s a phase she’s been going through,” said his ex-wife, “for the past three years.” There was a clear comment here on Sheldon Smyth’s apparent lack of interest in his own child.

  Lionel turned to his erstwhile brother-in-law. “So Bitty never told you when she joined the Catholics.” There was nothing in his voice to say that Sheldon’s ignorance surprised him. “Well, that’s old news.”

  In an aside to Charles, Cleo said, “Bitty’s a Protestant now—Bloody Heart of the Redeemer, I think. Something like that. It’s a sect—no, actually, more like a cult. Lots of traveling on holy missions to recruit heathens.”

  “I’m sure,” said Lionel, “Bitty finds it a damn shame that the Protestants have no nunneries.”

  “It’s a shame they have no confessionals,” said Bitty, reappearing from behind her uncle’s chair, weaving slightly and producing an awkward silence all around the table. “Imagine a little room where you can take your soul to get it cleaned.”

  This comment was met with dead quiet. Charles affected the distance of outsider status. Eyes cast down, his spoon served only to move the dessert about on his plate.

  “You’ve had quite enough to drink.” Cleo was firm and apparently still had the power to forbid her forty-year-old child, for now she moved the brandy snifter far from her daughter’s place setting.

  Ignoring her mother, Bitty passed by her own chair and moved toward Nedda in a slow, somewhat unsteady march. She held a boxed deck of cards in her hands. The cardboard was worn with ages of handling and bore a tarot illustration of the hanged man. She set it down on the table before her aunt, as though bestowing a precious artifact. “Maybe you could read the tarot cards for Charles.”

  Nedda Winter stared at the deck with a trace of alarm. This might as well be a dead animal that her niece had laid on the dinner table. She was slow to recover her composure, and then she slipped the deck into her lap beneath the cover of the tablecloth. “Not tonight, dear. I’m rather tired.”

  “What you need is a good stiff drink.” Sheldon Smyth rose to gallantly pull out her chair, then led her away from the table, and the rest of the party followed them to gather around the bar in the front room. While the lawyer poured out their drinks, Charles renewed his fascination with the staircase.

  “You feel it, too,” said Bitty, nodding. “It’s haunted.”

  He noticed a sudden dismay about her and turned to see what she was staring at—another damned mirror. It was impossible not to encounter one’s self at every turn. Bitty had caught her reflection alongside his own. How he dwarfed her in size. They resembled a sideshow team of giant and midget. She turned her eyes this way and that, finding the same tableau in every direction.

  They both looked up to escape the mirrors, and now they shared a view of the winding banister encircling a skylight dome at the top of the house. In another era of horse-drawn carriages and clearer skies, there might have been stars up there.

  “Lots of history in this house,” he said.

  “You mean all the murders,” said Bitty.

  Cleo’s smile clicked on slightly out of sync and all for Charles. “I’m sure you know the story of Winter House. Everyone does.” Glancing back at her daughter, she said. “It’s a tired old story, dear.”

  Every pair of eyes was fixed on Charles, reading the stunned surprise on his face. He was recalling a bit of history that appeared in newspapers every ten years or so, the regurgitation of a mass murder for the reading pleasure of the public on a Sunday afternoon.

  Oh, bloody hell.

  Riker and Mallory should have told him, warned him.

  Forgetting his manners, he looked over Bitty’s head to gape at the surviving Winter children all grown up.

  “There was another murder that wasn’t famous.” Bitty addressed Charles’s shoes. “You’re standing on the place where Edwina Winter died. She was Aunt Nedda’s mother.”

  He backed up a few steps. “She fell?” He looked straight up. The body could not have landed in that spot, not after falling down the stairs. The woman must have gone over the—

  “Nedda is our half sister,” said Cleo, as if this might be what puzzled her guest. “Different mothers. And her mother drank quite a bit. Well, there you have it, the oldest family scandal. Edwina Winter was drunk when she went over the banister.”

  “My father and his brother, James, saw her fall,” said Lionel, directing his gaze upward to a large picture hanging on the second-floor landing. “That’s their portrait.”

  Charles looked up at the oil painting of two adolescents. Even at this distance, he would call it a very bad piece of work, almost a cartoon.

  “Their account wasn’t quite accurate,” said Bitty.

  “Daddy and Uncle James gave the only account,” said Cleo. “How can it—”

  “Quentin and his first wife hated each other.” Bitty sipped sherry, stocking up on a little bravery from a glass. “I found the divorce papers filed just before Edwina died. They were charging each other with infidelity.”

  “That’s enough, Bitty,” said her mother. “Have some consideration for your aunt.”

  “No, don’t stop because of me,” said Nedda. “I never knew my mother. I was a baby when she died.” She gave her niece an encouraging smile, apparently approving of this uncharacteristic demeanor.

  “All the money belonged to Edwina Winter.” Bitty was running out of false courage. She went to the bar and poured herself some more. “The staircase is full of ghosts. It’s a nervous kind of haunting. Can’t you feel it?”

  “I know what she means,” said Sheldon Smyth. “There’s always been something queer about this house. Always felt it, just as she says. And that damned staircase. It’s just plain wrong.”

  “It’s the pride of the house,” said Cleo. “It was featured in Architectural Digest. The writer called it the absolute triumph of form over function. His very words.”

  Sheldon Smyth wore a condescending smile. His ex-wife h
ad missed the insult in that quotation, and she was doomed to repeat it to anyone who would listen to this joke told by herself at her own expense. Politeness prevented Charles from enlightening her, informing her that life was not lived on the stairs, but in the rooms where people might take creature comforts, procreate and dream. But not in this house. Here everything revolved around the tension of the staircase; the inertia of lines rushing upward appeared to be all that kept it from falling down.

  Taking Charles by the arm, Bitty smiled with new-found boldness. “You decide.”

  Helplessly bound by good manners, he climbed the stairs with her until they gained the second floor. The rest of the party was also being pulled along, straggling upward without wills of their own. The dynamic of the dinner party had changed. Oddly enough, Bitty was running the show. She paused and, with the air of a tour guide, pointed to the place along the stairs where Quentin Winter had died in the famous massacre. Charles glanced back to see Nedda, last in line, giving wide berth to this area, as if she must round the dead body of her father before she could continue upward.

  The staircase was not haunted—Nedda was.

  “Edwina Winter died almost twelve years before the massacre.” Bitty stood beneath the painting of the Winter brothers and instructed Charles to remain by the railing. “That’s where she was standing when she—fell. Now remember, all the Winters were tall, and they married tall people, like you. Think you could fall by accident?”

  He stood with his back to the railing, which was higher than one might expect, yet another design flaw, and he tried to imagine a scenario where he might go over the side; perhaps if the floor were slippery or he were to stumble. No, that would not work. His center of gravity would still be below the rail.

  “Tricky, isn’t it?” Bitty rested one hand on the smooth, round wood. “Now if it had broken, that would explain everything, but this is the original—perfectly sound. Give up?” Without waiting for a reply, she turned her back on him to open a door into the blackness of a bedroom. She pointed to the spot where he was standing. As if commanding a very large dog, she said, “Wait there.”

  The tiny woman was swallowed up in the shadows. Seconds later, she was rushing back into the light, running toward him, hands extended and palms flattened back, as if to push him. And she was fast. There was no time to grip the rail, nor even to raise his arms. Bitty stopped—dead stop—when her hands were a bare inch from his chest. She turned her smiling face up to his. “That’s the only way it could have happened. Quentin Winter murdered his first wife.”

  “That’s enough,” said Cleo, “I won’t have you saying these things about my father.”

  “Why not?” said her ex-husband. “Neither one of the Winter boys was a saint, not according to my father. It’s as good a theory as any.”

  “And now—the other ghosts.” Bitty was gleefully potted as she descended the stairs to a midpoint between the high ceiling and the parlor floor. She turned to look back at Cleo. “This was where your mother died.” Bitty turned her eyes to Charles. “Alice was her name. The second Mrs. Winter was my grandfather’s favorite model. He was an artist, you know.”

  All eyes followed the dramatic point of Bitty’s finger. “There was another body in the—”

  “Stop! You weren’t there!” Cleo yelled at her daughter. “You weren’t even born yet! You don’t know anything!”

  Nedda Winter was not taking this well, either. She gripped the rail with a sudden need of support.

  Had both these sisters witnessed the massacre of their family? Charles’s sketchy knowledge of this old story held no such detail.

  Bitty was prattling on about the other deaths and where the bodies fell as she led the party down the staircase. “And then there was the baby,” she said, almost as an afterthought. “A newborn. Sally was her name. She survived the massacre. What happened to her after that, Mother?”

  Nedda paused on the last step and stared at Cleo, waiting on the answer to that question. Clearly, she had no knowledge of her baby sister’s whereabouts. How curious. Charles wondered if another of the Winter children had been . . . lost.

  “Sally Winter.” Sheldon Smyth was the first to reach the bar. “I haven’t heard that name in years.” He smiled at Charles. “Everyone called her Baby Sally. I was just a boy, away at school when I heard the news. She ran off. Isn’t that right, Lionel? Isn’t that what the nanny told the police?”

  “The nurse,” said Cleo. “Sally had a nurse.”

  “Quite right,” said Sheldon. “As I recall, your uncle James fired that woman for stealing.” He spoke to Charles, for the outsider would need a running translation. “James Winter was their guardian after the rest of the family was murdered. Yes, I remember him confronting the nurse about stealing.”

  “You’re confused, old man,” said Lionel. “It was Uncle James who was stealing.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Sheldon Smyth. “That’s why he left town so suddenly. If I remember correctly, that was the year you turned twenty-one.”

  Lionel turned his back on the man, then poured a double shot of whiskey from the bar and downed it quickly.

  Nedda’s face had gone bloodless. She drifted back to the stairs, passing all of them by, and, without a good night to anyone. In dead silence, they all watched her climb and climb, then disappear behind a door on the floor above. Bitty, the living portrait of contrition and regret, trailed after her aunt.

  Sheldon Smyth was quick to retrieve a briefcase from the floor of a closet, and now he made his retreat, backing up to the door, pleading an early appointment and urging his guest to stay on for a nightcap. The caterers were gone, and so were Cleo and Lionel. Charles opened the door to the dining room, hoping to find them there, to say good night and beat a hasty retreat.

  Not there. Where then?

  They had not gone upstairs. After searching the kitchen and the sewing room, he returned to the front of the house to find Cleo and Lionel standing by the entrance to the foyer. With only a nod to their guest, they turned around and left. Charles heard the front door close behind them. Well, this was a bit backward, the hosts leaving the house in advance of the guest.

  “A most unconventional dinner party,” said Nedda Winter.

  He turned to see her standing behind the bar, uncorking a bottle of wine.

  “My family doesn’t entertain much anymore.” She smiled, quite her old self again, such a charming smile. She tapped a button on a control panel next to the bar, and the sound system died off to blessed silence. “Ah, that’s better. I’d like to thank you for not asking me where I’ve been for all these years.”

  “To be honest, I wasn’t sure that you were Red Winter. I don’t know the story as well as I thought.”

  “Do you like jazz, Mr. Butler?”

  Old-fashioned record albums had appeared on the bar, stacked up beside two wineglasses. Charles examined them one by one. Any audiophile could date them back to the middle of the last century. “This is a wonderful collection.”

  “Unfortunately, they’re all warped and scratched. And all the records that my sister stacked up for the party are not my idea of music.”

  “Mine either.” He pulled a record from the album cover. It was made of hard plastic that predated vinyl, cassettes and magnetically encoded discs. And it was ruined. What a great pity.

  Nedda turned away from him to study the control panel for the sound system. “I was hoping you could show me how to play the radio on this thing. It has a beautiful sound quality, and I know a station that only plays jazz from the thirties and forties. I tried to tune it in once, but that made Cleo cry. She said I changed the programming for all her favorite stations. She doesn’t know how to work it, either.”

  “And neither do I.” For a birthday present, Mallory had rewired his apartment with a similar sound system, and, yes, the sound quality was incredibly beautiful, but the control panel she had installed was equally daunting. “I have one at home, but it’s a different model and the but
tons are color coded.” Mallory had programmed his stations and painted the selection buttons with red nail polish.

  He strolled over to the antique radio that she had played last night. “Well, we know this works.”

  The front windows were open. The curtains blew inward, Duke Ellington and his band flowed out into the street.

  Charles Butler was in Luddite heaven. He ended the evening painlessly, sitting outside on the stone steps. The warm wind of Indian summer ruffled his hair to the tune of rippling piano keys. They were finishing off the last bottle in a prolonged good-bye.

  “I haven’t gotten soused on wine since I was twelve years old,” said Nedda Winter.

  “I gather your upbringing was rather liberal.”

  “You have no idea.” She looked up at the face of her house and smiled. “It was a party that went on for years. My parents were jazz babies, and they were never bothered by nice people from good families. Our guests were miles more interesting.” She ticked off an impressive list of actors, writers, gangsters and gamblers who had passed out at the dining room table. “But I liked the chorus girls best. They gave me a taste for cold beer and taught me to curse.” She produced a pack of cigarettes from the folds of her shawl. “And they taught me how to blow smoke rings.” She blew one now and it hung in the still night air. “You don’t like my house much, do you?”

  “I suppose it makes me nervous.”

  “Yes, I noticed that. But it didn’t bother you the other night, did it? Not with all those policemen, all that activity—and this music on the radio.”

  “Well, no.”

  “Oh,” said Nedda—big smile, “how the house loves a good party. I’m afraid we put on a rather poor show tonight. Not nearly enough people—and that dreary music.” She caressed the wrought-iron railing. “Poor house. It was made for a wilder nightlife.”

  Though he would not describe the crime scene as a wild party, he took her point. “So, tonight, I’m seeing the house out of context. The interior—that was actually designed for large gatherings, wasn’t it?”