by Wendy Webb
In the library, I carefully took one of her paintings off the wall, the one I knew concealed the safe, and, with shaking hands, dialed in the combination. The safe opened with a chock. It was as easy as that! But as I drew out its contents—cases of old jewelry that I knew belonged to my great-grandmother, legal papers, even an ancient-looking pistol (loaded, I noticed)—I realized the manuscript wasn’t among them.
“Where did you stash it, Mom?” I said to her, my mind running in several directions at once. But as I sank into one of the armchairs, I wondered if anyone could ever find something that was deliberately hidden in this house of secrets.
I spent the rest of the day scouring every place I could think of where my mother might have hidden that manuscript for safekeeping—I riffled through bookshelves in the library, opened dresser drawers, peered under beds and in the backs of closets. I even sifted through the attic, picking through relics from my family’s past. Nothing.
Defeated, I tramped back down to the main floor, wandering into the library and realizing my search was at its end.
Just then, the phone rang, and I snatched it before Jane could pick it up, hoping it was the doctor in Switzerland calling back.
“Hello?” I said. “This is Grace Alban.”
“Hello, Grace Alban,” said a familiar voice. “This is Matthew Parker.”
CHAPTER 18
Hi,” I said, a little startled to hear his voice on the other end of the line.
“I know we left it that you were going to call me if you needed to talk to somebody,” he began, and I could hear him clearing his throat. “But even though we extend the offer, people don’t always follow it up. So I thought I’d just give you a quick call to see how you were doing.”
I smiled. “I had a meeting with my mother’s lawyer today,” I told him, crossing the room and settling into an armchair. “She wants me to turn Alban House into a retreat for writers and artists during the month of June every year. She wants it to be named for David Coleville.”
He was silent for a moment. “What a marvelous idea. What do you think about it?”
“I’m not quite sure,” I admitted. “It will be up to me to administer it—to run the program, in other words. I’m to choose the participants from a pool sent to me by the university.”
I could almost see him nodding. “Is it something you’d want to do?”
“The more I think about it, the more I like it,” I said, looking around the room, imagining a group of artists and writers gathering for drinks before dinner.
“It’s fraught with meaning, all of it,” he said, and I could hear him pouring something into a cup. Coffee? “In terms of the timing, I mean.”
“How so?”
“She wants it named for Coleville, and June is the month in which he died, at the very house where this retreat is to take place. She wants her one remaining child to spend at least part of her life dedicated to honoring his memory.”
I shifted in my seat. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” I hesitated before continuing. “Obviously, she loved the man. The more I think of it—his death, I mean—the more I don’t like the conclusions I’m coming to. I really don’t think there was any way it was suicide.”
“You’re thinking that whatever is in that manuscript …”
“I turned the house upside down this afternoon looking for it,” I admitted.
“And you didn’t find it, I’m assuming.”
“No. I looked everywhere I could think of—safes, secret drawers, under beds, in the attic. It’s not here, unless my mother had another secret hiding place, which, when you think about my family, isn’t out of the realm of possibility.”
Matthew was quiet for a moment. “Oh, Grace. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.”
“Think of what?”
“What you said just now, about another secret hiding place?” he said. “This might turn out to be nothing, but I think I might know of one.”
“You think you know where the manuscript might be?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ve got an idea. Are you busy right now?”
I looked around. Amity was off in the gardens; dinner wasn’t quite ready. “I guess not.”
“I’ll pick you up at Alban House in ten minutes.”
CHAPTER 19
I jumped into the passenger side of the green Volvo, and Matthew pulled out of our driveway. He surprised me, just a short ways down the road, by turning into the church parking lot.
He raised his eyebrows at me, his face lit up with a grin, and he hopped out of the car. By the time I climbed out of the passenger seat, he was already fumbling with his keys at the side door of the church. He opened the door and held it wide, beckoning me inside.
“Is this a ploy to get me into the church for some kind of secret ritual?”
“As delightful as that sounds, no.” He smiled and closed the door behind us. “I know something you don’t know, and I can’t believe I haven’t thought about it before now.”
His eyes were shining so brightly that I couldn’t help getting caught up in his enthusiasm. “And what do you know that I don’t know?”
“This church has an archive vault,” he explained, leading me down the dark hallway, our footsteps echoing in the emptiness. “Generations of parishioners, especially people who lived through the Great Depression and didn’t trust banks or safety deposit boxes, have stored important items there for safekeeping.”
He opened the door to the basement and flipped on the light. “Maybe your mother came to Chip Olsen, who was the minister back then, with the manuscript—”
“To avoid having it destroyed!” I finished his thought. “If my grandfather had thought it was inflammatory enough to have killed for it, he certainly would have wanted to get rid of it.”
“And since she loved Coleville, your mother definitely would have wanted it saved,” Matthew said as we descended the stairs toward the basement. I noticed the air was getting colder and colder, the smell of stale earth stronger and stronger.
“Chip would have absolutely kept her confidence about it,” he went on. “She could’ve brought it here with nobody else knowing where it was.”
I could imagine my mother doing just that, saving the last work of the man she loved.
When we reached the bottom, Matthew flicked on the light, bathing the room in a yellowish hue. I gasped when I saw several stone sarcophagi, worn white with age, lined up in a row. This wasn’t just a church basement—it was a crypt.
I took a quick breath in, delicately touching one of them. “Who are they? What is this?”
“Freaky, huh?” Matthew smiled broadly. “I was stunned the first time I saw them, too. Church elders, mostly, from two centuries ago, and some even older than that. There’s even a Native American chief and his wife—a testament to how closely the settlers and the natives lived together at that time.”
He led me to a massive metal door on the far side of the room and quickly worked the combination lock, which responded with a loud click. “The church archives,” he said with a flourish, opening the door and ushering me inside.
Matthew flipped the light switch and I saw a cavernous room containing shelf upon shelf of items, almost like the stacks in a library. “This is where we keep old church records of births, deaths, baptisms, marriages, that sort of thing, along with valuable items parishioners want stored,” he explained.
“Lots of these things look really old,” I said, noticing a dusty felt box.
“Most of it is old. People don’t so much use church vaults nowadays. Frankly, lots of these items are forgotten, their owners having passed away without telling anyone they’ve stored something here.”
“And you don’t keep records?”
He nodded. “We do, but some parishioners didn’t want to leave a paper trail, especially if they were hiding something.”
A chill shot through me at that thought. That’s exactly what my mother was doing with the manuscript—hiding it
. “How are we ever going to find it amid all of this?” I asked, looking around at the shelves. “There’s an awful lot of stuff in here.”
“Look here,” Matthew said, running a finger along the side of one of the shelves. “The shelves have dates on them. What year did this all go down again?”
“Nineteen fifty-six,” I said, moving from shelf to shelf, counting my way back in time as I went. He started at the other side of the room and did the same.
A few moments later, he called out. “I found something!”
I flew to his side and saw a box just big enough to contain a ream of paper. It was marked ADELE MITCHELL, 1956.
“I can’t believe it,” I whispered, taking the box gingerly in my hands. “This has got to be it.”
Just then, I heard a loud click. Matthew snapped his head around and ran toward the door.
“Damn it!”
I poked my head around the shelf to face him. “What’s the matter?”
He didn’t have to respond. I saw him standing against the closed door.
CHAPTER 20
Please tell me this door opens from the inside,” I said, rattling the handle.
He shook his head. “It’s a vault. It locks from the outside when the door is closed.”
I looked at him, openmouthed. “You mean we’re locked in?”
Matthew fished a cell phone out of his pocket. “I’m afraid so. I’ll just call my secretary and she can come …” He stared at the display on the face of his phone and then looked up at me with a sheepish grin. “No bars. I guess the stone of this subbasement is blocking the signal.”
My stomach did a quick flip. “Now what?”
“I guess we wait,” he said, shrugging his shoulders with an ease I found disarming, considering we were locked in an ancient stone room adjacent to a basement crypt. I looked around at the generations of dust on the shelves and I wondered just how much air there was in there. The vault certainly didn’t have a vent to the outdoors.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We won’t be here long. The janitorial crew will be here soon. They’ll see my car, they’ll see the lights on leading to the basement, and they’ll put two and two together.”
“What if they don’t?”
“We’ll bang on the door and the ceiling,” he offered. “They’ll hear us. Worst-case scenario, we’ll have to wait until morning. Martha will be here at the crack of dawn and will figure out we’re down here. It’s Sunday tomorrow, remember? The whole church will fill up before eight thirty, and when I’m nowhere to be found, she’ll track me down, believe me. The woman is like a bloodhound.”
“All night?” I squeaked, a sense of unease growing inside of me.
He took my hands in his. “Listen, Grace,” he said. “Everything’s going to be okay. I promise. We’ll be out of here before you know it.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I do.” He smiled. “I’m just hoping it’s not one of the ladies from the church who finds us, or the scandal of us being alone together in this vault will spread faster than a swarm of locusts.”
I could see that he was trying to lighten the mood, so I tried to follow his lead. “What I want to know is why, every time I’m with you, something dramatic happens.”
“It’s just business as usual for an average Lutheran minister,” he said. “Sermons, marriages, funerals, and the odd life-threatening incident or two.”
I chuckled. “There are worse people to be locked in a vault with. I mean, if we have to start praying to be rescued, you’ve got a direct pipeline to the man upstairs.”
“The man upstairs that I’m most interested in reaching at this moment is the janitor,” he said, staring at his dead phone.
I sighed, looking around the room, dust hanging in the air like fog. I wrapped my arms around my chest and shivered.
Matthew’s eyes met mine. “Are you cold?”
I nodded. “A little. It really is dank down here, isn’t it?”
He peeled off the jean jacket he was wearing and held it open for me.
“Are you sure you don’t need it?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not at all. Please.”
I slipped my arms inside and felt his warmth wrap around me. The jacket smelled like him—a hint of spiciness from his soap mixed with fresh air. I turned to thank him, and our eyes locked for a moment that seemed to go on forever. I could feel my face heating up and was grateful for the dim light in the room.
We stood like that for a while, neither saying anything, each holding the other’s gaze, and then he reached toward me and pushed a stray tendril of hair off my forehead. I knew exactly what this moment was and exactly what was about to happen if I let it, and I stepped back a few paces. The attraction between us was undeniable, but getting involved with him, or anyone, was the last thing I needed.
“Thank you for the jacket,” I coughed, clearing my throat.
His eyes still held mine for a few seconds. “You’re welcome,” he whispered.
I turned and walked down one of the aisles. “What shall we do with ourselves, then, while we wait?” I asked a little louder than I intended.
“You could open the box, for starters.”
“You’re right!” I smiled at him. “I could.” I made my way over to the shelf where it had been sitting for decades. The box was wrapped in heavy brown paper that had begun to yellow and fray around the edges.
I slipped my finger under one end of the paper and ran it down the length of the box, the wrapping crackling easily with age. I tore the rest away and then lifted the lid, conscious that the last person to touch it had been my mother before she married my dad.
Inside was a large manila envelope containing what seemed to be a ream of paper. On the front of the envelope, my mother’s address, in the now-familiar handwriting of David Coleville.
I looked up at Matthew. “We found it.”
He nodded, his eyes shining. I opened the envelope and drew out the final work of David Coleville, a book the literary world had anticipated but never received; wondered and speculated about, but never got to read. Only we knew it existed.
My hands were shaking as I held the pages.
I had no idea what this manuscript might have been worth in monetary value, but as I sat there in the dusty, dank vault, I knew that its real value to me wasn’t in dollars and cents.
My mother wasn’t here to tell me about what happened all those years ago. I couldn’t simply ask her about her secret romance with one of this country’s most talented writers, but his unpublished novel, the ream of paper I held in my hands, would bring that summer to life for me in vivid detail—Coleville’s version of it, anyway.
Reading this story would be as close as I would ever get to time traveling. The words would transport me back to another time at Alban House, to a time before I was born, when my mother and father, David Coleville, and my aunt Fate were much younger than I was now, when my grandparents were vibrant and energetic and commanding. Through Coleville’s words, I could immerse myself in the world of my parents and grandparents in a way few children have ever had the opportunity to do.
I knew Coleville had changed the names of people and places, but I was sure I’d be able to discern who was whom. I stood there for a few minutes with the manuscript in my hands, an odd mix of excitement and trepidation bubbling up in my stomach. I had been dying to know more about their relationship, how they fell in love and why it all went wrong, but now that I had at least some of the answers at my fingertips, something was holding me back from turning that first page.
A voice then, soft in my ear. Be careful what you wish for, Gracie. Once you learn the truth, you can’t unlearn it.
I stared down at the first page and read the title aloud to Matthew.
“The Haunting of Whitehall Manor by David Coleville.” A tingling traveled through the page and into my hands as I said it. “Shall I read it aloud to you?”
“Let’s just take a moment to realize that yo
u and I are the first people in fifty years to be reading this work,” he said, his eyes glowing. “This is a real gift, Grace. Months and years from now, when the whole world knows about it, when this very manuscript has been sold at auction, when you have been interviewed on the Today show talking about how you found it, we can look back on this moment and remember that it was just the two of us, here in this vault.”
He sank down onto the cement floor and motioned for me to join him, which I did. “That said”—he smiled—“I’m ready to hear it.”
I took a deep breath and began to read, the words immediately transporting us out of that damp church basement and into the glittering showplace that was Alban House, fifty years earlier.
Chapter One
The first time I laid eyes on Whitehall Manor, it was a cold, dreary June evening. I was squinting to see anything out of the fogged-up window in the back of the car that my companion’s father had sent for us, but the world seemed dull and hazy around the edges, as though it was formulating itself, working to make itself whole out of the mists in preparation for our arrival, as Avalon did for Arthur. I let my mind drift to mystical kings and knights and wizards as we bumped along the road toward our destination. I didn’t know it then, but looking back on it now, it is an apt analogy, for just as Avalon was home to sorceresses and magic, so, too, was Whitehall, containing secrets and mystery and enchantment, like the island that is steeped in Celtic lore.
As we rounded the corner of the driveway, the house appeared, solid now, sturdy and whole, shrouded in the fog that had crept on land from its birthplace on the lake and lay heavy around the place. The house was not a castle, not exactly, but an enormous, imposing structure all the same, a full city block long at least. It reminded me of an old manor house in the windswept British countryside, the moors. It was an ancient and formidable place that had stood against the ravages of Lake Superior’s icy winds for generations.
As we got out of the car, I strained my neck to take it in, all three stories, with turrets and a tower, brick and stucco, several chimneys—I quickly counted fourteen, but there might have been more—and a patio running the entire length of the house overlooking tenderly manicured English gardens and the lake beyond. The staff stood at attention, at least a dozen of them, in a line snaking from the massive wooden front door onto the patio, in position to welcome their returning son home.