Winterhouse

by Ben Guterson

  Norbridge was stirring; he let out a low groan and began to stretch his limbs.

  Gracella reached out a hand to steady herself. She looked vastly different: The white of her face had drained to a sickly gray, the bun of her hair had gone slack so that her silver strands splayed in a wild tangle, and she seemed to have shrunk into herself. She looked thinner and weaker, as though she’d been struck with some instant wasting sickness.

  “What’s happening?” Elizabeth said, more to herself than to Gracella.

  “Elizabeth,” Norbridge said. He was sitting up and rubbing a shoulder to revive himself. His voice was frail. “Move away from her! Move away!”

  Gracella, still holding one hand to her chest and extending the other, stumbled forward. Her eyes filled with panic and anger as she made a motion to grab The Book from Elizabeth, but as she did so she lost her balance and fell to the floor, began to flail her arms, first at the air and then at her own body. She thrashed wildly, while her hair and black jacket and dress flew about. Elizabeth took two tentative steps in her direction.

  “Don’t!” Norbridge yelled. He was standing now, unsteadily. “Stay away from her!”

  Gracella gave one terrible, final jerk of her body, wailed like an animal just clutched in a trap that had snapped shut, and lay motionless. One tiny gasp rose up from deep in her chest, and then all was still.

  Elizabeth looked to Norbridge with utter incomprehension. She turned back to the form on the ground, half thinking Gracella might bolt upright and make a lunge at her, though the other half of her felt certain Gracella wasn’t going to stir at all—and never would again.

  “What just happened?” she said.

  Norbridge shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.” He was standing beside her now, studying Gracella the way a person might study some explosive he thinks could still be dangerous. “If she’s not dead, it seems she’s close to it.” He looked to Elizabeth. “What happened? I heard something here and came up—that’s the last I remember until now. What did you do?”

  Elizabeth opened her mouth to speak—and then, without warning, tears flooded her eyes. All of it—the fear of Gracella, the revelations about her mother, the exhaustion of the previous few days—rolled over her like a tidal wave, and her body unraveled into deep sobs. Norbridge put his arms around her. “It’s too much, I know,” he said. “Too much.”

  She cried while Norbridge held her tight. When, after a long moment, the sobs quieted and she felt she could speak, Elizabeth loosened her grip on Norbridge and leaned away. There was so much she wanted to tell him—about the message she had deciphered, and how she had used the power inside herself to move The Book, and how she had figured out nearly the entire story of the Hiemses and Gracella and even Riley S. Granger. But she figured there would be time enough for all of that. So instead, she reached for the pendant around her neck and lifted it from under her shirt.

  “I think Winnie was my mother,” she said.

  Norbridge’s face went white. He put a hand to his forehead and stared at the pendant. “Where did you get that?” he stammered.

  “I’ve always worn it. My aunt and uncle said it was from my mother.”

  He touched it, ran his finger over the indigo circle of marble. “I gave this to Winnie.”

  “And she gave it to me.”

  Norbridge fixed his eyes on Elizabeth, moved his hand to hold her lightly beneath her chin. “You…” he began, and then he stopped and examined the pendant once more. “I haven’t seen that necklace since Winnie left.”

  The noise of footsteps and voices—Jackson and others—sounded from beyond the doorway; they were rushing up the stairs.

  “I wear it all the time,” Elizabeth said. “Always.”

  Norbridge took the pendant between his thumb and forefinger and held it upright between them. He smiled. “This is magic, Elizabeth,” he said. “Real magic.” And then he hugged her once again.

  CHAPTER 37

  A NECKLACE RIMMED IN SILVER

  SOLVER

  SOLDER

  BOLDER

  Elizabeth, Freddy, Norbridge, and Leona stayed up until three in the morning talking. Norbridge had to leave twice to check on the New Year’s Eve party and confer with Jackson, but aside from those brief departures, he remained with the other three, and they discussed the events of the evening, the chain of events of the previous two weeks and—most amazingly to Elizabeth—the facts of her connection to Winifred and Norbridge and Winterhouse.

  It was a long conversation, as Norbridge first asked Elizabeth to walk him through the steps that had led to the events in the library. She’d shared pieces of it with him briefly right after she’d fled from Selena in the portrait gallery that afternoon, but now she fleshed it out and explained the final pieces about the silver letters and decoding the message and seeing the portrait of Winnie with the necklace.

  “But what made you try the word ‘faith’?” Freddy said.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t know. It just felt right all of a sudden. Like an intuition.” She drew out the pendant once again and glanced at it before holding it up for view. “There were the silver letters in The Book, which got me thinking, and I finally realized they were spelling out THE KEY IS AROUND YOUR NECK. Plus, something clicked for me about the symbol of the key, and it made me think of ‘keyword,’ and … I just felt like I should try it out.”

  Norbridge pointed to the necklace. “My grandfather Nestor gave that to my grandmother Lavina, and then it passed down to my mother, Rowena, and from her to Maria and then Winifred.”

  “The word’s also on the puzzle in the lobby, you know,” Elizabeth said. “But in another language. I think that stayed in the back of my mind, too. The whole thing was sort of like solving a crossword puzzle. It just suddenly seemed to fit.”

  “How did The Book end up on the floor, though?” Freddy said. “I still don’t get that.”

  Elizabeth had been vague on this point. She wasn’t sure how much to reveal about the feeling and how she had developed the ability to make things move.

  “Gracella bumped it when she turned around, perhaps?” Norbridge said. Very quickly—so quickly that only Elizabeth noticed—he gave her a wink.

  “Everything happened so fast,” she said. “I guess she bumped it. I don’t know.” Before Freddy could ask anything more, Elizabeth said, “The main thing is I’m sorry I didn’t tell all of you about The Book right away and then return it when I said I would. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Put it out of your mind,” Leona said. “I believe Gracella’s power was very strong, and at points along the way, her influence got to you, even though you tried to resist. I think she even caused you to shout her name out somehow. At least, that’s my take on things, but I wouldn’t berate yourself over any of it.” Leona glanced around the room. “But where is it now?”

  “The Book?” Norbridge said, and Leona nodded. He looked to Elizabeth. “Why don’t you explain?”

  “I put it back where I found it,” Elizabeth said. “We decided that was the best thing to do.”

  “I didn’t watch,” Norbridge said. “I don’t want to know where it is.”

  It had felt strange to Elizabeth to climb back up the ladder in the reference room and drop The Book behind the row of books on its top shelf. But that’s exactly what she had done once Jackson and three others took Gracella’s lifeless body to the mortuary in the nearby town of Havenworth, and she and Norbridge had conferred about what to do next. As she stood by herself and held The Book, there had been a moment when she considered just how incredible it was that this slim volume, not thirty minutes before, had been at the heart of such terrible events. It was so unassuming, with such a dull cover. She’d spoken a few magical words while holding it, and now it felt inert, merely a simple book.

  I hope it stays there and no one finds it, she had thought. Forever.

  “Probably for the best,” Leona said now. “We can only count our lucky stars that
Gracella wasn’t able to use its power.”

  “No thanks to the Hiemses!” Norbridge said. “We never even knew Gracella had a daughter, first of all. But to think of Selena and her husband engaged in all their scheming, as well as looking after Gracella’s body for years…” He gave a little shiver of disgust with his shoulders.

  “That’s really creepy,” Freddy said.

  Elizabeth thought back to that moment when she had stood beside the crate and tried to open it. She closed her eyes. “Don’t talk about it,” she said.

  “What about the Hiemses?” Freddy said. “Did anyone see them tonight?”

  “They’re gone,” Norbridge said flatly.

  “What do you mean?” Elizabeth said.

  “That’s the first thing I looked into after we left the library,” Norbridge said. “I had Jackson and two others go to their room right away. Gone. Cleared out. They’ve disappeared.”

  “That’s not good,” Freddy said.

  “Norbridge, I’ve been wondering,” Elizabeth began, and then allowed her sentence to trail off. She wanted to ask more about the Hiemses before the subject was left behind. The thought that they might be connected to Riley Granger—were, perhaps, even related to him—was something she had been contemplating ever since she uncovered the secret of Marcus’s signature on the card he’d given her. Now, though, with Gracella defeated and the Hiemses no longer a threat, she thought it likely there was nothing to her suspicions and resolved to let them go.

  “Yes?” Norbridge said, waiting for Elizabeth to continue.

  “I’ve been wondering this whole time why you wanted me to check in with you each day. Was there something you noticed? Like I resembled Winnie in some way, or you felt we were connected?”

  Norbridge furrowed his brow. “I knew there was something. That’s the only way I can explain it. I just knew there was something.”

  “You’ve hardly answered her question,” Leona said. “There’s a difference between knowing something and just having a funny feeling.”

  “Miss Springer is unwilling to be deferential, even on a night like this,” Norbridge said, and they all began to laugh. “But enough of all that.” He pointed to Elizabeth again. “I want to tell you about your mother.”

  For the next hour, both Norbridge and Leona told Elizabeth all about Winnie, detouring whenever Elizabeth asked a question or when some memory arose that they wanted to detail. They started from Winnie’s earliest years and worked their way up—how she’d been the gem of the hotel, a bright and eager girl who’d loved books and swimming and skiing and everything about life at Winterhouse. Elizabeth felt thrilled throughout, as though she’d discovered her mother’s diary or stumbled upon some old home movies and was finally conjuring her mother to life in some degree. As Norbridge and Leona spoke, Elizabeth kept thinking that when she’d arrived at Winterhouse over two weeks earlier, all she’d known was that her mother and father had died seven years before; now, she was sitting with her grandfather and hearing stories about her mother’s life from the very start. It seemed like a miracle.

  “But why did she leave Winterhouse?” Elizabeth said after Norbridge made a brief mention of Winnie’s departure. “I can’t understand why anyone would ever want to leave here.”

  Norbridge dropped his eyes to the floor. “I made one mistake,” he said. “I told your mother about The Book when she was about twelve or thirteen, and she took it very seriously—much more seriously than I would have thought. I think from that point on she felt there was some curse on her, as though it was her fate—or the fate of any child she had—to find the thing or be in some sort of peril over it. I told her it was just a legend, but the story seemed to frighten her beyond anything I ever would have imagined. As she got older she expressed deep worries to me about it, explained she couldn’t see living here, much less starting a family and exposing others to any danger. And so she left. One day when she was eighteen, Winifred was just gone. She left a note explaining herself, saying she was heading somewhere where it never snowed, never got cold, where she could be far away from the dangers of Winterhouse. She told me she was even changing her name, didn’t want me to be able to track her down. She said it was best for all of us, for Winterhouse, and that someday when the threat of danger had passed, she would come back. I never really understood any of it, but what could I do?”

  “And you don’t know what happened to her after she left?” Elizabeth said.

  “You have to understand that I lost track of Winifred completely,” Norbridge said. “She wanted it that way, only wrote me a few times the first year or two after she left. I always believed that someday she would reach back out to me, but she kept me in the dark. I don’t know anything about the man she married—your father—and I didn’t even know you existed, though somehow you must have ended up with your father’s relatives. I heard from a couple of reliable sources who thought Winifred had been killed in a car accident years ago, but I never found any information about it. I intend to trace the thread now, and find out for myself what happened by talking to your aunt and uncle, but the fact is she disappeared so completely I didn’t know a thing about you.”

  Elizabeth had no more questions in her. She thought of her mother’s fear and of what led her to leave Winterhouse, but it was all so confusing and sad she couldn’t put it together. All she knew was she wanted to learn as much as she could about her mother—her father, too, if possible—and now that she was at Winterhouse, she would be able to.

  Freddy was asleep; so was Leona. The fire had settled to embers and was quiet.

  “Norbridge,” Elizabeth said softly, “you have some genuine magic about you, don’t you?”

  He glanced at Freddy as if to make certain he was asleep. “And so do you, Elizabeth.”

  “Something happened to me here over the last couple of weeks. I’m not sure what it is, but something happened.”

  “You’re a member of the Falls family. It’s not surprising to me in any way.”

  She yawned. As much as she wanted to learn more, exhaustion was overwhelming her.

  “It’s been a very, very long night,” Norbridge said. “We’ll have a few days to sort everything out and talk more, but for now you should get some sleep. And then when the morning comes, you should enjoy the day any way you want.” He nodded to her. “It’s a new year.”

  CHAPTER 38

  A KEY, A LETTER, AND A GIFT

  LIFT

  LOFT

  LOOT

  BOOT

  BOOK

  The final four days of Elizabeth’s stay at Winterhouse seemed the easiest and most pleasant of any in her entire life. She and Freddy packed their remaining time with hours on the sledding hill, plenty of ice-skating, long stays in the swimming pool, and several treks around every corridor and corner of Winterhouse. They attended choir concerts in the evening, went on a snowshoe hike with a group of guests, and watched movies in the small theater. Elizabeth listened to a lecture in Grace Hall (“My Everest Ascent,” offered by one of the Winterhouse guests, Mr. Ludovici Spero), ate her fill of Flurschen, worked on the puzzle in the lobby, and spent time each day in the gallery studying the portrait of her mother. But even with all of this—even with days of crisp and beautiful sunlight, so that the hours out-of-doors were a crystal-blue delight—most of Elizabeth’s remaining hours at Winterhouse were filled with visits to the library, where Norbridge and Leona shared stories with her about Winifred’s life and where Elizabeth pored over the many pictures of her mother Norbridge had preserved in his old photo albums.

  The time could not pass slowly enough for Elizabeth, and she felt the sweetness melting down as the minutes ticked away.

  On the night before she was to leave, Elizabeth visited Freddy in his workshop. His WonderLog had been a big success, and Norbridge had said he was going to have some of the workers in the candy kitchen begin “mass production of the wondrous Walnut WonderLog,” as he had put it, after Freddy returned home.

  “Yo
u are the next Thomas Edison,” Elizabeth said, as Freddy tinkered with a mix of glue in a canister.

  Freddy closed his eyes, and when he popped them open he said, “‘Edison’! It can turn into ‘onside’!”

  “Seriously, you did an incredible job with the WonderLog.”

  “From the girl who saved Winterhouse.”

  She pictured the events in the library once more, and although it had been just three nights before, it felt a long time past and almost as though it had happened to someone else.

  “It seems like a dream,” she said. “I still can’t believe it.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know how you did it. I was scared to death in there.”

  “I just knew I couldn’t let Gracella do anything bad.”

  Even saying Gracella’s name felt strange—every time she replayed the scene in her mind, she paused at that moment when Gracella had tempted her. Why, if for only a split second, had she not found the suggestion entirely horrifying? She had a feeling she would be considering this for a long time.

  “Gracella,” Freddy said, shaking his head. “I don’t even like thinking about her.”

  Elizabeth put a hand to her pendant and allowed her eyes to stray to the wall of tools behind Freddy. The key, the one they’d used to enter Marcus and Selena Hiems’s room, hung on its hook.

  “Are you going to be working here for a little while?” Elizabeth said.

  “At least half an hour.”

  “May I borrow that key?” She pointed to it.

  Freddy swiveled his head to look at it and then back at Elizabeth with a disbelieving expression on his face.

  “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” he said, “but I’m already against it.”