The Caretakers

by Maxwell, Eliza

  At the end of the road, Tessa takes a right and, a short distance later, the GPS declares, “You have arrived at your destination.”

  Tucked at the back of a driveway lined with maples and oaks sits Bracknell Lodge. The symmetrical brick Georgian facade is softened by trellises heavy with climbing pink roses and a hand-painted wooden sign in the front garden. It brings to mind a girls’ boarding school, and the effect is surprisingly charming.

  Tessa is greeted at the door by a small woman in her fifties, with thick dark hair pulled back into a bun. She gives the sports car parked in the drive a lingering glance, then turns a curious eye to her guest.

  Mrs. Coburn, as she introduces herself, checks Tessa in with little fuss and shows her to her room.

  “What brings you to Snowden, Ms. Ashwood?” she asks as she unlocks the door to the guest room.

  “Sightseeing,” Tessa says. “In fact, maybe you can help me. There’s a house nearby. Fallbrook. Do you know it?”

  Her hostess’s brows slowly rise.

  “Oh yes, I know it.” The curiosity in her gaze turns to reservation. “If it’s historic homes you’re interested in, there are quite a few better preserved ones within driving distance. I could get you a pamphlet if you like.”

  “That won’t be necessary, thank you.” Tessa rolls her suitcase past the woman into the room and leaves it next to the bed.

  “Are you doing research for something, then?” Mrs. Coburn asks, her gaze narrowed. “Some sort of article, or a book?”

  Tessa doesn’t miss the disapproving note in Mrs. Coburn’s voice, which tells her the proprietress is aware of the house’s history.

  “No,” Tessa replies truthfully. “Not exactly.”

  She doesn’t elaborate, but Tessa can see she’s not made an ally.

  “Well, I doubt there’s anyone left around here who’d be much help when it comes to that sort of thing. Ancient history, all that. And the Donnellys keep themselves to themselves. Never a bother to anyone. It’d be a shame to see them disturbed at their age.”

  Tessa swallows the urge to ask more. It would be pointless. Mrs. Coburn has made it clear how she feels about Tessa’s interest in Fallbrook.

  “I don’t plan to disturb anyone,” Tessa says mildly.

  “I hope not,” Mrs. Coburn adds. “That would be a shame. Now, Ms. Ashwood, breakfast is served at seven a.m. sharp. Will that be a problem?”

  Tessa shakes her head with the sense she’s been reprimanded by a headmistress.

  Once Mrs. Coburn retreats, Tessa glances around the room, debating her next move. Her practical side says now is the time to unpack her laptop and do some of that research she claimed not to be doing.

  But the furor over Oliver’s latest video will still be burning strong, and she can’t face submerging herself in the real world again. Not yet. Not when she’s just managed to buy some hard-earned distance. It’s cowardly, but there it is.

  Instead, Tessa jingles the keys in her hand. There’s still time yet before the sun sets. What she needs is to keep moving forward, even if moving forward means coming face to face with the past.

  Maybe, just maybe, if she doesn’t slow down, she’ll have no time for regrets.

  18

  Tessa misses the turn. Twice.

  After the second time, she mutes the irritatingly pleasant voice of the GPS and studies the tangled brush along the side of the gravel road as the car creeps back in the direction she’s just come.

  Squinting, she spots two faded tracks that snake forward, then turn sharply and disappear behind a wall of greenery. Clearly, Fallbrook doesn’t get many visitors.

  According to her grandfather, the property isn’t entirely unoccupied. At least, it wasn’t at the time of his letter. He mentioned a cottage, and a trust with funds for a caretaker’s salary.

  Tessa has dredged her memories of that afternoon visit. She’s short on specifics, but what she does remember is an overwhelming sense of abandonment. No cottage, no caretaker. In fact, she’s sure they didn’t meet another living soul that day.

  The little car bumps slowly along the tracks. Brush and overgrown trees close in on her, branches scraping across the windshield, and she can’t shake the sense that she’s passing some unseen threshold separating her from the world she knows.

  Tessa presses on, as much out of relief to leave that world behind as interest in what might lie ahead.

  She’s quickly enveloped by a thick stand of towering old-growth trees, as tall and resolute as sleeping guardians. Tessa inches the car forward, eyes on the trail to show her the way.

  When the path eventually clears, it happens suddenly, and Tessa stops the car, overwhelmed. Her patchwork memories settle into place, overlapping with the present and filling in some of the missing color and details.

  The day was warm, she recalls. Stifling almost. She and Margot were quiet and drowsy on the drive home, their mother distracted. They hadn’t expected a detour, and Jane offered no explanations.

  Tessa was dozing, her forehead pressed against the window of the car, when the road became bumpy. She awoke groggy after banging her head a few times against the glass. Once she came fully to her senses, she saw the same view that greets her now.

  Tucked away in its own private realm, surrounded by forest and secrecy, Fallbrook stands ahead at the end of a long path, seemingly unchanged since that day.

  The sun is dropping lower in the sky, sending a diffuse light through the trees and illuminating the peaks of the once-grand home.

  Entranced, Tessa drives the car slowly forward, caught in the tendrils of an old spell. For a moment, she sees it as it would have been. Built for strength and beauty in equal measure, this was a home that visitors would never mistake for ordinary.

  As she comes closer, her eyes skim over the gables and the intricate railing on the balcony that lines the second story. She searches the shadows of the deep front porch, but nothing and no one stirs.

  The engine hums as she pulls up in front of the house, a sound she doesn’t notice until she parks and turns off the ignition, and silence falls.

  Tessa takes a deep breath and opens the car door.

  The house is monstrously large, rising proud and haughty from the ground and reaching high into the air, but up close the strange spell it cast breaks apart. Any illusions that Fallbrook hasn’t been ravaged by time and neglect evaporate.

  The wide steps that lead up to the front entry list to one side. Decorative carved moldings frame the top of the porch between crumbling columns, but they’ve broken and fallen away in places. What remains resembles dirty, tattered lace.

  Tessa’s eyes rove over the deteriorating structure. A good number of shutters are missing. A few cling to their positions by a single corner, tilting crookedly across windows with broken panes of glass. Spiders, untroubled by the rot and mold, have spun an impressive maze of webs between the rafters overhead.

  Decay seeps through every nook and cranny, as pervasive as a cancer. The grounds that surround the house are untamed, and vines twine their way between the boards and up the columns and exterior walls, reaching toward the colonies of spiders above.

  Bit by bit, the earth is reclaiming this space, feasting on the remains of the Cooke family home. Given enough time, it will swallow every board and nail, digesting it by increments, and leave nothing but the bones behind.

  Tessa doesn’t try to resist the intangible pull of the double front doors with their chipped and peeling paint. With a careful eye on where she puts her feet, she makes her way up the steps toward the porch. A telling softness in the third step warns her to place her weight on the fourth instead.

  The porch groans faintly, but Tessa holds her breath and continues forward. She stretches a hand out to the doorknob. Her fingers brush the surface of the tarnished brass, but just as she touches the cold metal, a hollow thumping fills the air. Tessa draws back as if she’s been scalded, but the noise doesn’t stop. Instead it grows louder and inexplicably faster, comin
g from everywhere and nowhere. A rustle of beating wings joins in as a flock of startled birds takes flight from somewhere above.

  Tessa glances wildly around. Whatever it is, it’s getting closer. Over the heavy beating of her heart, she hears a childlike voice, high and wavering, singing a lullaby.

  Ring around the rosies . . . thump thump . . .

  Pocket full of posies . . . thump thump thump . . .

  Ashes to ashes . . . thump thump thump thump thump . . .

  The sound crescendos. Then, as suddenly as it started, it stops and a figure appears at the edge of the house. Tessa gasps and takes an involuntary step backward, but her feet get tangled and she ends up sprawled in the dirt and dried leaves that coat the boards of the porch.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” the figure says in an indulgent voice, as if a stray cat had wandered in through an open door.

  Tessa scrambles backward, but a sharp pain radiates upward from her wrist, cutting short a burgeoning scream and turning it to a gasp.

  “You’ve hurt yourself,” the figure states, then steps around the corner of the house and comes toward her. The fading sunlight shows Tessa what she couldn’t see through her fear and surprise.

  It’s an old woman.

  An old woman with a softly rounded figure and long white hair plaited into a braid that lies across her shoulder. A pair of reading glasses hangs from a silver chain around her neck. Her face is lined. Her eyes are bright and sympathetic, and she’s holding a stick in her hand.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, dear,” she says as she approaches the steps. She holds up the stick with an apologetic smile, then tosses it onto the ground next to her. “Sorry about that. An old habit. Scares off any wildlife that might have found a nice place to nest in the big house. Raccoons, mostly, though I haven’t seen any for a while. Just the birds up in the rafters these days.”

  Tessa stares at her, slowly piecing together that the thumping noise was the stick rumbling along the edge of the house and echoing through the empty spaces inside.

  “Is it broken, do you think?” the woman asks. “I’d give you a hand up, but at my age I probably wouldn’t be much help. We’d both end up sprawled on the floor, and then where would we be?”

  Tessa shakes her head. She’s having trouble keeping up with the airy twitter of the woman’s voice, so unexpected given their surroundings.

  “That’s all right,” Tessa says as she picks herself up off the porch. Gingerly, she bends her wrist back and forth, but the sharp pain has subsided to a dull ache. “It’s not broken.”

  “Well, thank goodness for small mercies,” the woman says. “I’m Kitty. And you are?”

  Kitty. Not what Tessa would have guessed, but it was oddly fitting for the plump, soft woman standing in front of her. More so than Betty or Doris or Edith would have been.

  “Tessa,” she answers, dusting off her pants. “Tessa Shepherd.”

  Kitty doesn’t ask what Tessa is doing creeping around the abandoned property, though by rights she should. Tessa and Margot may be the legal owners now, but that doesn’t lessen her sense that she’s treading someplace she shouldn’t.

  “My family lives in the caretaker’s cottage,” Kitty says, gesturing toward one side of the property. Tessa can see nothing but forest, increasingly more shadowed as the sun drops lower. “You’re lucky it was me who found you. Deirdre isn’t keen on sightseers, though we don’t get many willing to venture out here in the middle of nowhere. There’s Aiden, too, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Have you lived here long, then?” Tessa asks.

  “Oh, all my life,” Kitty says. “Mam was the housekeeper at Fallbrook, God rest her. It’s the only home I’ve ever known.”

  If Tessa had to guess, she’d put Kitty’s age somewhere in her eighties, which means she must have known the Cooke family in her childhood. If information is what Tessa is after, Kitty is the stuff of a documentarian’s dreams. A firsthand source.

  Not that she’s making a film, of course. An opening shot of the house from a distance, just as Tessa first saw it, then moving slowly closer, revealing the state of the place by degrees. No music. Only the sound of the wind in the trees, underscoring the desolation.

  Force of habit, nothing more.

  Still, Tessa chooses her words carefully, as she would during first contact with any potential source.

  “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to show me around?”

  Kitty puts her hands into the pockets of her cardigan and shrugs. It’s unsettling, and it takes Tessa a moment to pinpoint why. Despite her obvious age, Kitty carries herself in the loose, unguarded manner of a much younger person.

  “Deirdre wouldn’t like it,” Kitty says as she makes her way up to the porch, avoiding the third step as Tessa had. “But you seem like a nice girl.”

  She stops and smiles, an open, welcoming smile that immediately makes Tessa feel guilty, like she’s hiding something. She is, of course. Hiding something.

  “Not much to see, really. Not anymore,” Kitty continues as she moves past Tessa toward the big double doors.

  She opens one of the doors and pushes it wide. It creaks as it swings, and all thoughts of truth and lies of omission flee Tessa’s mind. Even Kitty is forgotten as Tessa is captured once more by whatever old magic this house wields.

  Slowly, she steps forward, into the gloom of a glittering past that’s long ago lost its shine.

  The dying light of the setting sun penetrates only so far through the broken panes of glass, and Tessa’s eyes travel upward, from the debris-strewn parquet floor, past the curving spiral staircase, to land upon the domed, colored skylight overhead.

  When the sun is at its peak, it must be magnificent.

  Her gaze falls, and she wonders to what end? All the colored light in the world can’t hide the atrophy of the room below.

  “Is it safe?” Tessa asks.

  “Safe enough,” Kitty answers. “As long as you keep to the first floor and watch your step. I wouldn’t trust the stairs, though. Nothing much left up there to see anyhow. The roof has gone in places, and the weather and the birds have finished things off.”

  Tessa has so many questions, but she doesn’t want to offend Kitty, and needs to be careful how she words things.

  “So no one has lived here since . . .”

  “Not since the old family were all gone. No one much interested in it after, what with the rumors and the stories. But I suppose you’ll have heard all that already.”

  “Some,” Tessa says, not untruthfully.

  “A shame, really. The place was nice, once. But that was a long time ago. A lifetime. A house dies a slow death without a family to fill it. This one certainly has.”

  “Kitty,” calls a new voice from outside. “Kitty, are you in there?”

  The sound of footsteps shuffling along the porch reaches them, and Kitty turns to Tessa and holds a finger up to her mouth before answering, a gesture Tessa takes to mean she shouldn’t mention the conversation they’ve been having.

  “In here, Dee,” Kitty calls.

  A second woman fills the doorway, as tall and thin as Kitty is short and round. She’s even older, if Tessa is any judge. There’s a wooden cane in her hand, but instead of leaning her weight against it, she holds it up and points the tail end toward Tessa.

  “I suppose that fancy car belongs to you, then,” she says darkly.

  “Yes,” Tessa answers. “My name is Tessa. Kitty was just showing me the house.”

  “I can see that,” the woman says. The cane changes direction and points at Kitty. “What have I told you? You can’t be letting in every lookie-loo off the street.”

  Kitty opens her mouth, but before she has a chance to speak, the second woman continues. “This is private property, and you’re trespassing. You need to leave.” She steps back and holds the door wide, waiting for them to make their exit.

  Tessa glances quickly at Kitty, who rolls her eyes. “Deirdre, there’s
no need to be rude,” she says.

  But the other woman ignores her. “Come on now, shake a leg. I can’t be standing here all day.”

  Tessa has no desire to upset anyone, least of all an old woman, so she walks back toward the front doors, Kitty dutifully by her side.

  Deirdre closes the door firmly behind them, then stands fast, barring them from reentry.

  “Go on now,” she says, gesturing toward Tessa’s car. The sun is almost fully set, and darkness is creeping across the yard.

  Kitty sighs. “It was very nice to meet you, Tessa,” she says. “I’m sorry our visit was cut short. My sister isn’t known for her welcoming manner, I’m afraid.”

  Deirdre glares at her and folds her arms, but Kitty doesn’t apologize. Tessa is reminded of Margot, and the universal language of sisters.

  “Thank you,” Tessa says, then turns to Deirdre. “Maybe I should introduce myself properly and tell you why I’m here.”

  “Doesn’t matter why you’re here.” Deirdre dismisses her with a wave of a bony, age-spotted hand. “Whatever it is you want, we’re not interested, and we don’t speak to the press.”

  The irony of being mistaken for a reporter and thrown off the property doesn’t escape Tessa. Deirdre is already walking away and has made it down the steps into the yard. Kitty follows a few steps behind and sends Tessa an apologetic smile and a wave goodbye.

  She needs to explain, and quickly.

  “My mother’s name is Jane,” Tessa calls to their retreating backs. “At least, we thought so. But that wasn’t true. Her birth name was Imogene. Imogene Cooke, and she was born in this house.”

  The two women stop in their tracks. They turn first to one another. Whatever communication silently passes between them Tessa can only wonder at. Then they turn to stare at her.

  “My mother was the baby,” she says. “The one who survived.”

  19

  “Baby Imogene.” The words tumble from Kitty’s lips in a whisper of wonder, ending the stunned silence between them. “Imagine that.”

  As if Tessa’s words have flipped a switch, Kitty brightens and her face shines with delight.