Thornleigh proved to be the exception to yet another of my rules.
I came around a particularly challenging cove where overhanging rocks had sheltered the sand, making it dry and shoe sucking to the point that each stride was a pause I had to power through. Of itself, that wouldn’t have been enough to even slow me down, but in the V of the cove a beach cottage was revealed as I came closer. Wedged in a dip where jagged cliffs became hills that could be traversed by a long, winding drive that rose up behind and disappeared in the direction of the main house, the cottage waited. Waited? What a strange thought and, yet, I slowed, intrigued by the shabby little place so unexpected in the middle of nowhere. Though it faced the ocean, the cottage’s design was very like the clapboard farmhouses that dotted the countryside back home. As I drew closer, I noted that Virginia’s climate was obviously kinder. Here, the constant bombardment of sea gales had obviously taken their toll.
Peeling paint and loosened shingles and one shutter hanging by a thread gave the place the look of abandonment. I probably would have sped back up again if I hadn’t seen Mary on the porch. I startled, not because her presence was a sudden revelation, but because it wasn’t. She suddenly just was…silently standing there in the shadows. Her face too poorly lit to be seen.
She stood, still dressed in gray with her hands trailing down at her hips and her head oddly cocked to the side. Listening to the waves?
I slowed my steps even more and continued toward her even though she didn’t seem to see me. She hadn’t been particularly warm at dinner the night before, but no nod or wave or word as I approached began to fill me with alarm.
Her posture seemed odd and her face as it was revealed seemed slack, as if she’d sleepwalked out onto the porch. Her eyes were unfocused and unseeing.
“Mary?” I called, too freaked out not to try to “wake” her. “Mary? It’s Sam from Thornleigh.”
I was close enough now to see when her unfocused gaze sharpened with a sudden clarity of thought. She finally saw me. She blinked and her whole body firmed and straightened.
“Hello,” she said as if startled, though I’d been in her line of sight for long minutes.
My aunt would have diagnosed daydreaming, or “woolgathering” as she would call it. But if she’d seen Mary’s weird stance…
There was something wrong with O’Keefe’s cook. Very wrong. Now I had to forget my run because I’d never forgive myself if the poor woman was in the middle of a stroke or breakdown with no one else around for miles and miles. The back of my neck prickled, but I moved closer.
“I went for a run and found your house,” I said.
I was at the stairs to her dilapidated porch now. They were crooked and worn and one had pulled free of its nails on one side. Nevertheless, I stopped and waited for the invitation to climb.
Mary blinked again and finally managed a slight smile.
“Don’t blame my salmon,” she warned.
“No. Of course not. It was light and delicious,” I assured her. Not to mention mostly forgotten on my plate because of O’Keefe’s passion to sketch me by the fire!
“Miles barely eats,” she continued. She also shrugged as if it didn’t matter to her and finally waved me up the creaky porch steps.
“I noticed he was very lean,” I replied.
But it wasn’t really a conversation. Mary was already turning away and heading back inside as if I’d reminded her the cottage was there with its door standing wide-open. I followed, though I wasn’t asked. In fact, the screen door fell shut behind Mary because she made no effort to hold it for me when she passed through. She walked oddly with slow, measured treads and again her head was slightly cocked as if she listened to something I couldn’t hear.
“Is it? Your house?” I asked. I had pushed the door open to follow her. The hollow slapping sound it made as it closed sounded extra loud as the crash of waves was left outside. My eyes struggled to adjust to the dim interior of the place. An unpleasant odor wafted around me. It was old and it was the ocean, but it was also dampness and decay. I coughed. I couldn’t help it. My lungs simply didn’t want to let the reek inside.
There were no lights on even though the sun was setting.
Mary didn’t seem to notice. She continued across a warped wooden floor to a nearby workbench that sat where a coffee table should have been. I didn’t mind that she didn’t invite me to sit down. Not when I saw the condition of the sofa. Even in the gloom, I could see its upholstery was faded and stained. I looked up to see a water-damaged ceiling and surmised that years of drips had caused the sofa to go ruined and dank. Why had Mary ignored it?
She hadn’t noticed my disgust. She sat on the rotten couch and picked up her work where she’d left off. She was making a doll. It’s yet-to-be-membered body looked gruesome in her hands as she began to stuff its tiny, incomplete body. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t really look at the doll. She worked in a fugue, her eyes almost as unfocused as they’d been on the porch.
I had followed her into the room. Now I took a step back, but that proved to be a mistake because from that vantage point I could see into the neighboring room. Suddenly, Mary’s strange behavior took on horrific proportions as hundreds of tiny faces came into focus. Porcelain. Porcelain faces lined the walls from floor to ceiling in the adjoining room. Dolls. So many of them that they created a jumble of eyes and lips and noses and ragged lace and tiny hands and feet repeated again and again and again.
Hundreds? Possibly thousands, and me in the middle of them all.
In the middle?
My God, I had walked into the next room. Drawn by my horror and my dismay, I had taken several steps without realizing I’d moved. I was now in the room with Mary’s dolls.
“Oh,” I breathed out and it was in no way appreciative. It was a desperate bid to process what I was seeing and to keep the stench out of my nostrils. Because here the rot and water damage was worse. All of the dolls that Mary must have spent years constructing were ruined, their decaying little corpses like zombie Kewpie dolls on display. Mary, it appeared, would sit at her worktable piled high with stuffing and…parts….each day, every day and into the night creating porcelain baby after porcelain baby, each one exactly like the others, only to place them lovingly here to mold.
They were all the same. The exact same doll created time and time again.
I inched back into the room where Mary still worked. From the corner of my eye, I saw her pick up more stuffing and jam it into the body she held in her hands.
This wasn’t a stroke and if Mary had had a breakdown it had occurred many, many dolls ago.
“Why?” I choked out, further smothered by the cotton fluff in the air.
“No one knows,” Mary answered, as calm and matter-of-fact as if we were talking about the weather on a sunny veranda in Richmond. “No one knows,” she crooned to the small headless baby in her hands.
I backed away. Slowly and carefully. There was no one in this room with a knife. No madman attempting to rob and hurt and kill and, yet, I was in danger. Adrenaline spiked in my veins and my feet went numb. Mary no longer seemed aware of my presence, but something told me that she might jerk her head toward me in a sudden fit of caring whether I stayed or left.
And I needed to leave.
I’d had a lot of training since the attack that almost killed me, and one of the things I’d been told to do was trust my instincts no matter how silly they might seem. A little aging lady making dolls in a cottage by the sea might not seem like something to run from, but every cell in my body was telling me otherwise.
The heavy wet scent of the place grew heavier and heavier. Fingers of moldy air seem to grasp at me to hold me there, to draw me back into the room with the dolls.
Mary was singing now. “Know…no…nooooooooooo.”
Her wavering voice was mournful, but it was also angry. Very, very angry.
I think I was running before I even hit the sand.
Chapter Six
Meager sunlight filtered into the halls of Thornleigh through smudged panes. In those weak but warm rays, dust motes hung suspended, little specks in time and space. I wandered, released from the nighttime refuge of my room, hesitant to seek out O’Keefe.
I needed to talk to him about Mary. I needed to tell him what I’d seen. But I could still feel his touch on my skin.
I’d always been decisive. Taking action—to recover, to train, to travel—had saved me following the attack.
Thornleigh changed that. I was like one of those dust specks held suspended by compulsions and conflicting desires. There was a wrongness here and I couldn’t run away from it. Somehow I felt I would carry it with me. There was also something so right about O’Keefe that I couldn’t imagine leaving him behind and never seeing him again.
This morning I went up instead of down, climbing a single narrow flight of stairs to the attic beneath the eaves. A sound had drawn me this way instead of that. There had been a fluttering murmur cut off by a slight cry that might have been nothing more than a poor mouse in a trap, but I thought it might have been a bird that had found its way inside and now couldn’t get back out. The idea of a trapped sparrow starving to death in the dark and dusty upper realms of the great old house bothered me until I came out and up. Checking out the attic seemed more practical than trying to solve Mary’s deep-seated issues and definitely easier to deal with.
Don’t explore the shadows, O’Keefe had said.
The natural tendency to feel like an intruder in a new place was heightened by the strangeness I’d already encountered here. I stepped lightly, not exactly sneaking around but definitely not proclaiming my presence.
The sound came again more muffled than before. What if the bird had gotten tangled in some stored junk? What if it wasn’t only trapped, but hurt?
I hurried, taking the last few treads quickly. I tried the small door at the top half, expecting an unresponsive knob to make my efforts in vain. But the brass knob turned with a rattle beneath my fingers and the small door, about three quarters the size of a regular door, creaked open.
Dry, stale air crept out to greet me as if I’d unsealed a tomb. There was less sunlight here and I paused in spite of my concern for whatever creature might be caught in its final resting place, mouse or sparrow, because I couldn’t see.
I blinked. I strained my eyes. I looked hard into the shadows. I could make out the outline of eclectic clutter. The attic must have stretched across much of the house, but I could only feel the size of it. I couldn’t see the far reaches. Several small dormer windows did allow slight illumination, but they were dirty and covered with sagging old lace. The weak sunlight was caught and filtered harshly through yellowed lace webs.
Boxes, trunks and old forgotten furniture made my task impossible. How could I free a trapped animal when I could hardly see to place my feet? I moved forward anyway, drawn by the slight movement of one of the farthest curtains.
I thought of going back downstairs to find a flashlight, but I was afraid a trapped bird would beat itself to death on a dusty windowpane before I could make it all the way down and back.
As I came closer, the curtain moved again with a sudden rustle and sigh. I jumped and knocked against a stack of books, and several dusty sketch pads tumbled to the floor with faded flutters. I automatically reached to pick up the mess I’d made. I placed the sketch pads back on the stack, realizing as I did so that most of the stack was actually more of the same. Not books, but sketch pads and notebooks.
Once I had straightened the leaning stack of what must have been dozens upon dozens of sketch pads on top of an old trunk, I couldn’t resist lifting the top corner of the top pad. A glimpse of a familiar form caused me to open the pad completely. It was Mourning Walk—the sketch I now owned myself. With growing unease, I lifted the top page and then another and then another. Soon I had gone through the entire top sketch pad and several beneath and all of them were full of identical charcoal sketches along with closer studies of the woman’s hands and feet and lips and hair. My God. This wasn’t artistry. This was obsession.
Why the same woman again and again in the same pose as if he’d been driven to capture something about her again and again on the sketch pad’s pages?
Worst of all, the sketches reminded me of Mary’s dolls. Not in appearance, but in obsessive execution. The repetition was frightening. I backed away from the stack of pads much as I’d backed away from the moldering baby dolls with my heart pounding and my mind trying to understand what I’d seen.
A movement startled me and I jumped again. I’d forgotten why I’d climbed the stairs in the first place. But I hadn’t found the bird—only a cracked window allowing pacific air inside. One of the yellow curtains moved every time a breeze blew. I pulled the curtain aside and looked down at the tangled garden, then down farther to the waves crashing far, far below. I half expected to see O’Keefe wandering the garden with his statues, but I saw and heard nothing at all, too far removed to even hear the surf.
When I turned back to the attic, I had to blink again. The daylight outside with its sudden sun—no matter how faint—had blinded me to the shadowy room around me. In that moment of sensory deprivation, I heard the murmur again and identified it as a shuffling, muffled…step?
I strained to see, no longer thinking about mouse or bird. Even though my muscles bunched and my heart responded with quickened beats, I wasn’t going to cry out or see ghosts where there was nothing but shadows. Still, my eyes took ages to adjust and in those interminable seconds I almost believed that one of the garden statues had found me and followed me to show me its tears again. Or worse, a tiny stumbling doll reaching for me with moldering arms.
“I heard footsteps on the stairs,” a familiar voice began, and with its masculine vibration the shadows parted to reveal O’Keefe’s pale, handsome face as he stepped into the dusty sunlight.
Only when I relaxed into a different sort of tension altogether did I realize my fists had been clenched and my back pressed against the warm window. I quickly opened my fingers, hoping he hadn’t seen my fear. But this was Miles with his artist’s eyes and keen perception. His dark gaze, so startling against his porcelain cheeks, swept over me, taking in every detail.
“I heard something, too… I thought maybe a bird….” I trailed off because he didn’t look around at my words. He still looked only at me. And he stepped closer. I should have been frightened. His repetitive drawings, his belief that Thornleigh was haunted, should have frightened me. And it did. But more for him than of him. When he was near me, I was afraid, but more of my own visceral reactions than that any harm would come to me. He had been so upset when he’d seen my scars and angry with the man who had hurt me.
“More likely other things,” he said. “I warned you about exploring shadows. It’s best to ignore unusual noises at Thornleigh.”
I wanted to scoff at the idea that poltergeist activity existed or that it would scare me, but I was too distracted by his nearness. He leaned so close to me that I could breathe in his scent—charcoal and soap and a fresh hint of garden dew in morning sun. I drew in a startled gasp when he suddenly leaned even closer, but he was only reaching behind me to open the latch on the cracked window. He pushed it open, slightly brushing my arm as he did so. My responsive gooseflesh had nothing to do with the breeze that drifted inside or the hint of roses.
“There. Just in case. Better?” he murmured. He didn’t think there was a bird. He didn’t dispute the noise or try to explain it away. He simply didn’t accept a logical reason for it.
“Okay,” I said, shakily, affected by his proximity and his belief in ghosts. On one hand, he seemed so tuned into me, so warm and connected. He wasn’t at all put off by the defenses I’d erected since I’d been attacked. On the other hand, was he as unbalanced as his cook? Who was the woman he obsessively drew again and again?
“I’d like to sketch you in the sun,” he continued, as if he didn’t care if we were being haunted, as if a w
hole graveyard of ghosts wouldn’t distract him from capturing my likeness on paper and later in clay. I looked up at his face. He hadn’t straightened when he’d finished with the window. He still leaned into the sun near me and the faint beams softly caressed the hard edges and planes of his angular face.
I’d been curious about him before we met. I’d thought him handsome and intriguing from the first. But, here, with a yellowed lace curtain billowing around him, I had to blink against the urge to step into an intimacy with him that he hadn’t offered. In spite of the concerns the numerous sketch pads caused in me, I wanted to know him. I wanted to…
He cut his eyes toward me and they had gone brown like whiskey lit by the pale yellow sunlight, and I drew back. This was the danger here. Not ghosts or eccentric artists with strange obsessions, but this. My reaction to Miles. This desire to be close to him when I’d spent many months holding myself apart.
“How do you feel about a sitting in the garden?” he asked.
I didn’t like the garden. I didn’t think I could sit for him again without asking for his touch in ways that had nothing to do with art. I didn’t want to admit either.
“Yes. That will be fine,” I lied.
My cheeks warmed and his gaze dropped there, of course, attuned to the slightest variation of color.
“You’re sure?” he pressed.
I lifted my chin. I’d come here to be sculpted. The sketching sessions were part of his process. Just as sketching out rudimentary outlines of silver pieces had been a part of mine back when I still crafted. My workshop had been cold for a long, long time. I’d been too busy crafting myself into someone better and stronger. Or so I’d thought. Thornleigh had ways of making you see the hidden weaknesses in a piece. The fissures and imperfect alloys that would shatter when tempered.
“I’ll meet you in the garden,” I replied.
* * *
I refused to be afraid of statues, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t relieved when the chair I was to sit on turned out to be in a clearing devoid of brambles and weeping women. The midmorning sun was warm on my face. I tried to focus on that one simple thing as I braced myself for when O’Keefe would start. He had placed the chair and then the easel several paces away from each other.
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