A Murder at Alcott Manor

by Alyssa Richards

  “Gracious,” Peyton said.

  “Yeah,” Layla breathed. She had enjoyed Mason’s flirtation on that first day, especially the part that came before he recognized who she was. He had looked at her the way she had always wanted him to, like she was someone he would’ve done back flips to date. Not his ole soft friend Layla.

  “You sure he isn’t your happily ever after?” Peyton asked.

  “I don’t believe in happily ever after.”

  “Then how about your happily for now?” Peyton’s eyebrows climbed, and she nodded in Mason’s direction. “Because seriously.”

  Layla’s deep down belly laugh caught her by surprise, and she decided she would at least find out why he had been so flirtatious with her. She would just ask him.

  He dropped the lumber on the grass with a clatter and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. She thought about how different the last ten years could have been for the both of them if Brooke hadn’t died.

  She stuffed what felt like a solid rock full of guilt and regret into the distant recesses of her soul and decided there was no reward in wishing the past to be any different. She pulled her shoulders back. She would focus on gratitude—she was financially independent from her mother, and she was free from Asher, and those two things were quite something. Yes, Peyton was sort of right yet again. This was a new beginning, and she felt a little better already.

  Her daughters argued in the other room over closet space.

  “There goes the peace,” Layla said. “It was bound to happen eventually.”

  “Why don’t I take them outside for some beach and swim time? I’ll wear them out for you.”

  “Deal. I’ll finish unpacking.”

  “Unpack later. Rest for a minute, first. Put your feet up. No offense, but you look like you could use it. Have you been sleeping okay?”

  Layla passed on the opportunity to tell her that she was sleepwalking again. “Spoken like a woman without children. I have too much to do, and the girls have school tomorrow. Too much to organize.”

  “Layla-pop. I have to go back to Boston late tonight. Accept my help while you have it.”

  “Tonight? You’re leaving so soon?”

  “Yeah. I have to get back to the office in the morning.”

  “Oh. I’ll miss you.” Layla hugged her sister.

  “I’ll miss you, too.” Peyton kissed her cheek. “Now get just a little rest while you can.”

  Layla sighed. It wasn’t the idea of resting that bothered her. She didn’t even mind being a little disorganized. Her concern was the inevitable dreaming.

  10

  Emma and Anna laughed and squealed while they made their way to the beach with their aunt. Layla couldn’t see them, but she could hear them, and she was sure there was a game of tag going on, started by Emma, most likely.

  She had planned to unpack a few more boxes and organize their kitchen while the girls were out. She really did want the kitchen area usable before they had to make a school morning breakfast there tomorrow.

  But then fatigue began to pull at her. Maybe Peyton was right, a short nap would do her a ton of good. It had been an incredibly stressful few days, and she just needed to get horizontal for a minute. Besides, she would have to sleep sometime. If she slipped into a lucid dreaming state, she would be cautious. She could do that.

  She laid down on her air mattress and closed her eyes. Her mind wandered restlessly through the manor: the foyer, the main hallway, the great hall. She thought about how she would need to walk through the manor again today and then what path visitors would take when the tours began. When her mind’s eye reached the music room, her memories shot her to the great lawn: the overnight camping trip from a decade ago. The back of Brooke’s blonde head, matted with dark red blood. Her face slack and pale like a corpse. Mason’s fire red face screaming, “What have you done?!”

  Layla’s eyes flew open. Sweat prickled under her arms.

  “Can’t change the past.” She breathed too quickly. “Can’t change the past. Focus on what you’re grateful for today.” That was another pearl she had gleaned from Dr. Waters.

  She drew in a deep breath and shifted into a more deliberate mental space, one she had had to practice. It was her usual practice before she fell asleep, her grateful list. Her girls were at the top spot. Yes. God had clearly blessed her twice with those beautiful babies. She had a home for them, albeit a temporary one. Still, it was a roof over their head and a safe place to sleep at night.

  There was a special place in heaven for Tom Watson.

  They had healthy food to eat, she had a good nursing job that paid well. The next item on her grateful list was a surprise to her, because she didn’t intend to thank God for it outright: Asher was out of her life, and he was never coming back. She was glad he was dead.

  As if on cue, binding guilt wrapped around her insides and squeezed—an illogical reaction based solely on the fact that he had been her girls’ father. She responded as she often managed to, in private argument, an inside-her-head wrestling match to prove her innocence: He had been abusive.

  She found it strange that remembering how he hit her only made her feel worse. She put his death on the list anyway, and it wasn’t the last item, but in her mind she saw it in ALL CAPS. Because it was that good.

  She had talked with Asher about a divorce several times over the years, the last time not long before he died. He’d refused each time and said he’d make sure she never got custody of the girls if they divorced.

  He knew a little too much about her lucid dreaming, more than she wanted him to know. He said he’d tell everyone that she was mentally unstable, that she had been seeing a psychologist since she was a teenager, and that her vivid dreaming was probably a sign of psychosis.

  She wasn’t sure if he could get anyone to believe him. But his threats were strong enough that they caused her to back away from pursuing the divorce. He had connections in town. He told her that for every mental health expert she found who said she was sane, he would find two who would testify that she wasn’t. He wasn’t about to be humiliated in public by having his wife leave him. That meant their custody battle would go to a jury trial, and she didn’t want to gamble where her girls were concerned.

  There was a special place in hell for Asher Cardill.

  For the final item on her gratitude list, she thought of how she had lost almost all the weight that she had carried for most of her life. Roughly twenty more pounds, and she would lighten the scales to the lowest number she had seen in fifteen years.

  Sleep weighed heavy on her, and she floated in and out of sweet weightlessness. It felt so good to let go and be free. That brought her to one more thing to add to the list. It was quiet here in the basement, or the summer quarters, as Tom had referred to them.

  Long shifts at the hospital, packing, the move, and this thick-walled quiet added up to one big, fat sleeping pill for her. She prayed she wouldn’t dream, at least not in the way she had been taught to. She couldn’t—not at the manor.

  Though sometimes, she often “woke” in her sleep to find herself in that lucid dreaming state. Like a well-worn path, her mind just went in that direction without even trying.

  That worried her because she had children to take care of. She couldn’t be off on some sleepy time adventure when it was her responsibility to care for her girls. What if one of them yelled for her and she didn’t hear them? What if they tried to wake her and couldn’t because she was too far gone into her own dream world?

  There was little notice when she moved from the real world to her dream world. One minute she might be lying in bed trying to go to sleep, filling out her gratitude list, or maybe worrying whether she had done enough for her daughters that day. The next minute she opened her eyes and everything looked the same. There were those subtle signs, but sometimes she missed them. While she was at the manor and whenever it was time to sleep, she would keep a firm intent that she would not lucid dream. Not here.r />
  That did it. She decided she wouldn’t sleep at all right now. Instead, she would bring order to that kitchen. The cardboard boxes of glasses and plates and silverware were right where she left them. Peyton and the girls were still outside and that was fine. She didn’t mind doing this work by herself, she preferred it. To her there was nothing worse than having someone else organize your kitchen. That made it impossible to find anything.

  The freezer wrap ripped loud on the serrated edge, and she folded the cut sheet on the long edges to fit neatly inside the cabinet. Tacky as it was, this was less expensive than shelf liner, she rationalized, and she had to save every nickel. Tall glasses went in the back, short glasses in the front. She realized she would need a chair with a hard and sturdy seat. The girls would want to stand on it to get the glasses from the higher cabinets. She would get one tomorrow.

  Mugs next. Her favorite coffee mugs were the only ones she took from the house. She slipped the first one from the funny papers she’d wrapped it in to keep it from breaking. She knew all her coffee mugs before she could see them because each shape was distinct and familiar.

  This one was her Nurses Call the Shots mug, with a needle in place of the t. One of her patients’ family had given it to her with chocolates inside of it when their dad had been discharged.

  The next one had the prescription label across it with the word Coffee printed in bold letters. Her girls had given her that mug for her birthday. The last two mugs had happy girls drawn on it with their Mama in the middle. Her daughters had made those at school and brought them home for Mother’s Day.

  There was one mug left in the cardboard box, wrapped in newspaper.

  She stared at it. There shouldn’t be any others in the box. She had made certain that she threw out all of Asher’s stupid college mugs, and she didn’t bring any others with her.

  She gritted her teeth tightly together and began to hate this moment. She pulled cool air in and out through her nose. With a steady hand, she reached for the mug. If she had mistakenly packed one of his tea cups, she would simply throw it out. She was in charge of her life now.

  Not him.

  But she knew she hadn’t made any mistakes. She had taken great pleasure in tossing the mugs into the trash can.

  “Make me a tea, would you, Lay?”

  Slowly, she unwrapped it and found what she knew as impossible: an ugly, brown, fat-bottomed mug with the words Born to Golf on the side.

  She placed it on the counter and the pottery clinked against the surface.

  A mistake. That’s all this was. She would throw it out and that would be the end of it.

  She took one long step away from the counter and stared at mug, as if she faced her former husband in the flesh. Her skin crawled at remembering his loud, breathy sips and his slow smile at her over the thick molded rim. As if he had just won a tiny piece of her soul in return for arm-twisting her into making and serving him tea.

  “Layla,” she could hear him say. “What’s for dinner?”

  The memory of his voice made panic and heat rise within as though she were about to be sick. Do whatever he asked, or else, that was the code she lived by. She lived in perpetual fear of the or else.

  With a deep breath, she pushed her shoulders back and lifted her chin. He was gone. So was or else. She stood tall in front of his memory, demanded her fear to be small, and without backing down she said, “You will never control me again.”

  A feeling of freedom surged through her and she remembered what it was like when she was young and strong with only choices ahead of her. Without obligation. Without Asher.

  A husky snicker sounded behind her, one she hadn’t heard in several months. Her newfound strength drained from her like the rushing of water through a pipe.

  She swallowed quickly, her breath kicking up its pace. There was no one there, she knew. No one else in the room but her, and she would prove that to herself. But when she turned all the way around, she found Asher posed casually inside the empty six foot frame she’d left propped against the wall. A shudder rumbled through her body and pushed a tiny whimper from her lips.

  “Make me some tea, would you, Lay?”

  He shouldn’t be standing there smiling at her with his hands in his pockets. He was dead. In fact, she’d put his death on her gratitude list.

  She’d seen the police pictures of his lifeless body just below the grand stairway in Alcott Manor and how he had impaled himself on a sharp length of wood when he fell from the balcony. She identified his body at the morgue. She even planned his funeral, attended it with all of her family, and threw a handful of soil into his grave. She could still hear the soft thud from the dirt hitting the shiny wooden top of his coffin.

  “Nice to see you, Lay. It’s been a while.” His lips parted in a smile she’d seen him use too many times, and always when he wanted something. His teeth looked like yellow kernels of corn.

  “This isn’t happening.”

  He drew in a deep breath and walked around her, sizing her up, and too closely. “You’re looking good. Real good. Lost a little more weight, I see.” He touched his hand to her waist, and she slapped it away.

  “Ooooo. My, my.” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth five times and shook his head as if to say, Naughty, naughty.

  “You’re not here. You’re dead.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “No.” She stepped backward.

  “Give me a kiss, baby.” His smile was dark and hungry and wide, and he ran his stubby pink tongue along the bottom edges of his top teeth.

  “No!” she screamed.

  Layla awoke with a start and half-expected to see Asher standing in front of her as he had been in her dream. She stood in her kitchen. Her breath was fast and shallow.

  The room was empty, and even more importantly, she was alone. She drew in gasps of air.

  A stress response.

  That’s all that dream was. She had indeed fallen asleep, dozed off without even realizing it. And she was sleepwalking again, not surprising considering the amount of stress she was dealing with right now.

  She had been through an awful lot in the past few weeks. She was also sleeping in unfamiliar territory and not far from where Asher had died.

  Pressure, worry, strain, a strange dream was bound to happen.

  Maybe this was even a little of her signature guilt messing with her, too. Because she was happy that Asher was dead—happy and damn near victorious now that she stood here in the little kitchen where he wasn’t.

  She splashed her face with water and listened for the smallest sound or movement, the tiniest evidence that she might not be alone. Nothing.

  Thank God.

  She slowed her breath and tried to think of normal things. Like how this kitchen would be filled with the scent of brown sugared oatmeal, toast, and coffee in the morning. There would also be the sound of arguing because Anna Kate would ask for a Pop-Tart and Layla would not give her one.

  The box of mugs and glasses sat on the counter. She stared at it, wondering if Asher’s mug was buried in the bottom of it as it had been in her dream. She prayed she hadn't been clairvoyant then as well.

  “It’s not there,” she said aloud and only to herself. “I’ll prove it.”

  She marched toward the box and unpacked the contents far more quickly than she had packed them, with sheets of newspaper flying into the air and drifting to the floor. She didn’t line the shelves with freezer paper first, and she didn’t place the big glasses behind the little glasses in the cabinet. But she did slam every glass and mug on the counter to make a point.

  “There,” she said when the box was empty and the mug wasn’t there. “Just a dream.”

  11

  Mason stood in the too-long line at Sammi’s-on-the-Sea for his takeout order. His mind was stuck on the image of Tom submerged from the waist up in a large bathtub full of blood-tinged water. His horror-filled eyes and mouth were wide open, as if the last thing he saw lit
erally scared him to death.

  He couldn’t believe Tom was gone. Just like that. The man who had championed Alcott Manor’s restoration for so long had died, and in the home he had fought for years to save. He ran his hand over his face. Neither could he believe that there had been yet another death at Alcott Manor.

  He and Layla hadn’t talked about it yet, but the two of them would have to work closely together to finish the house. At least he hoped she would let him work with her to wrap up the job. The house had come a long way, and there was a lot left to do. Frankly, he needed the money and the credit to his reputation that finishing this job would bring. Taking over his father’s business had been harder than he expected.

  Layla Alcott.

  His former best friend who never ceased to surprise him. This time it was her appearance. She looked several shades different than when he last saw her.

  “Hey, Mason.” Frances, the cashier at Sammi’s, smiled wide and tried too hard to be pleasing, as was her custom whenever he came in. Several times she had slipped him her number on the back of his receipt. He never called.

  “Hey, Frances. That my to-go order?”

  “Yep, got it right here.” Frances flipped a pink-painted section of her otherwise brown hair behind her shoulder, peeked in the bag and moved things around. “They put two orders in here. Hang on, I’ll fix it.”

  “No, two orders is right.” He sifted through several bills in his black leather wallet and waited for her to give him the total.

  “Oh.” She stood uncomfortably corrected. “Alright. Then $15.96 is your total.”

  He gave her a twenty and thought about what she would never know—that his mind was already made up. He’d made enough mistakes in his life, spent enough time dating the wrong girls. Essentially, he’d had enough of being on the wrong track for his life. So from now on he was going with his gut to lead him to the right path for him. Dixie had been right when she told him that approach was probably his only option left. He’d tried everything else.