Sealed Off

by Barbara Ross

  I wandered to our little gift shop to check in with Mom. In the fall she divided her time between Linens and Pantries, the big box store in Topsham where she was assistant manager, and the clambake. She’d worked in Topsham the day before and then had gone home to prepare for Marguerite and Tallulah’s arrival. I’d handled the gift shop as best I could, along with my hosting duties.

  “Did you sell a lot of the lobster cookies yesterday?” Mom asked.

  We fed people more than enough during the clambake, but the gift shop carried lobster-shaped sandwich cookies, red velvet with vanilla cream, which people purchased as souvenirs.

  “I may have sold maybe two packages,” I answered. “I’m sorry I didn’t write it down.”

  “My inventory is off by more than two dozen. Have you all been eating them behind my back?”

  “I wasn’t able to be in the shop as much as I wanted yesterday,” I said. “You better check with Page and Vanessa.”

  I left Mom and went to ring the ship’s bell to indicate the first course was served. When the guests were seated the waitstaff delivered the creamy clam chowder, perfect on this chilly day. Mom put a CLOSED sign up in the gift shop and met me at the picnic table where Marguerite sat with Tallulah, Chris, and Wyatt. I didn’t normally eat the clambake meal. I was too busy with work, but we didn’t normally have a ninety-six-year-old who’d once lived in Windsholme visiting, so I made an exception.

  “We’ll tour the house as soon as we finish eating the main course. That should allow enough time for us to go back to the harbor on the Jacquie II with the rest of the guests,” I said.

  “Fine, fine,” Marguerite agreed. For someone who’d traveled such a long way, she seemed in no hurry to visit the house.

  * * *

  We headed to Windsholme as soon as we finished our lobsters. When we started the steep climb from the dining pavilion to the house, I momentarily regretted not renting a wheelchair for Marguerite. But she took the hill like a champ, thumping her cane along the path with Chris on one side and Mom on the other.

  Wyatt led the way, her long brown hair blowing in the cool breeze. She was dressed in a neat, rust-colored shirtdress, accessorized by a perfectly tied scarf in fall colors and a pair of flats that matched the dress. A stranger might have assumed the professional-looking outfit was because she was giving an important client and her honored guests a tour of a major project, but I knew better. Wyatt had always dressed beautifully, even when we were in prep school. We’d lost track of each other for years before she’d turned up to work on the renovation. Her careful dress and grooming hadn’t changed in all those years.

  “The house, as I’m sure you know, Marguerite, was built in 1890 by your father, Lemuel Morrow, the year after his father, Thomas, the head of the family, died,” Wyatt said as we walked. “Windsholme is attributed to the architect Henry Gilbert.”

  She stopped on the porch that ran the length of the front of the house. “Gilbert was a master. He was entirely self-taught and critical to the development of these Maine coast summer homes. He was meticulous, insisted on being onsite every day when his designs were built. He specified the woodwork, the wallpaper, even the furniture and rugs. It was a time when American architects turned away from the fuss of the Victorian style and embraced the straight lines of our colonial heritage. Gilbert had emigrated from Quebec Province, but he embraced the trend fully and pushed it forward.

  “Gilbert could have become a John Calvin Stevens or even the new H. H. Richardson, but he died tragically young. If Windsholme was his first commission, as we believe, there are only five houses built during his lifetime, and a half a dozen others completed from his plans after he died.”

  Mom, Chris, Tallulah, and I hung back, allowing Marguerite to be the closest to Wyatt.

  “We’ll start in the dining room,” Wyatt announced.

  The French doors to the east wing had been left propped open. The main entrance to the house now led to the giant hole the fire had burned in the floor of the great hall, neatly severing the east wing from the west wing. The rooms in the east wing up to the third floor were accessible via the servants’ staircase. Getting to the second and third floors in the west wing, the larger part of the house, required climbing scaffolding erected by the workers. That wasn’t going to work for Marguerite. I hoped she’d be happy with a full tour of the first floor and a partial tour of the second.

  Livvie and Sonny hurried up the hill toward us. Aside from Marguerite and Tallulah, we’d all been in the empty mansion many times, but everyone wanted to tour the place with someone who had lived there in its prime.

  “Hello, hello.” Mark Cochran came through the French doors onto the porch with his arm extended. “You must be Mrs. Morales.” He took one of Marguerite’s blue-veined hands into his enormous paw and worked her arm up and down like he was pumping a well. “Mark Cochran, general contractor. So excited to meet you.”

  Mark was a bear of a man, toweringly tall, heavily muscled, and with an expanding gut. He was dressed in brown cords and an expensive-looking yellow sweater. He looked like a successful, middle-aged version of the former high school football player he had once been.

  Like everything else about the day’s expedition so far, Marguerite took it in her stride. Withdrawing her hand, she said, “I’m excited as well.”

  “Shall we begin the tour?” Wyatt asked a little too loudly. She was nervous like the rest of us.

  We went through the French doors into the dining room. Fortunately, except for the lingering smell of smoke that still haunted the room on damp days, it was largely intact.

  “The murals in the dining room, as you probably know, are attributed to Reynold Ripley,” Wyatt said. “There’s no signature, but the style is highly recognizable, and we know he worked in the area at the time. Is that what you were told?”

  We all looked at Marguerite, hoping she could confirm the story. She didn’t respond. She stared at each of the four hand-painted walls in turn, her heavily lidded old eyes wide, her mouth slightly open. Wherever she was, it wasn’t here with us in the present day.

  Starting in a corner, she put a hand up and traced the outline of the harbor and the schooners at full sail depicted in the mural. She walked past the big stone fireplace, running her hand along its rough face, and then continued with the mural on the other side.

  Tallulah videoed it all dutifully, though I wondered in the dim light of the dining room if anything would be visible. The electricity was off for demolition and the gloomy day didn’t help, especially since the deep porch prevented much of the outdoor light from filtering through the French doors. All the inside doors to the room were closed, the passageway to the kitchen and back stairs, and the pocket doors to the burned-out great hall. We could hear the far-off thumps and bumps from the demo crew working on the third floor.

  We watched in silence as Marguerite made her slow pilgrimage around the room, examining each wall. I could tell Wyatt was bursting with questions, but none of us wanted to break the spell. After she returned to the center of the room, Marguerite pulled her arms into the sleeves of her camel hair coat, literally gathering herself. We stared expectantly.

  “It’s a shock,” she finally said. “It’s exactly as I remember it. When I stand here, I am a little girl. The dining room table is there.” She pointed to the center of the room. “And I can barely see the top of it. The second maid has come in to lay the fire in the fireplace. I can smell the cooking coming from downstairs and the noise of the cook at work.”

  As we listened, transfixed, there was a particularly loud thump from the demo workers and I jumped a little. I wasn’t the only one.

  “May we see the kitchen?” Marguerite asked.

  Wyatt smiled. “You remember the way?”

  Marguerite smiled back. “Of course.”

  Chris and Tallulah rushed to either side of her, but Marguerite didn’t wait. She used her cane and marched resolutely to the door that led through the butler’s pantry, past t
he entrance to the back stairs, and onto the balcony that surrounded the two-story kitchen.

  I hung back and motioned for Mark to do the same. “Can we open up the pocket doors? It’s so dark and close in here.”

  Mark rolled the double doors back, opening the dining room to the great hall. The big windows at the front of the house did lighten the place up considerably, though the window over the remains of the staircase had been lost to the fire and was boarded up. There was yellow caution tape strung around the hole the fire had burned in the floor of the great hall straight through to the basement. I didn’t know if it was for our benefit or more likely for the safety of the demo team. Overhead, I caught a glimpse of a catwalk made of scaffolding bridging one side of the second floor to the other.

  “We’ll be able to take Marguerite to the second-floor rooms in the west wing!” I pointed excitedly. “Thank you so much.”

  Mark beamed. “I thought you’d be pleased. We were going to need the scaffolding for the demo team anyway, so I had my guys put it up because I knew this visit was important to you. It’s why I didn’t let you in yesterday. I hoped you’d be surprised.”

  “Thank you.” There was the sound of a sledgehammer and a splinter of wood. “That sounds close. Are you sure they’re only working on the third floor?”

  “I reminded them this morning.”

  We caught up to the group on the balcony over the kitchen. It ran around all four sides of the room and was ringed by beautiful mahogany cupboards, glass-fronted for china and glass, drawers for silver, shelves for linens. The cupboards were all intact and I hated the idea that they would soon be demolished. Wyatt had designed a modern caterers’ kitchen for the main floor. If the house was intended to allow us to schedule and run events—weddings, corporate meetings, and so on—we wouldn’t want to be running up and down stairs for service. It was the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth, and the renovation was for a working family, not one with servants. Still it hurt. I couldn’t imagine how Marguerite felt.

  Marguerite stood against the rail on the far side of the balcony, looking into the kitchen below. There was nothing down there but an old wooden icebox with its doors off and the hulking wood stove that had been used for cooking throughout the house’s occupancy. The linoleum floor, installed during a hasty 1920s renovation, was cracked and curling in places, its original light and dark green pattern barely discernible.

  It was clear that wasn’t how Marguerite saw the kitchen. “This was my favorite place in the house,” she said in a strong voice. “On rainy days when there was little to do on the island, our cook, a lovely old woman named Mrs. Stout, would let me and my brother’s children ‘help’ her. What patience that woman had. Of course, we were no help at all.” Marguerite pointed to a corner of the kitchen. “Her rocker used to be right there.”

  The group, led by Sonny, started to move. This scene of nostalgia for past days of family grandeur wasn’t his thing. “Moving on,” he said in a loud voice. “You don’t want to miss the boat. Upstairs next?”

  Mark nodded.

  We crowded through the narrow hallway and went up the back stairs one at a time. Chris positioned himself behind Marguerite, waiting on each step while she slowly climbed. At the top, a door brought us into the great hall again, with yellow caution tape ringing the hole where the staircase should have been and the scaffold bridge leading across open space to the west wing.

  There was another loud bang.

  I hustled everyone into the master bedroom and then pulled Mark to the side. “That sounded like it came from the second floor. Make them stop until after Marguerite leaves.”

  Mark headed off across the scaffold bridge.

  “My mother’s dressing table was here,” Marguerite said as I returned to the bedroom. “So she could look down the hill, across the great lawn, and to the sea as she got dressed.”

  I had thought Marguerite might linger in her mother’s old room, but she did not. Her memories of the room were not as strong a pull as her memories of the kitchen. She’d led us back into the hall when Mark Cochran hurried across the scaffold bridge, his dark brows pulled together, lips set in a grim line. As soon as he was close, he said, “Julia, Wyatt, can I talk to you?”

  We met him where the bridge joined the old hallway floor.

  I knew what he was going to tell me. “The demo team is working on the second floor,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “They’re not, but there’s something you need to see.”

  “Great.” I looked over toward the rest of the group, milling outside the master bedroom door. I caught Livvie’s eye, held up one finger, letting her know the group should wait, and then followed Mark and Wyatt across the scaffold bridge.

  In the east wing of the house the large master suite, with its sitting room, dressing room, bedroom, and bath took up the entirety of the second floor. The west wing was larger and quite different. It had a long hallway, which led past the closed doors of half a dozen family bedrooms. I didn’t see any signs of destruction as we passed, and breathed a sigh of relief.

  At the end of the long hallway, the single door was ajar and that was clearly where we were headed. The large room beyond it, which stretched from the front to the back of the house, had always been called the nursery. I didn’t know if the room had specific significance for Marguerite, but I braced for the destruction I expected to see.

  “Oh my!” Wyatt had preceded me into the room. Whatever she was reacting to had to be bad. I steeled myself. But when I entered the big room it was empty, like all the rooms at Windsholme. It was only when I turned fully around back toward the door that I saw Wyatt and Mark staring at a huge gap in the wall.

  “What is—?” I didn’t get further. Through the still intact wood framing, I saw the room. A perfectly but modestly furnished room, with a single bed with an iron bedstead. The sheets were yellowed, the summer blanket moth eaten, but the bed was made. There was a small wooden bureau, a writing desk with an open notebook on its surface. A nightstand held an oil lamp, a book, and a pair of spectacles. The room looked like someone had walked out its door moments before and would return at any minute.

  “What the heck?” I looked from Wyatt to Mark. They both stood openmouthed, as astonished as I was.

  The wall separating the room from the nursery had been completely demolished, the rubble cleared away. The remaining framing clearly showed a door frame into the nursery, but there had never been one in my memory. The plaster on the back and sidewalls of the little room was still up and there was no door to the hallway or the room on the other side.

  “Did you know this was here?” I asked them.

  “No. I thought it was empty space, eaves boxed in.” Wyatt pointed toward the outside wall where the only window was high overhead, way above eye level. “I don’t think I missed the window. I must have thought it went with the room above.”

  “What happened here?” I asked Mark.

  “Exactly what I’m trying to find out.”

  He’d no sooner said that than two members of the demo crew entered the room—the short, squat, middle-aged man I recognized as the crew chief and the handsome man who’d exchanged looks with Jason Caraway at the clambake fire. “I told you no work on the second floor,” Mark said.

  “Not our fault,” the crew chief said in heavily accented English. “We did before.”

  He looked at the other man, who spoke up. “This was the first thing we did on the first day. The scaffolding was in place, so it was easy to reach. It was before you told us to confine our work to the third floor. We were shocked to find this room. Because it was furnished, we finished with that wall, cleaned up, and moved upstairs. I meant to tell you about it, but with the storm I forgot.” The man’s English was unaccented. His command of the language marked him as a native English speaker.

  Mark didn’t look happy. We could hear the shuffle of feet and the tap of Marguerite’s cane headed toward us. The theme from Jaws played in my head. “We’ll
talk about this later,” he said, dismissing the men. They turned and were gone, exchanging muttered “excuse me’s” with the group in the long hallway.

  Wyatt was inside the hidden room, opening bureau drawers. “This isn’t recent, that’s for sure. The stuff in here is from the late 1800s, turn of the last century maybe.”

  “Why was the room sealed up like that?” I asked. “Why was there no door?”

  “That is certainly the question,” Wyatt agreed.

  Livvie came through the nursery doorway followed by the rest. “Sorry, we couldn’t wait any longer. If we’re going to make it back to the—Holey-moley.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “What is it?” Mom asked.

  “It’s a room. A room with no door,” Wyatt answered. Everyone looked at Marguerite. “Do you remember a room being here?” Wyatt asked her.

  Marguerite stared at the place where the wall had been, then slowly shook her head. “No. I’m positive there was nothing there when I was young. I slept in this room with my brothers’ children.” Her hand swept around the old nursery. “My bed was against that wall.” She hugged herself. “It’s strange to think all that was behind it the whole time.”

  “The boat,” Livvie reminded us.

  I turned to Mark and Wyatt. “I’ll see everyone off on the Jacquie II,” I told them. “Then I’ll come back. I’ll take the Boston Whaler home with Sonny and Livvie later.”

  * * *

  We made our way, slowly, out of the house, the rest of us keeping pace with Marguerite. Once outside, we started down the hill to the great lawn. The Jacquie II sounded her horn, letting the guests know it was time to get aboard. The customers gathered their things, found the others in their groups, and started for the boat.