A Darker Shade

by Laura K. Curtis

  “You don’t have to remember them all, just the big ones.”

  “How can we tell which ones we need to know?”

  “Get your notebooks and I’ll show you how to pick out important information when you’re reading.”

  Both girls left and I swallowed the pills and gulped down the juice. I stood slowly, waited for the inevitable dizziness to pass, and made my way across the hall into the bathroom. Despite the acidity of the orange juice, my mouth felt cottony and tasted foul, so I took the time to brush my teeth as well as to change into a clean pair of scrubs. When I returned to my bedroom, however, only Liza was there.

  “Where’s Hailey?”

  Liza’s mouth compressed into an expression of mulish displeasure.

  “Will you please go get her, Liza? I can’t very well run around looking for her and her mother wants her to study.”

  Liza crossed her arms and rolled her eyes.

  “I don’t know what that means.” I took a deep breath and began to push myself back out of bed, but then I heard footsteps on the stairs. “She’s coming back?”

  If a child could snarl silently, Liza did so, and when Hailey appeared I understood why. Prescott filled the door behind her, a tray in his hands with a pitcher of ice water, a traditional porcelain tea pot, a mug, and a glass on it. Guilt rippled through me, followed closely by fear. I was supposed to take care of the children, to take a burden off the Prescotts’ shoulders, not to create an additional one. And if Liza turned against me, I’d be out on my ear in no time.

  “Hailey told me you were awake.”

  “I asked them not to bother you.”

  “Give us a minute, will you, girls?” Prescott brushed a hand over Liza’s head as the children retreated, but none of the stiffness left her body. When Hailey shut the door behind them, he sighed deeply before settling into her vacated chair.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Much better. Really.” I touched the tray, which he’d laid on the nightstand. “You don’t need to wait on me. I can take care of myself.”

  “Considering your current situation, I beg to differ with that assessment.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, exhaustion having depleted my normal filters, and he laughed and held up a hand. “Joking. I wanted to see whether you had it in you to get angry on your own behalf.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Never mind. The girls aren’t too tiring for you in your current condition, are they? I was against sending them in, but they promised to be quiet and to let you sleep. They worried about you so I thought it would be better to let them play nursemaid. You don’t need to be the teacher, just let them fuss over you.”

  “Honestly, it’s fine. They were reading quietly when I woke up.”

  “Good. Jenn doesn’t want their studies interrupted, so when I said they could sit with you she said they had to study.” He winced. “You can imagine how well that went over.”

  I could, and a laugh welled up, surprising me. “We’ll manage. They’re good kids.”

  “They are. Just be careful not to tire yourself out. Doctor Sanderson says you need rest and fluids, and the more of both you get the faster you’ll be back to normal and able to work full time again.”

  Ah, there it was, the cold wave of reality that doused the warm glow generated by his apparent concern. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Excellent.” He rose and opened the door to summon the girls. “I’ll be back later on.”

  We spent the next hour on history until Jennifer interrupted the lesson to fetch Hailey and Liza for lunch.

  “Are you doing all right?” she asked.

  “Much better, thanks. Sorry to be such a bother, though.”

  “No bother. I’ll have Hailey bring you a bite when they come up after they eat if that’s okay. I’m giving them leftover casserole from last night. Does that work for you?”

  “Of course. That’s very thoughtful.”

  “Not at all. I can take over Hailey’s French lessons while you’re resting. I know history isn’t on the usual Tuesday schedule, but I couldn’t imagine you wanted to teach biology without a whiteboard at the very least.”

  “No, you’re absolutely right.” I pulled the schedule out of my fuzzy head. “But the afternoon classes can stick to their normal rotation because today is history of fashion and handwork.”

  “Perfect.” She ushered the girls out and I closed my eyes, intending to rest for but a minute, and fell right back to sleep.

  Chapter 11

  Everyone, even Jennifer, came to wish me goodnight after dinner. Matt promised he’d be over in the morning to check on me before his conference call at ten. I heard the girls running up and down the hall as they prepared for bed, then Prescott in Liza’s room, his deep voice a quiet rumble as he read to her before she shut off her light.

  I tried to relax, begged sleep to come. But the more I courted sleep, the more firmly it turned its back.

  I could read. I had yet to explore the library downstairs, though Nathaniel had told me to feel free to read anything at any time. I could not help but remember the morning’s embarrassment, however. What if I got down to the library and then could not get back upstairs? I felt stronger than I had, but the idea of having to call out for help…no, I would not browse the library tonight.

  And I had no stomach for the one book I could easily reach.

  I punched my pillow into shape, rolled onto my side, and tried to force my eyes to shut. They popped open. Beneath the heavy duvet I began to sweat, so I threw it off. The cool air felt good on my skin, but after a minute I shivered. I pulled it back up, flipped to the other side and tried again. In the darkened room, my eyes still refused to close, searching out the room’s contours in the scant light slipping around the edges of the curtains.

  I could go upstairs, get a textbook. If I wore out too soon, I could turn around because coming down used up less energy. I eased out of the bed, tested my standing strength. No problem. I pulled on the canvas shoes that doubled as slippers and padded out into the hallway. No lamp showed under any of the doorways, but a glow reached into the hall from the large window in the playroom and another filtered up the stairs from the sidelights by the front door.

  My eyes adjusted, found the outlines of doors and stairs. The silence of the sleeping house magnified my rasping breath and the squeak of the stairs beneath my feet, naming me an intruder. Eight steps. Twelve. Twenty. My heart raced, but I made it to the top of the staircase without pause.

  I plucked the American History textbook from the shelf in the schoolroom along with the accompanying teacher’s manual. In the light from the window, I glanced through the advice on teaching the section the girls had brought to my room. Dry. Full of memorization exercises. I would find my own way to interest the girls in the topic.

  A noise infringed on my consciousness at the same moment a tendril of frigid air snaked around my ankle. A rhythmic combination of creak and moan, it sounded as if someone were shifting their weight from foot to foot. Screeeeeetch, grooooooan. Screeeeeetch, grooooooan. Screeeeeetch, grooooooan.

  My mouth dried and my muscles froze.

  The family room. It was coming from the family room.

  Close the door. Keep it out.

  But my knees locked. The chill slid around and up both my legs like the long, slimy fingers of some dread sea creature.

  My stomach heaved, throwing bile up my throat, and I choked.

  Get it together. And suddenly, the answer came to me. It was Hailey or Liza. Probably Hailey, angry about Matt’s attentions. She’d followed me up and climbed on the rocking horse, hoping to terrify me. Anger burned away fear and I marched over to the door to the family room, now open a crack though it had been closed when I’d entered the schoolroom. With each step, the sound grew louder and the air grew colder. She’d opened the window. I shoved the door open and sucked in a breath to tell her off.

  The rocking horse was perfectly still. The moon’s
cold light illuminated the room, throwing strange shadows. A column of greasy black smoke swayed impossibly in the corner behind the horse, each twisting movement in time with a creak or groan. I watched in helpless fascination as long ropes separated from the column, two of them, arms that reached for me to pull me to the vortex.

  I hit the stairs at full speed and crashed down them, uncaring of the racket until a tall form halted me two steps from the bottom. Shadows exaggerated his features and turned his eyes to pits in his dark face and for a single, gasping breath, I almost flung myself back toward the smoky threat of the third floor.

  “Molly?” Nathaniel leaned toward me. “Are you all right? I thought I heard you scream.”

  Had I? I replayed the scene in my mind, but it was a silent movie with only the morbid music of the house accompanying it. “I was startled. Sorry to wake you.”

  “You didn’t. What startled you?”

  The million dollar question. Even if I’d wanted to answer, I could not. A noise. A noise and a draft. An impossible apparition of smoke and soot. “A…mouse, maybe?” Still fairly ditzy, but not completely psycho.

  “A mouse.”

  “Maybe? It was dark. I couldn’t sleep, so I went up to get a book from the classroom. I didn’t expect anything to move.” I took a deep breath. “Are you sure this is the right place for Liza?”

  He drew back. “You don’t think my daughter belongs here?”

  I threw away years of advice from Sandy and Nadya and forged ahead. “You have to admit that this house is a bit creepy for a child who sees ghosts. Whether you believe in them or not, she does. And this environment…isolation from others her own age allows her imagination to run unchecked by the effective, if sometimes brutal, rein of her peers.”

  “A normal school? That’s your recommendation?”

  “I haven’t worked with her enough to make a recommendation like that. But there’s no reason you couldn’t continue to homeschool her if that’s your choice. Just in a more normal environment where she could practice socializing as well.”

  “So we should retain your services as her tutor, but move to a more congenial location. Perhaps into Portland proper, where you’d be more comfortable. Is that it?”

  “No!”

  “Really?” He leaned forward and I did my best not to shrink away. “Let me explain something to you. I brought Liza here specifically to get her away from those peers whose influence you so admire and I took a substantial financial hit to do so. I couldn’t move Liza right now even if I believed you. Which I do not. Here we stay. If you can’t handle it, you can take off like your predecessors.”

  Except not all of them had taken off. Even in the dark, he read my face.

  “I suppose I have Hailey to thank for telling you that story?”

  “You can’t expect a teenager to ignore such juicy gossip.”

  He rubbed his forehead in a way I was beginning to recognize. “I suppose you want to know what happened.”

  Of course I did. But I’d irked him enough for one evening. “It’s none of my business.”

  He sighed. “Get in bed. I’ll fix us both some hot chocolate.”

  With Nathaniel gone, I flipped on the lamp, sat on the edge of my bed, pulled off my shoes, and examined my feet and calves. I could still feel the gelid tentacles that had sucked the strength from them, but no marks remained as evidence and when I touched them the skin beneath my fingers felt entirely normal. I shoved them beneath the welcoming duvet, rubbing them together to increase the circulation.

  What had happened upstairs?

  What was that thing in the corner of the room?

  You were in the corner. Kind of…swaying. Hailey’s nightmare. But that was in her bedroom, not upstairs. I pictured the house’s layout, but the corners did not match. It was not some structural flaw that created a dusty whirlwind in one sector.

  I drew my knees up beneath my chin, shivering despite the duvet. I should go home. But if Prescott could not afford to move, neither could I afford to quit. Sandy took a twenty percent cut of our annual salary. If I stuck out the job without earning my bonus, it would be worth $30,000. If I left, I would owe Sandy $6000. Quite aside from the money, I could not abandon Liza. I was the only person who actually believed her. If she was crazy, so was I. And I was not crazy, which meant she needed protection. I whimpered, then pressed my lips together to prevent another from slipping out. Oh, Mama, you were right about never living in.

  Nathaniel’s footsteps on the stairs pulled me from my wallow. If I planned to stay, I needed every weapon and every ally. Including the man my predecessor had tried to murder.

  When he settled into the chair next to me and handed me the steaming mug, I gave him my best smile. He gave me back one so tired I almost told him to forget telling me what happened. Almost. But my room had four corners, and I couldn’t stop checking them for smoke. I needed to hear his story.

  Nathaniel wanted mine first. “You’re certain it was a mouse you saw?”

  “I’m not certain of anything.” On that I could be honest. “Why?”

  He sipped at his chocolate and focused on Liza’s door. “Before we moved here, Liza went to a private school. We had a housekeeper five days a week, and then an au pair once Liza left school. I knew when that first au pair quit at the very idea of moving up her that finding one for such a remote location would take some time, but the service assured me they’d matched more difficult cases.

  “I interviewed four or five candidates in their Boston office before settling on a young woman who swore that Liza’s delusions did not faze her, that her own granny had seen spirits for years and everyone in the family simply dealt with it. At first, she seemed a good fit. When Jenn and Hailey arrived I gave her a raise because of the extra work and locked myself into the office. The business took all my time and energy.

  “After a few weeks, Jenn tried to tell me that the girl was getting odd. She had, apparently, gone into town and bought herself a large crucifix which she hung on the wall in her room. And she’d taken to muttering to herself. But Liza liked her, so I let it go.

  “And then one night she packed up all her things, and when we got up in the morning she’d already called a taxi to take her to the train. I asked her why, but she refused to say. In fact, she would barely look at me.”

  If any of the women I worked with pulled a stunt like that, Sandy would drop them so hard they’d never get back up. And yet, when I thought about the family room, it was hard to fault the girl’s actions. She must have known she’d never work in care again, but it hadn’t mattered a bit.

  “Did you ask the service whether she gave a reason?”

  “They had no answers. At least none they’d share. They found me a new set of possibilities. This time, Jenn went with me when I did the interviews. The third candidate seemed perfect. Born and raised in rural Vermont, she understood both winter and isolation. She’d moved down to Boston because her husband’s job transferred him, but they’d divorced, leaving her with no social circle. Liza and Hailey weren’t thrilled—Aimee was older and stricter than the first au pair had been—but they adjusted.”

  He sucked in a breath, let it out. “I did nothing to that woman. I barely even noticed she was here. After Danny’s death, the company consumed me.”

  “Your brother worked with you before he died?”

  “We were partners. He owned half the company. All the marketing, setting up shows, publicity…anything that wasn’t actually designing and building the boats, he managed. Jenn does her best, but I’m buying out her half over time.”

  He shook his head, clearing it. “But regardless, I should have paid more attention to Aimee, especially after what happened to her predecessor. Jenn complained that she was focusing too much on Liza and ignoring Hailey. More, she insisted that Aimee’s attention to Liza was a way of getting to me. That Aimee was trying to seduce me into replacing her husband. I blew off her concerns, told her she was imagining things.”

 
“But she wasn’t.”

  “No.” He fell silent, sipping his chocolate. I could not make myself drink my own despite its sweet, soothing warmth; my stomach had clenched in anticipation of the finale.

  “It happened on a Sunday morning. Aimee was making French toast. She liked to cook. I’ve tried to reconstruct the scene a dozen times and I still don’t remember exactly what I said that set her off. It had to do with the fact that Jenn and I were going to Boston for a boat show the following weekend. She started screaming that I couldn’t lead her on and then turn my back on her. Though that was not how she put it. The things she accused me of…I swear to you, I didn’t do them. I never touched her. I was so shocked I sat there gaping like a hooked fish. She snatched a butcher knife out of the block and came at me.”

  The bald, emotionless tone lent extra force to the words and the images hit like blows. The kitchen, bright and clean, the intimacy of the morning as she cooked and he drank his coffee. The shock of violence in the easy domesticity. “What did you do?”

  “She wasn’t a big woman. I took her down, but she slashed me a few times in the process.” He let his gaze wander around the room, avoiding mine. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this is the wrong place for Liza. Maybe it’s cursed. But neither Marianne’s death nor Danny’s occurred here. It’s far more likely me who is damned. And selfish as I am, I’m not giving my daughter up, even if she’d be better off without me.”

  “Now you’re being melodramatic. Of course you shouldn’t give her up.”

  “I screwed up. Twice.” Now he did focus on me, and so intently I felt like the subject of a stop-and-frisk. “I won’t fail her again. So be honest with me. What happened upstairs? Because I don’t believe for a minute that you saw a mouse. Or that you even thought you did.”

  “No. I didn’t.” He deserved the truth. But I deserved to keep my job, and Ali deserved to go to medical school. No way could we all win. I’d settle for two out of three and give him as much of the third as I could. “I went upstairs, which probably exhausted me, and felt a chill. Then I saw something move in the shadows. Not a mouse, but not anything else I can explain, either. You know how strange it is up there with all the taxidermy—I’m putting the incident down to a fever dream brought on by sickness and staring glass eyes. Not worth worrying about. I swear to you, I am not losing my mind. I won’t desert Liza or try to seduce or attack you.”