The Mansion

by Boone, Ezekiel

  Emily reached for her purse. “Well, how about a tip, then? Can we leave a tip?”

  The woman held up her hand. “No, ma’am. I appreciate the gesture, but our salary includes tips. It’s not like we’re the sort of tourist town that does a bonfire business, and Mr. Eagle wanted to make sure that we’re happy with our jobs. I’ll tell you, Mr. Eagle is a good employer. He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” She laughed. “Well, aside from my kids. I’m supposed to say that, ain’t I?”

  “Does everybody work for Shawn?”

  “Most everybody,” Cheryl said. “There are a few people who have jobs in Cortaca they’re happy with and who don’t mind the commute, and there are a few who are just stubborn fools and who don’t want to let Mr. Eagle buy them out. Easy to tell. If you see a house or a business that looks like it ought to be torn down, that’s one of the ones who aren’t working for Mr. Eagle. Fools, if you ask me, but Mr. Eagle said nobody had to sell to him or work for him if they didn’t want to.”

  “Seems like a good thing for the town.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And how, might I ask, is it living up at Eagle Mansion? Some folks say it was haunted before Mr. Eagle fixed it up, but I drove up there over the summer, and it looked real nice. Never been out there before that.”

  “It’s very nice,” Emily said.

  Outside, they walked to the SUV together. Emily grabbed his jacket and pulled him close to her. “It’s kind of weird here, isn’t it? It all looks so perfect, and it seems perfect.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing’s ever perfect, is it?” She kissed him. “There’s got to be something lurking beneath the surface.”

  He kissed her back. “I don’t know. I mean, I can’t believe I’m going to be the one to defend Shawn here, but you’ve got to be honest. This was a real shithole of a town before he came back to fix it up. You don’t have to work for Shawn if you don’t want to, but if you do, good salaries, health care, free college tuition for your kids; kind of hard to argue that there’s anything nefarious about that.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “Have fun coding.”

  “I’m not coding, honey. Right now I’m just going through root access level—”

  She leaned in and kissed him again, cutting him off. “Please. For the love of god, Billy, remember that I’m not an engineer.”

  “I’m just looking under the hood. How about that?”

  “Men,” she said, shaking her head but smiling. “Don’t forget to send the car back for me, okay?” She paused, not yet letting go of his jacket. “You’ll be fine at the house by yourself?”

  “I won’t be by myself,” he said. “Nellie’s there.”

  “I know,” she said. “Didn’t you hear our waitress say that the house was haunted?” She kissed him a third time.

  As the Honda took him out of Whiskey Run, Billy saw a bedraggled building at the end of the commercial strip. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it was a clear holdover from before Shawn had McMansioned the entire town. It looked familiar to him from the time he’d spent living in the cabin, though. A bar? Wasn’t that it? There was a rough wooden sign that had probably been hanging from the day the bar was built, but he could just make out the faded name painted in what had probably once been a vibrant blood red: RUFFLE’S. He’d never actually been in there, he thought. The few times they had gone to a bar in Whiskey Run during those twenty-three months, they’d gone to Temerity’s, which was now gone, a victim of Shawn’s special breed of gentrification. There were places to drink in Whiskey Run 2.0—a couple of bars, a brew pub, restaurants—but they all looked shiny and clean, nothing like what a proper bar should be. If he were still a drinking man, Ruffle’s would be his first choice.

  If.

  He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, trying to catch a few minutes of sleep as the Honda drove him back to Eagle Mansion and Nellie.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  * * *

  RHYTHM

  Living with Billy while he was working was like living with a ghost.

  She tried to keep to a rigid schedule that first week. Out the door for her run by seven every morning, back between seven forty-five and eight thirty depending on how far she went. If it was a shorter run, she lingered in the shower and over her breakfast. On the days she ran six, eight, ten miles, she hustled through getting dressed and eating. Nine o’clock on the dot—okay, sometimes nine fifteen or nine thirty—she sat down at the dining room table with a cup of coffee and her laptop and . . . Stared at the blank screen on the computer, occasionally typing a few sentences and then deleting them. She did that until noon. Then lunch, sometimes in town and sometimes in the Nest, and whatever errands and chores she could make for herself. Midafternoon she read and screwed around on the internet until she got restless again and took a walk. After her walk, she prepped dinner, which she ate by herself since Billy was working, and then she watched television or movies until she was ready to go to sleep.

  That first full day, Billy had gone to lunch with her in Whiskey Run, but the rest of the week, she saw him only in flitting glances. Shawn’s addition wasn’t ridiculously large—there was only the bedroom suite; the office; the combo kitchen, dining room, and living room, with an attached powder room. The designer had some sort of fetish for high ceilings and open spaces, and it was a lot of square feet, but there weren’t that many actual rooms in the Nest. If Billy had spent every moment holed up in the office working on Nellie, Emily could have understood not seeing him, but that was the thing: she was sure she kept just missing him. She didn’t even understand how it was possible. It was almost like he was trying to stay out of her sight.

  She’d pop into the bathroom to pee, and when she came out, there’d be an empty glass sitting in the kitchen sink. Or she’d finish her lunch and go to brush her teeth, and there’d be a pile of his dirty clothes on the bathroom floor, his damp footprints still on the polished concrete. One night, she was sure he was in bed with her, could feel him pressed against her back, but when she rolled over to reach for him, she was alone; three in the morning and he was still working. She knew that he left the office, even if it was intermittently, because of the dirty clothes on the floor, because of a kitchen counter strewn with plates with scraps of sandwiches, frozen-burrito wrappers, plastic containers emptied of the meals she’d left for him. By the end of that first week, she caught herself constantly looking up from her book and checking behind her, as if Billy were in the corner of her eye. All she would have to do was turn her head fast enough and she was sure she’d see him in the shadows.

  Finally, she went and knocked on one of the doors to the office. After a few minutes, the doors slid open to show Billy standing there.

  “Hey,” he said. “You know, you don’t have to knock. You can just ask Nellie to grab me. You don’t even have to walk to the office.”

  He looked slightly dazed, the way he had back when he was drinking and trying to act like he was sober. She had planned to tell him she wanted to have dinner with him, to get a chance to hang out a little and then end the night with a roll in the hay, but she changed her mind as soon as she saw him.

  “When’s the last time you got some sleep, Billy?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. What day is it?”

  “It’s—”

  He cut her off. “Nellie. When’s the last time I got some sleep?”

  You’ve been awake for forty-one hours. I told you, you need to do a better job of taking care of yourself.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said.

  He was looking back into the room at the manifestation of Nellie’s presence, that green ball of light on the wall that gave you a focal point. Nellie had been doing the same thing for Emily, and while she liked it, it suddenly seemed odd to her. Was Nellie both with her and with Billy at the same time? Were there two of those balls of light bouncing around the building? And why have a ball of light at all? Nellie was everywhere in the Nest. Everywhere in Eagle Mansion no
w that there weren’t workers. There was no real reason why Billy had to look away from Emily to talk to Nellie. Billy could just talk into the air and Nellie would hear. Nellie was omnipresent, but with that ball of light, the way her voice stayed in the room, it was almost like Nellie didn’t want to give up Billy’s attention.

  He looked at Emily now and then gave her a kiss and a nice bite on the lip. “I’m eating, though. She”—he rolled his eyes, as if Nellie wouldn’t see it—“nagged me about that. Thanks for leaving me stuff in the fridge, by the way. Though that smoothie was pretty gross.”

  It took her a second. “That wasn’t a smoothie, honey. It was soup. You were supposed to heat it up.”

  That’s what I told him.

  “Great,” Billy said. “Nellie, please don’t turn into my wife. No guy wants two different women nagging him.” Emily started to speak, but he held up his hands. “Kidding! I love you. I couldn’t live without you. No offense to Nellie, but you’re the most important thing in my life.”

  Emily closed her mouth. She wasn’t mad at his comment about nagging. She recognized it as a joke. What bothered her was how natural his conversation with Nellie seemed. What caused a twinge in the deep impulse part of her brain was that, tonally, Billy almost sounded like he was flirting with Nellie.

  You really should get some sleep, Billy. You look like shit.

  He ran his good hand through his hair. Almost as if he’d been reading Emily’s thoughts, he said, “She sounds good, yeah? Way better at conversation.” He looked back into the office again. “Well, I feel like shit. Every time I try to get some sleep, I can’t.”

  He stepped all the way out of the room and into the hallway. The doors slid shut noiselessly behind him. He held up the hand with the stitches. “Stupid thing itches all the time. It feels like I’ve got ants crawling on me.”

  She took it in her own hands. The bandages were fresh and clean, snow-white, immaculately wrapped. “You had her change it?”

  He nodded. “A couple of times. She refuses to work with me until I go down to the infirmary and have it taken care of. She puts on antibiotic lotion and fresh bandages. Stitches come out on day ten. She says it’s looking good, and the scarring will be minimal.” He grinned. “Pretty freaking cool, right? Can you imagine portable medical clinics all over the country? Build them into self-driving vans or trucks with solar panels on the roof and you could bring medical attention to places that wouldn’t normally have it. Or, shit, third world countries. Build those med-bots into shipping containers and drop them off in hot zones?”

  Actually, the initial concept came about in preparation for longer space voyages, where there is no possibility of bringing in outside care. Shawn has invested in the effort to send a manned mission to Mars.

  Emily saw Billy’s eyes move, his gaze flicking over her shoulder. She looked behind her; Nellie’s soft tennis ball of light was on the wall. Of course, she thought. Closing the doors to the office didn’t mean anything.

  “Yeah, well,” Billy said, “dude likes to throw his money away. People just love the idea of space. Like it’s not bad enough we’ve colonized everything down here.”

  He yawned and then rubbed his eyes. The skin under his eyes was delicately bruised from tiredness, and he had a thick coating of stubble on his face. His hair, Emily noticed, was getting shaggy, too. He’d meant to get it cut before they left Seattle, but neither of them had remembered. There must be a place in Whiskey Run. And if not, they could make a day of it and go to Cortaca. That would be fun, they . . .

  “Hey,” she said. He looked like he was wobbling on his feet. “Nellie’s right. You do look like shit. You need to go get some sleep.”

  “I’ll just lie there agonizing over how crazy itchy these stitches are,” he said, yawning again, but even though he kept grumbling, he let her lead him to the bedroom and put him under the covers. Nellie kept quiet, but she blacked out the windows and dimmed the lights, turning them all the way off as Emily stepped back into the hall and the bedroom door closed behind her.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Of course.

  “And, well, thanks,” Emily said. She walked toward the kitchen. “It’s weird not seeing Billy at all, but I appreciate your company.”

  As she said it, she was suddenly aware of how true that had been. She’d easily fallen into the habit of chitchatting with Nellie. Questions about the weather segueing into “Anything interesting in the news?” Nellie smart enough to summarize things and synthesize analysis so that she could have a conversation about whatever it was that caught Emily’s interest. Asking Nellie what was good on television that night, or to find her a recipe for one of the kinds of fish in the deep freeze. Even though Billy was so involved in his work that he might as well have been a ghost, she wasn’t lonely: she had Nellie. And yet, if that was true, if Nellie kept her comforted, why had she been so jumpy about the way Billy seemed to always be just out of her sight? Was it, in fact, Nellie spooking her? No, she thought, because Nellie didn’t sneak around.

  Nellie was always there.

  Maybe that was the problem.

  She stepped over to the espresso machine. “I’m going to go walk around the grounds for a bit. Can you make me a latte to take with me, please?”

  The machine clicked on as Emily slid a mug under the spout.

  You should stay here. It’s going to start drizzling in about fifteen minutes.

  “I don’t mind,” Emily said. “It will do me good to walk around a bit. Keep me from going stir-crazy. I can’t stay in here forever.”

  Nellie didn’t respond to that.

  Outside, Emily found that it was already drizzling. She yanked the hood of her jacket up and over her hair, pulled her hand and the handle of the coffee mug into her sleeve, and walked down the stairs. It was cold, too. Cold enough for her to see her breath in the late-afternoon gloom. She patted her pockets with her free hand before remembering that she’d worn gloves to run that morning and they were laid out to dry with her sneakers. Why hadn’t Nellie reminded her?

  She stopped on the bottom step to look at the view. Okay, so there were some things about living at Eagle Mansion that bothered her, and sure, her book consisted of exactly zero written words so far, but it was undeniably stunning out here. Most of the trees were already denuded of leaves, but the pines stood tall and strong and green, and the lawn had come in green where sod had been put down. It didn’t matter that it was drizzling and gloomy and the light was dim; the Saint Lawrence River kept flowing, the small islands dotting the water still stood sentry, and the Canadian shoreline still held promise of adventure. She looked down the road toward Whiskey Run, but it didn’t seem particularly appealing. Nor did going the other way, over the top of the hill, or along one of the paths she’d already run. Maybe she should do exactly what she’d told Nellie, and check out the grounds.

  She started by going back up the steps and walking down the long, wide patio that ran the length of the mansion. She loved the heavy logs that were the bones of the mansion, the way they echoed the forest. She stopped to admire the empty swimming pool and hot tubs—they’d be something once they were running—and to peer into the mansion from the outside. Shawn’s architect had designed it so that the place was lousy with French doors, a way to open the house on days when the weather permitted, and it was kind of interesting for her to peer in. She’d already wandered through Eagle Mansion, of course, but there was something voyeuristic in standing on the patio and cupping her hands to the windows.

  The patio narrowed at the end, but turned the corner and took her around the side and then behind Eagle Mansion. It was difficult for her to tell what the difference was, but it was clear that this part of the estate was meant for the staff. Maybe that it was designed to be more functional? The doors seemed designed to hide what was behind them rather than to give guests views of the slope down to the river. Back here, the paved drive turned into a parking lot—guests dropped off out front by chauffeurs or automati
cs—with an unattached garage that held all the maintenance equipment. She hadn’t bothered going into the garage, but according to Nellie, it held a couple of pickup trucks, gardening tools and lawn mowers, snowblowers, a full-on snowplow—all that sort of crap. There was another outbuilding that was slightly smaller that was supposed to contain a fully outfitted workshop so the maintenance guys could make anything they needed for repairs, a decent-sized outbuilding that had the water-pumping equipment, and then a much smaller outbuilding, small enough that she would have called it a shed, that Nellie had told her was used for . . . Eh. She couldn’t remember. They were all immaculately designed and built, or at least seemed so from the outside, though so closely linked to Eagle Mansion’s design that it was hard to believe they had such pedestrian purposes and hadn’t always been there.

  There was another building, however, behind the kitchen and the ground fenced off for a garden, that she’d noticed but not paid attention to before. It was the size of a small cottage, and it looked, in a lot of ways, like a cottage. She walked over to it. The building stood out to her because, unlike the garage and the maintenance buildings, it had clearly been there for a long time. The roof was new, and from where she was, the windows looked new, but as she got closer, it was more and more clear that some of the rocks that made up the base had shifted, and the timbers didn’t look right. There were scorch marks around the windows and the door.

  Had it been there before, the winter she’d lived in the cabin with Billy and Shawn? It looked familiar, but she couldn’t tell.

  She stepped up to the door but it didn’t open. There was a handprint reader, and Emily put her hand on it.

  Nothing.

  “Nellie,” she said. “Open up, please.”

  Nothing. Maybe Nellie wasn’t wired up out here. She couldn’t remember whether anybody had said anything about the outbuildings and the grounds. Nellie must have been confined to Eagle Mansion and the Nest proper. She stepped away from the door and moved to one of the windows. Inside, the room showed clear signs of a fire, but that was it. Nothing that seemed worth keeping, she thought, and wondered why on earth the building was still there.