The Mansion

by Boone, Ezekiel

  She had been saving the book under the name “book,” and figured that she’d deal with the issue of a title later, but this was exactly right. She typed the words at the top of the document and then realized that it fit in perfectly with where she’d left off. She scrolled down to the bottom, where she’d left Nellie Falcon sitting alone in a boardroom, having just fired the man who had been her lover after she found out he was scheming against her . . .

  She wrote five pages that afternoon and evening before going to bed, and then another eight pages on Wednesday. The whole thing was laid out in front of her, and she felt a mild surge of irritation when she remembered that Shawn and Wendy were coming the next morning. She wanted to keep working. It would be okay, though, because she knew what she was going to write next in the book, and what she was going to write after that, too. Nellie Falcon was sitting pretty, even if she didn’t realize it yet.

  On Thanksgiving morning, she woke to a sky that was angry and bruised, low-hanging clouds glowering over the river. Nellie told her that the forecast was calling for six to eight inches of snow today, starting late morning. She also mentioned that Shawn’s chef was already working downstairs, in Eagle Mansion’s professional kitchen.

  I don’t want you to be startled.

  “Thanks,” Emily said. “What time is Shawn getting here?”

  He’s been slightly delayed, but he and his assistant—

  “You mean Wendy?”

  —Wendy, should arrive at Eagle Mansion around two this afternoon. Chef Ferguson will be serving Thanksgiving dinner at five o’clock, as you requested.

  “Got to say, I’m glad we aren’t going anywhere for Thanksgiving.”

  I’m glad you’re staying here, too. It will be interesting to have you, Shawn, and Billy together.

  She went for a longer run than usual, close to ten miles, figuring it might be one of the last days she could run trails before snow knocked them out of her reach. Plus, she was just being realistic about how much she was going to eat.

  It wasn’t until she was almost back to Eagle Mansion that she realized something had been odd. Why wouldn’t Nellie simply have said ‘Wendy’? And when she did say Wendy’s name, was Emily imagining that there was a bit of an edge to it? Why did she say it would be interesting to have Emily and Shawn and Billy together, but Wendy wasn’t part of that group?

  She was tired, though, and she didn’t think too heavily about it. She rode the elevator up to the Nest, thankful that the elevator guy had finally, finally, finally gotten the thing to work. It was good exercise for her to go up and down the steps, but come on, it was a lot of steps. When she came into the living area, she was pleased to see Billy sitting at the counter. He was eating a bowl of cereal and drinking a glass of orange juice. She’d tried to convince him that he was better off having an actual orange than a glass of orange juice—she’d gone so far as to have Nellie try to convince him, too—but he was stubborn.

  “You’re up early.”

  He tilted his mouth up to receive a kiss. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he said. “I’m glad you’re home. Honestly, I’m just a lot happier when you’re here. But shouldn’t you be slaving away at the stove already?”

  “I told you,” she said, “Shawn’s chef is taking care of it. He’s downstairs in the kitchen, according to Nellie.”

  “Right. Sorry. Just a little preoccupied.”

  “You’re nervous?” She was surprised.

  “Not nervous, exactly. There are layers of things baked into Nellie that I didn’t put there, and I’m struggling a bit to undo whatever Shawn and his engineers did. It will be good to have a chance to talk some things over with Shawn.”

  “Oh, come on. You can’t talk your programming stuff over with me?”

  He reached out and touched her cheek and smiled. “Only if I want you to fall asleep out of boredom.”

  “But generally, things are going okay, right? I mean, you’ve got good stuff to tell Shawn?”

  She couldn’t swear to it, but she thought he glanced up and hesitated before answering.

  “Yeah. I think Shawn’s going to be pleased. There’s still a lot to do, but Nellie is a wonder.”

  Thanks, Billy You’re making me blush.

  Emily wasn’t startled by Nellie’s voice. She realized she’d gotten used to it, the way Nellie was omnipresent. There wasn’t anywhere in the house you could be without her listening in, without her watching you.

  She decided to make herself eggs, and by the time she was ready to eat, Billy had finished and was headed off to the office. She took her plate and her tablet so that she could read the news and sat at the table looking out over the river. The sky was ripe with snow.

  Down by the bank of the river, she saw something moving. At first, she thought it was a deer, but then she realized it was a person. A woman? The grounds crew was barely out here once a week now that the weather had turned, and they certainly weren’t working Thanksgiving Day. She stood up and leaned against the window. It looked like a woman, but she couldn’t be sure. Dark hair.

  “Nellie,” she said, “who is that down by the river?” She moved away from the window and went to rummage in the kitchen drawers for some binoculars.

  There’s nobody by the river.

  “That woman. All the way down, near the dock.” She found the binoculars and pulled them out. They’d been in the house when they moved in. Not that she knew anything about binoculars, but they were hefty and powerful, and she was sure that just like everything else Shawn Eagle owned, they were the best.

  You are imagining her. There is nobody down by the water.

  Emily walked back to the window, ready to raise the binoculars, but she didn’t bother. Even without the binoculars, it was clear that Nellie was right. Nobody was down there. She was imagining things.

  TWENTY-NINE

  * * *

  THE HEIR RETURNS

  “The point,” Shawn said into his phone, “is that it shouldn’t have happened, and he’s fired. Period. It’s ridiculous that I even have to call you about this.”

  Wendy leaned forward and buckled his seat belt for him. He waved his hand at her, frustrated. How was it that he had to explain something so simple to a senior vice president? And how didn’t a senior vice president understand that her job was on the line, too?

  According to the pilot, they were about to land in Whiskey Run, but you couldn’t tell by looking out the windows; the snow was coming down heavily. The weather was calling for a good dumping. He was looking forward to it. Eagle Mansion was going to look like a jewel standing in the sea of white.

  The senior vice president started to talk again and he hung up on her. If she couldn’t figure out what that meant, she had no business having her job. He cinched the belt a little tighter around his waist.

  “Feeling particularly maternal today, Wendy?”

  “I read the safety card, Shawn.”

  That, Shawn thought, was actually one of the best things about having a private jet: you didn’t have to listen to the canned safety spiel at the beginning of the flight. As he had the thought, he felt the wheels of the jet touch down on the tarmac.

  “Whoa!”

  Wendy screamed, and Shawn supposed that maybe he was screaming, too, but it happened too fast for him to think it through.

  The ground crew was brand-new and not as well trained as they thought they were. By the end of the day, there would be only six inches of snow on the ground in Whiskey Run, but in the window of time that the jet was landing, the snow was coming down as heavy and hard as it ever had. The ground crew had cleared the tarmac an hour ahead of time and then again as soon as the pilot informed them the jet was on approach, but they should have waited a few more minutes: that gap in time was just enough for a thin scrum of slick to build up.

  Shawn felt the nose of the plane slide left, and then, sickeningly, it fishtailed back to the right. The engines were howling in reverse, and he felt himself surging forward in his seat. For the briefest m
oment he thought that maybe that was all of it, that the jet had straightened itself out, but then it swung back to the left again and this time didn’t correct course. It kept spinning. There was a lurch as one wheel went off the tarmac, and Shawn felt the plane tilt slightly. He wondered if planes could roll over like cars did.

  And then, suddenly and mercifully, the plane shuddered to a stop.

  He realized he was patting himself down, like a soldier checking to make sure he hadn’t been shot, but he was fine. Wendy was crying, but she was okay, too. The attendant got up from her seat and then stopped, turned, and ran into the galley. He could hear her vomit. The door to the cockpit opened and the copilot, a middle-aged Latina woman named Nicole, came out to check on him and immediately started apologizing. His bodyguards were out of their seats, too, hovering and looking shaken. He waved them all off. He was fine. He was fine. He was fine.

  He was shocked at how quickly it all happened, though. That’s how it goes, he thought. He was thirty-six and had bodyguards and personal trainers and personal chefs and personal doctors. He had built himself a palace in the woods and fortified it like a safe. He had all the money in the world. But the world didn’t care. Weather was impersonal. Gravity didn’t bow to anybody. He realized that Wendy was saying something, but she sounded hollow, like an echo, and he stood up and went into the private bathroom at the back. His bowels had turned to water, and he was in there for several minutes.

  The SUVs came down the runway, and he got out of the plane and into one that was already warmed up for him. The snow was still coming down with peculiar urgency, and he noticed that the window of the cockpit was already covered over. The runway itself had disappeared beneath the snow, the color of the tarmac gone and the runway only a piece of geometry.

  He was quiet during the drive out to Eagle Mansion, and Wendy asked him a couple of times if he was okay. He was, but he didn’t want to talk, even though she clearly needed to decompress. He just looked out the front windshield at the flashing lights on the snowplow that rode ahead of them, clearing the road the entire way.

  And yet, by the time they crested the rise that should have shown him Eagle Mansion standing proudly on the hill—the snow was still falling too hard for him to see it—he felt unaccountably good. It had been scary, but he had been fine. The universe’s way of saying to him, Hey, Shawn Eagle, appreciate what you’ve got!

  He got out of the car almost whistling. Instead of pulling up to the front entrance, they’d gone around to the side where there was a covered drive, so that he didn’t have to brave the elements, but he still caught a whip of snow across his face. It was bracing, he thought. Another reminder that he was still alive. Shawn told his retinue to make themselves scarce, and he and Wendy walked to the central spine of the building. The glass elevator was spotless, and he faced out during the ride, looking through that glass and then the windows along the front of the building, marveling at the way the snow had erased the idea of there being anything more than just this, anything more than Shawn Eagle, Eagle Mansion, the Nest.

  When the doors opened in the Nest, Emily was leaning against the counter, sipping from a cup of coffee. She looked really, really good, he thought. Healthy. Happy. He felt that familiar twinge, the part of him that was still in love with her, and he felt something else. Disappointment, maybe, because there was a part of him that wanted her to be miserable, to feel shut up alone in here with Billy. He wanted her to see that she’d hitched her wagon to the wrong train. They hugged, and she kissed him on the cheek, and they chatted for a few minutes.

  “I know you’re itching to go talk to Billy,” she said.

  “It’s nice to get to talk to you,” he said. “I miss you. I really do.”

  Billy could wait. He asked about her sister and nieces, about what she’d been doing to keep herself busy. Wendy did what Wendy always did, which was to fold herself into the background as necessary, and Shawn was surprised when he realized that he and Emily had been talking for close to an hour. Outside, the snow had slowed down and the estate looked like something approximating a commercial for engagement rings.

  “Okay,” he said. “I really do need to go check in with Billy. You guys aren’t going to want us talking shop over dinner.”

  She leaned over from where she sat on the couch to where he sat at an angle from her and squeezed his forearm. It was surprisingly thrilling and felt loaded with meaning, and he supposed that maybe, after all, he was more interested in the idea of getting Emily back than he wanted to admit.

  Down the hall, he stepped in front of the doors to the office, but they didn’t open. He looked at them, tried backing up and then stepping forward, but they stayed closed.

  “Nellie,” he said. “Open up.”

  Nothing.

  “Nellie, wake up. Open the doors.”

  They didn’t move.

  He felt like a fool knocking on the door. Was this Billy’s way of trying to humiliate him? If Billy thought he could pull some bullshit power play, he—

  “Hey! Sorry,” Billy said. “I’ve been messing around in the security settings, so things are a little wonky. I totally lost track of time. Nellie probably told me you were here, but you know how it is.”

  And one look at Billy, and Shawn did know how it was. Billy was wearing a clean, pressed shirt tucked into his jeans, ready for Thanksgiving dinner, but his thinning hair was disheveled and he had the look of a man woken from a dream. There was no attempt at intimidation by having the doors lock, just a man who told Nellie he didn’t want to be disturbed and then forgot that he was going to be having a guest.

  Not that Shawn Eagle was a guest here.

  “Well,” Shawn said, “I’m ready for the update.”

  “The short version? I’m making headway. You and your engineers did some really smart stuff, particularly how you rethought the way I introduced situational awareness into nonsituational settings—”

  “Thanks.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t finished. The problem is that you guys also dug in and messed around with stuff that shouldn’t have been touched. Every thread I pull shows three others that do god only knows what. There are layers and layers of things buried in there. Programs running on top of programs, and of course, because she’s constantly writing new decision trees and then rewriting parts of the program herself, it’s hard to find the right threads. The security settings you introduced are the worst.”

  Shawn flicked his eyes down. Billy was rubbing the thumb of his right hand across the scar on his left palm like he was nervous. Or hiding something.

  “What else?”

  They talked awhile of ones and zeros and everything in between, and by the time Wendy came to tell them that it was time for dinner, Shawn was excited. Billy really was making progress, and he’d taken one of the many intractable problems and cut through it with such a clear and elegant solution that it made Shawn want to smack himself in the head. This, he thought, was why he’d opened up all those windows to the past, this was why he’d gone back to Billy Stafford. The guy was an alcoholic and a lying, cheating, girlfriend-stealing asshole, and in a lot of areas of life he could be a moron, but when it came to engineering, he was flat-out brilliant. Give him a Gordian knot—a problem that was unsolvable—and where other engineers tried to untangle it, Billy took out his sword and cut through it. Only, Shawn thought happily, in this version of the story, Billy was only the sword bearer, and he, Shawn Eagle, got to be Alexander the Great. Nellie was going to be the victory that let him conquer the world.

  “I think, best case, I’ll be pretty much done by Christmas, with just some cleanup and then we can move into testing, and worst case, early spring.” Billy’s excitement was palpable.

  Dinner was a mellow affair. Out of deference to Billy, he and Emily and Wendy took it easy on the wine. The chef brought all the food up to the Nest and spread it out on the counter so they could help themselves and then left, so it was just the four of them, as Emily had insisted. After they finish
ed, Emily started to clear, but Shawn persuaded her to leave the mess alone for the staff members down in Eagle Mansion to deal with later.

  “This, my dear, is the whole point of being rich. Sometime during the night, little feet will come padding in like a fairy tale and set everything to right. In the meantime, we can sit in front of a fire and watch the slowly falling snow and pretend that we are, in fact, living in said fairy tale.”

  Wendy shook her head and went and sat down on a couch in the living area. She tucked her feet neatly under her. “You’ll have to excuse him. He can’t help himself.”

  Shawn adopted a mock look of injury. “Oh, you cut me to the quick!” He sat on the same couch as Wendy, but all the way on the other side, and swung his feet up onto the coffee table. Nellie had dimmed the lights in the living area to the level of candlelight, and she’d brought up most of the lights out on the grounds. It was like looking into a snow globe, and he knew that in the morning, when the storm had passed and left the earth made new again, particularly if the sun came out, it would be akin to staring over a field of diamonds. Emily and Billy both sat on the other couch, and he noticed that Billy was rubbing at his hand again.

  They talked about the new campus construction for Eagle Technology, and then of Beth’s plans to come to Eagle Mansion for Christmas, and then they started reminiscing about their time at the cabin, Shawn and Billy trying to one-up each other in telling stories about how hard it had been. Macaroni and cheese frozen solid and eaten like a popsicle; the invasion of blackflies in the spring; the time Billy was using the outhouse and a skunk took a nap right outside the door—or where the door would have been if they hadn’t scavenged it to use as a desk—and trapped him inside. It got late quickly. It was nearly ten thirty when Shawn started making noises about going out and sledding in the yard.