“Not at the other end,” Uncle Richard said, his voice thick and raspy.
Lenora glanced at the empty chair on the other end of the table and wondered about her uncle’s odd request. What would he do if she sat there?
Of course she didn’t. She chose a different seat, close to the other end, and farthest from her uncle. He unsettled her. She didn’t know how to read him, and she’d always been good at reading people. His moods were incomprehensible.
And she had a feeling he preferred that she sit as far away from him as possible.
At home, suppers had been a loud affair. John and Charles talked all over each other, while Rory tried to interject every now and then. Lenora had watched it all in blissful serenity and waited patiently for Mother and Father to ask her questions about her day.
This supper was much too quiet; only the ticking of a brass clock that hung above the fireplace imposed its cadence onto the stillness. Lenora, though she had never tasted food quite so delicious as what Mrs. Jones made, could do no more than pick at it. Her stomach was too knotted.
A clanking joined the ticking, then stopped. Lenora looked at her uncle. It seemed he couldn’t stop moving. He bounced in his seat, as though powered by an invisible energy. She glanced under the table. It was his leg. Then it was his fork. Then it was his finger, tapping the side of his face.
It was an interesting dance.
He said not a word to her, though she tried a few times to ask questions about Stonewall Manor and the years when Father had lived there. Mrs. Jones had impeccable timing and seemed to be always present to redirect her curiosity, and after a while, Lenora gave up. She would not get her questions answered today.
But tomorrow was a new day.
Lenora ate her supper in silence, every now and then braving a glance in her uncle’s direction. He kept a pen and a journal beside his plate. He would stare into space often, then scribble something in the journal, then look up, his eyes going glassy again, like he was lost in another world entirely.
What world was he lost in? Was it real or was it fantasy?
And why was it so hard for him to answer her questions? She wanted to know so much—what had happened between him and Father? How had her cousin—or cousins—died? Why had Lenora never known about this house and the people who lived in it?
Lenora studied her uncle again. He was scrawling something in the journal. His peppered hair moved in multiple directions, all over the top of his head. He raised his eyes and caught her gaze, but he did not seem to see her. His chair screeched against the floor. He said a terse “Excuse me, please” and gathered up his pen and journal and scrambled out the door. Lenora sat at the table for a few minutes, wondering what was next. She felt bewildered and slightly hurt.
Was this how it would be, then?
She stared at the chandelier and its warm light, which was not warm enough to melt the icy bits of sorrow settling into her heart, as though they intended to stay.
13
Mrs. Jones entered the dining room a few minutes later. “Did your uncle leave you?” she said. Her voice held a strong note of annoyance.
“Yes. Only a few moments ago.” Lenora didn’t know why she felt the need to defend Uncle Richard.
Mrs. Jones pressed her lips together. “I’ll speak with him this evening,” she said, her voice hard and definitive. “He must eat supper with his niece before getting back to his work.”
Lenora wondered if anyone could tell Uncle Richard what to do, but she didn’t ask this. Instead, she asked, “What does he do?”
Mrs. Jones’s face folded, her eyebrows drawing low over her eyes. She busied herself with Uncle Richard’s plates, saying only, “I’ll clear the table.”
Lenora knew Mrs. Jones had heard her, so she asked the question again. “What does he do?”
Mrs. Jones stopped in the doorway. “Do you really know nothing about your uncle?” Her eyes were so sad Lenora had to look away.
Lenora swallowed hard. “Father never talked about him at all.” She felt terrible admitting this, but it was the truth.
A darkness seemed to fall over the room, and Lenora looked up to see that it was caused by the twisting of Mrs. Jones’s face. She looked angry and sad, all at the same time. “Well,” was all she said, punctuated by a vigorous shake of her head.
Lenora would not let it go at that. “Did they hate one another?” she said.
“Not always,” Mrs. Jones said, setting Uncle Richard’s plates back on the table and pulling out a chair. She sat heavily and leaned back. “Not when they were boys. They loved each other very much.”
“What happened?”
“Time happened,” Mrs. Jones said. She rose as quickly as she had sat, and before Lenora could ask anything else, she disappeared from the room.
Lenora waited for some minutes, hoping she would return. Was she expected to clear her plates from the table, or did Mrs. Jones do that? She had just decided to clear them away herself, as she had always done at home, when Mrs. Jones returned.
“Are you finished, love?” Mrs. Jones said, as though they had not been talking about anything of importance.
Lenora nodded and said, “What is my uncle working on?” She would remind Mrs. Jones that the question was still unanswered. This is what she’d always done with Mother and Father. Mother called it inconvenient. Father called it delightful.
She rubbed her chest.
Mrs. Jones sighed as she leaned over to pick up Lenora’s plate. “Your uncle is a scientist,” she said. “He works on scientific things.” She gave a low chuckle. “Things I could hardly understand. My specialty is food, not science.”
“Food is science,” Lenora said.
Mrs. Jones smiled at her. “Not your uncle’s science.”
“What kind of science does he do?”
Lenora had always loved science. Perhaps she could help him.
Mrs. Jones’s gaze turned steely. “Perhaps he will tell you someday what he’s working on.”
“You can’t?” Why were there so many secrets here?
“It is his business,” Mrs. Jones said. “I don’t claim to understand it.”
“Do you think he would let me work with him? I’ve always enjoyed science. And I’m really good at it.” Lenora tried to keep the desperation from her voice, but it crawled between the words anyway.
Mrs. Jones dropped Lenora’s plate, and it shattered on the floor, a mess of jagged white pieces. “Oh dear,” she said, staring at the floor. She cleared her throat and bent to gather the pieces of Lenora’s plate into a pile. Lenora stooped to help her. “Thank you, love,” Mrs. Jones said.
After a long moment, once Mrs. Jones had swept up the remains and returned to the dining room to make sure there were no more shards of glass, she said, “No, Lenora. I don’t think your uncle would like a child in his lab.”
Disappointment ballooned in Lenora’s throat. “Oh,” was all she said.
They lapsed into an uncomfortable silence until Mrs. Jones said, “Would you like some strawberry cake? I made it today, so it’s fresh.”
“Yes, please,” Lenora said.
“You can eat with me in the kitchen.”
Lenora followed Mrs. Jones, but before she walked through the doorway, she turned back to the dining room. It glowed in the light from the chandelier. It was so large and festive and extraordinary. It would have been a perfect place for her family. She wished they could have seen it. The room dimmed.
They would see it. They would come.
The room brightened again.
She turned away, thinking now of something else: how to break the eerie, secretive silence that hung over Stonewall Manor.
14
Strawberry cake was Lenora’s favorite, but as she bit into this one, she tasted something bitter in her mouth. It was not the cake; Mrs. Jones was too proficient a cook to bake anything but a delicious cake.
It was the memories that did it.
Every year, her mother had baked her
a strawberry cake for her birthday. She had not had one this year.
“My birthday . . .” Lenora let the words trail off. Mrs. Jones reached across the small dark-wood kitchen table and folded her hand over Lenora’s.
“I made this cake to celebrate,” Mrs. Jones said. Her eyes shone. Her silver hair shivered from the light breeze reaching through the window. “I knew you had a birthday a few days ago. I made your father’s favorite cake.”
She didn’t say anything about the disaster. Lenora was glad.
But her throat was too thick to say thank you. She looked down at the cake, at its perfect pink frosting and its fluffy center. Her eyes burned. She swiped them with the back of her hand, the one Mrs. Jones wasn’t holding.
She wasn’t quite ready to let go yet.
“You can have two pieces if you’d like,” Mrs. Jones said. Lenora knew she was trying to cheer her up. She thought perhaps it would be a good time to ask more questions—Mrs. Jones might answer them now.
So she said, “What happened to my cousin?”
Mrs. Jones patted her hand and then pulled her warm one away. “You’ll have to ask your uncle about that, love,” she said.
“But my uncle doesn’t talk.”
“Yes, well.” A shadow bloomed in Mrs. Jones’s eyes. “Your uncle is on the mend.”
“From what?”
“Life.” Mrs. Jones turned back to the cake on the counter. “Would you like another piece?”
Lenora had eaten every crumb on her plate, so she nodded. “Yes, please.” Her manners, once again remembered. Mrs. Jones placed before her another large pink chunk.
“I’m afraid you may be somewhat lonely here,” Mrs. Jones said, her words floating on a sigh. “It’s a very quiet house. But there’s a garden.” Mrs. Jones bit her lip and looked at the floor. “It’s overgrown, but perhaps we might convince your uncle to hire a gardener, as he did in the old days.” She shook her head, as though clearing away an unwanted memory, before looking at Lenora with a smile that did not quite touch the corners of her eyes. “But you could explore the garden, as long as you remain in the yard.” Mrs. Jones pointed to a third door that Lenora had not noticed in the kitchen. “That door leads straight to the garden.”
The door had a small window cut out of it.
Mrs. Jones continued. “As your uncle said, the woods are forbidden. They are too dangerous and vast. Many children have been lost in the woods . . .” Her face took on a grayish tint, and she shook her head again. “We do not intend to send you to school, since the school year here is almost done, but you will go in September. I’m sure you’ll make many friends there, and then it will not be quite so lonely here.”
“Oh, I won’t be here in September,” Lenora said. It was almost a reflex now. “Mother and Father will come before then.”
Mrs. Jones looked at her with eyes that seemed to weep without spilling any water. “We can always hope, love,” she said. But her words lacked conviction, and Lenora felt her heart trip.
They lapsed into a heavy silence, where Lenora grasped desperately for words, for something to say that would fill the space. And finally she found them, the perfect ones: “My father is a hero.”
“A hero?” Mrs. Jones smiled.
“A great hero.” Lenora sat up a little straighter; she couldn’t help it. She was proud of Father, all the lives he’d saved over the years. Surely that meant . . .
“Tell me,” Mrs. Jones said.
“He saved people from fires. Many people. He would run into burning buildings and pull them out before they burned.” Lenora found that once she started she could not stop.
“He sounds very much like a hero,” Mrs. Jones said.
“He was never burned in a single fire. The mayor always said it was extraordinary.” Lenora bit her lip and scraped the last bit of icing from her plate with her finger. “He survived this fire, too. I know it.”
Mrs. Jones tilted her head, and, after a while, she said, “I see.”
The words got caught in Lenora’s chest. She couldn’t breathe, and she certainly couldn’t speak.
“I remember your father well,” Mrs. Jones said.
Lenora found her voice. “You do?”
Mrs. Jones smiled, and this time it did reach all the way to the corners of her eyes. “I have been at Stonewall Manor for a long time.”
“I would like to hear about my father’s life here,” Lenora said. “He never told us anything about it.”
The shadow returned to Mrs. Jones’s eyes, and Lenora was sorry for saying what she’d already mentioned—the truth that made Mrs. Jones angry and sad at the same time.
“No, I suppose he wouldn’t have,” Mrs. Jones said, which opened all kinds of additional questions in Lenora’s mind, the loudest of which was: Why?
But Mrs. Jones said, “It is getting late. What time do you normally go to bed?”
“Eight thirty,” Lenora said. She looked for a clock in the kitchen and found one hanging above the doorway leading to the dining room. It was a brass one full of gears crowding around the same white face of the other clocks she had seen in the entry. This clock, unlike those, worked. It was seven thirty.
“We have a little time, but not enough for stories,” Mrs. Jones said. Lenora didn’t believe her; she knew Mrs. Jones was merely avoiding the subject. “I could show you the library if you like. You could take a book to your room.”
But Lenora felt so weary suddenly that she didn’t know if she’d even be able to climb the stairs. If Father were here, he’d carry her. She yawned. “I’ll explore tomorrow,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll find the library.”
“As long as you steer clear of the east wing,” Mrs. Jones said, without looking at her. “It’s where your uncle works. He doesn’t like to be disturbed.” She cleared her throat. “And it is somewhat frightening in that wing.” She raised her eyes to Lenora, amusement crackling in the blue pools. “All the ghost stories from Stonewall Manor have to do with the east wing.”
“Ghosts?” Lenora said. She shivered. She had always hated ghost stories. And Stonewall Manor was so large and empty.
So was her room.
“Don’t worry, love,” Mrs. Jones said. “They’re only stories. Now. Would you like me to walk you upstairs?”
Lenora almost said yes. But then she thought of the awkward good night that would happen at her door. Mother used to read to her and Rory and John and Charles. Father used to tuck them all in at night.
Her throat felt tight when she said, “I’ll walk myself, as long as there are lights.”
Mrs. Jones smiled. “There’s a nightdress in the drawers by your bathroom. I hope it will be comfortable enough.”
Lenora stood and began to move out the kitchen door that led to the hall. She had never seen a kitchen with three doors. Mother would have loved it.
“Don’t forget to close your window before you go to bed,” Mrs. Jones said before Lenora reached the door.
Lenora paused. “Why?”
“House rules,” was all Mrs. Jones said, but Lenora knew there must be something more. There were so many secrets in this house. She hated secrets—all of them, good and bad. She would much rather know than be kept in the dark.
Lenora raced up the stairs, outrunning the monsters she imagined at the bottom. The voices of Rory, John, and Charles clambered up ahead and behind her.
But, of course, that was just her imagination.
She was all alone.
15
All through her first night at Stonewall Manor, Lenora tossed and turned. She saw visions of Mother and Father, of John, Charles, and Rory. She saw their happy, shining faces, lined up outside a house that looked very much like the one they had all lived in on Texas Avenue. John and Charles threw a baseball with Father out in the yard. Mother waved Rory inside so they could bake a pie together. She could see them through the window that looked out on the yard. The only one missing from the perfect family scene was Lenora. They did not appear to even notice
her absence, and when she tried to reach them, she was barred by an invisible wall.
Somewhere around midnight, her dreams turned darker. She saw a shadow standing before her, beckoning her toward an expanse of black—endless and menacing. The shadow was shaped like Father—tall, thin, broad shoulders—but the shadow had no substantial form or face. All it said was, Come, Lenora. Come find me.
Father, she wanted to say, but in her dream she could not speak. Outside her dream, she could, however. And speak she did, without even knowing. “Father!” she cried, and her voice crumbled into jagged pieces as the sheets tangled around her legs.
Someone opened the door.
The family that finally caught him, after his travels all over the world and his mighty deceptions that made him decidedly richer and happier, lived in the house beyond these woods.
They strung him up like a criminal, the lowliest of death penalties, reserved for pirates and witches—neither of which described him—and left him to die.
April 19, 1947
I could hear the spirit calling. It disturbed me from my work last night, a whisper that slid in through the drafty doors of Stonewall Manor. I followed it upstairs and found it in her room. I could see it this time, a tendril of pearls snaking from the open window. We warned her to close the window, did we not? My niece did not heed our instructions; perhaps she did not believe it was necessary. And if she does not believe in such simple necessities, she will find herself endangered in a way that is even more tragic than the disaster in Texas City—because this tragedy, this disappearance of children, has lasted centuries.
My brother deserves better than that. I will not relinquish his child.
I reached Lenora’s room before the voice could do its work. I slammed the window shut, cutting off its shimmering curl. It fell to the floor, a string of black ash, and then it disappeared before my eyes.
The things I have seen, what I have known, the experiences I have had with the woods and the evil within them—they would never believe me if I were to tell them everything. Sometimes I wonder if I am what they all think I am: mad with grief and sorrow that has never subsided in all these years. But everything I do has a purpose. I will prevail. I have nearly completed what I need to defeat the woods and what lives—lives? I do not know—inside.
The Woods Page 5