In that moment, as the trees began to close again upon his view, the woman in the yellow gown became a vivid symbol of his myriad frustrations. He was powerless.
De Brassart turned and said, in French, “He says we’re nearly there.” De Brassart’s smile, as always, did not touch his eyes, so Jean-Philippe felt no compulsion to return it.
“Good,” was all he said. “Let’s hope we beat the rain.”
They didn’t.
Charley
I hadn’t expected the rain. I’d been checking the forecasts for days now and keeping my fingers crossed there would be sun for the groundbreaking, and all the weather reports had assured me there would be, and they had been right. Any chance of a rainfall, they’d promised, was scant—only twenty percent—and if rain came at all it would be late tonight.
But the rain, having not read the weather reports, came exactly when it wanted to: just after five o’clock, when all the clean-up had been done and everybody else had gone and I was getting set to lock up the museum.
I liked to be the last one out. I’d always liked the ritual of locking-up. Routines again, I guessed—my mother’s influence. But there was something calming in the simple act of passing in an ordered way from room to room and making sure that everything was in its proper place, secure and safe.
Nothing in my life right now was any of those things, so it was good to feel, however briefly, I was in control of something.
I’d devised a route that took me through both conjoined houses in a logical progression, starting in the empty corner room downstairs, just underneath my office, in the Colonial side of the house. From there I went through the big square room that had, in the old days, been known as the “keeping room”; passed from that into the front lobby with its broad door and big dog-leg staircase, then into the other square downstairs room we called the parlour, and having now made sure the front of the house was locked tightly, I crossed through the parlour’s back doorway into the Colonial kitchen and buttery and up the narrow back stairs to the second floor. Here, in the two little storerooms set under the steeply sloped roof of the kitchen addition below, there was not much to check on or see, but the space opened up again as I stepped through into Benjamin Wilde’s chamber and made my way—careful to step to the side of the one springy floorboard I didn’t trust—over the landing and into my favourite room, where for a moment I stood and enjoyed the peace, liking the sound of the rain on the roof and the play of the rivulets chasing their way down the window-glass.
The records from Benjamin’s time had suggested that this was the room where his daughters had slept—he’d had three of them—and that was how we had planned to interpret it, but now I wondered if we couldn’t maybe expand that to make space for Lydia Wilde’s story, too. This was already going to be the most notably feminine room in the finished museum, and since we had nothing to tell us where Benjamin’s sister had actually slept, we could speculate he might have given her room to his daughters. We’d still tell their stories, of course, but because they’d all lived quiet lives it might not be a bad thing to add in the tale of their aunt’s tragic romance. The only thing people liked more than a ghost story was a good love story. This one was both.
It was just an idea, of course, and the trustees would have to approve it, but still, as I passed through my office and carried on fastening windows and turning off lights in the newer, Victorian side of the house, I was thinking of all the ways we could use Lydia’s story—not only for Halloween, as the reporter had said, but for Valentine’s Day.
I became so absorbed in exploring the possible angles that, by the time I came downstairs to the staff kitchen where the main back entrance was—the door I usually went out by—I was unaware of just how hard the rain was coming down until I realized that I couldn’t see a thing beyond the windows. The sight of water sluicing at an angle down the window-panes made me rethink my options.
There were spare umbrellas hanging from the coat rack, so that wouldn’t be a problem, but umbrellas offered limited protection when the rain was coming furious and sideways, and since my car was parked out at the far end of the parking lot, closer to the front door of the old part of the house, it made more sense to go out that way and make a dash from there. I’d still get wet, but wet was preferable to soaked.
I locked the back door, switched the kitchen light off, and unhooked a pink umbrella from the rack, before starting over where I had begun—moving through what would be the exhibit space, under my office, and into the ground-floor Colonial rooms. This time, though, while crossing the large keeping room, I heard something I hadn’t before: a steady, repetitive squeaking of floorboards above me that sounded, in that empty, echoing space, just like footsteps.
I stopped, and the noises stopped, too, and I realized that was probably because they had been echoes. Old houses could be good at playing tricks with sound, and this house was older than many I’d been in. I wasn’t about to become like Frank’s grandmother, jumping at every stray sound and imagining ghosts.
Whatever the cause of the echo, it seemed to be confined to that first corner of the room because as I crossed the rest of it, there were no sounds above me. The shadowed front lobby was quiet, too, thanks to the nondescript carpet that some former Wilde had seen fit to install here between the front door and the stairs—a grey carpet, much weathered, that never looked clean. We’d be tearing it up in the new renovations, restoring the floor underneath, but for now it was working to soften my footsteps.
And that was a problem. Because when the creaking began again, over my head, I could not put it down to an echo. Especially when I stopped dead in my tracks and the sounds on the floor above didn’t break stride, moving onto the staircase, taking the few short steps down to the first narrow landing, and turning . . .
In that moment my mind spun wildly. There wasn’t anything here anybody would want to steal, unless you counted my office computer and the somewhat obstinate coffee machine in the kitchen, and—
Now there were visible boots on the stairs. A man’s work boots, attached to legs encased in faded jeans, that in their turn a few steps down were joined by a grey T-shirt and the chest and shoulders of the man who owned it.
One of the workmen, I thought in relief. He was halfway down the stairs now so I saw him full in profile, enough to see that he was not much older than myself, with the tanned skin of a man who worked outdoors and the imprint of a hardhat still compressing his short-clipped dark hair, the wires of earbud headphones trailing down to one front pocket of his jeans.
At the bottom landing of the staircase he made the ninety-degree turn to come down the final three steps and he noticed me then, with an equal surprise. His recovery, though, was more fluid than mine. “Oh, hey,” he said, tugging the headphones from his ears and releasing a faint burst of wailing guitar before moving his hand to his pocket to switch off whatever device he’d been playing. “I thought everyone was gone. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
In spite of the fact the umbrella was still tightly grasped in my hand like a weapon, I chose to pretend that I hadn’t been scared. That I wasn’t still nervous. But, as was my habit when facing a male stranger, I kept an eye on my possible exits and cautiously tried to establish if he posed a risk.
He was taller than me, broad and muscular, but not aggressive. He wasn’t invading my personal space. He had stopped when he’d noticed me, and hadn’t tried to advance.
“That’s okay,” I said, standing as straight as I could in a businesslike posture. “You’re one of the construction guys, I take it?”
“Kind of.” He had a slow smile that seemed genuine. Friendly. Extending his hand for a handshake, he said, “I’m Sam Abrams.”
I did relax then. “The contractor?”