When I finally turned the knob, the door blew open, dragging me with it. I stumbled over the threshold and landed on Iola’s welcome mat, the lantern skittering across the floor and blinking out. Behind me, the wind snatched the trash bag, filled it, and animated it so that it sailed into the hallway on its own power. The door rebounded from the wall and smacked my arm before I crawled out of the way, gasping and shuddering, staring in morbid fascination as the bag floated in the dim light from the lamp in the front room. The white plastic apparition seemed to hover for a moment between the hallways and the grand staircase before the front door finally swung shut on its own. Lightning flashed outside, the double-globe lamp in the front room flickered and died, and I scrambled to my feet. Darkness enveloped me, and in spite of all the time I’d spent here, I didn’t feel welcome now. The house that had seemed such a comfort by day was anything but at night.
“Please, please, please come back on.” The power on the island wasn’t the most reliable right now. The infrastructure wasn’t back up to par. “Any chance you’ve got some flashlights, like, right around here . . . ummm . . . Iola?”
A low growl answered from somewhere downstairs, and my stomach fell through the floor. “Kitty?” I whispered into the inky blackness. “It’s just me. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty . . .”
The cat replied with a mew, friendlier this time, almost desperate. I caught a breath. “Do you know where your mommy keeps the flashlights?”
Something tickled my ankle, and I squealed. My voice echoed up the stairway, darting randomly through the darkness on bat wings. The cat had never come that close to me before. Out of reflex, I held my arms out and felt the air around me . . . just to make sure it wasn’t something . . . bigger.
The lamp blinked on. “Oh, thank you,” I murmured. “Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you-thank-you.”
The cat was less than a foot away, looking up at me. I watched his pupils contract in the flood of light. I could have touched him. The bitten-off ear twitched as thunder rumbled. Then he mewed, his amber eyes beseeching, the ear lowering and his head ducking into his body.
“What? Don’t tell me you’re afraid of storms. A big, bad tomcat like you?”
He mewed again. I extended my arm and lightly touched his head, careful to keep my fingers away from his mouth, just in case. His body arched around me, and he leaned against my hand, suddenly my friend.
“Okay, now I know this is some weird dream.” Any minute now, I would wake up in the cottage, still bloated on crawfish, corn, and boiled potatoes. Surely the cat who had been carefully avoiding me for days now wasn’t meekly trailing me as I tried to get J.T.’s lantern to work, then moved through the house, checking closets and cubbyholes in search of a flashlight, in case the power went out again.
Unfortunately, there were a million hiding places for a flashlight in Iola’s house, and if the cat had any clues, he wasn’t telling. I finally ended up settling for an oil lamp that was sitting on the fireplace mantel in the small, narrow room where Iola’s recliner and console television resided. Along one wall, an old Queen Anne settee sat dusty with disuse, keeping company with a set of TV trays, a magazine rack, and the window heat-and-air unit that had gone on and off every day like clockwork when Iola was still living here. I lingered for a moment at the bookshelf by the door. Iola was a fan of romance novels. Go figure. Some of the paperbacks looked like they’d been read a million times, the spines creased white, the titles practically gone. A few well-worn classics sat among them as well. A booklet —the kind probably printed for tourists at some time in the past —perched sideways atop three copies of The Old Man and the Sea. I tilted my head to read the title: Historic Homes of Hatteras Island.
The cat clung close to my legs again as I slid the booklet from the shelf and looked at the montage of photos on the cover. I recognized the image in the bottom left corner. The artificially colorized photo had been taken in better days when the gardens around this house were carefully manicured, the climbing roses trimmed, and the gingerbread railings on the porch freshly painted. A man in a suit stood beside a fifties-model car in the driveway, his thumbs tucked into the pockets of a vest that fit tightly over his round stomach, his chin upright and stiff. He wasn’t smiling but regarding the camera with an aristocratic air meant to indicate that he was someone important.
The lantern cast light over my shoulder as I set it on an upper shelf and opened the booklet, thumbing through until I found the same photo inside. An older picture and a newer one flanked it. The old photo was of a party on the lawn beside the house, perhaps in the early forties, judging from the cars parked in the driveway. The caption underneath read, Benoit House shown during the collegiate graduation celebration of Isabelle Renee Benoit, May 1941. Isabelle and her daughter, Christina, would both die young, leaving Benoit House and the Benoit shipping empire with no heir. Rumors of voodoo curses placed on the Benoit family by Haitian slaves would haunt Benoit House and Girard Benoit Sr. until his death from liver cancer in 1963, shortly after the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge, of which he was a strong proponent, officially linked Hatteras Island to the northern Outer Banks.
On the opposite side of the page, a color photo showed Iola’s house, not in its present state of decay, but not in its full glory, either. The flower beds were neatly groomed, but the paint on the garage building was weathered, and the upstairs railings were already leaning outward. A red Dodge Dart was parked in the garage.
The caption read, Benoit House in 1981, now owned by Mrs. Iola Anne Poole, remains an example of Gilded Age splendor on the Outer Banks. (House not open for public viewing at this time.)
Moving so that I wouldn’t cast a shadow on the book, I scanned through the one-page article, the lantern glow flickering over the words as the house lights blinked off, then on. The details in the article were largely about the history of the house.
. . . built by a Carolina lumber tycoon in 1898, eventually purchased as a summer property by Girard Benoit Sr., a shipping magnate from New Orleans whose family had long-held interests in the Outer Banks. Benoit’s adult sons from his first marriage lived briefly in the house. Both sons died in separate shipping accidents, one occurring just off Cape Hatteras, in an area known as Diamond Shoals, where two major Atlantic currents collide. The ship sank within sight of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, but rescuers were not able to reach it in time. Benoit’s daughter from a short second marriage, Isabelle Renee Benoit, similarly died young, giving fuel to the legend that Benoit labored under a lifelong curse, placed on the family when a slave midwife was forced to leave her own daughter to labor through a deadly breech birth alone so that the midwife could attend to a birth in the Benoit home. After a long illness and rumored bouts of mental instability, Girard Benoit left his fortune to his household help, rather than to extended family members, in a much-rumored effort to protect them from the curse and thus ransom himself in death.
“Whoa,” I breathed, looking down at the cat. “Okay . . . well now, there’s a story, right?” That explained, perhaps, how Iola had come to own this house. Her family members were the household help.
I studied the room in the dim light —the books on the shelf, the stack of plastic tubs in one corner with misty outlines of yarn balls, knitting needles, and swatches of fabric showing through.
Was this her story? Was this why she had lived the way she did, almost as if she were a guest here? As if the furniture and the fixtures were not hers to alter? Did that explain the belongings packed in containers, stacked in the hallway? Did she feel guilty about taking over ownership? Did she feel as if this place had never really belonged to her?
The cat stopped moving and sat with his body pressed against my leg. His crooked tail curled around my ankle like a furry leg iron, the tip brushing back and forth over my foot.
“Aren’t you just my best friend all of a sudden?” Lightning flashed outside, illuminating the dark corners of the room and blinking the lights again.
The cat ducked his head and let out a low, miserable sound.
“It’s just a thunderstorm.” I scratched his head, then untangled my leg and put the book back on the shelf, making sure it was exactly as I’d found it. All this business of family curses and mysterious deaths had shifted me off center. The only good thing about the pounding rain was that, if the house was making any of its usual noises —popping floorboards that sounded like footsteps, wind moaning through window sashes, bells ringing —I couldn’t hear them tonight. There was only the drumming of the rain, the rush of water from downspouts, and the crash of clouds colliding like titans.
The overhead lightbulbs browned out, the filaments barely casting a glow as I carried the lamp through the house, the flame circle dancing against the paneled walls, sliding over boxes, reflecting against plastic containers, casting into dark rooms, and slipping over the random arrangements of furniture. Upstairs, there were new sounds. In addition to the bass of thunder, the snap of lightning, and the rumble of rain, the drip of water into containers played a strange, random melody. Drop, plink, splash, plink, plink, plink, drip. I stopped at the top of the stairs, looked both ways up and down the dark hall as far as the lamplight would allow, listened. This was Iola’s music at the end of her life, the theme song of her struggle to save this house, to protect it.