He laughed dismissively. “My mother thinks I’m perfect.”
Callie shook her head, smirking at him. “That’s not what she said behind your back.”
“Come on. Let me redeem myself.” He smiled.
That smile!
“And there’s something I want you to see.”
“What?” she asked, suspicious.
“It’s a surprise,” he said, taking her arm and leading her toward the still-open door. The old MG was parked outside the house.
She stopped at the door. Maybe getting out for a ride would clear her head. She’d been seeing odd images ever since she arrived at this house. And hearing even odder sounds. The sound of the wind last night…She shivered to remember. It would be good to get away. She’d go for that reason, no other.
Paul opened the passenger door for Callie, then walked around to the driver’s side and climbed in.
At the end of the long gravel driveway, he turned right onto Route 127, taking the road that hugged the shore north toward Gloucester. It was a beautiful ride, alternating between woodland and ocean expanse and dotted with the biggest houses Callie had ever seen. It seemed so familiar. Had she taken this ride with her mother when she was a child? Doubtful. Her mother hadn’t owned a car, at least not that Callie remembered, although she did have a brief memory of someone driving. Still, the shore road was familiar in a way that surprised her, each curve revealing a framed glimpse of something she had never seen before yet somehow knew would be there.
They passed through Pride’s Crossing, Beverly Farms, and Manchester-by-the-Sea. After Magnolia, with its wooded canopy, they crossed into Gloucester. Paul turned right, down a side road that hugged the shore, then took a left into an empty parking lot. He pulled the car to the far side under a large oak tree and turned off the engine.
“Here we are,” he said, reaching across to open her door, then walking around the car to meet her.
He led her down a steep stairway, past a large house on the left. The stairs continued downward, steeper as they descended. He took her arm.
“What is this place?”
“Hammond Castle,” he said.
As they reached the bottom of the stairs, she glanced to her right, catching her first glimpse of the Gothic structure. She stopped short. It was an image she’d seen for years in a recurring dream. She knew what was beyond the doors: the great hall with its rose window and the huge organ that echoed so loudly it made her cry. She’d always assumed the vision had originated in the fairy tales Rose read to her each night, stories of gods and goddesses and kings and battles.
She dropped Paul’s arm.
“Callie? Is something wrong?”
“I’ve been here,” she whispered.
“Oh,” he said, sounding disappointed. “Well, we can go back. The castle is closed for the season anyway. It won’t open for tourists again until April.”
“I’m confused,” she said. “Why are we here?”
“I didn’t actually bring you here to see the castle. I brought you here to see something else. But if you’ve already been—”
“We don’t have to leave,” Callie said to him. “I’m just having déjà vu.” She smiled, regaining her composure. “Show me what you brought me here to see.”
Paul turned left, away from the castle, leading her down into a courtyard with tall stone archways, each framing a stunning expanse of ocean. He took her arm again and turned right, directing her down more steps until they were on the lawn in front of the great house. It was the same green patch she’d envisioned earlier on Emily’s liver, the same brown spot as well, which she now recognized as a dry patch in the middle of the sloping lawn. Beyond it lay the shadowy object she’d tried so hard to focus on in her treatment of Emily, something she now realized was a small island of rocks a few hundred feet out.
“That’s Norman’s Woe,” Paul said, pointing to the rocks. “Where twenty died on a schooner called Favorite, when it ran aground in a terrible storm with a woman lashed to a piece of the wreckage.”
“?‘The Wreck of the Hesperus,’?” she said, relieved. “You mentioned it the other night.” The lines of the Longfellow poem that Rose had recited so often came back to her. She flattened her palms against each other in front of her waist, left hand fingers facing right and right hand fingers facing left, one up and one down, just as Rose had taught her to do, and began to recite, with old-fashioned pauses and inflections:
“The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman’s Woe.”
“I didn’t know you were an elocutionist as well as a ventriloquist,” Paul said, amused.
“I told you I was talented,” she said, offering a little curtsy as Rose always insisted she do after a recitation.
“Very polished. Any other talents I don’t know about?” He grinned.
“You’ll just have to wait and see,” she replied and smiled back.
She took a long look at the rock that had become so famous. “It’s smaller than I imagined,” she admitted. Once, on a day when she particularly missed her mother and Rose, Callie had looked up the poem. She’d discovered that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had taken some liberties with the victim, changing her from an older woman to the captain’s beautiful young daughter. She had been tied to the mast of the ship in an effort to keep her from drowning, but her ending had been even more tragic. When the girl was found, she was frozen to death and still tethered. “It’s difficult to imagine a ship running aground there,” Callie said.
“Don’t be fooled. It’s treacherous. The reef is submerged. At least twenty ships have run aground on these rocks, going all the way back to 1630. One of the first Puritan ships went down there, which is an epic story in itself. And then there are the suicides.”
“Suicides?”
“A number of them. Marta Hathorne’s father, among others. Jumped right into the churn.”
“Marta Hathorne’s father—” The way Paul had put it sounded a bit cold.