Better Homes and Hauntings

11 Love Letters from No One

The island is a beautiful, though lonely, place. Josephine is so happy here, running as fast as her chubby little legs will carry her across what will become our lawn.

My feelings about living in a place so remote are in a constant flux, much more so with every visit we make to the island for “progress reports.” While it will be so alien to live without the clip-clop of horse hooves just outside the window or the murmur of conversation from the street, I must admit that Whitney Island is a peaceful place. None of the tedium of city life will find us here. No unexpected visits from neighbors. No calling cards. No worrying about being seen in the right shops, the right clubs.

And the house will further these advantages. The gardens will be second to none. There will be room for the children to play without worrying for their safety from carriages, strangers. I feel that I will be able to breathe properly, for the first time in years. It will be a compromise, diary, one that I hope I am able to make.

On that note, Gerald insists on the Crane’s Nest having enough room to throw the elaborate parties that are becoming so fashionable. I don’t know if I will ever have the desire to become a fixture on this circuit. I certainly don’t want to compete with a Mrs. Astor or a Mrs. Vanderbilt. But if it will bring my husband some pleasure and help his business, I will do it gladly. I simply don’t know if we need a ballroom that seats four hundred to accomplish it.

“Boooring!” Cindy called, yanking a box from under a tarp in the main attic. The finished, expansive space spread out over most of the main wing’s square footage and was larger than the first floor of Nina’s apartment building. “Get to something good!”

Nina thought about noting Cindy’s good mood, a general upswing in her morale since she and Jake started going on “dates” around the island—long walks along the shore, dinner on the back porch at the main house, long talks on the dock. But Cindy refused to talk about it, because she didn’t want to jinx it. And it didn’t seem nice to provoke her. Especially since she hadn’t told Dotty or Cindy about the kiss with Deacon in the greenhouse, and Nina knew that somehow, teasing Cindy would result in her own personal beans being spilled.

So instead, Nina flipped through the diary until she found a passage of Catherine’s thoughts that seemed to hold more dramatic promise.

For the first time in my marriage, I have been dishonest with Gerald. He asked me how I knew Jack, and I lied. I told him he was simply a friend of the family. I don’t know why I lied. Maybe I didn’t want to admit that I had any romantic entanglements before him. Maybe I didn’t want him to have any reason to doubt me. Or maybe I had some misguided need to protect Jack, to make sure he had this job and the opportunity to make a name for himself. Now I can’t go back. If I admitted that I lied, Gerald would be furious, and worse, he would be hurt. He would wonder why I felt it necessary to lie, and I would not be able to answer.

It is strange seeing Jack so often. It seems that he visits our New York home at least once a day to discuss plans for the house, ideas for simplifying or expanding. As Gerald is often away on business—more and more lately, it seems—it has fallen to me to meet with Jack and approve the changes to the various stages of the house plans. I will be honest. At first, those plans seemed like a nonsensical web of blue-smudged paper. And at night, I have wept with the frustration of being expected to understand it all.

But as Jack very patiently explained the schematics to me and the construction process as a whole, it all started to make sense. I could see the house in my head, from the ground up. I could walk through its hallways and imagine its views from the windows and the widow’s walk. It gave me an unexpected sense of power to be given control over the Crane’s Nest. Gerald might be the owner of the house and Jack the architect, but I will be its creator.

Jack is just as he ever was, as charming as he could possibly be. In the hours we have spent together, he has told me he’s missed me, and he is glad that we will be spending so much time together. I will confess that it is pleasant to keep company with someone who knew me before my ascension to my “post” as Mrs. Whitney. He knew the awkward Catherine of coltish limbs and flyaway hair, and he still looks at me as if I am a sweet he is eagerly anticipating. He has been a comfort to me as I enter this new phase as mistress of a monolith.

Nina turned the diary over in her hands, the dim light of the afternoon sun shining through the rain-dappled attic window. “It’s kind of sweet that Jack carried a torch for her all that time, since they were kids.”

“It’s kind of hot,” Cindy said, conscientiously folding the sheet that had just covered a rather lovely cherry table with carved lions for legs. “Repressed sexual tension, corsets, and . . . blueprints.”

Dotty’s lips pursed into a knowing grin. “Really, blueprints are suddenly attractive to you? And that has nothing to do with you nursing a certain recently concussed architect back to health?”

Without even looking at Dotty, Cindy pointed at her. “Quiet, you.”

Nina giggled, opening another of Catherine’s diaries. Technically, Saturday was their day off. They could leave the island for the day to run errands or just get away from the house. But instead, the ladies had trekked up to the attic on this miserable, drizzly day to search through the treasures there. Reading through Catherine’s diaries had left them with a gnawing curiosity about Mrs. Whitney. And Dotty was determined to find information that might be locked away in the attic’s nooks and crannies. So far, they’d managed to find a lot of broken furniture, a hobby horse that had belonged to little Josephine Whitney, and several crates of chipped china with gold-plated rims surrounding a golden W. And Dotty had found an oversized hatbox containing an enormous, faded blue picture hat, which was now jauntily angled atop her head.

“Anyway,” Cindy continued, “it definitely sounds like Jack and Catherine’s decision to run off together wasn’t a hasty one. They danced around each other from the beginning.”

Dotty frowned, snagging a small digital recorder from the pocket of her hoodie and putting it on the floor next to her.

“What’s that about?” Nina asked.

“I figured that it might be a good idea to record ourselves as we’re talking about Catherine and Jack. I’m hoping the recorder will pick up messages that the naked ear couldn’t pick up.”

“Why would we want that?” Nina asked. “Doesn’t it seem sort of reckless to try to communicate with whatever is going on in the house? I mean, why not just whip out a Ouija board and try to text with it?”

“Text with the ghost.” Cindy snickered. When Nina and Dotty turned their attention to her, she shrugged. “It’s funny, because it’s sort of the same thing, but not really . . . Right, sorry, carry on.”

For a moment, Nina was sorry that she’d mentioned the Ouija-board issue. She and Cindy had refused to participate in any sort of active provoking of the dead, including Ouija boards, attempted channeling, automatic writing, or just speaking rudely to empty rooms. Dotty was not happy, but she wasn’t quite brave enough to try any sort of communication by herself. Besides, Nina and Cindy were more than willing to help her with her research, and that was a dirty, occasionally risky job (splinters, errant sharp objects, occasional possession by spirits). Dotty had created a timeline on their whiteboard, keying in important dates and events in Catherine and Gerald’s relationship, then a separate timeline for Catherine and Jack’s supposed relationship. So far, she’d found plenty of dates but no real clues about Catherine’s death. And she certainly wasn’t any closer to a supernatural explanation for her family’s generational misfortune.

But at least she’d found a lovely hat.

“This is called EVP, electronic voice phenomena,” Dotty said, waving the recorder. “Some people think that if you set out a recorder and ask a spirit questions, the recorder will pick up noises and answers from the spirits that the naked ear couldn’t hear.”

“What if you record something you don’t want to hear?” Cindy asked.

“Still safer than a Ouija board,” Dotty said. “Those things are like a giant, evil neon sign that says, ‘Hey, undefined manifestations who mean us harm, here we are!’ ”

Nina laughed. “But don’t people use EVP and electromagnetic meters and all that to confirm the presence of ghosts? I don’t think we have to prove that they’re here. We know they are. I think we need to know why and how to get rid of them.”

“I don’t want to communicate with the spirits,” Dotty assured her. “But wouldn’t it be nice if Catherine or Jack gave us some clue to where we should look for her jewelry or what we could do to undo the curse?”

“Or tell us that Paul is dead?” Nina suggested brightly.

“I think I liked you better when you were all meek and unassuming.” Dotty grunted, lobbing a ball of tissue paper at her.

Nina easily ducked the ineffective projectile and turned her attention back to the diaries. “Here’s another one,” she said, reading aloud.

Jack kissed me today. Just writing those words is terrifying and makes me want to dash them with my pen. If Gerald were to ever find out . . . I shudder, diary, to think what his reaction would be.

It happened so quickly, and I was so shocked that I don’t think I responded appropriately. We were standing at his draft table reviewing plans for my bedroom suite. He was asking me questions about the placement of the bed that I realize now could be construed as intimate. I felt his hand on the back of my neck, and before I knew it, he had turned me around, pressed me back against the table.

I pushed him away, but I am ashamed to say that I felt some stirring inside of me, the longing and giddy lightness of that young girl who once kissed Jack Donovan on her porch swing. All these years, I believed I would never be the sort of woman who welcomed attentions from men other than her husband. But Gerald is gone so often, and Jack is always here. Always.

I am so confused, as unsettled as the storm-tossed waves that eat away at the shores of our new home. Is my marriage so easily eroded? Could I break my bond with Gerald so easily? What sort of woman am I becoming?

Dotty’s face became more unsettled with every word. Nina immediately regretted reading that particular passage. Sometimes she forgot that they weren’t just speculating about characters from some long-forgotten story but that these were Dotty and Deacon’s relatives. And of course, Dotty didn’t want to hear in-depth detail about her great-great-grandmother’s slide into an adulterous affair.

Catherine Whitney had been a lonely woman, isolated with an old flame while undertaking an intimidating task. Of course, she turned to that old flame for comfort. Nina didn’t judge her for it, but she wouldn’t treat the romance as if it was the greatest love story ever told—especially when Dotty or Deacon was around.

“So are we looking for anything in particular, or are we just sifting through the rubble like prospectors?” Nina asked, snapping the diary shut.

“Well, I was sifting, but while we’re up here, I was hoping to find Catherine’s wedding trunk. When she and Gerald got home from their extensive honeymoon, she used it to save her wedding dress and sentimental keepsakes. My grandmother told me about it when I was a kid.”

“How did your relatives not find and pawn this?” Cindy asked.

Dotty began counting the wall panels, until she found the fourth from the door. “Well, I’ll be honest, as much as she loved her husband, my grandmother saw the direction the family was taking in my grandfather’s generation. She didn’t know what was in the wedding trunk, but she knew that it would be a shame to let it be pawned for cash that wouldn’t sustain her spendthrift husband for more than a few months. So she took it.” Dotty shoved a stack of cartons marked “Pots and Pans” away from the wall with a grunt. Hidden behind the stack, she found an old steamer trunk bearing customs stamps from Paris, Berlin, London, and Lisbon. “And she hid it behind a bunch of cartons no one would look at twice. Who wants to sort through old pots and pans when you’re looking for treasures? And one rainy afternoon, right before she died, she told me where she’d hidden it. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell my father or my uncle—whom she loved but didn’t trust with anything valuable—but I had to swear that I’d share what I found with Deacon.”

Nina helped her drag the trunk into an open space in the middle of the room. Dotty plucked a bobby pin from Cindy’s hair with an apologetic shrug. She picked the trunk lock and popped the lid open, filling the attic with the scent of long-dried violets. Nina squealed in delight as they gently lifted a layer of yellowed tissue paper from the top tray, revealing a travel set of monogrammed silver brushes, combs, and a hand mirror. A tiny canister of violet-scented talc with powder puff, an ancient porcelain pot of lip rouge, and a set of pearl-studded hairpins completed the toiletry set. Dotty carefully lifted the tray from the trunk, revealing a carefully folded white satin bundle wrapped in more tissue paper. Nina helped her lift the heavy material from the trunk, unfolding it until it became a long, elegantly cut wedding gown with a high waist, lace sleeves pointed at the wrists, and a long, bell-shaped train.

“Wow,” Cindy marveled. “They sure knew how to make a dress back then. You know, this was a Charles Worth design? He was the Tom Ford of his generation. You really had to rank in the four hundred to get an appointment with him.”

“Gerald would have spared no expense for his bride.” Dotty noticed that the liner of the trunk top didn’t fit quite flush with the edges. She raised a hand to Cindy’s head to search for another hairpin, but the blonde warned her, “If you rip more hair out of my head, you and I are going to have a problem.”

Dotty harrumphed and plucked a pin from the picture hat, then jammed it into the space between the lid and the liner. After a few wiggles, the lid popped loose, revealing a false top that provided a handy—if narrow—secret storage space. A bundle of papers fell into Dotty’s hands.

“Jackpot, ladies!” she crowed, waving the packet over her head. The bundle of letters was tied with a bit of faded pinkish lace. She carefully untied the knotted lace and studied the dates scribbled on the back of the envelopes. “Letters to Catherine spanning, oh, three or four years!”

“Love letters?” Cindy asked.

Nina told her, “Well, I don’t think you tie letters from your school friends up in pink lace and hide them in your wedding trunk. Nobody in this house trusted anybody.”

“Good point. What do they say?”

Dotty very gingerly opened a random letter from the pile.

“ ‘Dearest Kitten,’ ” Dotty read. “ ‘The vision of me holding you in my arms—freely, without watchful eyes and interference—is the only thing that keeps me sane each day. When can we be together? I thought myself a good man, a patient man, a man of morals. But loving you has put every one of those misconceptions to the test. I need you, to touch you, to taste you. When can we give up all of this pretense? When will you be mine?’ ”

“Wow, that’s pretty hot stuff for the time,” Nina said. “Is it signed?”

Cindy let loose a silvery laugh. “No, the author signed it with a little sketch. It’s a little bird. An ugly bird. The letter writer is a better wordsmith than an artist.”

“It’s a crane,” Dotty said, her voice even more deflated than before. “Well, that’s one way to keep from getting caught. It does seem fitting that Jack would use the crane as a symbol, considering the location. After all, the house brought them back together.”

“Is it at all possible it’s from her husband?” Nina asked, more for Dotty’s benefit than for her own curiosity. Dotty seemed honestly disturbed by each new revelation about her ancestor.

“It doesn’t sound like something Gerald would write,” Dotty said, her tone skeptical. “I’ve read his business correspondence. Poetic lover he was not. The handwriting is similar, but everyone had lovely penmanship back then.”

“You OK, Dot?” Cindy asked, nudging her arm.

Dotty’s hat drooped as she nodded. “The more I learn about Catherine, the more it seems to make sense and then conflict. It just seems strange that a woman who would have a special passage built so she could go to her children instead of turning them over to nannies at night, who would give so much consideration to her servants’ comfort, would cheat on her husband.”

“Cheating on a spouse, particularly when that spouse is absent and—from what we’ve read—distant and cold, doesn’t make you a bad person,” Cindy told her. “It doesn’t make you a great person, but I don’t think you should think less of her because she was unhappy.”

“I know,” Dotty said. “Maybe I would feel better if we found something written from Gerald’s perspective, something that showed him for a callous, unfeeling jerk who deserved to be cuckolded. Or maybe something from Jack that proved he was worthy of Catherine’s love. Right now, everything feels off-balance.”

“Have you thought about contacting Jack’s family?” Nina asked.

Dotty shook her head, unleashing a small storm of dust from her picture hat. “There is no surviving family. He didn’t have any children. Like I said, he pretty much disappeared from public life after Catherine’s death. Some people claimed to have seen him in the days after her body was found. Even with the scandal, you’d think that he’d be able to parlay building one of the most luxurious homes in the country into more work, but he never did another high-profile project. Some doyenne in Virginia claimed to have hired him to build a summer home on the coast the following year and demanded repayment when he didn’t complete the design. But that didn’t work out, because she couldn’t find him. It’s like he just disappeared from the face of the earth.”

“You can hardly blame him. The woman he loved died suddenly. And there was probably a bit of guilt, since her husband killed her over their affair. He may not have wanted to work again just because of the associations with Catherine.”

“Do any of the letters say anything helpful?” Cindy asked, eager to break the somber mood. “Like, ‘Gerald told me to meet him at the top of the stairs at nine P.M. so he can strangle me?”

“Now, that would be too easy,” Dotty huffed, carefully slipping the letter back into its aging yellow envelope. “Everything here—the letters, the diaries, the artifacts—they’re pieces of the puzzle. I just have to find a way to make them fit.”

“In the meantime, you do look rather fabulous in that satellite-sized hat,” Cindy told her.

Dotty preened, putting on a brave, bright face. “Of course, I do, darling. I’m a Whitney.”