The Unseen

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The solid oak door creaked open into a small entry with glazed brick floors, surprisingly dark compared to the lightness of the house outside. The room had a greenish tinge from the garden green-painted wainscoting running halfway up the wall. Laurel was reminded of the Spanish-style houses around Santa Barbara, and she had a sudden, painful memory of—the dream—and her midnight ride from the hotel. She pushed away the thought and forced herself back to the present as she followed Audra and Brendan into the house.

Across the green entry there were two steps up into a second, larger entry with a fireplace and a long wood bench like a church pew facing it. Laurel glanced over a family portrait above the fireplace mantel, a crude, colorful painting of two parents and two children that gave her a strange sense of unease, but she had no time to study it before Audra stepped forward to begin her narration. “This is actually the newer portion of the house,” she explained. “The part that was added on when James and Julia moved in permanently.” Laurel looked around her at the cool, quiet rooms.

Past the fireplace were stairs down to a small empty room of indeterminate function to the right, with the same glazed brick floors, and what looked like a bathroom beyond. On the left there was a short hall with a glimpse of a small dark-paneled library at the end. Very odd rooms to have at the entry of a house, Laurel thought. There was dust like a fine sprinkling of baby powder everywhere, but otherwise the house was in surprisingly good condition.

“Hmmm,” Laurel smiled vaguely at Audra.

On the fourth wall of the second entry there was a door into a much wider and taller hall with dark hardwood floors and white walls. Laurel and Brendan followed Audra into it. A beautiful staircase curved up to the right with a tall bay window that looked out over enormous, overgrown gardens. Past a window seat, the stairs took another upward turn and disappeared.

Brendan took Laurel’s hand again as they walked forward. She frowned at him and he nodded ahead toward Audra, shrugging helplessly (with a What-can-I-do? look). Laurel pressed her lips together and went along. His hand was strong and warm around her fingers, and she was suddenly electrically aware of his presence beside her.

At the end of this hall there was an archway, with three short steps leading down, and then out of nowhere, a huge room, the size of a small ballroom, with two fireplaces, smoky mirrors in gilt frames lining the walls, and a wide, rectangular expanse of hardwood floor.

Laurel was about to follow Audra through the archway when she felt a chill run through her entire body.

“Here,” she said aloud, and Brendan turned back to look at her. Laurel pulled her hand from his and touched the doorjamb and thought she felt the faintest shock, like static electricity. “They cut the house here.”

“Yes, I believe you’re right,” Audra acknowledged, with an appraising glance at Laurel.

They all moved down the steps into the great room. Aside from a few end tables with marble tops, the only furniture in the room was a battered, dusty grand piano.

“This is the older house,” Audra said, unnecessarily; the feeling of the room was completely different, much older and more complicated. The ceiling was high, with a raised ornamental design in the dome, and the crown molding had plaster medallions at intervals all the way around the room. Two bay windows with dusty panes flanked a set of equally filmy French doors, which led out onto what must have been absolutely stunning gardens, several acres of them, now so overgrown with wisteria and yellow jasmine and honeysuckle Laurel thought instantly of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

The bare floors shone even through their layer of dust and Laurel noted they were heart of pine (heart pine) but far older than the floors in her own house: she could see the wide planks had been fastened by hand-carved wood dowels instead of nails.

Then she froze, staring at a spot halfway across the floor.

Brendan opened his mouth to speak to Audra, but Laurel dug her nails into his palm and pointed.

In the solid layer of dust on the floor, there were footprints. Smallish and soft-soled, like footsteps on the beach, headed away from them, toward the archway to the next room.

But they began in the middle of the floor, and left off well before the doorway, just five or six of them, and then nothing but undisturbed dust.

The three of them stared at the footprints.

Audra broke the silence, sounding exasperated. “No matter what you do, people get in.”

Which was absurd, of course, unless someone had been airlifted into the room—the trail of footprints had no logical beginning or end.

“But—,” Laurel said.

Now Brendan dug his fingers into her wrist, while he tsked sympathetically to Audra. “It’s a shame, isn’t it. No respect for property.”

He took Audra’s arm with his other hand and smoothly steered both women well away from the footprints, so as to leave the oddly isolated tracks undisturbed, all the while keeping up a bright and distracting dialogue. “But I have to say, we’re loving it, aren’t we, honey? I can tell this is going to cost me a fortune.”

At the doorway on the other side of the ballroom, they stepped down yet again—Was this house built on a hill? Laurel wondered—into a dark-paneled room that had clearly been the dining room. There was a long walnut table and some terribly dusty chairs. A massive grandfather clock stood in one corner, its pendulum still and silent, and the inner wall boasted another large fireplace with an elaborately carved mantel and white marble hearth. Four sets of French doors with arched tops led out to a wraparound brick patio. Veranda, Laurel corrected herself silently. Where the rocks fell. The room was large, and there was nothing about it that should not have been graceful and lovely, but something about it made Laurel almost claustro-phobically desperate to get out.

“For a while it was rented out for weddings,” Audra said vaguely. “The gardens, you know.” She gestured toward the arched doors. She seemed as uncomfortable in the room as Laurel was.

“How big is it?” Laurel asked. Her voice sounded tight in the echo of the room.

“Nine thousand square feet,” Audra answered promptly. “Twenty-seven rooms in all.” Brendan whistled, and Laurel felt an odd sense of awe.

Audra led them into the next room: a huge, modern kitchen—not a domestic kitchen, but an industrial one, of almost restaurant size. It was in startling contrast to the formal rooms they had just been in. Though the kitchen was merely functional, with none of the beauty or design of the previous rooms, Laurel found she was able to breathe again once they were out of the dining room.

“The kitchen was put in to accommodate the wedding parties and special events.”

Brendan looked around, nodding. “Who owns it now?”

“The county Historical Society. There were plans to turn it into a writers’ retreat and art institute… but that hasn’t materialized. No one wants to destroy it—but no one knows what to do with it, either. The Society keeps it up—barely.”

Brendan nodded, his eyes far away, calculating. Then he turned to Audra cheerfully. “Can we see the upstairs, then?”

There were three staircases in the back of the house—a set of stairs on the outside of the house, and an inside staircase on each side of the kitchen area.

To reach the back steps they went through a room that was set up as an office, with an antique desk and an elegant mailbox cubbyhole. “The house manager’s office,” Audra said, and Laurel marveled at the idea of a house so large that there would be a dedicated office simply for household affairs.

The stairs led up to a tiny servants’ kitchen, the back door of which opened onto the back stairs leading down to the garden. Out the kitchen door the rest of the servants’ quarters began, a rabbit warren of rooms, really so many that as they walked Laurel was having trouble keeping track of how many they’d seen. The rooms were strung out along a long corridor that bent and jogged at odd angles. Two bedrooms on either side of the kitchen, a half-sitting room across from a bathroom, then three steep and beautifully carved steps up into a small but cozy den, with nine-paned windows under slanting rafters. The grain of the floor was dark and rich, and Laurel could see through the windows that the roof was indeed, real slate. There were waist-high bookshelves with an assortment of volumes (not as elegant or expensive as the ones she’d glimpsed downstairs), and several framed front pages of old newspapers on the walls.

On the other side of the den, a door opened on to another hall with more steps up, then the hall continued with three bedrooms in a row on the left: the biggest bedroom so far, with two antique sleigh beds and a fireplace and faded animal wallpaper of lions and tigers and bears. The next room was a closet of a bedroom, clearly meant for a nanny or even a wet nurse. The narrow room had a single bed, a desk squeezed between two floor-to-ceiling cabinets, and a large and startling lithograph of a crow framed above the writing desk. Then the last bedroom: a nicely appointed one with a hearth and big windows overlooking the garden. All of these rooms opened onto a long, narrow balcony overlooking the garden.

“I’ve lost count of rooms,” Laurel murmured. It seemed they had been walking down the same hall for ages. The hall wasn’t only crooked, it rose up and down in an unnerving way; the floor was not merely uneven, it seemed to roll under their feet like a sluggish snake. In fact, the odd bulges of the hall vaguely reminded Laurel of a cobra that had recently swallowed prey, with odd undigested lumps of rooms.

The realtor nodded. “Julia Folger was forever moving walls and changing doors; the house was in a constant state of flux.”

“The Winchester Mystery House,” Brendan murmured, referring to a California house whose heiress owner had added on rooms and halls in an obsessive belief that it would prolong her life. Laurel felt a warm rush of familiarity—to instantly know what he was talking about and know that he knew she knew. He looked at her without smiling.

“We’re back in the main house, now,” Audra informed them. Her cheerfulness seemed somehow subdued. “That large room of course was the nursery, built for James and Julia’s children, Paul and Caroline. The children inherited their grandfather’s love of the hunt; you’ll see a number of hunting and riding trophies collected in the next hall.”

On the opposite side of the hall there was another door, and it was closed. Brendan reached to try the knob.

Locked.

He looked back at the women. Audra took out the key ring, and compared a couple of the keys, tried them. Nothing fit, and she stepped back and shrugged. They walked behind her, continuing down the hall, through another sitting area with more bookcases and a pale green leather divan.

The wide framed entry opened up into a perpendicular hall, with polished wood floors and a corridor of much larger rooms. The whole feeling of the building changed as they stepped through that entry. The ceiling was higher, the floor more solid and level, the walls thicker. Laurel thought again that the white plaster and curved ceilings had a vaguely Spanish flavor.

“And here we’re back in the newer part of the house,” Audra said.

The hall was four very large rooms on one side and two bathrooms on the other. Laurel couldn’t imagine what the house must look like from an aerial view.

She stepped to the window and looked out over the gardens. Through the brambles and tangle of vines, she saw a white gazebo at the head of the garden, gleaming like bone, and to the far left a small garden house of river rock at the end of a long reflecting pool.

Laurel caught a rustle of movement, a flash of black—too big to be an animal but not recognizably human—there and then gone… or never there at all. She shivered and hurried to catch up with Brendan and Audra.

The room at the end of the hall was the master bedroom: a spacious rectangle with large sunny windows, a fireplace, and window seats on both ends of the room.

They continued down the hall, which was lined with built-in bookshelves, to the next room, which Laurel immediately thought of as the fox room. It had French doors that opened out onto the round balcony over the front porch. The built-in shelves were crowded with silver hunting and riding cups. The walls held paintings of the hunt and old photos, of riders and horses and dogs.

“So you’ve taken us up through the forties,” Brendan said to Audra, and she looked at him blankly. “With the Folger family, I mean. James brought his bride Julia to the rebuilt house. The estate became a thriving literary community through the twenties and thirties. The children grew up as avid hunters and horsemen. Then what?”

“Well, then there was the war, of course,” the agent replied. “James Folger was killed overseas. His son Paul returned from the war and he and his sister lived with their mother until she died, sometime in the fifties.”

“And the brother and sister?”

“Remained in the house until they died.”

Brendan raised an eyebrow. “Neither married?”

“I don’t believe so,” Audra said. Her voice was distant. “They both died in the sixties, and it was never used as a family residence again.”

“Hmm,” Brendan said thoughtfully, and glanced at Laurel. “Would that have been the early sixties?”

“I think so, yes,” Audra answered.

Laurel felt a distinct uneasiness about the story. Lots of dropped threads there.

They moved on to the last door, facing them at the end of the hall.

As they stepped in, Laurel gasped.

It was large and dark—almost completely black, due to the solid wood shutters covering every window.

But her gasp was at the touch of the room. There was a sense of it like breath, a cool, live presence. Brendan stepped close to her and she could feel his warmth, although from far away.

They stood suspended in the breathing dark… and slowly their eyes became accustomed to the room, illuminated only by the thinnest shafts of light from the shutters.

“Library,” Audra’s voice came from somewhere.

There was a sudden blinding intrusion of light. Laurel blinked against the assault, dazzled, and saw Brendan silhouetted by the window, opening the shutters.

As her eyes adjusted she saw the room was dark-paneled and lined against one long wall with built-in bookshelves of some fine hardwood. There were tables, cushioned window seats under every window, two fireplaces, a standing globe, and an elegant carved bar, above which was a large framed painting of a dashing man in his forties, wearing a crimson smoking jacket. The painting was powerful but crude, the same primitivism of the family portrait in the entry downstairs. On the walls without bookcases were hundreds of black-and-white photographic portraits of men and women, mostly studio shots.

It was a magnificent, resonant room.

Laurel moved slowly along the wall of bookshelves.

Audra spoke behind, her voice distant, abstracted. “You’ll recognize many of the names under those photos: the authors who came here to work and play in the twenties and thirties—even a few movie stars. This room has seen a lot.”

Laurel had reached the end of the wall and turned to the next wall of bookshelves. A familiar navy blue volume caught her eye—a Duke yearbook, and she jolted at the date—1965.

Brendan spoke suddenly. “Audra, what is it you’re not telling us?”

The agent turned vacuously inquiring eyes on him.

“You’ve skipped a good deal of the history of the house. In the interest of full disclosure, I think it’s time you were straight with us. What exactly happened here, that no one has really lived in the house since the sixties?”

Audra’s gaze burned with resentment, and Laurel could see her calculating, coming to some decision. When she spoke it was with no inflection. “James and Julia’s son, Paul Folger, suffered from what they called dementia praecox.”

Brendan and Laurel knew instantly what she meant. “Schizophrenia,” Laurel said aloud.

“Paul Folger showed early signs of having a talent like his father’s, in painting rather than writing, but the story was that he became ill in the military—delusional and violent. There were no antipsychotics at the time, of course, only frontal lobotomies, electroshock, or permanent institutionalization. He was discharged from the service and returned home.”

“After James Folger’s death in Iwo Jima, Julia and her daughter Caroline kept Paul at home. After Julia’s death, Paul’s sister oversaw his care for fifteen years. Caroline rarely left the house; Paul Folger never did.”

Audra paused for a second, then continued tonelessly.

“Caroline killed herself in the house in 1960. At the same time that her body was discovered, her brother was found dead in his bed.”

“She killed him and then herself?” Brendan asked.

Audra didn’t answer. “No one has lived in the house since,” she said.

They were all silent in the library: there was a pall in the air. Laurel just had time enough to wonder what could have taken place between a spinster sister and a mad brother in fifteen years of living alone together, when Brendan spoke.

“Of course, people die in houses, all the time. As family histories go, that’s not too gruesome of one. Are you certain there weren’t more—occurrences?” Brendan suggested.

“I don’t know of any occurrences,” Audra said stiffly. “I’ve done some reading about the Folger family. The house has changed hands many times since then. That’s the extent of my knowledge of the house.”

“We’d like to rent it,” Brendan said beside Laurel.

Both Laurel and Audra turned to him, startled.

Brendan looked at Audra guilelessly. “The house is just sitting here. Why not get some money for it?” He took Laurel’s hand again, including her. “We can move in here and look for another place at our leisure. You can arrange that for us, can’t you?”

Audra looked from one to the other. “Who are you?” she said softly.

The room was completely silent, waiting.

No. Hovering.

“We’d like to rent this house, Ms. Lennox,” Brendan said again. “Who do we need to contact to do that? You’ll be paid a commission, of course.”

His certainty was chilling. Laurel felt she was standing beside a whole different person. Even his voice was different.

“I sincerely doubt that will be possible. But I will phone the Historical Society,” Audra said flatly.

“You are an angel. We really appreciate it, don’t we, hon?” Brendan said, back to his usual ebullient—and false, Laurel thought grimly—charm.