Poor kids.
She sipped more tea and read more notes. The three nannies had all said the same thing: the kids were smart, the kids were undisciplined, the kids were strange, there was something wrong, and they were leaving. Only the last one had tried to take the kids with her, and Alice had gone into such a screaming fit that she’d lost consciousness and the nanny had had to detour to a hospital. After that, the nanny took the kids back to Archer House and left them there. “These children need professional psychological help,” she’d written, and Andie thought, So North sent me.
That was so unlike him, not to send a professional, not to get a team of experts down there, and she thought, He’s not taking it seriously. Either that or he wanted her buried in southern Ohio for some reason.
She tilted her head back to think about that and saw the curtain of the window nearest the bed move, a flutter, as if from a draft. She watched, and when it didn’t move again, she shook her head and went through the rest of the folder, sipping the liqueur-spiked tea until the combination of that and the dry curriculum reports from the nannies made her so sleepy, she gave up. She turned off the bedside lamp, and the moonlight seeped into the room-full moon, she thought-and it was lovely to be so deeply drowsy on such a soft bed in such soft blue light that she let herself doze, thinking, I should have called Flo to tell her I arrived, I should have called Will, I should have…
Something moved in her peripheral vision, maybe the curtain again, she was pretty sure nothing had moved. Exhaustion or maybe the liqueur in the tea. She looked sleepily around the room, but it was just gloomy and jumbled, a gothic kind of normal, although it seemed colder than it had been, so she let her head fall back and snuggled down into the covers and drifted off to sleep, and then into dreams where there was shadowy laughter and whispering, and someone dancing in the moonlight, and as she fell deeper into sleep, the whispering in her ear grew hot and low-Who do you love? Who do you want? Who kisses you good night?-and she saw Will, smiling at her, genial and easygoing with his blond frat-boy good looks, and then she fell deeper and darker, and North was there, his eyes hot, reaching for her the way he used to, demanding and possessive and out of control in love with her, and she sighed in relief from wanting him, and somebody whispered, Who is HE?, and she went to him the way she always had-impossible to ever say no to North-and lost herself in him and her dreams.
Andie woke at dawn with a headache, which she blamed on Mrs. Crumb’s hot tea along with the hot dreams about North, probably evoked because she’d taken his name again. Guilt will always get you, she thought and resolved to stop lying, even if it was the only way to defeat Crumb. She took an aspirin and went down and moved the rest of her things from her car to her room, and then drove fifteen miles into the little town at the end of the road and hit the IGA there for decent breakfast food. Then she headed back to the house, determined to Make a Difference in the kid’s lives, but once there, she hit the wall. Alice was in the kitchen demanding breakfast, but she didn’t want eggs or toast or orange juice. Alice wanted cereal. She’d had cereal the day before and the day before that and the day before that and today wasn’t going to be any damn different. Andie looked into Alice’s gray-blue eyes and saw the same stubbornness that had defeated her in her short marriage.
“You’re an Archer, all right,” she said and gave Alice her cereal.
Then she made ham and eggs for Carter on the stubborn old stove, thinking of the kitchen North had remodeled for her when she’d moved into his old Victorian in Columbus, of the shining blue quartz counters and soft yellow cabinets and the open shelves filled with her Fiesta ware. It’d been her favorite place in the world, next to their bedroom in the attic. This kitchen was like a meat locker. Very sanitary but…
“That is not good,” Alice said, looking into the pan, but when Andie dished it up for Carter, he ate everything. He kept his eyes on his comic book the whole time and then shoved the plate away and left, still reading, but he ate it all. Progress.
“You’re welcome,” Andie called to his retreating back, and turned around to see Mrs. Crumb smiling at her, her powdery, jowly face triumphant over Alice’s empty cereal bowl as Alice deserted them, too.
Andie ignored her and tried to call Flo using the kitchen phone, staring at the battered white bulletin board that held only a list of faded phone numbers and an even more faded church collection envelope, which probably summed up Mrs. Crumb’s life. When she couldn’t get a dial tone, she said, “No phone?” and Mrs. Crumb said, “It goes out sometimes.” Terrific, Andie thought and went to scope out Archer House before she made a trip to the shopping center she’d passed on the two-lane highway the day before.
The layout of the house was, for all its size, fairly simple. The center of the house, as Mrs. Crumb told her, was the Great Hall, more than twenty feet square with a stone fireplace large enough to party in. The hall rose three stories to a raftered ceiling that dated back to the original house, sometime in the sixteen hundreds, each level ringed by a gallery with that ancient wood railing that Andie had almost fallen through the night before. Impossible to heat, Andie thought. And those railings are not safe. There were six rooms on each floor: one room on each side of the hall at the front of the house, and four rooms across the back. The first floor had empty rooms in front, and the kitchen, dining room, sitting room, and library across the back; the second floor had two bedrooms in front and four in back, all with four-posters and naked mattresses; and the third floor had Mrs. Crumb’s bedroom on the front left and Carter’s on the front right, and then Andie’s room, the doublewide nursery, and Alice’s room across the back. In between the front rooms and the back were staircases-the narrow servant’s flight behind a discreet door on the left and the massive formal stone staircase through an equally massive stone arch on the right. A long, white-paneled, red-carpeted entrance hall separated the rooms on the right from the Great Hall, but otherwise it was pretty much two rooms in front and four in back all the way up. Every room in the place was covered in dust, the paintings on the walls looking muddy and faded in the gloom and the bedrooms on the second floor doing a nice business in cobwebs and the occasional dead mouse. Jessica the ancient blue-faced doll would have fit right in there. Still, Andie was cheered by her ability to navigate the stone barn she was living in, so when she had the scope of the place, she went back to the library where Carter had folded his gangling body into a deep, red-cushioned window seat.
Tauruses like things, Flo had said, and even though astrology was a crock, Andie thought, Books.
“I’m going out to shop,” she told him. “Want to come along? There’s a bookstore.”
“There’s no bookstore in New Essex,” he said without looking up.
“Is that the little town at the end of this road? There was a shopping center I passed on the highway about half an hour before I got to New Essex. It had a bookstore.”
He stopped reading. “Grandville?”
“Yes.”
He nodded and went back to his book, and Andie took that for assent and went upstairs to find Alice, wondering what sequined promise would lure a little Scorpio out of the house.
Alice was in the nursery with her Walkman, dancing and singing “Gloria” at the top of her voice. She caught Andie watching and stopped, her colorless skin and straight white-blond hair making her look like a little ghost herself, almost translucent in the morning sun.
“I’m going to town to shop,” Andie said. “If you come along, I’ll get you a new bedspread. With sequins.”
“No,” Alice said automatically.
“Carter’s coming.”
“No he’s not. We don’t leave here.”
Andie came into the nursery and sat down on the ancient rocker near the TV. “Why?”
“We belong here.”
“Alice, it’s just for the day. We’ll be back for dinner.”
“That’s what she said,” Alice snapped, her stolid little face growing grimmer.
“She who?”
“Nanny Joy. She said we’d just go for the day and then she kept driving and driving and driving, and when Carter said where are we going, she said we were going to a new home.” Alice’s hands were curled into fists now, her face even whiter than before. “I’m not going. I’m not going! I’m NOT GOING! NO NO NO NO NO NO-”