"You're one of the guests, I reckon."
"We just got in yesterday."
"What do you think of the place so far?"
"It's… different from what I'm used to. But that's part of the adventure."
"Yep, the unknown is always scary at first. But once you get used to it, you start to like it."
Adam looked down at a set of wire-enclosed pens beyond the garden. A grunting sound rolled across the hills.
"Hogs," the man said. "About time of year to get out the boiling kettle and have us a slaughter."
Adam's face must have shown his revulsion.
The man laughed. "Don't worry, son. You won't get no blood on your hands. But meat don't get on the table by itself."
"I prefer my meat boneless," Adam said.
"Miss Mamie serves it up however you like. Careful, though, she's been known to take a shine to the guests. Especially them that's young and male. I reckon even an old crow like that needs a play-pretty once in a while."
"Thanks for the warning, but she's not my type," he said.
The man leaned forward like a conspirator, his face emerging from the shadows of the barn's overhang. "Say, can you do me a favor?"
"What's that?" Adam looked back at the manor again. Smoke rose from its four chimneys, but other than that, it appeared devoid of life. Even the breeze seemed to have died.
"Dig me a hole. I'll pay you."
"I don't want to get you in any trouble. Miss Mamie seems to have this thing about the guests being kept apart from the staff."
The man licked his lips. "Let me worry about Miss Mamie. But I got a sore arm and I'm a little down in the back. Pain's hellfire blue this morning."
"Okay, then," Adam said. He took the shovel and tested its balance.
The man took his right hand out of his pocket and pointed to the base of a dying gray apple tree that stood alone in a slight clearing. "Right there between the roots," he said. "About big enough to hold a hatbox."
The man followed Adam to the spot, and Adam slid the bright blade into the earth, turned the dark soil. In a couple of minutes he'd shaped the hole to the man's satisfaction.
"That's fine and dandy," the man said. "I can handle the rest. Appreciate it."
"What are you burying?"
"Covering up for old Ransom. He's no-account, but he's been around so long he gets away with murder. I got to finish a job for him."
"Well, have a good morning. I need to get back to my room."
"Here," he said, his right hand dipping into his pocket again. "A little something for your trouble."
"No, really," Adam said, holding up his hands in protest. The shovel handle had heated up the flesh surrounding his palms, a hint of possible blisters to come.
"You don't want to hurt my feelings, do you?" the man said. "Us mountaineers can get mighty prideful about such things."
"Sure, then."
The man held his fist out, then opened it over Adam's palm. A small green thing dropped into it.
"Four-leaf clover," the man said.
Adam smiled. "I'm going to need all the luck I can get."
Adam started back toward the barn, then turned and said, "I'm Adam, by the way."
"Lawson," the man said, now hunched over the hole as if his bad back had undergone a miracle cure. "George Lawson."
CHAPTER 9
Anna awoke with light slanting through the window, and for a few moments couldn't remember where she was. Then it all came back, Korban Manor, Mason, the cabin in the woods with its mysterious figurines, the pained spirit of the girl she'd encountered.
Why had the ghost asked for Anna's help? And who was the person in the shawl who had fled into the forest? Anna shook away the spiderwebs of memory. She hadn't dreamed last night, unless that whole walk in the woods had taken place solely in her imagination.
"Did you have a good night's sleep?" Cris asked from her bed across the room.
"I slept like the dead. Haven't slept that well in years. I guess even a city girl benefits from the peace and quiet."
Cris, her voice raspy from sleep and hangover, said, "I know what you mean. In Modesto, a siren wakes you up every fifteen minutes. It's kind of weird, though."
"What's weird?" Anna looked at Korban's portrait, then at the fire that must have been stoked and banked by one of the servants in the night.
"For the first time since I was a little girl, I remembered my dreams."
"Really?" Anna thought of her own recurrent dream, of her ghostly self on the widow's walk, holding that forlorn and haunted bouquet.
"Yeah. I was running across the orchard out there, I had these long bedclothes on, billowing out behind me. You know, all that lacy Victorian stuff you see on the covers of Gothic novels? I was running in slow motion, like the wind was pushing me back or something."
"The old 'running but never getting there' dream," Anna said. "I had them during final exams or sometimes when I submitted a research paper."
Or like the last time I dreamed about Stephen. What was that, nearly a year ago?
"I wasn't running away." Cris's voice faded a little as she recalled the details of the dream. "I was running to something. Waiting in the shadows, right at the edge of the frees. It was so real. I could feel the dew on my bare feet, the cold air against my face, the warmth-"
Anna raised herself up on her pillow and saw Cris, hair tangled, eyes bleary, but a blush apparent on her cheeks.
"— the warmth down there," Cris finished, as if startled by the force of the memory. "And I just kept running. I could feel the house behind me, almost like it was watching, like it wanted me to… then I was all the way across the meadow. The shadow thing, it moved out from under the trees, it touched me, but I couldn't see its face. Where it touched my shoulder, the warmth sort of expanded, filling me up…"
Cris's widened eyes stared past the room into the remembered dream. "It was pretty intense," she whispered.
Anna wasn't used to people sharing intimate details with her. Being an orphan had taught her to maintain a safe emotional distance. She'd kept secrets even from the few romantic interests in her life, keeping a deep part of herself hidden. Now this woman she'd only met yesterday was sharing a sensual dream. But maybe it was something else. "You found some company. Mason, I'll bet."
Cris grinned. "No, I definitely would have remembered if something had happened with him. I wasn't that drunk."
Anna forced herself to show interest in Cris's dream as penance for thinking of Mason. "What do you suppose it means?"
"That I'm a basket case?"
As if dreams had meaning. Dreams were nothing but a mistake of the synapses, a firing off of excess electrical energy much the way sparks jump off a cracked distributor wire in a car. Dreams were random brain waves, no matter what the professors in the Duke behavioral sciences program had taught her.
Basically, dreams were nonsense. Both the sleeping and the waking kind. Especially when they compelled you to visit a big manor tucked high in the Appalachian Mountains, where you searched for your own ghost. Especially then.
"Maybe it's just your subconscious reveling in your newfound sense of freedom," Anna said, scrambling up a solipsism from one of her old psychology classes. "After all, you have all kinds of time, no deadlines, no husband to please. Nothing but yourself and what you want to do. Maybe it's only natural that this relief should express itself in romantic imagery."
"Wow. That's good. I can't wait to get back home and tell my analyst."
Anna was going to add something about sexual frustration due to the dream's Victorian overtones. But that was too cynical and obtuse even for Anna.
"Or maybe it was just a dream," she said, dreading the coming bout of bloody diarrhea that welcomed her to each new day.
"Probably," Cris said.
Anna pushed off her quilts and sat up, shivering inside her cotton nightgown. "Dibs on the bathroom."