Inside the front door was a large entry hall, with arched double doors leading into two enormous rooms-one of which had apparently been the living room. The other looked to Ted as if it must have been a reception room for the Porte cochere that lay on the side of the house closest to the garage. At the far end of the entry hall was a graceful staircase that swept up to a small landing. The stairs split at the landing, leading in opposite directions to the symmetrical wings of a mahogany-railed mezzanine that provided access to the rooms on the second floor, as well as a clear view of the broad entry hall below. Suspended from the vaulted roof of the entry hall was an ornate chandelier, the sparkle of its crystal pendants dimmed by a thick layer of grime. Flanking the base of the staircase were two more corridors, leading to more doors.
From the front of the house there was no way even to guess what might be at the back.
For the next half hour they picked their way through the house, moving from one room to another. On the first floor, in addition to the living room and reception room, they found a dining room-easily large enough for a table to seat twenty-four-a library, a kitchen and pantry with a large service porch behind, and several smaller chambers that had apparently served as rooms for cards, music, sewing, and a variety of other activities. A conservatory constructed of three glass walls surmounted by an enormous glass dome extended out from the northern side of the house. Except for three cracked panes, the skylight was miraculously unbroken.
It was on the second floor, while her parents were exploring a large suite of rooms that lay above the library, that Kim felt it.
Suddenly her skin was crawling, as if a large insect were creeping across her neck. She jumped, reflexively brushing at the unseen creature, and the sensation vanished.
Steadying herself against the mahogany railing while her racing heart calmed, she glanced around for Jared, who had been with her only a moment before.
He seemed to have disappeared.
Then, a few paces away, she saw a door standing slightly ajar, and knew her brother must have gone into the room beyond it.
She started toward the door.
And felt it again.
This time it was an icy cold chill that fell over her, momentarily stopping her breath. She tried to call out to Jared, but the same paralysis that had fallen over her lungs had taken her voice as well. A terrible panic rose in her as the cold tightened its grip.
With no warning, the house itself had taken on a menacing quality, and she had a terrible feeling that she was about to die, that somehow this cavernous, decaying place was going to swallow her whole, and she would vanish, just as Jared seemed to have done a moment before.
"Kim? Hey, Kim! What's wrong?" The words startled her. She spun around to find Jared gazing worriedly at her. "What's wrong? How come you called me?"
For a split second Kim didn't trust herself even to speak, but then, as quickly as it had come over her, the strange sensations-the crawling skin, the icy chill, the strange paralysis-were gone.
Gone so completely that even her memory was fading with the rapidity of a dream vanishing in morning light, vivid one second, utterly gone only a moment later.
"I-I didn't call you," she stammered. Or had she? In the back of her mind she thought she felt a vague memory of wanting to call out to her brother. "D-Did I?" she asked.
Jared's concern congealed into fear. A second ago, in the bedroom a few feet away, he'd been positive he heard Kim's voice. And not just calling him, either.
She had been screaming-screaming in terror.
He had heard it!
Yet what could have caused her to scream? He glanced around, not knowing what he might be looking for. Could it have been a mouse, or even a rat? But Kim wasn't a sissy; some scurrying creature would only have provoked a surprised yelp.
What he'd heard-at least what he thought he heard-was the anguished cry of someone in fear for her life.
Now, though, she was staring at him, her head cocked, her eyes wide, her expression puzzled.
He remembered, then, something that had happened a few years ago, when they were eleven. Their mother had taken them for a picnic by a lake, and they'd gone swimming. He had hauled himself out onto a large wooden float, and was sprawled on his back, gazing up at the clouds floating overhead, when he'd heard exactly the same kind of scream from Kim as the one of a few moments earlier. He'd scrambled to his feet and scanned the water, but she was nowhere to be seen.
Then he'd looked down.
Kim, her eyes open and staring up at him, was lying on the bottom of the lake, under ten feet of crystal clear water.
She wasn't moving.
Without thinking, he'd dived for her, dragging her to the surface and wrestling her onto the float.
He'd started screaming himself then, calling frantically for help while trying to force the water from Kim's lungs. Others-grown-ups-arrived and took over, and after what seemed an eternity, but which he'd later been told was no more than a minute or two, Kim started breathing on her own again.
Afterward, when they asked him how he'd known his sister was drowning, it turned out that only he had heard her scream.
No one else heard anything.
Thinking about it, replaying those panicked moments in his mind, he knew his sister couldn't have screamed; even if she had, there was no way the sound would have carried out of the water.
It was, he'd finally decided, the Twin Thing, that strange, almost mystical connection he and his sister had always felt.
Today, though, he saw nothing that could have terrified Kim to the point of a scream. Not like that.
As if she'd read his mind-the Twin Thing again-Kim's eyes fixed on him. "Jared, what's going on? I swear, I didn't call you!" She paused, then spoke again, and he knew she truly had read his mind. "And I didn't even call you in my mind, like I did at the lake that day."
Jared hesitated, then shrugged. "Hey, if you don't remember, why should I?" he finally said. "And maybe it wasn't you at all-maybe it was a ghost!" He scanned the hallway, gave an exaggerated shudder, then fixed his sister with the most mysterious gaze he could muster. "Want to see if we can find one? If ghosts are real, this sure is where they'd be."
A moment later, the strange sensation she'd experienced all but forgotten, Kim set out with Jared to explore the second floor. Half a dozen bedrooms opened off the mezzanine-two of which had small parlors attached to them-along with three bathrooms. There were a few more rooms that were locked, but none of the keys their father had seemed to fit.
On the third floor, tucked beneath the huge oaken rafters that supported the slate roof, were half a dozen more rooms, each with a dormer window, those on the west side looking out over the town, the others over the wilderness to the east.
Finally, after they'd seen as much of the house as they could gain access to, the family gathered on the front porch.
"Well, what do you think?" Ted asked as they made their way back to the car. There was an excitement in his voice that immediately put Janet on her guard. A thought had come to her fifteen minutes ago-a thought she had instantly rejected. The electric note in his question told her the same thought had also occurred to Ted. Before he even spoke, she knew what he was going to say. "It would make a great little hotel, wouldn't it?"
At least a dozen answers to Ted's question popped into Janet's mind, every one of them negative. Instead of voicing even one of them, she slowly turned around and looked back at the immense derelict of a house that had sat abandoned for the last forty years.
She thought about Ted, and what his future in Shreveport might be. Though neither of them had talked about it yet, she knew there would be no job offer, not for a very long time.
Which meant there was nothing to hold them in Shreveport; she had no family there, and neither did he.
In the last few years most of their friends had drifted away, unwilling to deal with Ted's drinking.