Amber House (12 page)

It was almost eleven by the time I was all done with Sam. I went to fish the flashlight from his pack but came up empty, and then remembered I had left the thing in the kitchen the last time I had borrowed it. I sighed, gritted my teeth, and crept into the hall.

It was pitch-black. I felt along the wall toward the stairs. The tall, wide, empty space tugged at me, almost a vacuum. I reached out and grabbed the railing to steady myself.

The soles of my sneakers squeaked slightly and the sound bounced back on me. I felt small and clumsy, worried that the noise would wake up — whatever should stay sleeping. I stole down the steps and sped lightly down the hall, trying to make no sound, trying not even to breathe, trying to outrace the feeling there was someone at my back, someone I was running from.

In the kitchen, I snapped on the little light above the stove. And the world righted itself. I smiled at my overactive imagination and sat down to wait, watching the clock above the door.

At eleven thirty exactly, Jackson’s face showed in the kitchen window. He came through the door soaking wet. Water was running down his jaw and dripping to his chest. “Didn’t know when it would start raining. Sorry,” he said, gesturing to the growing puddles on the floor.

“You came over to help me — I’m the one who’s sorry. Any towels in here?”

He started toward the cupboards.

“Don’t move,” I ordered. “I’ll get them. Let’s keep the flood in one spot.”

“Bottom drawer.” He pointed. “Dish towels.”

I shook out two and handed them to him. He started drying his hair.

“Let me have your coat.”

“That’s all right, I can take care of this.”

“Just give it to me.” He shrugged out of it, and I hung it from a peg, tossing another couple of towels under it to catch the drips.

We switched to paper towels to wipe down his shoes. While he sat and did that job, I mopped up the floor with a few more.

“Not too good at predicting the future, are you?”

He started. “Why do you say that?”

“Where’s your umbrella?”

“Oh.” He managed a half grin. “Guess I’ll never be a weather forecaster. Where are we heading tonight?”

It didn’t look like I was going to get a second helping of the easygoing guy who’d shown up the other night. This evening’s Jackson was back to being withdrawn and a little on the uncomfortable side. Maybe he was feeling guilty for not having done more to warn me about the echoes. And maybe he should have. Although, to be fair, what could he possibly have said that I would’ve believed?

“I want to go back up to the third floor,” I said. “I want to look at the books in that glassed-in shelf.”

“The third floor? You sure?”

“I’m not going in the big room. And you’re not gonna leave me by myself. Right?”

“Right.”

“So we’re good,” I said, shrugging. “Let’s go.”

There was no electric light in the little room with the shelves — the lamp on the worktable used oil. Jackson picked it up. “It sounds like it’s still got something sloshing around in there. Shall we see if it lights?”

While I pointed his flashlight, he removed the globe and glass chimney and touched a lighter to the exposed wick. It caught with a steady golden flame. It didn’t smell like kerosene. I had some vague idea that lamps in the nineteenth-century used actual whale oil and wondered if we were burning the last drops of Moby-Dick.

Jackson put the chimney and shade back over the flame, and set the lamp on the table. It gave off a warm pool of light that didn’t reach much beyond the work area. It made me feel like I
had stepped into the past. It was a feeling I was beginning to get used to.

I sat on the floor in front of the opened cabinet, so Jackson settled on the chair. The “books” the shelves contained proved not to be books at all, but rather, a large set of leather-clad journals. Inside, page after page was filled with dated entries, all in the same elegant handwriting.

“Looks like they’re all diaries,” Jackson said.

The one I had in my hand had numbers stamped into the cover:
1850–60
. I pulled another one from the shelves. It said,
1900–10
. Another said,
1770–80
.

“Two hundred and fifty years of diaries? By one person?” I said. “Know what I think these are? I think they’re my great-grandmother Fiona’s notes. For her book on Amber House. She must have written it here, at this table.” I ran my hand over its surface, imagining her sitting here, day after day, month after month, filling all these volumes with her careful writing. It was hard to reconcile her with the party girl that old lady at the funeral had described to me.

“I want to flip through a few,” I said. “Maybe they’ll have some clues about the diamonds.” I pulled some more from the shelves at random and made a stack. “Okay,” I said. “I guess we should get out of here.”

I stood and started for the door, but he caught my elbow. “Hold up a sec.” He walked over to the rear interior corner of the room. “There’s a handle here.” His fingers found and traced the outlines of a door, worked into the paneling. “What do you say? Shall we open it?”

I felt like telling him no. I was a little leery about the things that lurked behind the closed doors on the third floor of Amber House. But I told him, “Go for it.”

The door opened onto a single large space that must have topped the entire west wing of the house. The wall between the
main part of the house and this attic still showed the clapboard siding of the old house — they had not bothered to dress it up in this utilitarian storeroom.

Jackson carried Fiona’s oil lamp into the attic, and I scuttled after the light.

Dormer windows poked out in the slanting, bare wood ceiling, and the brickwork of three chimneys showed on the two ends of the room. The open space between was spotted with mounded islands of boxes.

“Still game?” he asked me.

“You think we’re gonna find the Captain’s diamonds in one of these?”

“No,” he said. “But maybe some other treasure. Aren’t you curious what’s in them?”

I shook my head no, but added, reluctantly, “Okay, I’m curious.”

Jackson dusted off an old chair with a sagging seat, set Fiona’s lamp on a water-damaged table, asked me to sit, and started putting boxes in front of me for my inspection.

Most of the boxes were filled with papers — financial records of one kind or another. One held moth-eaten linens. Another few had Christmas decorations. There was a chest of miscellaneous hardware. A long pack of wallpaper remnants. Two trunks of baby clothes that seemed like they came from the sixties — clothes my mother must have worn. A box of baby toys from the same era.

I couldn’t resist. I had to try to
see
. I lifted out a child’s brightly painted circus set, opened it, and began to take out its jointed animals and clowns.

Like a switch had been thrown, the light brightened around the smiling lion I was holding. The sound of voices grew sharper until I could distinguish words. Then I saw an auburn-haired
toddler with my mother’s eyes putting the lion in its barred wagon.

My grandmother — young, with close-cropped hair — knelt beside her. “That’s right, Magpie,” she was saying, “the lion goes in the cage.” The little girl mimicked a lion, and Ida roared back. They laughed together.

And I thought:
Once upon a time, forgotten now by everyone, my grandmother had been happy.

I dropped the circus piece back in the box. The light bled to darkness. All felt normal again. I traded the box of toys for another carton Jackson had brought.

A box of empty pickling jars. Boxes of dishes. A stereopticon packed with rows of double-sided pictures. A case of canned food from the 1940s.

Jackson set a trunk in front of me. It was filled with canvases, standing on end. I drew one out. Globs of paint resolved into the riches of a wisteria vine heavy with flowers, trailing over the porch posts outside Amber House’s kitchen door. I held it up to the glow of the lightbulb to look for the signature.

“Huh,” I said.

“What?”

“The artist. Annie McGuinness.”

“Isn’t that —”

“My mother,” I finished for him, nodding.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s pretty good.”

I pulled out another. The daubs captured the face of a pretty, auburn-haired girl, smiling slightly, forever. She looked like Mom, but with the soft curves of a child’s face. I checked the signature. Annie McGuinness.

I flipped through the other canvases: a sailboat on the Chesapeake, racing ahead of a storm; sunlight breaking over spring-green fields around a tiny Amber House; another self-portrait of
my young mother sitting on a bench surrounded by leaves; one of a toddler in a Victorian dress, clutching Heavy Bear. All filled with light. All reflecting the eye of someone cheerfully captivated by the things she saw. I checked the signature on each. They were
all
Annie McGuinness.

I had never had any idea my mother could paint. I felt betrayed, somehow — like she’d hidden herself away with these paintings decades ago. Left me with a replacement, a changeling, who only looked like the person who once had been Annie McGuinness.

As I put the canvases back, I spotted a sketchbook tucked sideways in the end of the trunk, small and easy to hide. It was my chance to look back into the mind of my mother before she’d stiffened into the person she’d become. I pulled it out, then made myself shut the trunk’s lid.

I looked up to see Jackson watching me. His face was gentle, but I didn’t want his pity. It wasn’t a big deal. I set my teeth and shrugged. “Anything else?”

He shrugged a little too, his face shifting to that smooth, neutral look he used so often. He pushed forward two identical file boxes. “These are the last.”

I slit the tape on the first. It was full of family photos. The newest were of me as a baby. They went back from there, through the decades past my grandmother’s childhood in a pale wool coat and black button-up shoes, to a soldier from the Great War and a family in a horse-drawn carriage.

“I want to get these out of here,” I told Jackson. “I want to ‘find’ them someplace else, so I can look through them without having to explain them to my mother.”

“Can you carry one box down the stairs?”

I tried lifting one. “I think so.”

“I’ve got the other,” he said, tucking it beneath his left arm, taking up the lamp with the right. We ducked through the door.
I balanced my box on my lifted leg, and then I sealed that part of my family’s past back in its resting place.

We shoved the boxes under a bed in the west wing, then Jackson left through the conservatory. Sammy’s light was on when I headed for my room. I stuck my head in and found him whispering to his bear. He looked up at my entrance, blinking a little.

“Sam. What are doing? You’re supposed to be asleep.”

“Okay, Sarah. I will go back to sleep.”

“What woke you up? A bad dream?”

He lay down, and I went in and pulled the covers up over him. He said, “You want to hear my song, Sarah? It’s about a spider.”

I sat next to him and leaned to hear it. I was guessing “Itsy-Bitsy.” “Go,” I said.