The Fate of Mercy Alban (18 page)

I took a quick breath in, delicately touching one of them. “Who are they? What is this?”

“Freaky, huh?” Matthew smiled broadly. “I was stunned the first time I saw them, too. Church elders, mostly, from two centuries ago, and some even older than that. There’s even a Native American chief and his wife—a testament to how closely the settlers and the natives lived together at that time.”

He led me to a massive metal door on the far side of the room and quickly worked the combination lock, which responded with a loud
click
. “The church archives,” he said with a flourish, opening the door and ushering me inside.

Matthew flipped the light switch and I saw a cavernous room containing shelf upon shelf of items, almost like the stacks in a library. “This is where we keep old church records of births, deaths, baptisms, marriages, that sort of thing, along with valuable items parishioners want stored,” he explained.

“Lots of these things look really old,” I said, noticing a dusty felt box.

“Most of it is old. People don’t so much use church vaults nowadays. Frankly, lots of these items are forgotten, their owners having passed away without telling anyone they’ve stored something here.”

“And you don’t keep records?”

He nodded. “We do, but some parishioners didn’t want to leave a paper trail, especially if they were hiding something.”

A chill shot through me at that thought. That’s exactly what my mother was doing with the manuscript—hiding it. “How are we ever going to find it amid all of this?” I asked, looking around at the shelves. “There’s an awful lot of stuff in here.”

“Look here,” Matthew said, running a finger along the side of one of the shelves. “The shelves have dates on them. What year did this all go down again?”

“Nineteen fifty-six,” I said, moving from shelf to shelf, counting my way back in time as I went. He started at the other side of the room and did the same.

A few moments later, he called out. “I found something!”

I flew to his side and saw a box just big enough to contain a ream of paper. It was marked ADELE MITCHELL, 1956.

“I can’t believe it,” I whispered, taking the box gingerly in my hands. “This has got to be it.”

Just then, I heard a loud
click
. Matthew snapped his head around and ran toward the door.

“Damn it!”

I poked my head around the shelf to face him. “What’s the matter?”

He didn’t have to respond. I saw him standing against the closed door.

Please tell me this door opens from the inside,” I said, rattling the handle.

He shook his head. “It’s a vault. It locks from the outside when the door is closed.”

I looked at him, openmouthed. “You mean we’re locked in?”

Matthew fished a cell phone out of his pocket. “I’m afraid so. I’ll just call my secretary and she can come …” He stared at the display on the face of his phone and then looked up at me with a sheepish grin. “No bars. I guess the stone of this subbasement is blocking the signal.”

My stomach did a quick flip. “Now what?”

“I guess we wait,” he said, shrugging his shoulders with an ease I found disarming, considering we were locked in an ancient stone room adjacent to a basement crypt. I looked around at the generations of dust on the shelves and I wondered just how much air there was in there. The vault certainly didn’t have a vent to the outdoors.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We won’t be here long. The janitorial crew will be here soon. They’ll see my car, they’ll see the lights on leading to the basement, and they’ll put two and two together.”

“What if they don’t?”

“We’ll bang on the door and the ceiling,” he offered. “They’ll hear us. Worst-case scenario, we’ll have to wait until morning. Martha will be here at the crack of dawn and will figure out we’re down here. It’s Sunday tomorrow, remember? The whole church will fill up before eight thirty, and when I’m nowhere to be found, she’ll track me down, believe me. The woman is like a bloodhound.”

“All night?” I squeaked, a sense of unease growing inside of me.

He took my hands in his. “Listen, Grace,” he said. “Everything’s going to be okay. I promise. We’ll be out of here before you know it.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I do.” He smiled. “I’m just hoping it’s not one of the ladies from the church who finds us, or the scandal of us being alone together in this vault will spread faster than a swarm of locusts.”

I could see that he was trying to lighten the mood, so I tried to follow his lead. “What I want to know is why, every time I’m with you, something dramatic happens.”

“It’s just business as usual for an average Lutheran minister,” he said. “Sermons, marriages, funerals, and the odd life-threatening incident or two.”

I chuckled. “There are worse people to be locked in a vault with. I mean, if we have to start praying to be rescued, you’ve got a direct pipeline to the man upstairs.”

“The man upstairs that I’m most interested in reaching at this moment is the janitor,” he said, staring at his dead phone.

I sighed, looking around the room, dust hanging in the air like fog. I wrapped my arms around my chest and shivered.

Matthew’s eyes met mine. “Are you cold?”

I nodded. “A little. It really is dank down here, isn’t it?”

He peeled off the jean jacket he was wearing and held it open for me.

“Are you sure you don’t need it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not at all. Please.”

I slipped my arms inside and felt his warmth wrap around me. The jacket smelled like him—a hint of spiciness from his soap mixed with fresh air. I turned to thank him, and our eyes locked for a moment that seemed to go on forever. I could feel my face heating up and was grateful for the dim light in the room.

We stood like that for a while, neither saying anything, each holding the other’s gaze, and then he reached toward me and pushed a stray tendril of hair off my forehead. I knew exactly what this moment was and exactly what was about to happen if I let it, and I stepped back a few paces. The attraction between us was undeniable, but getting involved with him, or anyone, was the last thing I needed.

“Thank you for the jacket,” I coughed, clearing my throat.

His eyes still held mine for a few seconds. “You’re welcome,” he whispered.

I turned and walked down one of the aisles. “What shall we do with ourselves, then, while we wait?” I asked a little louder than I intended.

“You could open the box, for starters.”

“You’re right!” I smiled at him. “I could.” I made my way over to the shelf where it had been sitting for decades. The box was wrapped in heavy brown paper that had begun to yellow and fray around the edges.

I slipped my finger under one end of the paper and ran it down the length of the box, the wrapping crackling easily with age. I tore the rest away and then lifted the lid, conscious that the last person to touch it had been my mother before she married my dad.

Inside was a large manila envelope containing what seemed to be a ream of paper. On the front of the envelope, my mother’s address, in the now-familiar handwriting of David Coleville.

I looked up at Matthew. “We found it.”

He nodded, his eyes shining. I opened the envelope and drew out the final work of David Coleville, a book the literary world had anticipated but never received; wondered and speculated about, but never got to read. Only we knew it existed.

My hands were shaking as I held the pages.

I had no idea what this manuscript might have been worth in monetary value, but as I sat there in the dusty, dank vault, I knew that its real value to me wasn’t in dollars and cents.

My mother wasn’t here to tell me about what happened all those years ago. I couldn’t simply ask her about her secret romance with one of this country’s most talented writers, but his unpublished novel, the ream of paper I held in my hands, would bring that summer to life for me in vivid detail—Coleville’s version of it, anyway.

Reading this story would be as close as I would ever get to time traveling. The words would transport me back to another time at Alban House, to a time before I was born, when my mother and father, David Coleville, and my aunt Fate were much younger than I was now, when my grandparents were vibrant and energetic and commanding. Through Coleville’s words, I could immerse myself in the world of my parents and grandparents in a way few children have ever had the opportunity to do.

I knew Coleville had changed the names of people and places, but I was sure I’d be able to discern who was whom. I stood there for a few minutes with the manuscript in my hands, an odd mix of excitement and trepidation bubbling up in my stomach. I had been dying to know more about their relationship, how they fell in love and why it all went wrong, but now that I had at least some of the answers at my fingertips, something was holding me back from turning that first page.

A voice then, soft in my ear.
Be careful what you wish for, Gracie. Once you learn the truth, you can’t unlearn it
.

I stared down at the first page and read the title aloud to Matthew.

“
The Haunting of Whitehall Manor
by David Coleville.” A tingling traveled through the page and into my hands as I said it. “Shall I read it aloud to you?”

“Let’s just take a moment to realize that you and I are the first people in fifty years to be reading this work,” he said, his eyes glowing. “This is a real gift, Grace. Months and years from now, when the whole world knows about it, when this very manuscript has been sold at auction, when you have been interviewed on the
Today
show talking about how you found it, we can look back on this moment and remember that it was just the two of us, here in this vault.”

He sank down onto the cement floor and motioned for me to join him, which I did. “That said”—he smiled—“I’m ready to hear it.”

I took a deep breath and began to read, the words immediately transporting us out of that damp church basement and into the glittering showplace that was Alban House, fifty years earlier.

Chapter One

The first time I laid eyes on Whitehall Manor, it was a cold, dreary June evening. I was squinting to see anything out of the fogged-up window in the back of the car that my companion’s father had sent for us, but the world seemed dull and hazy around the edges, as though it was formulating itself, working to make itself whole out of the mists in preparation for our arrival, as Avalon did for Arthur. I let my mind drift to mystical kings and knights and wizards as we bumped along the road toward our destination. I didn’t know it then, but looking back on it now, it is an apt analogy, for just as Avalon was home to sorceresses and magic, so, too, was Whitehall, containing secrets and mystery and enchantment, like the island that is steeped in Celtic lore.

As we rounded the corner of the driveway, the house appeared, solid now, sturdy and whole, shrouded in the fog that had crept on land from its birthplace on the lake and lay heavy around the place. The house was not a castle, not exactly, but an enormous, imposing structure all the same, a full city block long at least. It reminded me of an old manor house in the windswept British countryside, the moors. It was an ancient and formidable place that had stood against the ravages of Lake Superior’s icy winds for generations.

As we got out of the car, I strained my neck to take it in, all three stories, with turrets and a tower, brick and stucco, several chimneys—I quickly counted fourteen, but there might have been more—and a patio running the entire length of the house overlooking tenderly manicured English gardens and the lake beyond. The staff stood at attention, at least a dozen of them, in a line snaking from the massive wooden front door onto the patio, in position to welcome their returning son home.

“We’re here!” announced Flynn, my traveling companion, otherwise known as Donald Flynn Brennan IV, the grandson of the man who had come to this country as the child of a poor Irishman escaping the Potato Famine and had made his fortune when this country was new, thriving, and growing.

I met Flynn at Harvard, where we were roommates anticipating our senior year, although I was older than he, having worked for several years to save up the funds to attend. I was lucky enough to have also received a small scholarship, being the ancestor not of a long line of well-heeled businessmen as was Flynn, but of the working-class stock from Boston who had built (and, yes, cleaned) the venerable institution so long ago. While my relatives were toiling with bricks and mortar and dust mops, Flynn’s were acquiring railroads and giant tracts of virgin forests and iron ore mines.

But despite his great wealth and lineage, Flynn wasn’t anything like the other “children of privilege” who haunted Harvard’s hallowed halls. We had lived together since we were freshmen, and I found him to be humble, curious, and, above all, a good laugh. He swept through life with a smile on his face, a joke on his lips, and a sense of ease that, I suppose, is the providence of the very rich.

Flynn had invited me home with him every summer and I had always refused, making up some excuse or another. But not this year. I felt that, as a man who would soon graduate from one of the most formidable educational institutions in the world, I had something respectable to offer.