The Winters(35)

I turned away from the photos and made my way to what I assumed was Dani’s actual bedroom, where she slept when she wasn’t up in the turret. Surprisingly, the door wasn’t locked. Inside was a teenager’s dream room, though three times as big and quite at odds with the rest of Asherley. Instead of stodgy antiques and quiet rugs, there was a large denim-covered sectional facing a flat-screen TV as big as a small theater’s. On the glass kidney-shaped coffee table, a tangled game console shared space with a clean crystal ashtray and spent sticks of incense. She had her own microwave perched on a small robin’s-egg-blue fridge. Band posters were interspersed with nice art and some African-type masks. Kilim rugs were scattered across the floors, artfully overlapping each other. Her four-poster bedframe had the same ornate quality as ours, though hers was painted white, the drapery pale pink, the comforter and pillows a riot of pinks and reds, the patterns expertly mismatched in a way I attributed to Rebekah’s eye. The dressing table was covered in dozens of tubes of lipstick and compacts of blush and eye shadow. There were also several more framed pictures of Rebekah, some with Dani as a baby, and more recent ones of her looking adoringly at Dani, a mother in love. I hadn’t seen these ones before, not in the gallery nor online. These were intimate, candid, imperfect. Something of real love was captured in the frames. They made me feel indescribably sad.

Without touching anything, I quietly left the bedroom. Now to the door at the end of the gallery. I knew it led to the turret, to Rebekah’s room, which I had only glimpsed behind Dani that first night. I wouldn’t stay long. I’d just look out those same windows from which Dani always seemed to be watching me, monitoring my movements around the grounds. I closed my hand around the glass knob. It turned easily, but the deadbolt kept me out.



* * *



? ? ?

During those nights and days Max was away, I was finally busy, so busy I barely slept or showered. Between refurbishing the Aquarama and feeding the kitten every few hours, I was charged with a humming sense of purpose. For the first time since I’d arrived at Asherley, I began to feel useful, especially when I fed the kitten her bottle. I had named her Maggie, after Miss Marguerite, one of Max’s ancestors in the paintings whose shock of white hair reminded me of her.

I was determined to learn more about the family I was marrying into, not to feel like I belonged at Asherley—I would never feel that—but at least to show Max I cared about its history. Katya pulled down some books about the people in the portraits, flipping to the most important ancestors. She generously spent an afternoon in the kitchen pointing out key facts, only losing her patience once or twice, complaining she had a lot to do, you know, and this was cutting into her precious work time.

“No, no, that’s Lady Carolina,” she said, correcting me, pointing out the difference between two paintings of a blond woman in the same blue dress. She explained that Lady Carolina, the mother, was a favorite of President Rutherford Hayes while he was a bachelor, before she married Max’s great-great-grandfather. Marguerite Winter Duplessix, their daughter, was courted by a Union general, someone famous she couldn’t remember, before she turned him down and married a local French farmer.

“Apparently she was an excellent letter writer, threw great parties, and was no lady. Rebekah loved her, ate up any information about Miss Marguerite. She found a large bolt of that blue satin perfectly preserved in the attic and had it made into that little skirt around her makeup table.”

She said it as though I’d been up there and was familiar with Rebekah’s bedroom.

“You mean in the turret?”

“Yes.”

“I’d love to take a look at it,” I said breezily, hoping Katya would slip me another secret key. She ignored the prompt while tracing a pencil down a long to-do list that included a weekly flower order.

“Katya, do you think we can order something other than those roses? Wouldn’t it be nice to get lilies or daisies, something fresh for spring?”

“It’s not spring yet,” she muttered. Then, as if to make up for her brusqueness, she asked about the kitten.

“She’s sleeping. I emptied the litter.”

“He won’t like it, you know.”

“The kitten?”

“You being in the greenhouse.”

At that moment I received a text from Max. Can’t wait to see you tonight. Getting in late. Wait up. xo

“I’ll talk to him,” I said, pocketing my phone. “Another few weeks and I can get her spayed. After that she can run free on the island and we can lock it up again.”

Truthfully, I had no plans to lock up the greenhouse again. While crouched on the floor, Maggie heartily latching on to her kitten bottle, I had begun to fall in love with the place and imagined cleaning the windows and planting rows and rows of vegetables on the tables, green beans, tomatoes, cat grass in pots, maybe some yellow marigolds, and taking great sheers to Rebekah’s red-black roses. Those hours in the greenhouse had revived my spirits. I had no intention of cutting off my supply of warmth and light.

I helped Katya clean up after lunch, then gave Maggie another quick bottle and headed down to strip another layer of varnish off the Aquarama before Max got home.

When I opened the door I was surprised to find Gus inside, holding his phone in front of the boat and talking out loud to someone on the screen. It was Dani. He spun around wearing the face of a man caught in the act of doing something that was, on the surface, quite benign, yet both of us knew it wasn’t.