The Spite House(62)
She expected to see Dana at the foot of the central staircase, waiting for her to come down, but Dana wasn’t there. Lafonda looked to the right, toward the open door of the drawing room. “Drawing room” still struck her as a strange room name, as did many of the room names in the mansion. She supposed it was one of those divides between a normal person and a rich person that the normal person could not bridge unless they lived long enough with or as the rich.
In every other house Lafonda had been in, rooms had common, simple names. Dining. Bed. Bath. Laundry. Living or family. If there was an office, it was likely a converted spare bedroom. You might have a sunroom if you were well off. The Houghton Manor, however, had all of these as well as a great hall—which she was currently in—a stateroom, an outer parlor, an inner parlor, a theater room, three studies, a private chapel, an upper and lower loggia, multiple antechambers, and more, not including the library. Even the bedrooms were officially “bedchambers,” and had a grandiosity befitting the title. Lafonda believed she’d done rather well to memorize most of the room names, as well as how to get to one through another and then another and into the next without always having to track back into a hallway. She was never interested in looking up what each room name meant, though, at least for those that didn’t strike her as obvious.
Looking at the open door of the drawing room, she pondered the room’s original purpose. She’d been in it a few times, and as far as she could tell it was just a gloomy micromuseum dedicated to Eunice’s great-great-grandmother, Beatrice. Three massive portraits of the Houghton matriarch decked the walls of the drawing room, one that captured Beatrice in her twenties, another from when she was middle-aged, and a third that immortalized her later years. Furniture and décor that was handpicked by Beatrice during her extensive travels, mostly conducted during her fifties, filled the room. Rugs from South and Central America, authentic china, pottery from Africa, Baroque chairs she had picked up in Italy, more. All set in a room without windows and, more conspicuously, without any tangible remembrance of Beatrice’s husband.
Lafonda made the mistake of asking about Eunice’s great-great-grandfather once. Eunice answered, “We never speak of him,” seeming to forget there no longer was a “we” when it came to the Houghtons, just her. The refusal to speak his name made him feel more ominous and present to Lafonda, somehow. If ghosts existed then surely he was made into one by his family’s campaign to forget him, and Lafonda sometimes wondered if he might be lingering somewhere in the house. She’d felt it most in that drawing room, which she never liked looking in the direction of, much less entering. Eunice would visit the room for maybe half an hour once a week, and while Lafonda primarily thought of it as a tiny museum, she believed it was a place of reverence for Eunice. A small, private sanctuary where she could pay her respects, seek guidance, meditate, or whatever else she felt she needed to do to maintain her mental health.
Eunice hadn’t visited it for a few nights, however, so why was the door open now? Even if she’d been in recently, she never kept the door ajar out of concern that it might later ease shut in the night and awaken the voice of the alarm system. Dana wouldn’t go in there. She found it eerier than Lafonda did, had said as much before.
So why was the door open? It was as if someone did it to lure her there, or distract her.
Go upstairs. Something isn’t right.
It was too late. She felt a presence behind her, a shade at her back. A sinking sensation drew her insides toward the floor. She did not want to turn around. Maybe if she’d done that a moment earlier it would have been safe, but now it was too late to turn around, and also too late not to.
She pivoted slowly, expecting to see the hazy image of Beatrice’s husband hovering above the bottom step, directing his anger at whoever was nearby for all the years he’d spent being forgotten. A great scream would leap from her throat at the sight of him, and she might pass out where she stood.
What she saw instead brought a more primal and practical fear that cramped her muscles. A short, brown-haired man with a patchy beard stood before her. He pointed a gun at her chest and held a finger to his lips. He had stern, weary eyes, and a quivering grip on the black pistol.
Lafonda’s fledgling scream deteriorated on its way up and came out as a death rattle. At least it’s not a ghost, she thought. I’m going to die, she thought. I’m going to miss everyone, she thought. I’m not going to miss anything, because I won’t be anything. I don’t know that. I’ll know very soon. Oh God. Oh dear God oh God.
The man stepped toward her, moved behind her. He must have been hiding behind the staircase. Now he had one hand on her shoulder and the gun at her back. He leaned in close and spoke quietly. “I don’t want to hurt anyone, got it? If you do as I say, no one will get hurt. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you scream or do anything stupid. But I don’t want to, got it? You got it?”
Lafonda nodded. She’d worked in an emergency room before transitioning into private care and personal training, and even in her current field she’d been in situations where a life was in the balance, and one couldn’t afford to waste much time second-and third-guessing what to do, what to say, what they heard and what it meant. This was not quite the same as the circumstances she’d been in before, but not so different that her brain might lock up and make her useless.
“There’s a little girl here, isn’t there?” the man said. He sniffed in short, rapid breaths, sounding like he’d run up and down the stairs several times before hiding behind them. He had the tangy smell of sweat on him. He looked just a little too stocky to be a long-term drug addict, Lafonda thought, but also too tired and jittery not to be under the influence of something. All of this was presumptive, but she’d have time to reconsider those presumptions after she survived this ordeal.