Child of Darkness

  Ami laughed. Then she leaned toward me to whisper.

  "He'll never admit it, but I was his only real girlfriend."

  She sat back, smiling.

  "Where are we going?" I asked, the realization striking me that I didn't know the name of the town or city. I wasn't even paying attention to what direction we were heading. "I mean, where is your home?"

  "Our home, Celeste. From now on, call it our home. Peekskill. We live outside of Peekskill because that's where Wade's company is located," Ami said. "The school you'll attend is just south of us about, what, Wade? Five miles?"

  "About," he said.

  "How will I get there every day?" I asked. From the orphanage, I just walked to the public school. "Is there a school bus?"

  "There is, but I'll take you every morning," Wade said. "Drop you off on my way to work. Ami will either pick you up or arrange for a pickup."

  "Maybe we'll get you your own little car to use. We can do that, Wade, can't we?"

  "We'll see," he said.

  She patted me on the arm and winked.

  Was this all a dream? After all these years, how could they just come out of nowhere and present me with this exciting new opportunity and all of this luxury? Surely, they'd been sent, and my future was truly beginning.

  I really had to pinch myself when I saw their house. Ami was not exaggerating, I thought. This was truly a mansion. The driveway looked like it was a mile long. First we approached the ornate gates with seven-foot-high pilasters, each capped with a large square light fixture. Wade pressed a button over his visor, and the gates began to open very slowly.

  "It's like entering heaven," Ami said. "It always gives me chills when I drive in, even after four years."

  "Hardly heaven," Wade muttered.

  "It is to me," Ami countered. "Wade's father actually owns the house, although he doesn't live here anymore. He doesn't want us knowing his comings and goings. He bought it years ago and had it renovated," she continued as the house and grounds came into better view. The landscaping was elaborate. There were flowers and bushes and trees, fountains and benches, spaced perfectly everywhere I looked.

  Off to the left, I saw a large swimming pool, a cabana, and a large gazebo. Just to the right of that was a tennis court. I was like a little girl in a toy store. My eyes were going everywhere, until finally I settled on the house, which seemed to literally rise up before me, looming over us. It was as grand as any house I had ever seen.

  "It's what is known as a Second Empire Victorian," Ami continued, assuming the tone of a guide as she talked about it. "It's two stories with a large attic. It's the only house in the area that has a cupola."

  On the left side of the house was a one-story porch, and on the right I could see bay windows. Ami pointed at them.

  "That's our dining room, so we can look out at the gardens when we eat. Your bedroom will be on the second floor, just across from ours and above the bay windows. Those two windows on the right are yours. The house has four bedrooms upstairs and two downstairs in the rear. We keep one bedroom for Wade's father whenever he has the inclination to stay over, which means whenever he's here and he drinks too much," she added.

  "Which is almost every time he's here," Wade added.

  The entrance to the house looked just as ornate as the driveway gates. There were paired entry doors with glass in the top halves and about five marble steps up to them.

  "It's just the sort of house you don't see built anymore," Ami added. "All those decorative brackets, the cornerstones, the cresting along the roofline. No one can afford to build such a home. I think we should give it a name, don't you? Famous houses all have names, like Tara in Gone With the Wind. Maybe you'll come up with an idea. Wade doesn't even try," she added critically.

  "How about calling it Our House?" he said, and smiled into the rearview mirror.

  "Ha, ha," Ami returned. She shook her head at me. "Wade has about as much creativity as one of his elbow pipes or whatever they're called."

  "Fittings, Ami, fittings. You should at least have some idea about the business that provides all this."

  "Right," she said. "I'll take a class on it."

  We went around the house to what looked like a definite add-on, an attached garage in the rear.

  "I'm dropping you two off, Ami, and heading back to the company," Wade said.

  "Couldn't you take some time off today?"

  "I'll be back early. I promise."

  "Promise? When Wade makes a promise, it's like the weather report. Twenty percent chance of rain," Ami said.

  "Very funny. I will be home early," he stressed.

  "You better. It's a special evening tonight," Ami warned him.

  The rear door of the house opened, and a stout woman emerged, dressed in a light blue maid's uniform with white lace trim. She looked about sixty, sixty-five years old. Her hair was dark brown with gray strands throughout, cut very short. She wore no makeup, not even lipstick, which she could have used; her lips were almost as pale as her complexion. I noticed that her forearms were heavy, and her hands quite large for a woman's hand. She moved quickly to the trunk of the car. Wade had pushed the button that opened it automatically.

  We stepped out.

  "This is our housekeeper, Mrs. Cukor," Ami said. "She's been working for the Emersons ever since she came from Hungary, which is a long time ago."

  Mrs. Cukor paused and turned to us.

  "This is Celeste, Mrs. Cukor. She's coming to live with us, as you know."

  "Hello," she said quickly, barely looking at me, and turned back to my suitcases.

  "Wade used to call her Mrs. Cookie, didn't you, Wade?"

  "When I was four," he said.

  "Wade's father still calls her Mrs. Cookie," Ami told me.

  "My father often acts like he's still four," Wade muttered.

  "I never heard you tell him so," Ami teased. Wade grimaced.

  "I don't have to tell him. He knows it."

  "I can carry that," I said when Mrs. Cukor took out the second suitcase.

  She held them both in firm grips, gazed at me a moment, her dark eyes narrowing as if she thought I was out to take her job and was warning me off. Then she turned without speaking and walked toward the door. If they were heavy for her, she didn't reveal it. There was no strain in her shoulders.

  "Mrs. Cukor never likes to seem incapable of doing anything," Ami said. "It's rubbed off on the Emersons because she's worked for them so long. Emersons are perfect in every way, in their bodies and their minds, right, Wade?"

  "Right. So long, Ami," Wade sang. He leaned over to kiss her on the cheek, which she immediately fanned as though a fly had landed on her face. He turned to me. "Welcome to our nameless home, Celeste. I hope you'll have a good experience here," he said.

  "Thank you," I told him, and he got back into the car.

  "Come on," Ami said, taking my hand. "I have a big house to show you, and your room, and then we'll talk about your new wardrobe and everything or anything you want to talk about."

  We started toward the door.

  Wade backed out, waved, and drove off. The garage door began to come down.

  It was like a curtain dropping on my past. For just a moment, a split second in fact, I thought I heard Noble call out to me, his voice shut off by the closing of the garage door. I stared at it and listened.

  "Come on, silly. We have a lot to do," Ami urged. She tugged me, and I followed her into what seemed to me to be a storybook world, looking back only once, but fearfully, as though I would be turned into a pillar of salt.

  4 A Level of Temptation

  . Although I had never been in a mansion, I thought again that Ami wasn't exaggerating when she categorized her home as one in Mother Higgins's office. If anything, she had been understating. The only comparable place I had visited was a museum I had gone to on a school trip. I had never seen doors so tall and ceilings so high in someone's home. Two people could live in a house this big and not see each other all
day, I thought.

  From the garage, we stepped into an entryway that took us past a pantry the size of the kitchen at the orphanage. I wondered, how could only two people need so much? All of the shelves were stocked neatly with cans and packaged goods. The shelves were so high that a ladder on rollers was needed to reach the top. Toward the rear was a walk-in freezer that I imagined was normally found only in good-sized restaurants.

  "It looks like enough food for a hotel," I said. "We don't have as much back at the orphanage for all the girls and all the nuns."

  Ami laughed, then shook her head and smirked. "Wade likes to get things cheaper by buying them in bulk. We do have a cook who orders the food, Mrs. McAlister, and she's good at that and a wonderful chef, but Mrs. Cukor hovers over her so closely, she's threatening to quit. Of course, she's been threatening that every other month for as long as I've been here," Ami explained with a smile. "Those two are always complaining about each other, not that anyone pays much attention."

  As if taking the cue from the sound of her name, Mrs. McAlister stepped out of the kitchen and into the hallway to greet us. Draped in an ankle-length white apron, she was wiping her hands on a dish towel. Looking behind her, I saw what appeared to be a very modern kitchen for a house this old. The appliances were all stainless steel, and the floor looked newly tiled in a pale yellow limestone.

  All I could think when I saw Mrs. McAlister was, either she was too skinny to be a cook, or else she didn't like her own food. Our cook back at the orphanage, Mrs. Putnam, weighed at least two hundred pounds and was only five feet tall.

  A good three inches taller than both Ami and me, Mrs. McAlister was thin, with long spidery arms and a long, narrow neck upon which her head rested like a weathercock, making jerky little motions to the right or left when she looked from Ami to me and back to Ami.

  She wore netting over her dark gray hair, pinned so tightly around her head that it resembled a helmet. Under a wide forehead dotted with brown age spots, she had untrimmed dark brown eyebrows that nearly grew into each other. Because she was so thin, the features of her long face were hard and very unfeminine. Her nose came to such a point that it looked like it could be used to punch holes in cans, and the dark line between her narrow lips made it seem as if her mouth had been cut out with a razor. I thought she had terrible posture, turning her shoulders in-ward and making her chest and small bosom look concave.

  "Oh, Mrs. McAlister. This is Celeste, our --" Ami paused and looked at me. "What should I call you? I'm not calling you daughter, and referring to you as an orphan is terrible. What is the word I want?" she asked me.

  "Guest?" I offered with a shrug. I was half kidding, but she leaped at it.

  "Yes, that's wonderful. Guest. We're looking after her until she reaches the age of eighteen. I'm sure Wade has explained."

  "He has. I've already set the table for four tonight. Mr. Emerson himself is coming to dinner, seeing as you've brought home a permanent guest to live in his house," she said dryly. "He called me directly," she concluded, adding to her sense of importance. "Welcome," she said, nodding at me, and then she jerked her head toward Ami. "I'm putting up the beef filet for tonight with my small potatoes, the ones Mr. Emerson himself likes so much," she added.

  "And something wonderful for dessert, I hope." Mrs. McAlister tightened the corners of her mouth a bit and looked at me and then back to Ami.

  "I thought perhaps my strawberry shortcake," she said.

  "Doesn't that sound wonderful, Celeste?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "Mrs. Cukor said you would prefer that apple cinnamon cake, but I think it's what she would prefer for herself," Mrs. McAlister added, twisting the right corner of her mouth up so sharply I could see her pinkish gums.

  Ami shrugged, threw me a conspiratorial glance, and then pulled me along.

  "Did you hear the way she refers to Wade's father? Mr. Emerson himself? It's as if Wade isn't really Mr. Emerson too. And imagine Mrs. Cukor and her arguing over what to have for dessert. I sometimes wish the house was small enough for us to have just one maid who could cook," she told me.

  If there was only one maid, she would be working so hard, she would drop in a week, I thought. Not only were the rooms very large, but the hallway was twice the width of the one at the orphanage. There were windows placed everywhere it was possible for natural light to come through, all of them the small-paned kind that took forever to clean. I knew. We had to clean them at Madam Annjill's orphanage, and if we missed a spot in one, she made us do all of them over as a lesson.

  "Well, she does set a beautiful table," Ami reluctantly admitted when we stopped at the dining room, a room that looked like it was meant for royalty. The table wasn't longer than the one at the orphanage, but it was certainly wider, oval shaped with thick gilded pedestals. There was a matching buffet and an armoire with gilded trimming as well. The chairs were high-backed and decorated in what looked to be a cream silk fabric. There was a grand teardrop chandelier and two sets of brass candelabra on the table. Beneath it was an oval area rug with colors that matched the furniture, the curtains, and the walls.

  "We have rugs in practically every room," Ami said.

  "Basil, Wade's father, favors hardwood floors and hates carpeting. He permitted stone in the kitchen, but nowhere else. Wade had our bedroom floor carpeted, and for weeks that's all he and his father argued about. Imagine talking endlessly about the pros and cons of carpeting! I really didn't care what was on the floor. I don't vacuum it.

  "I do like eating in this dining room, however. It makes me feel. . . special, like I'm eating in the White House or a castle. You'll feel the same way. You'll see," she said. "I want you to enjoy the good life, Celeste, just like me. I really do."

  There were two settings on one side, one across from them, and one at the head of the table. The bay windows looked out on the gardens and fountains, just as Ami had described when we first approached the house. Whoever sat at the setting across from the two would have her back to the windows. I assumed that would be my setting.

  "The floors look brand-new," I commented, noticing how they shone. "Were they just recently put in?"

  "Oh, no. Once a month we bring a team of floor cleaners with machines in to do our wood floors," Ami continued. "It would be too much for Mrs. Cukor, especially at her age."

  "How old is she?"

  "We don't know for certain, but we estimate she's in her mid- to late seventies, even though she doesn't look it. You can't believe what she has on documents, but we know she's at least that old."

  "Why doesn't she retire?" I asked as we continued down the hallway.

  "To what? She has no family in America, and she won't return to Hungary. She hates the thought of a rest home. She calls them God's Waiting Rooms, no thank you. She always says she'll retire in the grave. And then she adds, maybe. Personally, I think she'll live forever. The truth is, I'm a little afraid of her at times. I think she was brought up by gypsies, and that's why she has no family. She's very superstitious, always muttering some chant or another, throwing salt over her shoulder, crossing herself. One of the funniest things she does is stop walking, back up, and then start again with a different foot. Ignore her as best you can," Ami advised. Then she leaned toward me to whisper, "I do believe both Wade and his father are a little afraid of her themselves."

  I grimaced skeptically. How could grown men as wealthy and as influential as Ami had described them be afraid of an elderly maid?

  "Our living room, or great room, I should call it," Ann declared, looking into a truly grand, ornate room with red satin drapes edged in gold, oversized sofas facing each other, and an oval ivory table in the center. There were lamps everywhere, a dark wood grand piano on the right, and walls of bookshelves stacked with leather-bound volumes. I saw a glass case filled with what looked to be expensive ceramic figurines. Ami saw what I was looking at.

  "Those are Lladros," she said. "They, come from Spain, and there are about twenty thousand dollars wor
th of them in there. Wade's mother used to collect them. That is about the only expensive thing Wade will buy. It's a way of keeping her memory alive or something. I'm not particularly fond of them. I'd rather spend money on clothes. He buys one and then pretends he's doing it for me, and for his sake, I let him pretend. That's what a marriage is, you know, little compromises, sacrifices. The trick is to make sure he does most of them," she added with a laugh. "Anyway, there's the living room."

  As she had described, area rugs were scattered across the floor; they were all very expensive Persians, she said.

  "You don't play piano, do you, by any chance?"

  "No, but I've always wanted to," I said. The memory of piano music in the farmhouse was always strong.

  "Well, I'll see about getting you lessons," she said.

  "Really?"

  "Yes, of course. It would be nice to really use this room instead of keeping it like some sort of shrine. Wade rarely spends any time in here, but he inspects it regularly, and God forbid there be a spot of dust, or something out of place. It's all the way his mother kept it. Even those old magazines in the magazine rack are the magazines she was reading at the time of her death. Maybe he thinks if he keeps it this way, she'll return."

  "Maybe she will. Maybe she has," I said softly. Contact with the dead wasn't something I could just brush off completely.

  Ami laughed.

  "Talk like that will get you in the good graces of Mrs. Cukor. She takes her responsibility to keep the room spotless and perfect very seriously."

  "It's a beautiful room," I said.

  A second set of smaller sofas faced an enormous fieldstone fireplace, above which was a landscape with a bubbling brook. The colors were so vibrant, the water looked as if it would literally run over the frame. It brought back an image of the brook that ran near the farm.

  "Yes, it is. The whole house is. Look at the elaborate molding work," she pointed out. "I'm not kidding. A house like this one just isn't built anymore. No one takes all that care about construction. It was built when houses were still works of craftsmanship. At least, that's what Basil is always saying. Just ask him one question about the house, and he'll go on and on for hours. That's a warning," she added with a wink.