CHAPTER TWO

The Thorne Mansion

Cousin Hepzibah was sitting in the kitchen sipping coffee the next morning when I went downstairs. I almost asked her about the ghost, but Dad was there too, and I never brought up ghosts around my parents. I didn’t think they would take it well.

Dad was making his famous cheesy-chive scrambled eggs on the old-fashioned stove. It was weird to have that familiar smell in this strange place.

The kitchen looked nothing like our kitchen at home. It was an enormous room with furniture instead of wall cabinets and tables instead of counters. The floor was paved with slabs of stone. The sink was the size of a bathtub. The stove stood inside a huge fireplace.

“That’s an awesome fireplace,” I said.

“This is the original kitchen from the eighteenth century,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Back then the hearth was the center of the house, so it needed to be big. Big enough to roast a whole deer in it.” She pointed to the spit, an iron scaffold thing in the back of the hearth. It looked like an evil swing set.

“Does anyone ever use it?”

She shook her head. “Not as long as I’ve been here. In theory you still could. You would have to move the stove and sweep the chimney first, though.” She smiled. “Just in case you’re planning to bring home a deer.”

Dad and his friends did bring home deer meat sometimes, from their hunting trips. It saved grocery money, but I didn’t like the strong taste. I went over to where he was cooking and stood in the fireplace squinting up the chimney. It was black and dim.

“Eggs, Sukie-Sue?” Dad handed me a plate.

I looked around helplessly for a fork. Our kitchen stuff was still out in the truck. Cousin Hepzibah pointed to a wooden box on one of the big tables against the wall. I took out a fork with three metal tines and a wooden handle that felt very old.

“Good morning,” said Mom, coming into the kitchen. “Mm, cheesy-chives!” She took a plate from Dad, and I handed her a fork.

Mom turned to me. “Dad and I are going to unpack our stuff today, and then we can load up the truck for the flea market in New York tomorrow.”

“I want to come too,” I said.

“Really? You know how early we have to leave. Wouldn’t you rather spend the day settling in? You would be safe here with Cousin Hepzibah.”

“No, I want to help.”

My parents’ weekend trips could be grueling—up way before dawn, unloading heavy boxes from the truck, then sitting at a folding table for hours in the bitter wind or sweltering sun. But I wasn’t ready to stay here in this creepy house with nobody but a cousin I didn’t know that well and a ghost.

• • •

“Want me to show you the house, Sukie?” offered Cousin Hepzibah. “The ground floor, I mean. You’ll have to explore upstairs by yourself. My knees aren’t so great anymore.”

I followed her out the kitchen door and down the dusty hallway.

In the old days, the Thornes would have employed at least three maids and a manservant, but Cousin Hepzibah had been living alone since her brother died a few years before I was born. She had turned the ground-floor music room into a bedroom when her arthritis got bad. An aide, Alicia, had come in a few times a week to help, but she had to go back to Trinidad a month before we came, after her own mother had a stroke.

Cousin Hepzibah walked slowly, leaning on her cane. Some of the doors swung open with a creak as soon as she touched them; some stuck tight until I thumped them with my shoulder. I’d gotten pretty good at guessing the dates of furniture from helping Mom and Dad with their antiques. Walking through the Thorne Mansion was like walking through history.

The house had started small, only four rooms: the kitchen, the hall behind it, and two little bedrooms above. That part was built in the seventeenth century, Cousin Hepzibah told me. But three centuries of additions had grown like coral—the hollow shells of dead Thornes—burying the original house in encrustations. The Thornes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had made their money from ships. They had added parlors and work rooms, the music room, endless gabled bedrooms, and at the very top, over my bedroom, the widow’s walk.

“You should run up and take a look. You’ll love the view,” said Cousin Hepzibah, pointing up the staircase with her cane.

She was right. Up on the widow’s walk, the wind whipped my hair around my ears. I saw the hills and the winding road, the patches of woods, the town and the white church. Far off through the trees I even caught sight of sun on the sea.

A crow landed on the railing and peered at me sideways. I started to lean on the railing, then thought better of it. The paint was flaking off and there were balusters missing; it didn’t look steady enough to support my weight. The crow didn’t seem worried, but crows have wings. It was getting too cold, and Cousin Hepzibah was waiting. I went back downstairs.

Next, Cousin Hepzibah showed me through the ground floor of the east wing. There, early twentieth-century Thornes had spent some of the money from their investments in railroads and oil on building boudoirs, the gallery, the gun room, the conservatory.

Things fell apart in the 1930s, though. The building stopped during the Great Depression, and apparently the repairs did too. Upstairs, where I went to finish the tour on my own, everything was cold and dusty, festooned with cobwebs. In some rooms, I left footprints in the dust. Clearly almost nobody climbed the stairs anymore.

When I opened the casement window in what looked like a sewing room, I saw Mom and Dad in the driveway unloading our truck. “Sukie! Come down and help,” Mom called. I ran down the back staircase, the one meant for servants, creaking the treads.

• • •

We stashed our flea market stuff and some of our heavier furniture in the old carriage house, but most of our boxes went straight up into the main attic. It was hard work hauling our things up all those flights. The long, low attic room with its peaked roof stretched over the nineteenth-century additions. Eight dormer windows lit it dimly. A single lightbulb hung in the middle of the room, but nothing happened when I pulled its chain.

“I’ll have to fix that,” said Dad, putting down his armload of boxes.

The attic had that winter smell of cold dust. Groups of furniture stood around draped with dirty white drop cloths. I felt as if I’d tiptoed into a Halloween surprise party full of little kids dressed as ghosts, holding their breath while they waited to startle the guest of honor.

I added my boxes to Dad’s pile and peeked under one of the drop cloths. It covered a collection of wooden chairs with spiky arms and legs. They looked uncomfortable.

“Anything good?” asked Mom.

“Eastlake, I think,” I said. “Pretty beat up, though.”

Mom looked under a drop cloth near her and found an aluminum and Formica table from the 1950s. She let it fall back.

Something rustled behind me. I spun around. A mouse? A ghost?

It didn’t feel like a ghost, and for some reason, I didn’t think one would show up with my parents there. I made myself go look. Standing in that corner was a tall mirror in an elaborate wooden frame. My reflection looked elegant and mysterious.

“Now, that’s more like it,” breathed Mom. “What a beauty!”

“Hands off, Mom. It’s all Cousin Hepzibah’s,” I said. “We can’t sell it.”

“I know, honey. Can’t I admire it?”

“Quit slobbering. You’re like a wolf!”

“Don’t worry, I’m still a Thorne,” said Mom. “Let’s cover that.”

Together we threw a dusty cloth over the mirror. It unsettled a pile of old leaves by the window—the source of the rustling, maybe. I found an old broom and swept them into a newspaper, then opened the window and shook them out. The wind snatched them away, flinging them up and down and sweeping them toward the sea.

When we were done stowing our boxes in the attic, I took the broom to my tower room. If I got rid of the cobweb trapezes, maybe ghosts wouldn’t find the place so hospitable.

The broom felt cold in my cold hands, almost tingly. That happened sometimes—I got a cold, tingly feeling when I touched something, usually something old. I wasn’t really surprised to get the tingly feeling in this house, where everything was old.

My ceiling was so tall that even with the broom, I had to stand on a chair to reach the corners. The chair creaked when I stepped on it, and I could almost hear Kitty scolding me to go get a real ladder before I broke my neck.

The chair held my weight. Cobwebs dodged away in the air currents as I slashed at them, and a spider dropped down on a long line to inspect me. “I’m not afraid of you,” I told it. “Go find someplace else. This is my room now.”