CHAPTER 30

I lunged for the bathroom door and yanked it open. An older woman crouched on the floor, her posture mirroring Nisa’s.

“I’m so sorry,” Nisa gasped, as she and the woman both scrambled to their feet.

“What were you doing?” I demanded.

“The same thing she was.” The woman jabbed a finger in Nisa’s direction. “Spying.”

“I wasn’t spying! I—”

“Amanda Greer.” The woman dropped her hand. Her smile immediately catapulted me back to when I was a starstruck teenager in Doc Martens and an old flannel shirt, meeting her in a grubby tent. “I was just checking to see if anyone was in the next room. Now I know.”

The three of us stared at each other, and Nisa burst out laughing. “Right—now you know. I’m Nisa Macari. Of course I know who you are.”

Amanda lowered her gaze. “Aren’t you kind.”

“I’m Holly,” I said. “I am so glad you’re here, I can’t tell you…”

Amanda grasped my outstretched hand with both of hers and squeezed it, hard—very hard—the way people used to at after-work gatherings where everyone was trying to figure out who had gotten an end-of-the-year bonus and who had not.

“I’m so pleased to meet you in person.” Amanda released my hand. “This project, it’s the most exciting thing I’ve seen in ages. And Nisa, you’re the remarkable singer, aren’t you?”

She turned her sharp gaze on Nisa, who flushed. “Yes! Singer-songwriter, I’ll be adapting old English ballads—”

“Folk music.” Amanda nodded discreetly, as if acknowledging that she and Nisa shared membership in an arcane society, or some twelve-step program Nisa had somehow kept secret from me. “I love folk music.”

“It’s not really folk music,” Nisa started, but Amanda had already walked past her into our bedroom. She halted, scrutinizing bed, bureau, armchair, then stepped to the window, where she gazed outside.

“I like the yellow,” she said abruptly. She turned and directed her unsettling stare at me. “But it’s not my color. Washes me out. It suits you, though.”

I murmured thanks. I never wear yellow. Amanda was sizing me up, so I did the same. Her dark hair was untamed as ever, though not as thick. I was sure it was dyed. She was well into her sixties, but I saw no trace of gray. Her face was mostly unlined—a few well-placed stabs of Botox would have helped with that.

Her features had always been well-suited for the stage. Large midnight-blue eyes, arching black brows filled in with a few strokes of eyebrow pencil. A wide expressive mouth, high forehead. A flattened nose with a small bump in it—she’d broken it during a childhood fall, a detail she’d shared on an old episode of The Dick Cavett Show I’d viewed on YouTube.

Not a beautiful face, but a powerful one. Like Maria Callas’s, or Jeanne Moreau’s, designed to command attention from the last rows in the balcony. Movies didn’t treat it as kindly as the stage. Lingering closeups allowed you to detect a slight asymmetry. One eye was fractionally larger than the other, and from the wrong angle, her strong chin could dominate her face.

Yet she could convey immense vulnerability. The night before we drove to Hill House, I made Nisa watch Amanda Greer playing Amanda Wingfield in a Hartford Stage production of The Glass Menagerie, recorded for Connecticut Public Television. I lingered on her expression when her fragile daughter Laura first opens the door and sees Jim, the gentleman caller, glance from her to her mother, then swiftly back outside, calculating how quickly he can escape.

During those seconds, we witnessed an entire life collapse upon itself, burying Amanda Wingfield’s hope for her child as swiftly and silently as someone tossing a flower into an open grave. Amanda Greer does it without a single motion, without even blinking (a feat in itself). I’ve watched that clip dozens of times and cried during every single one.

“Holly?” I started, and saw Nisa observing me curiously. “You okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Come see my room,” Amanda ordered us.

We walked through the bathroom, which still had its original fittings—big claw-foot tub, subway tile floor, pedestal sink. There were plenty of towels, and the toilet had been updated sometime in the twenty-first century.

“Oh, isn’t this lovely,” exclaimed Nisa as we entered the bedroom, her voice falsely bright. The room was a mess—clothes and cosmetics bags and paperbacks, a beach towel. Did Amanda think she was staying at a resort hotel? The room was identical to ours, though the walls had been painted an ugly pink, again without removing the blotched wallpaper beneath. The effect was of a fading bruise.

Amanda let loose a practiced peal of laughter. “Oh please—it’s revolting! But I like it. It will help me get into character, right? This whole place—you could do a site-specific performance of Witching Night at Hill House. It would be perfect.”

“Maybe. Right now I just want to get it onstage where people will see it. Your Elizabeth will definitely make that happen.”

“Along with Nisa’s music,” Amanda said grandly, even though she hadn’t yet heard a note. Nisa blushed as Amanda gave me an enigmatic smile. She walked to the bed, picked up a linen jacket, and hung it in the closet.

“She has a closet,” said Nisa quietly.

“We have one too. It’s stuck behind the wardrobe.”

“I’m starved.” Amanda shut the closet door, which immediately began to creep open again. “I eat early—what do you think about five o’clock?”

I looked outside. The sky had darkened to lichen-gray, with a dull orange glow in the west, and the wind sent the last leaves spinning from the trees. “Sure,” I replied. “Why don’t we meet downstairs around four thirty? We’ll let Stevie know.”