After a restless flight from Seattle to Minneapolis, my daughter and I rented a car and drove northward, watching the landscape change from city to suburb to farm fields to pine forests. Cresting the top of the hill near Spirit Mountain, I took a quick breath in as I saw the expansive view before me—the bay between the cities of Duluth and Superior, the iconic Aerial Lift Bridge, rising and falling to accommodate the massive ships that needed to get into the port, and the flood of city on either side of the bay that seemed to have crested in my absence. Beyond all that, the vastness and ferocity of Lake Superior shimmered. Taking it in for the first time in two decades, I felt my stomach twist itself into knots.
I had come home to bury my mother, an event that seemed as surreal to me as the circumstances of her passing. As I drove down the hill toward town, it felt like time itself was ticking backward, the years folding in on top of themselves as though I were leafing through a book, back to the page when my mother was a vibrant fifty-year-old who still rowed on this greatest of lakes every summer morning. It simply didn’t seem possible that death could find her or, if it did, that she couldn’t persuade it to come back another day.
I wondered if it all hadn’t been a mistake, if I would arrive at the house to find her on the patio sipping a glass of lemonade or a gin and tonic, as she liked to do in the summer months.
Looking back on it now, it wouldn’t surprise me if my mother’s spirit had indeed been hovering as I drove toward the house that day. Not to welcome me home but to warn me of what was awaiting me there—memories that would unearth themselves from the graves I had dug to contain them, and things much stranger than that, monstrous things that would creep and lurk and hide. I’ve always known that old houses are full of such things, Alban House most of all.
As I turned into our driveway, I gasped aloud when I saw a ticket booth at the end of what was now a parking lot. I knew the croquet lawn had been paved over, but it still gave me a jolt to see dark asphalt where the grass my father tended so carefully—obsessively, my mother always teased—used to be.
Visions of our annual summer parties crept into my mind—girls in cotton dresses, boys in seersucker suits, lemonade we’d secretly spike with vodka. A croquet tournament in the afternoon; a bonfire on the lakeshore at night. I could see the shadows of my brothers, the twins Jake and Jimmy, running their ridiculous victory lap around the croquet lawn, mallets held high over their heads. The sound of their laughter floated around me before diminishing little by little until it was gone, as if it were buoyed downstream on a river of memory that flowed through this place and through me.
My daughter’s voice pulled me back from those visions of the past. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing toward the booth and pulling the earbuds out of her ears for the first time in the nearly three hours it took to drive here from the Minneapolis airport.
“The house is, well … it’s sort of a museum now, remember?” I reminded her.
Amity’s face didn’t betray any hint of recognition. She furrowed her brows. “What do you mean, a museum?”
“We talked about this, honey.”
She opened her eyes wide and shrugged with the particular type of silent sarcasm that only teenage girls seemed to possess. I sighed and tried again. “The university asked us if it could conduct public tours of the first floor of the house and the garden because of their historic value. I told you all of this last year.”
“I don’t get it. It’s just an old house.”
“Oh, Amity, for goodness’ sake.” I pulled through the parking lot and into our driveway. “Why don’t you read a history book or, better yet, listen when your family talks to you? In any case, it couldn’t matter less right now.”
Instantly, I regretted my shortness with her and put my hand on her arm. “Sorry, honey,” I started, but she had already slumped back into her seat and put the earbuds back into her ears. Another fantastic mother-daughter moment.
As I climbed out of the car, I noticed a woman poke her head out the ticket booth’s door, eye us suspiciously, and then skitter across the parking lot toward us, her high heels clicking all the way. “Excuse me!” she chirped, wagging a finger at me. “Excuse me! You can’t park there!”
I ignored her and opened the rental car’s tailgate as Amity unfolded herself from the passenger seat.
“This driveway isn’t for visitors, and besides, the house is closed,” the woman huffed, finally reaching us. “I’m sorry, but there are no tours today or for the foreseeable future. And we don’t want people wandering around the gardens on their own. That’s not allowed.”
“I’m not here for a tour,” I said, managing a smile. “I’m Grace Alban.” I watched as the woman’s scowl melted into confusion and then recognition.
Then a breathless stream of backpedaling. “Oh! Miss Alban! I’m so sorry! I should have recognized you right away!”
“That’s okay,” I said with a nod. “I haven’t been here in quite a while. Thanks for being so vigilant, keeping people out. We appreciate it, especially now.”
“I’m Susan Johnson,” she said quickly, still staring wide-eyed at me. “I’m with the university. I’m just here gathering some things. We’re not sure how long the house will be closed or if we’ll be able to open it up again.” She squinted at me. “I suppose that’s up to you now.”
I supposed it was.
She clutched her clipboard tighter to her chest. “I’m so sorry about your mother. We all are. What a wonderful lady.”
Tears were stinging at my eyes, so I grabbed my bag from the back of the car and nodded to Amity to do the same. “Thank you,” I said to the woman as I popped the suitcase’s handle up into place, grateful for something to distract me from her concerned face. “We’ll be in touch with you about reopening, but don’t plan on it for a while.”
“Of course. And, Miss Alban, this goes without saying, but if there’s anything the university can do …”
“Thank you,” I said to her again, eyeing her name tag. “Susan.”
I turned and let myself look at my home, Alban House, for the first time in twenty years. The redbrick façade rising three stories tall, the parapets jutting out from the roof, the enormous stone patio running the entire length of the house facing the lake, the stairs down to the gardens that framed the property—none of it had changed at all.
Growing up in Alban House, I felt I was a princess living in an enchanted castle, and indeed, the house was designed to look like one, patterned after the Jacobean estates European kings built for themselves in centuries past. But I soon learned people who lived in castles—the ones I read about in my storybook fairy tales—didn’t necessarily live enchanted lives. Not sweetly enchanted, anyway. Strange and otherworldly things swirled around them, threatening, no, wanting their happiness. At least that’s how the stories I read went. I held my breath as I realized I was walking right back into mine.
As I climbed the patio steps, I could almost see my mother standing there, her arms open wide. Jane ran right through the very spot, dissipating the image into wispy shards that fluttered away on the wind. “Oh, my girl,” Jane whispered into my hair as she threw her arms around me and hugged me tight. “Finally back where you belong.”
I relaxed into her embrace and felt the stress of the past few days begin to melt away. I put my head onto her shoulder and wanted nothing more than to stay there for a good long while—safe and comforted by the woman who had always handled everything for my family for as long as I could remember.
“And Amity, dear,” Jane said, cupping a hand to my daughter’s cheek. “Haven’t you grown since the last time you were here! You’re taller than your mother already. What grade will you be starting in the fall? Eleventh, is it?”
Amity smiled at this. “That’s right. I’ll be a junior. Nice to see you, too, Jane.” She gave me a sideways glance. “Should I take this stuff up to my room?”
I nodded, knowing my daughter wanted nothing more than to escape adult company, flop onto her bed, and start texting her friends. “Sure, honey. Go and get settled. I need to talk to Jane. Then I’ll be up and we’ll see about dinner.”
Amity lugged her suitcase across the patio, pulled open one of the massive wooden front doors, and disappeared inside.
“It meant the world to your mother that you sent the girl here every summer, once she was old enough,” Jane said to me, fishing a balled-up tissue out of her sleeve and dabbing her eyes with it. “Mrs. Alban doted on Amity, so she did.”
I cleared the sadness and shame from my throat. “Now I wish I had come with her. I wish …”
“I know, child. I know.”
Jane hooked her arm into mine and I let her lead me to the patio table. The sight of it, after all these years, gave me a pang of melancholy that reverberated through my whole body. The huge wooden table, with seating for fourteen, had always reminded me of something out of an ancient Celtic legend. My great-grandfather had imported it, and much of the materials used to build the house, from Ireland when he broke ground on this place in the late 1800s—at least that was how the story went.
We used to have meals on the patio during the warm summer months and even into the fall, Mother, Daddy, Jake, Jimmy, and me, along with whatever friends were circulating in our orbit at the time.
I thought of those days, and there it was again—the twins’ laughter, low, musical, infectious. I wished it would engulf me and carry me along whatever river their giggling was floating on, back to another time in this same place, back to evenings when my family debated our way through mealtimes, talking about art and politics and literature and even celebrity scandals of the moment; carrying me back further still to the days when our mother would wrestle with the cook for the kitchen so she could bake for us herself, greeting us with love and good humor and a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies as we came through the door after a long day of school; and back further to lazy summer afternoons when my brothers and I would lie on the lakeshore counting the sailboats as they passed.
And now they were all gone. Only I remained.
Jane’s voice dissolved these memories. “I thought you might like a bite of something after your journey,” she said, patting my hand. I saw she had set one end of the table with a bottle of wine, a basket of bread, some sliced cheeses.
I couldn’t remember the last meal I had eaten. Lunch yesterday? Or was it dinner the night before? Time was a blur ever since I got Jane’s call. I pulled out one of the heavy wrought-iron chairs and sank into it with a sigh. “This is just what I needed. Thank you.”
She hovered beside me, waiting. “Please, Jane, join me,” I said, gesturing to the chair next to mine. Even after more than fifty years of running this house, she still stood on ceremony.
I poured some wine for us both and took a big bite of the crusty bread and cheese, Gouda with caraway, which she knew was my favorite. With all she had been through in the past few days, Jane still took the time to attend to the little things to make me feel welcome.
She peered into her wineglass, a bit scandalized. She smiled, and I saw a devilish glint in her eye. “I suppose I could have a wee nip.”
Dear Jane. I had missed her gentle, good humor, the brogue making music of her words. I smiled at her for a moment but could feel my smile fade as quickly as it came. I had been dreading this conversation, yet I knew now was the time. I took a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh, and said: “You said on the phone you didn’t want to tell me the whole story until we could sit face-to-face. So here we are. What exactly happened, Jane?”
Jane shook her head. “I still don’t rightly know.”
I waited as Jane smoothed the apron in her lap. Finally, she began. “Your mother had her breakfast on the second-floor patio, right outside her bedroom, as usual. I told her that journalist called again, the man interested in writing the book about Alban House, and—”
I held up a hand to stop her story and squinted at her. “Wait a minute. What book?”
She sighed. “They’re always poking around here, the writers, especially after Mrs. Alban opened the house up to tours. They’re wanting to know about that night. Some want to know about the supposed Alban curse.” She spat out this last word as though it was tart on her tongue.
I rolled my eyes. “Not that again. You know, Jane, people die in other families and nobody thinks it’s a curse. Why can’t they just leave it alone? She told him to shove off, right?”
“Not this time.” Jane lowered her voice, narrowed her eyes, and looked back and forth, as though checking to make sure no one was listening. “She asked me to tell him to come that afternoon. She was going to talk to him.”
I nearly choked on the sip of wine I had just taken. “You’re kidding me.”
“No. She said she thought it was time. It was then she went out. Walked out the back door, waved good-bye, and that was the last time I saw her.” Jane’s gaze dropped to her lap, where she clutched a tissue. “Alive,” she added.
I reached over and took her hands, dry and red from years of working in the kitchen. “I can’t imagine how hard it must’ve been for you.”
“Aye,” Jane sniffed. As she dabbed at her eyes, I could see the years had settled into their corners, creating deep grooves where her faint laugh lines had been the last time I had seen her.
Jane cleared her throat and went on. “An hour or so passed, and then I started to get worried. The journalist would be on his way, and there was no sign of your mother. That’s when I sent Mr. Jameson and Carter out to look for her.”
“But you found her in the study, right? That’s what the police said.”
She shook her head. “No. That’s what I told the police, and it’s what they in turn told the reporters, but …”
“What, Jane?”
“Your mother disappeared. Vanished. Carter, Mr. Jameson, and his two assistants—those lads he’s got helping in the garden for the summer—they searched the entire grounds. I searched this house. She was nowhere to be found. She was not in the study.”
“But—”
“I know how it sounds. But I’m telling you, child. She was gone. We searched for more than an hour.”
Dread hung in the air, surrounding me. I wanted her to continue, but I couldn’t formulate the words to ask.
“Just when I was about to phone the police, we found her.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Not in the study. In the main garden. She was …” Jane stopped, took a deep breath in, and continued, her next words rushing forth like a waterfall. “She was laid out there, with her hands folded across her chest, on the bench by the fountain. As though she were in repose.”
I snapped my head around and looked toward the front of the house. “But you said they looked for her outside. You can see the fountain from right here. If she—”
“That’s what I’m telling you, girl. They had gone through that garden a thousand times, looking for her. She wasn’t there. And then, suddenly, she was.”
I held Jane’s gaze, shaking my head from side to side. The urge to get up and run away from this whole situation was overwhelming. As if she could see what I was thinking, Jane grabbed my hands and held them, and me, tight.
“I couldn’t have the police finding her like that, now, could I? In the same spot, the very same spot, where they found him all those years ago. The newspapers would have had a field day. We didn’t need that; you didn’t need that. So I had Mr. Jameson and Carter carry her into the study. Then we made the call to the police.”
I exhaled, not realizing I had been holding my breath the entire time. “You’re right, Jane. That kind of publicity is the last thing we need right now.”
I poured another glass of wine and gulped it down, thinking it might help quiet the violent shivering that was coursing through my body. It didn’t. I set the glass down on the table so I wouldn’t drop it.
“What are you saying, Jane? Do you think my mother was—” I had trouble formulating the word. “Murdered?”
Jane shook her head. “It doesn’t seem possible. Who would do something like that? And why? Your mother was the salt of the earth.”
I let her remark sink in. She was right; there was nobody who would want to hurt my mother. And yet … “What do the police say?” I asked finally.
“When the medical examiner was here, she said it was likely natural causes. Your mother was in her seventies, she had been ill and had a heart condition. But they’re doing an autopsy so we’ll know for sure.”
I slumped against the back of my chair.
“So the police say it was natural causes. What do you think?”
Jane looked me in the eye. “You don’t want to know what I’m thinking, my girl.”