When I told Jane about our dinner guest, she flew into high gear, calling in Candy and Michelle to help with the cleaning, laying a fire in both the parlor and the dining room fireplaces, polishing the silverware, baking bread, and preparing a chicken to roast.
“It’s not a state dinner, you know,” I said to her, walking into the kitchen just as she plunged her hands into the bread dough. “It’s just dinner.”
“Nonsense,” Jane clucked as she kneaded. “When people are invited to this house, they have expectations.”
As she buzzed around, she spread joy in her wake. She clearly loved what she was doing. A visitor was coming to Alban House and Jane was in her element, there was no doubt about that. All at once, I wondered what she was going to do when the funeral was over, when Amity and I went home and this house was empty, for good this time.
I sighed and leaned my chin on my hands, looking out the window and wishing my brothers were around to help me make some of these decisions.
Later, I sat with a book in one of the oversized leather armchairs in the library, my legs curled up under me. It had turned from a beautiful, sunny morning into a gray, wet afternoon, and I watched as the rain hit the windows in bursts. I had nearly forgotten what a chilly, sodden mess June could be in this part of the country. Jane had laid a fire in the fireplace earlier in the day, and now it was blazing, just the thing to take the dampness out of the air.
I caught sight of Amity stomping through the hallway, a pall of negative energy radiating from her. “Hey!” I called out, and she stopped under the library’s archway. “What’s the matter, honey?”
“Nothing,” she groaned. “It’s just that I was having fun helping Mr. Jameson and Cody in the gardens all morning, but now this.” She flailed an arm toward the rain hitting the window.
“Why don’t you come in here with me and grab a book?” I suggested. “The library’s full of interesting stuff.”
“Right,” she sniffed. “I don’t think so.” She started to walk away, but then a thought came to me, as clearly as if it had been whispered into my ear.
“If you don’t feel like reading, we could explore the secret passageways instead,” I said as nonchalantly as I could manage, pretending to go back to my book.
This stopped her in her tracks, just as I knew it would. I tried to stifle a smile as she turned back toward me, a scowl on her face. “What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t Grandma ever tell you?” I said, leaning forward in my chair. “This house is full of hidden doors, secret passageways, rooms within the walls. There are tunnels to the lake and the gardens and even to the cemetery.”
She raised her eyebrows and crossed her arms over her chest, jutting one hip out to the side. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” I said, closing my book and setting it on the end table nearest me. “My brothers—your uncles—and I discovered them when we were kids, and we used to play in them all the time.”
“Why would old John James Alban the First have built this house with secret passageways?” she wanted to know, taking a few cautious steps into the room. I held my breath. It was as though I was coaxing an elusive wild animal to come near.
“The same reason castles have them, I’d expect,” I told her. “Quick getaways, clandestine operations, evading people. Do you want me to show you?”
“Yes!” she cried, her eyes shining. A minor miracle: I could still impress my daughter and I was going to get to spend some time with her. As I unfolded myself from my armchair, I gave silent thanks for the rain.
“Come on,” I said, putting a hand on her back and steering her toward the kitchen. The passageways had electricity, but I had no idea if it was still working. “We should get a couple of flashlights just in case.”
A few minutes later, flashlights in hand, we were climbing the stairs. “This is so cool,” Amity murmured, her face aglow as she scanned the walls with new eyes, wondering what secrets lay hidden within them.
“All the bedrooms have hidden doors that lead to the passageways,” I explained. “It really is quite an extensive network of tunnels.”
I opened the door to the master suite and led Amity through the study to the bedroom and pointed toward the wall, where an enormous tapestry, a medieval-looking image of a girl sitting in a garden surrounded by animals, stretched from the ceiling all the way to the floor.
“Pretty much anytime you see a tapestry hanging in a bedroom in this house, you’ll find a hidden door behind it,” I told her, remembering now. My mind drifted to the long-forgotten rainy days of my childhood, when my brothers and I would sneak through these secret doors into, we thought, magical worlds where anything might happen. Our imaginations in overdrive, we pretended we were going back in time to the days when Alban House was first built, when Minnesota itself was fairly new. We believed we just might encounter our grandfather as a boy, playing in the same passageways. I felt that way now.
I lifted the tapestry’s edge and ran my hand on the wall behind it, stepping sideways toward the rug’s center. Amity followed. “See this panel?” I showed her. “It’s spring-loaded. All you have to do is press on it like this—” I put both hands in the center of the panel and pushed. It sprung back open toward me.
“Awesome,” Amity whispered, her eyes wide.
I pulled the door open farther to reveal the dark, dusty passageway behind it. I felt around for the light switch and flipped it a couple of times. Nothing.
“I’m sure these bulbs must’ve burned out long ago,” I said to my daughter. “I can’t imagine Grandma used these passageways very much.”
“No,” she murmured, peering around me into the darkness.
“You’re sure you’re up for this?” I asked her, teasing a bit. “You never know what we’ll find in here.” I knew there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing more terrifying than the odd spider or bat, but it was fun to give my daughter an adrenaline rush.
She nodded. “Let’s go,” she said, nudging me a little.
I pressed the button on my flashlight and watched as the shaft of light illuminated the passageway beyond, where the years hung in the air, clung to the wood-paneled walls, and blanketed the dark floorboards. Spiderwebs were stitched in intricate patterns, their weavers at work undisturbed for decades. It smelled of the past, of countless childhood afternoons when my brothers and I would explore here. Our footsteps echoed in the emptiness as we walked along, and I could hear Amity’s shallow breathing soft and low in my ears.
“This leads to your room,” I told her, pointing to a door that was nearly indistinguishable from the wall on either side of it. It groaned as we pushed on it, voicing its displeasure at being awakened after such a long rest.
“I didn’t even know this door was here,” Amity whispered as she pushed aside a tapestry and peered into her room, its light and color and brightness contrasting sharply with the dingy, shadowy passageway in which we stood.
“Come on,” I told her, gently shutting the door and leading her farther down the hallway. “You won’t believe what’s down here. It’s almost like a house within a house.”
And then I noticed it, what seemed to be a darkness within the light-colored dust on the wall. I shone my flashlight beam in its direction and saw, for lack of a better description, a trail along the passageway’s wall, roughly at hand height. I squinted at it. Had someone been walking there recently, absently trailing one finger through the dust as they went? That just couldn’t be. It wasn’t like my mother would’ve been creeping around these passageways, and Jane certainly wouldn’t, either. A workman, perhaps? One of Mr. Jameson’s lads?
I shone the light to the floor looking for footprints but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary there. Just my imagination, then.
We reached the end of the hall, where narrow spiral stairs led either up to the third floor or down to the first floor and basement beyond it.
I started up the stairs but then thought better of it. There was always an air of taboo about the house’s third floor. Even as kids, my brothers and I didn’t play up there. We knew that generations of Albans had grown up on the third floor in the nursery, and it felt as though something—one of them, perhaps?—didn’t want us up there. It felt that same way now, as though walking up those stairs was unwise and going down was the safer path. I didn’t think too long before heading down.
The stairway was even more narrow than I remembered—barely wide enough for a person to fit through. “Careful,” I told Amity, pointing at a broken step.
On the first floor, the passageways ran around each of the main rooms and were lined with peepholes, each with its own cover that could be slid on or off, so undetected lurkers could easily spy on the people who happened to be in our parlor, salon, library, living room, and dining room. My brothers and I used to haunt these halls when my parents had dinner parties. We loved listening in on the hushed conversations of those who thought they were speaking in private. With our ears to the walls, we heard about all manner of affairs and alliances, secrets and scandals. We were privy to political intrigue and upsets, business strategies and tactics, even the odd criminal alibi or two.
I took a quick breath in when I saw it: the same slim trail along the dusty wall. What could it possibly be?
I motioned toward one of the peepholes and slid open the cover. Amity brushed off the dust on the wall around it and then put her eye to the hole.
“It’s Jane!” she whispered, her face a mix of delight and devilishness. “She’s setting out the crystal glasses and wine decanter. What for?”
“The minister is coming to dinner,” I whispered back to her.
“Groan,” she mouthed, with a mock grimace. I squeezed her arm and we walked on.
At the far end of the passageway that ran behind the grand living room walls, we came upon another stairway that led, I knew, down to a false basement room. This hidden room was adjacent to the main basement that held the furnace and other equipment needed to run the house and the grounds, along with a dark-paneled studio that contained leather armchairs, a long bar, a fireplace, a billiard table, and a dart board.
This main basement room had always been called Scotch and Cigars, because generations of Alban men would retire down there after dinner for those two indulgences and to discuss politics or the day’s events, or to simply play billiards or darts in the company of friends while the women took tea in the parlor.
Amity might or might not have seen this main room in earlier visits to the house—it was accessible via the main stairway—but the false basement room would be the one I knew would interest my daughter.
A mirror image of Scotch and Cigars, it was a hidden, secluded lair for those same generations of Albans who needed to evade the law or other pursuers, or to conceal all manner of illegal substances—liquor during Prohibition, I suspected, thinking back to David Coleville’s letter—or to otherwise hide what they didn’t want seen in the light of day. There was even a daybed, a refrigerator, and a bathroom for those who needed to hide out for an extended period of time. When Jane discovered my brothers and me playing there one afternoon, she gave us strict orders to stay out of the room on pain of the severest punishments.
Just a bit farther down the passageway from the false basement room was a series of tunnels leading outside—one went directly to the lakeshore (for speedy getaways by boat, we always thought), one into the gardens, another led toward the back of the house, and still another found its way toward the cemetery beyond. It was as though John James Alban had wanted the ability to flee in any direction if necessary, and I had no doubt that in a family as wealthy and potentially scandalous as mine, it had been necessary often.
“Wait until you see this,” I said to Amity as we reached the door to this secret room. I put my hand on its center and pushed the groaning door open into the darkness.
The beams of both of our flashlights illuminated the room’s interior, resting on leather armchairs and sofas, alighting on walls and floorboards.
I noticed she was squinting, trying to make out something in the darkness. “Mom,” she said in a harsh whisper, grabbing my arm. “Look.”
As I stood there straining to see what she was seeing, a feeling of tangible dread seeped out of the room and surrounded me, settling on my skin and taking hold. Something was not right here.
I felt along the wall for the light switch and flipped it, illuminating the room in a yellowish glow. And I saw it then, the thing that had caught my daughter’s eye. On the daybed, a pillow and a blanket were strewn on top of the quilt, not so unusual for a daybed, but it looked mussed, as though somebody had been sitting or lying there … recently. On the end table, a glass of water. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw, or thought I saw, movement in the doorway to the bathroom. A dark shape shifting.
I grabbed my daughter’s arm and pulled her back into the passageway, slamming the door shut behind us.
“Move, honey, move!” I shouted as I pushed her along the corridor to the narrow staircase leading upstairs. We pounded upward, my heart racing, until we reached the hidden doorway to the living room. I popped it open and pushed Amity inside, through the hanging tapestry, slamming the door shut behind us and finally leaning on it to catch my breath.
“Mom, was that …?” Amity’s words stopped short, her eyes imploring mine for answers.
“I don’t know,” I said to her, grasping her arm again and hurrying us out of the room and into the foyer. “You just stay close.” I called out for Jane, who came scurrying out of the kitchen carrying a silver candlestick. Her smile faded when she saw the look on my face. “What is it, miss? What’s happened?”
“Jane, we might have an intruder in the house,” I said. “There was somebody in the false basement room.”
Jane squinted at me. “Whatever are you talking about, child?”
I tried again, slower this time. “I was showing Amity the passageways.”
She clucked and shook her head. “Not that again. Why all the children in this house gravitate toward those infernal passageways, I’ll never know.”
“Just listen.” I put my hand up. “We went down to the false basement, turned on the light, and … Somebody had been in there, Jane. Slept there, maybe. We saw a pillow and a blanket, even a glass of water.”
“I thought I saw something, or someone, move in the darkness,” Amity said, her voice cracking.
“I did, too, honey,” I said, draping an arm across her shoulders and pulling her close.
Jane crossed her arms in front of her chest as her mouth straightened into a thin line. “That’s simply impossible,” she said. “Nobody apart from family even knows that room exists.”
I looked from Jane to Amity and back again. “I think we should call the police.”
“It just can’t be, lass.” Jane shook her head. “There’s no way anyone could’ve gotten into the house, much less stumbled upon that hidden room. There’s a reason it’s hidden—your family didn’t want anyone to know it was there.”
“I know, Jane. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the fact is, Amity and I both saw evidence that somebody had been there. Recently.” I turned around and marched toward the door to the passageways. “Come on. We’ll show you.”
“Seriously?” Amity stood right where she was. “We’re going back down there?”
I hesitated for a moment and then smiled at my daughter. “I want to know if we really saw what I thought we saw. If somebody is down there, what’s he going to do against three strong women?”
With Jane brandishing the heavy candlestick and Amity and I wielding our flashlights, we made our way through the hidden door, down the rickety staircase, and through the door leading into the false basement room. I flipped on the light, and Amity gasped, her hands flying to her mouth, at what we all saw: Nothing. No blanket. No pillow. No water glass. It was all gone.
“Mom,” Amity said to me, her eyes wide. “I know we saw what we saw down here.”
I nodded, staring into the room, as though, if I looked closer, I would be able to discern what happened to the items we had seen there just moments before.
“It’s just your eyes playing tricks on you,” Jane said, patting me on the shoulder. “Not to worry. You were all worked up with your secret passageways and false rooms and …”
“No!” Amity interrupted, walking farther into the room and holding her arms wide. “I know what we saw. It was here, and now it’s gone.”
I approached my daughter and took her by the hand. “Let’s go upstairs,” I said, slowly pulling her toward the door. “I don’t like this.”
Jane and Amity crouched through the doorway, but I stayed where I was for a moment, looking at the table where the glass of water had been. The other furniture in the room was covered by a thin layer of dust, but that table was wiped clean.