Please tell me this door opens from the inside,” I said, rattling the handle.
He shook his head. “It’s a vault. It locks from the outside when the door is closed.”
I looked at him, openmouthed. “You mean we’re locked in?”
Matthew fished a cell phone out of his pocket. “I’m afraid so. I’ll just call my secretary and she can come …” He stared at the display on the face of his phone and then looked up at me with a sheepish grin. “No bars. I guess the stone of this subbasement is blocking the signal.”
My stomach did a quick flip. “Now what?”
“I guess we wait,” he said, shrugging his shoulders with an ease I found disarming, considering we were locked in an ancient stone room adjacent to a basement crypt. I looked around at the generations of dust on the shelves and I wondered just how much air there was in there. The vault certainly didn’t have a vent to the outdoors.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We won’t be here long. The janitorial crew will be here soon. They’ll see my car, they’ll see the lights on leading to the basement, and they’ll put two and two together.”
“What if they don’t?”
“We’ll bang on the door and the ceiling,” he offered. “They’ll hear us. Worst-case scenario, we’ll have to wait until morning. Martha will be here at the crack of dawn and will figure out we’re down here. It’s Sunday tomorrow, remember? The whole church will fill up before eight thirty, and when I’m nowhere to be found, she’ll track me down, believe me. The woman is like a bloodhound.”
“All night?” I squeaked, a sense of unease growing inside of me.
He took my hands in his. “Listen, Grace,” he said. “Everything’s going to be okay. I promise. We’ll be out of here before you know it.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I do.” He smiled. “I’m just hoping it’s not one of the ladies from the church who finds us, or the scandal of us being alone together in this vault will spread faster than a swarm of locusts.”
I could see that he was trying to lighten the mood, so I tried to follow his lead. “What I want to know is why, every time I’m with you, something dramatic happens.”
“It’s just business as usual for an average Lutheran minister,” he said. “Sermons, marriages, funerals, and the odd life-threatening incident or two.”
I chuckled. “There are worse people to be locked in a vault with. I mean, if we have to start praying to be rescued, you’ve got a direct pipeline to the man upstairs.”
“The man upstairs that I’m most interested in reaching at this moment is the janitor,” he said, staring at his dead phone.
I sighed, looking around the room, dust hanging in the air like fog. I wrapped my arms around my chest and shivered.
Matthew’s eyes met mine. “Are you cold?”
I nodded. “A little. It really is dank down here, isn’t it?”
He peeled off the jean jacket he was wearing and held it open for me.
“Are you sure you don’t need it?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not at all. Please.”
I slipped my arms inside and felt his warmth wrap around me. The jacket smelled like him—a hint of spiciness from his soap mixed with fresh air. I turned to thank him, and our eyes locked for a moment that seemed to go on forever. I could feel my face heating up and was grateful for the dim light in the room.
We stood like that for a while, neither saying anything, each holding the other’s gaze, and then he reached toward me and pushed a stray tendril of hair off my forehead. I knew exactly what this moment was and exactly what was about to happen if I let it, and I stepped back a few paces. The attraction between us was undeniable, but getting involved with him, or anyone, was the last thing I needed.
“Thank you for the jacket,” I coughed, clearing my throat.
His eyes still held mine for a few seconds. “You’re welcome,” he whispered.
I turned and walked down one of the aisles. “What shall we do with ourselves, then, while we wait?” I asked a little louder than I intended.
“You could open the box, for starters.”
“You’re right!” I smiled at him. “I could.” I made my way over to the shelf where it had been sitting for decades. The box was wrapped in heavy brown paper that had begun to yellow and fray around the edges.
I slipped my finger under one end of the paper and ran it down the length of the box, the wrapping crackling easily with age. I tore the rest away and then lifted the lid, conscious that the last person to touch it had been my mother before she married my dad.
Inside was a large manila envelope containing what seemed to be a ream of paper. On the front of the envelope, my mother’s address, in the now-familiar handwriting of David Coleville.
I looked up at Matthew. “We found it.”
He nodded, his eyes shining. I opened the envelope and drew out the final work of David Coleville, a book the literary world had anticipated but never received; wondered and speculated about, but never got to read. Only we knew it existed.
My hands were shaking as I held the pages.
I had no idea what this manuscript might have been worth in monetary value, but as I sat there in the dusty, dank vault, I knew that its real value to me wasn’t in dollars and cents.
My mother wasn’t here to tell me about what happened all those years ago. I couldn’t simply ask her about her secret romance with one of this country’s most talented writers, but his unpublished novel, the ream of paper I held in my hands, would bring that summer to life for me in vivid detail—Coleville’s version of it, anyway.
Reading this story would be as close as I would ever get to time traveling. The words would transport me back to another time at Alban House, to a time before I was born, when my mother and father, David Coleville, and my aunt Fate were much younger than I was now, when my grandparents were vibrant and energetic and commanding. Through Coleville’s words, I could immerse myself in the world of my parents and grandparents in a way few children have ever had the opportunity to do.
I knew Coleville had changed the names of people and places, but I was sure I’d be able to discern who was whom. I stood there for a few minutes with the manuscript in my hands, an odd mix of excitement and trepidation bubbling up in my stomach. I had been dying to know more about their relationship, how they fell in love and why it all went wrong, but now that I had at least some of the answers at my fingertips, something was holding me back from turning that first page.
A voice then, soft in my ear. Be careful what you wish for, Gracie. Once you learn the truth, you can’t unlearn it.
I stared down at the first page and read the title aloud to Matthew.
“The Haunting of Whitehall Manor by David Coleville.” A tingling traveled through the page and into my hands as I said it. “Shall I read it aloud to you?”
“Let’s just take a moment to realize that you and I are the first people in fifty years to be reading this work,” he said, his eyes glowing. “This is a real gift, Grace. Months and years from now, when the whole world knows about it, when this very manuscript has been sold at auction, when you have been interviewed on the Today show talking about how you found it, we can look back on this moment and remember that it was just the two of us, here in this vault.”
He sank down onto the cement floor and motioned for me to join him, which I did. “That said”—he smiled—“I’m ready to hear it.”
I took a deep breath and began to read, the words immediately transporting us out of that damp church basement and into the glittering showplace that was Alban House, fifty years earlier.
Chapter One
The first time I laid eyes on Whitehall Manor, it was a cold, dreary June evening. I was squinting to see anything out of the fogged-up window in the back of the car that my companion’s father had sent for us, but the world seemed dull and hazy around the edges, as though it was formulating itself, working to make itself whole out of the mists in preparation for our arrival, as Avalon did for Arthur. I let my mind drift to mystical kings and knights and wizards as we bumped along the road toward our destination. I didn’t know it then, but looking back on it now, it is an apt analogy, for just as Avalon was home to sorceresses and magic, so, too, was Whitehall, containing secrets and mystery and enchantment, like the island that is steeped in Celtic lore.
As we rounded the corner of the driveway, the house appeared, solid now, sturdy and whole, shrouded in the fog that had crept on land from its birthplace on the lake and lay heavy around the place. The house was not a castle, not exactly, but an enormous, imposing structure all the same, a full city block long at least. It reminded me of an old manor house in the windswept British countryside, the moors. It was an ancient and formidable place that had stood against the ravages of Lake Superior’s icy winds for generations.
As we got out of the car, I strained my neck to take it in, all three stories, with turrets and a tower, brick and stucco, several chimneys—I quickly counted fourteen, but there might have been more—and a patio running the entire length of the house overlooking tenderly manicured English gardens and the lake beyond. The staff stood at attention, at least a dozen of them, in a line snaking from the massive wooden front door onto the patio, in position to welcome their returning son home.
“We’re here!” announced Flynn, my traveling companion, otherwise known as Donald Flynn Brennan IV, the grandson of the man who had come to this country as the child of a poor Irishman escaping the Potato Famine and had made his fortune when this country was new, thriving, and growing.
I met Flynn at Harvard, where we were roommates anticipating our senior year, although I was older than he, having worked for several years to save up the funds to attend. I was lucky enough to have also received a small scholarship, being the ancestor not of a long line of well-heeled businessmen as was Flynn, but of the working-class stock from Boston who had built (and, yes, cleaned) the venerable institution so long ago. While my relatives were toiling with bricks and mortar and dust mops, Flynn’s were acquiring railroads and giant tracts of virgin forests and iron ore mines.
But despite his great wealth and lineage, Flynn wasn’t anything like the other “children of privilege” who haunted Harvard’s hallowed halls. We had lived together since we were freshmen, and I found him to be humble, curious, and, above all, a good laugh. He swept through life with a smile on his face, a joke on his lips, and a sense of ease that, I suppose, is the providence of the very rich.
Flynn had invited me home with him every summer and I had always refused, making up some excuse or another. But not this year. I felt that, as a man who would soon graduate from one of the most formidable educational institutions in the world, I had something respectable to offer.
Climbing out of the car, Flynn pushed the thick blond hair out of his blue eyes as he flashed me a wide grin. He looked the picture of a typical Ivy Leaguer, wearing a cream-colored cable-knit sweater with navy-blue trim around its V-neck; a blue button-down shirt underneath, tails untucked and hanging below his sweater; khaki pants; and loafers without stockings. This boy was to the manor born, no doubt about it, but the way he was laughing and shaking hands with the staff, he didn’t show it.
“Mary-Ruth!” He grinned, pulling a formidable-looking woman into his arms. “Give us a hug, lassie!”
“Welcome home, my boy. We’ve missed you, so we have.”
“It’s good to be home,” he said, resting his head on the old woman’s shoulder for a moment.
Flynn turned to me, then. “Mickey, meet one of the best women on this or any other planet, Mary-Ruth McBride. She runs things, and I do mean everything, here at Whitehall. Mary, here’s my much ballyhoo-ed roommate, Michael Connolly.”
“Ma’am, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said, bowing low.
But the woman had eyes only for Flynn, placing one hand, red and worn from a lifetime of working in the kitchen, delicately on his cheek. A moment of tenderness between herself and the boy, now a man, that she had obviously raised since childhood.
Just then, the two massive front doors burst open and the family appeared, right on cue.
“Darling!” Flynn’s mother held her arms wide for her son, and he flew into them as his father beamed and patted Flynn on the back. Hugs and laughter all around. I thought back to the chilly relationship I had with my own parents, especially my father, and I was, not for the first time, envious of Flynn. Wealth, privilege, and happiness, too. It didn’t seem quite fair, somehow.
“Mom, Dad, this is Michael Connolly—soon-to-be world-famous novelist, currently crew captain and pool shark.” Flynn smiled, winking at me. “Mickey boy, my parents, Donny and Honor Brennan.”
“We’re delighted you could join us for the summer, Michael,” Honor cooed, taking my hands in hers and giving them a squeeze. “We do so enjoy having the children’s friends here. Life, laughter, love, that’s what we’re about here at Whitehall. The more, the merrier!”
I can’t explain why, but I felt an odd tingle in my hands when she touched them. A slight jolt of electricity passed between us and she shot me a look with her steel-gray eyes that made me decidedly uncomfortable. Those eyes did not evoke life, laughter, and love. Just the opposite.
“Thank you so much for having me,” I said quickly, pulling my hands from hers and brushing my hair out of my eyes. “I’m starting my first novel, and I’m hoping to get some good writing done over the summer before the fall term puts an end to all that. Flynn convinced me this was just the place to do it.”
Flynn’s father patted me on the back as we all walked through the doorway and into the house. “Writing, you say?” he said. “A novel, is it?”
I suppose I should’ve responded with more than a grunt and a smile, but my words sifted down into a gasp when I stepped through the threshold and took in this place my roommate called home. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. Towering ceilings, a grand staircase, an enormous stained-glass window, one full story tall, overlooking the gardens and grounds. I had hoped to hide my rather pedestrian awe, but I’m afraid I stood there like a lump, mouth agape, eyes wide.
“What a beautiful home you have, Mr. Brennan,” I murmured.
“It’ll do, son.” Flynn’s father smiled. “It’ll do. And please call me Donny. Mr. Brennan was my grandfather.”
He led me into the drawing room next to the foyer, a decidedly masculine, dark-paneled room with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf on one wall and a wood-burning fireplace on another with leather armchairs, couches, a scattering of end tables and ottomans grouped around it. The staff had laid the fire earlier and now it was blazing, just the thing to take the chill out of an early June night here on the shore of Lake Superior.
Donny walked over to the sideboard, where decanters of scotch, chilled white wine, a bucket of ice, and various glasses had been arranged. As he began pouring drinks, I heard laughter, and looked up to see two girls come running down the grand stairway, arm in arm. I knew one of them from the family photographs that Flynn displayed in our dormitory—she was his younger sister, Prudence. Pru, he called her. The other girl, an auburn-haired beauty, I had never seen.
The girls swept into the room, bringing an air of fun and vitality with them that caused everyone to smile.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Pru sniped at Flynn while flashing me a big smile. “This whole house has been in an uproar for days about your arrival. You’d think the pope himself was making an appearance.”
“I thought I smelled something foul when I walked in, and here you are!” Flynn retorted, making a show of sniffing her hair and wincing.
“Welcome home, I suppose.” She sighed, her eyes settling on me. “At least you brought someone interesting with you this time.”
“He’s quite interesting, my dear sister. He intends to write novels. Those are books with big words in them.” Flynn shot Prudence a look and turned to her friend. “Now the lovely Lily here reads all the time, so she knows what I’m talking about.”
He wasn’t kidding about the lovely part. Lily was delicate and had a soft way about her that contrasted with Pru’s boldness. She blushed, glancing shyly at me.
“With all this talk of books, I hope we’re not going to be sitting around reading all summer long,” Pru said. “What a bore.”
I laughed out loud, bowing slightly to the girls. “Perish the thought, Miss Brennan. Flynn tells me you ladies play a mean game of croquet.”
“That’s right.” Pru brushed the wispy blond hair out of her eyes and flashed a smile. Then she hooked her arm into Lily’s and began leading her out of the room, giving me a backward glance. “We play for money here, Mr. Connolly. Are you up to it?”
“I think I can hold my own.”
The girls giggled and disappeared under the archway. “They really are good fun, if we can’t find anything else to do with ourselves,” Flynn said. “Pru’s a horrible flirt, though, so watch out for her.”
“What’s Lily’s story?” I asked as Honor and her husband joined us, handing us each a glass of scotch. I took a sip of the amber-hued drink—it was spicy and smooth on the way down, and from the first taste, I could tell it was a damn sight better than the swill we students bought back home.
“She’s Prudence’s friend,” Honor said. “The girl is with us so much, she’s like family now. She loves nothing more than to sit in the garden and sketch. So we’ll have an artist and a writer in the house this summer. How grand!”
“Tell me, Michael.” Donny cleared his throat. “You say you intend to write here at Whitehall. What’s the novel about, if I may ask?”
I grinned and looked down into my glass. “I don’t have the slightest idea,” I confessed. “I’ve had a horrible case of writer’s block for months now.”
Flynn sank into a leather wing chair by the fireplace, swirling the ice in his lowball glass of scotch and propping his feet on the nearby ottoman. “Dad, I told Mickey that if it’s inspiration he’s after, there’s no better place to find it than Whitehall.”
Donny slung an arm over the back of his son’s chair and nodded. “Indeed. ‘If these walls could talk,’ as they say.”
“Lots of history here, I imagine?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
“History, scandal, suspicious deaths, ghosts around every corner,” Prudence said, reentering the drawing room with Lily by her side. “Haven’t you heard, Mr. Connolly? Whitehall is cursed.”
As I read those words, I shuddered and put the papers down in my lap. I had goose bumps.
“So that’s what David Coleville thought of his first experience at Alban House,” Matthew mused.
“I can see the real-life people easily corresponding with the characters in his story,” I said, looking down at the page. “Flynn is obviously my dad, Johnny Alban. The characters Donny and Honor are my grandparents John James and Charity Alban. Lily is my mother.”
“And Prudence is your aunt Fate,” Matthew finished my thought, leaning his head back against the door. “The character seems so vivacious and feisty and full of life. Even on paper, her character took over the scenes, commanding attention. She reminded me a little of Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind or Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. A stark contrast to the woman we met yesterday at Alban House, isn’t it?”
I thought of my poor, bewildered aunt Fate, who had spent her life in a mental hospital and was now locked away on the third floor of Alban House.
“Makes you wonder what happened that she ended up in an institution, doesn’t it?” I said. “More now than ever before.”
“Read on.” He smiled. “Maybe we’ll find out.”
Chapter Two
A shaft of moonlight illuminated my darkened bedroom, so bright that it woke me from a fitful sleep. I stretched and rubbed my eyes, repositioning the pillows that surrounded me on the king-sized bed. I had remarked on its massive, intricately carved wooden headboard and footboard earlier in the evening when one of the staff had shown me to this third-floor room.
“It’s the kind of bed I’d imagine King Henry the Eighth sleeping in,” I had said, running my hand over its deep red bedspread.
“Fit for a king, indeed,” the girl had replied. “It may well have belonged to royalty, now that you mention it. Old Mr. Brennan, the man who built this house, imported it from Britain around the turn of the century.”
I noticed that my suitcases had been brought up and were standing near a cherry-wood armoire. “Is much of the furniture in the house antique?” I asked the girl.
“It is,” she said, chattering away as she opened the shutters to reveal a sweeping view of the lake, which was choppy and tumultuous on this windy night. “I’m charged with polishing it, all the furniture on the second and third floors. I tend to the tapestries as well. Some are said to have come from ancient castles in Britain, so there’s your royalty for you.”
The girl finished opening the shutters, turned to me, smoothed her white apron, and asked, “Shall I get you unpacked, then, sir?”
I frowned at her.
“Unpacked, sir,” she said again. “Shall I put your clothes away?”
“I think I can manage, thank you.” I smiled, and she took her leave. As I hung up my shirts and put my socks into a drawer, I thought about how living in a household with servants was going to take some getting used to. Put my clothes away indeed.
I rolled over and punched my pillows a bit and closed my eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. I kept thinking about the curse Prudence spoke about earlier that evening—what could she have meant? From where I stood, the Brennans had the world by the tail—great wealth, success, a happy and healthy family. The only curse I could see was what to do with it all.
I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling as the glow of the moon lit up the room. It was too bright, I thought, so I pushed off the covers and padded over to the window, intending to close the shutters. But instead I stood transfixed by what I saw on the lakeshore below.
Flames crackled in a fire ring on the beach. A girl wearing a white nightgown—or was it a dress?—was dancing around the fire, turning in circles with her arms held wide. I squinted through the distance and darkness to make out who it was. Lily? No, her hair was longer than this girl’s. Was it Prudence? One of the servant girls, perhaps? I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t see clearly—reality seemed to be hazy, as though the window itself was warped. But I was mesmerized by the girl’s movements, slow and wavy, as though she was moving her arms and legs through water. Or a dream.
Then I heard her voice, soft and low, through the open window. I could make out faint strains of a verse but couldn’t understand the words. They were strange, guttural sounds, like an ancient language from a different time.
I stood at my window until the girl stopped and snapped her head in the direction of the house. Did she see me? I jumped away from the window, my heart beating hard and fast in my chest. I smiled to myself, feeling like a little boy who’d been caught spying on girls through a peephole.
I peered out the window again, but … it couldn’t be. The girl was gone. The fire was out, the lakeshore was empty, and there was no sign of anyone, anywhere. What had just happened here?
I crawled back into bed and pulled the covers around me, but the gnawing in my stomach chased sleep away. Little by little as the hours passed, the reality of what I saw eroded in my mind. When the sun finally came up again, I wasn’t at all sure that the whole thing hadn’t been a dream.
I shivered and was suddenly aware of my dark and dusty surroundings. I was about to turn the page to the next chapter when I heard a loud rapping at the door.
“Reverend Parker! Are you in there?”
“Yes!” Matthew shouted. And we exchanged a look of relief.
We both jumped up, and he rattled off the combination to the janitor as I placed the manuscript back into the box and stood up, hurrying to smooth my dress just as I heard the lock click. The door popped open, and there stood one of the janitors looking slightly bewildered.
“Oh, thank goodness,” Matthew said, brushing the dust off his jeans. “We were in here retrieving a family heirloom of Miss Alban’s, and the door latched shut. I tried to call someone to get us out of here but my phone didn’t have any service.”
The janitor eyed the two of us. “I got suspicious when I saw your car in the lot and the lights on leading down here,” he said.
“Thank God you did, Pat,” Matthew put a hand on the man’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Heaven knows how long we might have been trapped in here if not for you. I was beginning to get more than a little claustrophobic.”
We hurried out the door, and he leaned onto it, shutting it with a thud. Twirling the combination lock a few times, he said, “Let’s get back upstairs.”
We made our way through the crypt and were halfway up the stone stairs when Matthew and I both stopped short. He turned to look at me and said aloud what we were both thinking.
“How in the world did that heavy door shut behind us?”
“That’s what I was wondering, boss,” the janitor said.
“Did you see anyone?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I sure didn’t. But when I got here I noticed the side door of the church was ajar, as if someone had left in a hurry and didn’t pull it closed.”